Red, Black, and Objective

Science, Sociology, and Anarchism

Sal Restivo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409410393
• eBook ISBN: 9781317069935
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on the empirical findings generated by researchers in science studies, and adopting Kropotkin's concept of anarchism as one of the social sciences, Red, Black, and Objective expounds and develops an anarchist account of science as a social construction and social institution. Restivo's account is at once normative, analytical, organizational, and policy oriented, in particular with respect to education. With attention to the social practices and discourse of science, this book engages with the works of Feyerabend and Nietzsche, as well as philosophers and historians of objectivity to ground an anarchistic sociology of science. Marx and Durkheim figure prominently in this account as precursors of the contemporary science studies perspective on the perennial question, "What is science?" The result is an approach to understanding the science-and-society nexus that is at once an extension of Restivo's earlier work and a novel adaptation of the anarchist agenda. Red, Black, and Objective is an exploration by one of the founders of the science studies movement of questions in theory, practice, values, and policy. As such, it will appeal to those with interests in science and technology studies, social theory, and sociology and philosophy of science and technology.

Chapter 1
Objectivity Revisited and Revised

I begin this book by exploring the terms of my title: objectivity, sociology, science, and anarchism. In the first two chapters, I consider the nature and meaning of objectivity. I will take the reader on a somewhat conventional tour of the subject but one that moves deliberately from the philosophical imagination toward the more revolutionary and empirical sociological understanding of objectivity. I begin by considering objectivity in the context of its conventional philosophical treatment, introducing the sociological imagination incrementally. The concept “objectivity” has been described as slippery and burdened by contradictory usages and inconclusive discussions. Contrary to its reputation in science as a basic goal, some critics have viewed it as a value and an ideology that manifests detachment and alienation from self, environment, and society. In some cases, the term “empirical” has come to be preferred over “objective”. But objectivity as a value or ideology, and as a troublesome philosophical concept, should not be confused with objectivity as the affirmation of “objective reality”. This affirmation is based on the fact that human beings do not and cannot know the nature of reality a priori and per se; they must exert mental, physical, and social effort to gain knowledge, to learn. In this sense, objectivity is generally viewed as the product of a social process, traditionally referred to as “intersubjective testing”. The idea is readily paired with the norm that scientific evidence is public and communal.

My interest here is with the sociology of objectivity. But my sociological narrative necessarily unfolds against the background of the history of objectivity. Scientific virtues are contextual, and objectivity as the sine qua non virtue emerges only in the mid-nineteenth century. While objectivity has been “in the air” since the classical age in Greek philosophy, “truth-to-nature” and “trained judgment” prevailed in earlier eras as the key virtues of science. We owe a great debt to Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007) for their notable efforts in contextualizing objectivity and unfolding its history in studied detail. Underlying this history is an ever-present struggle that pits objectivity in some form against some notion of subjectivity. This struggle, this tension, is of great significance in my project. It plays out against the history of sociology’s opposition to psychological (and especially psychologistic) explanatory paradigms.

The classical social theory of objectivity rested on the assumption that communication and exchange in a public forum or community of scientists are necessary and effective means for insuring that we admit to science only statements that are valid approximations to objective reality and not products of abnormal perceptions, selective and unique subjective cognitions, or idiosyncratic and private introspections. The problem with this theory was that it treated the psychological level of scientific activity as problematic, but not the social level. The idea was that public tests, logic, and experiments or empirical observations gradually eliminate personal biases and mistakes. This leaves out the identification and elimination of social biases and mistakes which should be of at least equal concern. Before I turned my attention to the questions addressed in this book, one of my earliest efforts in the sociology of science was devoted to exploring what a sociologist could say about objectivity. This was the beginning of decades of work leading me in the direction of the positions I develop in this book. It is crucial that we have a robust sociological understanding of objectivity before we consider the relationship between anarchism and science.

Objectivity as a Social Fact

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant used the term “objective” to refer to knowledge that could be justified independently of any individual’s whim. If a justification can, in principle, be tested and understood by anyone, it is objective. Karl Popper followed Kant in noting that the objectivity of a scientific statement is based on the fact that it can be intersubjectively tested. Objectivity, however, is not a product of universal human consensus. Practically, we tend to rely on corroboration by a limited number of persons, invested with the authority to establish “truth” by virtue of their “qualifications” and “credentials”.

Classically, the extent to which a given definition of objectivity expressed its social nature varied from ideas such as “universal agreement”, and “co-operative nature of scientific research” to various philosophical conceptions of “social institutions”. Popper, for example, viewed laboratories, scientific periodicals, and congresses as the collective bases for generating scientific (objective) statements. He argued that an individual cannot simply decide to be “objective”; objectivity is a product of cooperation among scientists. Assume, Popper proposes, that an individual, trained in science but now alone and isolated from communication with others, succeeds in building laboratories and observatories. This Robinson Crusoe writes numerous papers based on his (or her) experiments and observations. He has unlimited time, and ultimately succeeds in developing scientific systems which coincide with those accepted by “our own scientists”. Such a situation, Popper argues, would be nearly as accidental and miraculous as the case of science revealed to a clairvoyant. Before we turn to Popper’s reasoning, it behooves us to note that Friday’s co-presence on the island is and must be ignored here (along with various other locals Crusoe encounters) to make Popper’s point cleanly. The reasons, then, are:

There is no one to check this Crusoe’s results.

There is no one to correct the prejudices which unavoidably result from Crusoe’s peculiar experiences.

No one can help Crusoe exploit the inherent possibilities of his results because such possibilities are often recognized in the course of adopting relatively irrelevant strategies in the face of the results.

Having no one to explain this work to, Crusoe is unable to develop the ability to communicate clear and reasoned results; this is a discipline that one learns only by having to explain one’s work to others who have not done that work.

Crusoe can only discover his/her “personal equation” in a revealed way, by discovering changes in his/her reaction time and developing means for compensating; in “public” or “objective” science, reaction time is discovered when the contradictions among the results obtained by various observers are analyzed.

Popper concludes that objectivity is a social product, and not a product of an individual’s impartiality. To the extent that such an impartiality exists, it is the result and not the source of the social nature of objectivity. Scientific criticism and scientific progress, according to Popper, depend on cooperation, intersubjectivity, and public method.

Norman Campbell, in a philosophical exercise similar to Popper’s, concluded that a Crusoe could develop science even though the criterion of universal assent could not be applied. A scientific Crusoe could replace the intersubjective criterion with a subjective one by focusing on how satisfactory and coherent the laws were that one derived from the subject under study. This idea deserves serious attention. If it is meaningful to consider social factors which facilitate the production of objective statements, then a similar search could be undertaken to identify (social) psychological conditions which facilitate the production of objective statements. But Campbell’s Crusoe would have to be socialized in some form of “scientific community” in order to later carry out his/her work in isolation. And it is with the nature of such a “community” that the sociology of objectivity is concerned. Campbell, of course, ignores the fact that his Crusoe is a social being and that living in isolation will take a toll on his/her humanity. The scientific self would lose its capacity to “do” science as the person declines emotionally and mentally, an inevitable consequence of isolation.

Having recognized that objectivity is a social fact, some students of science have gone on to ask what it is about the organization and values of science that accounts for its capacity to progressively generate objective statements. One response to this query has been to view science as an adventure in rugged individualism. Michael Polanyi was among the most articulate spokesmen for this laissez-étudier position. Polanyi argued that there is an “invisible hand” that coordinates the independent activities of individual scientists and leads to “unpremeditated” discoveries in science. Other examples of the laissez-étudier conception of science stress science as a democratic system with built in measures that prevent it from becoming political. Stated in its crudest and most sociologically vulnerable form this position requires scientists to do nothing but act in terms of what they consider their self-interests; the “invisible hand” is responsible for the beneficial societal outcomes of these independent acts of self-interest. But laissez-étudier sometimes gets linked to altruism and humanism, and scientists are portrayed as individuals whose self-interests happen to be broadly in line with the best interests of society at large.

In a more sophisticated approach to the problem of scientific progress, Thomas Kuhn argued that normal science is educationally narrow, rigid, and ill-designed to produce creative scientists. But he optimistically adds that individual rigidity is compatible with scientific progress. He does not consider whether rigidity is a social as well as an individual fact. Is the supply of scientific innovators – young scientists new to their fields – independent of social conditions within and outside of science? Can youth and newness become increasingly unlikely and ultimately impossible as individuals become more and more standardized and commodified, and as deviation becomes not merely less likely, but more intolerable and more at the mercy of agents and agencies of social control? Even if we assume the validity of Kuhn’s model, certain “damping” effects on the cycles of scientific revolution and normal science can be hypothesized. The rigidifying effects of processes such as professionalization, bureaucratization, and routinization may lengthen the periods between revolutionary peaks, lessen the intensity of revolutions, progressively decrease periods of conceptual crisis in science, and progressively decrease the probabilities that an individual scientist will conceptualize a revolutionary idea, and that such an idea will be recognized and precipitate a crisis.

A second damping source is the “cost” associated with each revolution. Dialectical processes, as I noted earlier following Kenneth Boulding, incur costs. Such costs are cumulative and thus social systems, like biological systems, can progressively lose their capacity to recover and to continue to progress. This is part of the loss of adaptive potential that occurs as a species adapts to its ecological niche and eventually and inevitably fades off the evolutionary stage. This, incidentally, is one reason the business cycle model that locates the current economic crisis likely underestimates significantly the impact of the costs of this “cycle” on the nature of the recovery we can expect.

Science cannot be comprehended if social facts are ignored, treated naively, or approached with an optimism that obscures or denies their problematic nature. The full implications of the sociology of science must be recognized if science is to be genuinely comprehended as a social fact.

The Sociology of Knowledge

One of the basic objectives of sociologists of knowledge is establishing relationships between types of social structures and types of knowledge. A form of this idea had occurred to Francis Bacon. He identified values and interests associated with different types of institutions. Monarchies are associated with profit and pleasure, commonwealths with glory and vanity; universities are associated with sophistry and affectation, and cloisters incline to fables and unprofitable subtlety. He also speculated on whether the mind is more disabled by contemplation mixed with an active life or by a focus on contemplation. The systematic development of the sociology of knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is associated with names such as Durkheim, Marx, Mannheim, Scheler, and Gurvitch. Scheler, for example, associated Plato’s theory of ideas with the organization of the Platonic academy; he followed the Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch in arguing that Protestant beliefs determined and could only exist in the form of organization of the Protestant churches and sects; and he argued that Gemeinschaft societies generate a traditional, conclusive fund of knowledge rather than a form of knowledge which is continuously subject to discoveries and extensions.

The generalization of these types of hypotheses led to an intolerable relativism in the sociology of knowledge. If “scientific theories” are rooted in social milieux, then the prospect of obtaining warranted knowledge appears utterly futile. On this view, objectivity becomes an arbitrary mix of social conditions and relations, no more valid today than soothsaying in ancient Greece or Ptolemy’s astronomy. Indeed, if we accept this perspective, what warrant is there for the sociology of knowledge, which must itself be “nothing but” a product of its particular social milieu?

One proposal for resolving this paradox is to assume that the sociology of knowledge can trace the emergence of different types of knowledge to different social milieux, but it cannot judge the truth-value of these systems. Furthermore, if types of knowledge are rooted in types of social milieux, we can set ourselves the task of discovering the social conditions under which “scientific” or “objective” knowledge is generated. The literature on science and society illustrates a number of approaches to this task. A stronger proposal, and the one I endorse, is to recognize that true and false knowledge is reached in the same way, by way of our interactions with others in our material environments with their earthly resources.

Science in some form has existed in all kinds of societies. The science referred to in the term “modern science”, however, is assumed by many social thinkers to flourish in democratic contexts. This points to a crucial question: which societal type(s) facilitate(s) scientific development in the fullest measure? This question is often addressed by emphasizing external social forces and contexts that facilitate or obstruct scientific activity and scientific progress. Internal social forces and contexts that affect science as a social activity, process, organization, or institution were, in these traditional approaches, treated incidentally if at all. To fully comprehend science as a social fact, we must attend to internal factors. Professionalization and bureaucratization are examples of such forces and contexts. Both processes have been associated with the emergence of science as an autonomous, progressive social activity. Their continuing impact on science has stimulated some concern about dysfunctional consequences.

Scientists are normatively supposed to be rewarded for innovative and creative activities; bureaucratic norms value conformity over innovation and creativity. Bureaucratic organizations tend to exercise direct or indirect control over outsiders (or non-members). The more scientists become imbedded in bureaucracy the more their work norms become the work norms of the organization. The more “mature” the bureaucracy the more it tends to resist adapting to new conditions inside and outside the organization and the more it resists adopting innovative organizational and technological tools. One solution to this, practiced in some of the larger R&D firms, is to establish “off-campus” research sanctuaries where scientists identified as having the most creative potential work under conditions unfettered by conventional bureaucratic monitoring and oversight. Another solution is to keep organizationally off-line scientists on the payroll for ad hoc innovative projects.

Viewed in conventional social psychological terms, bureaucratization has a tendency to subordinate individual to collective decision-making, dividing responsibility for a given decision. This can easily lead to the negation of responsibility, and then to a failure to act effectively with regard to internal organizational problems, or broader “external” societal problems. Adopting a more strictly structural perspective would focus not on the conflict between “individual” and “collective” decision making but on the forms and substance of collective decision making. The conventional approach inherits the same problem we encountered in the unproblematized preference for intersubjectivity over subjectivity.

The dysfunctions of bureaucratization are reinforced by and reinforce the dysfunctions of professionalization. The two processes are linked at least to the extent that they are concomitant in the modern history of industrializing nations. Professionalization has been associated with the increasing specialization in the division of labor, the knowledge explosion, and the increasing demand for management expertise in highly technical and bureaucratized societies.

In the process of professionalization, an occupation becomes colleague-oriented, with practitioners seeking exclusive rights over naming and judging their mistakes. The goals of professionalization include standardizing, specializing, gaining status for occupational roles and services to society, and “objectivizing”, limiting the impact of subjective elements on performance and service. One of the first, and among the foremost, students of professionalization, A.M. Carr-Saunders (1886-1966) concluded that professionalism was a hopeful feature of his time.

The dysfunctions of professionalization, however, arise precisely from the “hopeful” tendency toward occupational demarcation. This creates a volatile potential for subordinating reason to dogma. The structural basis for this is the closing off of the boundaries of the profession to outside influence. In medicine, for example, professional autonomy may have facilitated significant increments in knowledge about disease and treatment while simultaneously impeding the application of that knowledge. Professionalism tends to exempt the professional scientist from social responsibility, ethical codes notwithstanding. The negation of responsibility, as I noted earlier, has also been associated with bureaucratization.

The literature on professionals and complex organizations has traditionally stressed the conflicts inherent in linking the roles “professional” and “bureaucrat” based on differences between “professions” and “bureaucracies”. This research focuses on the independent professional’s resistance to bureaucratic standards, and his/her conditional loyalty to the bureaucracy. But there has been an increasing convergence of bureaucracies and professions, as bureaucrats become professionalized and professionals become bureaucratized. In this convergence, the dysfunctions of the two processes reinforce one another. Bureaucratization, for example, may reinforce tendencies in professionalization toward occupational closure and dogma with its demands for reliable responses and strict adherence to rules and regulations.

To the extent that the dysfunctions of bureaucratization and professionalization become increasingly salient and converge, we can expect a tendency toward occupational closure, an ethnocentrism of work, and a decrease in the capacity of individuals and organizations to respond to problems in critical and creative ways. This tends to undermine and eventually eliminate any pretentions to objectivity.

The important point to consider when thinking about the dysfunctions of professionalization and bureaucratization is not so much what it reflects about particular empirical realities, but the fact that it illustrates the mutability of social facts and the potential that exists in all social phenomena for dysfunctional or pathological transformation. Philosophers and other students of science have acknowledged the potential for evolutionary or progressive developmental change in science, but they have not given adequate attention to the potential for devolutionary change inherent in science as a social phenomenon. Students of “the crisis in science” in the 1960s and 1970s (including some philosophers) were, however, attentive to the dysfunctions of professionalization and bureaucratization.

The Crisis in Science

In the wake of the upheavals of the 1960s, some scientists and philosophers were asking questions by the early 1970s about the inhospitable climate for science. The title of a 1971 article in Science by the historian of science Arnold Thackray paraphrased Charles Babbage’s 1830 Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and on Some of its Causes. Thackray confronted Science readers with ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Objectivity Revisited and Revised
• 2 The Social Theory of Objectivity and Its Problems
• 3 Sociology: A Copernican Revolution Changes How We Think About Science and Mathematics
• 4 Science Studies: Sociological Theory and Social Criticism
• 5 Math Studies and the Anarchist Agenda
• 6 Anarchism and Modern Science
• 7 What’s Mind Got To Do With It?
• 8 Science, Religion, and Anarchism: The End of God and The Beginning of Inquiry
• 9 A Manifesto in Anarcho-Sociology
• Appendix 1: A Dialogue on the Syllogism With Philosopher Jean Paul Van Bendegem (JP), Free University of Brussels
• Appendix 2: Bibliographic Epilogue: Anarchism All the Way Down
• Bibliography
• Index