Conclusion: Rationality, Relativism and the Politics of Knowledge 213
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CONCLUSION Masons, Tricksters and RATIONALITY, RELATIVISM AND THE POLITICS OF Cartographers KNOWLEDGE Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge Public Knowledge and the Knowledge of the Public Thirty years ago John Ziman made a modest proposal that went some what unremarked in the midst of the Kuhnian revolutionary uproar.1 David Turnbull Science, he claimed, is basically social because it is as much driven by the need for consensus and convention as it is by logic and method. Science is first and foremost public knowledge. Now some of the social constraints on Ziman's slightly normative perspective on science as public knowledge have been very nicely delin eated in the work of Brian Wynne and others who have brought to light the problems experienced by members of the public in dealing with experts. They have found that science seamlessly interweaves memory, trust, uniformity, history and authority constructing the kind of knowledge space I have described earlier. But the universalised and standardised scientific expertise this produces connects very poorly to the lived experience of lay people and their local knowledge.2 The mismatch between 'public knowledge' and the 'knowledge of the public' is reflected in debates in other arenas about the lack of recognition of the role of 'social capital' and its associated decline and in debates about the supposed transition to reflexive modernity.3 One way of conceiving of social capital is as local knowledge manifested in participation, trust and cooperation of informal groupings, for example, commercial fishermen, neighbourhood watch and the PTA. The concept of social capital gives recognition to the value of the forms of lay knowledge embedded in the intricate varieties of horizontal con nectedness or informal Latourian networks not normally recognised by 1 Routledge th'e more formal, vertically connected, standardised forms of knowl 1~ Taylor &. Francis Group edge production through which 'science gains its image of intellectual LONDON AND NEW YORK universality'.4 Robert Putnam developed the notion of social capital to explain the relative success of Northern Italy in developing democratic forms of government and economic progress. He has since gone on to find it in decline in the US, as Eva Cox has in Australia, a decline that reflects Conclusion: Rationality. Relativism and the Politics of Knowledge 211 210 Masons. Tricksters and Cartographers the failure not of the public to understand science, but of science to without and within and has almost as many variants and theoretical understand the public's knowledge.s orientations as there are proponents. Similar problems concerning the disjuncture between scientific However, I would argue that this barrage of criticism does not knowledge and local knowledge have been apparent in the cases necessarily mean the sociology of scientific knowledge is in a phase of examined earlier in the book. Cathedrals were built without plans or terminal self destruction or that it is doomed to be a victim of the standardised measures, Pacific Islanders navigated without maps or 'science wars'.6 Rather, it can be seen as an indicator that the sociology compasses, maps became adopted by the state through a social process of scientific knowledge has reached maturity and that a great deal is at of linking local sites; turbulence research and malaria vaccine research, stake. The considerable and vocal opposition shows both that it like all technoscience, is local and site-specific in the first instance. is having an impact and is being taken seriously, though it may also In every case disorganised local knowledge was assembled in con be simply an opportunity for alternative views to gain some purchase. tingent circumstances; yet scientific knowledge is publicly presented as But perhaps a more significant sign of maturity is that it has developed universal and rational. enough common ground between its diversity of approaches to have thrown up, in the manner of a Kuhnian paradigm, some basic problems which have to be solved. Some of what I take to be its basic problems are coincident with the Rationality, Universality and SSK criticisms of its opponents, and some of its problems have been brought to light through the maturation of the program. Whatever The problems of universality and rationality are central to the real their origin, they all, in effect, turn on the question of the relationship world political issues concerning the question of whose knowledge between local and universal knowledge and the basic aim of the should be authoritative. They are also central to the more internal enlightenment project, which must still have salience today-the problems of the sociology of scientific knowledge. As we saw in the last improvement of the human condition through our own efforts. Or in chapter, the turbulence of turbulence research points to analogous sum, what forms of knowledge and reasoning are going to improve forms of turbulence prevalent in the sociology of scientific knowledge our lot? This is not just a dilemma for the sociology of scientific knowl in particular and in science studies generally. edge, it is the millennia I problem. We appear to be stuck with irrecon From one point of view it might appear that the sociology of cilable and equally problematic alternatives. The forms of universal scientific knowledge is hamstrung by the reflexive dilemmas raised by reason that are taken to stand behind science have been seen as the its apparent lack of unity and coherence, and by the questionable valid problem by constructivists, feminists and post-colonialists alike. On ity of any given theoretical ordering. However, the quest for coherence this scenario there is little or no correspondence between the universals and unity is as much a chimera in sociology as it is in science; all our of science and the reality of people's lives and cultures; the world ends understandings of the natural and the social are complex, multiple and in exploitation of people and resources with the attendant probability messy. Equally, just as messiness proved no obstacle in engineering of a capitalist if not a nuclear winter. But on the opposing scenario, if research, it need not be an obstacle in the sociology of scientific knowl local knowledges proliferate there is nothing to choose between them edge. Indeed, the revelation of messiness and its celebration can be seen and we become enmired in Balkanised epistemes where criticism, as an essential strength in the sociology of scientific knowledge. enlightenment and progress are impossible and the world ends in a The sociology of scientific knowledge is also awash in claims that it postmodern 'bonfire of the dualities'. has reached maturity, has proven sterile, is an attack on civilisation as In this last chapter I want explore the reasons why this clash we know it, has been of no use in policy making or liberating the Third between the local and the universal is irresolvable unless we devise a World, -is obsessed with the social, has moved beyond the social, like strategy that will embrace the contradiction, celebrate the messiness, all forms of constructivism and relativism is self-contradictory and but also avoid the central weakness of postmodernism, which is that its therefore just more postmodern claptrap, is at heart the old orthodoxy critique of modernism and progress has led to the abandonment of the and should be replaced by cultural theory. SSK is under attack from possibility of the improvement of the human condition. Such a strategy 212 Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers Conclusion: Rationality, Relativism and the Politics of Knowledge 213 some have called 'transmodern'.7 In order to get to the transmodern I Indeed, seeing them set out like this makes their denial seem irrational. want to explore the vital and thorny problems of rationality. But epistemologically speaking, even if the claim for rationality's govern According to the more positivistic accounts now gaining renewed ing role is weakened to talk of aims or desiderata as Bunge does, currency, the key to understanding the unparalleled success of science Wittegenstein's point prevails: no body of rules can contain the rules for lies in its embodiment of the highest form of rationality and objectivity their application. So even on its own terms the project of a transcendental in the scientific method. This mythical underpinning of science also rationality supervening all local variation seems problematic. provides the rationale for the celebration of modernism and the current But from a constructivist's historically contingent perspective there domination of the West. A view, un selfconsciously exemplified by the are no universal criteria of rationality. What counts as rational has arch-rationalist Ernest Gellner who, in one of his more hard-nosed always been contested and cannot help but be the outcome of locally moods, claimed 'If a doctrine conflicts with the acceptance of the negotiated criteria in particular contexts of struggle. superiority of scientific-industrial societies over others, then it really is out.'8 The concept of the individual as a rational actor that is now so basic to Western ways of thought is not derived from first principles, but But rationality is a deeply problematic concept. It is very profoundly rather arose in conjunction with the development of modern science in embedded in the hidden assumptions of late twentieth-century occiden the seventeenth century. This was a period which saw the debates over talism about what it is to be a knowing, moral, sane individual. Indeed, the appropriate forms of rationality between the Cartesian rationalists so embedded is it that to be anything other than rational is to be igno and the Baconian empiricists. Whether true knowledge was to be derived rant, immoral, insane or the member of an undifferentiated herd. deductively from self-evident first principles or by observation and Hence rationality cannot be treated as simply an epistemological experiment, it had already been accepted that the acquisition of such concept about the conditions under which one can know something, it knowledge was within the capacity of human individuals.