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Part I
The Demarcation Problem
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1
Science’s Need for Revolution
1. | The Scientific Revolution: The Very Idea |
1.1. | Deconstructing the myth of Kuhn as revolutionary |
1.2. | Scientific disciplines as social movements in stasis |
1.3. | Where is the next Galileo in the postmodern academy? |
2. | The Historical Dimension of the Demarcation Problem |
2.1. | The identity of science: definition or demarcation? |
2.2. | The autonomy of science: Vienna or Harvard? |
2.3. | The ends of science: providential or corrigible? |
3. | The Political Dimension of the Demarcation Problem |
3.1. | In search of fallible social vehicles for scientific norms |
3.2. | Conclusion: the problem of science in open and closed societies |
A paradoxical consequence of the emergence of a distinct field of inquiry called “Science and Technology Studies” (STS) is it that has helped to undermine the classical justification for just such a field. Originally it was thought that there was something unique about science as a social and intellectual practice that warranted a field, if not exactly STS, then at least relatively autonomous specialities in the history, philosophy and sociology of science. Some described this uniqueness in terms of a set of necessary and/or sufficient conditions that all properly scientific practices share. Others pointed to a mode of succession that characterized an “internal history of science,” in terms of which any pretender to the title of science had to demonstrate their legitimate descent (Lakatos 1981). Together the image projected was of a unified conception of science potentially traceable to a canonical origin, aka the Scientific Revolution. This classical strategy of justifying science came to be seen in the 20th century as solving the demarcation problem – specifically, the problem of demarcating science from non-science, or pseudo-science (cf. Remedios 2003).
The demarcation strategy is familiar from the history of political thought as akin to the genetic basis used to legitimize royal dynasties. However, in the case of science, philosophers sought demarcation criteria that could have been applied across all of history. When something similar has been urged in the sphere of politics, typically under the name of natural law, it has often resulted in calls to overturn the current regime on grounds of illegitimacy. In science, it has resulted in a relatively bloodless coup that now represents the orthodoxy in STS. It consists of a de facto acceptance of, on the other hand, a disunified conception of science – or, spun more positively, a recognition of the plurality of “sciences” – and, on the other, the mythical status of a definitive world-historic “Scientific Revolution” (Galison and Stump 1996; Shapin 1996).
A famous 1983 paper by Larry Laudan officially declared the problem’s demise (Laudan 1996). There seems to be a broad consensus today among historians, philosophers, and sociologists that science is whatever scientists do – and if they do different things in different fields constituted by recognized scientists, then so be it. Yet, this is precisely the sort of solution that the original statement of the demarcation problem was designed to prevent. How can what was so obviously wrong 50 years ago now seem so obviously right? I happen to believe that the demarcation problem is worth reviving today. In particular, there is a need for a “non-providential” account of the nature of science – that is, an account that does not presume that the dominant tendencies in the history of science are ipso facto normatively acceptable. STS’s rejection of the demarcation problem may be understood as an overreaction that has thrown out the teleological baby with the providential bath water in making sense of the history of science.
This chapter provides an autopsy of the demise of the demarcation problem (cf. Fuller 1988: ch. 7). The first part offers perhaps the most accessible entry point into the problem of demarcation, namely, the historical moment when science came to be formally set apart from other forms of knowledge in society. This is the so-called Scientific Revolution, which allegedly happened in 17th-century Europe. This topic immediately opens up into a consideration of the most influential theorist of scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, especially his impact on STS. In sections 2 and 3, I explore how one might justify demarcation criteria from a historical and political standpoint. Together they constitute the demarcation problem’s “social epistemology” (Fuller 1988: esp. ch. 7). Section 2 traces the origins of the demarcation problem to the need to decide between competing definitions of knowledge from a neutral standpoint, modeled on a judgment delivered in a trial. In section 3, I flesh out the politics that inform this backdrop, drawing on Popper’s discussion of open and closed societies.
1. The Scientific Revolution: The Very Idea
Although the expression “scientific revolution” is most closely associated with Thomas Kuhn (1970), who embedded the phrase in a general theory of scientific change, it also names a specific time and place – Western Europe of the 17th century – from which descend the modern institutions, methods, theories, and attitudes of science, as epitomized in the achievements of such figures as Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and, most of all, Newton. Interestingly, the idea of localizing the Scientific Revolution dates only to the 1940s, when both the British historian Herbert Butterfield, known for his progressive “Whig interpretation of history,” and Kuhn’s own mentor in historiographical matters, Alexandre Koyré, an émigré Russo-French philosopher influenced in equal measures by Plato and Hegel, started to speak in these terms (Fuller 2000b: 23).
The use of the same phrase “scientific revolution” in Kuhn’s general and Butterfield’s and Koyré’s more specific senses is only partly justified. The specific coinage was intended to be provocative. It was an anti-Aristotelian and anti-Catholic gesture designed to consign the Renaissance to a pre-modern past that was superseded by the revival of a Platonic theory-driven science (Koyré) and the Protestant Reformation of the Christian conscience (Butterfield). These crucial elements of the modern scientific imagination had been held back by the demands of secular governance and everyday life. Thus, Koyré contrasted two Italians who had been previously seen in much the same light: Galileo’s single-minded pursuit of a unified truth marked him as a scientist, whereas Leonardo da Vinci’s jack-of-all-trades empiricism did not.
The rhetorical force of the distinction between the likes of Galileo and da Vinci was not lost in the postwar period. In the aftermath of two world wars that implicated science in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, the future integrity of science required that it be seen as having historically revolted not only against religion but, perhaps more importantly, technology. Thus, the Scientific Revolution supposedly marks the moment when philosophers came to regard technology as an appropriate means for testing their theories without being seduced by technology’s potential as an instrument of domination. In the more metaphysical terms with which both Butterfield and Koyré were comfortable, the Scientific Revolution was about matter coming under the control of spirit, the passions subsumed by reason.
However, the historical identification of the Scientific Revolution causes problems for the periodization of European cultural history that became popular at the end of the 19th century and still prevails, at least in popular treatments. It casts the early modern period as opening with a “Renaissance” that eventuated in an “Enlightenment.” The Scientific Revolution supposedly happened at some point between these two epochs – perhaps when they overlapped in the 17th century. Yet, the import of the Scientific Revolution is seriously at odds with the narrative that postulates the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as consecutive stages in history. As represented in Kuhn’s Structure and elsewhere, the import of the Scientific Revolution is that a group of people, whom we now call “scientists,” managed to wrest control of the means of knowledge production from the politicians, religious fanatics, and others who made it impossible to pursue The True independently of The Good and The Just. This autonomization of inquiry epitomizes all the perceived benefits of academic disciplines. They include: (1) secure borders for inquiry that keep larger societal demands at a distance; (2) common standards for incorporating new members and topics, as well as for evaluating their efforts; and (3) discretion over the terms in which the concerns from the larger society are translated into “new” problems.
Yet this “order out of chaos” narrative fails to do justice to the progressive spirit of the figures normally identified with the Renaissance and especially the Enlightenment. These figures – Galileo and Voltaire come most readily to mind – relished whatever immunity from censure they enjoyed but did not generally associate it with the self-restraint, even self-censorship, that is alleged to be a hidden source of power after the Scientific Revolution. Rather, this period (roughly 1400 to 1800) marked the emergence of the arts of explicitness, including such wide-ranging pursuits as satire, the quest for a language of pure thought, and indeed, experimental demonstration.
To be sure, the religious wars of the 17th century made Britain sufficiently dangerous to justify the non-sectarian declarations contained in the Charter of the Royal Society (Proctor 1991: ch. 2). However, it is all too easy to project into the past contemporary anxieties about the potential fate of dissident scientists. Indeed, issues of “respect” and “legitimacy” loomed so large in the early modern era because would-be autocrats were often incapable of enforcing their will in the face of resistance. On the one hand, the autocrats lacked the necessary means of surveillance and coercion and, on the other, potential dissenters were not exclusively dependent on a particular autocrat for material support of their work. Together these two conditions ensured that intellectuals could maintain their autonomy by moving between patrons.
The problem of identifying a Scientific Revolution was raised to a problem of global history with another postwar project: the multivolume comparative study of “science and civilization” in China undertaken by the British Marxist embryologist Joseph Needham (Cohen 1994: ch. 6). China was Europe’s economic superior until the early 19th century, yet it had never passed through a scientific revolution. Europe’s “Industrial Revolution” – a phrase coined in the 1880s, a century after it purportedly began – initiated the systematic development of technology by scientific design. Up to that point, technologies across the world had emerged by means that, for the most part, were innocent of science to such an extent that aspiring innovators had to be accepted into an esoteric craft culture because the relevant knowledge was not seen as the common entitlement of humanity.
In contrast, the idea of science in its modern hegemonic sense presupposes that all humans enjoy a privileged cognitive position in nature (that at the moment may not be fully realized), a status associated with the great monotheistic religions descended from Judaism but not those of the East, where humans were seen more as one with the natural world. The idea that humans might transcend – rather than simply adapt to – their natural condition so as to adopt a “god’s eye point-of-view,” especially one that would enable the “reverseengineering” of nature, was profoundly alien to the Chinese way of knowing. In this respect, the Scientific Revolution marked a revolt against nature itself, which was seen as not fully formed, an unrealized potential. Francis Bacon’s account of experimentation famously expressed this sensibility as forcing nature to reveal her secrets, namely, possibilities that would not be encountered in the normal course of experience.
The idea of humanity giving a divinely inspired reason to nature had become widespread in the West by the late 18th century, especially after Newton’s achievement moved philosophers – not least those behind the American and French Revolutions – to envisage society as something designed ex nihilo on the basis of a few mutually agreeable principles, what continues today as “social contract theory.” In this context, the pre-contractarian “natural” state of humanity appears unruly because its wilder animal tendencies have yet to be subject to a higher intelligence, secularly known as “rationality” (Cohen 1995).
The joining of political and scientific revolutions in this radical sense is due to the Enlightenment philosophe most responsible for the rise of social science, the Marquis de Condorcet (Fuller 2006b: ch. 13; cf. Baker 1975). He specifically connected the successful American Revolution and the ongoing French Revolution via the rhetoric of the first self-declared scientific revolutionary, Antoine Lavoisier (Cohen 1985). Lavoisier had recently reorganized chemistry from its traditional alchemical practices into a science founded on the systematic interrelation of atomic elements. However, Lavoisier himself was not an enthusiastic supporter of revolutionary politics, unlike his great English scientific rival, Joseph Priestley, whose radical Unitarian theology forced him into exile in the newly constituted United States, where he was warmly received by the Founding Fathers (Commager 1978: ch. 2). As Priestley celebrated the French Revolution in exile, Lavoisier was guillotined by the revolutionaries at home.
Lavoisier believed that a scientific revolution would stabilize (rather than dynamize, as Priestley thought) the social order. Here he fell back on the classical conception of “revolution,” suggested in the Latin etymology, as a restoration of equilibrium after some crime or period of political unrest. Specifically, Lavoisier opposed Priestley’s continued support for the practically useful, but logically confused, concept of “phlogiston,” the modern remnant of the ancient idea that fire is an ultimate constituent of nature. In this context, Priestley is best seen as an epistemic populist, much like the positivist philosopher-physicist Ernst Mach who, a century later, wanted scientific judgment to be grounded as much as possible in practical experience, as opposed to theoretically inferred entities that only an expert class of scientists might observe (Fuller 2000b: ch. 2).
Kuhn’s relevance as a theorist of scientific revolutions emerges at this point – and not only because his own most carefully worked out case of a scientific revolution was the dispute between Priestley and Lavoisier over the nature of oxygen. Kuhn also agreed with Lavoisier that revolutions mainly restored stability to a science – and by implication a society – fraught with long unsolved problems. Kuhn portrays scientists as the final arbiters of when their knowledge has sufficiently matured to be applied in society without destabilizing it. This doubly conservative conception of revolutions reflects Kuhn’s definition of science as dominated by only one paradigm at any given moment. Consequently, despite Kuhn’s broad cross-disciplinary appeal, especially among social scientists, Kuhn consistently maintained that only the physical sciences satisfy his strict definition because it is only in these fields (and arguably only until about the 1920s) that scientists are in sufficient control of the research agenda to determine when and how a revolution begins and ends, and its results spread more widely.
Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolutions appeared radical in the late 1960s because it was conflated with the then-prevalent Marxist idea of revolution as an irreversible break with the past, something closer in spirit to Condorcet’s original conception (Fuller 2000b: ch. 5; Fuller 2003a: ch. 17). This conflation was facilitated by Kuhn’s portrayal of scientists in the vanguard vis-à-vis the direction of their own work and its larger societal import. This image was in marked contrast with the perceived captivity of scientists to what C. Wright Mills called the “military-industrial complex.”
However, Kuhn’s own reluctance to engage with his radical admirers suggests that his model was proposed more in the spirit of nostalgia than criticism and reform. This interpretation is supported by the original Harvard context for the restorative conception of revolution, the so-called Pareto Circle, a reading group named after the Italian political economist Vilfredo Pareto, whose “circulation of elites” model was seen in the middle third of the 20th century as the strongest rival to Marx’s theory of proletarian revolution. This group was convened in the 1930s by the biochemist Lawrence Henderson, who taught Harvard’s first history of science courses and was instrumental in the appointment of chemistry department head, James Bryant Conant, as university president (Fuller 2000b: ch. 3). In that capacity, Conant hired Kuhn not only as a teacher, which enabled him to develop the more general ideas for which he would become famous, but also as a researcher on the origins of the Chemical Revolution, which eventually gave Kuhn’s general thesis about scientific revolutions what empirical credibility it has (Conant 1950).
1.1. Deconstructing the myth of Kuhn as revolutionary
STS’s biggest blindspot is its lack of reflexivity (Fuller and Collier 2004: esp. Introduction): unless STS researchers already come to the field with, say, feminist, Marxist or post-colonialist identities, they tend not to reflect on the conditions that maintain their inquiries. To be sure, there was a spell in the 1980s when some prominent British STS researchers devoted considerable attention to a very narrow sense of reflexivity, namely, linguistic self-reference (e.g. Woolgar 1988, Ashmore 1989). In retrospect, it can be seen as a relatively late adoption of Jacques Derrida’s “deconstructive” textual criticism, whereby an author is caught in a pragmatic contradiction between the content and the context of her textual utterance. This serves to destabilize the meaning of the text, thereby placing the author’s authority “under erasure” (cf. Culler 1982). Since most texts self-deconstruct under such intensive scrutiny, STS researchers rarely bother to attend to a more sociologically informed sense of reflexivity, which would interrogate, say, the extent to which STS it...
