When an anthropologist starts to question members of a culture about why they believe what they believe--why, for example, they believe that there are spirits in rivers or trees-- the 'natives' will be baffled, if not annoyed. "Because that's the way the world is", might be a typical (friendly) response. The typical anthropologist would not regard this statement as a sufficient explanation; she would look for more evidence as to why this system of beliefs was adopted.
If our anthropologist were then to enter a scientific laboratory and press a practitioner to explain why she believed in quarks, or genes, the answer might be: "Because they exist." One of the methodological principles of the new sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is symmetry: "the sociological explanation of beliefs in science should be pursued equivalently for both true and false beliefs" (Pinch, 1993, p. 363). In other words, appeals to reality are not sufficient to explain belief systems. True and false is an evaluation all cultures make, relative to their belief systems; an outside observer of a culture should not privilege these accounts.
Consider an example, which we will borrow from the new sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) (Latour, 1986). Supposing we were studying the ritual practices and beliefs of a tribe called the Azande. Take a rain dance, for instance. The Azande shaman, or skilled practitioner of the dance, would be able to explain every success and failure and show that it did, indeed, achieve the desired effect, when done properly.
If we studied this Azande practice from an outside perspective, we could explain every success and every failure in terms alien to the Azande and ultimately show, to our satisfaction, that the dance had no effect on the rain. In contrast, if we adopted an Azande framework to study the Azande system of beliefs, we might come up with some interesting new interpretations that improved ritual practices, but we would be unlikely to decide that whole Azande system was worthless as a general method for improving human relationships with nature.
One can use powerful techniques like ethnography to study scientific laboratories--the same sorts of techniques that might be used to study a tribe in the Amazon. One should also take the same attitude studying these natives, keeping a kind of anthropological distance. One should not go into a study of the scientific laboratory or of the Azande village by assuming, at the outset, that the practices one observes do lead to the truth, if done properly. Nor should one assume the converse--that the sets of rituals one observes are simply primitive mumbo-jumbo which cannot possibly lead to a greater understanding of nature and the universe. In the course of study of any culture, one may uncover great truths.
To summarize our argument so far, when one studies scientific practice, one should keep a bit of anthropological distance and not take all the scientists' accounts of their own behavior at face-value. Nor should one ignore those accounts. There are two kinds of anthropological distance one must try to maintain:
1) Practitioner: Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, in a recent stinging attack on much of social studies of science, imply that in order to study science, one has to have professional training equivalent to a scientist: "We are saying, in effect, that a scholar devoted to a project of this kind must be, inter alia, a scientist of professional standing or nearly so" (Gross & Levitt, 1994, p.235). Certainly, deep knowledge of the subject matter is important, but being a scientists can assume adherence to a view of the world in which certain practices lead unquestionably to a kind of truth. Not all scientists hold such views (Wise, 1996), but those that do would have to be able to bracket their beliefs in order to study them critically. Charging such a scientist with studying her practice would be akin to asking the Azande shaman to evaluate her beliefs--it is a rare shaman or scientist that could attain this sort of distance. William Keith imagines the scientist responding to the sociologist or anthropologist: "We thought (science) was about seeking truth, while you think it's about social arrangements" (Keith, 1995, p. 321).
Let us try to make this difficult point clearer by considering Kuhn's views once again. During a period of crisis, or revolution, scientists in an area become aware that they are operating within a paradigm and that other views are possible. Kuhn argued that holders of an existing paradigm could not even understand a new point of view, because the two belief systems were incommensurable. An example is Barbara McClintock's discovery of genetic transposition *(Keller, 1983). She was working on corn in the mid-1940s at a time when most geneticists were working on drosophila, and she generated a set of anomalies by looking closely at the way in which mutations occurred. After six years of hard, relatively isolated study, she concluded that whole sections of the chromosome could be transposed to another location, and that this was a process that illustrated the normal functioning of the whole genetic system, not an odd or unusual event.
Her initial attempts to communicate this discovery failed almost totally; other geneticists literally did not know what she was talking about, both because what she described was theoretically at odds with the dominant paradigm, and because her methods and the organism she studied were unfamiliar to most. "Central to neo-Darwinian theory was the premise that whatever genetic variation does occur is random, and McClintock reported genetic changes that are under the control of the organism. Such results just did not fit in the standard frame of analysis.
"But it was not only the ideas themselves that were foreign, and hence difficult to grasp for most geneticists; the very kinds of evidence she presented, or rather the patterns it formed were also difficult to follow...Her knowledge of maize was more intimate and more thorough than that of anyone else in the audience" *(Keller, 1983, pp. 144-5). This is the kind of combined theoretical and methodological incommensurability that could occur at times of paradigm shift, according to Kuhn. McClintock's work was eventually recognized in the mind 1970s when similar conclusions emerged from work on bacteria *(Keller, 1983). This thirty-year hiatus is an example of how long a period of incomensurability can last, but also how it can eventually be overcome.
Kuhn later reduced the importance of incommensurabilities, but those who take a radical view of Kuhn have continued to emphasize it *(Pinch, 1997). If this radical view of Kuhn were right, then it would be very difficult to find a practicing scientist who could study her area of science. Consider a 'normal scientist' in genetics looking at what McClintock was doing in the 1950s. Joshua Lederburg concluded she was "either mad or a genius" after visiting her lab *(Keller, 1983, p. 142). To study science, one would need a scientist who could bracket what he 'knew' about the realities in his field.
2) Methodological: Kuhn argues that science does not lead to truths about the universe, but rather makes progress by solving puzzles. "I do not doubt, for example, that Newton's mechanics improves on Aristotle's and that Einstein's improves on Newton's as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein's general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle's that either of them is to Newton's" *(Kuhn, 1962, pp. 206-7).
An anthropologist or psychologist studying science should be careful not to rely on the puzzle-solving practices of a particular field of science to evaluate that area. We discussed this problem above; it is easily solved by noting that our anthropologist will use methods derived from her specialty, perhaps ethnographic techniques, and a psychologist will use tools appropriate to her discipline (see below). Gross and Levitt's professional scientist who studies science would have to receive special training in social sciences as well.
Kuhn's emphasis on puzzle-solving over ontological truth is also prone to a radical interpretation: that science does not lead to absolute truths. This point of view is often referred to as ideological relativism. It implies that the beliefs of the Azande are just as true as the claims of science--'truth' is a relative notion, and truths vary from culture to culture. Perhaps we can never escape our cultural assumptions, and science is simply an outgrowth of a particular culture's assumptions that the observer can be separated from the observed. There is no absolute, rational boundary between science and pseudo-science, therefore work in areas like ESP and astrology and even Creationism can fairly be labeled science by their proponents (Collins, 1982).
The four discoverers in the last chapter would have been astonished if an observer had argued that they were only contributing to a culturally-bound world-view, even if they were given credit for helping to solve puzzles. Rightly or wrongly, they believed they were after eternal truths--just as the Azande see their beliefs as truths.
To Richard Feynman, the real distinguishing characteristic of science resemles Popper's falsification--a willingness to criticize one's beliefs. In a commencement address at Cal Tech in 1974, he talked about 'cargo cult science', after an unnamed group of South Sea Islanders who wanted the planes that had come full of cargo during World War II to return. So they built something akin to a runway, put fires along its sides, made a wooden hut and put a man in it with wooden pieces on his ears and bamboo bars sticking out from them like antenna. The planes didn't land, of course. Feynman argued that the central scientific idea is missing in cargo cult sciences:
It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated (Feynman and Leighton, 1985, p. 341 ).
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
Feynman is sketching a kind of Campbellian hero who seeks the grail of truth without regard for mortal consequences. Feynman himself played a critical role in the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, which does not contradict Feyman's emphasis on scientific integrity but does demonstrate that a scientist's choice of a problem may be determined by institutions. The point a sociologist might make is that these organizations do not lie outside of science--indeed, the Manhattan Project was created by scientists like Einstein and Szilard. (see Chapter 4)
Furthermore, Feynman's view of the self-critical scientist stands in apparent contrast to Latour's observation that science advances by creating 'black boxes' (Latour, 1987): procedures or devices or equations or facts that are taken for granted by future generations of scientists and may be virtually incomprehensible to outsiders. Black boxes are an effort to close off the kind of constant questioning Feynman is calling for. Latour thinks of science studies as an effort to open these black boxes, particularly for a wider public.
The physicist Alan Sokal (http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/physics/faculty/ sokal/index.html) designed an experiment to test whether science's critics, many of them relativists, were cargo cultists or serious scholars. He submitted an article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Herneneutics of Quantum Gravity" for the special "Science Wars" issue of the postmodernist journal, Social Text (Chapman, June 6, 1996). The article was a deliberate parody of the kind of language used by postmodern scholars, quoting extensively from philosophers like Derrida. Sokal's hypothesis was that, despite the fact that he deliberately made statements about physics that were wrong, the editors would accept it, because it accorded with their preconceptions. In other words, he bet that the editors would exhibit confirmation bias. Studies of the peer-review process suggest that reviewers are often biased towards results that agree with the dominant paradigm in their area (Cicchetti, 1991; Mahoney, 1977).
The editors of the journal accepted his manuscript and published it. When Sokal revealed the hoax, they apologized to their readers, but defended themselves on the grounds that Sokal's deception was itself ethically questionable--a journal editor assumes that an author is being honest (see Robbins and Ross, http://www.nyu.edu/pubs/socialtext/ sokal.html).
This reminds me of the classic study in which graduate students pretended to be mental patients in order to gain admission to mental hospitals (Rosenhan, 1973). All were admitted and diagnosed, a fact which was used to critique the whole mental health system. But the hospitals defended themselves on the grounds that no sane person would ask to be admitted to a mental hospital! One wonders what the response would have been had a science studies scholar constructed a fake physics article, complete with a set of plausible references and fabricated data that supported the current paradigm in a domain. Chances are, the article would be accepted, if the referees were blind to the author's name and discipline. If so, the fictitious article would simply be dismissed as a fraud and not be seen as undermining the legitimacy of physics.
Deception aside, Sokal's piece was deliberately constructed to sound like nonsense. If he had submitted it to a refereed journal like Social Studies of Science, it would certainly have been rejected. Therefore, it is wrong to tar science studies with the mistakes made by the editors of Social Text..
Strong relativism of the sort advocated by a minority of science-studies scholars has produced an enraged response from some scientists and mathematicians (Gross & Levitt, 1994) and a more sympathetic critique from others (Labinger, 1995). Gross and Levitt in essence revive C.P. Snow's old two cultures argument (Snow, 1963) and report that the rift between the scientific and humanistic cultures in the academy is widening, with the humanists now claiming to have a unique perspective from which to view science, one that scientists like Sokal find bizarre and incomprehensible. Gross and Levitt argue that a realist perspective is essential to doing science:
Science is, above all else, a reality-driven enterprise. Every active investigator is inescapably aware of this. It creates the pain as well as much of the delight of research. Reality is the overseer at one's shoulder, ready to rap one's knuckles or to spring the trap into which one has been led by overconfidence, or by a too-complacent reliance o mere surmise. Science succeeds precisely because it has accepted a bargain in which even the boldest imagination stands hostage to reality (Gross & Levitt, 1994, p. 234).
From this perspective, even the adoption of methodological relativism would make it impossible to understand science, and strong relativism would simply be nonsense. At a recent meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Donna Haraway (Haraway, October 20, 1995) put her finger on the central question--are most of the philosophical differences between scientists like Feynman and Gross and those relativists who study them the result of mutual incomprehensibility or deep-seated issues that cannot be resolved? Are the two sides condemned to talk past one another forever?
There is room for compromise on the realist/relativist debate. One approach is to take an agnostic view, to bracket the question of whether the entities and relations discovered by scientists really existed before they were brought to light:
...what does indeed come into existence, within, usually, a longer term process, when science 'discovers' a microbe or a subatomic particle, is a specific entity distinguished from other entities (other microbes, other particles) and furnished with a name, a set of descriptors, and a set of techniques in which it can be produced and handled. In other words, some part of a preexisting material world becomes specified and thereby real as something to be reckoned with, accounted for, and inserted in manifold ways into scientific and everyday life. This does not preclude the possibility that some physical correlate of this entity existed, unidentified, tangled up with other objects, before scientists turned their attention to this object" (Knorr-Cetina, 1995, p.161).
This agnostic position vis-à-vis realism works well with methodological relativism; it allows the scholar studying science to bracket the whole question of which objects or entities are real and study how scientists convince themselves that they are real.
The physicist Jay Labinger saw methodological relativism as a "perfectly sound scientific practice" if its intent were to isolate the role of social negotiations and other cultural phenomena by bracketing the effects of reality. In this case, of course, one would have to keep in mind "that the subject of study is now an approximate model, and that the excluded factors may well turn out to be at least as important as the ones being examined" *(Labinger, 1995, p. 291). Labinger calls for collaboration among scientists and those studying science. This is a promising solution to the problem of expertise: how can one acquire both sufficient knowledge in a science and also in history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology or psychology? Myers' work on writing in biology is an example of such a collaboration (Myers, 1990; Myers, 1995).
An alternate solution to the realist/relativist controversy was suggested by Donald Campbell, who pointed-out that one can be both a realist and a sociologist of scientific knowledge by taking the view that reality plays only a small role in settling scientific debates. Indeed, I would go farther and argue that the role of reality varies among scientific controversies--some may be resolved easily by negotiations among participants, others may include hard, inescapable facts that resist efforts at premature closure. If one drops the ideological posturing, one can conduct empirical studies to determine in what sorts of situations nature resists and facilitates negotiations.
C.P. Snow had little to say about social sciences, which exist between sciences and humanities and could theoretically bridge the two cultures gap. Gross and Levitt have a great deal to say about cultural anthropology and the sociology of scientific knowledge, particularly in their more radical forms, but little to say about disciplines like cognitive psychology of science that do not adopt the strong relativist position.
This page was last edited: Wednesday, July 14, 1999