and Studies after Science Technology the "Science Wars"

Zaheer Baber Department of Sociology National University of Singapore Singapore

David J. Hess, Science Studies. New York: New York University Press,1997.197 pages. Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff (eds.), Universities and the Global Knowledge Economy: A Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations. London: Pinter, 1997. 184 pages. Jacques Gaillard, V.V. Krishna and Roland Waast (eds.), Scientific Communities in the Developing World. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997. 398 pages. Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal Devoted to the Developing World. Sage Publications, Bi-Annual.

During the 1970s, a determined group of mainly but not exclusively British sociologists sought to herald a revolution of sorts in the sociology of science. Armed with the general aim of directing attention to the study of social processes that led to the constitution and stabilization of scientific knowledge, the intellectual movement succeeded in adding "scientific knowledge" to the growing list of the "social construction of X" within sociology. The "constructivist" perspective as it came to be known later, was never monolithic and continued to generate a number of different schools that proliferated with varying fortunes and half-lives. Thus labels such as the Strong Program, the Bath school, EPOR (Empirical Program of Relativism), SCOT (Social Construction of Technology) and Laboratory Studies symbolize the internal differences between the various approaches that could be subsumed under an overall constructivist position. Other sociologists working under the general constructivist perspective also sought to reject the existing institutional sociology of science and turned to sociology of scientific knowledge, but did so without coining specific labels for their endeavour. They applied existing theoretical and methodological frameworks, such as ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, conflict theory and reflexivity, to examine the messy business of the construction of scientific facts and theories. Despite their real methodological and philosophical differences, most practitioners of the "new" sociology of science subscribed to a general social constructivist perspective. A large number of the founding members of this new movement also went through a mandatory rite of passage that consisted of contesting what was perceived to be "naive" realism in philosophy and the work of Robert Merton in the sociology of science. As the intellectual movement matured, and as it invariably happens with other intellectual endeavours, a substantial part of the energy of some of these scholars was devoted to dissecting,

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sometimes with critical vehemence that generated much heat, the work of fellow- travellers who, despite being committed to a social constructivist position, had developed divergent interests and approaches to the issues at hand. Although few scholars associated with the new movement really subscribed to what David Hess calls "radical constructivism" or the position that "there is no material reality that constrains sensory observations" (p. 35), it would be disingenuous to claim, as some have in the wake of the Alan Sokal (1996) affair, that nobody ever made this argument. It is true that most proponents and practitioners of the "new" sociology of scientific knowledge subscribed to some version of what Hess calls "moderate constructivism" (p. 35), Steve Fuller (1993:5) has called "realistic constructivism", Roy Bhaskar's (1989) "critical realism" (p. 35) and so forth. However, it would not be accurate to maintain that radical constructivism was never espoused by any sociologist of science. Hess himself refers to Harry Collins as someone who "endorses relativism" in his writings (p. 39). This according to Hess would mean taking the position that "evidence and other universalistic criteria (such as consistency) do not play a crucial role in theory choice, which instead is largely conditioned by contingent or particularistic social factors" and that "attempts to articulate prescriptive theory choice criteria are useless because scientists will not follow them" (p. 38). As Hess points out, there is no doubt that in some cases "non-evidential factors play a determining role in the resolution of controversies, or at least in the timing of the resolution" (p. 97), but the problem is that Collins casts the whole issue in terms of a categorical polarity and then opts for the radical relativist option. As Hess quotes Collins, "it is not the regularity of the world that imposes itself on our senses but the regularity of our institutionalized beliefs that imposes itself on the world" (p. 98). According to Hess, this is not an isolated remark, but a principle that has been repeated a few times by Collins. Thus in other writings, Collins goes on to offer the "prescription to treat the objects in the natural world as though our beliefs about them are not caused by their existence" (p. 98). Collins is not the only one to endorse such social idealism that Sokal (1996) has parodied. Steve Woolgar has expressed dismay at the fact that most sociologists deploying the constructivist framework have been "uncertain about taking issue with a further key assumption, the world exists independently of, and prior to, knowledge produced about it" (Woolgar, 1988:53). As he put it, almost a decade ago, the scientific laboratory and the culture of scientific research comprise a "moral order of entities" or "technologies of representation" where "the objects of the natural world are constituted in virtue of representation" (Woolgar, 1988:83; 102). It is the great virtue of Hess's book that in an atmosphere of shrill accusations and counter-accusations brought about by the unfortunate "science wars" - unfortunate both in terms of its occurrence and the terminology used to describe it - the tone adopted here is even-handed and attempts to move beyond the intractable and unproductive realist versus relativist debates that social scientists should leave for the philosophers to ponder. Four extremely well written, and consequently readable, chapters entitled "The Philosophy of Science", "The Institutional Sociology of Science", "Social Studies of Knowledge" and "Critical and Cultural Studies of Science and Technology" deftly traverse the main contours of the various positions adopted within the still developing field of Science and