A Stranger's Notes on the Bielefeld Workshop

To my surprise, the “stars” at the ERASMUS/EASST workshop - those who laid the foundations of STS and are still shaping it - looked as young as the field. Watching them as an outsider, I soon perceived a tacit mutual understanding, often due to taken-for-granted goals, shared experience and a familiarity with the ideas. When I finally came to feel like an insider, I discerned an encounter of at least three profoundly different currents, both in methodological commitments and in approaches to the analysis of science. A polar disparity split the foundational axiom concerning the “proper nature” of science - the outright denial of the latter vs. the assumption that the nature of science is elusive and indefinable in spatial terms, in “boundaries”, and insoluble within the “social”. The constructivist paradigm cannot cross swords with its weaker rival, the systems approach, until it manages to find persuasive terms and explanations for the specific, now still axiomatically conjectured. Both schools are nurtured at the Bielefeld University - the hospitable place of this meeting - but their initial departures are rooted in non-intersecting grounds. The hosts did their best in preparing the starting point of the theoretical discussion, targeted at the basic axiom - a “demise of the social” - by publishing a provocative standpoint in the EASST Newsletter last year (vol. 13, 3).

At the workshop, they still insisted on the “internal dynamics” of science, penetrated by external orientation (P. Weingart et al.). A. Pickering’s answer to the challenge seemingly went astray, as the discussion drifted along the track of familiar formulations, conceptual attitudes, practised vocabulary. One gets the impression that after a cannonade of tentative, inventive conceptual “turns”, STS is now cruising - defending its achievements so far, but still not venturing to plunge into the axiomatic depths of its foundations, which a next theoretical turn would probably re-construct.

The unanswered questions, formulated by the “new generation” of post-graduate students who had the floor at the Panel session, hit the soft underbelly of STS - its meta-cognitive purpose and the “what problem”. The question “What is Science?” is still a concern, but it’s gone undercover and, thereby, has been eliminated. A still inexperienced response on new larger grounds surely requires a reconsideration of the bundle of axioms, now taken-for-granted, together with a stronger methodological rearming, for which one is still not ready. What would the new generation venture doing?