The Lakatos-Feyerabend relationship is documented in detail in Motterlini 1999.
Carnap's most famous paper on frameworks is his "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" (1956), which is very readable, by Carnap standards. Another very influential (though difficult) discussion of "conceptual schemes," which follows up some of Quine's themes, is Davidson 1984.
8.1 Beyond Philosophy?
In the latter part of the twentieth century, ideas about science were in a state of flux. Options proliferated, including radical options. The previous chapter looked at some of these developments from the side of philosophy of science. The same phenomenon is found-perhaps even more so-in fields that border on philosophy. That is one topic of this chapter. I will focus on sociology of science, as this is an area that began to interact intensely with philosophy. Some of the same issues arose in the history of science, but it was sociology that sometimes set itself up as a replacement, or "successor discipline;' to the philosophy of science (Bloor 1983).
8.2 Robert Merton and the "Old" Sociology of Science
Science is a social enterprise. It seems, then, that one field we should turn to in order to understand this fact is sociology, the general study of human social structures.
The "sociology of science" developed in the middle of the twentieth century. For a while it had little interaction with philosophy of science. The founder of the field, and the central figure for many years, was Robert Merton.
"Mertonian sociology of science" is basically mainstream sociology applied to the structure of science and to its historical development. In the 19 40s Merton isolated what he called the "norms" of science-a set of basic values that govern scientific communities. These norms are universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. Universalism is the idea that the personal attributes and social background of a person are irrelevant to the scientific value of the person's ideas. Communism involves the common ownership of scientific ideas and results. Anyone can make use of any scientific idea in his or her work; the French are not barred from using English results. The norm of disinterestedness is made questionable by Merton's later ideas, but the basic idea is that scientists are supposed to act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than personal gain. Organized skepticism is a community-wide pattern of challenging and testing ideas instead of taking them on trust. (Merton sometimes added humility to his list of norms, but that one is less important.)
The four norms are one part of Merton's account of science. Merton added another big idea in a famous (and wonderfully readable) paper first presented in 1957. This is Merton's account of the reward system in science. Merton claimed that the basic currency for scientific reward is recognition, especially recognition for being the first person to come up with an idea. This, Merton claimed, is the only property right recognized in science. Once an idea is published, it becomes common scientific property, according to the norm of communism. In the best case, a scientist is rewarded by having the idea named after him, as we see in such cases as Darwinism, Planck's constant, and Boyle's law.
Merton argued that the importance of recognition is made evident by the fact that the history of science is crammed with priority disputes, often of the most acrimonious kind. And let no one suggest that the figures involved were always jealous also-rans. Galileo fought tooth and nail over recognition for various ideas of his. Newton fought Hooke over the inverse square law of gravity, and he fought Leibniz over the invention of calculus. The pattern has continued similarly from the seventeenth century to today. National loyalties are often a factor, as seen recently in the dispute between the American Robert Gallo and the Frenchman Luc Montagnier over the 1983 discovery of HIV. There are some exceptions to the general tendency; the most famous is the tremendously polite and gentlemanly non-dispute between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace over the theory of evolution by natural selection in the nineteenth century. But the usual pattern when two scientists seem to hit on an idea around the same time is to fight for priority. As Merton says, the moral fervor seen in these debates, even on the part of those with no direct involvement, suggests that a basic community standard is operating.
Merton argued that the reward system of science mostly functions to encourage original thinking, which is a good thing. But the machine can also misfire, especially when the desire for reward overcomes everything else in a scientist's mind. The main "deviant" behaviors that result are fraud, plagiarism, and libel and slander. Of these, Merton held that fraud is very rare, plagiarism somewhat less rare, and libel and slander very common. Fraud is rare largely because of a rigorous internal policing by scientists, which derives partly from their own ambitions but also from organized skepticism. Plagiarism does happen, but the most usual outlet for deviant behavior is libel and slander of competitors. More precisely, what we find is a special form of slander that relates to the reward structure of science: accusation of plagiarism. This is vastly more common than actual theft. When two scientists seem to hit on an idea simultaneously, it is easy and often effective to insinuate that while my discovery was legitimate, it is no accident that Professor Z unveiled something very similar around the same time. After all, Professor Z was taking notes intensely during an informal talk I gave some months ago, and he cornered one of my graduate students and wanted to know how we had managed to ... (etc.). Professor Z, or Z's allies, will often reply in kind.
Merton also has a poignant discussion of the fact that the kind of recognition that is the basic reward in science will only be given to a small number of scientists. There are not enough laws and constants for everyone to get one. The result is mild forms of deviancy such as the mania to publish. For pedestrian workers who cannot hope to produce a world-shaking discovery, publication becomes a substitute for real recognition.
Though the mania to publish is certainly real (and no less real in philosophy than in science), I suggest that Merton's analysis is not quite right on this point. Scientists (and philosophers) who cannot hope to produce another e = mc2 will nonetheless often have real standing in a small community of people who work on the same detailed problems. Recognition even in a tiny community of colleagues can be a significant source of motivation. Kuhn's analysis of normal science recognized this fact. And in explaining the mania to publish, at least in recent years, university administrations and their desire for a simple way to measure productivity surely play a role.
Merton's editor Norman Storer suggests that we think of Merton's four norms as like a "motor" and think of the reward system as like the "electricity" that makes the motor run (Merton 1973). The norms describe a structure of social behavior, and the reward system is what motivates people to participate in these activities. But it is not so clear what the relation is between the two parts of the story. As Merton himself noted, the reward system can be at tension with the norms. In fact, I cannot see what remains of the norm of disinterestedness once we give Merton's analysis of the reward system. What we seem to have is not disinterestedness but a special kind of ambition and self-interest.
Earlier discussions in this book also suggest possible problems with Merton's "organized skepticism." There is definitely something right in this idea, and it has the same kind of intuitive appeal as simple statements of empiricism. But we must confront Kuhn's argument that too much willingness to revise basic beliefs makes for chaos in science. What we find in science, Kuhn claimed, is a delicate balance between skepticism and trust, between open-mindedness and dogmatism.
Still, we see in Merton's analysis a good pattern for a theory of the structure of science. We have a description of the rewards and incentives that motivate individual scientists, and we have an account of how these individual behaviors generate the higher-level social features of science. We will return to this idea in chapter ii.
Merton's sociology is often seen as the "old" style of sociology of science, a style that was superseded nearly thirty years ago. But there are some good ideas here, especially in the
treatment of rewards. And sociology of science in the Merton tradition does continue, albeit with less drama and gnashing of teeth than we find in the newer approaches.
8.3 The Rise of the Strong Program
The sociology of science changed, expanded, and became more ambitious in the 197os. Here is a standard way in which the "old" and "new" work are often distinguished. The older work wanted to describe the social structure and social placement of science as a whole but did not try to explain particular scientific beliefs in sociological terms. The newer approach has tried to use sociological methods to explain why scientists believe what they do, why they behave as they do, and how scientific thinking and practice change over time.
That standard description has some truth in it. But the newer sociology of science is also very interested in general norms, especially norms of reasonableness. Recent sociology of science has also worked with a different view of what scientific theories are like. At least in some of his work, Merton assumed a view of scientific theories that is close to logical empiricism-theories are basically networks of predictive generalizations. The newer sociology embraced Kuhn, holism about testing, incommensurability, new ideas about observation, and various speculative views about scientific language. In fact, these ideas make up a kind of "anti-positivist package" that was accepted not just by sociologists, but also by many historians, feminist critics, and others concerned with science in the latter part of the twentieth century.
The sociologists embraced some philosophers, but they intended their work to conflict with many traditional philosophical ideas about science. Some thought of sociology as replacing philosophy of science, a field that had become dried up and burdened with useless myths. The logical positivists, who seemed the most dried-up and abstract, became the bad guys, and eventually they turned into paradigm cases of Dead White Males.
The most famous project in this new form of sociology of science is the strong program in the sociology of scientific knowledge. This project was developed by an interdisciplinary group based in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 197os, headed (to some extent) by Barry Barnes and David Bloor. A central idea of the strong program is the "symmetry principle." This principle holds that all forms of belief and behavior should be approached using the same kinds of explanations. In particular, we should not give totally different kinds of explanations for beliefs that we think are true and beliefs that we think are false. Our own assessment of an idea should have no effect on how we explain its history and social role.
Applied to science, the symmetry principle tells us that scientific beliefs are products of the same general kinds of forces as other kinds of belief. Scientists are not some special breed of pure, disinterested thinkers who pay attention to nothing but data and logic. People of all kinds live in communities that have socially established local norms for regulating beliefnorms for supporting claims, for handling disagreement, for working out who will be listened to and who will be ignored. These norms will often be subtle habits, rather than explicitly stated rules.
Scientists are people who work in an unusual kind of local community. This community is characterized by high prestige, lengthy training and initiation, notoriously bad fashion choices, and expensive toys. But according to the sociologists, it is still a community in which beliefs are established and defended via local norms that are human creations, maintained by social interaction. Scientists often look down on beliefs found in other communities, but this disparaging attitude is part of the local norms of the scientific community. It is one of the rules of the game.
As a result, we must recognize that the kinds of factors that explain why scientists came to believe that genes are made of DNA are the same kinds of factors used in explaining how other communities arrive at their very different beliefs-for example, a tribal community's belief that a drought was due to the ill will of a local deity. In both cases the beliefs are established and maintained in the community by the deployment of local norms of argument and justification. The norms themselves vary between the tribal community and the community of scientists, but the same general principles apply in both cases. Most importantly, we should not give the Real World a special role in the explanation of scientific belief that it does not have in the explanation of other beliefs that pass local community norms.
The strong program also sought to analyze particular scientific theories and their relation to social circumstances. This work became especially controversial. The aim was to explain some scientific beliefs in terms of the political "interests" of scientists and their place within society.
For example, Donald MacKenzie (1981) argued that the development of some of the most important ideas in modern statistics should be understood in terms of the role these tools had in nineteenthcentury English thinking about human evolution and its social consequences. That connection went partly via the program of eugenics, the attempt to influence human evolution by encouraging some people to breed and discouraging others from doing so. MacKenzie argued that a body of biological, mathematical, and social ideas was well matched to the "interests" of the ambitious, reformist English middle classes. So he was asserting some kind of link between the popularity of specific scientific and mathematical ideas, on the one hand, and broader political factors on the other. What kind of link was this supposed to be? MacKenzie was cautious. When links are made between specific scientific ideas and their political context, the sociologist of science is quick to say that no simple determination of scientific thinking by political factors is being alleged. Sometimes metaphorical terms like "reflect" are used; scientific ideas will "reflect the interests" of a social group. Certainly it can sometimes be shown that the popularity of a scientific idea benefits a social group. But is this benefit supposed to explain the popularity of the scientific idea, or not? If so, is the explanation supposed to be a causal explanation, albeit a qualified one, or some other kind of explanation? This has been the source of some obscurity, but the issue of causal analysis in complex social systems is often very difficult. Some kind of explanation is intended, though.
This work on scientific ideas and "interests" antagonized conventional philosophers and historians, but it antagonized not only the "old farts." Even Kuhn was critical of it. Although Kuhns work is always cited by those seeking to tie science to its broader political context, Structure did not have much to say about the influence of "external" political life on science. Kuhn analyzed the "internal" politics of science-who writes the textbooks, who determines which problems have high priority. But he saw an insulation of scientific decision making from broader political influences as a strength of science. Despite his status as a hero, Kuhn did not like the more radical sociology of science that followed him.
The strong program is also often associated with relativism. Many sociologists accepted this label, but we need to be careful. There are so many definitions of relativism floating around that the sense of relativism embraced by the sociologists need not be the same as that used by commentators and critics. The forms of relativism that are important here concern standards of rationality, evidence, and justification. Basically, relativism in this context holds that there is no single set of standards entitled to govern the justification of beliefs. The applicability of such standards depends on one's situation or point of view (see also glossary and section 6.3). In this sense, the strong program does tend to be relativist. It holds that science has no special authority that extends beyond all local norms. Instead, the norms and standards that govern scientific belief can be justified only from the inside, and that is true of other, nonscientific norms as well. We who live within science-dominated societies will find it compelling to say, "Science really is the best way of learning about the world." But, according to the strong program, saying those things is just an expression of our local norms. No one can hope to take a point of view outside all local norms and conceptual systems and say, This conceptual system or this set of local norms really is the best, the one that adapts us best to the wor
ld.
So, despite some differences within the field, it is fair to say that the strong program is an expression of a relativist position about belief and justification.
A famous problem for relativists is the application of relativism to itself. The problem does have various solutions, but it can definitely lead to tangles. Unfortunately, that is what happened in sociology of science. The application of the field's principles to itself led to interminable discussions that have weighed down the field. If all beliefs are to be explained in terms of the same kinds of social factors, and no set of local norms can be judged "really" superior from an external standpoint, then what about the theories found in sociology of science? This came to be called the "problem of reflexivity." Mostly the sociologists of science accepted that their claims were true of their own ideas. They accepted that their own theories were only justified according to local social norms. This conclusion is OK, but the whole issue led to endless methodological obsessing and navel-gazing.
In this section I have focused on a particular, dramatic strand in postMerton sociology of science. But although it is easy to write as if "the strong program" was a clean and definite package, the program contained a good deal of variety. And it was not the only kind of sociology of science developing in this period. Just as the strong program elbowed aside earlier social accounts of science in the 1970s, it was to be partially elbowed aside in turn, in the 198os.
8.4 Leviathan and Latour
This section will look at the two most famous works in recent sociology of science.
The first is a piece of sociologically informed history, rather than pure sociology: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985, 1 will abbreviate the book as Leviathan). This book does not advo care the strong program, but it is often seen as a sophisticated development of those ideas. The book is so widely respected, in fact, that various different camps tend to claim it as their own.
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