It includes everything from mainstream social scientists to literary theorists looking for texts to deconstruct. Some resentful scientists dismiss the whole field as a pack of English majors who couldn't pass freshman calculus, but who presume to treat the scientific community as if it were a primitive tribe with a colorful mythology. More discriminating scientists concede that the culture of the scientific community is a legitimate subject of study, and that scientific priorities are sometimes skewed by social factors like money and politics. But they also insist that science continually tests its theories against external reality by experiment, so that, unlike literary studies or philosophy, science produces a continually growing body of reliable, transcultural knowledge. Scientists may have their prejudices, but these are relatively unimportant if they do not prevent science from progressing steadily towards a truth that is the same for everybody.
Biblical studies provides an analogy.
The writers of the four gospels have differing viewpoints and interests, and this is an interesting subject for scholars. But for believers such matters are insignificant compared with the fact to which the gospels all testify, the Resurrection of Jesus. If the Resurrection is a fact , then what that fact implies is far more important than the cultural setting of the reporters. When a naturalistic age reinterprets the Resurrection as a myth, however, the mythmakers and their audiences become the main story. A man by that name may have existed, and perhaps he even had trouble with his daughters, but the Lear we know is the creation of Shakespeare and his culture.