Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, Vol. 28 (1993), 47-60

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM TEACHING ITSELF A LESSON: SCIENCE STUDIES AS SOCIAL MOVEMENT'

STEVE FULLER Science Studies Center, Virginia Tech

Social constructivism is a recognizable tendency throughout the human scien• ces today, especially in psychology, the law, and, of course, in sociology and anthropology. However, perhaps because of its methodological origins in eth• nography, Science & Technology Studies (STS) is currently dominated by a brand of constructivism that has become increasingly "reflexive," in a manner that would be more familiar to a philosophical logician seeking meta-level consistency than to a critical theorist seeking to situate her own activity in the midst of ongoing social practices. In this sense, reflexive constructivists take their cue from Ludwig Wittgenstein, not Alvin Gouldner (cf. Ashmore 1989). STS reflexivists do little to hide the fact that they regard the Wittgensteinian form of reflexivity as intellectually more rigorous and sophisticated than the Gouldnerian one. Posed in more neutral, or "symmetrical" terms, the reflexi• vists who dominate our field recursively apply the same form of analysis in a way that increasingly narrows the scope of inquiry. Thus, theoretical breadth seems to be sacrificed in the name of methodological purity. STS reflexivists typically treat the idea of "embodied" and "embedded" practices as restricted to properties of the text they happen to be writing or reading. Sentences do not reside in Plato's Heaven, but are embodied in particular texts, which are em• bedded "intertextually," to quote Derrida, with other texts, usually ones that are co-presentable with the original text. Further moves are typically not made to embody the text in a book, and to embed the book in several social contexts simultaneously, including, say, a small group interaction, a reproduction of the acadernic regime, and a legitimation of the publishing industry. All of these moves are equally "reflexive" in that they force one to consider the content of one's utterances in relation to the multiply embedded contexts of utterance, thereby minimizing any perceived general difference between content and context. Adrnittedly, the contexts just raised stretch beyond (and beneath) the reflexi• vist's visual horizon. But why should we let an atavism of phenomenology (if not radical empiricism) constrain the scope of OUf reflexive inquiries? lust be- 48 STEVE FULLER cause I cannot see the accounting records of the company that publishes my books, does that make my text any less embedded there than in the writings of authors who cite my work? To ans wer yes, as STS reflexivists typically do, is to limit the constructivist lessons that STS can teach itself. In particular, I want to explore in this paper the fundamental sociological problem that the con• structivist turn in STS poses of STS more generally, which I will call The Pro• blem of Wide Reflexivity: What sort of sodal entity is STS? For the methodo• logical individualists among my readers: What sort of group am Ia member of, when I call myself an STS practitioner? I will consider this question from both an empirical and a normative standpoint. In other words, I shall survey the cur• rent multiplicity of STS's identity, and then propose an approach to consolida• te STS in a way that will enable us to realize our diverse, but not entirely in• compatible, goals.

A good place to begin is with a latter-day Tocqueville, Juan Ilerbaig (1992), a Spanish STS graduate student who, upon visiting the United States recently, detected "two STS subcultures" pursuing increasingly divergent paths. His principal observations about the relevant differences were on the mark: for ex• ample, that the divide occurs between STS graduate programs with a problem• centered, social activist bent (e.g. Penn State) and ones with a discipline-cen• tered, scholarly bent (e.g. University of California at San Diego). This division is repeated even in what "STS" is said to stand for: "Science, Technology, and Society" or "Science and Technology Studies"? Does the STSer primarily identify with the aims of the National Association for Science & Technology in Society (NASTS) or the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)? There are even alternative histories told of these two strains, both starting in the 1960s, but one starting with the Vietnam War and the other with Thomas Kuhn. In my latest book (Fuller 1993), I go so far as to characterize this as a Low Church-High Church distinction, with no regrets for the invidious com• parisons that it invites. As a philosopher of science who styles hirnself a "social epistemologist" (Fuller 1988) and who teaches in one ofthe High Church outposts (Center for the Study of Science in Society, Virginia Tech), I found it curious that Ilerbaig would trace the apparent academic insularity of programs such as mine to the "sociological revolution," by which he largely means the Sociology of Scienti• fic Knowledge and its aftermath. His account suggests much more uniformity within the High Church than is in fact the case. A brief look at our internal di-