Respectable People, Respectable Methods, Respectable Facts

Abstract

This chapter argues that disqualification—the stigmatization of knowledge—is used to separate people from their facts. Drawing on ethnographic observations of a leading neuroscientific laboratory, the chapter first argues that neuroscientists disqualify fact claims in psychiatry that are not connected to brain science. Such claims are positioned as unscientific or unempirical. Second, neuroscientists then appropriate these stigmatized claims by connecting them to brain data. As such, stigmatized tools and measures in psychiatry—like assessments and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—become respectable only when connected to neuroscience. This means that fact claims in psychiatry become stigmatized depending on how they are used and who is using them. What is flawed science in one set of hands becomes redeemed in another. The chapter argues that disqualification provides a means to separate scientists from their facts, tools, and ideas, such that they can be reformulated and claimed by elites.