As I have tried to show here, the public sphere is a category that can do this kind of work. On the one hand, it has the great virtue of being a real historical phenomenon, marked by concrete events (the spread of periodical literature, the formation of masonic lodges) that can be located in a particular era. It was also marked by a certain self-consciousness among its participants, and to that extent, the public sphere is partially an actor's category. But just as importantly, the public sphere can be seen as a system for the formation of concepts, as Foucault described such a system in
The archaeology of knowledge.
61 The patterns of knowledge that are created and their role in the exercise of power are not to be understood on the basis of the unity of subjective consciousness, Foucault argued, nor their logical necessity. Seen this way, the development of the public sphere in the eighteenth century manifested a new discursive formation, what I have called the discourse of criticism, and this discourse fundamentally reconfigured the basis on which knowledge was considered authoritative. Of course, none of this invalidates the reality of judgements of trustworthiness made by Shapin's more or less civil natural philosophers, nor would I suggest their judgements are merely epiphenomenal. But it does suggest that there is still a larger integrative social history of truth waiting to be written, one that takes account of both science and civility and the larger discursive transformation represented the emergence of the public sphere. In such a hypothetical history, I am convinced, there will be a clear role to be played by science in the Enlightenment.
61 Michel Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge, transl. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1982), 31-76.
There are 21½ more pages just like that before that paragraph.