申論題

Part I (70%): Please read the following passage and answer one of the questions beneath it in a coherent essay of around 500 words. You may use short quotations to support your arguments, but most of your writing should be in your own words.
        Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also intluences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural.
        In advancing [this argument], however, I do not ally myself with an over-extension now popular in some historical circles: the purely relativistic claim that scientific change only reflects the modification of social contexts, that truth is a meaningless notion outside cultural assumptions, and that science can therefore provide no enduring answers. As a practicing scientist, I share the credo of my colleagues: I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it.
                                                             from Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (pp. 21-22)
vocabulary:

1) In trying to understand a work of literature, is the use of a suitable methodology and theory of reading more or less important than individual insight and imagination? Explain, using examples to illustrate your ideas. OR