Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory

Barry Barnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135029012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory centres on the problem of explaining the manifest variety and contrast in the beliefs about nature held in different groups and societies. The sociological interest of such beliefs is illustrated and a sociological perspective upon scientific change is developed.

chapter 1

The diversity of beliefs about nature and the problem of explaining it

I

For most people, whatever their way of life, the beliefs they accept and utilize are held unselfconsciously, and are rarely reflected upon. Moreover, when reflection does occur, it tends merely to depict these beliefs as natural representations of ‘how things are’. Critical, analytical examination of beliefs, their origins, functions, and claims to validity, is the province of specialized academic roles in modern societies, and is a phenomenon of little general significance. The ‘Western layman’ lives in a taken for granted world; solid, objective and intelligible; on the whole he thinks with his beliefs, but not about them.

In highly differentiated, modern societies there is always a sharp distinction between the social and the natural. People invariably distinguish two spheres of belief, one relating to a world of objects, facts or concrete events, one to a system of values, obligations, conventions and institutional categories. Both spheres are taken for granted as permanent and valid; both, in this sense, are real. But, today, it is our construction of the natural or physical world which is the most secure and unquestioned. We appeal to nature for our basic metaphors of order and permanence. Our ontological tastes lean to the material and substantial rather than to the abstract or spiritual, so that we find a satisfying congruence between the use of the term ‘concrete’ as an adjective and its use as a noun. Peter Berger, writing of the taken for granted nature of everyday beliefs and practices, assumes this ontological preference in his audience and writes: ‘For most of us, as we grow up, and learn to live in society, its forms take on an appearance of structures as self-evident and as solid as those of the natural cosmos’ (1961, pp. 10–11).

With an undifferentiated society, it might have proved more apposite to show how perceptions of nature became as solid and self-evident as those of social life (Horton, 1967). But modern industrial society does not provide its members with such a clear-cut pattern of order and ready intelligibility. For us, natural order is a model for understanding social order. Sociologists and politicians, in their different ways, articulate the metaphor of society as an organism to attempt to gain, or to convey, an understanding of its regularities. Crusading ladies use metaphors from epidemiology to characterize the spread of drug-taking or pornography.

Whereas alternatives to our presently constructed social order are usually found threatening and dangerous, such is the confidence engendered by our conceptions of natural order that alternatives to them are merely treated as odd, or perhaps amusing. And no powerful social group or society exists with an alternative natural world view that may serve to shake our faith in our own. Quaint cosmologies in our midst, or the anthropomorphic physics of primitive societies, disturb us no more than the existence of those who believe in them. Whereas we like to think our values are the best, we know our view of nature is the right one.

Indeed, there is an obvious Tightness about our own world view. It seems, in some way, to mirror reality so straightforwardly that it must be the consequence of direct apprehension rather than effort and imagination. Conversely, alternative beliefs possess an obvious wrongness. The more natural our own perspective becomes, the more puzzling become the strange propositions of ancestors, aliens and eccentrics. How did such mistaken ideas come to be held? However have they remained uncorrected for so long? A whole series of categories exists which can be readily deployed by anyone in modem societies needing to answer such questions: inferior or impaired mentality, stupidity, prejudice, bigotry, hypocrisy, ideology, conditioning and brain-washing are but a few. All imply a distortion of what is really perceived, a disturbance of a person's normal direct apprehension of the world. Common sense theories of the incidence of beliefs involve the actor treating his own as in need of no explanation and the varying beliefs of others as intelligible in terms of pathologies and biasing factors.

Many academic theories about beliefs, whether philosophical, psychological or sociological, are closely related to this common sense approach. Typically, they divide beliefs about nature into ‘true’ and ‘false’ categories, treating the former as unproblematic in the sense that they derive directly from awareness of reality, whereas the latter must be accounted for by biasing and distorting factors. It is sometimes thought that philosophers should develop criteria which establish the truth or falsity of beliefs, and psychologists and sociologists should account for the falsehoods they expose by unearthing causes of bias.¹ Such theories are more explicit, and a degree less parochial, than common sense approaches but their structure remains the same.

None the less, this particular perspective, treating truth as unproblematic and falsehood as needing causal explanation, can be made the basis of thoroughly sceptical approaches to the incidence of beliefs. We need only cite Bacon, warning against the pervasiveness of the idols which beset the human mind, and Marx asserting the systematic distortion of perception in all class societies, to illustrate how fruitful and iconoclastic the approach has been within two widely varying philosophical traditions. Neither of these two writers found much within their own cultures in the way of valid or true beliefs. Both had views on the distortion of perception and belief which remain influential today. Indeed, most sociological attempts to give causal explanations for beliefs about the world fall more or less into one of these traditions.

Talcott Parsons's analysis of ideology (1959) provides a suitable example. He regards the empirical claims of ideologies as in need of explanation in so far as they deviate from what is valid. In practice, this may only be determined to the extent that science has generated relevant standards of correctness; suspect beliefs must be compared and judged in terms of the available ‘value-science integrate’, which provides a reliable but never complete basis for judgment (1959, p. 295):

Secondary selection and distortion can only be demonstrated by reference to their deviation from the cultural standards of the value-science integrate … once an ideology has been clearly identified by reference to deviation from these cultural standards, … [other] considerations can be brought into play … One is the problem of explaining the sources of ideological selection and distortion.

Other writers have sought to employ the term ‘ideology’ rather differently from Parsons, and have criticized his definition of it. Geertz, for example, opposes Parsons's ‘evaluative’ usage, which permits only incorrect beliefs to be termed ideological, yet it is clear that he too seeks causes when beliefs cease to accord with ‘reality’ (1964, p. 69):

The social function of science vis-à-vis ideologies is first to understand them—what they are, how they work, what gives rise to them—and second to criticize them, to force them to come to terms with [but not necessarily to surrender to] reality,

There is, of course, a very wide range of particular approaches to the explanation of beliefs within the social sciences. Some of them are much more subtle and complex than the preceding. Yet that simple scheme does capture one important element which most theories share. The causal explanation of beliefs correlates with distortion or inadequacy, and hence operates as an implicit condemnation. Beliefs which are valued, for whatever reason, are spared a deterministic account. There are glimmerings of other possibilities, notably in Durkheim, Lukacs and Mannheim, but these remain inadequately explored. The frequently made claim that the sociology of knowledge applies to true and false beliefs alike is not reflected in its concrete achievements. Mannheim, it will be remembered, accepted that mathematics and the natural sciences lay beyond the scope of his theories.

It should be noted at this point that it is only causal elucidation by reference to bias, or interference with normal faculties of reason and cognition, which is held to be inapplicable to true beliefs. Other kinds of causal account remain possible. The origin of some class of true beliefs may be due to the growth of interest in some previously neglected field of experience, or to a set of phenomena being encountered and recorded for the first time. Another kind of acceptable causal account is that which describes the removal of a biasing factor. One might, for example, relate the rise of true beliefs to a weakening of religious or political control within a society. Both these kinds of causal account invoke no disturbances of human cognitive processes.

An interesting variant on the second kind of explanatory scheme can be discerned in the work of Robert Merton, which has been seminal to the sociology of science. Here, it is assumed that truth, or at least an increase in the truth content of beliefs, does follow from the unhampered operation of reason, from proceeding rationally. But it is not obvious that people naturally do proceed rationally, rather than, for example, on the basis of emotion or tradition. For people to operate almost entirely rationally they need to have internalized some non-rational commitment to rationality. Science as an institution maintains and transmits this commitment to truth as revealed by reason. Scientists espousing error not only deviate from the natural indications of their own reason, but from institutional norms as well. Hence the peculiarly high level of rationality in science and the peculiar reliability of its beliefs. (For an excellent discussion of this ‘happy coincidence’ see King, 1971.)

Merton's attribution of special status to scientific beliefs has been accepted without question by most sociologists. Although it would be generally agreed that biasing factors occur, in different degrees, in most institutional contexts, and hence that most belief systems embody some degree of error and distortion, the natural sciences are generally accepted as true and undistorted bodies of knowledge; their methods as impartial, unbiased models of investigation. Thus, science can function as a model of how we would be able to orient ourselves to the world in the absence of our psychological biases and social prejudices. Such has been the enthusiasm for science in Western cultures that statements of its truth have taken on almost the nature of tautologies; science has been allowed to define what we hold to be true about the world. Although it is still possible meaningfully to ask whether parts of science might not be false, in practice, any epistemology which implied that the generality of scientific beliefs were biased or mistaken would be stillborn. Similarly, the scheme for explaining beliefs discussed in the preceding paragraphs would be unable to maintain its credibility without science as an exemplar of true belief.

The idea of truth as a normal, straightforward product of human experience, and that of natural science as a paradigm of a true system of beliefs, have been of considerable importance in academic work. One of their most important consequences has been the conception of scientific knowledge as a growing stockpile of facts. As science is a collection of unchanging truths it can only grow by producing yet more truths to add to the collection. Each truth resembles a brick being incorporated permanently in the structure of a rising building. Science grows by gathering more detail in areas already investigated, and by stumbling across new sets of facts in areas of experience never previously investigated. This conception has been very influential in older approaches to the history of science (Agassi, 1963), and has been implicitly influential in a sociology of science tradition which has given much attention to priority of discovery in science, but little to theoretical controversy.

Another consequence of these ideas is that the existence and distribution of scientific beliefs is readily explained; essentially, they are believed because they are true; people will tend to accept them wherever human cognition and reason are unconstrained (this, of course, fits well with the traditional stress on autonomy within science as an institution). Thus, the sociology of knowledge approach, which seeks to account for the content of beliefs by social causation, will be, a priori, irrelevant to an understanding of scientific belief systems. It is interesting to note how influential this analysis has been within the sociology of knowledge tradition itself, where the study of scientific beliefs has been almost entirely neglected.

Conversely, false beliefs must be identified and accounted for, and the pronouncements of the sciences are ready at hand for use as definitive discriminating criteria. Other belief systems can be compared with science to expose the false elements within them; these can then be given sociological explanations. Such procedures are particularly evident in social anthropology, where they are important in the identification of magical beliefs and practices, mystical beliefs, and ritual and symbolic activities. (Although anthropologists generally talk about the non-efficacy rather than the falsehood of magic they rely on the truth of science to identify non-efficacy. They have no other justification for claiming that ceremonies do not cause the rain which follows, or that chanting does not aid the growth of corn. For interesting discussions of these questions in the context of anthropology see Goody (1961), Beattie (1966, 1970), Jarvie and Agassi (1967).)

It is, of course, the fully accepted beliefs of our current science that are used as touchstones of truth. The history of science presents something of a problem, for it is inescapably apparent that illustrious scientists of the past held views widely at variance with present ones. The situation can be saved by replacing the notion of truth with that of ‘what rationally follows from the available evidence’. This defines unproblematic beliefs uniquely, and all others need explanation as before. Alternatively, the term ‘truth’ may be used implicitly with the above meaning. What matters is that Newton's beliefs, or those of some other hero, are ‘right’ and not in need of causal explanations, whereas other beliefs linked with the same evidence are ‘wrong’, even though Newton's beliefs are not accepted as final today. Science is conceived as a uniquely rational process leading to present truth; that which can be set on a teleologically conceived sequence leading to the present is assumed to be naturally reasonable and not in need of causal explanation. That which lies off the path is aberrant, and interesting to the historian of science only indirectly.

II

Here, then, is what has been a very common way of understanding beliefs. We have one world, with a wide range of conflicting beliefs about it; this is intelligible in terms of one set of true, or uniquely reasonable, beliefs, and a wide range of causes of error and distortion. Today, there is a good deal of dissatisfaction with this point of view, but it remains implicitly influential among many who no longer explicitly argue its merits. Theories such as this one cannot be merely abandoned, they have to be exorcized. Hence it will be useful to examine the grounds which have been provided for accepting the theory, and the difficulties which it has encountered.

Eventually, this will involve some discussion of the work of philosophers, particularly epistemologists and philosophers of science. This will often involve using their ideas in a way which they did not themselves intend. We shall be seeking an account of how beliefs actually can arise. They will generally be intending to justify beliefs as knowledge. An example will serve to make the point.

Suppose a philosopher gives an account of how true or reasonable beliefs arise by citing (say) sensory inputs, memory, induction and deduction. Now imagine a critic who accepts the account, as account, but claims that it is a story about how human beings are deluded by appearances. Truth, he suggests, is only to be approached by shutting out deceptive sensory inputs and meditating on the nature of reality. This might produce further arguments from the philosopher, but the sociologist could safely leave the discussion at this point.²

The sociologist, if he accepts the model suggested earlier, is really only interested in the philosopher's view as a naturalistic account. He wants to know what beliefs arise in the absence of bias, and can be content to leave the issue there. He can call such beliefs true beliefs about the world, but it is their naturalness which really matters to him. Simply to give an account of how cognition and reason generate beliefs naturally, is to justify the sociologist's use of the theory in question. Thus, it will be with an entirely naturalistic interest that philosophers' accounts will be considered, and the following comments will be, accordingly, neither philosophy nor criticisms of philosophy.

Ideally, then, the sociologist needs an account which shows how beliefs arise naturally from cognitive and rational processes, given a particular field of experience. He also needs to know that essentially only one set of beliefs may so arise, or at least that incompatible sets of beliefs may not so arise.³ Thus, he will look to philosophers who argue for the truth of particular sets of beliefs about the world, and account all alternatives as false. Many philosophical approaches have been of this form. Perhaps the best way of classifying them is according to whether they stress the role of the mind in the generation of knowledge, or minimize it and emphasize instead the external constraint of the world itself, or the sensuous given, or the data of experience.

For present purposes, it will suffice to limit discussion to the second kind ...