EASST REVIEW

by Steve Fuller (steve.fuller@durham.ac.uk)

Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Durham, United Kingdom

On 2-4 December 1994, a conference was held at Durham University on 'Science's Social Standing' which attracted over eighty participants, ranging from undergraduates to professors, who between them represented virtually all the major natural and social sciences in the UK. The conference was sponsored by the Times Higher Education Supplement (or THES), EASST, leading publishers in the natural and the social sciences (Sage and Taylor & Francis), as well as the Philosophy, Physics, Psychology, and Sociology Departments at Durham. I organized the conference under the auspices of the Centre for the History of the Human Sciences, whose director, Irving Velody, lent invaluable material and personal support to an operation that was only eight weeks in the making. The amount of enthusiasm generated for the event from 'high places' in such a short time (e.g., the managing editor of the THES attended the first day of the conference) suggests that the 'public understanding of science' is finally becoming a publicly contested issue, with 'science studies' being one of the recognized contestants.

In the interest of space, I will not review what is already a complicated history of the issues surrounding the conference or speculate why 15-20 year old doctrines in science studies are suddenly perceived as posing a threat to the scientific establishment. Readers can probe these issues for themselves in the bibliographic guide appended to this report. A convenient point of departure is the appearance of The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science, by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge 1993), now available as a trade paperback in bookstores throughout the UK. The book is little more than some well-known case studies shorn of their controversial philosophical implications. However, the effort is presented as a contribution to the public understanding of science, and hence an implicit challenge to the monopoly that scientists have traditionally enjoyed in this area. Moreover, the authors argue that it is in scientists' own interest to leave behind inflated talk of 'rationality', 'objectivity', and 'truth', and to promote instead the more ordinary image of science described in the case studies. In that way, the public will learn to have more reasonable expectations of science, and scientists won't feel a need to promise what they cannot deliver.

While it is clear that Collins & Pinch meant to give friendly advice to scientists, the book -- and Collins in particular -- were taken to be hostile by the scientists most closely identified with the public understanding of science. At least part of the misunderstanding here can be traced to a subtext of The Golem that became increasingly prominent in Collins's public exchanges (especially a position paper published in the 30 September 1994 issue of the THES). Collins was at least as interested in defending the autonomy of science studies as in advising scientists on how to improve their public image. This led to a positive feedback loop: the more that Collins insisted on drawing a sharp distinction between the sociologist's and the scientist's work, the more that scientists took him as in fact encroaching on their work, and thus the more they felt emboldened to reciprocate by pronouncing on what sociologists of science should be doing. What this shows, quite vividly perhaps, is the fundamental incompatibility between offering advice and remaining autonomous. As science studies practitioners move increasingly into the public sphere, we will have to learn to be accountable to groups -- like natural scientists -- on whose livelihoods we impinge but whose mindsets may be quite different from our own. The dispute over the dispensability of 'truth' to an understanding of science is a good case in point. In science studies, we tend to judge the matter purely on the basis of Ockham's Razor: why appeal to inflated epistemic terms, when more down-to-earth social ones will do as well for understanding how science works? However, scientists approach the issue much differently, which I only came to fully appreciate in the course of organizing the Durham conference.

Words like 'truth', 'rationality', and 'objectivity' are rallying points around which scientists can show solidarity, no matter how disparate their particular fields of study. This point is easily lost on science studies practitioners because of the great emphasis that we nowadays place on the 'disunity' of the sciences, which is too quickly interpreted as an empirical refutation of scientific realism or logical positivism. On the contrary, a big challenge for us is to understand how scientists can believe that science is both 'one' and 'many' -- that science strives for unity while pursuing distinct paths of inquiry.

This belief has important practical consequences, too. During the conference, the people associated with science studies were continually distancing themselves from one another, displaying their disunity with a vengeance: Feminists castigated Strong Programmers, macro-sociologists and micro-sociologists crossed swords, and various schools of ethnomethodology interrogated each other's practices. (It is also worth noting that however much private sympathy there may have been for Collins, no one from 'our' side ever publicly defended him.) In contrast, among the physicists, chemists, and biologists at the conference, whenever one of them made a claim, you can be sure that another would prop it up from his own distinct angle, sometimes 'creatively reinterpreting' what the earlier scientist had said. Often this occurred as acts of collective remembering of the grand narrative of scientific progress (to which I will return below).

Another way in which the scientists displayed their strength was by making it seem as though the mere refusal to engage in appeals to 'truth' et al. was a sign of moral failure, as if one were hesitant to declare Jesus Christ one's personal saviour. I learned this point the hard way on a BBC 4 radio debate with Lewis Wolpert a few hours before the conference began. My strategy was to say that professions of faith to 'truth' et al. did not bring us any closer to solving the problem of unemployed scientists, setting research priorities, or designing the high school science curriculum. (Too many truths, but too little money.) Wolpert then proceeded to accuse me of using these details to obscure the larger fact that I was committed not to 'truth', but to a 'political agenda'. Even the otherwise sympathetic moderator gasped at the charge, and the debate soon disintegrated.

Luckily for 'our' side, scientists' depth of emotional commitment to the epistemic virtues seems to be matched by a superficial understanding of what is entailed by those virtues. For example, an effective strategy for short-circuiting the virtue of 'objectivity' was to show that its practical accomplishment -- the construction of uniformity in belief and action -- has often been at the expense of other virtues such as creativity and critical judgment. When this point was placed in the mouth of a scientific icon -- as Graeme Gooday did in his account of T.H. Huxley's qualms about standardized lab training -- it wasn't long before the Professor of Physics at my university bemoaned the tendency for students in his courses to think that uniform methods must produce uniform results.

In general, scientists were receptive to science-studies-like reflections when science was shown to work against itself. An example would be the incongruity between the formulaic character of most scientific training and the open-ended inquiries associated with scientific research at its best. The more one could find precedents for revisionist views of science in things said by historical members of the scientific establishment, as in the Huxley case, the more scientists were likely to entertain the idea that change has not always amounted to progress. Indeed, if it were possible to write a plausible history of science in which science studies reflections were presented as 'always already' part of scientific thought, practicing scientists would probably be happy to insert science studies into their professional training programmes. At least it is an avenue worth exploring.

What I don't think worked so well were the case studies around which we focussed three panels in the conference. Harry Collins suggested the idea, which in principle sounded fine: take three episodes covered by science studies and then ask a historian, philosopher, and practicing scientist to comment on them. The relevant science studies texts would be circulated in advance, so that panel members could keep their remarks on point. Michael Lynch offered the additional twist of making Wolpert's account of the history of biology in his popular book, The Unnatural Nature of Science, one of the cases, to which a sociologist (Lynch) would then be one of the respondents. While I think the weakness of Wolpert's historical and philosophical reasoning was brought out nicely, other sorts of weaknesses were revealed in the sessions centering on the sociological case studies.

What is an adequate response to the charge that the N-Rays episode is 'trivial' for understanding the overall trajectory of modern physics? What does one say to a dismissal of a contextualist account of quark research on the grounds that quarks were eventually accepted by scientists who operated in contexts quite unlike the original one? These are two questions that the sociologists did not answer especially well. The problem, as I see it, is that case studies can always be accepted 'on their own terms' but ultimately dismissed as lacking clear implications for the grand narrative of scientific progress. Since science studies practitioners have been loath to develop their own counter-narratives of the history of science, there is no alternative macro-context in which to situate the case studies, and hence prevent them from simply being reduced to diversions from what scientists regard as the main story.

As this was the first time scientists and science studies practitioners met with the explicit purpose of coming to terms with one another, much of the conference resembled the first moments of family therapy: pent-up frustrations giving way to outbursts. However, after a day of hearing each other out, topped off by a convivial dinner, the discourse situation improved markedly, and I think some real progress was made toward understanding what each side fears and loathes of the other. However, more conferences of this kind are needed, and so I would like to close with some advice for planning Durham's successors.

(1) The conference should focus on a relatively specific topic, not only to keep the discussion on point, but also to avoid charges that various groups are 'under-represented' in the discussion. Our conference tried to maximize the diversity of disciplinary perspectives, but one could just as easily tried to maximize the diversity of class, gender, or political perspectives. And several thought that this would have led to a better outcome. In any case, quite a different conference chemistry would have resulted. Depending on the topic, one principle of representation may seem more appropriate than another.

(2) The conference should have a clear aim, and maybe even a collective project to which the discussion is seen as contributing. One obvious model is a 'constitutional convention' whose ultimate aim is a statement of principles for the interaction of natural and social scientists in areas where both groups have an interest.

(3) The conference organizers should do some spade work to find out just how far apart the participants are likely to be on a host of relevant issues. One suggestion along these lines was that each participant be asked to draw a 'cognitive map' that represented his or her sense of the interrelationship among disciplines and their relationship to substantive problems.

(4) Uninvited members of the audience (about 2/3 of our conference) should have ad vanced access to whatever written materials are made available to the invited members. Some of the best discussion was prompted by the uninvited members, especially when the invited speakers gave 'canned' lectures that made it hard to ask exploratory questions.

(5) The conference organizers should not be afraid to court the media as promoters and reporters. Throughout the UK controversy, the media has been quite even-handed in its coverage, with a tendency to lean toward the science studies point of view. Our 'underdog' status vis-a-vis the scientific establishment (imagine David vs. Goliath) helps here. I became convinced that the conference was a good idea when I read the THES editorial for 30 September 1994, which undercut a pseudo-serious criticism that Richard ('Selfish Gene') Dawkins had offered of the sociology of science. He argued that sociologists presupposed the validity of scientific knowledge every time they stepped on board an airplane en route to a conference. Be that as it may, the THES retorted, sociologists can probably flourish under a wider range of funding regimes than most scientists, and hence are not nearly as tied down to the fancies of a particular society as the scientists themselves are! However, it must be said that scientists deal with the media more effectively in terms of spending time with reporters, serving up soundbites, and writing letters to the editor on a moment's notice. Because we have yet to master these skills, we often do not appear as well in public as we might. But I imagine that will soon change.



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A Bibliographic Guide To 'Two Cultures II'

by Steve Fuller

Although scientists have been privately grumbling about science studies for years, 1992 marked the appearance of two works of science popularization that did more for the public visibility of the field than anything science studies practitioners themselves had done up to that point: Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon), and Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber & Faber). Between these two books, the one written by an American theoretical physicist and the other by a British experimental biologist, the impression was quickly given that science studies provided an omnibus threat to all of science. I reviewed them both in the February 1994 Social Studies of Science, to which their authors then replied in the November 1994 issue. The May 1995 issue will continue the dialogue with 'Science as Culture: A View from the Petri Dish', by Jay Labinger, a Caltech chemist who responds to a wide range of science studies works and is himself responded to by several of the authors of these works.

Also published in 1994 was the first booklength critique of science studies practitioners, who were now lumped together with feminists, ecologists, AIDS activists, multiculturalists, and assorted postmodernists as 'academic left' critics of science: Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). My review of this book, along with a response from the authors, appears in the February 1995 History of the Human Sciences. The book was also reviewed by Michael Ruse in the November 1994 issue of The Sciences, the official magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. Gross and Levitt, along with several science studies notables, respond to the review in the March 1995 issue. Also of note is the cover story on Bruno Latour in the October 1994 issue of Lingua Franca (a slightly lurid American humanities magazine), which includes his response to Gross and Levitt.

In the UK, 'Two Cultures II' has been documented on a weekly basis in articles and letters published in the Times Higher Education Supplement. This started with the 16 September 1994 issue, which reported the eruption of symbolic violence between Wolpert and Harry Collins at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. By the end of the year, the THES was proclaiming the dispute to be the hottest news item in British science for 1994. The Durham conference itself has been subject to a full-length article ('Science Friction') in the 13 January 1995 New Statesman. A report of the conference from the Lancaster University delegation appears in the Winter 1995 Technoscience (the 4S Newsletter). The opening position papers from the conference -- representing the perspectives of a practicing scientist, an historian, a philosopher, and a sociologist of science -- appear in the May 1995 History of the Human Sciences.

There has yet to be comparable mass media coverage in the US, but that may soon change with the publicity surrounding the recent annual meeting of the National Association of Scholars, which was devoted to a defense of science and featured as keynote speakers Gross and Levitt, Weinberg, Joshua Lederberg, and Gerald Holton. (The NAS, which had previously focused on the humanities, is the leading organized academic opposition to 'political correctness' on US campuses.) Media coverage included Anthony Flint, 'Science Isn't immune to Cultural Critique', Boston Globe (15 November 1994) and Scott Heller, 'At conference, conservative scholars lash out at attempts to "delegitimate science"', Chronicle of Higher Education (23 November 1994). A follow-up conference, sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, will be held at the end of May 1995 and promises to include feminist, multiculturalist, and other leftist thinkers who side with the scientists in their opposition to science studies. That should prove to be a memorable event.

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Email the editor, Chunglin Kwa:

Kwa@sara.nl