Responses to Critics

Home , Science policy, Scientific dissent

Miriam Solomon Temple University

In this paper I respond to the criticisms of Helen Longino, Alan Richardson, Naomi Oreskes and Sharyn Clough. There is discussion of the character of social knowledge, the goals of scientiªc inquiry, the connections between Social Empiricism and other approaches in science studies, productive and unproductive dissent, and the distinction between empirical and non- empirical decision vectors. My critics have engaged with Social Empiricism from a variety of perspectives.1 Our views have much in common. Spending some time on our dif- ferences is valuable precisely because we share enough to make the differ- ences intelligible. We can pay attention to the working details of our views.

Longino Longino and I agree that normative terms should be applied at the level of the community, rather than the individual. Where we disagree is on what we mean by “community knowledge.” By “community knowledge” I mean the aggregate of the knowledge of all scientists involved in a debate. That includes dissenting parties, both groups and individuals. I think Longino has something more epistemically processed in mind: something like “the considered reºective opinion of the experts,” or, as she says in her comments, “the accepted corpus.” For Longino, “community knowledge” is different from the aggregate of the knowledge of the individuals in the community: community knowledge has been through a normative process 1. Thanks to each of the authors for their thoughts on Social Empiricism. Special thanks to Alison Wylie for proposing this as a session at 4S 2006, and for editing our papers for Perspectives on Science.

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of evaluation. (I think this is also what Alan Richardson means by “science with conscience.”) I’m not sure how Longino squares this with her empha- sis on pluralism, unless she allows the “accepted corpus” to include con- trary theories. Social Empiricism is not an account of the norms of scientists, unless those scientists are interested in broader questions of science policy. Normative judgments in social empiricism are applied by those social epistemologists interested in appraising what a community does. Longino wonders whether my normative prescriptions for decision vectors are really necessary. She notices that basically, what I recommend is consensus when all the available empirical success is in one theory and dissent when different theories have different empirical success. That is so. The decision vectors come into play when considering the distribution of cognitive labor. “Dissent” covers a wide range of distributions of cognitive labor—of which consensus is in fact an extreme. Distribution of cognitive labor can be normatively inappropriate when there is too much attention paid to one theory(ies) and not enough paid to another theory(ies). Several examples in my book show that a dissent can be normatively inappropriate when the non-empirical decision vectors are not equally distributed. Finally, I have an instrumental conception of rationality. So I am interested in discussing both what counts as appropriate ends of inquiry (truth, empirical success or whatever) and in what is conducive to achieving those ends.

Alan Richardson Richardson is right about my views. I think science should be done without “conscience” in the Hobbesian sense. I haven’t seen “conscience” to add much of value to scientiªc inquiry and I see it as often getting in the way. I’m ºattered that Richardson sees this as a revolutionary idea. I completely agree that my views are 180 degrees away from those of Charles Sanders Peirce, the metaphysician of consensus, and would add that there is much that is similarly Hegeleian (and Habermasian) in Longino’s views. Richardson worries that without consensus as a telos of inquiry, inquiry will fall apart as a normative project and “epistemic irritation” will be un- addressed. I am completely unconcerned by this. For most epistemologists and scientists, anyway, consensus is just a proxy for truth, and not in itself valuable. I argue in Social Empiricism that “truth” can be a regulative goal in science without producing either temporary or ultimate consensus. “Whig Realism,” in Chapter 3, explains how there can be truth in a theory without a theory being literally true. It may be that, in the present or even in the limit of inquiry, truth content is maximized by having more

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than one theory. “Epistemic irritation” can be responded to in a number of different ways, or even ignored. It is true that what motivates some scientists is a desire to prove other scientists wrong. But usually that comes together with a desire to show that their theory does better than the theory of other scientists. I would say—it is not important for a scientist to get the opposition to convert or die. (Consensus is the result of such military methods.) What matters is that a scientist develop empirical successes—especially unique empirical successes—in their own theory. Do non-empirical decision vectors “wash out” or “cancel out” in good science? They balance, but they do not disappear. One way of putting it is that they cancel out logically, but not physically.

Naomi Oreskes I love all the scholarship in science studies since Kuhn and I happily de- scribe its more recent insights in the introduction of my book. I see Social Empiricism as building on these ideas. I wanted to say something clearer than, for example, Latour’s “agonistic ªeld,” and, in particular, I wanted to develop a normative voice, which is largely absent in non-philosophy science studies. When historians and sociologists write about how the “rational” is socially constituted, they are working at a descriptive level, at most describing how a particular social group demarcates the “rational” from the “irrational”. I wanted to say something normative enough about scientiªc rationality that I would be willing to go out on a limb and com- ment usefully on current scientiªc controversies, with the ultimate goal of fostering scientiªc success. I couldn’t have written Social Empiricism without building on the creative social epistemologies of non-philosophers such as Peter Galison, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Andy Pickering and Steven Shapin. But they do not propose a normative perspective—indeed, some of them are opposed, for various theoretical reasons, to the idea of producing one—and so I tried to create one. We agree about the basic character of the rejection of continental drift. I don’t accuse Oreskes of writing that the debate had “no signiªcant social dimensions.” We disagree a little about what some of the “social dimensions” are. Oreskes analyses in terms of “epistemological afªnities” and I ªnd factors such as empirical salience of some data, conservatism, anti- theoretic preferences and national alliances to be important. (Some of these factors may overlap.) It is here that we need to talk more about his- torical details. For example, I see American anti-theoretical preferences as quite different from the “method of multiple working hypotheses” that was explicitly adopted by the Canadian geologist Tuzo Wilson. Wilson

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was much more open to continental drift than the vast majority of Ameri- can geologists. It’s ªne with me if the normative conditions for consensus are an “impossible standard.” Fine because, according to Social Empiricism, consensus is not a normative goal. However, I don’t think the normative conditions for consensus are in fact impossible, although they occur less often than consensus occurs (scientists, like many philosophers, are rather attached to the ideology of consensus). I require for consensus that one theory has all the available empirical successes. That does not mean that it explains everything; just that other theories do not do a better job of explaining/ predicting/controlling (in brief, “handling”) particular phenomena. It means that the other theories are dispensable, not that we are at the end of inquiry. In the case of the plate tectonics theory, as Oreskes says, there were lots of difªculties still to address, either with the plate tectonics theory or with some other theory. If the geosyncline theory really handled seismic data that the plate tectonics theory did not, then I am happy to re- vise my assessment and say that consensus on plate tectonics theory was inappropriate. (Was anything done with MacDonald’s measurements to repeat them or extend them? Explanatory success, as I argue in my book, is a weak form of empirical success, and theories should have more than explanatory success to be worthy of pursuit.) If it was just the case that there were a number of seismic anomalies not handled well by the plate tectonics theory OR by any other theory, then consensus on plate tectonics theory was appropriate. Social Empiricism offers a framework for distinguishing scientiªcally productive dissent from dissent that is not scientiªcally productive, but is, rather, in support of other enterprises. Scientiªcally productive dissent in- volves developing empirical successes that are not available in the other theory: making new predictions, doing new experiments, explaining un- explained phenomena, and developing new technologies. If that isn’t going on, then the dissenting theory does not merit serious scientiªc attention. Intelligent Design Theory is an obvious example of this, as are the tobacco company theories of lung cancer and the conservative theories of climate change that Oreskes mentions. I like dissent, but only scientiªcally productive dissent. (I am not Feyerabend.) When people hear that I work on scientiªc dissent, they sometimes think that I work on these cases, and that I am in favor of all dissent. Actually, I think these cases are too easy—philosophically speaking—to merit much analysis in the framework of Social Empiricism. Frankly, I think some people are not doing science in good faith. Social epistemology as a whole has something to say to them (we need to think about how to address their claims, politi- cally) but Social Empiricism dispenses with them fairly quickly.

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Sharyn Clough Clough engages the heart of my views, and offers some reformulations that I am thinking about. In particular, I think the relevant/non-relevant distinction is illuminating. I claim that there is no overlap between empirical and non-empirical decision vectors. (So many people talk of overlaps or fuzzy boundaries in this general area—e.g. Longino, Nelson, Harding—that it is worth em- phasizing that my position is unqualiªed). What falls in each category is a contingent matter. Speciªcally, decision vectors inºuence the outcome (di- rection) of a decision. Empirical decision vectors are causes of preference for theories with empirical success, either success in general or one success in particular. Such success should be identiªable (e.g. a salient prediction or a useful technical manipulation). Non-empirical decision vectors are other reasons or causes for choice. Are values empirical or non-empirical decision vectors? Preference for theories with feminist values (such as non-hierarchical ontology) is not preference for theories with empirical success, although it could (luckily for those of us who prefer feminist ontology) turn out that theories with feminist values are more empirically successful. The point is that such theories are not, now, being selected for their empirical success. Can values be assessed empirically? It depends what is meant by this. We can certainly ask whether, for example, democratic social practices are conducive to human ºourishing. And we can also ask whether a particular theory with non-hierarchical ideology has empirical support. But the feminist discovery that there are political values behind scientiªc theorizing is frequently meant to point out the arbitrariness and irrelevance of such values in non-political domains. As Clough says, feminist values may be irrelevant to a particular domain. So, for example, hierarchical political values are irrelevant to questions about the internal organization of the cell. (I would understand Liz Ander- son’s example differently. To say that “women can’t be adequately deªned by their relationships to their spouse and children” sounds to me like a theory, albeit a theory that is more likely to be produced by someone with feminist values. In this case, of course, feminist values are relevant to the domain of inquiry.) Perhaps the heart of the difference between Clough’s views and mine is that—I am humbled to say—Clough is more of a Quinean than I am. For her, there are no irrelevant values. If we have enough trouble with under- standing the internal organization of the cell in terms of democratic values, might we challenge our political values and take totalitarianism more seriously? I’m going to have to think about that some more.

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