Hi Klaus
I do get the sense that we are discursively aligned (if you'll forgive the pun). Yes, theory is another language game - and Richard Rorty is helpful here as is Stephen Kuhn (and Popper's objective knowledge isn't). Also it's very instructive to look at the sociology of science literature (especially the classic Gilbert & Mulkay) that shows how irrelevant theorising is to practicing scientists but is important to the group - philosophers of science - for whom this kind of rhetoric does matter. Foucault and others would say to us that the relevant question is how did we get into a situation where it became possible and important for certain people to talk about and spend time debating the kind of textual representation abstracted from practice that - it is argued - scientists actually use when they do stuff. Kuhn taught us that the kinds of monumental shifts between renaissance, medieval, and modern visions of how to do science and what it meant were thoroughly historical. Rorty and pragmatism taught us that some of these ways of talking (about science but also humanities etc) were useful for certain kinds of things and others weren't - some were more democractic and informed than others, and so forth.
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