Scientific knowledge

The purpose of science is to obtain scientific knowledge. That is to say, scientific work is directed towards acquiring a special type of information, either for immediate practical use or for publication in textbooks, encyclopaedias, learned journals, etc., under various headings such as physics, chemistry or biology. A typical item of scientific information might be, say: ‘The benzene molecule contains six carbon atoms arranged in a ring’. This is clearly somewhat different from the sort of knowledge usually to be found in novels, law reports, sermons, or political manifestos – for example, that ‘it is love that makes the world go round’, or ‘the greater the truth, the greater the libel’.

But what are the distinguishing features of scientific knowledge as such? This traditional philosophical question is important because it may decisively affect our actions to know that a particular piece of information is ‘scientifically’ warranted (cf. §16.3). It is also one of the key questions about science as a human activity, for it asks about the fundamental objectives of research.

Towards a social psychology of science

Science is what scientists do. The scientific life is notorious for the demands it makes on the mind and on the spirit. The social psychology of science is thus an essential metascientific discipline, along with philosophy, sociology, politics and history.

The traditional academic ethos (§6.3) lays great stress on the individuality of scientists, and thus emphasizes the distinctive mental and emotional traits that tend to separate them from the mass of people and from one another. The naïve history of science is a chronicle of heroic or saintly personalities who have triumphed through their innate abilities and virtues. More seriously and soberly, psychologists have tried to delineate or discover the personality types that are characteristic of scientists in general, or of scientists in particular disciplines, such as theoretical physics or experimental biology.

Unfortunately, these investigations have not proved very conclusive. Mature scientists, and even science students, are not, presumably, ‘just like everybody else’, but careful empirical research on their personality traits has not provided reliable insights that are superior to everyday ‘folk’ understanding of these matters.

Science as an instrument

Up to this point, we have been looking at science from the ‘inside’: now we take an entirely different standpoint, and consider science from the ‘outside’. The external sociology of science considers it simply as a social institution, embedded in society, and performing certain functions for society as a whole, on a par with other institutions associated with law, religion, political authority and so on. For the moment we shall treat science as a ‘black box’, whose inner workings are of no significance except to ensure that it can perform the functions assigned to it. Eventually (§12.5) we shall reopen this box, and reconsider the internal sociology and philosophy of science from an externalist point of view.

Science is valued by ordinary citizens, by powerful individuals such as politicians and company directors, and by corporate bodies such as commercial firms and government agencies, primarily for its use. It is fostered mainly as a resource to be applied to the furtherance of individual and/or collective activities whose goals are not specifically the advancement of knowledge. This conception of science as essentially an instrument for achieving a variety of goals other than the acquisition of knowledge is so widespread and so dominant in our society that it overshadows all other conceptions of its social function.

Costing the benefits

The purpose of R & D is to provide benefits. But how should the value of these benefits be assessed? It is all very well to say that research on insecticides has resulted in improved crops of bananas, but was the improvement worth the cost of the research? Research costs real money and its outcome is very uncertain. It might have been more profitable to invest the money in a new plantation. Without some rough estimate of the relative balance of costs and benefits, the use of science as an instrument of policy (§12.1) is based solely on blind faith.

The inputs to R & D can easily be quantified in money terms. The cost of employing researchers and providing them with suitable apparatus, buildings, technical staff, telephones, travel to conferences, and so on would normally appear as line items in the financial accounts of the corporation or agency supporting the laboratory.

Government support for science

There is nothing new about State support for science. From the seventeenth century onwards, scientists have been directly employed as government officials to chart the land, the seas and the skies, to check weights, measures and coins, to supervise the manufacture of dangerous chemicals and explosives and many other technical jobs. The industrialization of society as a whole has merely enlarged the responsibilities of every government for the welfare and security of its citizens, and correspondingly increased the scale and sophistication of the scientific work that has to be done by the government apparatus (§10.6).

Government patronage of ‘pure’ science also goes back a long way into history. In Britain, the Royal Society and other learned societies were institutionally independent of the State, but were sufficiently close to the centres of authority to extract occasional subsidies for major scientific projects (§10.5). The absolute monarchies of France, Prussia and Russia went much further, by setting up national academies whose members were paid a personal stipend to do full-time research (§10.3). Whatever the level of financial patronage it received, pure science was valued by the State as a cultural ornament, a sign of national superiority, and as a potential source of economic and military benefit.

Epistemology

Scientific knowledge takes a variety of forms, from the most obvious descriptive facts to the most abstruse and speculative theories. Yet it is often treated as a single body of information, of peculiarly high credibility. The fundamental concern of epistemology is how much of this knowledge can be considered true, or how firmly it should be believed.

The history of science should dispel any notion that all science is true. There are innumerable cases of elementary errors of observation which were long held to be facts.

Science and the sociology of knowledge

The Fleck–Kuhn account of scientific change (§7.5) suggests a more radical approach to our whole subject. Instead of starting with a philosophical perspective (chapters 2 and 3), which emphasizes the cognitive aspects of science, we should perhaps have taken a sociological point of view from the beginning. In the past decade, academic metascience has been greatly influenced by a research programme which looks on science as primarily a social institution. This programme stems from the more general discipline of the sociology of knowledge, which used to be concerned mainly with the place of social-science knowledge in the culture of a particular type of society, but which is now being turned on the natural sciences and their associated technologies.

A programme of this kind is clearly implicit in what has already been said in previous chapters. The historical course of development in any field of science has a significant social component. The rate of scientific change, for example, is strongly influenced by the disciplinary structure of the scientific community, and not simply by the scientific ideas that happen to be current.

Different aspects of science

What is ‘Science’? Our whole approach to the subject of this book depends on how we might be tempted to answer this question. But it is really much too grand a question to be answered in a few words. Conventional definitions of science tend to emphasize quite different features, depending upon the point of view. Each of the metascientific disciplines – the history of science, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science, the psychology of creativity, the economics of research, and so on – seems to concentrate upon a different aspect of the subject, often with quite different policy implications.

For example, if science is defined as ‘a means of solving problems’, this emphasizes its instrumental aspect. Science is thus viewed as closely connected with technology, and hence an appropriate subject for economic and political study. The implication that this instrument should be used wisely and well puts it into the open arena of social conflict.

Another definition of science – as ‘organized knowledge’ – emphasizes its archival aspect. Information about natural phenomena is acquired by research, organized into coherent theoretical schemes, and published in books and journals.

‘R & D’ in ‘S & T’

Science and Technology – perhaps one should say, ‘the sciences and their associated technologies’ – together constitute a major social institution based upon the systematic generation, accumulation and utilization of knowledge. This knowledge is very diverse. Some of it is directly useful; some of it appears totally divorced from human affairs. Some of it is symbolically codified in the form of experimental data, theoretical formulae, solutions to standard problems, therapeutic protocols and engineering blueprints: some of it is essentially tacit, and only becomes manifest through expert technical work (§15.4). Much of the knowledge that is put to use has simply accumulated in the scientific and technical archives, over a period of many years. As in the past, a considerable amount of formal technological knowledge is continually being produced in day-to-day practice; in clinical medicine, for example, any novel course of treatment may be considered something of an experiment.

The immense social dynamism of modern ‘S & T’ comes from its aggressive employment of the social device of research – that is to say, systematic activity undertaken to obtain information or understanding that goes beyond established knowledge or accepted practice.

Beyond the instrumental mode

Scientific research is undertaken nowadays primarily for its eventual material benefits (§9.1). For this reason, our discussion of the external social relations of science has focused almost exclusively on its instrumental connections through technology. But the influence of scientific knowledge and ways of thought is far wider than the contributions of R & D to industry, medicine, agriculture, war and other typical human pursuits (§12.1). In this final chapter, therefore, we consider science as a general cultural resource, with significant societal effects beyond those directly due to technical change.

This is a large and diffuse metascientific theme, which can only be treated very schematically. Science is only one amongst the many elements that go into the making of contemporary culture. These other elements – psychic, political, philosophical, humanistic, aesthetic, religious, etc. – have to be appreciated in their own right and not looked at solely through eyes that have already been ‘blinded by science’. Scientism (§3.9) is not just a philosophical doctrine; it has its sociological, political and ethical manifestations, which are equally misleading and dangerous.

Recognition

Scientists make ‘contributions’ to knowledge: what do they get in return? Nowadays most scientists are paid a salary to do research, either on a full-time basis or as a normal part of their academic duties (§10.4). From the point of view of an economist, they are simply professional employees, earning a living by their labour. A psychologist, on the other hand, might emphasize the peculiar personal gratifications of research and discovery, for which there is ample testimony in the autobiographical writings of (mostly successful) scientists. In practice, scientists (like other people) respond to a complex mixture of professional and vocational incentives, which arise from the social environment in which they live and work. Sociologically speaking, academic scientists get both their psychological and material inducements primarily through membership of the community of other scientists. Satisfactory research performance earns recognition within the scientific community, which is usually linked to more obvious rewards from society at large.

Scientific recognition takes a variety of forms, graded to the various stages of a successful career. At the very lowest level, an academic scientist scarcely exists unless his or her work has been published in a reputable scientific journal (§4.4).

In Teaching and Learning about Science and Society (Cambridge University Press, 1980), I argued at length that everybody ought to learn something about science, but that science is a large and open-ended topic, which needs to be treated in various ways at various stages of educational maturity. At school level, the most natural approach is through case studies of the place of science and technology in modern life, as we presented them, for example, in the SISCON in Schools units (published in 1983 by the Association for Science Education and Basil Blackwell). For slightly older students, a conception of science as a social institution can be built up from historical case studies, along the lines of the lectures I wrote up as The Force of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1976).

The present work goes one level deeper. It is addressed to students – and other diligent readers – who want to discover, beneath the historical and contemporary particulars, a more general framework of principle. They want to understand what is being said about science by the historians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, economists and political scientists who have been making such notable contributions to ‘science studies’ these last few years. They need access to the scholarly literature in these various fields, both for its intrinsic interest and as a possible guide to action in scientific research, in industrial management, in political administration, and in public affairs.

Science as an instrument of policy

As we have already remarked (§9.1), to the eyes of the general public, science is simply one of the components of ‘science and technology’, which is primarily an instrument in the hands of society. This instrument can be used to do whatever society wants, over a very wide range. These wants are impossible to list in full, and have very varied sources of motivation, such as:

In the past half century, the vague Victorian belief in science as a source of ‘progress’ has been transformed into an established doctrine.

Societal demand

Even though the differences between ’science’ and ‘technology’ (§9.7) between ‘research’ and ‘development’ (§10.1) and between ‘pure science’ and ‘applied science’ (§10.7) have never been easy to define in principle, an institutional distinction between the academic and industrial modes of research was maintained in practice throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In the past few decades, however, this gap has been steadily closing. Some metascientific observers follow Jerome Ravetz in describing this process as the industrialization of science, implying that the industrial mode of research has become dominant. The evidence is, however, that a more general transformation is taking place, to a new collectivized form in which characteristics of both the academic and industrial modes are intermingled.

This transformation is often supposed to have come about solely by societal forces acting on science from the ‘outside’; as we shall see (§11.2) it is also a natural result of its own internal development. The external influences are obvious. The demand for more and more R & D to meet societal needs (§9.1) has not only had the effect of expanding industrial science on a very large scale: it has also had an immense effect on the scale and style of academic science.

Behaving as a scientist

Academic science is not formally organized as a whole. It is not governed by a bureaucratic hierarchy, like an army or an industrial firm (§5.6). It does not have a constitution, a charter, or an official book of regulations. In principle, it is simply a community of individuals, each of whom has a permanent tenure of an academic post as a teacher or researcher. To adopt traditional political metaphors, academic scientists are like free citizens of a democratic republic of learning, or like a community of farmers, each secure on his own holding.

And yet this community is not a mere collection of individuals. Although it does not have an overall organizational plan, it is structured around a number of formal institutions, such as learned societies, and informal institutions, such as invisible colleges. It is spanned by an elaborate communication system which follows standard practices in the management of publications and archives, regulates the roles of authors, editors, and referees, and has strict conventions on the style and format of papers (§4.5). The procedures by which scientists are ‘recognized’ (§5.1) are less systematic, but are just as elaborate.

The archival literature of science

The basic principle of academic science is that the results of research must be made public (§1.5). Whatever scientists think or say individually, their discoveries cannot be regarded as belonging to scientific knowledge until they have been reported to the world and put on permanent record. The fundamental social institution of science is thus its system of communication.

How can one get to know what is known to science? In its most primitive form, scientific knowledge is to be found in the primary literature of science. This is a vast collection of ‘articles’, ‘papers’, ‘research reports’ and similar documents usually in a very conventional style and format that dates back to the origins of modern science in the late seventeenth century. A primary scientific communication is an original contribution to knowledge, by a named author or authors, normally published as a paper or article, of limited length (up to 50 pages, say) in a periodical, or journal devoted to a specific scientific subject.