Abstract
Despite the sweeping title of this essay, which suggests a descriptive, even ethnographic survey of science, its aim is more modest. I offer at most a sketch that is free from three faults, three philosophical assumptions and conclusions that much received sociology of science takes for granted. The first is the assumption that science stands in some special place of authority in the contemporary social order and, authority being a social construction, that both explains it and obliges us to accept it. Although the sociology of science should explain the authority of science, uncritical endorsement of authority is a recipe for stagnation. The second assumption is that there is no social reason to distinguish science from technology. Muddled as the two are in the public and the official mind, the sociology of science should present them as differing in aim and in social structure. The third assumption is that socio-economic factors are sufficient to explain the growth of scientific knowledge. Suffice it to say, I concede that research is not as immune to the influence of these factors as the classical thinkers of the Enlightenment Movement assumed.
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- 1.
I constantly argue against fusing science with belief, and counsel against “believing science”. Belief is a private matter; a free society does not require that one believe this or that. One can endorse the scientific project without believing any of its findings. The focus on belief invites the accusation that science is a religion-substitute. True, some people use it that way. They simply miss the very different sort of cognitive effort science is, including its different sociology. From the days of the scientific revolution, its advocates repeatedly denied that it imposes faith in any doctrine. It is only because of that different sociology that some scientists can both conduct successful research and hold some antiquated religious beliefs.
- 2.
To the extent that the careers of sociologists of science in the academy depends on ambitious members of appointment committees who are professional scientists who view their task as to maintain the authority of science, to that extent the work of sociologists of science is as inherently suspect as any other public-relations effort.
- 3.
Sometimes sociologists refer to science as a profession. I take a stricter view: a profession is an organized and legally defined monopoly. Scientists, like any workers, can be spoken of as acting professionally without being members of a profession.
- 4.
See the interesting study of Naomi Oreskes (1999), and the comments of Rachel Laudan in her review (2000). Oreskes also co-edited an anthology of memoirs by those taking part in the scientific revolution in earth science (Oreskes 2001). In both volumes she resorts to the language of belief (see note 1 above). My view is that this is unobjectionable and in all cases can be replaced with the language of “ideas” without loss. For example, her aphorism “science is not about belief; it is about how belief gets formulated” translates seamlessly into “science is not about ideas; it is about how ideas get formulated” (Oreskes 1999, p. 6). In fact this translation is helpful and one can see at once that a false dichotomy is involved: science is both about ideas and about the formulation of ideas. It is indeed not about belief in those or any other ideas. Ideas can be formulated and promoted without being endorsed, still less believed.
- 5.
Oreskes (1999) argues most cogently that this was hindsight ; several mechanisms had been put forward. Her explanation is different: resistance was due to inductivist dislike of theory-driven science. Oreskes also argues that inductivist American geophysicists operated with multiple “working hypotheses”. It is unclear whether she sees that her model of this science is a fascinating counterexample to Kuhn ’s claim that genuine science requires consensus on a paradigm. The beauty of it is, geophysics is a “hard science”.
- 6.
Oreskes is characteristically clear and blunt: “Scientists are interested in truth. They want to know how the world really is, and they want to use that knowledge to do things in the world.” (Oreskes 1999, p. 3.)
- 7.
I do have some criticism of the piece as scholarship, though: I lament its failure to acknowledge the immense debt that today’s sociology of science owes to Kuhn , and through him to Polanyi; neither is listed in Gieryn’s bibliography.
- 8.
Examples: “Some have greatness thrust upon them”, Twelfth Night, ii, 5; Rudyard Kipling , “The Man Who Would Be King”, 1888; Robert Louis Stevenson , Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Doctor Hyde of Honolulu, 1890.
- 9.
Peter Hucklenbroich says in the opening of his “System and disease: On the fundamental problem of theoretical pathology”, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 1984, 5, pp. 307–323: “Theoretical Pathology as a purely intellectual and theoretical discipline”. He gives the date of its birth as 1959 or 1981.
- 10.
Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London, Hutchinson, §11.
- 11.
J. Agassi, ‘Methodological Individualism’, Brit. J. Soc., 11, 1960, 244–70, reprinted in J. Agassi and I. C. Jarvie , Rationality: The Critical View, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1987.
- 12.
C.P. Snow , “The Two Cultures”, 1959, reissued 1993. Snow suggested that the teaching of technical terminology in schools to all pupils would help close the gap between scientists and the lay public and to that end he suggested emulating the Soviet educational system. This showed the poverty of his familiarity with the Soviet school system and his lack of understanding of what the acquisition of technical terms involves.
- 13.
This is not to say that cultivating the view of the physician as infallible is in the interest of physicians, even though many of them think so. See Nathaniel Laor and J. Agassi Diagnosis: Philosophical and Medical Perspectives, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990.
- 14.
The scientific revolution established science as amateur and efforts at its professionalization began in 1830 and ended after World War II. See below. See also Dorothy Stimson, Scientists and Amateurs: A History of the Royal Society. New York: Henry Schuman, 1948. Even Michael Polanyi and Thomas S. Kuhn ignore this fact.
- 15.
Derek J. de Solla Price , Little Science, Big Science, New York, Columbia University Press, p. 19.
- 16.
Of course, quite possibly the sociologists of science are often unable to follow “hard-science” texts of later periods.
- 17.
I am referring to the 1987 film directed by Mick Jackson , with Jeff Goldblum as Watson, Tim Piggott-Smith as Crick , Alan Howard as Maurice Wilkins and Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind Franklin. It is variously known as “Double Helix”, “The Race for the Double Helix”, and “Life Story”. Another excellent depiction of science in a critical manner was the 1978 BBC series “The Voyage of Charles Darwin ” which attended closely to the running dialogue Darwin had with Charles Lyell , Capt. FitzRoy, the geological and fossil evidence, and himself.
- 18.
Preceding these were the medical, alchemical and mineralogical laboratories that did not possess scientific status by the standards of the Royal Society of London.
- 19.
One of the most extreme of relativist texts that I have come across (Edwards et al. 1995) was published in, of all places, the journal History of the Human Sciences, even though it was not historical but constructivist and philosophical.
- 20.
Indeed, as sociologists of work care for the quality of working life and so oppose excessive routinization, some of them reached the conclusion that if Kuhn is right then the quality of research life needs improvement too.
- 21.
This theory R. G. Collingwood advocated to explain magic since he was reluctant to take it at its face value, refusing to view its practitioners as irrational.
- 22.
A famous joke ascribes to Einstein’s wife the assertion that all a researcher needs is a pencil and a used envelope on the back of which to write something.
- 23.
“As against solipsism it is to be said, in the first place, that it is psychologically impossible to believe, and is rejected in fact even by those who mean to accept it. I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin , saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me.” (Bertrand Russell , Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948, p. 180).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Joseph Agassi for his help with, and hence input to, this paper.
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Jarvie, I.C. (2017). Towards A General Sociology of Science. In: Bar-Am, N., Gattei, S. (eds) Encouraging Openness. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 325. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57669-5_30
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