Abstract
It is fashionable these days to speak of combining the work of the science studies or metascience disciplines into a coherent, unified, or “integrated” theory of science. The disciplines I have chiefly in mind are history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology of science.2 Several papers of the present volume speak of integration, especially those of the psychologists, who call for a happy harmony of science studies efforts.3 As one of the first philosophers of science to take “new wave” sociological work seriously and as one who does not worry much about academic territorially, I too have been one of the happy harmonizers. Unfortunately, however, all is not sweetness and light.
[M]an is not what he seems, a creature of a day, but is known to be an interpreter of nature.... Full of wonders is nature. But the most wonderful of all is man the interpreter—a part and a member ... of the world’s infinite Community of Interpretation.
——Josiah Royce1, after Sophocles
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Notes and References
Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity, New York: Macmillan, 1913, Lecture XVI, paraphrasing Sophocles’s Antigone. Professor Max Fisch first called this passage to my attention.
Readers more accustomed to British usage should here understand’ science studies’ to include philosophy, for present purposes I prefer the term’ science studies’ to, say, ‘metascience’. Labeling the enterprise “metascience” begs the very questions I want to raise, since most self-styled metascientists think that they are natural scientists, working at a high level of generality.
B. Gholson, W. R. Shadish, R. A. Neimeyer, and A. C. Houts (eds.), Psychology of Science: Contributions to Metascience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; in press.
A. C. Houts, T. D. Cook, and W. R. Shadish, Jr., “The Person-Situation Debate: A Critical Multiplist Perspective,” Journal of Personality 54. 1986. 52–105.
I do not mean to suggest that sociologists of science are politically conservative in the way that many romantic figures were.
In America there is a need to defend science against fundamentalist religious and political groups. Such social threats are often the context for treating science essentialistically. See Larry Laudan, “The Demise of the Demarcation Problem,” in R. S. Cohen and L. Laudan (eds.), Physics, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983. 111–127.
Nor is it to say that more general questions are of no epistemological interest. In my view general epistemology and methodology of science, though related of course, are hardly the same subject.
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutchinson, 1959; and Conjectures and Refutations, New York: Basic Books, 1963.
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, London, 1931. See also Thomas Nickles, “Remarks on the Use of History as Evidence,” Synthese 69. 1986. 253-266.
On the other hand, the psychological studies equally challenge our individual competence to pursue our own interests in an ideally rational (e.g., utility theoretic) manner. It is a false dilemma to say that since these studies challenge disinterested, universal reason, they therefore support the importance of interested, “local” reason. They seem to challenge reason of any kind, at least individual reason. See Steven Stich, “Could Man Be an Irrational Animal?,” in H. Kornblith (ed.), Naturalizing Epistemology, Cambridge: MIT Press.
I hope the present essay is an improvement upon my first attempt to formulate this idea, in “Justification and Experiment,” in D. Gooding, T. Pinch, and S. Schaffer (eds.), The Uses of Experiment: Studies of Experiment in the Natural Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 (in press).
Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior, New York: Macmillan, 1947; 3rd ed., 1976; and Models of Man, New York: John Wiley, 1957. On the importance of economy of research in philosophy of science, see Nicholas Rescher, “Peirce and the Economy of Research,” Philosophy of Science 43. 1976. 71-98; largely reprinted as Chapter 4 of Peirce’s Philosophy of Science, Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1978.
David Faust, The Limits of Scientific Reasoning, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 117ff. For a different sort of cognitive critique of historical work, see Howard Margolis, Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, and his paper, “Is the Real World of Any Use?,” presented at the 1987 4S Meeting, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Obviously, there are plenty of Bayesians around. For one who abandons Bayesianism for this reason, see Ronald Giere’s paper in this volume and his Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Thomas Kuhn suggests that it not be made much wider. See his “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?” in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. 1-23.
Faust, op.cit., 1984. Note 13. 3. Faust reviews work by Tversky and Kahneman, Nisbett and Ross, Tweney, and many others. That many of our epistemic limits and biases are products of evolutionary compromise reminds us of the work of Donald Campbell and others on evolutionary epistemology. See also Alvin Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, on the relevance of psychology to epistemology but also Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, on the relevance of sociology rather than psychology for epistemology.
See the works cited in Note 12.
I here build my case around cognitive needs and the resulting order imposed on the community by method. However, one can also proceed in roughly the opposite direction, for there are also moral and political needs that call for methodological organization of the community. Those needs have been addressed by working scientists at crucial junctures (e.g., the time of emergence of experimental science, the Wertfreiheit dispute in turn-of-the-century Germany, and the Nazi threat) and by methodologists from Bacon to Mill to Polanyi. For an excellent treatment of these issues, based on the Boyle-Hobbes debate, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. They aim “to display scientific method as crystallizing forms of social organization and as a means of regulating social interaction within the scientific community” (p. 14).
My thinking about heuristics is indebted to William Wimsatt, “Robustness, Reliability, and Multiple-Determination in Science,” in M. Brewer and B. Collins (eds.), Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences: A Tribute to Donald T. Campbell, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 124–163.
See Nickles, “The Reconstruction of Scientific Knowledge,” Philosophy and Social Action 13. 1987. 91-104; and “Reconstructing Science: Discovery and Experiment,” in D. Batens and J. P. van Bendegem (eds.), Theory and Experiment, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1988. 33-53.
J. R. Brown (ed.), Scientific Rationality: The Socialogical Turn, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984, for references. Augustine Brannigan, The Social Basis of Scientific Discoveries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, provides a sophisticated account of scientific discovery as social attribution.
Against method as the secret of success, see Richard Rorty, “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. 191-210; and, of course, Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, London: New Left Books, 1975, a contemporary statement of an Hegelian position.
Methods explain the rapidity of breakthroughs in an indirect manner, for they provide the resources by which entire families of models of different and competing varieties (families of families) may be produced quickly and tried against each other and against nature.
Or research “puzzles” in Kuhn’s language. See Kuhn, op. cit, 1970. Note 15. See also The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. 2nd ed., 1970; and Jerry Fodor’s “Introduction” to Psychological Explanation, New York: Random House, 1968. Kuhn rightly stressed the importance of the articulated reconstruction and routinization of problem-solving procedures.
Smith’s remark was: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest.” The Wealth of Nations, New York: Modern Library, 1937. 14. See Albert Hirschman’s interesting “Morality and the Social Sciences: A Durable Tension,” in Normal Haan et al. (eds.), Social Science as Moral Inquiry, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Although the Smith move may appear to abandon reasons in favor of hard-nosed, naturalistic causes, the appeal to interests in place of universal reasons need not be a rejection of a broadly moral perspective, as we shall see below.
Steven Shapin, “History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions,” History of Science 20. 1982. 164. I have reversed the order of the two passages.
Kant and the Germans furnished the connected world view that was missing in Hume and in atomistic, anti-relational British empiricism. Kant recognized that the unity of consciousness and the coherence, stability, and cognitive labeling of our perceptions were problems to be solved, that the world did not simply impose its own unitary, determinate cognitive space upon us through our direct perception of reality. Of course, Kant’s explanation was a psychological one, in terms of a set of internal processing rules, the categories and forms of intuition which are themselves simply “given” and universally built into all human beings. Hegel and other critics externalized much of this process to the social realm. Compare modern ethnomethodological concerns about coherence—with the social construction and maintenance of objects, situations, features, roles, etc.
Woolgar and Bruno Latour envision a complete reversal of roles in calling for a ten-year moratorium on epistemology in order to see what is left for cognitive studies to explain after naturalistic studies of science have done their work. See their “Postscript” to Laboratory Life, 2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Of course, they have primarily in mind a special sort of French Cartesian-Kantian rationalistic or structuralist epistemology, and I do not. However, they probably would be happy to extend the moratorium to Anglo-American cognitive psychology as well.
See Shapin, op. cit, 1982. Note 26. 159.
The numbered paragraphs are lifted, with minor changes, from my “Justificaiton and Experiment,” op. cit., 1988. Note 11. For a linking of specific patterns of reasoning with types of social behaviour and psychological orientation within the setting of a leading physics laboratory, see Terry Shinn, “Cognitive Process and Social Practice: The Case of Experimental Macroscopic Physics,” a portion of which was presented at the Boulder Conference. For a more general linkage of forms of scientific life (as articulated in their methodologies) and social formations, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan, op. cit., Note 18.
See Nickles, “Methodology, Heuristics, and Rationality,” in Joseph Pitt and Marcello Pera (eds.), Rational Change in Science, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987. 103-132. For a discussion of the critical imperative and the degree to which it ought to be institutionalized, as part of a larger discussion of the optimal form of the scientific community, see Robert Neimeyer and William Shadish, Jr., “Optimizing Scientific Validity: Toward an Interdisciplinary Science Studies,” Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 8. 1987. 463-85. See also Gholson, Shadish, Neimeyer, and Houts, Psychology of Science, op. cit., Note 3.
A high degree of social activity concerning a body of claims does not imply belief in the literal truth of those claims, but for the same reason we must appreciate that the importance of predictive testability is not purely an epistemological matter of confirming or disconfirming an hypothesis. Especially during the early stages of a programme of research, the heuristic role of experimental testability may be more important than its epistemic role. Standard H-D accounts of science have been overly epistemic, overly “philosophical,” at the expense of understanding how science works.
Andrew Pickering, “The Hunting of the Quark,” Isis 72. 1981. 216-36. See also Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Harold Brown, “On Being Rational,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 15. 1978. 214–248; and Brown’s forthcoming book on rationality.
Rudolf Carnap, in The Continuum of Inductive Methods, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952, showed that the effectiveness of a given, simple inductive method depends on what sort of world we live in. Michael Friedman explicitly draws the inference that methodology must be an empirical subject and not apriori, a claim with which pragmatists will heartily agree. See his “Truth and Confirmation,” Journal of Philosophy 76. 1979. 361-382. In Structure, op. cit., 1962, Note 24, Kuhn asked what the world must be like in order for us to know it, a question that also entertains Donald Campbell.
This is the pragmatic turn characteristic of Charles Peirce and interestingly extended by Simon, Rescher, Laudan, and others. See Simon, op. cit., 1947 and 1957, Note 12; also Nicholas Rescher, Methodological Pragmatism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978; and Larry Laudan, “Methodology: Its Prospects,” in Arthur Fine and Peter Machamer (eds.), PSA 1986, Vol. 2, East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Assn., 1988.
Actually, the serious use of scientific content has only recently (once again) become possible for philosophers, too. Only with the rejection of apriori, purely analytical philosophy and of purely logical or conventional conceptions of method can we now appreciate the content-specificity of methods.
Faust, op. cit., 1984, Note 13, is an example. For him “social factors” add information to the scientific research context, supplementing the experimental data, but it is psychological rather than social processes which digest the data.
At the Yearbook Conference, the sociologists present repeatedly attacked the naive view that sociology is concerned only with groups or communities and not with individual behaviour, e.g., linguistic behaviour. See also Shapin, op. cit., 1982. Note 26. 195.
Steve Fuller made this observation at the Boulder conference.
Jeff Coulter, The Social Construction of Mind, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979; and Rethinking Cognitive Theory, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Compare Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do, New York: Harper and Row, 1972; 2nd, enlarged edition, 1979. But see also the work of the Edinburgh sociologists.
See Woolgar’s critiques of the Strong Programme and others in “Interests and Explanation in the Social Study of Science,” Social Studies of Science 11. 1981. 365-94. “Two Readings of Ethnomethodology,” Social Studies of Science 11. 1981. 504-514. “Reconstructing Man and Machine: A Note on Sociological Critiques of Cognitivism,” in W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and T. Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. 311-328. (However, note my suggestion at the beginning of this paper that Woolgar’s own programme has some uncomfortable similarities to foundational positivism.) See also Steven Yearley, “The relationship between Epistemological and Sociological Cognitive Interests: Some Ambiguities Underlying the Use of Interest Theory in the Study of Scientific Knowledge,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 13. 1982. 353-388. For an early discussion of differences within the Strong Programme, see Edward Manier, “Levels of Reflexivity,” in P. Asquith and R. Giere (eds.), PSA 1980, Vol. 1. East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Assn. 1980. 1197-207.
Woolgar, op. cit., 1987, Note 42, rejects Bloor on Wittgenstein as a “strong programmer” in another sense: codifiability suitable as input into an AI device. To many, the message of Wittgenstein’s Investigations is that forms of life are diverse and conventional in a way that resists all attempts at codification.
Shapin, op. cit., 1982. Note 26. 159. Bloor and the other Strong Programmers would agree that observation is underdetermined.
Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981.
See, e.g., the February 1981 special issue of Social Studies of Science, on the Bath relativist programme, as well as their more recent books.
David Bloor, Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Sociologists and historians have shown that what originally appeared to be nature’s own language—the mathematical language of primary qualities, or Galilean geometry—turned out to be just the language of one particular specialty—mechanics—and only an early stage of that. After Berkeley had undermined the distinction of primary and secondary qualities, Hume could take the language of direct experience as nature’s own language (which comes directly in through the five senses, as “inlets” to the sensations). Thus Hume anticipated the modern, universal observation language of the positivists. Contemporary sociologists have added much to philosophers’ own criticisms of this language, showing it to be the language of no science, let alone of all sciences, and that, like theoretical claims, observational claims are radically underdetermined. For problems of decontextualization of observation claims in science, see Nickles, op. cit., 1988. Note 11. For more on ‘nature’s own language’, see Rorty, op. cit., 1982. Note 22.
W. V. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. 69–90. Reprinted in Hilary Kornblith (ed.), Naturalizing Epistemology, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. 15-29. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and the Brown Books, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969. 28. Bloor, op. cit., 1983, Note 47, Chapter 9, claims that his style of sociology is the best way to continue and extend Wittgenstein’s work. He acknowledges that the ethnomethodologists and their kin give Wittgenstein a different reading.
See Woolgar, op. cit., 1987. Note 42; Collins, “Classifying Rule-Based Expert Systems,” Philosophy and Social Action 13. 1987. 57-67.
In this case sociologists’ opposition to philosophers’ constant talk about rationality can take two forms, one anti-scientific and the other pro-scientific. (1) The idea of a rigid, rule-guided methodology is just an instrument of positivist science or, on the contrary, (2) any appeal to reasons and rationality is the next-to-last vestige of special creatinism and religious anti-naturalism. See Note 25. The last vestige is humanistic constructivism, the view that man is self-defining. Of course, one can turn the tables and see the computer model as a way of assimilating ourself to our literal constructions-digital computers-and thereby gaining an understanding which is at once constructive (artificial) and natural.
But also as the real person, the seat of human subjectivity and knowledge, now that the body could be explained scientifically. Moreover, the mind and some of its contents (as they eventually came to be defined) provided a model for mechanical theories and for all conceptions of nature as “intelligible to reason.” The mind imposed its laws of reason on the world. This idea culminated in Kant’s critical philosophy, epitomized in his remark in the Prolegomena that the mind does not draw its laws from nature (e.g., by induction) but imposed them on nature, and in Hegel’s still more radical constructivism. Hence, again, the irony of the constructing mind deconstructing itself out of existence.
Some sociologists have anticipated this move and think they already have an answer: like a long line of German thinkers, and especially Wittgenstein, they relocate the “mind” in social action. Incidentally, I do not mean to suggest that Woolgar simply takes folk categories as given. On the contrary, as chief aim of his ethnomethodological programme is precisely to show how ordinary and scientific ways of speaking and construing the world are constructed and maintained.
A fuller discussion would distinguish the epistemological from the apparently non-epistemological strains in German idealism (roughly, Kant vs. Hegel), whence the issue becomes one of whether science will (or should) supplant philosophy, or at least tame it in the form of scientific espistemelogy. We also need to take into account the various attitudes toward science and their underlying reasons. Some people are so “pronatural-science” that they want to reconstruct all inquiry on this model. Others are more moderate in their pro attitude. Still others are pro-natural-science but anti-human-science, or vice versa. And some are just “anti-anti,” not to mention those who are officially neutral. Whatever their place in this grid, some people think the sciences can be improved (by thoroughly naturalizing them or, on the contrary, by humanizing them, or yet again by holding them to some normative standard); others feel that we should not tamper with science, or that it won’t do any good.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London, 1651, Part 1.
See Frederick Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977.
Depending on how ‘metaphysical’ is taken, Woolgar might also deplore my treatment on the grounds that I obfuscate the issues even more than those social critics of cognitivism who concede established categories of description (without inquiring into how they are sustained) in proposing a social scientific in place of a cognitive scientific explanation of human action. See Woolgar, op. cit., 1987. Note 42.
See Rorty, op. cit., 1982, Note 22, for this position.
S. Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950; see also Woolgar, op. cit.; 1981 (“Two Readings”), Note 42. 511. Rorty, op. cit, 1979, Note 16, retains an unusually sharp distinction between reasons and causes.
Rorty’s position is inspired by Sellars’s classic essay, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Science, Perception, and Reality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. 1-40.
On the difficulties of integrating even closely related scientific specialities, see Edward Manier’s contribution to this volume.
Piotr Hoffman, The Anatomy of Idealism, dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1982, for an excellent treatment of these developments.
Consider the resolutions of apparent contradictions such as matter acting where it is not (at a distance), the origin of species, the unconscious mind, the relativity of simultaneity, subatomic particles, and wavicles.
On social epistemology see Steve Fuller, Social Epistemology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
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Fuller, S.: An interview with Marc De Mey on the possibility of cognitive science as a focal point for science studies; Social Epistemology, 1987, 1, 83–95.
Gale, A.G. & Findlay, J.M.: Eye movement patterns in viewing ambiguous figures; in Groner, R., Menz, C. et al., Eye Movements and Psychological Functions: International Views; Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 145–68.
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Nickles, T. (1989). Integrating the Science Studies Disciplines. In: Fuller, S., de Mey, M., Shinn, T., Woolgar, S. (eds) The Cognitive Turn. Sociology of the Sciences a Yearbook, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7825-7_12
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