WHERE AND WHEN DOES IT TAKE PLACE? MAKING FACTS IN SCIENCE, BUILDING CASES IN LAW

There are two forms of deconstruction. Radical DECONSTRUCTION is rare. It is a sign of deep crisis and extraordinary skepticism among intellectual workers facing high uncertainty. Moderate deconstruction, however, occurs wherever conflicts over knowledge are built into the competitive and adversarial structure of social fields. We illustrate the social dynamics of moderate deconstruction for two specific cases: making facts in science and building cases in law. There are strategies of deconstruction common to both science and law which generalize untrustworthiness and thus economize on deconstruction costs. These strategies are rhetoric, ideology, procedure (or method), and reputation. Under certain conditions, moderate deconstruction turns into radical DECONSTRUCTION. This is most likely to happen in revolutionary science and in loosely coupled textual fields that have minimal hardware and social solidarity.