science-in-the-making

is the messy, political, emotional human processes by which scientific facts are proposed, argued, and become 'facts' only once they have allies. ..

the processes by which scientific facts are proposed, argued, and accepted. A new proposition is argued and studied in publications, conferences, letters, email correspondence, discussions, debates, practice, and repeated experiments. It becomes a 'fact' only after it wins many allies among scientist and others using it. To win allies, a proposition must be independently verified by multiple observations and there must be no counterexamples. Latour sees science-in-themaking as a messy, political, human process, fraught with emotion and occasional polemics. The scientific literature bears him out.' (net)

science in the making, n.Definitions

science in the making