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Science As Social? - Yes and No'

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Science As Social? - Yes and No' SUSAN HAACK SCIENCE AS SOCIAL? - YES AND NO' Ours is an age in which partial truths are tirelessly transformed into total falsehoods and then acclaimed as revolutionary revelations [Thomas Szasz j.2 INTRODUCTION Some feminist philosophers of science claim the insight that science is social. It is true that the co-operative and competitive engagement of many people, within and across generations, in the enterprise of scientific inquiry, contributes to its success. It is false that social values are inseparable from scientific inquiry; false that the purpose of science is the achievement of social goals; false that knowledge is nothing but the product of negotiation among members of the scientific com­ munity; false that knowledge, facts, reality are nothing more than social con­ structions; false that science should be more democratic; false that the physical sciences are subordinate to the social sciences. I shall first offer an account of what is epistemologically distinctive about scientific inquiry in which the proposition that science is social, in its true inter­ pretation, plays a significant part. Next, I shall argue that in its other interpretations - the inevitability or desirability of politicized inquiry, social constructivism, "de­ mocratic epistemology," and the rest - the proposition that science is social is false. And then, turning to the question, what, if anything, all this has to do with femi­ nism, I shall argue that "science as social" is either a genuine insight, but not a feminist one, or else is no insight at all; and, in conclusion, that feminism has taken a wrong direction in pursuing the project of a feminist epistemology of science - a project that is neither sound epistemology nor sound feminism. [Tlhe ... causes of the triumph of modem science, the considerable numbers of workers and the single­ ness of heart with which - (we may forget that there are a few selfseekers ... ; they are so few) - they cast their whole life in the service of science lead, of course, to their unreserved discussion with one another, with each being fully informed about the work of his neighbour, and availing himself of that neighbour's results; and thus in storming the stronghold of truth one mounts upon the shoulders of another who has to ordinary apprehension failed, but has in truth succeeded in virtue of his failure [CO S. PeirceV A long tradition has taken science to enjoy a peculiar epistemic authority because of its uniquely rational and objective method of inquiry; a long history of failed at­ tempts to articulate what that uniquely rational and objective method is, suggests a 79 L. H. Nelson and J. Nelson (eds), Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, 79-93. © 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. 80 SUSAN HAACK need for some re-thinking of the presuppositions of this, as I shall call it, "Old Deferentialist" approach. Radical critics of the Old Deferentialist picture4 - the "New Cynics" - conclude that there are no objective epistemic standards and that there is nothing epistemo­ logically special about science. My view of the matter is much less exciting. There are objective epistemic standards. As I argued in Evidence and Inquiry,S these stan­ dards are not internal to science; they are the standards by which we judge the worth of empirical evidence, and the rigor and thoroughness of empirical inquiry, generally. By those standards, science has succeeded astonishingly well. Science is not epistemologically privileged, but it is epistemologically distinguished. It is important to distinguish standards for judging the worth of evidence from standards for the conduct of inquiry. The two are run together in much con­ temporary epistemology, and nearly inextricably confused in most recent philo­ sophy of science; but, though related, they are as different as criteria for judging roses are from instructions for growing them. The former kind of question, though hard enough, is a bit more tractable than the latter. The goal of inquiry is to dis­ cover substantial, significant truths;6 and, since there is a certain tension between the two aspects of the goal - it is a lot easier to get truths if one doesn't mind the truths one gets being trivial - there can be, at best, guidelines, not rules, for the conduct of inquiry. The explication of criteria for appraisal of the worth of evidence is a little more tractable, because focused on only one aspect of the goal, on truth­ indicativeness. The main focus in what follows will be on the harder kind of question, about the conduct of inquiry. What I have to say about this will, however, presuppose a con­ ception of our criteria for appraisal of the worth of evidence according to which the best model of those criteria is not, as much recent epistemology has assumed, a mathematical proof, but a crossword puzzle. Experiential evidence is the analogue of the clues, background information of already-completed entries. How reasonable an entry in a crossword is depends on how well it is supported by the clue and any other already-completed, directly or indirectly intersecting, entries; how reasonable, independently of the entry in question, those other entries are; and how much of the crossword has been completed. An empirical proposition is more or less solid depending on how well it is supported by experiential evidence and back­ ground beliefs; how secure the relevant background beliefs are, indepen­ dently of the proposition in question; and how much of the relevant evidence the evidence includes. How well evidence supports a proposition depends on how much the addition of the proposition in question improves its explanatory integration.7 No doubt most scientific theories are, at some stages of their career, no more than tenuously-supported speculations; and no doubt some get accepted, even en­ trenched, on flimsy evidence. Nevertheless, science has succeeded extraordinarily well, by and large, by our standards of empirical evidence. It has come up with deep, broad and explanatory theories which are well anchored in experiential evi­ dence and which interlock surprisingly with one another. And nothing succeeds like SCIENCE AS SOCIAL? - YES AND NO 81 success; as having plausibly filled in long, central entries greatly improves the prospects for completing other parts of the puzzle. Science has done this, not in virtue of its possession of a uniquely rational method of inquiry, but because of the ways in which it has strengthened, deepened, and extended the method all of us use when we try to figure out some empirical question. There is no such thing as "the scientific method" in the narrow sense in which the phrase purportedly refers to a set of rules which can be guaranteed to produce true, or probably true, or progressively more nearly true, results. No mechanical procedure can avoid the need for discretion, good judgement - as is revealed by the Popperian shift from: make a bold conjecture, test it as severely as possible, and, if counter-evidence is found, abandon it and start again, to: make a bold conjecture, test it as severely as possible, and, if counter-evidence is found, don't give up too easily, but don't hang on to the original conjecture too long. In a broader, vaguer, sense, the sense in which the phrase refers to making conjectures, developing them, testing them, assessing the likelihood that they are true, certainly there is such a thing; but not only scientists, but also historians, detectives, investigative journalists, and the rest of us, use "the method of science" in this sense. Nevertheless, there is something distinctive about inquiry in the sciences - or rather, a lot of things: systematic commitment to criticism and testing; experimental contrivance of every kind; systematic effort to isolate one variable at a time; instru­ ments of observation from the microscope to the questionnaire; all the complex apparatus of statistical evaluation and mathematical modelling; and - the engage­ ment, co-operative and competitive, of many persons, within and across gen­ erations, in the enterprise of scientific inquiry. The fact that science is, in this sense, social, is an important factor contributing to its epistemological distinction. There are all kinds of tasks that get done better if several people are involved. But scientific work isn't much like shelling an enormous quantity of peas (which will get done quicker the more people are helping);8 nor much like carrying a very heavy log (which can be done by several people but not by a single person). It is - of course! - more like doing an enormously complicated crossword puzzle. And the epistemological significance of the social character of science is, correspondingly, quite complex and subtle - no simple case of "many hands make light work." It depends, not purely and simply on the involvement of many people, but on the internal organization of science, as well as its external environment. Scientific inquiry is forwarded by division of labor. Members of various sub­ communities and sub-sub-communities of what philosophers of science sometimes refer to, by a considerable abstraction, as "the" scientific community, work on dif­ ferent problems. Members of each sub-community, in tum, work on different aspects of "their" problem. It is as if different sub-groups, and different persons within them, worked on different parts of a crossword puzzle. The result? - the benefits not only of specialization, but also, provided each individual and each sub­ group has access, as needed, to the work of the others, of saving duplication of work in checking the consistency of their entries with other, distant but still 82 SUSAN HAACK obliquely interconnected, areas of the puzzle. Then again, some inquirers are better suited by taste and temperament for deep or broad theoretical speculation, some for precise and patient observation, some for devising complex instrumentation, some for elaborate statistical evaluation, and so forth (rather as if we had whizzes at anagrams, specialists in Shakespearean allusions, devotees of exotic place-names, and so on, working together on part of a crossword).
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