Abstract

In this thesis I have attempted to extend the dialectical notion of appropriation in the work of Marx theoretically to the area of the social construction of scientific products. My guiding question was, how might we consider the products of natural science as social, prior to their appropriation by the community? I saw as my task the description of the social construction of scientific concepts prior to the various communal negotiations which a new concept generates. ;The response was framed in terms of the work done by individual scientists in resolving a communal problematic and an analytically distinct, personal problematic. Here I drew on Sartre's concept of totalization or the uniting of the personal subjective and the communal objective as they together take their place in the completed product. I also attempted to formulate an epistemology of interactional metaphor where discrete parts of language, when brought together in poetry, in a unique fashion, produce a new vision, a new relationship. I tried to argue that scientists in uniting a number of communally shared but discrete parts similarly create new insights and relationships through a tensive engagement with their problematic. The construction of the structure of the DNA molecule was used as the major exemplification of the above concepts