November 14, 21, 28, December 5, 12, 2007 January 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, February 20, 27, March 5, 12, 19, 2008 April 9, 16, 23, 30, May 7, 28, June 4, 11, 18, 2008 HOW TO THINK ABOUT SCIENCE CBC IDEAS Transcripts PO Box 500 Station A Toronto ON M5W 1E6 cbc.ca/ideas [email protected] Tel. 416 205 6010 Fax. 416 205 2376 © 2008 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Under no circumstances may this transcript or matters contained herein be reproduced or otherwise used for any purposes beyond the private use of the recipient (other than newspaper coverage, purposes of reference, discussion and review) without the express written consent of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TABLE OF CONTENTS 1: Simon Schaffer, co-author of Leviathan and the Air Pump and historian of science at Cambridge 2: Lorraine Daston, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and co-author of Objectivity 3: Margaret Lock, medical anthropologist in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University and author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death 4: Ian Hacking, philosopher of science at the University of Toronto and the Collège de France, author of Representing and Intervening; Andrew Pickering, sociologist of science at the University of Exeter and author of The Mangle of Practice 5: Ulrich Beck, professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and author of Risk Society; Bruno Latour of Sciences Po in Paris, author of We Have Never Been Modern 6: James Lovelock, independent scientist, creator of the Gaia theory, author of The Revenge of Gaia 7: Arthur Zajonc, professor physics at Amherst University and author of Catching the Light 8: Novelist, essayist and poet Wendell Berry, author of Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition 9: Rupert Sheldrake, independent biologist, author of The Presence of the Past and A New Science of Life 10: Brian Wynne, associate director of the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGEN) at Lancaster University, author of Rationality and Ritual, co-editor of Misunderstanding Science 11: Sajay Samuel, clinical professor in the College of Business at the Pennsylvania State University and essayist on science and common sense 12: David Abram, magician, independent scholar, founding member of the Alliance for Wild Ethics in Santa Fe, New Mexico, author of The Spell of the Sensuous 13: Dean Bavington, Canada Research Chair at Nipissing University, author of a doctoral dissertation on the role of science and managerial ecology in the collapse of the cod fishery 14: Evelyn Fox Keller, biologist, professor of the Philosophy and History of Science at MIT, author of Reflections on Gender and Science and The Century of the Gene 15: Barbara Duden, professor at the University of Hannover, author of The Woman Under the Skin and Disembodying Women; Silya Samerski, author of The Mathematization of Hope and essayist on the “pop gene,” the gene in everyday talk. ii 16: Peter Galison, professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard, author of How Experiments End, Image and Logic and Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps 17: Steven Shapin, historian and sociologist of science at Harvard University, co-author of Leviathan and the Air Pump, author of A Social History of Truth and The Scientific Life 18: Richard Lewontin, professor of biology at Harvard, co-author of The Dialectical Biologist, author of Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA 19: Ruth Hubbard, professor of biology at Harvard, author of The Politics of Women’s Biology and, with her son Elijah Wald, Exploding the Gene Myth 20: Michael Gibbons, professor of the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, co-author of Rethinking Science; Peter Scott, vice-chancellor of Kingston University, co-author of Rethinking Science; Janet Atkinson Grosjean, the Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia, author of Public Science, Private Interests 21: Christopher Norris, professor of philosophy at the University of Cardiff, author of Against Relativism and Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism; Mary Midgley, philosopher and author of Man and Beast, Science as Salvation and Science and Poetry 22: Allan Young, professor of anthropology in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill, author of The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 23: Lee Smolin, Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, author of The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science and What Comes Next 24: Nicholas Maxwell, professor of philosophy, University College London, author of From Knowledge to Wisdom and Is Science Neurotic? iii PREFACE “How To Think About Science” began from an intuition that both the practice of science, and its public reception, have changed dramatically in recent years. On the one hand science, as technology, has produced an accelerating transformation of everyday life. On the other, science, as knowledge, has been increasing de-mystified, with an entire new academic field, comprising anthropologists, historians, sociologists and philosophers, dedicated to studying the ways in which scientific knowledge is produced, warranted and institutionalized. We live, consequently, in a world that increasingly resembles an uncontrolled scientific experiment but with a new and unsettling skepticism about science as source of certainty, prediction and control. A comprehensive treatment of such a subject is not possible. What you have in your hands reflects my reading, and my acquaintance, during the nearly thirty years that I have been producing radio programmes for Ideas. I realize that it samples only a fraction of the riches offered by the new field of science studies. Indeed, since the series was broadcast I have had enough suggestions from listeners to do a second series of comparable length and, I’m sure, comparable interest. Nevertheless I think what follows offers an interesting introduction to the variety of ways in which science has been rethought in our time. The points of view represented are diverse, and sometimes contradictory. Themes recur, but one would be hard-pressed, I think, to reduce the whole to any common denominator. In the fifth episode, for example, I have paired the German sociologist Ulrich Beck with the wonderful French provocateur Bruno Latour. The two men are friends and interlocutors, but, using essentially the same evidence of ecological crisis, they come to opposite conclusions: Beck calling for a new “reflexive modernity,” Latour arguing, as the title of one of his books puts it, that “we have never been modern.” Is the difference substantive or merely terminological? Is terminology so easily divorced from substance? It is this kind of interesting, and involved comparison that I think this series invites and makes possible. A similar contrast could be drawn between Steven Shapin who argues, in episode sixteen that science is now an inescapable fate – “if we don’t trust one group of scientists,” he says, “we’ll have to trust another group…” – and Sajay Samuel who claims, in episode eleven, that science can, and should be made subservient to common sense. There are many ways of thinking about science. My hope is that this series will offer students and citizens resources with which to undertake this thinking. -David Cayley iv IDEAS HOW TO THINK ABOUT SCIENCE: SIMON SCHAFFER Paul Kennedy Boyle and the Experimental Life, the book’s avowed Hello. I’m Paul Kennedy and this is Ideas about science. purpose was—I’m quoting from the introduction— “to break down the aura of self-evidence surrounding the Simon Schaffer experimental way of producing knowledge.” This was a What happens when you apply the methods of an work, in other words, that wanted to treat something enterprise to itself? What happens if you study what obvious and taken for granted—that matters of fact are scientists do as scientifically as you possibly can? What ascertained by experiment—as if it were not at all happens if you apply to our most treasured beliefs the obvious; that wanted to ask, how is it actually done and methods we use to make those beliefs and to justify them? how do people come to agree that it has truly been done? Paul Kennedy The authors of this pathbreaking book were two young Science under its own microscope is our subject today on historians, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, and both Ideas. Our guest is Simon Schaffer, a historian of science have gone on to distinguished careers in the field they at Cambridge, and his theme is the unravelling of received helped to define, science studies. You’ll be hearing from ideas about science. Steven Shapin later in this series, but How to Think About Science begins with a conversation with Simon Schaffer. I Simon Schaffer called on him recently in his office at the Whipple I think there were two standard images of what the Museum of the History of Science at Cambridge where he sciences are. One image is that scientists are absolutely teaches. We talked first about why science came under a special people, that they're much more moral, and much new kind of scrutiny during the period when he was just more virtuous, and much, much cleverer, and that they do beginning his studies, the 1970s. This was a time, he said, things nothing like what anybody else does. And on the when many modern certainties were shaken, and there was other hand, there's an equally powerful public image of no greater modern certainty than the authority of science. science, which is that science is organized common sense, In this atmosphere, a new generation of scholars began to that it's just cookery raised to a fairly sophisticated art.