EASST REVIEW

by Aant Elzinga

As the subtitle says, this is an introductory text on science and technology studies. As such it has the virtue of defining and locating the field historically and intellectually in a much broader terrain than what we usually find. Apart from the topics that figure prominently in similar books stemming from Anglo-American academic speech comunities, this one tries to do justice also to a number of additional entries. Chief among these are institutional studies, issues of science and technology policy in a critical perspective, and a discussion of the place and conditons of research in the humanities. The latter is a topic put on par with and treated as part of "science studies". This is natural considering the continental European definition of science as Wissenschaft, whereunder is also included Geisteswissenschaft. This broadening of the scope of the science studies field is welcome and corresponds with recent trends in the policy domain where the humanities are being played up as important dialogue partners with the natural sciences, medicine and engineering (without, for that matter, being able to expect more funding - on the contrary).

In keeping with their broader perspective the authors, who are affiliated with the Department of Theory and Social Studies of Science, also betray their humanistic ambitions and training by bringing to the subject a politically informed, critical and historiographically reflective approach. Touching upon macro- as well as micro-levels of analysis found in the literature, history and philosophy of science, social studies, gender studies and policy studies of science are all brought together under the common umbrella of Wissenschaftsforschung.

This is a term that is difficult to translate. The nearest English-language equivalent might be "Research on research" (which is comparable to the Scandinavian forskning om forskning), or perhaps "science of science", or even "Science research". The trouble with the first two is that they are too loaded with technocratic associations of managerial contexts, especially in the former Soviet Union, but also in the West. The third translation is too awkward. The ambition of the authors of this book is moreover anything but technocratic. First and foremost it is one of socially responsible scholarship. Their delimitation of the field is consciously informed by the dual heritage of STS, on the one hand that of the radical or critical science movement, on the other hand that of the more moderate "internalist" and "professionalizing" post-Kuhnian mode of sociology of scientific knowledge and actor network theory with their various conceptual shifts, branches, terminologies and methodologies.

In the very first chapter some of these historical roots and intellectual background features are highlighted, indicating how STS should be understood as part of a progressive, i.e., democratic politico-cultural trend of more than fifty years vintage, especially in Europe but also in the U.S. The historical trajectory charted out goes from Saint Simon, over Marx, Weber, Scheler and Mannheim to a concentration of a number of important events in the 1930s. Included are precursors to scientometrics, Boris Hessen's delivery at the 2nd History of Science Congress, the emergence of an early notion of science of science in Poland 1936, the work of the Bernalists, and the debate on the steerability of science sparked off by their theses on the social responsibility of and need to plan science. The accent all the way through is on science, not so much on technology. Merton's identification of a system of norms is taken to reflect a liberal democratic tendency in opposition to totalitarian attacks on science qua institution and enlightenment culture. This history is brought forward through the thick of the Cold War and the McCarthy era up to the advent of 4S and EASST in the mid-1970s. Some readers might want to see something on the German finalization debate included, compared for example to the Bernal-Polanyi debate, contrasting the situation and contexts.

The foregoing account, which is much more detailed and multifarious than what has been sketched here, is in keeping with the authors' conviction that the function of STS is to contribute to critical historical self-reflection over and in the sciences. This, it is suggested, may be done through three parallel analytical lenses. One is with a focus on the (among other institutional) interplay of science, technology and society broadly speaking, but also yielding specifics amenable to case studies. A second is with focus on societal and cultural conditions (and conditioning) that facilitate and are constitutive of science and research, all the way from the level of its differentiation(s) and institutional fabrics to the realms of imagery, norms and cultural goods that play into the self-definition and upholding of boundaries or relationships vis-…-vis other domains of societal endeavour, like religion, which historically speaking is seen to have had a heavy bearing on the shaping of science and its multiple discourses, its dynamics, and the posing of questions concerning its authority and/or legitimation at various points in time. A third focal point is the one that has been most prominent of late, i.e., a concern with the nitty gritty of scientific practices, the interplay of materialities and the cultural in the lab, and how scientific knowledge is (socially) constructed at its sites of production.

Thus emerge three broad, partially overlapping domains of STS. These are defined on the basis of a common denominator - the quest for (self-) understanding of (and in) what has become a major cultural force in our time: science/wissenschaft. From this vantage point the so- called "science wars" debate is seen as yet another instance of Kulturkampf, the latest in a series of such if one looks back into the past, at least in the continental schools where one has had scrimages around hermeneutics and Methodenstreit, where Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften were pitched against each other, with compromises like the emergence of Kulturwissenschaft (Cassirer). The delimitation of the field in terms of Wissenschaftsforschung as proposed in the present volume also seems to invite closer participation from scholars in places with stronger disciplinary identities, like political science, history and sociology which also deal with knowledge society, risk and reflexive modernity from critical points of view. Moreover the authors' approach clearly privileges the humanities and cultural sciences, as distinct from more instrumentalist (unthinking?) modes of analysis found at business schools. This does not mean that scientometrics, science policy studies, or other "harder" tools of the trade need to be excluded. In the present text they are certainly included, but in a way that does not let us forget the broader flux of contingencies, be it of institutions, corporate frameworks for industrial growth, state and power politics, or social and epistemic differentiation processes at work in disciplines and the articulation of disciplinary identities and claims. All of these, it appears the authors are saying, are significant at one or another level in the negotiational and truth claiming practices that take place at (and around) the sites of scientific knowledge production.

When it comes to making sense of life at these sites the authors want to enrich Bourdieu's scheme of reproduction of symbolic capital(s) with Latour's and Woolgar's account of credibility cycles. This in turn is overlayered with David Edge's analysis of various types of regulatives and conditions involved in maintaining competition within bounds of the non-antagonistic as distinct from the antagonism that gives rise to and is part of the substance of science and technology based controversies in our contemporary societies. This seems to be a fruitful framework for controversy studies, a subject the authors are well equipped to elaborate on but have refrained from doing so here. Perhaps in the next edition one might see a specific chapter that takes this (controversy studies as a genre) further, with exemplifications from the many case studies that now exist in the literature.

Gender studies is a genre that is not forgotten. It has a chapter of its own. Among others it is seen as a field where scholarship has been able to show historical and political contingency, not as external contextual determinants but as constitutives right into the heart of cognitive structuration. Considerable space is given to the "first wave" of the women's movement in science studies and the efforts to make visible and reconstruct women's contributions in science, as well as explanations of the economic, social, cultural and academic mechanisms whereby women were excluded or made invisible at various points in historical time.

A second section reviews findings that deal with gender as a determinant in the hierarchisation of social location and the distribution of rank and rewards in (and between) sciences and the humanities. Two further sections take up the question of the social construction of gender difference in science and other issues related to feminist science criticism: standpoint theory, essentialism, and identity politics subsuming "new forms of representation". Similarities and differences of approach and analysis among Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway and others are briefly explored. One of the strengths of this chapter again is its broad reflective historiographical mode of presentation, which tends to add a social epistemological dimension to the trends under discussion.

Another chapter gives an insightful review of concepts and perspectives of the "newer" STS, building on Callon's identification of four models (in the Handbook). The tension between philosophy of science and the cognitive (anti-rationalist) turn in Social Studies and with it the discussion centered around the Duhem-Quine thesis and paradgim theories is reviewed as a backdrop to a presentation of essential tenets, topics, shifts of "program" and a few influential case studies within or associated with SSK. (Some of the earlier ones on reciprocity between natural and social order - e.g. phrenology - are unfortunately left out.) This is followed by an outline of laboratory studies and actor network theory, with reference made to several genres in this domain - Knorr-Cetina, Latour and Woolgar, Callon and advocates of the rhetorical or semiotic turn of analysis. Today there are many books and articles that cover this episode; despite the brevity of the treatment in the present book this digest is hard to beat in terms of independence and pointedness of succinct presentation.

Chapter six is something of a novelty in that here the social sciences and Geisteswissenschaft are added to the science studies map. We are given an interesting recapitulation of some of the current discussions on the role of the humanities that has emerged in several countries in connection with evaluation exercises. Are the humanities compensation potential to balance technocracy and alienation in science-permeated high tech society? Or do they have some other utility and function? Breakthroughs in the neurosciences (with prospects of neuropharmocometics), genetic biology, nanotechnologies, AI and computerized visualisation techniques prompt questions of identity - what is it to be "human"? - therewith challenging the humanities with some of its age old questions in new and urgent forms. At the same time the conditions of doing research in the humanities are also changing rapidly. To be sure, all of this is a signficant part of making the case for considering "science studies" as having a broader scope both in its objects of research and approaches. Research ethics and bioetchics as topics might have been played up more in this context too.

The final three chapters deal with topics that show how science and technology policy studies, when framed in a self-reflective historiographical perspective, are really integral to STS. For this reader at least the book provides a rationale for paying much more attention to policy relevant issues, science communication (conceived more broadly and critically than PUS - public understanding of science), and interplay between institutions; we are shown how these can be tackled without giving up our science criticist agenda. This applies equally to technology assessment, risk analysis and the role of social movements in the shaping of technologies. In relationship to the triangle drama of macro "actors" - university-state-industry I miss a fourth one, civil society.

All of these topics have become the basis of more limited specialist discourses; here they come together with the topics of the previous chapters in a natural way, without for that matter stranding in some species of Low Church eclecticism. The quality of analysis, the selection and up-to-dateness of the literature, and the synthetic achievement are all commendable. The readability of the book is enhanced by the inclusion of lists of literature with comments after each chapter, as well as a 12-page glossary of frequent STS terms and concepts (we might quible about ones missing too), plus a 4-page list of journals in the field, again with comments. The bibliography is useful, even if I would have liked to see something of the German finalization theorists, controversy study texts like Engelhardt and Kaplan, as well as some bio- and research ethicists included. In sum, what we have here is "the introductory textbook we have all been waiting for". My only regret is that it only exists in German. Hopefully EASST's Publication Committee can do something about this, so that it will become available in English too, so we can start using it more extensively in our classes.

Also recommended is another publication from Vienna: Ulrike Felt and Helga Nowotny (eds.), Social Studies of Science in International Perspective (University of Vienna, Institute for Theory and Social Studies of Science, 1994), 142 pp. It contains the proceedings of a workshop at which several well-known scholars address a few thematic questions (e.g., the new production of knowledge) and gives brief reviews of the state-of-the- art in their respective countries, mostly pointing to who (what groups) are doing what. This report is also useful for those who need introductory materials to provide orientations into STS for their curricula, or to argue for the field in front of their faculty boards, research councils and central university authorities.

Entries refer to Britain, France, the Netherlands and Austria. German, Portugese, Spanish and Scandinavian country studies do not appear here. It is always stimulating to compare notes between countries. Apart from an orientation on the various "turns" in the discourses at hand, one of the things that emerges from this little volume is that STS is still beset with many difficulties when it comes to gaining a recognized institutional space in university landscapes in Europe. Discussion and comparison of strategies for institutional capacity building and interchange tend to be exhausting but are certainly not exhausted.

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by Adrienne van den Bogaard, Department of Science and Technology Dynamics, University of Amsterdam

Review of Sal Restivo, Mathematics in Society and History, Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht 1992, and Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995.

Mathematics and number-worlds are very influential in our daily lifes. We all have to learn some mathematics at particular moments in time, so we can buy chicken at fixed prices per kilo, work with grade point averages, organize schedules, understand policies established for noise levels at work places, etc. The use of numbers in the world around us seems so obvious; numbers seem so logical in the way they are established as well as in the way they function that its use doesn't need any explanation or further exploration. Do we ever doubt that 2+2=4? Do we ever check whether a liter of milk bought in the supermarket actually contains one liter? The truth of mathematical representations seems to leave hardly any room for the study of the relation between mathematics and society. This review will show that the opposite is the case. Sal Restivo and Theodore Porter even have opposed views on the relation between mathematics, quantification and social change.

Restivo's and Porter's books on mathematics and quantification are very different in focus, argumentation and style. Restivo is the sociologist, Porter an historian of science. Restivo studies the development of mathematics as a discipline. Porter studies the role numbers play in bureaucratic, political environments and in scientific communities working under pressures from the outside world. Both tell big stories; taken together they ambitiously grasp the whole world except Africa and Australia. Restivo and Porter share a perspective on the making of knowledge: both stress that they are somewhere in the middle between the realists and the relativists. By starting with the statement that scientific knowledge (about objects and processes) is a social process through and through, they both stress that this does not mean that the knowledge is random and completely arbitrary. Knowledge can't be made whichever way scientists would like. Having said this, both focus on the question as to which social processes create knowledge.

David Bloor was one of the first in STS to open up mathematics to social enquiry. He used the mathematical discipline perceived as the ultimate producer of 'truths' to show the possibilities of the 'strong programme' (Knowledge and Social Imagery, London: Routledge 1976). Bloor situated the locus of sociological enquiry in the selection of possible mathematical orderings of (physical) objects. This implied some form of 'alternative mathematics' which Bloor exemplified by comparing Greek ideas about 'number' with our own. Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West (first published in 1918), spent one chapter on the Meaning of Number which apparently inspired Bloor to think about an alternative mathematics (p95).

Restivo presents his book as 'the first by a sociologist fully devoted to a sociology of mathematics.' Restivo has also been inspired by the writings of Spengler on whom he spends his first pages. Spengler has been cited as an important though neglected source of inspiration for sociologists by Randall Collins and Restivo in the "Development, Diversity, and Conflict in the Sociology of Science" (The Sociological Quarterly, Spring 1983, pp185-200): "Oswald Spengler did treat science and mathematics as culturally related outgrowths of the historical ethos ("soul") of each civilization. But he had little influence on the emerging sociology of knowledge, in part because he did not link ideas to specific social classes or institutions" (p187). In his book Restivo tries to rehabilitate Spengler by exploring his thesis 'that there are as many number-worlds as there are cultures'. To many (social) scientists mathematics is a unique mode of knowing that has produced universal orderings. Spengler, however, attacked this privileged status of mathematics as an intellectual or scholarly discipline:

'We find an Indian, an Arabian, a Classical, a Western type of mathematical thought and, corresponding with each, a type of number - each type fundamentally peculiar and unique, an expression of a specific world-feeling, s symbol having a specific validity which is even capable of scientific definition, a principle of ordering the Become which reflects the central essence of one and only one soul, viz., the soul of that particular Culture. Consequently, there are more mathematics than one.' (Spengler, Cited in Restivo, p8)

In part II of his book, Restivo works out what he calls the weak interpretation of Spengler, i.e., the consideration that mathematics is a social and cultural phenomenon. He aims at developing a sociology of mathematics: 'Numbers are social through and through.' In my opinion he is most successful in chapter 7, 'Conflict, Social Change, and Mathematics in Europe', which is both consistent and humorous.

"The ideals or norms of science do not cause scientific behaviour, but emerge from the struggle for individual success under different conditions of competition." This is Restivo's structuring argument in writing his history of the emergence of a European mathematical discipline. The controversy between two Italian mathematicians, Cardan and Tartaglia (in the first half of the sixteenth century), reflects a transition from a situation in which solutions to mathematical puzzles were kept secret to one in which it was normal to share intellectual properties. Cardan's advantage was the result of his decision to publish his solution to cubic equations. The contest between Cardan and Tartaglia was settled by a mathematical duel, which was a traditional way to earn your money among sixteenth-century mathematicians. Cardan came out as the winner because Tartaglia had withdrawn.

The next controversy Restivo goes into is the one between Leibniz and Newton, a priority-dispute about the infinitesimals (second half of the seventeenth century). This controversy, Restivo claims, reflects the shift from informal message centers, where knowledge was personally delivered from by one scholar to another, to organisations (e.g., the Royal Society) with printed knowledge in the form of journals. 'Leibniz must rank as one of the most successful organisation builders in the history of science' (p71).

The chapter ends with a critique on Merton and Kuhn in favour of his own argument. "In no case do we find a mathematical change centered in a struggle between rival traditionalists and innovators. Moreover, the long-term trend in Western mathematics has not been towards a single, dominant paradigm, but rather towards rival schools at odds over fundamental questions about methods and knowledge" (p85-86). In the case of mathematics the state of the discipline resembles more the social sciences than Kuhn's image of normal science. Therefore, the dynamics of mathematics can best be analysed in terms of the changes in organisational forms.

Another very nice piece in Restivo's book is his attempt to develop a sociology of 2+2=4. This 'representation' seems to be the exponent of the kind of universal truths mathematics produces. He starts with citing some mathematical realists, one of whom claimed that 2+2=4 accurately described the encounter of two dinosaurs with two others, although no one has ever observed this event. There cannot be any culture- bound answer to the question of 2+2. It's always 4. Considering these attributions of truth to this expression, it is remarkable that within the mathematical community Whitehead and Russel (who are the exponents of the relation between mathematics and logic) wrote a lengthy book of 800 pages to prove the truth of 2+2=4. How true actually is 2+2=4? Restivo argues that there must be more at stake. For him, the fundamental question here is what these kind of number-truths do in social relations. "It is not just that something is or is not logical in some absolute sense. It is that logic - and certainty relations in general - are cultural resources that can be used to defend or attack a social order by affirming or denying self-evident statements" (p114). To rephrase this we could say that these kind of mathematical truths function as resources of power.

Restivo goes on by empirically problematizing 2+2=4. "Adding is in general empirically problematic." What happens when we add two cups of rice and two cups of water? The ones absorb the others. This example may look like a misunderstanding, referring to the general truth that we can't add apples and oranges. However, whenever we add we make abstractions and generalizations. If we add two books we could ask questions about the numbers of pages or the authors. When we chose to add two books with the same number of pages, we could ask questions about the sort of paper the book is printed on, etc. To rephrase it in constructivist terms, adding implies similarity, and similarity is problematic.

One of Restivo's main claims is that the competitive structures of the mathematical discipline forced mathematics into an ever ongoing process of abstraction and generalisation. The more mathematics developed, the more mathematics itself formed the basis for new mathematical knowledge.

The idea that mathematical representations are made into certainties by people outside the mathematical community in the first place raises a question which happens to be central in Porter's book, namely "How are we to account for the prestige and power of quantitative methods in the modern world?" (pviii). Porter is an excellent story-teller; his book consists of stories of accountants in the US, engineers in France, statistical bureaus, cost-benefit analysis and many smaller histories like the development of the metric system. All the stories are about knowledge developed by experts under more or less bureaucratic and political control. The moral of these stories is, to put it bluntly, that quantification supersedes elitism. The less experts derive their authority from the institutional context the more their work is organized along strict rules (which Porter calls mechanical objectivity) in order to produce controllable numbers.

The stories carry one main lesson, and serve to illustrate one main point and one main answer: numbers are technologies of trust. The development of capitalism and the emergence of national states with one central government resulted in a replacement of face-to-face relations by relations at a distance in the domains of trade and politics. In a period in which personal trust could no longer be the basis for negotiation, numbers were given this role. The amount of trust attributed to and built in numbers is however a matter of degree. Porter distinguishes France and England from the United States on the question where experts derive their authority from. In France, experts were educated at the cole Polytechnique which was very close to the French state bureaucracy. Bureaucrats and politicians imputed the value of experts' personal judgments to their Bildung; discretion was highly appreciated. In England, it was not so much the education as the 'mobility' of the experts through bureaucracy which had given them their authority. Experience in different domains - instead of specialist experience only - resulted in trustful personal judgments of experts. Democracy in the US resulted in a need for impersonal judgments; expert discretion could always be disputed in court. This provided an impetus (not always to the expert's pleasure) to quantify their knowledge. Porter ascribes to numbers a kind of objectivity which can be characterised as 'impersonal knowledge', the exclusion of subjectivity. Therefore, in Porter's opinion, there is a relation between quantification and democracy, and the expert Bildung and technocracy. "The pursuit of rigor flourishes mainly in conjunction with democracy. ... The regime of calculation involves a bid to empower experts who have at most a limited ability to subvert democratic control. Technocracy presupposes relativily secure elites" (p146).

It seems to me that Porter is arguing that quantification tends to break down elite cultures. He mentions quantifrenia in the bureaucratic management of diversity (p76). Quantification and impersonal knowledge go hand in hand; not the blacks themselves but the figures tell us about their oppression. Porter considers quantification a liberating and emancipating force, supporting social change. Restivo, makes a completely different plea. "The realm of the 'logical', 'rational', 'scientific', 'objective', and 'quantitative' is, among other things, a realm of ideas that symbolize the reigning social order, and inevitably become targets of opponents of that order" (p135).

While Porter claims that striving for a specific sort of objectivity and a changing society went hand in hand, Restivo claims, as we have seen, that objectivity and a stable order go hand in hand. These opposed views seems to suggest that the relation between quantification and social change/stability is a dynamic one. In the late nineteenth century there was a great concern about the extreme poverty of the working class. This led to the idea of measuring nation's national incomes to be able, among other things, to gain insight into the distribution of this national income. In the Netherlands, for example, it was the well-known socialist W.A. Bonger who tried to establish a national income figure. In the 1920s, this led to the phenomenon of the 'budget statistics' that required a huge system of measurement. We could argue, at this point, that the quantification of nation's wealth was at least partly an attempt to show how small laborers could share this wealth. Although the poverty of the working class must have been very obvious in terms of bad clothing and housing, a quantified proof of this poverty made the problem 'objective'. One could no longer deny the problem. Poverty was redefined as a problem of the distribution of national wealth. This part of the history supports Porter.

After the 1940s, these budget statistics were one of the roots in the later development of national accounts and macro- econometric models in the Netherlands. During the second half of this century, government increasingly used economic data in the interpretation of economic events and in the preparation of economic policies. These numbers became part of a consensus on how to think about economic life of the established bureaucracy. One consequence was that left-wing parties and progressive movements had more and more problems getting their different views accepted as at least a possible viewpoint on the economy. All the other parties accepted the economic data produced which increased the 'objectivity' of these numbers. As Restivo argues, "In general, the wider and more diffuse the social interests embodied in a representation, the more it qualifies as objective" (p125).

This Dutch example of the history of quantification in economic policy suggests that questions about quantification need to be historicised as well as sociologised. It suggests that we can't speak about numbers per se, but that we always have to ask 'whose numbers?'. And then we come back to Restivo's point about the limited empirical relevance of numbers. We have to ask ourselves what these numbers embody and for what purpose they were constructed. The problem then becomes who is actually able to deconstruct numbers. Everybody who has ever watched a quiz on television knows how scared people are when a numerical math problem is to be solved.

In my opinion, Porter's argument about the relation between 'openness' and quantification misses precisely the fact that numbers also have a mystifying role. Who is actually trained enough to deconstruct numbers when the need arises? For many people the origins of numbers, let alone when mathematical symbols enter the arena, are highly obscure. People believe them or they don't, but seldom do they themselves check the numbers about the economy's growth. Porter himself must have recognized that it would have cost him quite a lot of readers if he had included complex nineteenth century mathematics used by the Ponts engineers. He tries to verbalise some quantitative arguments, but never writes down any number relation, let alone a symbolic equation. Doing this would have closed his text for those not very educated in numbers and symbols. The same holds for Restivo's book: why does he mention, for example, 'transcendental numbers' without explaining them?

Let me finish with a comparison with technology studies. During its history we have had advocates of "technology as emancipating force" and advocates of "technology as oppressing force". Nowadays we know that both positions are as true as they are ridiculous. Sometimes technology is emancipating, sometimes it is not; sometimes it emancipates the one group, while it oppresses an other. Sometimes technology emancipates in one period while it oppresses in another period. We, who study the role of mathematics and quantification in society, and the way society and culture have shaped mathematics, should take over these lessons.

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Email the editor, Chunglin Kwa:

Kwa@chem.uva.nl