Introduction to the distinctiveness issue

‘Science has transformed modern society. Whether one approves or disapproves of the way society exploits the power it provides, science appears to be distinctive in its revolutionary force.’

Are these platitudes correct? Is science distinctive? Is it science that is distinctive, or the technology to which it is so closely linked, or the economic systems in which it is embedded? Perhaps it is not the whole of science that is distinctive, but some limited part? Perhaps there is an error in the assumption that science is the kind of stable thing which could be distinctive? Perhaps science is a highly variable social construction which is renegotiated differently on each occasion?

I will try to show in this chapter that the question of what, if anything, is distinctive about science, is important and worth probing deeply. Our more casual answers are not good enough, because they are shaped by unthinking assumptions. We will come up with different answers if we concentrate on science as established knowledge, or on science as a process for producing new knowledge. We will see our problem quite differently if we idealise to the explicit rationality of the philosophical tradition or if we look at science in relation to one of the specific contexts in which it has a practical significance.

The practical significance of the question of the distinctiveness of science is an issue of science policy. Its importance is easily demonstrated in an age in which more economic and manpower resources are continually requested for science on the grounds that the investment makes good economic sense.

From relativism through scepticism to a modest realism

At the end of the last chapter, some of the ideas that pull us towards relativism were discussed. Perhaps we are locked in the world of ideas, from which we can never escape, because whatever we claim wider reality to be, we can never get beyond the web of symbolic representations to that which our language seeks to represent. Relativism is a kind of scepticism about what we can know of objective reality. In its extreme form, ontological relativism, the claim is that reality is nothing but our shared social construction. In this chapter, a correction to this view is proposed. It is argued that there is a route from relativism to realism. By concentrating on active rather than passive experience of the world, the reader will be led to a minimal realism that is very hard even for sceptics and cynics to dismiss persuasively. On this basis, bolder realist positions may be constructed, even while conceding the argument that what is conventionally called knowledge is the outcome of construction processes that are social as well as individual.

The core of the argument of this chapter is that the inclusion of a minimal conception of reality (linked to experience of our own actions and interactions) makes a great deal of difference to the normal kinds of analysis in science studies. Most such studies, and especially those after Kuhn (1970a, originally 1962) clearly separate reality as constructed by the scientific practitioners under study from reality as constructed by the commentator.

The problem: understanding natural science as cognitive activity

Science is a victim of its own success. It has changed the world into one which judges more harshly the manner in which knowledge is created, maintained, and applied. Scientific knowledge becomes simultaneously easier to create and to criticise. We now live in a world which appears to have reduced the incalculable dangers of what once lay outside the horizons of our knowledge, but has made more worryingly obvious the risks inherent in our knowledgeguided actions. Although science is continually eliminating past errors while increasing the precision and range of its knowledge, it also undergoes infrequent revolutions which abandon earlier apparent certainties. The increasing power given to us by science to adapt the world to our desires is not accompanied by equal knowledge of the best way to implement such power. Indeed, science makes it easier to appreciate the problems that the power to change things has already produced. It is no wonder that people are increasingly ambivalent towards science. Perhaps it is a self-limiting system, the repeated operation of which cumulates problems it cannot handle.

And yet science still provides hope for the future. Within its limits, it is a powerful generator of new understanding, of resources for dealing with problems that threaten to overpower us. Indeed, we are now locked into a form of life that is only sustainable by the continuing growth of scientific knowledge. We cannot go back to any of our romantically reconstructed pre-scientific pasts without some intervening catastrophe to cut back our material expectations and our population.

In this chapter, I will consider knowledge-producing activities which are claimed by their proponents to be scientific. The best practices are properly scientific, the worst are pseudo-scientific; in between lies a continuum from good science to bad science.

Our immediate judgements of pseudo-science are very often prejudgements, coming before careful open and rational deliberation. To turn the prejudgements into explicitly reasoned judgements involves identifying and scrutinising many hidden issues. Consider, for example, your own thinking in evaluating an area of popular belief which you are not inclined to take seriously. It might be the idea that putting a pyramid over a razor blade will keep it sharp indefinitely (pyramidology*), or that the Bermuda Triangle* poses a genuine danger to Caribbean shipping, or that psychic surgery really does involve removal of internal organic material, leaving the skin unbroken. If you dismiss any such case with a chuckle, rather than after careful investigation, you are presumably relying on the feeling that the very idea is ridiculous; you are, perhaps, fitting in with the conventional establishment attitude, which is to scorn such things. Your attitudes are not the result of your own considered thought, and it may be quite difficult to turn them into explicitly reasoned conclusions.

If our distinction between good science and inferior or pseudo-science is not just to be a label for value judgements with no explicit rational basis, we should identify criteria which can be applied to any case without prejudgement to help us come to clear conclusions. The criteria offered in this chapter will be developed further in the next chapter, which offers a theory of the pathologies of science.

Introduction

In this chapter I will present the argument central to the structure of the book, that the knowledge that is continually being constructed and reconstructed in science is usefully studied through the interaction of a hierarchy of levels of cognitive activity.

The post-Cartesian tradition of modern philosophy made knowledge a judgement of the individual mind. But knowledge is expressed in terms of the social instrument, language. There is a competing pull between analysing knowledge in terms of the individual and with respect to communities who share a language and a form of life. In societies as complex as ours, it is not always appropriate for social analyses to suppose that knowledge is constructed in large language-sharing communities Modern science studies seeks to understand science by drawing apart in space and time the local practices which constitute it. The present argument is that it is also helpful to distinguish a series of levels at which the nature of working scientific knowledge can be analysed. The knowledge held at each of these levels is shaped by the cognitive activity of that level. These levels are to be thought of as quasiautonomous, at least in the short term. They are affected, but not fully determined by, what goes on at other levels.

Discovery of the pulsar

Consider the following story, an idealised version of the discovery of the first pulsar. In July 1967, a newly constructed radio telescope operated by the Cambridge radio astronomy group began systematic recordings of the signals it received from the heavens.

Introduction

The nature of the practice of science is changing along with its content. In the past, the changes have been on a curve of continuing growth, as perceived successes are repeated and society finds new uses for science. In the present day, the main driving force is economic investment in science as an overhead on science-based technologies. As a result, knowledge creation is now mostly in the context of knowledge use. With the recent decline in its rate of expansion, science now grows too slowly for new component activities simply to be added to established ones. Change involves loss as well as addition. In addition to the practical limits to growth, the problems produced by sciencebased technologies are providing negative feedback. Science struggles to adjust itself to deflect criticism and loss of support.

Our understanding of science, then, should take into account its changing nature. The present-day preoccupation with short-term economic value is producing effects disliked by both scientists and their public. Should we, perhaps, try to influence the way science changes?

All the options involve change. We cannot move back. A more slowly changing pre-scientific society could not sustain the science-based technology on which our survival at present population levels depends. Since past science was always in a state of exponential growth, to keep science in its traditional form would involve it growing further in a society which cannot grow and change fast enough to accommodate it. To keep science as an activity without growth would change it into a more conservative practice, no longer affected by the influx of so many young people who have much to gain by challenging old dogmas.

Introduction

Traditional philosophical theories of scientific method concentrated on explicit systems of rationality and left out reference to the informal individual and social rationality which sustains them. The sociological turn in science studies instead made science into just another form of social life, the local complexities of which can be described and understood in the same terms as any other social practice. This chapter seeks to provide a theory of how science combines explicit rationality with individual and social informal rationality. The coherent fragments of explicit rationality which science has actually produced are provisional drafts of current philosophical ideals of knowledge. They are generated as the output of a nested set of cyclical activities. The cycles go on at every cognitive level, the results affecting subsequent repetitions. The knowledge content of science is continually being updated and revised by the interaction of the various loops of information flow. The theory moves goes beyond description of the epistemological practice of science into the construction of a ideal account that might also function prescriptively.

If we look at science as a whole, we may idealise the process in terms of the general form of a cycle which moves around the following stages:

1. Matching factual claims to reality.

2. Matching theories to factual claims.

3. Reconciling theories in networks of understanding.

4. Reworking reality in the image of our understanding.

Every cognitive level is (or should eventually be) involved in this cycle. The process is sustained within a complex social system and is driven through its changes by (socially acquired) individual motivation.

Alchemy

An ancient art. It thrived in Alexandria in Hellenistic times, continued in Arab culture, and came to Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its primary concern was with the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm, so that knowledge of the transformations of material substances could uncover universal secrets. It became most famous for the search for the transmutations of base metals into gold and for the alkahest, or universal solvent. Its application to medicine (iatrochemistry) thrived in the sixteenth century. Its ideas were carried on after the seventeenth century especially in mystical cults, and its knowledge of chemical manipulation was a direct precursor of chemistry. Isaac Newton was among those in the seventeenth century who studied alchemical manuscripts and did experiments in the attempt to uncover secrets of the tradition (Dobbs, 1975, 1991). Its critics pointed out that its chief insights were expressed in ambiguous allegorical language, so that later alchemists were never quite sure what their precursors had actually achieved.

Anti-fluoridation

In the 1940s, American public health authorities judged that naturally occurring fluorides in local water supplies may be reducing dental decay. A test was set up in which fluoride was artificially added to a town's water supply. It was so obviously successful that untreated towns being used as ‘controls’ soon adopted the same water treatment, bringing the test to a premature end.

It is difficult to be precise about just how the emergence of the psychological sciences in the nineteenth century was linked up to other political and social events. This difficulty is compounded by the problem of grasping what actually does differentiate these sciences from those religious, philosophical, and medical discourses on human mental life which preceded them. In this chapter I suggest that these issues become clearer when placed in the context of ‘governmentality’. The national political territories in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were traversed by programs for the governing of increasing areas of social and economic life in order to achieve desired objectives: security for wealth and property; continuity, efficiency, and profitability of production; public tranquillity, moral virtue, and personal responsibility. These programs were not unified by their origin in the state, or by the class allegiances of the forces that promoted them or the aims they set themselves. As we shall see later, they were as heterogeneous in conception and support as they were diverse in their strategies and mechanisms. What did characterize these programs, however, was the belief in the necessity and possibility of the management of particular aspects of social and economic existence using more or less formalized means of calculation about the relationships between means and ends: what should be done, in what ways, in order to achieve this or that desirable result.

The idea of ‘the self’ has entered a crisis that may well be irreversible. Social theorists have written countless obituaries of the image of the human being that animated our philosophies and our ethics for so long: the universal subject, stable, unified, totalized, individualized, interiorized. For some accounts, in particular those inspired by psychoanalysis, this image was always ‘imaginary’: humans never existed, never could exist in this coherent and unified form – human ontology is necessarily of a creature riven at its very core. For others, this ‘death of the subject’ is itself a real historical event: the individual to which this image of the subject corresponded emerged only recently in a limited time-space zone, and has now been swept away by cultural change. In the place of the self, new images of subjectivity proliferate: as socially constructed, as dialogic, as inscribed upon the surface of the body, as spatialized, decentered, multiple, nomadic, created in episodic recognition-seeking practices of self-display in particular times and places.

The hypotheses that I have put forward in this book should certainly be located within this problem space. However, I have also tried to address myself to a reciprocal set of problems concerning ‘the self’: the peculiar fact that at the very moment when this image of the human being is pronounced passé by social theorists, regulatory practices seek to govern individuals in a way more tied to their ‘selfhood’ than ever before, and the ideas of identity and its cognates have acquired an increased salience in so many of the practices in which human beings engage.

How should one do the history of psychology? I would like to propose a particular approach to this issue, a critical history of the relations between the psychological, the governmental, and the subjective. A critical history is one that helps us think about our nature and our limits, about the conditions under which that which we take for truth and reality has been established. Critical history disturbs and fragments, it reveals the fragility of that which seems solid, the contingency of that which seemed necessary, the mundane and quotidian roots of that which claims lofty nobility. It enables us to think against the present, in the sense of exploring its horizons and its conditions of possibility. Its aim is not to predetermine judgment, but to make judgment possible.

Psychology and its histories

The psychological sciences – psychology, psychiatry, and the other disciplines that designate themselves with the prefix ‘psy’ – are certainly not devoid of a historical consciousness. Many weighty tomes tell the story of the long development of the scientific study of psychological functioning, normal and pathological. Almost every psychiatric or psychological textbook appears obliged to include a historical chapter or review, however desultory, of the topics under discussion. These texts repeatedly tell us the story of the development of the psychological sciences in similar terms: they have a long past but a short history. A long past: a continuous tradition of speculation concerning the nature, vicissitudes, and pathologies of the human soul, virtually coextensive with the human intellect itself.

Over the past half century, in the liberal, democratic, and capitalist societies of what we used to call the West, the stewardship of human conduct has become an intrinsically psychological activity. Psychological experts, psychological vocabularies, psychological evaluations, and psychological techniques have made themselves indispensable in the workplace and the marketplace, in the electoral process and the business of politics, in family life and sexuality, in pedagogy and child rearing, in the apparatus of law and punishment, and in the medico-welfare complex. Further, it is increasingly to psychologists that the citizens of such societies look when they seek to comprehend and surmount the problems that beset the human condition – despair, loss, tragedy, conflict – living their lives according to a psychological ethic. The rise of ‘the psychological’ is thus a phenomenon of considerable importance in attempting to understand the forms of life that we inhabit at the close of the twentieth century.

A number of authors have documented the expansion of the psychological domain, and have accounted for it in different ways (e.g., Lash, 1979, 1984; Bourdieu, 1984; Baritz, 1960; M. Rose, 1978; Rieff, 1966). Whatever the undoubted strengths of these accounts, they have tended to see psychology – and the psy knowledges and devices more generally – as little more than signs or effects of other, more fundamental, social or cultural changes, and indeed have tended to view these events as symptoms of a more general cultural malaise.

In the summer of 1989, an advertisement began to appear regularly on the front page of one of Britain's leading serious newspapers. It was for a private organization called Self-Helpline and offered a range of telephone numbers for people to ring for answers to some apparently troubling questions. There were “Emotional Problems” from “Dealing with infidelity” to “Overcoming shyness.” There were “Parenthood Problems” from “My child won't sleep” to “I feel like hitting my baby.” There were “Work Problems” such as “Am I in the right job” or “Becoming a supervisor.” And there were “Sexual Problems” from “Impotence” to “Better orgasms.” For the cost of a telephone call, callers could obtain “self-help step by step answers to dealing with your problems and improving the quality of your life.” They were assured that “all messages are provided by our professionals qualified in medicine, counseling and business.” And, the calls could be made anonymously, without the fear of being traced: it appeared that the problem, and its solution, was entirely a matter for one's self (Self-Helpline, 1989).

In the context of the major cultural shifts taking place in Britain and many other countries in the 1980s, the rise to political power of governments adopting the rationalities of the ‘new right’ and espousing the logics of neoliberalism in their reforms of macroeconomic policy, organizational culture, social welfare, and the responsibilities of citizens, this little advertisement may seem trivial.