There is a production process in science, by which the educational background, institutional setting, funding decisions, social accidents, and happenstances that form directions of research, hunches, hypotheses, and insights are stripped away, intentionally and systematically, to produce "facts" in a form ready for publication. This de- / re-contextualization serves to obfuscate the process and shamanize the practitioners, but more importantly it serves to generalize the resulting fact and put it into its scientific rather than social context. And it is the scientific context- the fact's objective existence- not the social context, that makes it powerful and useful for further construction of other facts. The social context forms part of the essential background / input, but the produced facts and insights are not by nature social, nor should they be received as such.
Experiments are instrumental in this transformation process, which goes from a hunch, to a collegial suggestion, to an hypothesis, to a testable hypothesis, to the hunt for alternative hypotheses and thus for experiments designed to exclude them and to support the main hypothesis, (if true), followed by group presentations and critique, outside peer review that adduces more alternative hypotheses and possible experiments, and finally to publication and collegial acceptance (or rejection and refutation). When all this is done, the murky origins of the hunch necessarily fall away and become trivially unimportant, (other than in memoirs and reminiscences), and the fact stands alone as supported with all the armament that science can bring to bear, both in its technical testing capabilities and its social structure of critique. It thence, if lucky, becomes a sentence in a textbook. In Bruno Latour's words, it is "freed from the circumstances of its production"
The above was a recounting of the conventional (and scientist's) perspective on the evolution of scientific facts. Whether this is the case is contested by social constructivism, a movement in philosophy that adheres to antirealism, which is to say that all of what we regard as outside "reality" is socially constructed, and thus science is likewise a social institution that generates conventions that by its social power it is able to foist onto a naive public, who in turn, like sheep, contribute their taxes to keep the scientific community wallowing in money and social power, cranking out yet more obscure and artificial "facts". Indeed, the very status of truth that is given to facts is fundamentally a social construct made up of a community of believing people, whatever their reasons and supposed evidence.
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| A few of Latour's works over the years. He declines to be post-modern, because he disagrees with the whole frame of modernity, as being somehow different from or non-continuous with the rest of history. And this attitude comes back to his dismissive attitude towards science and the enlightenment as being a break in kind from prior ways of understanding the world. It has just been fetishes all the way down. |
Bruno Latour (along with his co-writer Steve Woolgar) waded into this controversy back in the 1970s with a French philosophical and anthropological background, to investigate what really goes on in a laboratory. He embedded himself into a leading laboratory and learned how it operated, informally and formally. This is recounted in the book "Laboratory Life" (1979; recent review), which, as usual for continental philosophers, is challenging to make sense of. The authors tend to straddle the two perspectives, both respecting and recounting the normal scientific activities and perspectives, (if rather laboriously), and then also persistently suggesting their contrary viewpoint and program that they bring to the project.
"Despite the fact that our scientists held the belief that the inscriptions could be representations or indicators of some entity with an independent existence 'out there', we have argued that such entities were constituted solely through the use of these inscriptions. ... By contrast, we do not conceive of scientists using various strategies as pulling back the curtain on pregiven, but hitherto concealed, truths. Rather, objects (in this case substances) are constituted through the artful creativity of scientists. Interestingly, attempts to avoid the use of terminology which implies the preexistence of objects subsequently revealed by scientists has led us into certain sylistic difficulties. This, we suggest, is precisely because of the prevalence of a certain form of discourse in the description of process. We have therefore found it extremely difficult to formulate descriptions of scientific activity which do not yield to the misleading impression that science is about discovery (rather than creativity and construction). It is not just that a change of emphasis is required; rather, the formulations which characterize historical descriptions of scientific practice require exorcism before the nature of this practice can best be understood."
Exorcism indeed! One might posit a simpler explanation- that science is, in fact, in the business of discovery, though with the caveat that what is to be dis-covered is never fully known beforehand, sometimes not even suspected, and thus there is a great deal of intutition, creativity, variation, and social construction involved in the process, and uneven and unpredictable results coming out. While the status of the resulting fact is never perfectly secure, and is supported by another social process of conventional agreement, that agreement is routinely granted once the preceeding critical hoops have been surmounted and leads generally to the vast pool of factual and "objective" information that finds its home in the academic literature, textbooks, college instruction, Wikipedia, etc. A pool that is further confirmed routinely by succeeding work and technical developments that depend on its objective factuality.
Latour does not, in the end, adhere to the hard program of social construction, for the simple fact that the object of the scientific story he recounts, the thyrotropin releasing hormone (TRF), was found, was found to be a specific and real substance, and went on to a respected place in medical practice and the textbooks, not to mention later earning a Nobel prize. There is real comedy in the attempt, however, as the anthropologist takes on the scientists at their own game, analyzing and plumbing their depths for structures and paradigms that they themselves hardly suspect, complete with diagrams of the laboratory, pictures of the roof and other apparatus, graphs of publication trends, and verbatim interviews with protagonists, underlings, etc. It is a sort of depth-psychology of one laboratory.
"But it would be incorrect to conclude that the TRF story only exhibits the partial influence of sociological features. instead, we claim that TRF is a thoroughly social construction. By maintaining the sense in which we use social, we hope to be able to pursue the strong programme at a level apparently beyond traditional sociological grasp. In Knorr's terms, we want to demonstrate the idiosyncratic, local, heteregeneous, contextual, and multifaceted character of scientific practices. We suggest that the apparently logical character of reasoning is only part of a much more complex phenomenon that Auge calls 'practices of interpretation' and which comprises local, tacit negotiation, constantly changing evaluations, and unconscious or institutionalized gestures. ... In short, we observe how difference between the logic of scientific and non-scientific practices of interpretation are created and sustained within the laboratory."
Granted, most of this is overwrought, but the true worth of this work was that these observers came into an eminent lab and paid minute attention to what was going on, and emphasized that what comes out of the sausage machine in publication and other products is far different than the materials that go in. While the conventional approach would emphasize the preceeding scientific observations and technical developments that led the leader of this lab to even contemplate that the purification of TRF from millions of dissected brains was possible and desirable, Latour emphasizes instead, and with some success, the social contingencies that surrounded the original uncertainties, the slow progress, the false leads and constantly discarded "bad results", the huge amount of money and effort required, and other nitty-gritty that forms the day-today of laboratory life. The latter emphasis is useful in accounting for how science gets done, but discards other crucial inputs, and is ultimately not at all convincing as a general theory of what science accomplishes or is.
I think the confusion arises fundamentally (apart from professional jealousy) from the fact that social constructivism is perfectly valid for some areas of our lives, such as arts, fashion, religion, morality, and to some extent, politics. Many problems do not have an objective criterion, and are socially constructed on an ongoing basis with criteria that boil down to what and who is thought good, whether for the individual, family, collective, etc. And the insistant denial of the total social construction of one's own field- as is understandably routine among scientists- is particularly vehement (and unfounded) in the case of religion and has lent the latter bizarre and extraordinary power through the centuries, which the deconstructivist project is entirely appropriate and well-prepared to investigate. And it should be said that many forms of primitive and pseudo-science partake of this form as well, if not of outright fraud. So the line is hardly stable or absolute. But when it comes to science as practiced in the enlightnement tradition, with a variety of safeguards and institutional practices that feature competition, peer review at multiple levels, and final public transparency, the approach falls flat.
- A contemporary accounting of this scientific race, last of a 3-part series.
- TRF is one of a series of "releasing hormones", operating between the hypothalamus and pituitary. Or should the word "is" be put in quotes?
- A critique of the critique.
- Mankiw takes on MMT, and obsesses about inflation, along mainstream lines.
- MMT replies.
- Limited liberty at Liberty University.
- Notes from the Taliban.
- Birds: who cares?
- A cult is exposed.
