Theory and Reality

by Peter Godfrey-Smith

  The second work is more controversial; it was important in a shift that took place in sociology of science: Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar's Laboratory Life (1979). This book appeared before Leviathan; it is famous as a pioneering work in its style.

  Leviathan discusses the rise of experimental science in seventeenthcentury England. This is seen as a pivotal case for our understanding of science, pivotal for its historical role in establishing the social structure that science has and also for illustrating this structure especially clearly. The book focuses on a dispute between Robert Boyle, a leader in the new experimental science, and Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is remembered now mainly as a political philosopher (Hobbes's 166o book Leviathan, which Shapin and Schaffer refer to in their title, is a work of that kind), but he also engaged in scientific disputes. The battle between Boyle and Hobbes was not "science versus religion" or anything like that; it was a battle over some specific scientific issues and over the proper form for scientific work and argumentation. Boyle prevailed.

  According to Shapin and Schaffer, what came out of this period, and especially from Boyle's work, was a new way of bringing experience to bear on theoretical investigation. Boyle and his allies developed a new picture of what should be the subject of organized investigation and dispute, and how these disputes should be settled. The Royal Society of London, founded in 166o by Boyle's group, became the institutional embodiment of the new approach. Boyle's approach did not become the model for science during the later seventeenth century, but it became one very important model, especially in England. There were some fairly strong differences in scientific "style" between different European countries during this period (and many would say that these have not entirely disappeared).

  Boyle sought to sharply distinguish the public, cooperative investigation of experimental "matters of fact" from other kinds of work. Proposing causal hypotheses about experimental results is always speculative and should only be done cautiously. Theological and metaphysical issues should be kept entirely separate from experimental work.

  In marking out a specific area in which dispute could be controlled and productive, Boyle hoped to show that scientific argument was compatible with social order. The seventeenth century had seen civil war in England, and this whole period in European history was one in which even the most abstract theological questions seemed capable of leading to violent unrest. So there was much concern with the problem of how to control dissent and dispute-how to stop it from spilling over into chaos. According to Shapin and Schaffer, Boyle saw his group of experimentally minded colleagues as a model for order and conflict resolution in society at large.

  Boyle was not only setting up new ways of organizing work; he was also setting up new ways of talking: new ways of asking and answering questions, handling objections, and reaching agreement. We see this, Shapin and Schaffer argue, in Boyle's handling of key terms like "vacuum." The existence of vacuums was a key topic of debate in the seventeenth century. Aristotle's physics held that vacuums could not exist, but various lines of experiment suggested that perhaps they could. Boyle's experimental work involved the use of a pump that could apparently evacuate all or almost all the air from a glass container, in which experiments could then be performed. Shapin and Schaffer argue that Boyle was not really trying to answer the standard questions about vacuums. Instead, he was reconstruing questions about vacuums in a way that brought them into contact with his experimental apparatus. Critics could-and did-complain that Boyle's pump could not settle the questions they wanted to ask. Boyle's strategy was to subtly replace these questions with other questions that could be the topic of experimental work. The old questions-such as whether an absolutely pure vacuum could exist-had been set up in such a way that they would generate endless and uncontrollable dispute.

  Shapin and Schaffer present their view in terms taken from the (later) philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Since Wittgenstein has influenced many people in the sociology of science, it is worth taking a moment to sketch the relevant ideas. Wittgenstein's early ideas about logic and language influenced logical positivism. His later ideas, especially his Philosophical Investigations (1953), were very different, and they had massive effect on latetwentieth-century thought. These later ideas are more an "anti-theory" than a theory; they are an attempt to show that philosophical problems arise from pathologies of language. Philosophy arises from a subtle transition between ordinary use of language and a kind of linguistic misfiring, in which questions that are really incoherent can seem to make sense. Wittgenstein wanted to diagnose and put an end to these misguided linguistic excursions. He avoided formulating theories of anything, but some of his ideas have been adapted for use in theories in various areas, including sociology of science (Bloor 1983).

  Two ideas are especially popular. A "form of life" for Wittgenstein is something like a set of basic practices, behaviors, and values. Actions and decisions can make sense within a form of life, but a form of life as a whole cannot be justified externally. It's just the way a group of people live. Wittgenstein was not much interested in the kinds of cultural variation studied by sociologists and anthropologists, and it is not clear what sort of "unit" a form of life is for him. But sociologists have adapted the concept to fit the kinds of groups they study.

  The second big concept drawn from Wittgenstein is the concept of a "language game." A language game is something like a pattern of linguistic habits that contribute to a form of life and make sense within it. Wittgenstein opposed a picture of language in which words and sentences are attached to their own particular meanings (mental images, perhaps) that determine how language is used. Instead, Wittgenstein claimed we should think of the socially maintained patterns of language use as all there is to the "meaning" of language. Shapin and Schaffer argue that Boyle's treatment of key terms like "vacuum" established a new language game. This language game was a key component in a new form of life, the form of life of experimental science.

  At this point you may be remembering the logical positivists and their attempt to analyze the meaning of scientific language in terms of patterns in experience. Is the idea of a language game developed to serve experimental science different from this positivist idea? It is different. The logical positivists claimed that the right theory of meaning would show that all meaningful language ever does is describe patterns in experience. According to Shapin and Schaffer, Boyle was setting up a new way of using language. So there is perhaps more of a connection to the "operationalism" of the physicist Bridgman, who was briefly mentioned in chapter z. Bridgman (19z7) urged that scientists reform their use of language to ensure that each term has a direct connection to empirical testing.

  Those are the central ideas in Leviathan and the Air Pump. But something should be said about another, more problematic, feature of the book.

  Shapin and Schaffer claim that Boyle and other scientists are engaged in the manufacture of facts. In everyday talk the phrase "manufacture of facts" would be taken to indicate deception, but that is not what Shapin and Schaffer have in mind. For them, there is nothing bad about the manufacture of facts; they want us to get used to the idea that facts in general are made rather than found. This is reminiscent of Kuhns claim, in Chapter X of Structure, that the world changes during a scientific revolution. Like many others who use these terms, Shapin and Schaffer want to reject a picture of the scientist as a passive receiver of information from the world. But a denial of passivity does not require this kind of talk, and it often leads to trouble. For example, at the very end of Leviathan, their discussion of "making" leads Shapin and Schaffer to express their overall conclusions in a way that involves a real confusion. They say: "It is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know" (1985, 344)• This is a classic example of a false dichotomy. Neither we alone nor reality alone is "responsible" for human knowledge. The rough answer is that both are responsible for it; knowledge involves an interaction between the two. Even this formulation is imperfect; human knowledge is
part of reality, not something separate from or outside it. But, speaking roughly, in order to understand knowledge, we need both a theory of human thought, language, and social interaction, and a theory of how these human capacities are connected to the world outside us.

  I now move on to a second famous work in the sociology of science, Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life (1979). In the mid-197os, Bruno Latour, a French sociologist, spent a couple of years visiting a molecular biology laboratory, the Salk Institute in San Diego. He went as a charming observer who knew little about molecular biology. During the time that Latour was there, the lab did work that resulted in a Nobel Prize; they discovered the chemical structure of a hormone involved in the regulation of human growth. Latour wrote Laboratory Life, with Steven Woolgar, as a description of the lab's work.

  Latour and Woolgar, in their account, ignored most of what a normal description of a piece of science would focus on. They ignored the state of our knowledge of hormones; they ignored the ways in which experimental methods in the field are able to discriminate alternative chemical structures; they ignored how the new discovery fitted into the rest of biology. Instead, Latour looked at the lab in a sort of deliberately superficial and self-contained way. The lab was a kind of machine where chemicals, small animals, and reams of blank paper came in at one end, and small printed pieces of paper-journal articles and technical reports-came out at the other end. In between the two, a huge amount of "processing" went on, processing that turned the mass of raw materials into the intricate finished products (see fig. 8.1).

  Latour saw this processing as aimed at taking scientific claims and building structures of "support" around them, so they would eventually be taken as facts. A key step in this process is hiding the human work involved in turning something into a fact; to turn something into a fact is to make it look like it is not a human product but is given directly by nature.

  Laboratory Life was a huge success. To many it seemed like a breath of fresh air, a book that exuded wit and imagination. Along with other works, it prompted a shift within the field. The strong program came to seem crude. The strong program wanted to get rid of explanations of scientific belief in which nature just stamps itself on the minds of the scientific community. But perhaps the strong program was replacing this with an equally crude picture, in which social and political "interests" stamp themselves on the scientific community. This is not a very fair reading of the strong program. The sociologists were being caricatured, just as they had caricatured traditional philosophy of science! Some would see justice there. Latour also inspired a different style in sociology of science, a style that might be described as elusive, self-conscious, and literary.

  Fig. 8. r

  The lab according to Latour and Woolgar (From Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, © 1986; reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press)

  Latour's approach, which borrows from French philosophy, sociology, and semiotics, is sometimes called the "actor-network" theory. What the sociologist does is to study the fine structure of the internal dynamics of scientific work, especially dispute and negotiation about what has been established. The sociologist does not begin the story by taking for granted "pressures" or "interests" in society at large, and "nature" or the real world is not taken for granted either. Instead, both "society" and "nature" are seen as products, not causes, of the settlement of scientific controversies (Latour 1987). Where traditional empiricist philosophy had seen science as "data-driven," and the strong program had seen science as "interest-driven," Latour sees scientific work itself as the driver.

  In Latour's view, when we explain why one side succeeded and another failed in a scientific controversy, we should never give the explanation in terms of nature itself. Both sides will be claiming that they are the ones in tune with the facts. But when one side wins, that side's version of "the facts" becomes immune to challenge. Latour describes this final step as a process in which facts are created, or constructed, by scientific work.

  There is an interesting strategy in Latour's work here, along with much obscurity. Latour gets us to look at the dynamics of controversy in science in a very fine-grained way. What social role is played by appeals to "truth," "nature," and "the facts"? How do people use these terms before, during, and after the settlement of disputes? These are good questions. One kind of understanding we might have of the concepts of "truth" and "nature" is an understanding of how they are used as resources in arguments and discussion.

  An investigation of this kind might tell us a lot about how people decide what they take to be real, but this does not mean that the settlement of scientific disputes determines what is real. However, Latour refuses to make this distinction when he presents his work. To some extent this seems to be due to his interest in very unorthodox philosophical positions. But sometimes his neglect of this distinction seems to be just a matter of his dashing, provocative writing style (a style common in French intellectual life).

  Revolutions, as is well known, have a habit of eating their children. Although Latour is often seen as displacing or digesting the strong program, that program has been showing some resistance to the French stomach acids. A striking attack on Latour was recently published by the strong programmer David Bloor (1999). Bloor's paper radiates exasperation at the fact that Latour's obscure project has come to seem the more sophisticated and appealing option. Bloor urges a return to the strong program, and he presents that program in a way that avoids careless talk about the "construction of reality." Bloor is an exception; sociology of science has rarely treated this issue with care. And although I doubt that the strong program is the way of the future, Bloor is right that recognizing the role of social structure in science does not require strange inversions of the relations between thought and reality.

  In both its radical work and its more cautious work, sociology of science in the latter part of the twentieth century tended to suggest an unusual picture of science. This is a picture in which science is controlled entirely by human collective choices and social interests. What makes science run is negotiation, conflict resolution, hierarchies, power inequalities.... There seems to be no place in the picture for the responsiveness of scientific belief to the real structure of the world being investigated. Often sociologists accept that of course the real world imposes some constraints on what we believe. But any particular observations that a person might make are always subject to so much reinterpretation, reconstruing, filtering, and ne gotiation that they cannot guide belief or theory change. What makes things happen in science-what makes people believe one theory rather than another-is the interaction of social forces.

  Further Reading

  A standard collection of Merton's works is The Sociology of Science (1973). A central work in the rise of the strong program is Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976). See also Barnes, B1oor, and Henry 1996. Shapin 1982 is a good survey of historical work done by sociologists of science. On the issue of relativism, see Barnes and Bloor 198z and other papers in that collection (Hollis and Lukes 1982).

  Shapin has followed up the argument in Leviathan with some other very interesting work, especially A Social History of Truth (11994)• Latour's other famous books include Science in Action (11987), The Pasteurization of France (1988), and We Have Never Been Modern (11993).

  9.1 "Science Is Political"

  The relationship between science and politics was subjected to new kinds of scrutiny in the late twentieth century. To some extent, the overall image of science changed, especially in the humanities. Generalizations are risky here, but we might say that through much of the last three hundred years, science has been regarded in Western societies as a progressive, anti-authoritarian force, able to challenge and break down entrenched ideas and arrangements. This view was most vivid in the "Enlightenment" period, in the eighteenth century; confidence in science as a progressive force is one aspect of what are now called "Enlightenment values." There have
always been exceptions to this cultural image of science, within nineteenthcentury romanticism, for example, and in some Marxist thought. But various parts of intellectual culture saw a larger shift in attitudes toward science in the latter part of the twentieth century. The cold war was a crucial cause of this shift, but there were other currents at work also.

  Science came to be seen instead as a force in the maintenance of the "status quo," especially with respect to political inequalities. On the side of politics that considers itself progressive rather than conservative, many began to treat science as part of a larger, multi-tentacled political structure that acts to reinforce subtle forms of exclusion and coercion, even in apparently "free and democratic" societies. The anti-authoritarian image of science came to be seen largely as just "good PR" And the institution of science itself, it was argued, is full of hidden features that include some individuals and exclude others.

  Many thought that by showing the connections between scientific institutions and political power, it would become clear that "science is political," rather than being an institution outside of politics that enjoys a special authority derived from this political neutrality. Revealing the political embedding of science would also have relevance to questions about education, medicine, and a variety of other crucial areas of social policy.

  The most important manifestation of this new attitude is found in the development of feminist critiques of science and feminist philosophies of science. That is the topic of the first part of this chapter. The second part looks at the growth of another new approach to understanding science, the interdisciplinary field known as "Science Studies."