> But this is true of everything! You could say the same about geometrical
> objects; because there are no actual objects that correspond to the precise
> definition of a circle, then the concept of circle is meaningless and there
> is no difference between circles and polygons and squares.
>
> The word "science," of which Chuck gave common definitions, implies -- nay,
> means -- systematic knowledge.
Sure, and bracketing the difference between a mathematically defined relation like a circle and a social practice like science, I'm wondering where the boundary between systematic knowledge and science lies. Blacksmiths, midwives, monks, farmers, warriors, stone masons, fisherfolk, cooks, and healers have all had systematic knowledge... are they Scientists now? Even though they are note defined that way under modernity?
What science studies has stressed is that boundary practices are fundamentally social and power laden and my point is that once you see how far far far off the ideal notion of Science, Scientific - normal, revolutionary, or programmatic - practice is and always has been since the modern reification of Science in the mid-to-late 19th C (though Shapin and Shaeffer, in 1985's Leviathan and the Air Pump, find a seminal event in the battle between Hobbes and Boyle over the separation of scientific knowledge production and socio-political philosophy), then the denigration of other highly systematic and thoroughly institutionalized ways of knowing as premodern and unscientific is understood to be more about social power than about systematic objectivity.
The reification of Science you support is all about closing down democratic participation in technoscientific development; foreclosing avenues of systematic research tied to premodern or radical social agendas - studying mutualism was impossible for 70 years in the West because of its connection ot Kropotkin, why do you think we don't have mre dialectical biologists?; closing down public participation in Science-based policy; and eliminating craft practices in an industrial and industrially medicalized world - unless they are going to be denigrated with the title Art.