Isabelle Stengers

The Invention of Modern Science Isabelle Stengers Translated by Daniel IV. Smith Theory out of Bounds Volume 19 M IN NE SO TA University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London This translation would not have been possible without the support of a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the School of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, whose generosity is gratefully acknowledged. Copyright 2000 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Originally published as Llnvemion des sciences modemes (Paris: La Decouverte, 1993). Copyright 1993 Gius. Laterz.a & Figli Spa, Roma-Bari. This book is a result of the cooperation between Laterza Publishing House and Sigma Tau Foundation in the “Lezioni Italiane” series. The English-language edition has been arranged through the mediation of Eulama Literary Agency. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MK 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper LIBRARY OF CONGRESS C AT A LOG 1NTG-I N - PI B L1 C ATIO N DATA Stengers, Isabelle. [Invention des sciences modemes. English] The invention of modern science / Isabelle Stengers ; translated by Daniel W . Smith, p. cm. — (Theory out of bounds ; v. 19) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8166-3055-0 (he : acid-free paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3056-9 (pb : acid-free paper) 1. Discoveries in science. 2. Science — Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series. Q180.55.D57 S7413 2000 501— dc21 00-008711 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 For Felix Guattari and Bruno Latour, in memory of an encounter that never took place. Contents PART I. Explorations l Chapter 1. The Sciences and Their Interpreters 3 Scandals — Autonomy—A Destructive Science?—The Leibnizian Constraint Chapter 2. Science and Nonscience 21 In the Name of Science — Break or Demarcation? — Popper’s Question — The Unfindable Criterion — One Historical Tradition among Others? Chapter 3. The Force of History 39 The Singularity of the History of the Sciences — The Three Worlds — Clarifying the Paradigm PART II. Construction 55 Chapter 4. Irony and Humor 57 Constructing a Difference — Great Divisions—The Political Invention of the Sciences — On the Event Chapter 5. Science under the Sign of the Event 71 In Search of a Recommencement — The Power of Fiction — A New Use of Reason?—The Inclined Plane Chapter 6. Making History 89 Negative Truth — Authors to Interest— Bringing into Existence — Mediators- Political Questions PART III. Propositions 109 Chapter 7. An Available World? 111 The Power in Histories — Mobilization — The Patron’s Job — The Politics of Networks Chapter 8. Subject and Object 131 What Singularity for the Sciences?—Mathematical Fictions — Darwin’s Heirs Demoralizing History — “What Does He Want from Me?” Chapter 9. Becomings 151 How to Resist? — Nomads of the Third World — The Production of Expertise A Return to the Sophists Notes 169 Index 179 I H 'ce < a. Explorations The Sciences and__ Their Interpreters Scandals a disturbing rumor has been spreading in the world of scientists. It seems that there are some researchers — specialists in the human sciences, no less— who are challenging the ideal of a pure science. A field is being constituted, born in England some twenty years ago,1 prospering in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but now present in France.2 This field, known under various names — “social studies in science,” “sociology of the sciences,” “anthropology of the sciences” — puts in question any separation between the sciences and society. The researchers it brings together would dare to claim to study science as a social undertaking like any other, neither more detached from the cares of the world nor more universal or rational than any other practice. They no longer denounce the numerous infidelities committed by scientists against their own norms of autonomy and objectivity, but consider these very norms to be empty, as if every science were “impure” by nature and not be- 1< cause of its deviation from an ideal. The thinkers of science sharpen their weapons and rise to the defense of a threatened cause. Some of them rely on the very classical argument of retaliation [retorsion]. It has been useful, though it still keeps to old paths. In saying that science is a social undertaking, doesn’t one subordinate it to the categories of sociology? Now, sociology is a science, and in this case it is a science that is trying to become a superscience, the science that explains all others. But how could it escape the very disqualification it brings on the other sciences? Thus, sociology disqualifies itself and cannot claim to impose its interpretive grid. Others play the card of real ism: if everything is only a social bond, that is, conventional and arbitrary, how have we been able to send men to the moon (and, one might add, to explode atom bombs)? When the need arises, don’t sociologists of science, like everyone else, run to the doc tor, who prescribes vaccines and antibiotics, which are products of science? Others suggest that the putting in question of scientific objectivity be assimilated to the justification of a brutal law of the strongest. Civilization is in danger! The anxiety of the scientific world is strange, because it repeats, as if in a delayed reaction, the anxiety that seized the small world of philosophers of science when the historian Thomas Kuhn proposed, in 1962, the category of “normal science.” No, asserted Kuhn, the practicing scientist of a given science is not the glorious illustration of a critical mind and the lucid rationality, which these philoso phers tried to characterize through the scientist. Scientists do what they have learned to do. They treat the phenomena that seem to be the concern of their discipline in accordance with a “paradigm”— which is both a practical and a theoretical model — that seems obvious to them, and in relation to which they have very little distance. Worse, since every paradigm determines the legitimate questions and the criteria according to which responses can be recognized as acceptable, it is impossible to construct a third position “outside the paradigm” from whence the philosopher would be able to evaluate the respective merits of rival interpretations (thesis of noncom- mensurability). Worse yet, the scientist’s subordination to the paradigm of his com munity is not a fault. According to Kuhn, what we call “scientific progress”— the cumulative process thanks to which ever more phenomena are becoming intelligible, technologically controllable, and theoretically interpretable — depends on it. And he describes in harsh terms the lucidity of scientists who belong to disciplines without a paradigm: either they argue with each other, tear each other apart, accuse one an other of ideological biases, or else they coexist in the indifference of schools sanc tioned by the names of their founders. We speak of “Piagetian” psychology, “Saus- surean” linguistics, “Levi-Straussian” ethnology, and the very adjective signals to their happy colleagues that here science does not have the power to make scientists agree. We do not speak of “Crickian” biology or “Heisenbergian” quantum mechan ics, do we? T he philosophers of science exhibited a considerable discontent. Of course, they reverted to the argument of retaliation [retorsion]: Kuhn proposes 4 , 5 the idea of a “paradigm” to the historian and philosopher of science, and thus he has no right, according to these very terms, to claim to describe the sciences “as they really are.” They claimed that it was impossible to put an outmoded science, like the one that thought of water as an element, on the same level as today’s science, which water confirms by letting itself be ruthlessly synthesized and decomposed. They denounced the tragedy for civilization entailed by reduction of science to mob psychology, to a psychology of irrational crowds subject to the effects of fashion and imitation. The majority of scientists, however, did not have, the same reac tion at all. They loved Kuhn’s “paradigms” enormously. They recognized in them a pertinent description of their activity. The notion of a “paradigmatic revolution,” in which one paradigm displaces another, was for them an appropriate way to describe their discipline’s history. And the human sciences began to dream of a paradigm that would one day bestow on them the progressive mode of their happy colleagues. “New paradigms” began to flourish almost everywhere, from systems theory to anthropol ogy or sociology. W hy did something that scandalized the philosophers satisfy so many scientists? And why are they so scandalized now? Hadn’t Kuhn already stressed the social dimension of the sciences by showing that the scientist must be described as a member of a community and not as a rational and lucid individual? It is the question of this curious delayed reaction that will be my point of departure. A u to n o m y ' ■ '.L -.'a "’'■■f'XP ‘j > -■ We can, I believe, affirm that, from the viewpoint of scientists, Kuhn’s description! preserves the essential thing: the autonomy of a scientific community in relation to its political and social environment. This autonomy does more than simply preserve the community; it institutes this community as the norm and as the condition of pos- 1 sibility for the fruitful exercise of a science, whether it is a question of the practice of a normal science or the paradigmatic revolutions that rejuvenate it.

Load more