Abstract
If the theme of this volume—“Einstein meets Magritte”—evokes the possibility of an intersection or convergence of ideas between parties who never meet empirically, then the topic of the present essay can be seen as the reverse: that is, the possibility of a failure of convergence, intersection, or even engagement of ideas between parties who not only encounter each other in empirical space but repeatedly converse there. It is the structure and dynamics of such failed meetings, especially as they occur between traditional philosophers of science and theorists, historians, and sociologists working in the relatively new field of “science studies,” that I mean primarily to explore here. I am also concerned, however, with the more general theme and issue of in/commensurability, which figures centrally and by no means incidentally in the debates that divide them.
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Notes
This essay is adapted from Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Theretical Controversy, Cambridge, Mass, Havard University Press, 1997.
A slightly different version appears in Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory, ed. Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky (Durhan, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997)
Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Page references will be cited in the text.
See, e.g., David Papeneau, “How to Think about Science” [rev. of Kitcher], New York Times Book Review (July 25, 1993), pp. 14–15; J.A. Kegley, rev. of Kitcher, Choice (November, 1993), pp. 471–472.
See, e.g., John Ziman, “Progressive Knowledge,” Nature, 364 (22 July 1993), pp. 295–296;
Steve Fuller, “Mortgaging the Farm to Save the (Sacred) Cow,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 25: 2 (1994), pp. 251–261.
Notably Larry Laudan, Hilary Putnam, and Bas van Fraassen.
See Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Kitcher seems unaware of critiques of the referentialist model of language to which he appeals or of related alternative accounts. Given the mutual segregations of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, it is not surprising that neither Foucault nor Derrida appears in his lengthy bibliography. It is surprising, however, that neither Wittgenstein nor Rorty—or, aside from one minor brush-off, Hesse—does. For related discussion, see Michael A. Arbib and Mary B. Hesse, The Construetion of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 147–170.
Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986; orig. 1979), p. 180.
Kitcher—with a glance, it seems, at S.J. Gould and R.C. Lewon-tin’s celebrated essay, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London [1978] 205: pp. 581–598)—explicitly rejects the telling of “just-so-stories” in the history of science.
Nevertheless, he cites, endorses, and is evidently influenced by Howard Margolis’s defiantly and explicitly Whiggish history of science in Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Margolis maintains that the symmetry postulate of Edinburgh sociologists and historians of science—that is, their refusal to privilege present scientific knowledge methodologically as always already true—is a foolish overreaction to “an older history of science” that got “a bad reputation” because it said impolite things about the losers in scientific controversies. That was, Margolis observes, crude—but, he adds, “of course, being winners, the winning side must have had more of something” (p. 197, italics in text). Kitcher’s own version of that “something” is discussed below.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Kitcher believes that a “pessimistic” overestimation of the significance of theory-ladenness is a general feature of contemporary sociology of science. The claim that “we see just what our theoretical commitments would lead us to expect” is, he writes, “a gross hyperextension of what philosophers and psychologists are able toshow” (p. 167, n. 53; see also p. 141, n. 18). His statement of that claim is itself something of a hyperextension, however, setting up a spurious contrast with the “eminently sensible conclusion,” attributed to Kuhn, that “anomalies emerge in the course of normal science” (ibid.). The crucial issue, of course, is not the emergence of anomalies-something no sociologist of science would, I think, deny—but how to describe their operation in intellectual history. Kitcher evidently sees them as epistemic arrows shot straight from reality, piercing our otherwise theory-clouded or theory-skewed observations and setting us, and our theories, straight. The alternative view—and, arguably, the one Kuhn himself favors—is that perceived anomalies may destabilize specific theories but that, like all other perceptions, must themselves be interpreted via prior conceptualizations. For detailed discussion of Kuhn’s views on this and related topics, see Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 223–244.
See, e.g., Latour, B., Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), The Pasteurization of France
Latour, B., “On Technical Mediation-Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy,” Common Knowledge 3, 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 29–64;
Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, ed., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987)
Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice,” in Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) pp. 1–28;
Callon, “Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for Sociological Analysis,” in Wiebe Bijker and John Law, ed., Constructing Networks and Systems (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994);
Charles Goodwin, “Seeing in Depth” [on the collaborative use of instruments in oceanographie research], Social Studies of Science, 25:2 (May 1995), pp. 237–274.
Contrary to common misunderstandings, “around again” in both the classic idea of the hermeneutic circle and more recent analyses of the reciprocal determination of theory, action, and observation describes not a continuous repetition of the same path but—if spatial images are sought—a set of continuously linked loops. For related discussion, see Arbib and Hesse, The Construction of Reality, 8, and Smith, “Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account,” Critical Inquiry 18, 1 (1991), pp. 125–139.
For an influential, though not unproblematic, account of stabilization at this level of analysis, see Jean Piaget, Biology and Knowledge: An Essay on the Relations between Organic Regulations and Cognitive Processes trans. Beatrix Walsh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971; orig. 1967).
See Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Boston: D. Reidel, 1980) and The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala, 1988)
see also Maturana, “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Drift, or Lineage Diversification through the Conservation and Change of Ontogenic Phenotypes,” trans. Cristina Magro and Julie Tetel (forthcoming; orig. pub., Occasional Publications of the National Museum of Natural History, Santiago, Chile, 43, 1992).
Cf. Latour, B., We have Never been Modern, pp. 111–114.
For examples, see Ruth Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984)
Gerard Radnitsky and W.W. Bartley, eds., Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987)
William G. Lycan, Judgement and Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).
Latour, B., Science in Action, p. 192, italics in text.
For discussion of related ambivalent and apparently endemic cognitive processes, see R.E. Nisbett and L. Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1980)
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A., ed., Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For a survey of pseudodoxia epidemica from a staunchly realist/rationalist perspective
see Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds trans. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Keith Botsford (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994).
For the relation between class and epistemic authority, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Difficult practical situations of this kind—dealing with published denials of the Nazi Holocaust is another example—are often cited as real-life refutations of (supposedly merely theoretical) epistemological relativism. The implication is that, at the “limits of tolerance” presented by such situations, the choice can only be between, on the one hand, declaring certain people objective fools or absolute liars or, on the other hand, capitulating to their demands or agreeing to the “equal validity” of their claims. As just indicated, however, and as I have discussed elsewhere (cf. Smith, “The Unquiet Judge: Activism without Objectivism in Law and Politics,” Annals of Scholarship, 9, 1–2 [1992], pp. 111–133
Smith, “Making (Up) the Truth: Constructivist Contributions,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 61, 4 [1992], pp. 422–29), these are not the only alternatives, nor is it clear that the recommended beyond-tolerance responses-that is, the issuing of strenuous absolutist/objectivist declarations of morality and truth—would (in themselves) have (only) the presumably desired outcomes.
Philosophy of science appears, in some places, to be merging with its own subject-sciences, e.g., philosophy of biology with theoretical biology (see Robert N. Brandon, Adaptation and Environment [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990]
Elliott Sober, ed., Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology 2nd ed. [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994]). In other places, it seems to have naturalized not only its lingo but also its projects and methods, either jumping ship altogether in anticipation of neurophysiological replacements of philosophical accounts of cognition
(see Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986]) or reconceiving its task as that of mediating or “intertranslating” the discourses of traditional epistemology and contemporary cognitive science
(see Andy Clark, Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Parallel Distributed Processing [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991]
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained [Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991]
Owen Flanagan, Science of the Mind [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992]).
See Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Shaping recent (and, from the present perspective, dubious) affirmation of the “incorrigible presupposition” of a realist ontology by “virtually any form of praxis” (A Social History of Truth, pp. 29ff. and 122). In the formal acknowledgments to the latter book, Shapin alludes to “a series of friendly arguments with my colleague Philip Kitcher” (hi). Kitcher, in turn, notes in the formal acknowledgments to The Advancement of Science that his “thinking about epistemology and the history and philosophy of science has been greatly helped by discussions with [among others]… Steven Shapin,” who, he adds, is not “likely to agree with the conclusions of this book, but can pride [himself] on having diverted me from even sillier things that I might have said” (viii).
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Smith, B.H. (1999). Microdynamics of Incommensurability: Philosophy of Science Meets Science Studies. In: Aerts, D., Broekaert, J., Mathijs, E. (eds) Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection. Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action and Society, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4704-0_4
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