Science as Process and Perspective – 11. Science in Context

In this last lecture of the course, I take a look at science in its societal context. This is the subject of study of an interdisciplinary research field called "Science, Technology, and Society (STS)." It considers sciences as a practice embedded in a community/society, and treats the norms of science as emerging from the practices of the community.

I start with a critical reevaluation of Merton's norms of science. Rather than being guidelines for how scientists should behave, norms can be interpreted as rhetorical resources used to establish the authority of scientific fields and institutions by setting them apart from the rest of human activities and organisations. This is called boundary work. It leads to separate epistemic cultures in different subfields of science, defined by different types of scientific activity.

This diversity of epistemic cultures can be studied using an anthropological approach. Karin Knorr Cetina, Bruno Latour, and others, pioneered this kind of approach in the 1970s and 80s. They embedded themselves in scientific laboratories to examine the behaviour of researchers in their natural habitat. Latour, in particular, focussed on (1) how scientists learn how to see the phenomena they study, (2) employ tacit knowledge in their research (enculturation), and (3) crystallise the resulting narratives into an ordered account of nature. This is the basis for actor-network theory (ANT), which sees the production of knowledge emerging from networks of relationships between heterogeneous sets of human and non-human actors. It inverts the traditional worldview of reality as described by physical laws, with the production of abstract theories (such as physical laws) through the aligned activities of actor networks.

For the last part of the lecture, I examine the role that discriminated minority views play in the production of scientific knowledge. First, I demonstrate the presence of discrimination through examples of the Matilda Effect, a bias against recognising women scientists' achievements, which is a special case of the Matthew Effect, a bias towards assigning credit to well-established individuals (the rich get richer). This leads us to consider feminist sociology of knowledge (with the work of Helen Longino) and feminist epistemology (in the shape of standpoint theory). It argues that some people are privileged in the (somewhat ironic) sense of having encountered more problems than those who are privileged in the societal sense (which do not see those problems). By including such minority views in the production of knowledge, we therefore broaden the range of problems science can address and achieve knowledge that is more broadly anchored in the needs of society (which standpoint theorists call "strong objectivity"). This calls for a diverse, representative, and democratic scientific community.

Finally, I show how we can integrate diverse standpoints into production of scientific knowledge through deliberation. I critically examine the alleged need for consensus in science-based decision-making. Such a requirement for consensus is no longer tenable, if we take the underdetermination of scientific theories seriously. Instead of using unanimity in scientific debate as a criterion for the quality of a scientific claim, we must focus on the quality of deliberation that was used to arrive at that claim. Well-reasoned dissenting views actually strengthen the quality of deliberation. This means that unanimity can be bad for high-quality science, if it is used to suppress minority voices and to create an illusion of consensus where there should be none.

Many of the examples presented in this lecture are from Sergio Sismondo's excellent "Introduction to Science and Technology Studies." Check the references in the slides for further reading on specific topics.