Social construction and the scientific artifact

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Social construction and the scientific arti-fact

• Beate Elvebakk, Centre for Technology, Innovation
  and Culture

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SCIENCE STUDIES

• New-ish discipline
• Family of more or less related theories and
  methodologies
• Empirical study of scientific practice
• Philosophy, sociology, anthropology
• Science as a product

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PRE-KUHN

• science accumulative,
• science comes ever closer to nature,
• paradigm shifts determined by new observations
  of nature,
• the object pulls science after it.

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Kuhn as basis

• knowledge is a social phenomenon, not the
  property of individuals
• science is being used uncritically
• scientific theories are upheld partly by social
  control
• Accepting a paradigm is not basically a rational
  choice

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Bloor (1974) Science and Social Imagery

• Causal.
• Impartial with respect to truth or falsity,
  success or failure, rationality and
  irrationality.
• Symmetrical. The same kinds of reasons should be
  used to explain both kinds of beliefs (postulate
  of equivalence)
• Reflexive.

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Bruno Latour

• Actor-Network Theory
• 1977, book co-written with Steve Woolgar
  Laboratory Life. The social construction of a
  scientific fact.
• Ethnographic study of life in the Salk
  laboratories
• Focus on scientists as opportunistic actors and
  on science as persuasion

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Standard theories of science

• Science as essentially different from other
  activities epistemologically privileged
• The purity of science, no influence from
  external factors
• Science as politically neutral, above politics.
  Descriptive, not normative.

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Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world

• About linking science studies to the world beyond
  the laboratory
• How does scientific truths travel?
• What makes science true beyond its context of
  discovery?
• Relations between micro and macro?
• Science is politics by other means

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The story of Pasteur and anthrax

• (from Latours book The Pasteurization of France)
  
• Anthrax local problem, local causes
• How is Pasteurs laboratory made relevant to the
  farms and cattle?
• Transition from local to universal and back
  again

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The world as text

• The various elements co-define each other.
• The elements are actors/actants, and move in
  different networks.
• An actant is virtually anything - anything to
  which qualities can be attributed.
• - These attributes evolve in the process of
  interacting with other actants

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Pasteur

• Takes the anthrax bacillus to his laboratory, and
  something happens to the bacillus that never
  happened before the colony grows, and the
  bacillus is made visible
• Anthrax becomes the bacillus
• Latour terms this process a translation
• Translating the farmers interests to coincide
  with his own

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Translation

• To make others interests coincide with your own,
  through displacing some actors with others
  (anthrax with microbes)

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Achievement

• To make the small-scale, local, theoretical work
  appear relevant to large scale, universal
  practical problems.
• To forge these links is an important part of what
  science is about
• To become the representative of a new class of
  actors (the microbes)

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Interesting the farmers

• Farmers become interested in science through the
  translation
• Mimics the disease in the laboratory and
  displays power over the disease
• Variates the virulence of the disease at will
• Microbiology as the answer to the farmers
  problems

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OUT OF THE LABORATORY

• Laboratory truths travel with the laboratory
• Transforming farms to laboratories
• - not too much, because that will be
  impractical
• - not too little, because then it wont work
• Scientific facts are like trains, they do not
  work off their rails.

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TRIALS

• Interacting forces that become known through
  trials
• Resistance existence
• Truth is a temporal process.
• Reality is not an absolute actants may take on
  more and less reality during their life-spans.
  The microbes become ever more real.

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Universality of science

• Universality of science is not given, but created
• Scientific truths become true through making
  world more scientific
• It is not only about discovering regularities,
  but creating regularities.

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Changing Scales

• Laboratories work because they change the scales
  of things, making big things small and small
  things big
• Makes mistakes affordable
• Accelerates the frequency of trials

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Principle

• The more science and technology have an esoteric
  content, the further they extend outside thus,
  science and technology is only a subset of
  technoscience

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Alan Sokal

• The Science WarsI
• Is science studies mer nonsense?
• Is saying that something is constructued saying
  that it is not true?

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Position

• there exists an external world, whose properties
  are independent of any individual human being and
  indeed of humanity as a whole that these
  properties are encoded in eternal'' physical
  laws and that human beings can obtain reliable,
  albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of
  these laws by hewing to the objective''
  procedures and epistemological strictures
  prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

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Reasons

• The Social Text article is structured around
  the silliest quotations I could find about
  mathematics and physics (and the philosophy of
  mathematics and physics) from some of the most
  prominent French and American intellectuals.
  (Sokal, A House Built on Sand 11)

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POLITICS

• I go on to suggest (once again without argument)
  that science, in order to be liberatory,'' must
  be subordinated to political strategies. I finish
  the article by observing that a liberatory
  science cannot be complete without a profound
  revision of the canon of mathematics.'' What's
  more surprising is how readily they accepted my
  implication that the search for truth in science
  must be subordinated to a political agenda, and
  how oblivious they were to the article's overall
  illogic.

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Truth

• Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines
  is that they are false (when not simply
  meaningless). There isa real world its
  properties are notmerely social constructions
  facts and evidence domatter.

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Relativism

• Hacking
• If somebody seriously asks the question what is
  the velocity of light? and work hard at
  answering it, and get an answer, they will
  determine that the velocity of light is about
  186000 miles per second

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True claim

• If a group asks about the velocity of light, and
  works hard at it, has plenty of material,
  intellectual and cultural support, and does
  everything pretty much as has in fact been done,
  then it should get something like present-day
  measures of that number.

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Form of Knowledge

• A framework for what may or may not be true
• Possible questions, and sentences that may be
  true or false
• Methods or techniques for answering them.

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Examples

• Methods of measurement (IQ) The goal of an
  activity (missile accuracy)
• New chemical substance (TRH)
• Available equipment (bubble chamber)
• Research programmes/funding (laser).