The politics of symmetry

While symmetry and impartiality have become ruling principles in S&TS, defining its core ideal of a 'value-free relativism', their philosophical anchorage has attracted much less discussion than the issue or:how far their jurisdiction can be extended or generalized. This paper seeks to argue that symmetry and agnosticism unwarrantably present as generalizable procedure what are in fact contingent knowledge-political attempts to reposition various fields of controversy. They present a methodological version of what remains a rather exceptional case in a larger class of 'third positions: which define various types of situated distance and various mixtures of detachment and involvement An inspection of influential symmetrical 'translations' of the dispute between Hobbes and Boyle, and of recent 'epistemological chicken' and 'capturing' debates, reveals some of the epistemological and political hazards which afflict S&TS's convulsive forward push of the 'symmetry frontier' Given such perils, a case is made for 'weak asymmetry' with regard to the issues of truth vs error, science vs politics, and culture vs nature.