Science & Tech Quote by Katherine Fullerton Gerould

Science is at its most powerful when it pretends not to have a point of view. Gerould’s line needles that posture: the “insidiousness” isn’t that science is false, but that it smuggles authority by presenting itself as pure procedure - a neutral method anyone can apply - rather than a historically situated subject with its own institutions, gatekeepers, incentives, and blind spots.

Calling science “not a subject, but a method” captures a familiar rhetorical move: if you frame your work as method, you frame your conclusions as inevitable. The subtext is about power. A “subject” admits arguments, fashions, and politics; a “method” implies a clean pipeline from reality to truth. That distinction matters because it lets scientific language travel beyond the lab into policy, education, and social life with a kind of moral immunity. Disagree, and you’re not offering a rival interpretation; you’re cast as irrational.

Gerould, writing in an era enthralled by Progress-era technocracy and the prestige of expertise, is skeptical of how “the scientific” becomes a cultural credential. The quote doesn’t reject experimentation or evidence; it questions the myth of frictionless objectivity. Methods are designed by people, applied to questions chosen by people, and interpreted through the values of people. The danger isn’t science itself, but the way its self-description can dissolve accountability: when a claim is “just the method,” no one has to own the assumptions underneath.

It’s a compact warning about epistemology as branding - and how the strongest ideologies are the ones that insist they aren’t ideologies at all.