Representing Reality

Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction

Jonathan Potter

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9780803984110
• eBook ISBN: 9781446234471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

`This is an admirable book which can be recommended to students with confidence, and is likely also to become an indispensable source of reference for those researching fact construction? - Discourse & Society

How is reality manufactured? The idea of social construction has become a commonplace of much social research, yet precisely what is constructed, and how, and even what constructionism means, is often unclear or taken for granted. In this major work, Jonathan Potter offers a fascinating tour of the central themes raised by these questions.

Representing Reality overviews the different traditions in constructionist thought. Points are illustrated throughout with varied and engaging examples taken from newspaper stories, relationship counselling sessions, accounts of the paranormal, social workers? assessments of violent parents, informal talk between programme makers, political arguments and everyday conversations. Ranging across the social and human sciences, this book provides a lucid introduction to several key strands of work that have overturned the way we think about facts and descriptions, including: the sociology of scientific knowledge; conversation analysis and ethnomethodology; and semiotics, post-structuralism and postmodernism.

1

Social Studies of Science

If we are asked to think of something that epitomizes the world of facts, before very long we are likely to consider science. Colossal investments of time, money and people seem to have led to facts which are sharply specified and precisely defined, sustaining the weight of prodigious technological advances. Looked at in this way science becomes a ‘hard case’ against which to test an argument about the constructed nature of facts. If you can succeed in showing that scientific fact generation deviates from idealized models, then you expect that fact generation in other realms is likely to be even further from those models (Collins, 1985). If even white-coated scientists, with all their training and technical back-up, produce facts which are in some way problematic, then what hope for barristers, newspaper reporters or ‘ordinary people’?

This argument makes many assumptions and can easily be viewed as a piece of rather transparent rhetoric used by some social researchers into science to build up the importance of their work. However, with the proviso that we should not take the ‘hard case’ argument too seriously, the social study of science is an excellent place to start examining fact construction. Not only has it been a melting pot for different theories of knowledge generation but it has also led to numerous detailed case studies of the work of scientists. Many of the themes and problems that arise in science recur in other fields of fact making.

Social studies of science have broadly based origins. Although much of it is characterized as the sociology of science, or the sociology of scientific knowledge, in the last two decades one of the notable features of the field is the wide interdisciplinary collaboration among sociologists, philosophers and historians of science, psychologists, linguists and literary analysts. Indeed, the traditional sociology of science, which held sway until the 1970s, now seems striking in its conservatism and its resistance to a thoroughgoing exploration of the social basis and context of facts. It is worth briefly considering the nature of this earlier work to provide a contrast to what came later.

Traditional Sociology of Science

Typically, traditional sociology of science was concerned with two questions. How is science organized as a social institution in such a way that scientists regularly and successfully produce objective facts? And, conversely, what distorting social factors might result in the production of scientific errors? The figure in the sociology of science who was most involved in formulating and attempting to answer these questions was Robert Merton (1970, 1973). I will take his solutions in turn.

Norms and the Scientific Ethos

Merton wanted to understand the way particular social conditions paved the way for the emergence of modern science. He suggested that the rise of Puritanism in the seventeenth century generated an ethos characterized by values such as utility, rationality, empiricism and individualism which was ideally suited for science. Merton argued that, when they conformed to these values, people were starting to view their world more in the manner of modern scientists, and thus starting to act in a way that facilitated the production of objective facts.

In an extension of this argument, Merton suggested that modern science is sustained by a more developed set of puritan values, which he called the norms of science. The argument is that modern science is constrained by four particular institutional imperatives: universalism, communism, disinterestedness and organized scepticism. While historically developed from the Protestant ethos, the role of these imperatives is to generate the conditions which allow facts to be produced in a reliable way. Communism requires that knowledge is freely and openly shared; organized scepticism, that all knowledge claims are assessed for their theoretical coherence and empirical adequacy; disinterestedness and universalism, that everyone’s knowledge claims are assessed by essentially the same impersonal criteria and thus that scientific status is gained through merit rather than patronage or social position.

This account of science has continued to generate a large critical literature (for recent discussion, see, for example, Fuller, 1995; Lynch, 1993). And stories have been told about the origins of science which are strikingly different from Merton’s (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985; Latour, 1993). The major point of interest for us is the way in which the problem of fact production was initially constructed in Merton’s work. Essentially, it started from a received view of the nature of scientific facts – that they are impersonal, empirically warranted, rigorously tested – and then asked what kind of social organization could produce such things. In what has often been called a storybook (Mitroff, 1974) view of science, scientific activity is taken as given, and the problem for the sociologist is to outline a social system that will explain it.

The problem with starting with the storybook view of scientific facts, as many subsequent analysts have pointed out, is that it is just that: a storybook account which does not describe the actual practices of scientists. For example, it is possible to view norms such as universalism very differently, by not treating them as clear-cut constraints, but as symbolic and open-ended resources that have to be interpreted differently according to the context in which they are used (Mulkay, 1976, 1980). Moreover, it is possible to consider scientific accounts which invoke such norms as vocabularies of justification (Mulkay and Gilbert, 1981; Potter, 1984). That is, norms can be seen as one element in the persuasive armoury that scientists draw on when they are arguing with other scientists or attempting to legitimate the practice of science as a whole.

This brings us to the question right at the heart of this current book. How are descriptions made to seem literal and factual? In this case, how can scientists describe their individual activities in a way that presents them as following from the impersonal rule of ‘proper’ science? Before focusing directly on that, however, I will turn to the other major feature of Mertonian sociology of science, which is its concentration on error.

Sociology of Error

Although Merton stressed the importance of the set of norms for guiding the scientific activity of fact finding, he also stressed that scientists do not always conform to these norms. At times there is fraud; scientists may keep results to themselves or pass them only to selected associates; there may also be prejudice against particular individuals or groups. However, these deviations were treated as exceptions – indeed, for Merton they must be exceptions, for without their general effectiveness scientific facts would not have the special status they do.

Merton suggested that these deviations from the norms provide a sociological or psychological way of explaining scientific error. Prejudice against a group of researchers may result in the maintenance of a mistaken theory in the face of a correct alternative, or individual ambition may lead a scientist to falsify findings to fit into a desired model. What is interesting here is the asymmetrical way in which researchers in the Mertonian tradition approached what they construed as true and false belief. False belief could be directly explained through a ‘social fact’ (personality, prejudice and so on) disrupting the proper operation of scientific norms. True belief was dealt with quite differently. For scientists governed by the norm system, true belief arises directly from a careful investigation of how the world is. Put simply, in this view of science, the facts themselves determine truth, while error is explained by processes of a psychological or sociological nature. The consequence of this is that with true belief there was nothing to explain save for how the conditions for proper scientific inquiry came about and how those conditions are undermined. Social researchers only come into their own when they apply their skills in understanding group processes and psychodynamics to understand how false belief came about. This set of assumptions has been most effectively identified and criticized by the sociologist David Bloor (1991).

In effect, then, the tradition represented by Merton and others bracketed off the study of facts themselves and contented itself with examining their sociological context. A full sociological analysis of the content of science – of scientific ideas, theories, methods and so on – was reserved only for falsehoods. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that these sociologists embraced scientists’ own stories about the distinctive and privileged nature of their knowledge and were led to focus their attention on facts that scientists had already discarded as mistaken for one reason or another. Given this self-imposed limit on analysis it is perhaps not surprising that the crucial developments that paved the way to a full social study of scientific facts came from philosophy and history of science rather than sociology.

Philosophy and Scientific Facts

It is important not to give the impression that philosophers and historians of science have been more sceptical about scientific activities than sociologists. For, with some notable exceptions, they have found scientists’ stories as congenial and as self-evident as Merton. Philosophers have been primarily concerned with the justification of scientific knowledge; while historians have been traditionally interested in the thoughts and procedures that led ‘great’ scientists to ‘great’ discoveries. Philosophers in particular have traditionally taken it as given that scientific knowledge is special; and have seen their role as being to show how this special nature can be rigorously demonstrated. However, in their attempts to provide such a demonstration through the detailed exploration of classic scientific episodes, philosophers and historians started to build a radically different view of science. I will focus here on three facets of this novel view: the breakdown of the distinction between observation and theory; the notion that scientific beliefs are bound together in complex networks; and an emphasis on scientific communities and practices.

Observations and Theories

One of the most powerful and bewitching ways of understanding facts has been to think of them as observations of how the world is. Do I see a table there or not? Was that a blip on the photon scintillator or not? Observation has been thought to provide two basic rewards. First, it appeared to offer direct and unmediated access to the world and its features. It is the evidence of one’s own eyes. Second, it seemed to allow for a basic process of corroboration: any observer who takes a particular viewing position ought to be able to see the same thing. Taken together, these appear to allow observation to work as a foundation for knowledge building; whatever else might be going on, we can see some particular properties of the world, and also others can check our observations by substituting themselves for us (Mulkay, 1979).

The idea that facts are a product of observation (the doctrine of empiricism) is so taken for granted, and so fundamental to scientists’ understanding of their current practice, that it is difficult indeed to resist viewing it as selfevident. Indeed, both our scientific and everyday language of knowledge and understanding are permeated with visual metaphors: looking for the truth, seeing the point, viewing it as self-evident, and so on. Yet this idea of knowledge based on observation has a complex historical pedigree. Its self-evidence to us now is not something natural; it has been built up over a long period of time.

For example, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) documented the way that, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle drew on ideas from the judicial process to provide a new way of justifying his scientific claims about air pressure and the existence of a vacuum. They quote from Boyle:

For, though the testimony of a single witness shall not suffice to prove the accused party guilty of murder; yet the testimony of two witnesses, though but of equal credit . . . shall ordinarily suffice to prove a man guilty; because it is thought reasonable to suppose, that, though each testimony single be but probable, yet a concurrence of such probabilities, (which ought in reason to be attributed to the truth of what they jointly tend to prove) may well amount to a moral certainty, i.e., such a certainty, as may warrant the judge to proceed to the sentence of death against the indicted party. (1985: 56)

The truth of the scientific claims is established for Boyle, then, through using a number of witnesses who can concur in their support. It should be noted, however, that not just any witness would do; for Boyle, reliable witnesses were members of the appropriate communities, while ‘Papists and atheists’ were apt to find their stories questioned. Note also that, for Boyle, this way of understanding scientific observation was not self-evident. He had to argue for it and he imported the practice from the more familiar legal setting.

In this century the utility of observation as a foundation for scientific knowledge has started to come under threat from philosophical, historical and sociological analysis (for example, Barnes, 1977; Hacking, 1983; Kuhn, 1970; Rorty, 1980). In questioning the idea that visual experience is somehow a direct and unproblematic facsimile of aspects of the world, philosophers drew on psychological research on visual perception, and in particular work showing the sorts of reversals in how one sees an image that take place with visual illusions along with the role of cultural expectations in categorizing what is seen. We are all familiar with line drawings that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, or as either the top or bottom of a set of steps. Here the visual experience changes, although the drawing stays the same, and this is taken to raise the possibility of fundamental disagreements over the meaning of the same scene (Hanson, 1969; Kuhn, 1970). Cultural expectations are shown to operate in contexts where, for example, people quickly have to identify playing cards from a pack in which the colour of the ace of spades has been changed to red. The tendency is to report the ace of spades as black in line with expectations. The lesson, and the problem for empiricism, is that we may see what we expect rather than just what is there.

These are rather artificial examples and their relation to actual scientific practice is open to question. Practices of observation in the sorts of settings that scientists actually work in are much more complex than these simple, isolated visual exposures imply (for example, Goodwin, 1995; Lynch and Woolgar, 1990; Knorr Cetina and Aman, 1990). For example, Michael Lynch (1994) notes the way in astronomy the term observation serves as a rather loose device for collecting together a range of actions such as setting up the position of a telescope, connecting a particular sensor to it, building up patterns of dots on an oscilloscope, converting a series of these into a chart and then gaining the support of colleagues over a particular interpretation. Unlike the snap judgement made of a single projected image, observation is ‘temporally extended, socially and equipmentally distributed, and contingently fated’ (1994: 138). Nevertheless, the sorts of psychological examples used by Kuhn and others worked as powerful rhetorical counters to the idea that what is seen is determined by the object, or even its image on the retina.

The problem with the idea that perception provides a firm and unproblematic foundation for knowledge becomes more apparent when we consider that, whatever the images on scientists’ retinas, when observations enter the currency of science they do so in terms of utterances or some form of written discourse. Even at its simplest this involves some form of categorization; it is not just seeing what is before the eyes but seeing it as something; not just a particular colour sensation but a descriptive choice: red, brown with golden speckles, or whatever. And in science, as with ‘common sense’, our categories are not some neutral and abstract set of descriptive pigeon-holes; they are derived from theories and broad cosmologies. Philosophers such as Mary Hesse (1974) have argued that scientists work with descriptive terms – mass, mitochondria, muscle fibre – that presuppose a whole set of theoretical assumptions; and if we try to unpack these assumptions, and ground them in terms of other observations, these too are theory dependent (see Chalmers, 1992; Mulkay, 1979, for useful summaries of these arguments).

In addition to this range of problems with observation there is another issue which is increasingly apparent with modern science. Much of the time scientific ‘observations’ (and, as I have noted, this term starts to become increasingly misleading) are dependent on intricate recording apparatus such as electron microscopes, oscilloscopes and bubble chambers whose workings are themselves dependent on a range of elaborate theories which are presupposed in every observation (Feyerabend, 1975). Take Karin Knorr Cetina’s (1996) ethnographic study of the use of a particle detector in high energy collider experiments at CERN. The detector is immensely complex, and the physicists spend much more of their time trying to make sense of its behaviour than they do looking for the hypothesized and almost unimaginably small particles that are their research topic. They run the huge equipment over and over again to find out about its blemishes and idiosyncrasies. The term observation here stands only in the loosest relation to research practices in this community.

The Web of Belief

Another facet of this critique of empiricism considers the way scientific statements or beliefs are connected together in a network. In the early part of the twentieth century the philosopher of science Pierre Duhem argued that scientific claims were never evaluated purely in relation to the findings of particular experiments. Instead, claims are evaluated by considering a whole range of issues, including experimental findings, theories, ideas about method, statistics and so on (Duhem, 1962). For example, if a finding is consistent with a well-established body of theory, it is more likely to be accepted without discussion than if it is thought to contradict an established theory. An ‘observation’ of ‘dark matter’ in space is more likely to be rigorously repeated if it is seen as contradicting basic postulates of modern astrophysics; astronomers will search for alternative interpretations that sustain the coherence of their general account of the universe. In contrast, an observation that meshes with a large body of theory may be accepted with relatively little discussion.

In the 1950s, the American philosopher Will...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Social Studies of Science
• 2 Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
• 3 Semiology – Post-structuralism – Postmodernism
• 4 Discourse and Construction
• 5 Interests and Category Entitlements
• 6 Constructing Out-there-ness
• 7 Working up Representations
• 8 Criticizing Facts
• Appendix
• References
• Index