The purpose of this work is to present part of the results of a study on the construction of diseases uithin biomedical discourse, where the point of departure is an approach akin to the sociology of knowledge, one which I refer to here as anti-essentialist. The research data presented, describing how the etiological theory of HIV as a causative agent of Aids was settled, intends to demonstrate some of the theoretical and methodological issues raised in the first part of the paper. These data, obtained from a review of medical texts, are examined with the help of analytical categories originally proposed try Foucault (discoursive formation), Latour (black boxes), and Kuhn (paradigm). This study is intended to show how theoretical constructions become natural objects as perceived by medical doctors; as a result, the process of construction is obscured, thus severely limiting the degree of criticism physicians are able to apply to their own knowledge.
Aids; discourse formation; black boxes; paradigms