« July 2003 | Main | September 2003 »
Patronage plays an important part in the stratification of social worlds organized around technical work. It is the patronage in technical worlds that gives them much of their peculiar flavor, a vigorous compost produced by something that isn't really a social movement, and isn't really an ethnic group, but seems to act sometimes like either or both.
I said in my post about burden of proof (last post, 3 August), that many of the relations among specialties can be seen as a network of settled obligations. At the same, unsettled relations among lines of research can often be seen as disputes about what obligations one specialty has toward the concepts, theories, and methods of another.
Many of the obligations among specialties are quite clear and solid. For example, research in many areas presupposes much of modern physics conceptually, theoretically, and procedurally, via embedding in instruments. It's easy to think up a chain of these dependencies: chemistry is obligated to physics, molecular biology is obligated to chemistry, cell biology is obligated to molecular biology, development is obligated to cell biology, and so on, so that we eventually wind up noticing, e.g., that Da Vinci's Last Supper (1498) is obligated to the physics of sub-atomic particles.
Lawrence Solum's recent elegant posting on burden of proof helps to clarify a related problem in understanding the relationships among scientific disciplines. Our model for thinking about burden of proof is, of course, the criminal trial and the rules of procedure which have grown up around it. But scientific research also involves extensive burden-of-proof considerations, for claims to discovery are subject to a similar kind of public scrutiny, complete with versions of cross-examination and rebuttal. Indeed, the historian Barbara Shapiro argues that scientific notions of fact-establishment are modeled on the legal procedures of the early modern period.
Here, I want to look at the way that distributing the burden of proof in scientific research acts to organize the relationship among specialties.
