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The Prehistory of Science and Technology Studies

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The Prehistory of Science and Technology Studies " C HAPTE R 1 The Prehistory of Science and Technology Studies A View of Science Let us start with a snapshot of a common view of science. It is a view that coincides more or less with where studies of science stood some 50 years ago, that still dominates popular understandings of science, and even serves as something like a mythic framework for scientists themselves. Snapshots always lack nuance, but they are useful nonetheless: this one includes a number of distinct elements and some healthy debates. It can, however, serve as an excellent foil for the discussions that fo llow. At the edges of this picture of science, and discussed in the next section, is technology, seen as simply the application of science. In the common view, science is a fo rmal activity that accumulates knowledge by directly confronting the natural world. T hat is, science makes progress because of its method, and because that method allows the natural world to playa role in the evaluation of theories. Science's method is a set of procedures and approaches that makes research sys­ tematic, and tends toward the discovery of truths. While the scientific method may be somewhat loose and large, and therefore may not level all differences, it creates a certain consistency: different scientists sh ould perform an experiment similarl y; scientists sho uld be able to agree on important questions and considerations; and most importantly, di ffe r­ ent scientists considering the same evidence should accept and reject the same hypotheses. T he result is th at scientists can agree on truths about the natural world. Exactly how science is a formal activity is open to some question. It is worth taking a closer look at some oftl1e prominent views. Two important philosophical approaches within the study of science are logical positivism, initially associated witl1 the Vienna Circle, and falsificationism, associated with Karl Popper. T he Vienn a Circle was a group of phil osophers and sci­ entists who met in the early 1930s. T he project of the Vienna Circle was to 2 Prehistory of Science and Technology Studies Preh istory of Science and Technology Studies 3 develop a phil osophi cal understanding of science that would allow fo r an ex pansion of the scientifi c worl dview - particularly into the social sciences Box 1.1 The problem of induction an d into philosophy itself. T he project was immensely successful, in the sense that positivism was widely absorbed by scientists and non-scientists Among the asides inserted into the next few chapters are a number of interested in increasing the rigor of their work. Interesting pro blems in the versions of the" problem of induction." These are valuable background view, however, meant that positivism became increasingly focused on is­ for a number of issues in Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) . At sues within the philosophy of science, losing sight of the more general least as stated here these are theoretical problems, that only occa­ sionally become practical ones in scientific and technical contexts. While project with which the movement began (see Friedman 1999; Richardson they could be paralyzing in principle, in practice they do not come up. 1998). One aspect of their importance, then, is in finding out how scientists Logical positivists maintain that the meaning of a scientific theory (and and engineers contain these problems, and when they fail at that, anything else ) is exhausted by considerations, logical and empirical, of how they deal with them. what would ve ri fY or fa lsifY it. A scientific theory, then, is in some sense a The problem of induction arose with David Hume's general ques­ mere summary of possible observations, in a logically structured language. tions about evidence in the eighteenth century. Unlike classical skeptics, T his is one way in which science can be seen as a fo rmal activity: scientific Hume was interested not in challenging particular patterns of argu­ theories are built up by the logical manipulatio n of o bservations (e.g. ment, but in showing the fallibility of arguments from experience in Ayer 1952 [1936 ]; Carnap 1952 [1928]), and scientifi c progress consists general. In the sense of Hume's problem, induction is the extension of in in creasing the number and range of potential o bservations that its theo­ data to cover new cases. To take a standard example, "the sun rises ri es indicate. every twenty-four hours" is a claim supposedly established by induc­ T heories develop through a method that transforms in dividual data points tion over many instances, as each passing day has added another data point to the overwhelming' evidence for it. Inductive arguments take into general statements. T he process of creating scientific theories is there­ n cases, and extend the pattern to the n+ 1st. But, says Hume, why fore an inductive o ne. As a result, positivists tried to develop a logic of should we believe this pattern? Could the n+ 1st case be different, no science that would make solid the inductive process of moving from indi­ matter how large n is? It does no good to appeal to the regularity of vidual fac ts to general claims. For example, scientists might be seen as cre­ nature, because the regularity of nature is one of the things at issue. ating frameworks in which it is possible to uneq uivocally generali ze from And as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) and Nelson Goodman (1983 [1954]) data (see box 1.1). show, nature could be perfectly regular and we would still have a Positivism has immediate problems. First , if meanings are reduced to problem of induction. This is because our ideas of what it means for o bservati o ns, there are many synonyms, theories o r statements that look the n+ 1st case to be the same as the first n cases are not the only as tho ugh they should h ave very different meanings, but do not make possible ones; sameness is not a fully defined concept. differe nt predictions. For example, Copernican as tronomy was initially It is intuitively obvious that the problem of induction is insoluble. It designed to dupli cate the more successful predictions of the earlier is more difficult to explain why, but Karl Popper, the political philoso­ pher and philosopher of science, makes a straightforward case that it Ptolemaic system ; in terms of observations, then , the two systems were is. The problem is insoluble, according to him, because there is no roughly equivalent, but they clearly meant very different things, since principle of induction that is true. That is, there is no way of assuredly o ne put the Earth in the center of the universe, and the other had the going from a finite number of cases to a true general statement about Earth spinning around the Sun. Second , many apparently meaningful all the relevant cases. To see this, we need only look at examples. cl aims are not systematically related to o bservatio ns, because theories are "The sun rises every twenty-four hours" is false, says Popper, as for­ often too abstract to be im mediately cashed out in terms of data. Ab­ mulated and normally understood, because in Polar regions, there stractio n should not render a theory meaningless. Despi te these prob­ are days in the year when the sun never rises, and days in the year lems and o thers, the positivist view of meaning taps into deep intuitions, when it never sets. Even cases taken as examples of straightforward and cannot be entirely dismissed . and solid inductive inferences can be shown to be wrong, so why should we be at all confident of more complex cases? 4 Prehistory of Sci ence and Tec hnology Studies Prehistory of Sc ience and Tech nology Studies 5 Even if one does not believe positivism's central ideas, many people are attracted to the strict relationship that it posits between theories and obser­ Box 1.2 The Duhem-Quine thesis vations. Even if theories are not mere summaries of o bservations, they should be absolutely supported by them. T he justification we have for believing a The l)uhem- Quine thesis is the elaim that a theory can never be con:­ scien tific theory is based on that theory's solid connection with data. An ­ elusively tested in isolation: what is tested is an entire f ramework or a other view, then, that is more loosely positivist, is that one can by purely web of beliefs. This means that in principle any scientific hypothesis logical means make predictions of observations from scientific theories, can be held in the face of apparently contrary evidence. Though and that the best theories are ones that malce all the right predictions. This neither of them put the issue quite this baldly, Pierre Duhem and W. v. o. Quine, writing in the beginning and middle of the twentieth view is perhaps best articulated as falsificationism, a position developed by century respectively, showed us Why. (Sir) Karl Popper (e.g. 1963), a philosopher who was once on the edges of Let us imagine we have some theory that makes a number of pre­ the Vienna Circle. dictions. How should we react if some of its predictions turn out to be For Popper, the key task of philosophy of science is to provide a demar­ false? The answer looks straightforward: the theory has been falsi­ cation criterion, a rule that would allow a lin e to be drawn between science fied, and should be abandoned. This is the basis of Popper's ra~ional­ and non-science.
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