Understanding Social Change Knowledge - what is it?

Kath Woodward Hello, I’m Kath Woodward and I’m joined today by Anne Scott who’s a Lecturer in Women’s Studies and Social Policy at the University of Bradford, and by Russell Stannard, Emeritus Professor of at the . Today we’re going to talk about knowledge, what is knowledge, how is it produced, and what different sorts of knowledge are there. Knowledge involves the production of meanings, of ideas, of ways of doing things and of ways of understanding the world. It’s not just about ideas, it’s about practices, it’s about what we do and what this means for how we understand the world we live in. Some forms of knowledge have more significance, perhaps more status than others. There is a privileging of some kinds of knowledge. One of the forms of knowledge in a contemporary world which might be seen to be privileged is that of scientific knowledge which has particular distinguishing features and it might be argued also has higher status than other forms of knowledge. What are the characteristics of scientific knowledge and of its methods? Russell, can you tell us a bit about what you think are the ways in which scientific knowledge are constructed and what distinguishes this.

Russell Stannard So it’s the overwhelming characteristic is that scientific knowledge is fundamentally based in experimentation and observation of the physical world. It doesn’t how attached and enamoured you might be of some kind of theory that you have, if the data goes against it, then you have to abandon it which, of course, makes it sound as though scientific knowledge is very objective and, you know, you can’t question it. Indeed, that’s how it used to be thought, you know, you had the ideological positivist who had their verification principles saying that a great characteristic about scientific statements is that you can verify them, you can prove that they are right through experimentation. Karl Popper knocked that on the head when he pointed out that, in a sense, scientific statements are never verified. What you can do with a scientific statement is you can falsify it, you know, if something comes up from the data which goes against it, then you know that you’ve got something wrong. You can’t verify it, he said, because you can’t test out the statement under all conditions. You might have got agreement so far but you never know about what’s going to happen next in some slightly different situation. An example of that is the Newtonian Mechanics which was thought to be on extremely strong grounds, but then it was discovered that when you test situations where the objects are moving at very high speeds, you know, close to the speed of light, everything just completely falls to the ground, just doesn’t work out at all, and what you then have to do is bring in relativity theory. Now that doesn’t mean to say that you have Newtonian Mechanics for slow speeds and relativity for high speeds. Relativity covers all those situations and you then discover that Newtonian Mechanics is just an approximation to the truth. So you might then think, well OK, we’ve now got the truth, special relativity and the answer is no, we haven’t because later on it was discovered that there was a thing called general relativity which takes into account gravitation and special relativity is just a special case of that, and we expect that there’s going to be yet another theory which we call a quantum gravity which will take into account what happens when you deal with the very small. So, as I say, you never know for certain in science whether you’ve actually got the truth. All you can say is that you’re closer to the truth and you prefer today’s theory to a previous one.

Kath Woodward So it’s about approximations which it seems to be what you’re suggesting – even science is about approximations?

Russell Stannard Yes, and there is this inherent sort of uncertainty about the whole thing as to whether you’re in fact even looking at the problem in the right kind of way, you know, we say that all data is theory-laden, now it’s not a case that the scientist goes into the laboratory and is confronted by pristine data. Why has he got that particular set of data? He’s decided to do that particular kind of experiment rather than some other kind of experiment and the reason why he goes for that is he’s got a particular theory in mind which is biasing him in a particular direction, and it might very well be that the really crucial experiment he ought to be doing is something entirely different.

Kath Woodward You talk about the methods of scientific enquiry and mention, well you mentioned objectivity but also particular things like experimentation, do you think these would be seen as being attempting to be objective?

Russell Stannard Oh yes, oh yes, I think that scientific investigation is based on the idea that there is a real world out there, it has a certain set of properties and our job is to try and describe as closely as we can what that world is like, but the trouble is we never know how close we’re getting.

Kath Woodward We’re now going to listen to a short quote from Sandra Harding who points out some of the possible limitations of objectivity and also the gendered nature of science.

“Objectivist justifications of science are useful to dominant groups that consciously or not do not really intend to play fair anyway. Its internally contradictory character gives it a kind of flexibility and adaptability that would be unavailable to a coherently characterised notion.”

Kath Woodward What does this tell us about objectivity in relation to science, Anne? Would you like to comment on Harding here?

Anne Scott Yeah, I think Harding’s pointing to some really interesting issues, although you pointed out Russell how the notional objectivity is understood in quite a complex way by practising scientists. One of the interesting things in the history of social science is that there’s been a history of taking this notion of objectivity and trying to apply it to the social sciences in a way that isn’t necessarily that easy to do, and also on to some of the life sciences that cross over on to the social sciences and the effect is to try to create a view from above, this notion that you’ve kind of got a bird’s eye view of the world, and somehow you can understand everything from some perspective that isn’t a perspective. And the problem is that particularly when you’re dealing with the social sciences and the social world there isn’t a view from above; we’re all situated somewhere, we’re all in a context, we all have a background, a history, a way of seeing the world. As Donna Haraway once said “experience can never be raw”. I think it’s a wonderful expression because what she’s pointing to is that we always interpret our experience through our history and our life. The problem is, is that when you have knowledge producers who are coming from a very narrow social group, then they can all see the world in the same sort of way, so if you have people biasing the kind of knowledge they see coming from their own perspective. If they’ve all come from the same perspective then the knowledge can be biased in a particular way without anybody really realising it and, as you pointed out, a whole series of issues when you’re talking about either social science or natural science knowledge, your background, your experience can come in, in terms of the sorts of questions you ask, or in terms of the sorts of evidence that you consider to be acceptable, or in terms of the way that you present that evidence when you’ve finished your work, or the way you interpret what you see. If you have a small group of people with all of the same sorts of biases in relation to that constructing knowledge together, they can then say we’ve come up with an objective universal way of seeing the world, our way of seeing the world is neutral. The problem with this view from above is that it seems to be neutral, it seems to be universal, but it isn’t really, and in people who have different ways of knowing, or

different ways of interpreting the world because of their different histories or different experiences if they belong to less dominant social groups can find that their ways of knowing the world are de-legitimated, seem not to be authoritative, and in a sense they’re made invisible. So the effect then is that you’ve got a situation which isn’t fair and where knowledge is being used in a way which is very interrelated with the operation of social power.

Kath Woodward Which seems to suggest that there is an interrelation between the objective and the subjective, that these aren’t things that you can separate out - would you say that this applies to science as well as to social science?

Russell Stannard I would. Thomas Kuhn made this great point that scientists always work within a given paradigm, a certain way of looking at the world, and you then begin to find that certain things don’t fit in with that and you try to accommodate to it, you think well this is just an exception, we’ll find a way out of it, and then suddenly you discover that there’s a total paradigm shift and you suddenly get a much better match with the data by looking at the world in a totally different way. So, for example, we used to think of the world as being run on strictly deterministic lines according to classical Newtonian Mechanics, then along come quantum theory where suddenly you found that from any given state of affairs you could not predict for certain what was going to happen next, all you could deal with are probabilities, which is a totally different mind-shift. As soon as you make that mind-shift and see the world in that kind of open way rather than the closed determinalistic way, you can then start to explain a whole range of things which you couldn’t do before, but you’re still working within a paradigm of some kind, and the quantum paradigm that we’re working within now might indeed be overturned by yet another way of looking at the world.

Kath Woodward Lisa Heldke describes the way in which the objective and the subjective interrelate, the way in which things change as a result of the investment of the researcher into the object of their research in the following way.

“With respect to the assertion that theorising is not the one-sided activity of a detached subject, think about making bread. The dough responds to your warms hands’ kneading action and you learn to respond to it, to know when you’ve kneaded it long enough and when to add more flour. It’s an activity that depends upon a connection between bread- maker and bread dough. This relationship takes time to develop. I think the same claim can be made to some degree about any kind of inquiry activity”.