1 http://digithum.uoc.edu Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Universidad de Antioquia Digithum, No. 24 (July 2019) | ISSN 1575-2275 A scientific e-journal coedited by UOC and UdeA A RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON CULTURE AND SOCIETY Introduction In the present post-truth moment the authority of science is being increasingly challenged. As a response to the rise in anti-scientific thinking and alternative facts, we have seen efforts such as the March for Science emphasizing the key role that scientific research and its results should play in policy making and in political decisions and actions regarding the economy, society, and the future of humanity and our planet. For all the mischief it has caused, the post-truth age has nevertheless catalyzed a transformation of the epistemology of science. By problematizing rigid dichotomies between fact and value, science and politics, and truth and opinion, it has forced scholars to rethink their ideas about how scientific knowledge is produced. It is no longer possible to hold on to the classical view of science, according to which facts merely speak for themselves. There are no brute, self-evident matters of fact, but every “fact” in scholarly reasoning is in need of interpretation to make sense. Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers (2000; 2008; 2011) has spoken of science along these lines as a “constructivist” project: scientific research does not merely discover and describe 1. The verb facere, of which factum is neuter past participle, means “to do”. phenomena out there in the world, but it actively participates in producing them. That facts are made instead of just found already existing there in the world is also suggested by the etymology of the noun “fact”, which derives from Latin factum, “event”, “occurrence”, literally “thing done”. 1 A fact is a result of a certain kind of practical activity involving work of fabrication. This does not make facts any less real; only that they do not pop out of nowhere, but emerge out of artificial situations. Scientific statements are therefore distinguished from fiction only a posteriori, not a priori. Of course, this is not something that only just our post-truth moment has made visible, but the entanglement of science with fiction is centuries-old. According to Stengers (2000), Discourse concerning Two New Sciences, which Galileo wrote in 1637 after his condemnation by the church, marks an important event in the history of modern sciences in this respect, as it states the definition of uniformly accelerated motion under the guise of fiction. To animate his claims, Galileo stages an imagined dialogue between Salviati, the “Academician” who acts as Galileo’s spokesperson, and two laymen, Simplicio and Sagredo, who ask questions and pose objections. Stengers Introduction Published in: July 2019 Olli Pyyhtinen Tampere University SPECIAL SECTION “Fictioning Social Theory: The Use of Fiction to Enrich, Inform, and Challenge the Theoretical Imagination” RECOMMENDED CITATION PYYHTINEN, Olli (2019). “Introduction”. In: “Fictioning Social Theory: The Use of Fiction to Enrich, Inform, and Challenge the Theoretical Imagination” [online article]. Digithum, no. 24, pp. 1-9. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and Universidad de Antioquia. [Accessed: dd/mm/yy]. <http://doi.org/10.7238/d.v0i24.3188> The texts published in this journal are – unless otherwise indicated – covered by the Creative Commons Spain Attribution 4.0 International licence. The full text of the licence can be consulted here: http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/ Olli Pyyhtinen, 2019 FUOC, 2019