Review of Steve Fuller, Philosophy, Rhetoric & The End of Knowledge: The Coming of Science and Technology Studies, Wisconsin University Press, 1993.

In his Structure of the Scientific Revolutions (1970), Thomas Kuhn outlined the historical patterns in the evolution of scientific ideas by delineating ruling paradigms governing specific periods of scientific development. He suggested that the scientific paradigm of one period is not commensurable with that of another. Prof. Steve Fuller has produced an innovative work which goes well beyond the issue of paradigmic incommensurability in the process of knowledge development. His is a bold, critical and ambitious exploration of knowledge production and academic organisation. He has set his sights high by taking on the entire academic and scientific establishment treating them to a skilful and arresting critique of the knowledge policy they have preferred and followed since the eighteenth century’s `siècle des lumieres’.

The work is fresh, full of interest, identity, originality, critical reflection and theoretical provocations. Fuller considers his work “as a report of his practice as a theorist moving within the academy as well as between the academy and the rest of society”. The end of knowledge means basically the transgression of well established and entrenched disciplinary boundaries as a necessary condition to usher in a new organisation of knowledge development in general and scientific knowledge in particular. Fuller examines the changing role of knowledge in a democratic society. His declaration of an end to disciplinarian knowledge is predicated on the coming of an alternative knowledge management in a democratic society fuelled by the discourses of science technology studies.

Fuller’s intellectual programme for knowledge policy encompasses knowledge and societal change. In many ways it is more sweeping than a Kuhnian paradigm shift. It conjures up in the reader’s mind images like the end of ideology, end of civilisation, end of communism and so on. It provokes the mind to draw analogies with thoughts which puncture into definite patterns whole epochs such as Alvin Toffler’s First, Second and Third Waves, Paul Kennedy’s the Rise and Fall of Civilisations, the rise of F. W. Taylor’s scientific management; H. Ford’s mass production system and Toyota’s lean production system. Whilst Taylor, Ford and others developed programmes for managing labour, technology and production, Fuller positioned himself as a social epistemologist/theorist to manage the STS-inspired interdisciplinary knowledge by reversing the direction of knowledge development from the atomised chaos of post- modern times.

The end of knowledge policy which dominates the academic establishment and the coming of a new one based on Fuller’s vision of STS as an “emancipatory practice” in and for a democratic society suggests indeed a turning point of the role of the knowledge world.Fuller is thus a theorist and practitioner, a social philosopher who not only interprets the knowledge world but also wishes to change it in line with the deepest democratisation of society.

Without any exaggeration, it is impossible to do justice to the full range of his views by this short review. Drawing on a vast range of disciplines, philosophy, STS, AI, Sociology, Political economy, history and philosophy of science, SSK, rhetoric and discourse analysis, cognitive psychology, Fuller not only tries to criticize the scientific and academic establishment, but also to change the academy’s complacent preference for an expert-directed disciplinary modes of organising knowledge production itself.

Fuller’s work is rich, incisive, brilliant and encyclopedic on one hand and racy, provocative, suggestive, tantalising and at times difficult to follow on the other hand. STS enjoys pride of place in Fuller’s thinking. Indeed he seemed to have derived his new social epistemological research direction mainly from his engagement in STS theorising and practice. For Fuller “The emerging field of STS has the potential to be an emancipatory practice, given the dual mission of dissolving disciplinary boundaries and democratising knowledge production”(p.xx). His own theory of social epistemology and the values embodied in the STS field reinforce each other.

STS thus serves as an intellectual fountain for the social management of knowledge production. Fuller is certain that Science and Technology Studies can provide the normative, philosophical and rhetorical resources to bring about change in the way we know reality and organise knowledge academically. The fact that STS represents largely still a potential sea-change in re-organising knowledge did not deter him from drawing relevant lessons to change knowledge policy and the academy from it.

The existing academic organisation does not encourage the development of STS type of knowledge. The location for its development in the academy is too tenuous and even uncertain. The academy insists in applying its standard and quality of disciplinary cannons and the rules and the procedures of orthodox educational validation. Fuller recognises that “Disciplinary boundaries provide the structure needed for a variety of functions ranging from the allocation of cognitive authority and material resources to the establishment of reliable access to some extra social reality.”(P.105). He himself in fact asserts that” if interdisciplinary fields rarely become disciplines in their own right, that is because their central problem continues to be defined in terms of old disciplines. Despite STS’s professional distrust of disciplinarity, it must be said that the real politick of academic survival dictates that STS move toward becoming a discipline or die”(p.220/221).

The intellectual challenge Fuller set himself is simultaneously counter-intuitive and dialectical. On the one hand Fuller is still working to complete the process of theorising both the philosophy and the rhetoric necessary to define and legitimise STS within and outside the academy as an “emancipatory practice” and even a “discipline”, and on the other hand he invites the reader to draw lessons from STS to break asunder the academy’s grip on knowledge policy based on disciplinary turfs. There is thus a perennial tension running in this engaging work: reliance on the STS resources to manage the knowledge enterprise in general whilst STS itself is still regarded by the academy as a “maverick knowledge programme” in relation to their ruling criteria for disciplinary validation/certification and quality assurance.

More over, the kind of vision for STS that Fuller espouses-an emancipatory practice- challenges directly the academy’s established knowledge structure, culture, policy. Crossing disciplinary boundaries is not merely a technical trespassing of knowledge. It points a finger at the heart of the academy’s place in knowledge and society.It touches on the academy’s power and authority in re or de-regulating control of resource and epistemological property rights. Changing the academy’s role in society is not a matter of changing theories, “a new social formation is also needed” (p65). Fuller’s vision of STS thus suggests the re-organisation of the academy both internally and in its relationship with society. Inevitably, such a change will not be polite; it would require resources to put up a counter-challenge and neutralise the resistance of the academy and society which had behind them the whole industrial system and the organised body and habit of disciplinary academic resources and infrastructure accumulated over a century and half.

All is not gloom and doom. On the positive side, STS has made breakthroughs in pioneering an interdisciplinary knowledge direction. Much ground has been covered over a generation. There are also many trends in STS.Though the academy may never praise STS; it may not damn it easily nor ignore it. The work by the Edinburgh school, critical Marxism, constructivism, actor network theory and I might add Fuller’s own research programme on social epistemology “have involved showing that seemingly disparate phenomena are in fact instances of the same deep and general principles; e.g., that there really is no sharp difference between science and the rest of society, initial appearances to the contrary” (p.386). Like the hedgehog, STS envisions the big picture and recognises an essential ontological sameness/identity between science and society. Like a fox the academy uses its fragmentary disciplinary optic to impose atomised conventions on reality and knowledge.

The concept of fragmenting reality and drawing reductive boundaries to knowledge followed the enlightenment turn where positivistic epistemology merged with instrumental rationality dominated scientific discourse.Fuller takes on the fundamental bed rock of enlightenment dualism from which the entire western hegemonic intellectual tradition which informs the grand narrative of scientific development is constituted.

In knowledge production, dualism of mind and matter, soul and body, humanity and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, reason and emotion have dominated scientific discourse since the enlightenment. In social relations differences between experts and non-experts, classes, sexes, races and cultures have dominated societal development. This double dualism in knowledge (science) and social relations (society) has served to develop an epistemology of science which has given exclusive privilege to the expert, the dominant class, dominant sex, dominant race and dominant culture. This in turn has led to an expert-led knowledge strategy, management, culture and policy. Fuller’s research programme on social epistemology radically collapses this double dualism in knowledge production and social relations opening the policy space to manage knowledge not for the manufacture of goods and profit but for the employment of people and the satisfaction of needs.

What is Fuller’s STS-inspired programme of Social epistemology? Fuller’s research programme on social epistemology shuns social reductivism and technicism as both ontologically and epistemologically inadequate. He founded his theory from a strong normative position of the interpenetration of science with society. Science is socialised and society is scientised. Any “residual ontological” difference between something called “science” and something called “society” should disappear” ( p. 337). Fuller concurs with Latour’s insight that science has incorporated all of society into its networks- so much so that to claim that science is done by technicians in laboratories is just as misleading as to claim that finances are transacted exclusively by tellers in banks (p335). Fuller approached with care how he defined the non-dualistic relationship between science (knowledge) and society (social relations). By the inseparable relation of science and society, Fuller did not mean the impact of an ontologically pre-existing entity called science on society or the vice versa. He did not mean the interaction of two independently existing entities either. Nor did he mean the mutual shaping of separately existing entities. He did not mean the inclusion of an ontologically independent thing called science within a social context or society within a scientific context. Nor did he mean the fusion of science with society. He employed a strategy of interpenetration to capture the unified concept of science in society and society in science. With such an ontological and epistemological unification of science and society, Fuller dissolves any residual or trace of dualism.

Fuller created a model for the interpenetration of science with society by identifying rhetorical aims and transaction of concepts and analogies between disciplines. He suggested that several disciplines already have common concerns but no effective “rhetoric to articulate those concerns as common” (pp60-61). The rhetorical strategy may either amplify differences (the Socratic vice!) between two disciplines or minimise (the Sophists art!) them. Persuasive rhetoric seeks common grounds and Socratic dialectics opposes spurious consensus. The interpenetrative task becomes whether a discipline engages in persuasion or amplification of differences in order to import either ideas from another discipline or export ideas to that discipline.

He then constructs four interpenetrative possibilities based on testing ideas in one discipline against those of another and/ or applying ideas from one disciplinary domain to another. The case of interpenetrative incorporation is minimising difference by engaging ideas imported from other disciplines. The case of interpenetrative reflexion suggests a model of amplifying differences by exporting ideas from the engagement of discipline to discipline.Fuller uses the metaphor of “no representation without intervention” here. The case of interpenetrative sublimation suggests minimising difference even when ideas are exported from one discipline to another. The model of interpenetrative excavation suggests the amplification of difference by engaging with ideas imported from other disciplines. Fuller suggests boundary engagements between disciplines as a strategy of escaping from them. He also removes the discussion disciplinary communication from the simple models of linearity and interactionism. His interpenetrative incorporation, reflexion, sublimation and excavation are useful suggestions to bring about ontological and epistemological boundary engagements, dissolution and knowledge transformations.

The postulate of an ontological interpenetration between science and society serves as a foundation for an epistemological development which invites close public scrutiny in the affairs of science. “For an ironic consequence of the ever-increasing divisions of cognitive labour in society is that more of us, for more of the time, share the role of non-expert. This universal sense of nonexpertise, I maintain, is the epistemic basis for constructing the public sphere” (p.292). Central to Fuller’s theory of social epistemology is thus opposition to what he referred to as plebiscience and support for prolescience. Plebiscience refers to a scientific knowledge policy and research agenda defined and executed by scientists with the exclusion of the general public. It suggests a minimalist public involvement in science.Science is expert led and its culture is exclusively a closed science shop. If any involvement of the public in science is necessary, it can be justified only in so far as it permits the “process to flow smoothly”(p.xviii).

Fuller’s Prolescience defies the knowledge policy which gives privilege to scientific experts to produce science and all others (the nonexperts) merely to consume it. Public involvement in knowledge production starting from research goal setting to the distribution of knowledge is acknowledged as critical.”In a prolescientific state, research agendas and funding requests would have to be justified to a board of nonexperts, not simply to a panel of scientific peers” (ibid).

The social epistemologist “combines views on the nature of knowledge that are typically seen as antagonistic.” Fuller asks and answers his own question: “Am I a scientific realist? a logical positivist? or a social constructivist? The answer is that I am all three”. He suggests that his realism is predicated on his positivism, which is in turn predicated on his constructivism (p.191). This is a heavily counter-intuitive stance.

How can Fuller as a social epistemologist knowledge manager become a realist, constructivist/relativist and positivist at the same time? What he means by this is that he is not definable by each of these approaches in themselves; but his own complex intellectual identity emerges from the particular and creative way he escapes being defined by each of them and eventually transcends their limitations. For example, when he calls for the re-arrangement of disciplinary boundaries, he chooses a model of interpenetration. He thinks that the knowledge enterprise is most creative not when there are rigid boundaries or no boundaries what so ever; nor is it creatively necessarily linked with the simple addition or elimination of boundaries; rather creativity results from moving boundaries around as a result of constructive border engagements (p.47). It is in both the dialectical engagement with each of the disciplines and in overcoming the exclusive defining power of each where his own research programme and his own unique intellectual identity finds full expression.

Thus the social epistemologist stance is open and positive, being in constant engagement with all the knowledge trends, minimising differences between disciplines or amplifying them depending on the interpenetrative equation. In addition it is always critical by appropriating, learning, and sustaining new interdisciplinary combinations and integrative syntheses. Knowledge becomes accountable to an expanding public sphere, disciplinary barriers to citizen participation in knowledge production weaken and society’s democratic culture deepens and grows. His latest work, Philosophy and Rhetoric is a continuation of the work he began with earlier books on Philosophy and Its Discontents, Social Epistemology and the journal he edits by the name of Social epistemology. Together they pioneer a new approach aiming at nothing but a revitalisation of knowledge production management and social theory.

author’s address: mammo1@mdx.ac.uk