Abstraction, by contrast, is the method by which modern science achieves its universality and heft.

Science wrenches phenomena out of their specific contexts, makes parts meaningful independently of
wholes, and recombines segments in ways that transgress boundaries fixed by law, custom, tradition or
institutional practice. Science creates entities – the periodic table of chemical elements, the nitrogen
cycle, blood pressure, the metric system, biodiversity, the ozone hole – that reflect no one’s un
mediated observations of the world and yet are recognized and accepted as real. It is this very capacity
to make ideas and objects that travel, spilling over the limits of lived experience, that students of the
scientific enterprise have taken as the foundation of science’s special cognitive authority. Science, on
the conventional account, faithfully mirrored nature and thereby underwrote shared human
understandings of how the world works. In the newer version, historically excavated and
ethnographically observed by a generation of scholars, science represents rather than mirrors reality
(Hackett et al., 2007; Jasanoff et al., 1995). It may do so with utmost honesty and care, but science’s
products are at best images of real things, and much work has to be done to make the representations
look as if they are the right ways of characterizing the world. That work tends to erase specificity and
remove traces of the human mind and hand: all the moorings that tie scientific claims to local, subjective
and contingent circumstances are cut loose so that claims may float freely and persuade people as
objective facts (Daston and Galison, 2007; Latour, 1990).