Finn Collin

Science studies as naturalized philosophy

Preface.- Introduction.- 1. The Naturalization of Philosophy.- 2. Wittgenstein, Kuhn and the Turn towards Science Studies.- 3. David Bloor and the Strong Programme.- 4. The Strong Programme as Naturalized Philosophy.- 5. Harry Collins and the Empirical Programme of Relativism.- 6. Bruno Latour and Actor Network Theory.- 7. Latours Metaphysics.- 8. Andrew Pickering and the Mangle of Practice.- 9. Steve Fuller and Social Epistemology.- 10. An Alternative Road for Science and Technology. Studies and the Naturalization of Philosophy of Science.- Notes.- References.- Index.

The Frankfurt School, Science and Technology Studies, and the Humanities

This paper examines the often overlooked parallels between the critical theory of the German Frankfurt School and Science and Technology Studies in Britain, as an attempt to articulate a critique of science as a social phenomenon. The cultural aspect of the German and British arguments is in focus, especially the role attributed to the humanities in balancing cultural and techno-scientific values in society. Here, we draw parallels between the German argument and the Two Cultures debate in Britain. The third and final purpose of the paper is to explain why these efforts in support of the humanities would in the end prove fruitless, even somewhat self-defeating. The key factor is the instrumentalist analysis of science adopted in both arguments, which played into the hands of the emergent “entrepreneurial university” with its strengthened emphasis upon the economico-technological aspect of science and consequent neglect of the humanities.

Bunge and Hacking on Constructivism

Both these collections of essays address the issue of social constructivism. As a first approximation, constructivism may be described as the most radical wing of the “new,” post-Mertonian, branch of science studies and one that has attracted considerable attention during the past couple of decades. Its hallmark is the claim that, contrary to what anyone would naturally assume, important aspects of reality owe their existence to social processes. A moderate version holds that it is science and its concepts that are socially generated, while a more radical version claims that the world described by science is itself a social construction. The two collections evince sharply differing approaches to the subject. Mario Bunge’s book addresses numerous topics under the catchall label of “connections between philosophy and sociology” with constructivism exemplifying just one. All the same, the special urgency marking the author’s treatment of constructivism and the new science studies will not escape the reader: indeed, the remaining

Nursing Science as an Interpretive Discipline Problems and Challenges

The idea of reconstructing nursing science upon phenomenological or hermeneutic foundations faces difficulties in generating a truly theoretical element in a science thus based. This reflects the nature of the intentional concepts used to describe and explain human subjectivity within those approaches. The methodology of Alfred Schütz was explicitly designed to solve this problem, but seems, in one reading, to have only very limited scope, and in another reading to misapply the term “theory”. Besides, it embodies an unduly passive construal of the hermeneutic stance. These results indicate that the phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches should be supplemented with a “third person approach” in nursing science.

The Naturalization of Philosophy

Naturalism is the view that reality is coextensive with nature and that, hence, human knowledge has no object beyond the natural realm. A trend towards naturalism has been a pervasive characteristic of European thought for two and a half millennia, a slow drift away from an original dualist mode in European thought towards an ever more stringent naturalistic monism. In Plato’s philosophy, the original dualism was put forth with exceptional starkness. It was primarily defined in ontological terms, postulating a special, privileged realm of being composed of eternal and immutable essences; from this followed an epistemological dualism. A retreat from this extreme position was made already by Aristotle and in subsequent Greek and Mediaeval philosophy; but the most significant impetus to the naturalizing trend came with the scientific revolutions in the 16th and 17th centuries. From now on, naturalization would be driven primarily by epistemic considerations. The science-driven naturalizing trend assumed a particularly aggressive form in logical positivism in the early 20th century. But logical positivism embodied a fundamental tension: Its conception of science was itself non-naturalistic and non-empirical. Some of these problems were addressed by a post-positivist thinker in the analytic tradition, namely Willard Van Orman Quine, who urged a naturalization of epistemology that heralded the rise of an empirical investigation of man’s cognitive powers under the name of cognitive science.

An Alternative Road for Science and Technology Studies and the Naturalization of Philosophy of Science

In this book, I have tried to show how STS emerged at the intersection of two trends. One is the naturalization of philosophy, the other the search for a better accommodation between natural science and society, inspired by a widespread disaffection with science and its societal role in many Western countries. I argued that this critical stance towards science and the resulting anti-philosophical attitude have been detrimental to STS as an empirical discipline. Paradoxically, the ambition to naturalize philosophy led STS to fatally compromise its empirical commitments. STS tried to show not merely that science has historically been shaped by societal forces, but even that its susceptibility to such influence is inherent and inescapable. To establish this strong conclusion, STS had, ironically, to resort to philosophical arguments. Moreover, the normative subtext to STS’s empirical efforts has gradually become more explicitly articulated, in step with the decreasing news value of its empirical results. Its critical attitude to science got STS involved in the Science Wars, which have now fortunately subsided. But STS still needs a new, positive agenda: Where orthodox STS wanted to show science to be social through and through, the reformed discipline would highlight those aspects of science that make it answerable to non-social reality. Borrowing ideas from recent social epistemology as articulated by Alvin Goldman, it would attempt to record, and improve, the reliability of different ways of conducting science. This would be Science Studies’ most valuable contribution to the improvement of science and to strengthening its positive role in society.

Latour’s Metaphysics

In Chapter 6, Latour’s theory of actants as the producers of science was mainly examined at a purely methodological level. However, Latour holds that an ontologically neutral vocabulary is not just a methodological convenience in analyzing natural science and technology, but actually captures reality in the most fundamental manner. He tries to bring this out by a critique of the traditional subject-object dichotomy in Western thought, and the Society-Nature distinction that is its counterpart at the macroscopic level. These distinctions are upheld with particular tenacity in Modernism; however, Latour urges that societal practice, even in Modernity, belies these metaphysical dogmas. Latour sketches out an alternative metaphysics of a radically monistic kind; it is actualist, nominalist and particularist, rejecting all potentialities and possibilities. Actants are in themselves without any positive features; whatever features they possess come to them by attribution, earned through their participation in networks with other actants. But even apart from its vagueness, it is difficult to see how this radically heterodox ontology solves the problems facing Latour’s conception of science. This applies in particular to the strongly anti-realist and localist construal of the theoretical entities of science. The problems with this approach are particularly apparent with respect to scientific claims concerning the past.

Who Are the Agents? Actor Network Theory, Methodological Individualism, and Reduction

This chapter examines one of the most influential developments in current social theory, namely Actor Network Theory (ANT), in the perspective of the individualism-holism issue. ANT moves the actor to the centre of the social stage, yet an actor different from anything that has been encountered before in the literature. The development of the basic ideas of ANT is traced as these ideas gradually evolved in the work of its chief protagonist, Bruno Latour. Latour’s thought has a distinctively philosophical flavour, and yet his ideas have been put into practice with ostensible success in a particular area of social research, namely the field of science and technology studies. Latour’s work is still in progress, but its current version incorporates many ideas that are also encountered in other recent authors, among them several represented in the current volume. These ideas, however, are pushed beyond their normal bounds, which leads to a dissolution of the classical conception of methodological individualism and results in a radical position that is dubbed “methodological particularism”. An examination of this position holds important methodological lessons for social science.

Wittgenstein, Kuhn and the Turn Towards Science Studies

The version of philosophical naturalism that Science Studies adopted as its foundation was formulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Like Quine’s naturalism, Wittgenstein’s version sprang from disaffection with Carnap’s philosophy of language. But while Quine’s model of language as a network of inferential connections could immediately be transformed into a picture of scientific knowledge, there is no Wittgensteinian theory of science. However, one can be extrapolated from various parts of his work. What results is a picture of science showing a striking similarity to Kuhn’s celebrated paradigm model. And indeed, both Wittgenstein’s and Kuhn’s thinking constitute a significant part of the theoretical foundations of Science Studies. However, Science Studies aim at transcending the largely historical perspective of Kuhn, and replace it with a strictly sociological approach. Another and highly significant difference between Wittgenstein and Kuhn on one side and Science Studies on the other lies in STS’s critical attitude towards science and its status in society. I this, they articulate misgivings about science widespread in Western societies after World War II. There is an interesting parallel to the Frankfurt School on this point. The latter wanted to critique science from a purely philosophical perspective, however, whereas Science Studies adopted a naturalistic approach, using social science to debunk natural science.

David Bloor and the Strong Programme

The inception of Science Studies is traditionally attributed to the so-called Strong Programme, which was developed by David Bloor and other members of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh from the mid-1960s. In contrast to traditional “weak” sociology of science, the Edinburgh group endeavoured to explain the very contents of scientific theories. Explanations were to be causal, and neutral (or “symmetrical”) in their way of handling scientific results we consider false and methodologically unsound, and those we consider true. The explanations would be couched in social categories, and the determining forces would be social interests. Surprisingly, no explicit analysis of explanation is provided in the Strong Programme; an implicit position may however be reconstructed that turns out to be closely similar to Hempel’s model. Based upon this model, it can be shown that explanation of the contents of scientific theories would call for impossibly strong sociological theories. This conclusion is not refuted by STS’s long list of acclaimed explanatory successes, which upon closer scrutiny turn out to accomplish rather less than is claimed for them. Unfortunately for the Strong Programme, retraction from the stringent Hempelian notion of explanation is not possible, since a weaker mode would no longer exclude explanations in the philosophers’ favoured terms and would thus forfeit the aim to naturalize the philosophy of science. Another major problem for the Strong Programme is that application of its favoured methods to the programme itself would seem to rob it of its scientific credentials.