Getting serious about 'interrogating representation': An indigenous turn

Steve Woolgar has urged the sociology of scientific knowledge to 'interrogate representation', and he has advocated an exploration of reflexivity issues as a means toward this end. However, ten years of scholarship addressing the meaning and purpose of a subdiscipline dedicated to displaying the social constructedness of all texts (including, at least by implication, its own) have yielded little. I propose an approach to the reflexivity dilemma, and to the larger question of 'representation', which differs significantly from those previously attempted. This alternative requires the genuinely radical step of considering a very different philosophy of language than the one(s) currently shared by SSK researchers and the scientists whose accounts constitute SSK's 'data'. Philosophies of language which might serve as instructive examples presently exist in the thought of some indigenous peoples, particularly American Indians. I explore one such philosophy as it is articulated by a Navajo student of traditional learning. I then show how such a philosophy of language reconfigures the reflexivity problem, and also offers SSK some ideas about how it might begin to do what it cannot presently do: formulate a genuinely radical interrogation of representation.