Modern values in post-modernism
JOHN ZIMAN
John Ziman is at 27 Little London Green, Oakley, Aylesbury HP18 9QL, UK. His most recent book is Real Science: What It Is and What It Means (Cambridge University Press).
The One Culture? A Conversation about Science
edited by Jay A. Labinger & Harry Collins
Chicago University Press: 2001. 322 pp. $17, £12 (pbk)
Without a doubt, people ought to have a better understanding of the status of scientific knowledge. Yet most scientists know little — and care even less — about the 'science wars'. This courteous exchange of views between a few of the active partisans may help them to resolve some of their mutual misconceptions, but does little to enlighten the ignorant eavesdropper. What is all the argy-bargy about?
The bogey word, and one that is not much mentioned in The One Culture, is 'post-modernism'. Despite all the intellectual atrocities committed in its name, this was a legitimate reaction against the doctrine of 'modernism'. It questioned the idea that formal rationality was the sure way to happiness, goodness and beauty. At first, the 'culture wars' raging in the arts and humanities seemed of no concern to natural scientists, but the post-modernists also unmasked many social pathologies that claimed 'scientific' authority. Science itself, the traditional stronghold of modernism, became a strategic target of their critique.
The gates of the citadel were inadvertently opened by Thomas Kuhn in 1962. His admirable historical study of scientific revolutions could be read as a scholarly justification for complete metaphysical relativism. He seemed to be saying that apparently secure scientific knowledge was never more than the collective opinion of a particular social group, and could thus be debunked by reference to the views of other groups. Philosophically speaking (as several of the contributors to The One Culture point out), total scepticism is old hat, and essentially vacuous. Nevertheless, it remains the principal (unsmart) weapon in the 'science wars', and is not adequately countered by equally naive mantras (also uttered here) that scientific knowledge is really, really true.
More constructively, Kuhn was drawing attention to the social factors that influence the production of scientific knowledge. Strangely, this influence had been systematically denied by philosophers. Perhaps they were so focused on the hypothetical ideal of finally revealing scientific truth that they felt they could overlook the messy human processes along the way. Unfortunately, scientific knowledge is always on the road, so its current state is inevitably affected by where it is or has just come from — that is, by the ideas and interpersonal communications of the researchers and research institutions that produce it.
DAVID NEWTON
Most participants in the debate agree that science has nothing to fear from a closer study of its social features. Indeed, they accept that it is only by understanding the creative and critical practices by which scientists cooperate and compete that we can fully appreciate the status of scientific knowledge — the extraordinary reliability of some parts of it and the horrible uncertainty of much of the rest. How come, then, that sociology is widely perceived as 'anti-science'?
This conversation doesn't resolve the puzzle. In the book, the so-called 'sociology of scientific knowledge', or SSK, fills the stage. But despite their self-proclaimed relativism, its proponents repeatedly insist that they too are faithful supporters of the scientific enterprise. In any case, the innocent reader should not accept their claim to be speaking for the whole field of 'science studies'. As the admirably broad-minded contributions of Michael Lynch and Steven Shapin show, SSK is actually only one of the many guerilla bands that operate in this wide-open academic territory.
What the SSKers say again and again in this rambling conversation is that their relativism is strictly "methodological". As their avowed leader Harry Collins puts it, they are carrying out an "amoral analysis", in which they "leave the scientists to decide on the truth" while "recording the argument without taking sides". The practices and beliefs associated with a research project in physics should be treated "symmetrically" with those associated with, say, the casting of a horoscope or the detection of a witch among the Azande of Sudan. Indeed, the adherents of SSK say that they are just ethnographers, like Edward Evans-Pritchard, who adopted a similar stance in order to demonstrate the innate rationality of pre-scientific cultural systems.
Unfortunately, as most social scientists now acknowledge, this highly desirable objectivity is nowhere near attainable. The conversation does not include any sociologists or ethnographers outside the narrow speciality of the sociobiology of science, so it is never pointed out that outsiders don't necessarily have a clearer view of a culture than the people who live inside it. In practice, methodological relativism shades into rhetorical affectation, dangerously compromising the sincerity of the 'science studier' in the eyes of the 'studied scientist'. Thus, to preserve a semblance of consistency, SSK overbalances into full metaphysical relativism, where its pro-science protestations sound very thin.
What has SSK actually taught us? Principally, it has shown us that scientific research is 'really' just like any other human activity. Big deal! In fact, this unsurprising outcome was written into the initial script. SSK aims to tell everyone what they should know about science, but aborts its own mission by perversely bracketing out the social peculiarities that differentiate science from other modes of knowledge production. Thus, it has nothing to say about the practices that seem to make scientific knowledge so remarkably reliable for certain purposes.
SSK is just too conceptually limited to answer the questioning title of this muddled, muddling book. The 'pro-science' conversationalists here are all physical scientists, so they fail to see that the natural world has many different aspects, each inspiring a somewhat different scientific culture. Or should one say that the natural and human sciences, including SSK itself, are all subcultures of modernism, all challenged by the post-modern critique, and all really on the same side in the science wars? |
