A little good news for a change

And all without military funding! How DO you do it?

There seems to be no link to the Democracy article, so here it is: http://democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6789.

And very nice it is too. ‘[T]he world really is divvied up into “brute fact” and “social fact,”… but the distinction between brute fact and social fact is itself a social fact, not a brute fact’ is my favourite sentences of 2010 this week.

Goldman Sachs? Really?

I can only guess that the name of their organization is put forth in relation to some previous mission that was accomplished.

Nice article, Michael.

One small comment:

Cannily, Sokal chose Lingua Franca, a then-influential (since folded) magazine that covered the academy and the humanities, as the venue in which to publish his “gotcha” essay&dots;

I believe that he didn’t choose Lingua Franca; rather, an editor from Lingua Franca figured out that the Sokal paper was a hoax (from an off-hand comment in a party that SocialText was about to get egg on its face), and got him to publish his essay there. (The original plan was to wait a while before revealing the hoax.)

Linnaeus,
That’s interesting to me, and I’d like to know more about it, as I did some history of science coursework and related research in the early 1990s (and enrolled in one course, though with an early professor, towards the end of the decade), and much of the recent work I came across–in history of science, not sociology or philosophy or anything along those lines–seemed to me to have been wrongheaded in the specifically leftist way Prof. Berube is alluding to. (I.e. the author’s political commitments seemed apparent though I did not investigate his personal biography.) I don’t recall encountering the term “science studies”: “science, technology, and society,” yes.

That’s interesting to me, and I’d like to know more about it, as I did some history of science coursework and related research in the early 1990s (and enrolled in one course, though with an early professor, towards the end of the decade), and much of the recent work I came across—in history of science, not sociology or philosophy or anything along those lines—seemed to me to have been wrongheaded in the specifically leftist way Prof. Berube is alluding to. (I.e. the author’s political commitments seemed apparent though I did not investigate his personal biography.) I don’t recall encountering the term “science studies”: “science, technology, and society,” yes.

Definitely, there are certain historians who aren’t innocent of some of the scholarly excesses in the science studies field, but it’s been my impression (for whatever it’s worth) that within the field, historians have (generally) been more resistant to these extremes. A lot of that has to do with conversations and disputes within the science studies/history of science & technology/science, technology & society field; it’s by no means monolithic.

I would put forth the hypothesis that you can reasonably guess where someone locates herself/himself within the science studies field by the general labels they use to describe what they do: science, technology & society (STS) is a bit of an older label that I’d say is preferred by historians, philosophers, and some sociologists. Science studies tends to be used by other sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies folk. I could be wrong here, as I haven’t done any kind of broad survey, but that would be my guess.

I don’t think these particular labels are just a matter of semantics. I think they’re indicative of the kind of scholarship these people see themselves as doing.

Anonymoose (15.), the problem is that science exists within a social context just like any other human endeavour, it is (if I may use the term most certain to piss off many of my colleagues) socially constructed. To believe that it can be somehow more pure than other human pursuits, and ultimately disinterested, is imho incredibly naive.

Take my facetious “[a]nd all without military funding” in comment 2. I posted this because much (not necessarily most but much) of the funding for sciences and mathematics (my field) is military. It is obvious that this impact how science is done, who does it, and what is done. the question in the end is not “does science serve interests” but rather “whose interests does science serve”.

Landru – you wrote my comment for me. Thank you.

@18: the problem is that science exists within a social context just like any other human endeavour, it is … socially constructed.

Well, that comity was certainly short-lived. Here we are, back to the trenches of 1915 all over again. Perhaps I can make my exasperation with this kind of remark clearer with a little bit of vulgar quantification.

As always, the hinge here is, what exactly does “socially constructed” mean? Specifically, since it is presented without qualifier or modifier, can we take the phrase to mean a complete delineation, ie “science is 100% socially constructed”? or does it just mean “science is more than 0% socially constructed”? Either case strikes me as rather trivial, I guess in a similar, though less educated, vein as Bianca Steele @20.

As Bianca said, the claim that “science is more than 0% socially constructed” is quite obvious to anyone who practices it — just ask the 85% of NSF applicants whose perfectly valid proposals have been rejected! More deeply, we know first hand how our knowledge is mediated through equipment whose operation depends on human theories; and we know first hand how unconscious choices of language can limit and shape further thought. So, yeah, I go with “more than 0% socially constructed” without any argument; it seems almost a trivial statement.

The other extreme, the claim that science is 100% socially constructed, is simply absurd; to call it childish would, really, be an insult to children, who are often naturals at investigating the natural world. I hope I don’t have to go into any more detail with this same dreary point, which has been made so many times: science has human practices in it, but it is tethered to an objective reality and cannot drift arbitrarily far from that mooring. Or, to put it brutally, if science were 100% socially constructed then there would be no computers and no Internet and you wouldn’t be reading this.

If you want to present more information by being more specific, arguing that science is not 47% socially constructed, but rather 53%, well then knock yourself out. In the meantime, I find these sweeping statements about social construction to be basically either trivially true or trivially false, and so without much value either way.

Next year, the Somme!

N.B.: The search for the Higgs boson is, in fact, a good example insofar as the description of the science being done as “the search for the Higgs boson” elides 99% of the scientific and technological work done in the process. Those 99% are not incidental. Does this mean I think we shouldn’t engage in the project or have some panel of lit professors tell us what to do? Of course not. But we should be aware of what is going on.

OK, done doing end-of-semester errands for the day. Time to get back to thread-tending!

Kenny Easwaran @ 9:

It doesn’t seem to me that the idea that morality and justice are “immutable natural law” is any more conducive to conservatism than to egalitarianism. When the left sees itself as a movement “to imagine that another world is possible”, they mean a world that is better than this one, but still has the same fundamental facts about morality and justice, right?

No, not right — not because you’re wrong, exactly, but because this is precisely what all the fuss is about. Some people on the left insist that there are indeed immutable principles of morality and justice, and the more egalitarian and fair a society becomes, the more it approaches the realization of those principles. Whereas people like Rorty and me think we’re basically making it up as we go along, and that it does not help, as we go along, to think of ourselves as discovering and realizing fundamental facts about morality and justice. That was the debate I wanted to have with Sokal, not only because it’s an important debate in itself but also because there really was no way, by January 1997 (when he came to the University of Illinois), to debate his proposition that some humanists had been publishing some very silly, uninformed stuff about the sciences.

Landru @ 11:

is it so hard to admit that a lot of well-regarded stuff within Science Studies was, actually and not just potentially, wrong-headed, arrogant, misinformed and—this most important—useless?

Well, yes. Because I don’t know which well-regarded stuff you mean. I don’t see any reason to back off from Barnes and Bloor’s “symmetry principle,” for example, and Latour’s work on social/scientific networks isn’t hokum. Where Sokal’s complaints had most traction, imho — and this becomes most clear in Fashionable Nonsense — was with the Lacanian French left, none of whom could really be said to be doing “science studies” in any plausible way.

In the end, what good did “the relentless critique of everything existing” actually do for humanity?

It won some significant victories, over the past 200 years, for the working classes, for racial minorities, for women, for gays and lesbians, and for people with disabilities — basically, everyone excluded from the Old Dispensation. I’ll take those victories, thanks, along with the license to critique the history of the relentless critique of everything existing.

And Anonymoose: don’t switch the dice, mfren. I mentioned “medicine or engineering or environmental science,” and you came back with string theory and the Higgs boson. It matters which science we’re talking about. As I wrote in Rhetorical Occasions (inexplicably, some people here seem not to have purchased that book, despite its universally acclaimed cover design),

the reason that so few cultural leftists in the humanities care about new developments in theories of matter or of the evolution of the universe is precisely that such theories have no social utility whatsoever. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation and the rough determination of the age and “size” (and therefore, possibly, the fate) of the universe are triumphs of human intelligence; they are among the achievements of our species of which I am most proud. But they will not increase the peace and they will not fight the power; nor, for the cultural right, will they enhance trust in established authority or shore up traditional forms of identity and sexuality. Nor, for that matter, will they contribute a spare dime or a plugged Euro to the gross domestic product of any gross domesticity. For the conduct of human affairs, the statement, “the identity between the string energies in a universe with a circular dimension whose radius is either R or 1/R arises from the fact that the energies are of the form v/R + wR, where v is the vibration number and w is the winding number” (Greene 403, n. 3) has neither implications nor consequences.

Some sciences can reasonably be asked to serve some useful social purpose. Some cannot. Also, what Christian said about Mars.

christian_h: It’s science that is socially constructed. Not Mars. I really don’t get why people confuse the two. Nobody here – least of all me – has claimed that if the social construction of science had been or was different, Mars would suddenly cease to exist

I don’t know the fancy Latin term for this kind of fallacy, but I think you’re accusing me of accusing you of something that you — and I — never did. It’s a classic rhetorical tactic to respond to an attack that was not actually made, but as this is just you and me it’s completely wasted. What’s this about Mars? though for some reason Michael’s favorite seems to be Neptune. I didn’t say you said anything about Mars, I’m talking specifically about what you said about science as a human practice.

So, to be perfectly clear, here is exactly what I’m accusing you of: writing “science is socially constructed,” without qualifier or modifier such as “somewhat” or “partially” or “47%”, and thus implying “wholly” or “entirely” or “100%”. Are we clear on that? Nothing about Mars, just that one simple, unqualified sentence.

Now, over the top boys!

The statement that “science is wholly/entirely/100% socially constructed” is just ridiculous, and the reason why this is obvious has nothing to do with Mars but everything to do with the successful technology that you have in your hands right now. To me, “science is wholly/entirely/100% socially constructed” can only mean that “the products of science are purely an agreement between humans” and thus “science is not tethered to objective physical reality,” or that objective physical reality does not exist. There, have I made it clear? that’s what I’m accusing you of having said, and it’s patently absurd. If the output of science were merely an agreement between humans without grounding in physical reality, then it never would have been possible to build the Internet, or a computer, or a transistor, or even an electrical circuit. I should hope this point is beyond dispute: the fact that humans can make successful advanced technology proves that human science has a grounding in reality. Nothing to do with Mars, this is a statement specifically about the human practice of science.

Now, if I’ve accused you falsely, then you can correct me and perhaps an armistice will be in sight. Perhaps. To remain as clear as possible, without secret treaties, let me then ask:

1. When you say “science is socially constructed” without any modifiers, do you mean the same statement as “science is wholly/entirely/100% socially constructed”?

2. Assuming the answer to 1 is yes, then what is the meaning can “wholly/entirely/100% socially constructed” have which does not directly imply “not grounded in (or even tethered to) physical reality”?

There, that should do for a start. Meanwhile, for better or for worse I am merely a national lab rat and so don’t sit on or chat with promotion committees. But in response to “you might be stunned how little they think of the humanities”, can I suggest that the humanitarians might get a better reception if they didn’t truck in phrases that are, on their face, patently absurd as well as insulting?

@christian_h

If ethical questions were not a matter of taste, that is if ethical sentences were true propositions, wouldn’t you expect a little more…consensus? Ignoring the meta-ethical arguments…if the sentence “the earth is roughly spherical” and the sentence “science should be answerable to humanism” were of the same type, shouldn’t we expect the same type of consensus for both of them? I know I would. But that clearly is not the case, is it? As M.B. put it more diplomatically above:

“Whereas people like Rorty and me think we’re basically making it up as we go along, and that it does not help, as we go along, to think of ourselves as discovering and realizing fundamental facts about morality and justice”

@Michael Bérubé

I realize that you were talking about more practical aspects of science, but when you make some parts of science “answerable and of some service to progressive interests”, what’s stopping you from going further? Where’s the cutoff point, and who decides? “The identity between [blah blah blah]” does have consequences: resources available for research are finite. A salary on a theoretical physicist is (potentially) a salary less on a medical researcher. From a certain POV, it makes total sense to completely cut research that is unrelated to the “conduct of human affairs”.

Personally my curiosity greatly exceeds my empathy, so I certainly hope no such scenario materializes while I’m still around…

Michael, re @26 —

Well, yes. Because I don’t know which well-regarded stuff you mean.

Well, I’m just cribbing it straight from you! In your review of _Beyond the Hoax_ linked here you describe Sokal and Bricmont as “noting”, and hence you implicitly agree that

major figures in science studies are given to making such assertions as “the validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence” (Kenneth J. Gergen) and “there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such” (Barry Barnes and David Bloor, founders of the “strong programme” or “Edinburgh school” in science studies).

These quotations are patent absurdities; and if “major figures in science studies” were “given” to saying something, doesn’t that mean it was “well-regarded” in that same field? (or do you really want to nitpick further on what the threshold for “well-regarded” should be versus “fairly well-regarded”?) Your own writing in the book review reveals clearly that patent nonsense was, at some level, considered acceptable in the field of science studies. Walk it back if you want to, but my authority here so far is basically you.

Now, regarding who actually achieved “some significant victories, over the past 200 years, for the working classes, for racial minorities, for women, for gays and lesbians, and for people with disabilities—basically, everyone excluded from the Old Dispensation”, the more complete quote from your essay was

On my side, perhaps humanists are beginning to realize that there is a project even more vital than that of the relentless critique of everything existing,

I assumed here that by “humanists on your side” as the authors of “relentless critique”, you were specifically talking about academic literary and cultural critics — not a category into which I would put Martin Luther King or Walter Reuther or Elizabeth Cady Stanton (would you?). I can believe that the academic lit-crit crowd may have had more actual influence for gay rights in the US, and as I’ve said elsewhere I remain in awe of your own work on disabilities studies. But you’ve really dodged the main question I asked, which is “why hasn’t three decades of pomo litcrit, and its academic litter-mates, given us more to work with in holding back the zombies who plague us now?”

It would be good to see a study of the role of alternative medicine in all this. It seems to have been a big reason for Feyerabend’s extreme stance, and one of the few concrete examples of anti-science theories to which science studies practitioners had a serious commitment.

Totally pointed OT comment: Go Bears! Cal that is.
And now back to our regular programming: Zombie theater in the sciences.

But of course science – as opposed to the objective reality it studies – is 100% socially constructed. To believe anything else would be idealism of the most reactionary kind. How this should imply that it is “untethered” to the objective world it is studying is beyond me, however.

As for mathematics, “truth” is obviously a matter of convention. Pythagoras theorem mentioned above, for example, is false in physical reality. Or rather, it is strictly speaking meaningless outside the abstract (social!) construct we now call Euclidean geometry. Of course the way mathematics has been constructed was and is inspired by physical reality in the same way a piece of art – even the most abstract one – is ultimately inspired by physical reality (after all we are part of physical reality).

As for, say, ethical questions being mere matters of taste: this can only be claimed under the assumption that social realities are somehow less real than and separate from physical realities, which I believe to be spectacularly wrong and, for that matter, anti-science.

christian_h: I agree that theorems and theories are constructed (which may not have been clear, since that wasn’t really the point I was making), but to be persnickety, I would want to distinguish between falsity and error; I.47 is true, simply, in virtue of it being a true inference from its premises, while certain beliefs that people might have about the world based on a mistaken application of the theorem are false.

(I.e., inferences are true (valid) or false (invalid), claims about objects are correct (match reality) or erroneous (fail to match reality). Assigning true/false to one and correct/erroneous to the other is somewhat arbitrary, but the point is to distinguish between truth-claims that are about validity and truth-claims that are about reality-matching, which are quite different. So it’s misleading to make the point about the social construction of various theories by saying that “it’s false in physical reality” – that misconstrues the nature of the social construction of theories by conflating two different kinds of truth/correctness.)

Per Hidari @ 7, I am also dying to know if there’s documentation that E.O. Wilson really said that. It was in a public lecture? Did someone in the audience just take notes? Was the text ever circulated? I just want to know what the next sentence was.

And: are multiculturalism, relativism, and “no supercollider” also independently equal to communism? Are all four automatically present when one is?

This has become off-topic now, and I think I’ve posted before on Ian Hacking’s analysis of what “social construction” means (and I doubt I’m more educated than others who’ve commented), but it might help a little. Hacking says “X is socially constructed” means that X could have been otherwise at a minimum–in other words, X is historically conditioned. And (Hacking goes on) many people who talk about social construction go on to say X is bad and further that X can be eliminated. One of his examples is anorexia, and there are a lot of reasons to think of anorexia as socially constructed, none of which denies the physical (or mental and emotional) reality of girls who are anorexic. Another example is missile accuracy: although the answer to “was the target hit?” is not socially constructed, the way manufacturers label their products is.

But to many people, to say that X is “socially constructed” is to say it is constructed according to extra-scientific criteria. It seems to imply that scientists are hypocrites, or else that they aren’t the ones who ultimately control which theory wins out in their field. And politically, it seems to imply that since we non-scientists are the ones who ultimately determine what scientific theory should be accepted as true, in a democracy we should be able to replace a theory we don’t like with something better.

And then it can seem like the existence of anorexic girls somehow directly serves the interests of the powerful in society (rather than that, for example, adjustment problems are symptomatic in historically conditioned ways), and that science is harming them by defining anorexia the way it does or by trying medical approaches instead of changing society.

@Landru,

On the questions that seem to trouble you, the two most useful books are, imho, Luckman and Berger’s “The Social Construction of Reality” and Ian Hacking’s “The Social Construction of What.” They would both meet your standards for technical and accessible.

It’s important to note that science is, indeed, made up. Very few people deny that most science is useful. But if we were to go by the data, you would have to admit the chance of a given scientific theory being superseded is close to 100%. For example: is ether “made up”? Well, the concept of ether was certainly made up: all concepts are. If you think that concepts correspond to objects, however, you will correctly note that the concept was supposed to correspond to actual ether (not socially constructed ether). As it happens, ether doesn’t exist, which makes it particularly easy to see that (the concept of) ether must have been socially constructed; it’s certainly not a natural kind. However, there are other scientific concepts that have been constructed, just as the concept of ether was constructed (quarks, neutron stars… the Higgs Boson), but for now people who like correspondence theories of truth think that these concepts correspond to actual entities beyond the concepts and the phenomena which the concepts predict.

Anyway, this example is a roundabout way to make the point that “Is X socially constructed?” and “Is the social construction of X important?” are two different questions, and they may have different answers. In general, I think debates over whether, say, quarks and neutron stars are socially constructed have value mainly insofar as they flesh out and systematize what we mean when we say (in general) “X is socially constructed”; if you get to the point where you believe that X is socially constructed and also bad, which it seems, Landru, is a place you’re willing to go with some biomedical science and psychology, that systematicity comes in handy.

Anyway, I would say that ether was “made up” in a different way than the way witches making your cows die was “made up.”

Science is really—and I mean, really, really, really—the union of (at least) two activities: (I) inventing theories/pictures/models of what’s going on in the natural world, and (II) testing those theories against reality.

I’m in sympathy with what you want to say, and I think a lot of the “social construction” assertions are way too strong, but your reliable second half may not work out if you really really want to see the reality you like. This is an interesting read in the context of the thread.

bianca steele @50 — It seems quite significant to me, that (nearly) all the concrete examples of social construction of science being mentioned here involve medicine (I don’t know what you mean about labeling missiles, but that sounds more like marketing than science), or perhaps more generally making statements about people. Of course, when people are involved it is not surprising that politics would play a larger role in descriptions that purport to be scientific; whether pregnancy should be seen as a medical condition, or homosexuality as a mental disorder, seem like the purest examples of “social facts” masquerading as objective reality. (One might ask psychiatric patients of the old Soviet Union whether their diagnosed illnesses were social or brute facts.) It should be mentioned, that a great deal of the practice of medicine is plainly not an act of science — doctors are not doing controlled experiments with well-defined outcomes — and the latter should not be splashed by the shortcomings of the former. Since I’ve never seen a technical, yet accessible (ie readable), yet non-trivial definition for what “the social construction of science” means, I’m forced to fall back on the ordinary meanings of the words. And, the first thing the phrase conjures for me is the image of the state legislature voting to set pi equal to 3, reasoning that will make a range of calculations easier and less costly (not that this is something I’d put past the 112th Congress, mind you). To me, “social” means “between humans” and so “socially constructed” means “arrived at purely by agreement between humans” ie without reference to the RWOT; which is a longer and more polite way of saying “made up”. And so, christian_h’s formulation that “science is 100% socially constructed” has for me the meaning that “science is 100% determined by agreement between humans” with no reference to the RWOT, and or to put it more bluntly “science is 100% made up.” This is obviously ludicrous — and that’s before considering whatever motivations might drive a person to state such a claim. It may certainly be the case that there is some definition of “social construction” that, when applied to science results in a statement that is neither trivial (“science is done by humans and uses human languages”) nor ludicrous (“the outcomes of science are not influenced by data”). But I’ve never seen one, and with my limited education (much more so than yours, I’m sure) it may be out of my reach forever.

“… of your Democracy article,” that should have read.

Muphry’s Law strikes again!