Knowledge as Social Order

Rethinking the Sociology of Barry Barnes

Massimo Mazzotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754648635
• eBook ISBN: 9781317108900
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Investigating a theme first pioneered by Barry Barnes in the early 1970s, this volume explores the relationship between social order and legitimate knowledge and is intended as a tribute to Barnes' seminal role in the development of the discipline of science and technology studies (STS). The contributors highlight the way in which Barnes' work has shaped their way of conceptualizing the basic relation between knowledge and society. In doing this they explore the original sociological underpinnings of STS while pointing to the way in which Barnes' interdisciplinary work has been developed to tackle current concerns in the field as well as in social theory. They also address the concerns of social scientists who are investigating the nature of power and agency and the problem of social order, emphasizing the essential role played by scientific knowledge and technological machinery in the construction of social life. Contributors to the volume include Martin Kusch, Steven Loyal, Mark Haugaard, David Bloor, Trevor Pinch, John Dupre, Donald MacKenzie, Harry Collins, Steven Shapin and Karin Knorr Cetina.

Chapter 1
Relativism at 30,000 Feet

David Bloor

In his book River Out of Eden the well-known biologist Richard Dawkins takes a swipe at something he calls ‘cultural relativism’. It is, he says, a ‘fashionable salon philosophy’ and its adherents clearly irritate him. These people, in Dawkins’s view, need to confront a few simple and undeniable facts: facts such as, ‘Airplanes built according to scientific principles work […] Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications […] don’t’. He throws down a challenge: ‘Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet’, he says, ‘and I’ll show you a hypocrite’.

Who are the targets of Dawkins’s challenge? He is quite precise on the matter. They are people who think it clever to say that ‘science is no more than our modem origin myth’. They assert that ‘science has no more claim to truth than tribal myth’ and that ‘Neither way is more true than the other’ (1995).1 I share Dawkins’s impatience with these formulations, but the question I want to ask is what happens when his challenge is directed at other forms of relativism, for example those found in the history and sociology of science.

Advocates of what is sometimes called the ‘strong programme’ certainly don’t say that science is no more true than myth, indeed, this is explicitly rejected (Barnes and Bloor 1982: 1–47).2 Their position is that the truth of both is, in a sense, equally problematic. Both bodies of belief require the local causes of their credibility to be investigated. Credibility is always to be viewed as an empirical problem and sociological variables will always be involved. Is this subject to Dawkins’s knockdown argument?

I don’t know what answer Dawkins would proffer to this question. I do know that others think that such relativists can’t make sense of a technological feat like flying at thirty thousand feet. A case in point is Christopher Norris, in his book Against Relativism (1997). This includes a sustained attack on ‘the strong sociologist’s programme’ whose claims, says Norris, tempt him to an exasperated endorsement of Dawkins’s challenge – which is duly quoted (on p. 314). This is the line of thought I want to address. I think it is wrong. There is no inconsistency or hypocrisy involved in a strong programme, relativist account of the technology of flight. It is those who think they can generalise Dawkins’s accusation to cover this sort of relativism who need to confront reality and examine their conscience.

The Nub of the Problem

The nub of the problem is how we should analyse practical success in dealing with our environment. That we do have a degree of success is obvious and the aeroplane is a good symbol of it and of all the complexities involved. A widely accepted starting point for the analysis of practical action invokes the idea of trial and error. This seems applicable to the discovery of the secret of flight.3 First there was the desire to emulate the wonderful ability of birds. People tried to build bird-like, flapping wings and failed. All manner of contraptions were assembled and discarded. Fixed-wing gliders, what we would call ‘hang-gliders’, represented the real break-through. Otto Lilienthal built and flew these with some success in the 1890s though he eventually killed himself experimenting with a new wing. He brought to the task not only courage but an engineer’s systematic, empirical curiosity.

Similarly with the Wright brothers who took good care to inform themselves of Lilienthal’s work. Their goal was powered flight. They too did a lot of experimenting with models of different wings. They built a small wind-tunnel to test different cross-sections, though there was a lot they did not understand about wind-tunnels. Nevertheless their work still represented a further stage in the process of moving carefully back-and-forth over the terrain, accumulating and recording data and becoming ever more familiar with its intimate details. On 17 December 1903, they achieved their goal.4

I shall pick up the historical story again in a moment, but let us ask what we, as analysts of the process, should be making of all this? There are methodological choices to be made, and these will have consequences for the question of relativism. The big choice is this: should we see the trial and error of Lilienthal and the Wrights as itself a natural phenomenon? Or are we going to allow it to be glossed in non-naturalistic terms?

I should explain what I mean by the word ‘naturalistic’. The best way is to start with the work of experimental psychologists. They try to build causal models of learning and adaptation, hence all those experiments on rats in mazes and all the work on human perception, memory and learning. We could say their aim is to build a ‘learning machine’, for example, one that would model our tendency to extrapolate from experience and generate inductive inferences.5 Of course, the naturalistic stance doesn’t end with psychologists. It is shared by many practitioners of anthropology, sociology and history who adopt a matter-of-fact approach to knowledge. They bring into the story a concern for interaction, convention and shared cultural resources. The ultimate learning machine is a social institution.

Two points need underlining. First: a naturalistic, causal analysis of knowledge does not challenge the reality of knowledge. Scepticism is not at issue. To explain is not to explain away. Psychologists studying vision do not conclude that we cannot really see. What they challenge are alternative accounts of knowledge that are naive, metaphysical or non-naturalistic.6 Secondly, I accept that we may be a long way from an adequate analysis of cognition, but the issue here is the goal of our efforts, rather than their current success. The aim is to see our own cognitive achievements as part of nature: as causal, law-like, material processes. Make no mistake about it. If we opt for the naturalistic approach to knowledge, relativism will come out as the winner.

I realise that the argument has moved rather quickly here, linking relativism and naturalism in such an immediate way. In order to consolidate this link let me go back to the definition of relativism and offer you some further resources for thinking about its relation to what I have called ‘naturalism’. Then we can get back to aeroplanes.

Relativism versus Absolutism

So far I have characterised relativism very simply. It is the idea that both true and false beliefs are, with regard to the causes of their credibility, equally problematic. I now want to make two farther suggestions about the definition of relativism. One will concern a ‘formal’ requirement on any adequate definition; the other will concern the metaphors and comparisons that give substance to the formal specification.

Formally relativism is the opposite of absolutism. If the word ‘relativism’ is to mean anything it must stand in clear opposition to something else that can qualify as ‘absolutism’. To put the point in another way: if you are not a relativist about knowledge, you are an absolutist. If you reject cognitive relativism then be prepared to embrace and defend cognitive absolutism. I am assuming here that to qualify as a relativist it is necessary to deny that there are any instances of absolute knowledge. An absolutist, by contrast, asserts that there are at least some instances of knowledge with an absolute character.

Relativism and absolutism thus stand as jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive, but there is still the problem of giving substance and content to the contrast. We have got to get this right otherwise the boundary will be drawn in the wrong place. We must not let some insipid, ersatz candidate pass muster as authentically absolute when it is no such thing. To anchor the distinction in the right place we need more than a few slippery, verbal formulae: we need to grasp the basic ideas that are at stake. We need a model of what it is for something to deserve the label ‘absolute’.

To provide such a model we must go to the area of our culture where our intuitions about the word ‘absolute’ are at their firmest and where the category seems most at home. This, of course, is theology and our talk of God. Our best and most enduring exemplar of something absolute is God. God does not come into existence and then go out of existence. He is eternal. God does not change and decay. He is perfect and unchanging. God’s properties do not depend on this or that precondition or contingency. He is necessary and the uncaused cause of all else. He transcends causality. Again, God’s commands are not made by reference to anything external that validates, justifies or constrains them. They are infinite in scope, ultimate and self-sufficient. The attributes of God are absolutes, or they are nothing, and our attitude towards them must be the appropriate one: they are not useful fictions or conjecture but the objects of faith.

This is the point I want to emphasise. When we accord a knowledge claim the status of ‘absolute’ it must display an appropriate analogy with properties we should want to attribute to God. It may not share all of these, but it surely must share some. If it doesn’t then we can be quite sure that our attribution is suspect and that our standards, as it were, are slipping. Now you can see the strategy of my argument. It is to force the critics of relativism to acknowledge their absolutism and then to impress upon them the demanding character of the position they have wittingly or unwittingly chosen to occupy.

The relativist is in a relatively comfortable position. There are no absolutes in the contingent realm of nature where everything is bound up in causal relations or arises meaninglessly by chance. For the relativist our knowledge is just one more phenomenon within this realm. The relativist is at home with conjecture, inconsistency, expediency, partiality, a mixture of success and failure and all the shortcomings of this vale of tears. For non-relativists things are not so comfortable. They can acknowledge the existence of things with a merely relative status, but only as stations on the road to the absolute. The familiar pragmatics of scientific work (theories that are approximate, that have limited scope, that are inconsistent, that get this bit right and that bit wrong, or that are accepted as useful fictions) cannot themselves belong to the realm of absolute truth. To qualify as absolute, a knowledge claim must transcend these limitations.

It may sound strange to put it in this way, but the critics of relativism have something like a theological problem on their hands. It is a form of what theologians call the problem of incarnation. To ask how absolutes are manifest in the natural world is like asking: how was God made flesh? How did an infinite spiritual being come to be the finite human person that was Christ? Remember that orthodox Christian theology stipulates the identity of God and Christ while insisting that this in no way compromises either the reality of the Godhead or the true humanity of Christ. This is acknowledged as a mystery that cannot be penetrated by the human intellect.7 I fear a similar impasse awaits the anti-relativist.

If this sounds like a fanciful comparison recall the situation in the philosophy of mathematics. Those who adopt what is called a ‘Platonizing’ stance think of mathematics as a set of truths about a realm of abstract objects. They then confront the problem of explaining how the human brain can grasp such truths and connect itself to this realm. This was Gotlob Frege’s problem in his Foundations of Arithmetic (1959). He poured scorn on the relativizing tendencies of his contemporaries who appealed to ideas from psychology or evolution. Numbers, for Frege, are self-subsistent objects – selbständige Gegenstände (p. 73). They are non-physical and non-sensory and outside space and time (‘raum-und zeitlos’ – p. 15 – ‘weder räumlich und physikalisch […] noch auch subjective […] sondern unsinnlich und objectiv’ – p. 38). So how do we know them? How is the Platonic heaven of number brought down to earth? Frege talked of an intellectual or spiritual activity (‘eine geistige Thätigkeit’) which can ‘fasten upon’ concepts (‘anknüpfen’ was the verb he used – p. 32). These obscure metaphors were all he had to offer. This is the quasi-theological impasse of which I spoke. Not all anti-relativists are explicit Platonists like Frege, but what he did blatantly and on a large scale others, sooner or later, must do surreptitiously and on a small scale.8

We can now anticipate the strategy the anti-relativists will adopt if they cannot confront this truth about themselves and explicitly embrace the absolutism to which they are committed. They will deploy their rhetorical skills to disguise their resort to the absolute. They will seek to break down the distinction between the sacred and the profane and to undermine the ‘otherness’ of the absolute. They will try to ‘domesticate’ the absolute in order to convince us that it is something familiar we meet with every day. Before I examine this response, however, there is a confusion that I need to clear up. It concerns the relation of relativism and idealism.

Relativism and Idealism

Critics of cognitive relativism frequently confuse relativism with idealism, as if they were the same thing or as if a relativist were logically committed to idealism. Idealism has a long and complex history, but for our purposes it is sufficient to see it as comprising two main claims. First, that there is no independent object of knowledge distinct from the knowing subject and, second, that the knowing subject has the character of a mind, soul, spirit or a centre of consciousness. For the idealist, the material object of knowledge is collapsed into the mind of the knowing subject.9

One can see at once how one might be tempted to criticise a simple-minded idealist by appeal to our ability to fly high into the air. The ground looks a frighteningly long way down. We don’t want to fall and this may serve as a reminder of our instinctive commitment to the reality of the material environment. This is a version of Dr. Johnson’s response to Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley said that ‘to be was to be perceived’, so Johnson kicked a rock as a knock-down proof he was wrong.10

Those who raise a cheer at Dawkins challenge may well be thinking along these lines. If so, then their target should be idealism not relativism. We must not confuse them. The ideal-material dichotomy is not the same as the relative-absolute dichotomy. One is ontological the other is epistemological. The opposite of ‘idealism’ is ‘materialism’, not ‘absolutism’. Time after time critics of relativism run these logically distinct oppositions together and collapsed them into one confused hybrid.11

A sense of cultural history should have been enough to warn of the danger. Historically, cognitive relativism has typically been associated with materialism, not idealism.12 It is the believers in absolutes who have typically embraced idealism. Mind and spirit are the traditional homes of absolute truth. Historically, relativism and idealism have been on opposite sides of long-standing ideological and political divides and yet, oblivious of the barricades, the critics of rela...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Relativism at 30,000 Feet
• 2 Relativism: Is it Worth the Candle?
• 3 Who is the Industrial Scientist? Commentary from Academic Sociology and from the Shop-Floor in the United States, ca. 1900 – ca. l970
• 4 The Meaning of Hoaxes
• 5 Objectual Practice
• 6 Producing Accounts: Finitism, Technology and Rule-Following
• 7 Power and Legitimacy
• 8 Barnes on the Freedom of the Will
• 9 Agency, Responsibility and Structure: Understanding the Migration of Asylum Seekers to Ireland
• 10 Against Maladaptationism: or What’s Wrong with Evolutionary Psychology?
• Index