Social Construction in a Cold Climate: A Response to David Harley, ‘Rhetoric and the Social Construction of Sickness and Healing’ and to Paolo Palladino's Comment on Harley

Abstract

The relation of rhetoric to science depends also on whether—to put the two extremes—science is perceived as accretive and progressive or as largely a history of dead ends in experiment and odd dead ‘facts’ now to be read only as allegories of the society that produced them. (Gillian Beer and Herminio Martins¹)