Lacan, Science, and Law: Is the Ethnography of Scientism Psychoanalytic?

By adopting an idealized conception of the scientific enterprise, mirroring scientists' own self-conception, courts minimize the social and rhetorical aspects of science as ornamental, contingent, and eliminable. Lacan's reflections on science, and on the question of whether (or in what sense) psychoanalysis is scientific, parallel and enrich the efforts in science studies to show that the social and rhetorical aspects of science are co-productive, constitutive, and inevitable. Specifically, Lacan's identification of science as a discourse in denial of its subjectivity leads to a psychoanalytic re-orientation of ethnomethodology - an anthropological approach now favored in science studies. In the context of litigation involving scientific expertise, attorneys already assume, in their depositions and cross-examination, the role of ethnographers on foreign ground, but to the extent that the discourse of science replaces or dominates the discourse of law, legal ethnographers should also assume the role of analysts exploring the unconscious of science. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.