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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Science occupies an ambiguous space in contemporary society. Scientific research is championed in relation to tackling environmental issues and diseases such as cancer and dementia, and science has made important contributions to today’s knowledge economies and knowledge societies. And yet science is considered by many to be remote, and even dangerous. It seems that as we have more science, we have less understanding of what science actually is.
The new edition of this popular text redresses this knowledge gap and provides a novel framework for making sense of science, particularly in relation to contemporary social issues such as climate change. Using real-world examples, Mark Erickson explores what science is and how it is carried out, what the relationship between science and society is, how science is represented in contemporary culture, and how scientific institutions are structured. Throughout, the book brings together sociology, science and technology studies, cultural studies and philosophy to provide a far-reaching understanding of science and technology in the twenty-first century.
Fully updated and expanded in its second edition, Science, Culture and Society will continue to be key reading on courses across the social sciences and humanities that engage with science in its social and cultural context.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface to Second Edition
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Science, Culture and Society
What is science?
Science in technoscientific worlds
Representing technoscience – Paolozzi and Faraday
Two key thinkers
Scientism
Science is everywhere
2 In the Laboratory
In the molecular biology laboratory: investigating the structure and function of a protein
From design to practice to results
What did the experiments show?
Formal science work, language and discourse
Some observations on these experiments
Outcomes
Formal science
Different kinds of formal science
What are experiments for?
Further reading
3 Scientific Knowledge
The standard account
Scientific realism
Problems with realism
Wittgenstein, language and science
Implications for looking at science
Challenges to the standard account
The emergence of social constructionism and actor-network theory
Actor-network theory
Thought communities and the social production of scientific knowledge
Conclusion
Further reading
4 History
The standard account of the history of science
A history of sunshine 1
Standard history of science
T.S. Kuhn and scientific revolutions
A history of sunshine 2
Exoteric and esoteric histories of science
Conclusion
Further reading
5 Scientists and Scientific Communities
Representing the scientific community
Sociology of the scientific community
Scientists construct the scientific community
A career in formal science?
Gender discrimination in science
Sexism
Addressing gender discrimination in science
Conclusion
Further reading
6 Popular Science
What is popular science?
Contemporary popular science: enforcing the ‘ideology’ of science
Scientific fraud
What do popular accounts of science show us?
Further reading
7 Science Fiction
What is science fiction?
Mainstream science fiction – definitions and its relation to science
Mainstream science fiction films
Science fiction trends and tendencies
Conclusion
Further reading
8 Science in a Changing World
Climate change, science and society
Towards the future
Further reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
Begin Reading
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Science, Culture and Society
Understanding Science in the 21st Century
Second edition, revised and updated
Mark Erickson
Copyright © Mark Erickson 2016
The right of Mark Erickson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition first published in 2005 by Polity PressThis second edition first published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0324-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Erickson, Mark, 1964-Science, culture and society : understanding science in the 21st century / Mark Erickson. -- 2nd Edition.pages cmRevised editon of the author’s Science, culture and society, 2005.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 978-0-7456-6224-4 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-6225-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Science--Social aspects. I. Title.Q175.5.E75 2015306.4’5--dc23
2015008230
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface to Second Edition
The second edition of Science, Culture and Society has undergone substantial change. The core theoretical perspective remains the same; I am still committed to using the work of Ludwik Fleck and Ludwig Wittgenstein to make sense of science, focusing on the language, meaning construction and representations of science in the different communities of which we are members. I also use broadly the same structure as the first edition. However, much of the content is different. In particular, chapter 2 presents an account and analysis of a recent molecular microbiology experiment; comparing this to the experiments I used in the first edition reveals how far and how fast biosciences have moved in the intervening decade. Other chapters include new content in the form of more recent popular science texts, science fiction narratives and theoretical understandings of science in society. Also included in this edition is a much stronger focus on gender discrimination in science, reflecting how this topic is (finally) receiving much more attention in policy. The first edition included extensive discussion of nanotechnology to illustrate the relationship between the formal science produced by scientists and public understandings of science, but I think that the example in this edition – climate change science – is more appropriate and a much more pressing concern for all of us. My intention in producing the revised and updated edition, however, remains the same; to provide an overview and introduction to understanding science in social and cultural contexts and to show how all members of society are involved in the social construction of science.
Mark EricksonMarch 2015
Acknowledgements
This book grew out of courses I taught at the University of Birmingham and, more recently, the University of Brighton and I am grateful to all my students for their comments, suggestions and insights into science in society. The book also grew out of research I carried out in a number of laboratories. I thank all those who took part in these various research projects, but in particular I want to express my gratitude and thanks to Dr Douglas Browning of the Department of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, who taught me a huge amount about scientific method and molecular microbiology and put up with my constant stream of questions as he was trying to get on with his experiments. My thanks also to Professor Steve Busby, who granted me access to his laboratories at the University of Birmingham. Professor Alistair Rae provided very helpful guidance on relativity and quantum mechanics.
It is a privilege to be part of a supportive academic community and Sara Bragg, Tom Shakespeare and Charlie Turner all deserve special thanks for offering advice and reading drafts. My colleagues and my students at the University of Brighton provide an endless source of inspiration and encouragement. At Polity, Jonathan Skerrett provided encouragement and advice.
Ljubica Erickson supported me throughout and helped with my grammar, and Fiona Sewell worked wonders on the manuscript with her excellent copy-editing (although all remaining mistakes are, of course, mine). Finally, my thanks to Sara Bragg and Milica Erickson-Bragg, who make everything worthwhile.
The author and publishers would like to thank DuPont for use of the quote on page 7. This is Copyright © 2015 DuPont. All rights reserved. The DuPont Oval Logo, DuPont™, and all products denoted with ® or ™ are trademarks or registered trademarks of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company or its affiliates.
Introduction
This is a book about what science is, how it is made and how it is represented in society and culture. We have a range of resources available to us to make sense of science, such as journals, histories of science, popular science books and magazines, social science accounts of science and science fiction novels and films. This book examines these resources and their interconnections to help to understand what science is, how we can define science and why science matters in contemporary society. Science is fabricated from language and discourse, actions and practices, representations and material cultures. However, where many social science accounts see science as being confined to laboratories and other designated sites of scientific production, this book sees science spread through our society and culture, unfolding in multiple domains and in multiple forms. Science is a social construction, but all of society is involved in constructing science, not just scientists.
Science and technology studies (STS) has emerged as a diverse discipline that sees scientific knowledge and technological artefacts as being constructions. By this STS means that the knowledge that emerges from scientific situations – laboratories, observatories and so on – and the technologies that emerge from scientific knowledge are constructed and contingent on when and where they were made. On this view scientific knowledge is not discovered, uncovered or found, but is actively made through the actions and interactions of scientists and engineers using the resources that surround them. It therefore opposes a longstanding view of scientific knowledge as ‘out there’ waiting to be ‘discovered’ or ‘uncovered’ by talented individuals. From the STS perspective science and technology are social activities that reflect the social conditions of their production and the social conditions of those involved in their production. This book is, in part, an examination of the roots and current status of these ways of understanding science and technology.
However, there are a number of issues that arise from the STS position. The first is that many, or even most people who are involved in producing scientific knowledge and new technologies do not subscribe to the story that STS tells. For them, science is a progressive, neutral activity that produces true knowledge and facts about the natural world through applying a standard method. Most scientists do not think that the knowledge they produce is contingent on social factors or conditions, only that it is constrained by the limits of scientific possibility, material and technical resources or funding. The understanding of what science is from inside scientific institutions is often very different from that of STS scholars. In this book I have attempted to produce accounts of science that scientists themselves might recognize.
Secondly, understanding that science and technology are socially constructed tells us little about how and why science has a particular status in our society. In fact, it probably does the opposite. The commonly held view in Western industrial societies is that science is a form of knowledge that produces results that are more concrete, ‘better’ and more factual than other ways of making sense of the world. Our societies are filled with representations of science as a more precise way of understanding, of science as a solution to problems in the world, of science as a prop to shore up political ideologies, of science as creating a better future for us. The dominant story of science in society, scientism, tells us that science is a form of knowledge and a method of investigation that is separate, bounded and superior to other knowledge and ways of investigating. Social studies of science have long since debunked this myth, but it is very persistent in societal understandings and expectations of science.
A further point needs to be faced at the outset. Whilst many public images of, and attitudes towards, science are positive, a number are negative. Contemporary scientific activities that are in the public eye sometimes meet with resistance. Science’s roles in genetic modification of organisms, human cloning, production of improved weaponry, or failure to warn of the dangers of food and other health scares, for instance, are obvious examples. Sometimes public representations of science confront the idea that science is always the right way forward. This contested status of scientific knowledge challenges the widely held public view of science as a ‘good’ thing.
These short descriptions of perspectives on science in society show that science is not a single thing but a complex social phenomenon that appears in many places in a number of different forms. By taking this as a starting point this book differs from many STS approaches. Whilst it may be the case, as STS holds, that scientific knowledge is socially constructed by those involved in its production, this book will argue that science as a whole, the science of our societies, is itself a social construct, which the whole of society is involved in creating. The process of social construction of science results not in a unitary and essential object, but in a complex, contested and contestable family-resemblance concept that holds a range of different meanings according to where it is being deployed, and by whom.
Our societies are so permeated by science, scientific knowledge and the products of scientific endeavour such as technology that all of us, at some level or other, consume representations of science and incorporate them into our everyday understandings. This happens in many different ways, through education, the media and culture, but also through scientific and medical interventions into our bodies, through working in scientific environments or being subject to scientific work regimes, through being included or excluded by formal scientific institutions, through the consumption of technologies. We constantly and continuously construct what science is in our language, actions and interactions, through deploying meanings and through having other meanings presented to us. Given the dominance of scientism in our society, we often don’t have much choice in this.
This continuous social construction of science is based upon a range of resources that are available at any given time. This book investigates what these resources are and looks at the interrelations between them. A key one is what in this book is called ‘formal science’, the science that is done in laboratories and other scientific institutions. At the heart of formal science is the production of scientific knowledge through the work of scientists. Examining just how such knowledge emerges is instructive not least in revealing the complexity and difficulty of much formal scientific work. Formal science is an important topic for this analysis as it is the substrate that a number of other resources consume to construct their own versions of science. Yet the reverse is also the case: professional scientists working in scientific locations are constructing scientific knowledge, but are doing so with reference to the same external resources that the public are using. This book is able to look at a small range of these: histories of science, popular science texts and science fiction narratives. External accounts of science represent different understandings of what science ‘is’, and such representations serve both to reinforce a dominant story of science and to obscure aspects of the operation of formal science.
This book investigates the tensions between internal and external accounts, between esoteric and exoteric. The central argument of this book is that the social construction of science is a two-way street between the esoteric communities of which formal scientists are members and the exoteric, public communities to which we all belong. This frame of reference, based on the work of Ludwik Fleck and Ludwig Wittgenstein, is outlined in more detail in chapter 1. Subsequent chapters use this perspective to examine, firstly, the production and understanding of formal science knowledge in laboratories (chapter 2) and in philosophy and sociology of science (chapter 3) before going on to look at histories of science (chapter 4), scientific communities (chapter 5), popular science representations (chapter 6) and science fiction texts as a resource for the social construction of science (chapter 7). The book closes with an examination of climate change science and societal responses to this (chapter 8). We only know about climate change because of the activities of climate change scientists – knowledge emerged from their esoteric thought communities into wider, exoteric domains. This knowledge is understood and interpreted in exoteric domains in conflicting and contestable ways, and the societal response to climate change reflects both ambivalence towards science and scientism’s advocacy of scientific solutions to social problems. Climate change science provides a clear example of how exoteric and esoteric communities are connected.
Many social accounts of science have argued that to understand science we need to understand society and its workings. Whilst this book supports that position it also argues the reverse: to understand society we need an understanding of science. To achieve that, we need to understand what formal science in scientific institutions is, and how scholars have made sense of it over the years. But we also have to recognize how society actively attaches meanings to science, making sense of science through using the resources at hand. We need to see the cultural resources that are used in this process and understand the relationship between science, culture and society if we are to be able to get to grips with what science is, why it is so important and why our society is inextricably implicated in it.
1Science, Culture and Society
Someone says to me: ‘Show the children a game.’ I teach them gaming with dice, and the other says ‘I didn’t mean that sort of game.’ Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before his mind when he gave me the order?
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ([1953] 1958)
What is science?
Much of this book is taken up with trying to define and describe science. Having this as a goal might seem strange – most people know what science is and use the word often in their everyday lives, scientists work away in their laboratories and produce scientific knowledge, social scientists use the word to describe a range of things that they see, and our culture is full of representations of science. Yet many scientists find it hard to explain even what their own work is and what it means to other people, let alone what science as a whole is and what it means. In contrast, social scientists and philosophers of science often can offer descriptions of what science as a whole means to us, and know what science as a project is, but find it difficult to explain the connection between this and the individual actions that take place in laboratories, or the role that science has in society. Our media and culture also ‘know’ what science is, and present us with images and understandings of science, but on closer inspection these representations often turn out to be crude stereotypes that reflect the prejudices and traditions of analysis that are bound up in the media community, rather than reflecting what science and scientists actually are. As for the ‘lay public’, when we begin to look at everyday uses of the word ‘science’ we can see that it comprises a range of meanings (think of the differences between ‘domestic science’ and ‘science fiction’), few of which match up to dictionary or academic definitions of science.
As we start to define science we realize that our definitions are often in a negative form: we define science by saying what it is not, not what it actually is, yet we can see that science is very important to us. Science appears all around us, is part of our lives, but when we try to explain it to ourselves or to others we run into major problems, and often fall back on clichés. Science is a complex and complicated thing. We have problems looking at it due to its complexity, and at times it feels as if the more science that we have, the harder it is to explain and the less we feel we understand it. This loss of connection is compounded by a widespread belief that science is unitary and easily definable; we feel that we should be able to do better in making sense of science. Given this, our culture’s frequent retreat into stereotypes and clichés in describing science is understandable.
Science in technoscientific worlds
What are we talking about when we speak of science? The word ‘science’ becomes attached to a great many different things in contemporary society, from laboratory practices to hair shampoos and political programmes. This profusion of attachments implies that there are problems of definition associated with the word ‘science’, and it may be that these are impossible to resolve. But we can also clearly discern a strong, dominant definition of science as the formal method of collecting knowledge about the natural world. We have a profusion of uses of the word ‘science’, but a strong, unitary definition. Why is this? There is something about the way that knowledge works in our society that makes us partition and compartmentalize experiences, objects, institutions, emotions, everything as if they were discrete entities. In the case of science, the conceptualization we have of it pushes us towards seeing science as being isolated, separate from us, and simply a neutral way to discover knowledge about nature. But when we look at it, when we think about how science slops over into so many other domains of life, we can see that this narrow compartmentalization will not do. We are probably wrong in trying to make sense of science in isolation, of trying to look at it on its own. At the very least we need to see it in context, and as soon as we start doing that we can see that one crucial thing about science is its embeddedness in society, in the social. We can argue elsewhere about the truth or falsity, the goodness or badness of science; our starting point for trying to make sense of science is to see it in its social contexts, as a human, social product.
The idea of ‘technoscience’, a concept first used by Gaston Bachelard in the 1950s and picked up and extended by Jean-François Lyotard in the late 1970s, is an attempt to address the need to see science in much wider contexts, and not simply as a method for producing knowledge. For Lyotard technoscience was an instrument where science ceases to be just about the generation of knowledge and becomes a tool that will produce technical innovations and, significantly, interventions into our lives (Lyotard 1991: 47). In contemporary society we tell ourselves a story that links science and technology such that they become inseparable. We have a difficulty in contemporary society in distinguishing between science and technology: when we look at new technologies we often think of science and when we look at science we often think of new technologies that science will provide. This is clear in much technology advertising, for example:
1999 The miracles of science ™Today, consumers throughout the world invariably associate the red DuPont oval with leadership in innovative science-based materials. This recognition exists because DuPont manufactures quality products and protects their integrity through branding, the process of creating and disseminating a name that can be distinguished from other products and develop customer loyalty and trademarking, which protects brand names from unauthorized and unscrupulous use. Over the years, branding and trademarking products have increased in importance as a result of DuPont’s continued diversification and a steady increase in market competition. (http://www2.dupont.com/Phoenix_Heritage/en_US/1999_b_detail.html)
This is more than a story of conflating two things, science and technology, that have an elective affinity: technoscience designates a state of affairs (a time and place – Western industrial societies in the early twenty-first century) where the intellectual problems of the day become increasingly dominated by technical and mechanical considerations and often solutions. The recent surge in interest in epigenetics is a good example of this: human problems such as crime or mental illness are traced back to technical causes which may, if epigeneticists are correct, have a technical solution.
Box 1.1Genetics and epigenetics
DNA is the molecule that passes on inherited characteristics; changes in a DNA sequence will change these characteristics. This is genetic inheritance. The DNA that an organism inherits provides the code for which genes will be transcribed, and so what characteristics the organism will have. DNA is, in most organisms, a very large molecule which contains the code for many, many different things. Not all of the genome, the complete set of genes or genetic material in an organism, is transcribed; indeed, much of the human genome is described as being redundant or ‘junk’ DNA.
A large number of factors determine which genes will be transcribed and when they will become active. Whilst every cell in an organism will have the same DNA, each cell will organize and transcribe the genome into accessible and closed regions using epigenetic regulators and transcription factors. This is a very complex set of interrelated processes involving DNA methylation (the usual form of which serves to prevent a gene being expressed), nucleosome remodelling, exchange of histone variants (thus changing the folding of the DNA molecule), and post-translational modification of the histones (the molecules around which the DNA is wrapped).
Experiments on laboratory animals and in vitro have shown that some epigenetic traits may be heritable, and these claims are significant. The doctrine of DNA specifies that only DNA can carry heritable traits and that only changes in the DNA sequence will change heritable traits. The implication of these more recent epigenetic claims is that changes in the environment of an organism may affect the transcription of the organism’s DNA and that these epigenetic changes may be heritable by subsequent generations. ‘A heritable alteration, in which the DNA sequence itself is unaltered, is called epigenetic inheritance’ (Griffiths 2005: 326).
The implications could be vast, but are both contested and highly contentious. The idea that organisms adapt genetically to their environment is an old argument, dating at least back to the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who argued that physiological changes that an organism undergoes in its lifetime can be passed on to offspring (the inheritance of acquired characteristics); but it is a thoroughly discredited one, replaced by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. However, proponents of epigenetics have made bold claims concerning environmental factors changing DNA methylation; a parent’s adaptation to or just exposure in an environment can be transmitted to the child. Evidence for this in humans is scant, although a study of Holocaust survivors and their children’s mental health produced interesting findings (Glausiusz 2014). ‘Biologists first observed this “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” in plants. Tomatoes, for example, pass along chemical markings that control an important ripening gene. But, over the past few years, evidence has been accumulating that the phenomenon occurs in rodents and humans as well’ (Hughes 2014: 22).
Language is important here; what we are talking about is really two separate concepts: the actual epigenetic processes that take place inside a cell, such as DNA methylation, and the possibility that acquired characteristics, the consequence of epigenetic activity in a cell, are heritable. Perhaps we should go further and describe these as two separate, but related, language-games (see p. 81 on Wittgenstein and language-games) where the first provides a scientistic base for the second.
As well as the point where science and technology become inseparable, where a particular state of affairs pertains and technical solutions become paramount, technoscience is also a context that our inquiries are located within: technoscience exceeds the sum of its parts. Donna Haraway expresses this well:
This discourse takes shape from the material, social, and literary technologies that bind us together as entities within the region of historical hyperspace called technoscience. Hyper means ‘over’ or ‘beyond’, in the sense of ‘overshooting’ or ‘extravagance’. Thus, technoscience indicates a time-space modality that is extravagant, that overshoots passages through naked or unmarked history. Technoscience extravagantly exceeds the distinction between science and technology as well as those between nature and society, subjects and objects, and the natural and artificial that structured the imaginary time called modernity. (Haraway 1997: 3)
Technoscience is thus both an object of inquiry and a context that our inquiry can be located within. Technoscience is also a language and a grammar that we are using to describe the world around us and our selves within the world. Our lives are now described by technoscientific language, our meanings are constructed around technoscientific viewpoints on the world. We cannot easily escape this frame of reference, this form of life. Judy Wajcman, taking Haraway as one of her starting points, argues that technoscience is a gendered domain (2004: 9) and that the technologies which emerge within it are both a source and a consequence of gender relations (ibid.: 107). This approach is a deliberate challenge to the idea that technology and science are neutral things that can be put to a range of uses: Wajcman’s technofeminism points out that science and technology – and technoscience in particular – are gendered objects that have gendered consequences (Wajcman 2007). It isn’t simply the case that men and women can and do use science and technology in different ways; it is that science and technology themselves are gendered, reflecting gender divisions and inequalities. This theme of gender division and gender inequality is one we will return to often in this book: science and technology are sexist, and science and technology must be understood as social relations as well as objects.
Given this complexity – the entanglement of technology and science, the conflation of knowledge, social relations and practices in science and technology – it will be difficult to identify a starting point for technoscience; when we talk about it we are talking about trends and tendencies, rather than facts and figures (although these, too, are important). One such trace we can identify is, ironically, in the world of artistic production; ironic because the dominant discourse about science in contemporary society is still articulating the idea of ‘two cultures’ (Snow 1959; Wallerstein 2006) where art and science are considered to be separate spheres, and art is removed and remote from the ‘concreteness’ of scientific knowledge and the tangible impact of technology.
Representing technoscience – Paolozzi and Faraday
The work of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) was inspired by technoscience – the fusing together of science and technology – from the 1950s (for examples see Paolozzi 1958 in Kirkpatrick 1970). The themes of his art and sculpture are often ‘scientific’ in the sense that they express the significance of scientific knowledge and scientists in our society, and he often executes works using the technology of our everyday lives – domestic appliances, engines, radios, robotic toys – and placing it in new, sometimes surreal, contexts and conjunctions. Paolozzi’s commitment to modernism and to the progressive character of modernity is clear, and his art expresses a strong faith in the power of science to transform and change the world, although the results are sometimes unexpected or even surreal. Paolozzi’s works show that science has creative power (in the senses both of being a product of creative processes such as human imagination, and of creating things), transformative power (changing nature and society and the self) and visual power (science looks good). His work also suggests that science is inescapable: it is an integral part of the modern world that we live in, and Paolozzi’s art celebrates this, whilst at the same time showing the dangers of science and the power that science and technology have over us.
Michael Faraday (1791–1867), one of Britain’s greatest scientists, made huge theoretical and practical contributions to the study and understanding of electrical phenomena in the early nineteenth century. Faraday’s understanding of science was based upon the idea that the world was a structured whole, formed by continuously interacting natural agents or powers, and the task of the scientist was to discover the regular patterns in nature and to describe the laws that govern the behaviour of natural phenomena (Agassi 1971; Harré 1981: 177). In many ways, as we shall see, Faraday’s understanding of science was little different from that of many people – scientists and non-scientists alike – in contemporary society: we are often told that science is a form of knowledge and set of techniques that provides a truthful account of the natural world by breaking it down into its component parts and identifying the rules and laws that govern the behaviour of such parts (this is, in truncated form, the ‘standard’ account of science; see box 2.1 on p. 31). Among Faraday’s achievements were a series of experiments that showed that different varieties of electricity, that is, electrical phenomena produced by different means such as chemical or mechanical processes, were all manifestations of the same phenomenon. Through this Faraday unified the understanding of electricity in a way similar to Newton’s unification of the laws of motion in the seventeenth century. Faraday was both an experimenter and a theorist, a point emphasized in Agassi’s definitive biography (Agassi 1971), and Faraday’s experimental work produced two of the most important inventions of modernity: the electrical generator and the electrical transformer. His practical and theoretical works are of huge importance: the electrification of the world and the entry of electricity and electrical modes of being are a direct consequence of Faraday’s work. It is unsurprising that Paolozzi chose Faraday as a theme and subject for a sculpture (see figure 1.1).
Paolozzi completed Faraday in 2000 – it is a millennial piece of art, a celebration of modernity. The sculpture shows a seated figure, monumental (over 5m high), powerful, superhuman, raised above the viewer on a large pedestal. The humanoid form that is represented here is a figure that is fragmented and invaded by geometrical machine-made forms. The figure holds rods – symbols of power and law – that extrude cables that encircle the piece. These lines of power evoke those that encircle our world and encircle the self. The self is transformed through this power, changing from the organic version of a human being to a transformed ‘modern’ human, fractured and re-constructed by science and, by association, modernity. This is most visible in the ‘cubist’ way that Paolozzi represents the head of this sculpture (see figure 1.2): Paolozzi saw the cubist heads that he began to produce in the 1990s as inspired by computer graphics that had been pared down to a series of geometrical facets. He described these cubist heads as ‘Mondrian Heads’ ‘because they reminded him of Piet Mondrian’s late “boogiewoogie” paintings’ (Pearson 1999: 74). The shift from an organic human form to an inorganic, machine-made humanoid form suggests that our human selves have been transformed by technology and by science, that we have become cyborgs – machine/human hybrids (see chapter 7 for more about cyborgs).
What does this sculpture say about our relationship to science? Science is an agent here, changing our lives and changing our bodies, changing society and changing nature. Science is powerful, exuding energy that can change the self and can transform the whole world. But science is also dangerous, transforming the human into the inhuman (Lyotard 1991). The understanding of science that is being represented here is not the same as that expressed by Faraday himself, nor is it the same as the dominant story of science that we are told in contemporary society.
The science of the Faraday sculpture, the science of today, is not the unified and essentialist science of the past, i.e. a form of science where there are clear foundations and rules that unify all scientific endeavours. Science in the past has been characterized by the unity of the enterprise – science was seen as a combined, unified project that all scientific knowledge was a part of, and all scientists subscribed to the core values and goals of this project. Here, when we look at Faraday, we see a void at the core of the form, the scientist, and, by implication – for scientists are as much a part of society as the rest of us – a void at the heart of all of us. There is no core to science: instead there is a rather glaring absence, one that is surrounded by strength and power, but an absence nonetheless. Our science today is fragmented and being constantly reconstructed by its interaction with society, economics and culture. Our science is not a pure form of knowledge and practice but is a confused and confusing set of enterprises, activities and representations that make up our technoscientific reality. There is no centre to ‘science’ because science has expanded far past its original boundaries and has entered and colonized realms that also have no centres.
Figure 1.1 Sir Eduardo Paolozzi RA, Faraday, 2000 (Photo by Bec Chalkley)
It takes the power and insight of an artist such as Paolozzi to see this and to produce an image of this that begins to express what that absence means. We tell ourselves a story of science as unified, as powerful, as transformative and, above all, as having a continuous history and a continuous future. We experience science as an essential force, as something that has an essence, a core that is true and permanent. However, as Paolozzi’s Faraday suggests, we need not look at science in that way. Thinking of Paolozzi’s sculpture, and particularly his cubist heads, gives us another way of configuring and understanding what science is.
Figure 1.2 Detail of Faraday – head (Photo by Bec Chalkley)
Paolozzi’s cubist heads are made up of geometric fragments that have been recombined and reconstructed, and we can think of science as having a similar form. Science can be imagined as being a semi-opaque, three-dimensional object with many faces – a dodecahedron, for example – an object that we imagine turning around in our heads such that, as we turn it, a new face comes into view and focus.
As we turn our dodecahedron around in our mind, each face we see expresses a different aspect of science. We may start with the face that shows us the production of scientific knowledge in the lab, and we can examine this face to understand further what this process of knowledge production entails. As we look at this face of science we see that adjoining it are other faces that are impinging on the production of scientific knowledge – the history of science, the materiality of lab work, the scientists’ understanding of their own project – and we will find it easier to understand the process of knowledge production by making reference to the adjoining faces. Later, we can turn the dodecahedron around and look at another face – perhaps the representation of science in popular culture. Again, we can examine this face to make better sense of how such representations are produced and how they are connected to, for example, the science of popular science books, the practices of laboratory workers or a common theme in science fiction. The more we look at the dodecahedron, the more we see the connections, tensions and interconnections between the different faces of science. We also begin to see that the dodecahedron is, actually, much more multi-faceted: there are far more than twelve faces to this imaginary object. And because the imaginary object is semi-opaque we also see that inside, like Paolozzi’s Faraday, it has no core, no centre, no essence. Each facet of the object of science, like each facet of the head of Faraday, has a reality and an existence of its own, and is related to other facets, yet no one facet expresses all of the object, or has a necessary superiority to other facets.
When we look at an art object, say a sculpture or a painting, we often find ourselves looking at one particular feature – the eyes of a portrait, or the foreground of a landscape. That we focus on, say, the eyes of Paolozzi’s Faraday is a feature of our culture, not a feature of the sculpture: similarly it is a feature of our culture and not an expression of some integral quality or essence of science that we look at science and describe its form of knowledge as being superior to other forms of knowledge. This need not be the case, although our investigations will show that there are features of scientific knowledge that make it different from other forms of knowledge.
We can describe science as a multi-faceted object that we can pick up, turn this way and that, peer inside and scrutinize, but science also has its own agency. With Haraway we must admit that it is no longer possible to maintain a strong separation between subject and object: things that appear to be passive and subject to external influence often turn out to be active and capable of effecting change themselves (Haraway 1997). We objectify science, but do this through our subjectivity that is itself constituted by our technoscientific lives. This means that we need to look at ourselves, our relationship to science, and how we embody science, to start to understand it. We need to see science located in its social context; not as a separate and remote object, but as something that is embedded in the world of social relations. But also we need to scrutinize science appropriately and recognize that we cannot grasp it all at once as a whole.
Two key thinkers
We can see science as a fragmented and multi-faceted object. This is a perspective that is supported by two key thinkers – Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ludwik Fleck – who offer, respectively, some tools for making sense of the grammar and language of science, and of the social relationships inside and surrounding science.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein provides us with a way of understanding how a concept such as ‘science’, which appears to have such a tight and formal definition, can come to have so many different meanings, and how such a complex concept can occupy such a central position in social thought. Ironically, it is Wittgenstein’s early philosophy that provides the opposite conception of science, the position held by logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap and A.J. Ayer (see chapter 3), where science is seen as being a unified project with a unitary method: the most important, and best, form of knowledge existing in modern society (Ayer 1971). As Ayer notes: ‘There is no field of experience which cannot, in principle, be brought under some form of scientific law, and no type of speculative knowledge about the world which it is, in principle, beyond the power of science to give’ (Ayer 1971: 64).
Box 1.2Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was born into a wealthy Viennese family. He initially studied engineering before moving to study philosophy at Cambridge in the years before World War I. His first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (published in 1921), was hailed as a work of genius. Wittgenstein thought that it had solved all of the current philosophical problems, and abandoned philosophy after it was published. The book presents in a rigidly logical way a series of propositions that describe the relationship of language to the world, and at the heart of the book is Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning, which states that language consists of propositions which picture the world.
Wittgenstein realized in the late 1920s that the doctrine of the Tractatus was wrong and returned to philosophy, taking up a chair in philosophy at Cambridge. His second book, Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953), is also about the relationship of language to the world. However, in this book Wittgenstein abandons the idea that propositions have fixed meanings that can be broken down into their logical elements. He moves away from the formal analytical frame of reference and looks at how meanings become attached to words. The meanings of words were constructed through their use, and thus could not be understood when taken out of their linguistic context. Breaking sentences down into atomic elements to find meanings would never work as the meanings are attached as language is deployed. Wittgenstein called the whole situation where meanings become attached to words ‘language-games’.
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy radically departs from his earlier work. Where he had seen the world as being a totality of logical propositions which could be described with the regularity of scientific endeavour, in his later work Wittgenstein presented an understanding of the meanings of words as being constructed through their use – the meaning of words was contingent upon their use in everyday speech. This meant that there were no fixed meanings for words, and that meanings could shift and change according to how, where and by whom they were being used. Wittgenstein thought that some concepts in our language were ‘family-resemblance concepts’ in that they could not fall into simple ‘true/false’ bipolar distinctions (such as a colour being described as red or as not red, one or the other) and were really amalgamations of a constellation of meanings. He uses the example of ‘games’ to illustrate this point:
Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic-games, and so on. What is common to them all? – Don’t say: ‘There must be something common, or they would not be called “games”’ – but look and see whether there is anything common to all. – For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that…. Look for example at board games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. – Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience…. Think now of a game like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared? … And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing, sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. (Wittgenstein [1953] 1958: §66)
I would propose that we consider ‘science’ to be such a family-resemblance concept (Wittgenstein [1953] 1958: §67; Phillips 1977), where it is not possible to consider phenomena as either ‘science’ or ‘not science’. Rather, we will see that much of what we formally categorize as science in contemporary society is not as ‘scientific’ as we thought, and much of what we think of as being unscientific actually contains elements of science. However, it isn’t simply that our use of the word ‘science’ (or scientist, scientific, etc.) is ambiguous and open to a range of meanings. We need to recognize that, in the same way that when we deploy the word ‘game’ in everyday language we cannot help starting to look for game-like features, when we deploy the word ‘science’ we start looking for ‘scientific’ features. Given the opentextured definition of the words that we use, it is likely that we will find such features when we start looking. Wittgenstein uses the example of ‘natural law’ and the use of the term by scientists to show that simply using particular words means that we will end up carrying out certain forms of investigation, or will start to look at the world in a certain way. When we use the term ‘natural law’ we immediately start looking for certain things, and start thinking in a certain way:
First of all, the idea of compulsion already lies in the word ‘law’. The word ‘law’ suggests more than an observed regularity which we take it will go on.
The usage of the word natural law connects, one might say, to a certain kind of fatalism. What will happen is laid down somewhere … if we got hold of the book in which natural laws were really laid down. The rules were laid down by a Deity – written in a book. Rules in physics are a guess: ‘I suppose that is the law’. (Wittgenstein 1993: 430)
For Wittgenstein, the use by science of terms such as ‘natural law’ meant that science would always see the world as if there was a set of already written laws that it simply needed to uncover. It is not that our language ‘compels’ us inescapably to see things in certain ways (this would be too determinist and mechanistic for Wittgenstein), but that there is an element of compulsion there, and that it is only by great effort that we can escape from the view of the world that our language imposes upon us. We can use Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a therapeutic intervention into the world of ideas and words to help us see where it is that language is leading us, and to identify alternative understandings of the world around us. Wittgenstein’s philosophy helps us to see that our language, far from being a perfect tool for describing and explaining the world, is something that actually hides things from us, confuses us, leads us astray.
By applying Wittgenstein’s philosophy to the case of science we can begin to see the concept of science as a complex constellation of meanings that bring together a wide range of different practices and knowledges. By comparison with Wittgenstein’s example of ‘game’, this family-resemblance concept is much more difficult to unpack because one of the central modes of understanding the contemporary world is based upon a version of scientific knowledge, scientific method and scientific practice. There is no formal theory of games that make us look at games in our society as if there was a hierarchy of practices – with, say, chess at the top and football at the bottom. However, there is a strong perception in our society that scientific knowledge is better than other sorts of knowledge, and that scientific practice is a more reliable mode of investigation than other forms of inquiry. This story is reinforced again and again in our culture. For example, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s 2011 popular science book argues that the most important questions of life and how we can understand the world:
[t]raditionally [were] questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our search for knowledge. (Hawking and Mlodinow 2011: 13)
In similar vein Richard Dawkins, eminent biologist and social commentator, when asked by popular science magazine New Scientist what would make the world better, replied: ‘The world would be a better place if everybody learned to think like scientists’ (New Scientist, 2725, 33). An op-ed piece in the next issue of the same magazine made a similar point:
So being rational can be difficult – it often goes against our gut feelings. But if we want to stay alive, let alone make the world a better place to live in, there is no substitute for science and reason. We need to base our actions on how things really are, rather than how we would like them to be – and elect leaders who do the same. (le Page 2009)
These are strong, sweeping statements and claims, but they are so prevalent that we barely notice them even when they claim ownership of all significant forms of knowledge and meaning. The cover of New Scientist for 7 July 2012, reporting on the discovery of the Higgs boson (aka the ‘god particle’), declared: ‘Higgsteria! What the god particle means for the universe.’ Philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend’s double-edged statement ‘[s]cience seems to be about all there is’ (Feyerabend 2011: 6) captures this condition well. Because of this we find it difficult to see the other uses of science, or the other locations of science, let alone other forms of knowledge and meaning, as having similar status to ‘formal science’ (broadly akin to the natural science taught and researched at universities) (See box 1.3).
Box 1.3Formal science
I use the term ‘formal science’ in this book to denote scientific knowledge and scientific research that is formalized through institutional acceptance, principally through the formal institutions of scientific communities and scientific publications. The term ‘natural science’ is a charged one, implying as it does a direct relationship to ‘nature’. As we will see, a lot of what scientists do is not particularly natural and doesn’t actually involve objects from ‘nature’ (see box 3.1 on p. 73).
Using the term ‘formal science’ also alerts us to the problems of using the word ‘nature’. The dominant story of science we tell ourselves implies that nature is something that is external to us, ‘out there’ and tangible as a separate realm. In contrast, and with philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), we need to see that nature is not natural, is constructed by us through our language, social relations and everyday practices. Nature is a product of human action and thought; talk of ‘natural science’ from this perspective is misleading.
The dominant story of science and the superiority of scientific knowledge has a long history. This story reinforces science’s image of being a method of achieving truth, a discourse that is neutral in its origin and consequences. We can identify a number of different locations where this story is presented to us, and where we interact with it. We can call these different locations where stories of the world we inhabit are told and retold thought communities.
Ludwik Fleck
The idea of thought communities comes from the work of the Polish microbiologist and sociologist of science Ludwik Fleck (see box 1.4). A thought community is a group of individuals who think in a similar way using shared ideas, concepts and theories: they share a particular ‘thought style’ that is visible in the discourse of the thought community. Fleck suggests that such thought communities are multiple, vary in size and vary in composition. For Fleck, it was important to see scientists in the context of their thought community: new scientific ideas could only ‘progress’ once they were accepted by the thought community that would be using them (see box 1.5).
Box 1.4Ludwik Fleck
Fleck (1896–1961) was a Polish microbiologist who took a keen interest in the philosophy and sociology of science. His groundbreaking book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact was published in 1935. In it, Fleck describes how scientific communities come together, and how the esoteric (internal) knowledge of a scientific community will be related to the exoteric (external) knowledge of other thought communities. In addition, Fleck offers an account of the history of science which is discontinuous, unlike the seamless progressive standard accounts.
Fleck’s life is quite astonishing in other ways. By 1935 he was head of the bacteriological laboratory in the city of Lvov, but was sacked that year as part of the anti-Jewish measures taken by the Polish state. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact was published that year, but in Switzerland – as Fleck was Jewish he could not get it published in Poland or Germany due to anti-Semitic prejudice and laws. Up to 1939 Fleck survived as a private researcher, but then the Russian occupation of that part of Poland saw him made director of Lvov city microbiology laboratory, and appointed to the state medical school. The Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941 saw Fleck sacked (again) and confined to the ghetto – he became director of the bacteriological laboratory at the Jewish hospital, a post he held until December 1942.
During this period there was an outbreak of typhoid, and Fleck – without proper equipment, lab supplies or funds – managed to invent and develop a diagnostic test for typhus, allowing infected patients to be confined at a much earlier stage (thus preventing the infection spreading) and started working on a vaccine which he extracted from the urine of infected patients. He used his family to test this out, but before he could check the results in a fully scientific way, by vaccinating a large group, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto. Fleck was sent to Auschwitz, where he was forced to produce his vaccine for use by the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.
Fleck agreed to do this, and was supplied with a team and a small lab in one of the isolation huts, i.e. where all the inmates were already dying of typhoid. Fleck produced a large quantity of vaccine from the urine of German soldiers (the Nazis would not allow him to use urine from Jews to produce vaccine for their troops, of course). This ‘vaccine’ was inert – effectively sterile – and did not protect against typhoid. Fleck’s team also produced a small quantity of real vaccine that did work – thus allowing them to convince the Nazis that what they were injecting into their soldiers was a real vaccine. This real vaccine they kept for themselves and for the inmates of Auschwitz, as many of whom as possible were secretly inoculated. Fleck was upset that he could not keep proper scientific records of how effective these inoculations were as the Nazis would kill or relocate his research subjects frequently.
Fleck survived Auschwitz, and no doubt countless others also survived because of the vaccine he produced there. After the war Fleck was made professor of microbiology at Lublin University, and a fellow of the Polish academy of sciences in 1954. He emigrated to Israel in 1957 and died in 1961.
In his major work Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
