Liao indeed stimulated a lot of thinking. His presentation was very interactive, with the audience asking questions and making comments throughout. Literacy involves language, and science relies upon it for communication. The way to control an unruly cow is to expand the field. People have challenged the concept that knowledge is based on external reality and have maintained that it is socially constructed, and Pickering is disturbed by this socially constructivist view.
Scientists are human agents in a field of material agency.
They interact with nature via athe machines they build. This interaction takes the form of a dialectic betweeen resistance and accommodation. Existing culture is the surface of human emergence. Connolly looks at language as one means for interaction beween scientists and the physical world. He is disturbed that Hmost people associate science with its culture rather than its machines.