First STS Course in Russia

The author’s preliminary thoughts

“Science and Technology Studies: From Ontology to Epistemology and Vice Versa” is the first Russian course on STS and it is now being prepared in order to start in the first term of 2007-2008.

The following text is written for the rubric of “Journal of Course Design” on the course web site I am running under the Central European University Course Portfolio Project. On this web site one can find an extended syllabus of the course, preliminary plans of seminars, the course bibliography and other appropriate materials (http://www.cfkeep.org/ html/snapshot.php?id=38931006043154). In offering this text for EASST review I seek to enlarge the circle of my possible readers so as to elicit critical response and advice from STS colleagues that might help me to correct the course. I really feel myself a bit lonely with my STS course in Russia where STS has not yet been established as a specific field and where a critical reflection on STS is nearly absent.

How I have come to be teaching a course on philosophy of STS.

To answer this question I probably, should retell my life – from kindergarten (where my first acquaintance with science and technology came about, and where the nurses often used to say each other: Don’t you think that this little girl will teach something like an STS course in future? …– Mmm, yes, it seems so …) through the school years (when I hated sciences to such an extent that I hardly dragged myself through school completion) and the university years (when I suddenly became interested in all sorts of sciences, and especially in philosophy) up to my present job which is teaching and learning…. It would be a long story and so, to save time I will dwell only on the most crucial points.

My dissertation (PhD; 2000) was dedicated to phenomenology and, more precisely, to phenomenological perspectives on science and technology. Thus, I read Husserl and Heidegger who were not very optimistic about science and technology and, for the second part of my thesis, I read American “phenomenologists” who were much more optimistic about science and technology but could hardly be considered as “phenomenologists” in the initial sense of the term. This mess at first made me quite disoriented but later disposed me to a critical perspective and strengthened me in the thought that philosophy played with words like a juggler did with balls. But then what do words refer to? It was probably at this point that I began to think about the problem of realism and truth.

Trying to resolve the contradiction between phenomenology and love of science and technology I sent an e-mail to Professor Don Ihde – an American phenomenologist and a philosopher of technology – and in the course of exciting consultations with him I heard about STS for the first time (many thanks to Professor Ihde!). By the way, the contradiction remained unresolved, but it stopped troubling me for some reason and I moved on.

When, after my defense, I left the quicksands of phenomenology I set foot on the rippled surface of science and technology studies having a secret hope to learn how words referred to things and whether it was true that all knowledge was nothing but a social construction (this truth too being a case in point). Bruno Latour captivated me by promising to keep both words and things (I did not want to part with either of them). While I cut my way through STS materials and the accompanying social constructivist stuff, I realized to my surprise that “things” were often used as reference points for models that would explain where our “constructions” came from. The so-called “practical turn” of contemporary thought meant that we considered our “constructions” as originating in our operations with “things”, regardless whether these are “natural” or “artefactual” ones. But what were these “things”? If they were, again, only our “perceptions” of “things”, then we remained within the limits of an epistemological circle and the reference to “things” was superfluous. If they were more than “only perceptions”, then we reverted back to an objectivistic ontology and, thus, ruined a constructivist stance. However, when considered more deeply this hard contradiction turned out to be not so hard. This very constructivist “neglect of things” originated from the definite attitude toward “things” that was nothing but a metaphysical attitude. Yes, it was, rather, negative, nihilistic, metaphysics denying “things” their own goals but, nevertheless, this attitude was obviously extra-empirical. Thus, I got a strange outcome: the prohibition on metaphysics in European thought resulted from certain metaphysical premises which could never be revised simply because metaphysics was prohibited. Really, philosophy is full of strangenesses; stand firm all those who study philosophy!

So, my attention shifted from the “objectivist-constructivist conflict” to the conflict between two ontologies, one of which disconnected the truth from subjectivity while another one joined them opening the way to save both “things” and “words”. I found the latter kind of ontology in the texts of great ancient dialecticians from Plato to Proclus as well as in the Russian philosophical tradition that inherited the holistic outlook from antiquity via the Alexandrinian school and Orthodox theology. As for the modern Western philosophy – it had too long persisted in its opinion that, as Whitehead regretted to notice, studying “how we know” was much more important than studying “what we know”. The trajectories of critical thought resulting in social constructivism had showed that a negative metaphysics about “things” gave birth to a monstrous positive metaphysics about “culture” and “society”. A subject who failed to bear the whole weight of being alone shared it with the same others and turned into a “collective subject”, which nevertheless failed to save the situation. References to “things” more and more often appear in the social constructivist texts marking what I call “an ontological turn” which, it seems, has come into being in the depths of “practical turn”.

But as long as I cast away the “objectivist-constructivist” opposition I have not seen here a return of social constructivists to “naïve objectivism’ along with the loss of constructivist main points. I have seen a hint at the kind of ontology which gives the way “to know both an archetype and a demiurgic art” (using Proclus’ words). And although I could find next to nothing about dialectics in this stuff – poor term, it has become too cluttered with irritant connotations! – I have found a lot of references to so called “relational ontologies” which counterbalance “ontology of subject” with “ontology of things”.

As far as ontology starts with “objects” and relational ontology does the same I become interested in the question: What is this new type of objectivity born by relational ontology, or what is now a “thing” which has got back the belongings negative metaphysics took away from it? And so, I decided to trace a philosophical (first of all, ontological) basis of science and technology studies to try to answer this question. The choice of STS is by no means accidental. Firstly, STS has been formed (in its present-day, of course, not final contours) on the very peak of a constructivist wave, when coming up to the extreme point with its neglect of “things” it could see the whole depth of “thingsless” absurdity. The reaction was to save both “things” and constructivist perspective, which I would treat as the core feature of STS. Secondly, caring for science and technology STS deals with “objects”/”things” as well as with the processes of their technosciencific creation that, by definition, puts them in between “natural” and “human” components of the world. And here it is also important that contemporary natural philosophy (ontology) that is attached to contemporary natural sciences translates the image of “thing” which is quite different from “things” that forced Kant to invent his critical paradigm. All of this makes STS a unique place where, probably, (who knows!) a “new objectivity” will grow.

So, I have planned the course on philosophy of STS and subtitled it “From ontology to epistemology and vice versa” in order to stress a present-day convergence of ‘explanatory’ and ‘hermeneutical’ models of knowledge that underlines a possible synthesis of natural and human sciences. And since teaching is always at the same time self-learning I hope that in the course of my STS course I will reach myself the better understanding of what relational ontologies and a “new objectivity” may be.

Structuring the course

When I was planning my STS course, besides the difficulties that referred to its essential topics I faced with some of the other-order problems. Since 1999 I traveled abroad to participate at STS seminars and conferences; in 2002-2003 I worked as a Research fellow at IAS-STS in Graz, Austria and, thus, I was often surrounded with people who were doing STS, adopted and used their vocabulary. But each time I returned to Russia I found an “STS vacuum”. No relevant texts, no books, no translations and a perplexity at best. It seemed that the Russian reception/criticism of postpositivist stuff had stopped at the line of sociology of scientific knowledge and the strong programme’s issues. In spite of (or owing to?) the very solid Russian philosophical school and in spite of the very strong Russian philosophers who tackled and explored the problems of sociology of science and postpositivist epistemology, STS-specific strategies remained nearly unnoticed. Step by step, very slowly, the situation started changing but even now STS has not yet been marked as a special field. Actually, in Russia my course will be the first teaching course dedicated directly to STS.

This imposes some additional terms upon me. Before discussing the STS ontological issues I have to “introduce” this trend to my audience, to tell about its pre-history and the various traditions that forewent it, to draw its present-day contours, to outline a “canon” of STS (as A. Pickering put it), to survey the STS network and so on. That is why I decided that my course would consist of two parts – preliminary and main ones. The first one will introduce STS and acquaint students with its history whereas the second one will be devoted to the theoretical (philosophical) aspects of STS current practices. And the crucial point is that this structure must reflect the meta-goal of my course – tracing an inter-relation between ontology and epistemology. Therefore, I have built up the syllabus in the following way:

When I teach the first part of my course I try to present all the historical material as referred to the two great modern “traditions” – “ontology of nature” (natural sciences and metaphysics) and “ontology of culture” (social sciences and critical theories) – tracing their paths up to “nature-culture ontology” of the XXth century (philosophies of process, complexity and system theories). I consider (of course, briefly enough as it is appropriate to the propedeutic part) “history of science”, “philosophy of science”, “sociology of science” and “philosophy of technology” as the predecessors of STS and try to inscribe my historical sketch in the context of “nature-culture division”. When teaching the second, “contemporary”, part I dwell on contemporary STS issues/practices and their ontological, epistemological, and methodological dimensions, reserving a special space for the STS reading of scientific experiment, the place where technologies, people, ideas, and things meet. Here I accentuate relational ontologies and the “mixed objects” that they entail. I do understand the difficulties this multilayered program poses for me. However, if one does not make an attempt, he/she fails automatically. At least I will try. Another trap which threatens me lies in the very idea of doing philosophy of a subject (or investigatory practices) that is quite suspicious of philosophical generalizations and opposes “case study” method to them. But here S. Fuller invigorates me when he says in his new book The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies (Routledge, 2006; p. ix): “philosophy’s most astute and potent allies are often found outside the discipline”. I agree with him and the more so that I am convinced of a ubiquity of ontology which gleams even where it has been refused, and, therefore, I believe, philosophy always finds work.

Preparing the course

Last winter I finished the program of the course and applied with it to the Faculty’s academic council. I did not encounter any problems with acceptance of the program in my Faculty’s curriculum. The only thing was a gentle recommendation to change the title of the course replacing “Science and Technology Studies” with “Postpositivist Approaches to Science and Technology” or something like this. The point is that, as I have already written, STS does not figure as a special trend in Russian scholarly standards, besides which, when translated into Russian “science and technology studies’ sounds a bit heavy and not quite discipline-like. But since an introduction of STS as STS was my important point, I maintained the title. As for the rest – the program received approval and support from the Dean of Faculty, the Head of my Department, the colleagues who got acquainted with it and the course was planned for the first term 2007-2008. I am very much grateful to my Faculty which, along with “classical” philosophical education, encourages an advancement of courses covering current developments in Western social sciences.

At the same time I applied with my syllabus to the Central European University Course Development Competition Program (CDC), which supports faculty’s innovative courses at their home universities … and I won the grant! Due to this grant I could provide myself with material resources for the course, first of all with a great amount of relevant books that had been entirely absent in Russia. Now I have at my faculty quite a library for STS literature — the only one of its kind in Russia!

My teaching method is based on lectures (14) and seminars (7). Seminars are an essential part of the course because they are expected to be discussions of basic texts on philosophy of science, sociology of science, history of science, science and technology studies. Students are expected to read the required texts and present papers on their crucial problems. This means that I have (and that is what I am doing now) to select relevant texts and themes for discussion, to produce the course reader and to choose among the very “hot” STS controversies for the seminars disputes.

My other strong concern is my future audience. The course is of the advanced-level and planned for the four-year philosophy students – about 20 in number. The course is optional (one of three) and so, I will get just a part of all students. How many students and of which sort will come to learn of STS, whose very name sounds alien? To complicate matters further, I have never taught anything for exactly these students before and we little know each other. I have written a brief announcement of the course and sent it to my potential audience. In September we shall see what happens…

Course Portfolio Project

When got the CEU grant I was offered to participate at the CDC subprogram – the so called Course Portfolio Project the goal of which is making the work of teaching visible. The project supposes a creation and running the web site of the course for a monitoring of the course from its underlying motives to final results. I agreed on this project because I thought that it would be a nice opportunity to question my intentions, ideas and teaching philosophy again and eventually to analyze my possible successes and failures. This too is a reason why I am writing this now.

Olga Stoliarova is Assistant Professor, State University – Higher School of Economics, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Ontology, Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Moscow, Russia, olgprin hotmail.com.