100 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
to explain and the extent to which it "takes responsibility" for it, the "depth" to which it penetrates it. He argues that with increasing modernisation of traditional societies and the changes it entails in terms of social and production relations, both these tend to shrink from their original proportions while seeking to arrive at a new level of equilibrium. Other sociologists have referred to this process as the "secularisation of religion".
This suggests that common-sense knowledge and perceptions "expand", incorporating new socialised knowledge and experience, while ideologies, e.g., religion gradually "retreat" from this terrain no longer needing, or now unable, to satisfactorily embrace and explain this range of phenomena or processes.
We may recall that Bernal speaks of science occupying the "middle ground" between "practice" or "technique" on the one hand and and "ideas and traditions" or ideologies on the other. For Bernal, the former appears to have greater claims to factuality or objectivity, at least inasmuch as it is on the level of empirical reality and the object of shared perceptions. Commonsense or practical knowledge must be included in this scenario to truly complete the process of social construction of knowledge.
The task of "spreading the scientific temper" cannot be the mere transmission of scientific knowledge alone which would make little sense unless systemically incorporated into existing idea-systems or unless it is incorporated into common-sense knowledge by being purposefully incorporated into "practice" or "technique", ideally directly into production processes. The use of science, not simply transmission of its ideas, must be central to the endeavour; strengthening common-sense perception through incorporation of science into practice or production, expanding its range and scope so as to "reflect back" upon "ideas and traditions" and form a social basis for the generation or strengthening of a critical, scientific attitude. Science must thus walk on three legs, not two. At least so long as it retains its Janus-face as ideology and as science, till that millenial era when the separation of theory and practice, the division between mental and physical labour, vanish. Then, "it may well be that scientific knowledge will so pervade all social life that science will once again have no distinct existence."(2P