Working at the Edges of Institutions During their Transformations

In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This essay is a commentary on Traweek’s work from the perspective of Sandra Harding with respect to their shared backdrop of the science wars, the value of standpoint theory and of Traweek’s ‘meshworks,’ and their work in different non-US/European STS contexts.

The Science Wars Go Public

In the 1990s, the Science Wars moved from the academic world into the public arena, further widening the gulf between critics of science, who argued that science was a socially empowered belief system or ideology, and defenders of a more traditional view of scientific knowledge. The critics of science were alienated by scientists’ insistence on promoting scientific knowledge as archaeological-ontological rather than interpretational-epistemological. They became actively hostile to the practice of science as well as to the putative knowledge that scientists produced, denouncing both as ideological, patriarchal, sexist, racist, and pretenders to truth. The religious right responded with its own critique of science by arguing that creation science was just as legitimately science as evolutionary theory, but successive court decisions rejected this interpretation. The implications for how we are to understand the nature of scientific knowledge remain profound for formulating effective science-based public policies.

Introduction: Why Science Wars?

While all definitions are stipulative by nature and reflect alternative usages, the meaning of the word “knowledge” is especially ambiguous. It carries profound consequences for what we mean by truth, reality, and rationality, but most importantly for our understanding of scientific knowledge claims. Rhetorically, knowledge trumps belief and opinion, but it is not clear that knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is essentially different from and superior to belief and opinion. As to the questions of what scientists know and how they know it, no answers have stood up to critical scrutiny in the history of modern science. Despite this uncertainty, modern science has claimed a hegemony in our society on the production of knowledge as superior to belief and opinion.

The Opening Phase of the Science Wars

Kuhn’s monograph fed into the broad antiestablishment spirit of the 1960s and elicited polar-opposite responses, from the defense of objectivity and realism within scientific knowledge to an enthusiastic embrace of the view of scientific knowledge as ineluctably subjective interpretations of experience. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend aggressively attacked the rationality of scientific reasoning and eventually rationality itself. Kuhn’s new image of science fed into the emerging postmodernist critique of reason and truth as rhetorical devices wielded for political ends. Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” swept the humanities and social sciences, concluding that there could not be a single correct meaning of any text, including scientists’ “reading” of the “book” of nature. Concurrently, philosophers of science, among them Israel Scheffler, Imre Lakatos, and Karl Popper, began a counterattack against Kuhn, defending the rationality and objectivity of scientific knowledge and reason generally.

Science Wars

What do scientists actually know and what do they know about? Answers to these questions are crucial not only for our understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, but also for the formulation of effective science-based public policies, from global warming and energy to biotechnology and nanoscience. There is a lack of convincing answers to these questions because of an illogical conflation within modern science of epistemology and ontology, seeking to transcend experience and produce knowledge of reality using experience itself. Attempts at explaining the nature of scientific knowledge from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries reveal that scientific reasoning has selectively employed deduction and induction, rationalism and empiricism, the universal and the particular, and necessity and contingency as if these opposites were compatible. As Thomas Kuhn showed, the history of science belies the definitive truth of ontological claims deduced from theories and, as a corollary, the definitive truth of theories themselves. Science Wars reviews the competing conceptions of scientific knowledge from Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century BCE to the “science wars” of the 1990s and provides thought-provoking analyses for understanding scientific thought in the twenty-first century.

The Quiet Resolution of the Science Wars

The “science wars” were resolved surprisingly quietly. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, critics of science from humanities disciplines fought with scientists over the extent to which science is a social and biased process or a path to truth. Today, there are few absolute relativists or adherents of scientific purity and far more acknowledgment that science involves biased truth-seeking. Continuing (but less vicious) wars over Bayesian and frequentist statistics likewise ignore some key agreements: tests of scientific claims require clarifying assumptions and some way to account for confirmation bias, either by building it into the model or by establishing more severe tests for the sufficiency of evidence. This sedation was accompanied by shifts within social science disciplines. Debates over both simplistic models of human nature (especially over rational choice theory) and over what constituted proper quantitative and qualitative methods died down as nearly everyone became theoretically and methodologically pluralist in practice. I herald this evolution, pointing to its benefits in the topics we cover, the ideas we consider, the evidence we generate, and how we evaluate and integrate our knowledge.

Dwa przełomy. Wilhelm Dilthey i historycznokulturowe przesłanki science wars

Współczesny rozdźwięk między humanistyką a naukami matematyczno-przyrodniczymi skłania do powtórnego przemyślenia zespołu historycznych okoliczności, które doprowadziły do rozpadu życia naukowego na odizolowane od siebie domeny („dwie kultury” Charlesa Snowa). W efekcie tego rozpadu przyrodoznawstwo mistyfikuje humanistykę, humanistyka mistyfikuje nauki matematyczno-przyrodnicze; konflikt nabiera ideologicznego zabarwienia, przeradzając się w rywalizację o monopol na prawo do definiowania rzeczywistości. W tym kontekście Diltheyowska koncepcja ugruntowania humanistyki jako poniekąd inwersji nauk przyrodniczych, w szczególności zaś wpływ tej koncepcji na autodefinicje dyscyplin humanistycznych − nabierają dosyć przewrotnej aktualności. Według przedstawionego w artykule ujęcia Diltheyowski postulat naukowej suwerenności badań humanistycznych, pozostających w całkowitej niezależności od empirycznego i matematycznego przyrodoznawstwa, stanowi ogniwo pośrednie między dwoma zjawiskami. Pierwszym jest eskapistyczna reakcja środowisk artystycznych na siedemnastowieczną rewolucję naukową; drugim − konglomerat takich współczesnych tendencji, jak socjologiczna biofobia i antynaturalizm (aspekty konstruktywizmu kulturowego) czy próby semiologizacji współczesnych teorii fizycznych. Tendencje te z konieczności zarysowane tu zostały jedynie szkicowo, ze świadomością, że same w sobie stanowią wielopłaszczyznowe zagadnienie badawcze. Tym samym na pan pierwszy wysuwa się w artykule Diltheyowska filozofia nauk humanistycznych, a zwłaszcza te jej aspekty, które wykazują dostatecznie wyraźną analogię z kryzysem XVII w. i zarazem poddają się dostatecznie uzasadnionej wykładni jako jedna z przesłanek współczesnego konfliktu nauk.

Positivist Misconceptions of Science and the Search for Viable Solutions

Prevailing current definitions of science are largely based on a traditional, positivist paradigm that favors the natural sciences and either denies or downplays the scientific status of the social sciences and the humanities. The disciplinary organization and institutionalization of research and systematic inquiry is still the norm. This article argues that the rigid organization of science and indeed the dominant view that there are hard sciences and soft sciences with the latter occupying an inferior position with regard to their knowledge claims and utility is pretty outmoded and does not fit well the current challenges and global needs. This is not just an academic issue but has clear practical implications in terms of funding and staffing, as well as the distribution of other valuable resources, especially in view of the dwindling federal and state funding for both the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences. We develop our argument using as a methodological platform the ideas of ‘The Two Cultures,’ the ‘Science Wars,’ the new constructivist turn in social studies of science, and science as a social institution. We argue that current definitions of science need to be modified to include the humanities and to emancipate the social sciences and the ‘soft’ paradigms associated with them. This can form the basis of an earnest effort for better integration of different kinds of disciplines and for achieving much needed synergisms to tackle complex problems that tend to be multifaceted and whose solutions do not easily conform to single disciplinary paradigms. The contention here is that such a bridge between the two cultures can use as a model the social sciences, since they successfully combine methods from the natural sciences with approaches and theories common in the humanities. In our opinion, this is a feasible path to both greater interdisciplinarity and more vigorous collaboration between the different branches of science that can benefit both working scientists and society at large when dealing with pressing issues like environmental problems, the depletion of natural resources, pandemics, and natural disasters.