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Interesting Thursday conversation (following up on our Monday one), from several perspectives.  I, for one, found it useful to have started with the question of doctors and then to treat the more general question of whether science is "objective," value-free, culture-independent, universal.  Among other things, it helped to focus attention on problem-solving (one goes to a doctor for help with a problem) and on social validation (one trusts, or doesn't trust, a particular doctor based in large part on one's trust in the wisdom of a larger community, eg western medicine, of whom the particular doctor is expected to be a loyal member).  So, a doctor isn't actually expected to be "objective" etc; s(he) is expected to be helpful in a particular context because of training/expertise/membership in a particular community.

So, empirical science is also not fully "objective" nor value-free, culture-independent, universal.  Indeed, that it isn't, by its very nature, capable of those things is actually part of its power.  Science can explore more possible understandings/futures by virtue of the legitimate different understandings of the present that result from the "crack" and the role for subjectivity it creates.  But then the question becomes what makes one trust (or not trust) a scientist?  science?  What's the context within which science is useful?  What problems is it good at solving and why?  And what role does training/expertise/membership in a particular community play in that?

The little boy from The Emperor's New Clothes seems to me relevant here.  In science, one wants/needs at least some people who see/make claims about things that are markedly different from those of others in the surrounding community.  Without them, there is a tendency to persist in making sense of things in particular ways and little ability/inclination to entertain alternative ways that might prove more useful in the longer run.  This is probably true, at least to some extent, of medicine as well.  So perhaps we should trust scientists less because of training/expertise/membership and more for their skepticism, their ability to entertain the possibility of thinking about things in a variety of different ways, including ways quite different from the norm?  

Along these lines, I'm looking forward to future conversations in which we think more about the meaning and significance of "norms" and "normal."  And pleased by the evidence from our last conversation that "co-constructive inquiry" actually works, that we can in fact hear/learn from/be changed by sharing quite different initial understandings.   Maybe what's most important in science (and .... ?) isn't objectivity or truth or facts or normalcy but rather the use of both subjectivity and shared subjectivity to generate, individually and perhaps collectively, new ways of understanding?