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English language and its warlike knowing apparatuses dominate global academic practice, including the repertoire of critique in social sciences. But what might be done about this? The paradox is that if we fight this, we simply rehearse the same logic of antagonism. This article tries to avoid this bind, experimenting instead with an alternative apparatus – an approach that values the art of balancing. In presenting this approach, shi-as-reasoning (shì, 勢), I take inspiration from Dr Hsu, a Chinese medical (CM) doctor in Taiwan, who avoids fighting viruses while treating patients with SARS in biomedically dominated clinics, and who publishes his work in English-language biomedical research journals. In doing so, he balances among the complexities of shi in the body of diseased patients, possible herbal interventions (decoctions), the contexts of CM practices in Taiwan, and English-language dominated biomedical research. Since this article describes Dr Hsu's practices in English, it makes use of elements taken from the material semiotics of social science, Dr Hsu's accounts of CM, and the logic of the non-antagonistic interplay between yin and yang. Following the lead of Dr Hsu, it thus suggests that a shi-inflected-reasoning might help to rebalance a situation that is imbalanced as a result of the domination of English in academia.

How might science and technology studies and science, technology and society studies (STS) learn from its studies of other knowledge traditions? This article explores this question by looking at Chinese medicine (CM). The latter has been under pressure from modernization and "scientization" for a century, and the dynamics of these pressures have been explored "symmetrically" within STS and related disciplines. But in this work, CM has been the "the case" and STS theory has held stable. This article uses a CM term, reasoning-as-propensity ( shi, 勢), to look at contemporary practices of cancer care in a hospital in Taiwan. It describes how shi ( 勢) informed the design of a new decoction, Kuan Sin Yin, while also relating to the production of scientific knowledge, biomedical interventions, Buddhist practices, and the patients living with cancer themselves. Does CM's use of shi ( 勢) simply confirm the essential and incompatible otherness of CM? Looked at from outside the answer seems to be yes. However, this article explores how STS might change itself—and the theory–practice division in STS—by thinking through shi ( 勢) in dialogue with its othered object. This opens the possibility of an STS for CM.

How might the agency of the subaltern be conceptualized within the intersection of multiple worlds? Actor-network theory's (ANT) translation framework for understanding agency portraying this as entrepreneur and talking of a world in the making is arguably "imperialist," "managerial," and "monolithic." Draws from the enactment turn of ANT and insights into the politics of representation, this article elaborates an alternative framework which focuses on displacement. By examining the case of dialysis patients, the article explores the displacing practices that follow the disruption of routines in dialysis. Patients have to go through a process of problematization, distribution, hybridization, and restabilization, in order to sustain the coexistence of their alternative practices with dialysis. Unlike entrepreneurs in the translation model who transform the world by interesting others, enduring trials, and becoming spokespersons for all, those patients who manage to displace and sustain the coexistence of multiple worlds avoid interesting, still less confronting, the hegemonic actors and claiming representation for themselves. This article suggests the displacement of agency as a generic alternative.

In Mandarin, the English word 'nature' translates as ' ziran' (自然zìrán) in science, biomedicine and everyday life. At the same time, ziran indexes a second older set of meanings that make little immediate sense in English. Current in many Chinese medical practices as well as in classical Chinese philosophy, these include 'what is spontaneously so' or 'let the character of the self unfold'. In this article we explore how these two families of meaning are related by particular Taiwanese Chinese medical practitioners as they describe how they negotiate the relations between biomedicine and Chinese medicine in daily professional practice. At the same time, inspired by related logic-shifting writing in anthropology, postcolonial studies and postcolonial STS, we draw on the 'art of patterning' (辨證 biàn zhèng) to understand how ziran-nature relations are specified in those accounts. Patterning is the art of specifying the shifting arrangements and misalignments that lead to ill health. Treating this as a way of thinking about ziran-related overlaps between biomedicine and Chinese medicine, we show that patterning attends not to objects 'out there' but to appearances (象xiang, xiàng). Put into use as an STS term of art it therefore shifts the epistemological basis of inquiry because case-stories no longer reveal underlying mechanisms, but instead narrate patterned appearances. One implication of this is that any particular pattern diagnosis lies alongside a galaxy of alternatives that might be equally good to think with. Within the limits set by referential academic conventions, we thus attempt a postcolonial shi (勢)-inflected STS in this paper by resisting the use of a single analytical framework, instead setting different forms of patterning alongside one another.

How might Science and Technology Studies learn more from the intersection between 'Western' and 'other' forms of knowledge? In this article, we use Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's writing on equivocal translation to explore a moment of encounter in a Chinese Medical consultation in Taiwan in which a practitioner hybridizes Chinese Medicine and biomedicine. Our description is symmetrical, but creates a descriptive equivocation in which 'Western' analytical terms are used to describe a 'Chinese' medical reality. Drawing on the history of Chinese Medicine, we argue that the latter is not analytical, but 'correlative' in a specifically 'Chinese' manner that explores patternings, flows, and propensities in local collections of things and symptoms. In particular, it both handles difference without seeking to unearth stable causal mechanisms and absorbs new elements including relevant features of biomedicine. We conclude by briefly considering the scope of a possible post-colonial and 'correlative' STS and show that a 'correlative' description of the same Chinese Medical consultation would differ markedly from one making use of 'Western' analytical assumptions.

In this paper we explore a moment of intersection between 'Western' and Taiwanese social science knowledge that took place in a Taiwanese seminar in 2009. Our interest is post-colonial: we treat this as an encounter between dominant and subordinate knowledge systems, and follow Helen Verran by conceiving of the bodily disconcertment experienced by the participants as an expression of metaphysical difference. We then provide three contexts for that disconcertment: one, the post-1949 story of Taiwanese economic development; two, the syncretism of Taiwanese street Daoism; and three, the history of philosophy where we draw on contrasts between Western and Chinese traditions. We suggest that each of these contexts is embedded in and informs the disconcertment experienced in the exchange. We then argue that rendering the origins of this disconcertment discursively accountable is performative. Our conclusion is that the cultivation and articulation of disconcertment is a crucial tool for interrogating and moving beyond the metaphysics, the subjectivities, and the institutional organisational forms that together help to reproduce hegemonic Western knowledge traditions.