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Science in Popular Culture

其他書名	Contested Meanings and Cultural Authority in America, 1832-1994
出版	University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2004
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=86zVAAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Science-talk, as I call it, has varied within any given moment of history, too. An evaluation of the changing and multiplicitous meanings of science shows that Americans' descriptions often had a dual nature. Increasingly over the last two centuries, the words and images used to define science placed it behind larger and more impermeable rhetorical boundaries. These boundaries helped to distinguish science and opened the door to attestations to its power and prestige in contrast with other forms of knowledge. But a science more easily set apart was also one more easily set aside. As the rhetorical boundaries around science grew, they sometimes severed links between science and the world of ordinary phenomena and concerns, making the scientific remote, inaccessible, and potentially ignorable. The dual nature of science-talk has carved a seemingly paradoxical place for depictions of science in modern American culture, as both a means of asserting authority and as a marginal element of popular discussion. This result suggests a more nuanced picture of the so-called "cultural authority of science" than has typically been offered by historians and sociologists.