Dinosaur family values: The cultural construction of scientific value concepts in nineteenth and twentieth century western literatures

Attempts to define the nature and role of science in Western culture are multiple and conflicting, and often devolve to simple competitive evaluations; science is said to be “better” than the arts, or literature is lauded as a more “humanistic” enterprise. What these sorts of arguments fail to address is the apparent lack of an agreed upon positive content or definition of “science.” In an attempt to ameliorate this lack, this project examines the role of scientific value concepts in Western culture.; I argue that, through the discursive construction of a “value” distinct to science, science as a cultural institution or entity can appear to have an autonomous and unified character. Questions of what science is, or what it means, are thereby put aside in favor of examinations of scientific value. Scientific value concepts attempt to reify the concept “science” by establishing the taken-for-granted presence of scientific needs or a scientific economy. Explicitly, scientific value surfaces in debates about an object's “value” to/for science. Implicitly, scientific discourses construct various “values” for scientific endeavor and scientists.; This project examines the five ways scientific value operates in Western culture. Scientific value concepts: (1) delimit the borders of professionalized science; (2) make a scientific discipline seem valuable to a society; (3) make the scientist seem valuable as a subject in/for a society; (4) rationalize scientific imperialism through the imperative of waste; and (5) partially result from scientific representations' cultural effects or work.