When I started this blog, I thought that I'd avoid the running debates which make up the "science wars" front in the "culture wars". Bruno Latour's book and Michael Lynch's book are two very reasonable (and arguable) approaches by social scientists who often agree; here is a rich lode of materials on the other side.
I'm reluctant to get into these debates because I think that most of the points brought up the opposition are irrelevant to the problems of understanding how and why institutions (scientific or otherwise) work the way they do. I also think that many of the arguments in the science wars are of very poor quality. But avoiding the debates is an idle fantasy, and low quality is not a strong barrier to broad acceptance of an argument. So I find myself driven to deal with some of the more common mistakes which appear discussions of science studies. I'm going to try doing this in series of relatively short posts, dealing with one problem at a time.
The first problem is the frequent assumption that "social" or "socially constructed" means "not real". I'm not sure where this idea comes from, but it goes pretty far back, and it's spread pretty widely. We can tell this just from the language: virtually every word in English that means "made" has a very similar form that means "false", "counterfeit", or "invalid": made/made up, forge, craft/crafty, manufactured (out of whole cloth), constructed/constructive, construe, fashion, fit/fit up, artifact, and so on. These usages tell us that the equivalence of social and non-authentic was around long before the science wars became relatively well-organized in the 1990s.
Yet obviously, the fact that something is manufactured or conventional does not mean that it is not real, or authentic, or legitimate. Cars are made in factories, but you wouldn't want to stand in front of one when it's moving. A twenty-dollar bill is just a manufactured scrap of paper, but that doesn't mean it's worthless because its value as money is merely conventional. When the foreman of a jury gets up and says "Your honor, we find the defendant guilty as charged", that construction has substantial consequences.
So "real" and "social" are two different kinds of categories, and don't have much to do with one another. The opposite of "real" isn't "social", but "ideal"-- substance and stuff aren't contrasted to the activities of people, but to abstract forms and ideas. My own view is Pragmatist: something is real to the extent that it makes a difference in the behavior of other things. There are, of course, other philosophical views of the subject, but that's way off my topic here. On the other hand, something is social to the extent that it takes other things into account self-consciously in shaping its own behavior. "Social" is about both stuff and form; it cuts across the real/ideal distinction. Here's the bumper sticker version: Sociality is what we together do with other things; reality is what other things do with us.
So what's all the fuss about? Some folks hold that some things exist independently of our knowledge of them, that the laws of nature were so before there were scientists to discover them, and that therefore "reality" is not "social". But this simply confounds two different subjects, and leads to endless confusion. The idea that things exist independently of our knowledge is not very helpful: how do we know that? A world without an inquirer is utterly closed off from us, by definition; there's simply no point in worrying about it.
There's a better way to think about it. Our inquiries tell us something about the way the world is, but inevitably they do so in a limited way. As we improve our ways of inquiring, the world comes to look different. We call this an increase in knowledge, but it is indistinguishable from a change in the world. Nor are we justified in assuming that we are asymptotically approaching some sort of truth about the way things really are because: (1) we have no way of proving that we are not simply traveling down a very long blind alley, and (2) we have no way of proving that alternative approaches would not have been more fruitful, and (3) the notion of "really" embedded in this way of looking at it is very fuzzy. We're better off thinking of ourselves as identifying and removing errors (specific situations which can be identified and dealt with) than in trying to move in uncertain direction toward an unknowable truth.
So what have we got? A bunch of very clever people have been working hard for quite a while, and they keep coming up with better ways of seeing and interpreting the world. These improvements are incorporated into the next round of work, and so lead to further improvements. Are the improvements due to a progressively deeper understanding of how the world works? Sure. Are the improvements the result of better social organization of inquiry? Yes. Is the world there in any case? Of course it is. So what's the fuss about? Darned if I know.
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