Inventions in Sociology: Studies in Science and Society 9811681694, 9789811681691

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Inventions In Sociology Studies in Science and Society Sal Restivo

Inventions in Sociology

Sal Restivo

Inventions in Sociology Studies in Science and Society

Sal Restivo Ridgewood, NY, USA

ISBN 978-981-16-8169-1    ISBN 978-981-16-8170-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements: Standing on the Shoulders of Social Networks

For many years on relevant occasions I have quoted the sixteenth century Flemish scientist Simon Stevin’s comment, “Wonder en is geen wonder,” literally “Miracle is no miracle.” Materialistic, critical realism, not magic, mysticism, or awe should be our default position when facing the world and each other. And this has been my default position for as long as I can remember. And yet my life and career look like miracles. There are a few occasions on which I was involved in actual or near accidents that could have killed me. On the other hand, my social class background hardly promised a successful international scholarly career. That eventuality came to be on account of the particular set of social networks my life slowly unfolded into and through. The power of those networks to propel me overcame those networks that caused and sustained my lack of ambition, competitiveness, and hunger for power. I have not had a taste for or sought means for self-publicity and self-marketing. I never showed any interest in the pursuit of financial success. I have not been intense in my pursuits. I followed paths of least resistance designed to ensure my survival, minimize relationships with “bosses,” avoid or minimize being judged and judging, minimize pain and maximize pleasure. I wanted time, not money; I wanted to be invisible to the powers that be. These “I’s” are the grammatical illusions left behind by my travels through the networks of my life. This book puts into words a voice in the wilderness. I certainly know that I have a certain visibility in the fields of STS and sociology. Nonetheless, I often feel like a young weightlifter I coached in college. The City College of New York weightlifting team and club had won numerous national and v

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individual championships and had the highest GPA of any club, academic or sport, on the campus CCNY in the 1960s. One of our members, Lenny Susskind, went on to become one of the founders of string theory. In any case, my protégé and I were attending a competition and the young man saw Joe Puleo, a member of the American Olympic weightlifting team. He went up to him, reached out to shake his hand and said, “You’re Joe Puleo, aren’t you?” And Puleo said, “Yes. And who are you?” “Oh,” my young friend said, “I’m nobody.” I realize I’m not exactly “nobody,” so perhaps a more appropriate story is that of the great jazz pianist, Oscar Peterson. Peterson remembers that after first hearing the pioneering jazz pianist Art Tatum, he stopped playing for two months and experienced crying fits at night. After hearing Tatum, Les Paul and Everett Barksdale stopped playing the piano altogether. and switched to the guitar. After listening to lectures by some of the leading sociologists and anthropologists while in graduate school I thought of switching to the accordion, guitar, and/or piano, and I probably should have. And reading books by people like Michael Taussig reminded me of Peterson listening to Tatum. But the more I got to know the people in my field and other disciplines, the less intimidated I felt. The fact that I intimidate myself whenever I look through my own book, The. Social Relations of Physics, Mysticism, and Mathematics, is some sort of insight into why I followed Peterson’s example and not Les Paul’s. I’ve had many opportunities in earlier acknowledgements to name the key nodes in the social networks whose shoulders I stand on. The list here is not inclusive and signals only some of those who come to mind in this moment in these waning years of a life of the mind. In no particular order, Randall Collins (our collaborations were fluid and intuitive), Julia Loughlin (a sociologist to conjure with), Daryl Chubin (an easy friendship and easy collaborations), Leslie Brothers (who tutored me in all things mind and brain in the 1990s on email and over breakfasts, lunches, and dinners overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica), Jens Høyrup (an exceptional host at his apartments in Copenhagen and Rome, and an enormous humane intelligence), Jean Paul Van Bendegem (the scholar’s scholar), Bart Van Kerkhove, Karen François, Rik Pinxten, Michele Pieters (a dream and a nightmare), Karin Knorr-Cetina (a supportive Eve from the moment she offered me a bite of her apple in 1976), Steve Woolgar (the pointillist to my cavalier, the odd couple of STS), Susan Cozzens,

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Nick Mullins, Tom Gieryn, Leigh Star (the skies darkened forever when she left us too early), Wenda Bauchspies (she surprised the academy as much as it surprised her), Jennifer Croissant (born to the academy but no slave to it), Cliff Hooker (occasionally made me feel like Tatum made Peterson feel), Joe Needham (my interlocutor on the Big Problem of why science emerged in the West and not in China), David Bohm (who I was privileged to discuss quantum mechanics and relativity with in my living room a couple of times a year), Bernard Barber, Jerry Ravetz, Dirk Struik, Elizabeth Fee, Rita Arditti, Hilary Rose, Marcel LaFollette, Eleanor Dunn (now E.  Mac Commara), Don Campbell, Milton Rokeach, Sylvan Tomkins, Everett Rogers (with whom I shared some of the most civilized conversations on science and communication), Mônica Mesquita (she forced me to “pay attention”), Ubiratan D’Ambrosio, Leone Burton, Fiona Wallis, Paola Valero, Paul Ernest, Peter Denton, Sarah Voss, Mary Douglas (one of my virtual teachers and one of the kindest and most generous academics I ever engaged with), Margaret Mead (a world class kibitzer), Nancey Murphy (who warmly indulged my godless inquiries), Linnda Caporael (a dinner companion to conjure with), Shirley Gorenstein, Ellen Esrock, John Schumacher, Michael Zenzen, David Weick, Langdon Winner, Audrey Bennett, Bernard Rosenberg, Aaron Noland (I am a Proudhon man), Leo Hamalian, Burt Aginsky, John Useem, Chris Vanderpool, Herb Karp, Jay Gubrium, and Helene Mialet. Special thanks to Peter Denton for making theology amusing albeit with the help of a Guinness or two, and for his help on this and other of my projects. Finally, I want to thank my sons David (who became one with the piano and drums to many bravos and awards) and Daniel (who is more like me than I am though he would resist this description) for teaching me things only they could have taught me. Without Valerie there would have been no Dave and Dan to teach me; our relationship was volatile and ended in divorce but she was brilliant and introduced me to society and culture. I have two surrogate daughters, Lia (the woman beyond words) and Katie (my neighbor in Troy, NY; we danced occasionally, and she was the first subject in my Draw a Brain protocol study when she was four years old). They have fulfilled their promise as students and as adults. Near the end, Ya Wen taught me that love was a real possibility for me. Natalie, thank you for moments I will never forget even if you have. And finally, good night Emily Juliano, we will be at one forever.

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This book is about my experience as a social theorist caught up in the flow of thought from Durkheim, Marx, Nietzsche and other classic social theorists to post-modernisms and science and cultural studies after 1960. I write as someone who has contributed to and been caught up in that flow. The point here, then, is not to argue, prove, convince, or persuade (except in the most general, informal, and one might say osmotic ways). Rather, this is an invitation to join me on a journey, to follow a path, to share in a biographical moment at the cross-roads of histories and cultures.

Contents

1 Paradigms and Programmes  1 T.S. Kuhn: A Man for All Seasons   1 The Kuhnian Paradigm   3 The Marxist Paradigm for Science and Scientific Change   6 Conflict Theory & Marxism   7 The Strong, Weak, and Moderate Programmes   7 Conclusion: Toward a New Theory of Inquiry  10 Bibliography  11 2 Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Rewrite Science 15 Anthropology of Science  15 THE Laboratory Studies  18 Anthropological Epistemology  21 The Social Construction of Facts  22 Laboratory Life  22 A Note on Ethnomethodology  25 Conclusion-the Laboratory Studies: A Critical Overview  26 Bibliography  29 3 Inside a Scientific Laboratory: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice 31 Preface  31 Introduction  32 The Discipline and the Laboratory  33 The Laboratory Atmosphere  34 ix

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A Phenomenological Laboratory  39 The Rhetoric of Persuasion in Science  40 Reflections on Life Among the Colloids and the Chemists  44 Contingencies and Science  47 Denouement: Indra’s Net  49 Conclusion  51 Bibliography  52 4 The Invention of Science: An Orientalist Perspective 55 Preface  55 Science and Orientalist Discourse  56 The Image of Science  58 How Shall We Think About Science?  60 Science and the Creation of the West/East  62 Can Science Be Saved?  67 Conclusion  67 Bibliography  68 5 The Sociology of Objectivity 71 Preface  71 Introduction  71 Objectivity as a Social Fact  72 The Sociology of Knowledge  75 The Crisis in Science  79 Science and Values  81 The Psychology of Science and the Theory of Inquiry  86 The Social Organization of Science  90 Dialectical Sociology  93 Conclusion  95 Epilogue: Culture Versus Genes in Human Evolution  96 Bibliography  97 6 Social Construction: The Fundamental Theorem101 The End of the Social? 103 Social Constructionism as a Fundamental Theorem 104 Social Constructionism and the Ethnography of Science 106 Actor-Network Theory (ANT) 115 The Variety of Constructionist Experience 115

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Where Do We Go From Here? 118 Who Is a Social Constructionist? 119 Social Construction and Forms of Life 120 What Have We Learned? 121 Who Conceives Society? Social Constructionism Redux 122 Conclusion 125 Bibliography 126 7 Wild Men and Winnowers: Donald T. Campbell131 Introduction 131 Wild Characters and Selective Winnowers 132 ERISS and Civilization 133 Critical Realist Sociology of Science 136 Validity in Question 139 Conclusion 143 Epilogue: ERISS and Civilization Revisited 144 Postscript: Farewell to the Winnower 145 Bibliography 146 8 Cavaliers & Pointillists: Steve Woolgar147 Overture 147 Preface 148 The Journey Begins 149 Ethnomethodology? (The Woolgar “?”) and Sociology? 151 Woolgar and Skepticism 157 Bibliography 160 9 Surely, You’re Joking, Bruno Latour?161 Introduction 161 Laboratory Life 163 A Career Unfolds 164 Bruno Latour Vs. David Bloor: Ant Versus the Strong Programme 175 Will the Real Bruno Latour Please Stand Up 182 Conclusion: Latour and Facts 183 Epilogue: Reading Latour 184 Postscript: A Last Word on Latour 185 Bibliography 185

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10 Science East & West: Joseph Needham189 Needham’s Legacy 189 Karl Marx (1818–1883): Marx’s Legacy 191 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): Nietzsche’s Legacy 194 The Legacy of Human Science 196 Chuang-Tzu’s Legacy 198 Conclusion: History of Chinese Science in Perspective 199 Bibliography 202 11 Dangerous Abstractions: STS and the Unabomber205 Introduction 205 STS and the Unabomber 207 Conclusion 208 Bibliography 208 12 The Yin and Yang of Scientific Practice: Philosophers and Sociologists209 Preface 209 Overture 210 Introduction 210 First Movement 212 Intervention 215 Second Movement 217 Third Movement: The Practice Turn 218 YIN 222 YANG 223 The Social & Social Construction Revisited 225 Conclusion: For the Philosophers 229 Bibliography 229 13 Requiem for Plato: The Sociology of Mathematics231 The Stage Is Set 232 The Variety of Mathematical Experiences 234 The Social Roots of Mathematics 238 Puzzles and Proofs 245 The Robber Baron/Saintly Politician Thesis 249 Conclusion 253 Epilogue: What Is Mathematics Redux 254 Bibliography 259

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14 Your Social Brain: Searching for Mind and Consciousness in John Wayne’s America261 Loneliness 261 Mutual Presence 263 Genius 264 The Myth of Individualism 265 Consciousness Explained 267 Individual Choice in Context 269 Conclusion: The Myth of Horatio Alger 271 Bibliography 272 15 Romancing & Dancing With Robots273 Overture 273 Introduction 274 Social and Sociable Robots 275 Theories of Mind 276 Getting to the Beginning of Our Story 278 Resources for a Sociological Theory of Mind 279 Theory of Mind Revisited 280 The Social Mind 281 Robots ‘R’ Us and Robots as Robots 284 Singing the Body Information 285 Conclusion: What Now, That Robots Can Dance? 292 Epilogue: The Social Turn in Social & Sociable Robotics 294 Postscript: Will the Real Cynthia Breazeal Please Stand Up 295 Bibliography 296 16 Sustainable Journeys: Daedalus, Icarus, Tantalus and the Future of Science and the World301 Preface 301 Prelude 302 Modern Science as a Social Problem 303 The Ten Pillars of Sustainability 304 Data, Data, and More Data 306 The Morality of Science 308 Survival Wisdom 311 The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 314 Conclusion: Key Barriers to Global Problem Solving 315

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Guest Commentary: Peter Denton 317 Bibliography 323 17 Post-truthism: An Era or an Intellectual Strategy?325 Introduction: Anti-intellectualism Comes Home to Roost; America 2016–1984 325 The Post-truth Paradigm 330 A Post-truth Era 331 Post-truth, Analytically 334 Conclusion 340 Bibliography 341 18 Conclusion: Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge343 Part I. The Fallacies 343 Classic Fallacies from Philosophy 349 Part 2. Paradigm Principles: An Experiment in Abnormal Discourse 350 A. The Social Construction Conjecture As the Fundamental Theorem of Sociology 350 Part 3. The Social Brain Paradigm 358 Penultimate Principles 361 Bibliography 361 Bibliography363 Index395

CHAPTER 1

Paradigms and Programmes

T.S. Kuhn: A Man for All Seasons When the ordinary scholar or learned layperson hears the name “T.S. Kuhn” s/he is likely to connect it to the term “paradigm shift” and the idea that the objectivity of science is conditioned by political and subjective perspectives and worldviews. Kuhn’s influence on the rhetoric of science discourse is signalled by the widespread use of the terms “paradigm,” “paradigm shift,” and “normal and revolutionary science.” These developments form part of the argument that Kuhn’s contributions led to a paradigm shift in the sociology of knowledge and science. There are still echoes of the idea that Kuhn’s contributions were anti-Mertonian, relativistic, opposed to positivism and logical empiricism, and even compatible with Marxism. These are the waning echoes of the myth of a Kuhnian revolution in the sociology of knowledge and science, the central dogma of which is that Kuhn’s account of science overturned Mertonian sociology of science. Many sociologists, historians, and philosophers of science in the 1970s would have agreed with sociologist of science, Jerry Gaston, that there was initially a consensus about the importance of Kuhn’s work. However, few of Kuhn’s champions took full account of the reception given The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970). Historians of science were widely resistant to Kuhn’s claims (e.g., Beaver 1979: 140; Reingold 1980), and the earliest reviews of the first edition by historians were not © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_1

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kind. Indeed, there was no evidence of an opposition between Kuhn and Robert K. Merton prior to the late 1960s and early 1970s (Joseph Ben-­ David 1979: 204-205). British sociologists of science were the chief creators of the anti-Mertonian Kuhn (e.g., Sklair, 1973: 69; Blume 1974: 7; Barnes 1972a: 11; Barnes 1972b: 277; Barnes 1977: 23; Barnes 1982; Mackenzie and Barnes 1979: 207; Dolby 1972: 315; Whitley, 1974: 2; Weingart, 1974: 45 and Suppes, 1977: 127). Sklair (1973: 150) and Harrington (1976: 18-19) were among those who interpreted Kuhn as a Marxist. There were dissenters who saw Kuhn as a Mertonian (e.g., King 1971: 30; and see Bourdieu 1975), a view that was confirmed when Merton (1977: 107) himself wrote that he and Kuhn were “at one” regarding the significance of the values and institutions of science as providing a salient but “far from exclusive…context for cognitive decisions.” The contradictory interpretations surrounding the Kuhnian paradigm were discussed at length by Pinch (1997). This situation followed a divide between American and British scholars that reflected different and competing intellectual traditions (Ben-David 1979: 204-205). Kuhn therefore had his critics outside of North America (Mulkay 1979; 39; Elias 1974: 35). One of the few philosophers of science who “saw through” Kuhn’s “sociology” was Mary Hesse (1980: 32). She argued that Kuhn not only failed to contribute to the sociology of science, he discouraged it. While ultimately denying that he’d made any contributions to the sociology of science, Kuhn himself gave some inkling that he saw what he was doing as sociology of science. He notes (Kuhn, 1962: 40n4) that there is some overlap between his work and that of the sociologist of science Warren Hagstrom, but this is hardly enough to establish his sociological credentials. Trevor Pinch’s (1997) claim that Kuhn could reasonably be given a radical interpretation would (if correct) destroy the core of Kuhn’s contribution. Merton (1977: 107) pointed out that Kuhn, like any author, cannot control what becomes of h/her book. Kuhn thus became a man for all seasons (Masterman, 1970: 69; Watkins, 1970: 92). Merton (1977: 108) continued: Along with the great number of scholars and scientists who have put the Kuhnian ideas to effective use are varieties of acolytes who have transmuted those ideas to accord with their own ideological dispositions.

Two distinct varieties of Kuhnians emerged. The “romantics” sought to discredit the objectivity of science. The “political revolutionaries” of various stripes used Kuhn’s revolutionary rhetoric to reinforce and support

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their own agendas, and here new contradictions emerged. Those revolutionaries aligned with Marxism were faced with the Procrustean task of combining a forced Kuhnian-inspired view of science as subjective and ideological with Marx’s own emphasis on objective social structures and scientific knowledge. The first edition of Kuhn’s book (1962) did not herald a Kuhnian mythology. The second edition (1970), with its rhetoric of subjectivity, persuasion, and revolution appealed to the Woodstock and “New Age” generation. His political model wasn’t so much one of revolutions, however, but rather one of the circulation of elites. The revolutionaries interpreted Kuhn as providing or identifying mechanisms for scientific change that were not embedded in traditional scientific institutions. Kuhn emphasized sensing malfunctions (an individualist perspective). He obscured the unintended consequences of social actions that preceded crises. He also ignored the dialectics of institutional change. The circulation of elites element in Kuhn’s theory echoes the ideas of Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). Pareto was a slippery controversial figure: was he a fascist who influenced Benito Mussolini or a liberal humanist? While this is not the place to try to unravel Pareto, to the extent that Kuhn offers us a circulation of elites model grounded in the psychology of the individual, he can be said to be following a Pareto model of social change. In general, whatever political content his admirers and critics have associated with his theories has been progressively erased in Kuhn’s reactions to his critics. At the end of the day, he was at one with Merton in terms of being satisfied with science-as-it-is, elitism in science, and scientific progress as the consequence of individual and cliquish self-interest. These features and the resistance to new ideas and discoveries embedded in normal science was for Kuhn consistent with the pursuit of knowledge and consensus maintenance. as it was for Merton. The Mertonian-Kuhn believed in science-as-it-is as a well-functioning system and the paradigmatic mode of discovery, prediction, and explanation.

The Kuhnian Paradigm A Kuhnian paradigm crystallized in the early 1970s. It was not a full break with the Mertonian paradigm, but became associated with the end of the Mertonian hegemony. Two volumes marked the end of that hegemony: Joseph Ben-David (1971) and the 1973 collection of R.K. Merton’s contributions to the sociology of science over a period of almost half-a-­ century. Ben-David, in conformity with the majority of orthodox sociologists of science, argued that decentralized authority systems are

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more conducive to variety in ideas and experiments than centralized systems. This viable thesis is, however, applied to the “external” settings of science but not to the “internal” organization of science. Orthodox, Mertonian-­dominated sociology of science adopted an idealistic concept of the rational intellectual activity we understand as science. There was in this orthodoxy no consistent definition of scientific knowledge conducive to cumulative sociological theory. Conflicts in science and their potential impacts on knowledge production, the establishment of facts, and the dynamics of values and ethics in science were not a major focus for these sociologists. The appearance of Merton’s 1973 volume underscored the fact that he had given the field its major paradigm. If this represented a culmination of Merton’s legacy the promise of its further evolution was diminished by the fact that alternative sociologies of science were emerging (e.g., Rose and Rose, 1970; Sklair, 1973; Barnes, 1974; Bloor 1976). There were strains of neo-functionalism in some of these paradigms but they were less a reflection of Merton’s omnipresence than of the pernicious myth of science as a pure, privileged mode of inquiry. It was in the midst of this emerging “let a hundred sociologies of science bloom” period that Kuhn became a man for all sociology of science seasons. He was peculiarly suited for neo-Mertonian revisionism (Mulkay 1972, 1979: 134). Merton (1977: 106-107) commented on the anomaly of acolytes who fail to distinguish the substance from the fate of Kuhn’s work. The anomaly is self-conscious in Leslie Sklair (1973: 267. Sklair disembodies the Kuhnian approach from what Kuhn actually wrote. Merton also pointed out numerous convergences between his work and Kuhn’s. Merton criticized Kuhn’s restrictive sociology, but insisted that he and Kuhn were at one regarding the significance of the institutions and values of science as contexts for cognitive decisions. This is interesting because, according to some interpreters, Kuhn has helped shift the focus of attention in the sociology of science to cognitive factors. But Kuhn did little more than Merton: he drew attention to the social context for cognitive decisions. This is far from revolutionary. It was (and has continued to be) overlooked by those who champion Kuhn as a sociologist of knowledge and science that he himself did not consider his work sociological, but rather a contribution to the internalist history of science. Moreover, he understood The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as an homage to his mentor, the internalist historian Alexander Koyré. In my 1971 dissertation, I had already identified the ways in which

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Kuhn failed the sociological test. He criticized normal science for being educationally narrow, rigid, and ill-designed to promote creativity (Kuhn, 1972: 166). This does not impede scientific progress because rigidity accrues to individuals. What he and many traditional sociologists of science failed to recognize was that rigidity also accrues to organizations, institutions, networks, and groups of all kinds. Those social structures are subject to bureaucratization and professionalization, processes that can facilitate the end of objectivity. These processes, and social controls imposed by political authorities, all contribute to rigidity in social groups (Restivo, 1975: 158-162). Kuhn’s sociological myopia is further reflected in his assumption that the supply of innovators—young scientists and those who have entered new areas of research—is independent of social conditions within and outside of science. Kuhn argues that crises regularly disrupt normal science. Such crises also disrupt periods of normalcy in political economies. In both cases, the crisis polarizes the community into defenders of the old order and advocates of a new order. Recourse to the strategies of normal science having now become impossible, scientists are left with mass persuasion and force. Nonetheless, paradigm choice is eventually achieved once again, based on the highest standard, that of community assent. Thus, scientific revolutions are simply phases in the evolution of scientific institutions. The Mertonian Kuhn offers a prescriptive account of science thinly disguised as objective history. The Merton social system of science paradigm and the Kuhn scientific revolutions paradigm do not disrupt the Grand Paradigm of science: methods, logic, and rationality unperturbed by the sinusoidal dance of science through normal and revolutionary periods. The final irony is that while the true believers in the sociology and history of science were celebrating the Kuhnian revolution, Kuhn himself (1978) continued doing internalist history of science unencumbered by notions of paradigms, exemplars, and scientific revolutions. To reiterate, Kuhn’s basic claim is that scientific revolutions arise out of conflicts between an old guard and a young Turks generation. The history of mathematics offers an important counterexample here, however. Major innovations in mathematics are primarily the result of conflicts among rival innovators (Collins and Restivo 1983; see Chap. 13 this volume). Physicist David Bohm’s (1973) argument for science in permanent revolution is one of the alternatives to Kuhn’s punctuated equilibrium model of scientific change. Bohm’s argument straddles observed reality and prescription.

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Since Bohm was a student of Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, this is a nice segue to the Marxist alternative to Merton and Kuhn.

The Marxist Paradigm for Science and Scientific Change We are left at the 1970 watershed that was assumed to cross over from Merton to Kuhn with a single Mertonian-Kuhnian paradigm. With a new sociology of science emerging in the wake of Science and Technology Studies, there was a post-Kuhnian sociology of scientific knowledge coalescing. There was already an obvious alternative to Merton and Kuhn in Marx. Even here, however, in spite of substantial studies of the social and cultural factors driving science and pioneering efforts in the sociology of mathematics, Marxists have generally remained tied to the Grand Paradigm of science. In spite of surviving into the post-1970s era of science studies and the strong programme, Mertonians and Kuhnians remained stuck in a Mannheimian paradigm of the sociology of knowledge. Within this paradigm, scientific knowledge (and mathematics in particular) defined the limits of the sociology of science (Mannheim 1936: 79). Marx himself reached a potential turning point in this field with his criticism of science-as-it-is and a vague proposal for a “human science.” The most significant contribution to the Marxist (historical materialism/ sociology) study of science was Boris Hessen’s (1931) unfinished study of the economic foundations of Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687). In spite of his post-1970 ambiguous views on the social construction of science, the early Merton defended Hessen’s views against the idealist criticism of the historian G.N. Clark (see the details of Merton’s critique in Chap. 10). Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s (1978) attempt to provide a materialist account of pure mathematic fails, in the end, because he is unable to eliminate transcendental and idealist assumptions about science and mathematics from his analysis. Attempts by Marx (1974) and Marxists (B., Mike 1978) to show that science and mathematics obey dialectical laws have been singularly unsuccessful. Nonetheless, the renaissance in Marxist science studies during the latter decades of the twentieth century produced an important alternative to the Mertonian-Kuhnian agenda (see further examples in Dickson 1979; Struik, 1967; Needham 1956; and Restivo 1981). Perhaps the most successful application of dialectical thought to the study of mathematics is Suzanne Bachelard’s (1958) study of

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mathematical physics. This is by far the best study of science in the phenomenological tradition.

Conflict Theory & Marxism The traditional opposition between functionalism and conflict theory in general sociology has become an increasingly prominent feature of the sociology of science as the Mertonian hegemony has weakened. There is an affinity between conflict theory and Marxism, but conflict theories tend to be more complex than Marxist theories. Political and economic factors are prominent but not exclusive features of conflict models in the sociology of science (Collins 1975). The conflict perspective, on scientific facts as social constructions conditioned by social contingencies, converges with the constructionist perspective associated with the laboratory life studies of the 1970s and 1980s. The laboratory life studies brought the tools and techniques of ethnography to bear upon the description and interpretation of scientific work. They reflected a variety of substantive concerns, methodologies, and theories; but they all tended to stress inquiry as a constructive rather than a descriptive activity, rejected the distinction between social and cognitive aspects of science, emphasized situations in the social construction of scientific facts (and thus challenged conventional ideas about the organization of scientific activities in scientific communities), and described scientific facts as “discursive accomplishments” (Knorr-Cetina 1981; Woolgar 1981).

The Strong, Weak, and Moderate Programmes The laboratory life studies, and associated new science studies research, raised fundamental questions about facticity and presented new problems regarding the relationship between science and the sociology of science— questions and problems that are at the centre of the controversy among advocates of the strong, moderate, and weak programs in the sociology of knowledge and science. David Bloor (1976) argued that the best way to study science and knowledge is to proceed as the other sciences proceed. His “strong programme” opened the way for sociological studies of all forms of knowledge including mathematical knowledge. The scientific premise of the strong programme is at odds with Bloor’s argument against the idea that mathematics has a life of its own, however. This argument should apply to science in general; but if it is so applied, the strong

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programme is unhinged. To the extent that it is grounded in the Grand Paradigm of Science, the strong programme is an adjunct to the Mertonian-­ Kuhnian program. The paradox is that its adherence to the Grand Paradigm nonetheless puts us on the road to a non-Mannheimian social constructionist sociology of science. This is not a straightforward paradox and Bloor would have good reasons to resist it. The basic tenets of the strong programme are (Bloor 1991: 7): 1. It would be causal, that is, concerned with the conditions which bring about belief or states of knowledge. Naturally there will be other types of causes apart from social ones which will cooperate in bringing about belief. 2. It would be impartial with respect to truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or failure. Both sides of these dichotomies will require explanation. 3. It would be symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of causes would explain true and false beliefs. 4. It would be reflexive. In principle its patterns of explanation would have to be applicable to sociology itself. Like the requirement of symmetry this is a response to the need to seek for general explanations. It is an obvious requirement or principle because otherwise sociology would be a standing refutation of its own theories. The basis for Bloor’s resistance to the claim that he is committed to the Grand Paradigm would rest on his acknowledgement that the strong programme is an amalgam of “the more optimistic and scientistic strains” found in the works of Durkheim, Mannheim, and Znaniecki. He distances himself from optimistic and scientistic programmes; the paradox arises, nonetheless, because he views his strong programme as adhering to the existing values of the sciences and proposes that the sociology of scientific knowledge follow the path(s) of the successful sciences. Anyone, including myself, who values science must live with or try to resolve this paradox. I have tried to resolve the paradox by distinguishing between Science (an institution) and sciences (the general methods of human rational inquiry). I refer to D.T. Campbell’s (1974) descriptive evolutionary epistemology as the “mild” or “moderate” program in the sociology of science because it shares a demarcationist perspective with the strong programme (in which science is viewed as superior to all other modes of inquiry) but is more explicitly flexible about scientific method. Campbell contends that

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facts are not neutral, self-evident entities. But he argues that it is essential to preserve the ideology of facts that speak for themselves because it has a functional truth. In general, this puts Campbell at one with Merton and Kuhn, even considering his cautious affection for Paul Feyerabend and his defence of “wildness” and “unjustified variation” in science. The traditional sociologists of science with whom Campbell, Merton, and Kuhn aligned confined their studies to explaining false beliefs. True beliefs did not have to be explained; they were by definition their own explanations. The weak program in the sociology of science involved a worldview approach to science studies (Restivo, 1980; Chubin 1981; Chubin and Restivo, 1982; Restivo and Loughlin 1987). This should not be confused with David Bloor’s (1999: 81n1) use of the term “weak programme” (or equivalently, “weak program”). Bloor used this term, unaware at the time of Chubin and Restivo (1982) to refer to the traditional sociologist of science who assumed only false beliefs required explanation. True beliefs were considered to be their own explanations, beholden only to rationality and nature. The Restivo-Chubin weak program is based on the following ideas: (I) theories, systems of knowledge, and facts are embedded in and reflect worldviews (cf. Hooker 1975); (2) following Bohm (1973), theories are considered insights, and insights are neither true nor false—they are only more or less successful strategies in certain contexts of human thought and action; (3) no insight can ever be final or absolute; (4) no system for arriving at insights can ever be universally valid and eternally stable; (5) there is always a broader context for establishing an insight than the context of any given system of inquiry; (6 ) the focus of the sociology of knowledge and science is the general epistemic activity of human beings; (7) there is no a priori reason for granting special, absolute, and eternal status to the logic, methods, and theories of the Grand Paradigm of modern science in the realm of inquiry; (8) ontological nihilism and philosophical relativism are rejected, but Feyerabend’s (1978) Protagorean relativism is affirmed—implying that decisions about the nature of science and the sociology of science are political decisions in the broadest Foucauldian sense. The emphasis in the weak program on taking a critical position regarding the privileged status of science reflects the political (and, more generally, sociological) awareness that science refers to a worldview, a mode of organization, and a system of power; science is not a disembodied set of logics, methods, theories, and facts. This is the rationale for the Rashomon theorem (based on the famous Japanese tale of the many truths about an

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event) formulated by Zenzen and Restivo (1982: 448): “There are numerous…ways of describing and interpreting any given phenomenon; the status of any given account is not determined by whether it is ‘true’ or ‘real’ in some absolute sense, but by how useful it is in the competitive realm of knowledge production and utilization.” The weak program assumes that democratic values and organizations are necessary conditions for the development of epistemic strategies that can lead to critical understanding of our individual and collective experiences and to progressive; or better, perhaps, unfettered and continuous inquiry. It is characterized by a Spenglerian capacity for conceptualizing an alternative science (an alternative to science), and thus represents a radical departure from Merton and Kuhn. (For an extended discussion of the strong, moderate, and weak programs, see Restivo (1981) and Chubin and Restivo (1982).)

Conclusion: Toward a New Theory of Inquiry When contemporary sociologists reflect on the foundations of their discipline, they tend to draw uncritically on orthodox philosophies, histories, and sociologies of science. This tendency applies as much to those sociologists who are wary of scientism or opposed to the idea of a social science as it does to those intent on establishing sociology as a science. Some sociologists have sought to update their reflexive sociologies by uncritically adopting a Kuhnian sociology of science. 1 have argued that the Kuhnian revolution is a myth. The more important point is that, as the latter decades of the twentieth century unfolded, the field of science studies became more diversified, more deeply rooted in the experiences of working scientists, and more concerned with the comparative and cross-­ cultural study of knowledge, belief systems, and values. These developments went even further as science studies became part of a cluster of science study disciplines including cultural studies, literary studies, feminist studies, and post-colonial studies of science. Furthermore, the diversification of STS more generally embraced design studies and sustainability studies. These developments have not simply provided new choices for reflective sociologists; they have also made it imperative for sociologists of sociology and sociologists in general to become more critical students of knowledge and science. Marxist and conflict sociologies of science, laboratory life studies, the conflicts among the strong, moderate, and weak programs, and the new science studies of the Other (see Chap. 4) promise to

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carry us beyond orthodox and revisionist Mertonian-Kuhnian paradigms toward critical sociological theories of inquiry. There is a major problem confronting alternatives to sociologies of science that are ideologies of science-as-it- is: the problem of self-exemplification. The resolution of this problem—how to study science critically without accepting a priori that science is the paradigmatic mode of inquiry—promises to revolutionize science as we know it and to reshape our conception of inquiry. In retrospect, there is little I would change about my evaluation of Kuhn in the 1980s. Kuhn’s “confession” upon receiving the Bernal Prize in 1983 more than adequately confirmed my critique of Kuhn’s “sociology” of science. Kuhn was surprised that he had been nominated for the prize based on his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which he had thought of as exclusively internalist. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the impact of society on science, but this book was not written from that perspective. It was based entirely on technical materials in the sciences (Kuhn 1983). The consequences of that mythical revolution will not soon disappear, for paradigms still abound.

Bibliography Bachelard. S. (1958), La Conscience de la Rationalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Barnes, B. (1972a), “On the Reception of Scientific Beliefs,” in B. Barnes (ed.), Sociology of Science (Baltimore: Penguin Books). Barnes, B. (1972b), “Introduction,” in B.  Barnes (ed.), Sociology of Science (Baltimore: Penguin Books). Barnes, B. (1974), Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Barnes, B. (1977), Interests and the Growth of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Barnes, B. (1982), T. S. Kuhn and Social Science (London: Macmillan). Beaver, D. (1979), “Possible Relationships Between the History and Sociology of Science,” in J, Gaston (ed.), The Sociology of Science (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass). Ben-David, J. (1971), The Scientist’s Role in Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall). Ben-David, J. (1979), “The Emergence of National Traditions in the Sociology of Science: The United States and Great Britain,” in J. Gaston (ed.), The Sociology of Science (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass). Bloor, D. (1976), Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

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Bloor, D. (1991), Knowledge and social imagery, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Bloor, D. (1999), “Anti-Latour,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30(1): 81–112. Blume. S. (1974), Toward a Political Sociology of Science (New York: The Free Press). Bohm, D. (1973), “Quantum Theory as an Indication of a New Order in Physics. Part B: Implicate and Explicate Order in Physical Law,” Foundations of Physics 3(2): 139–168. Bourdieu, P. (1975), “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason,” Social Science information 14(6): 19–47. Chubin, D. (1981), “Constructing and Reconstructing Scientific Reality: A Meta-­ Analysis,” International Society for the Sociology of Knowledge Newsletter 7 (May): 22–28. Chubin, D. and Restivo, S. (1982), “The ‘Mooting’ of Science Studies: Research Programs and Science Policy,” 53–83, in K. Knorr-Cetina and M. Mulkay, (eds.), Science Observed (Beverly Hills: Sage). Collins, R. (1975), Conflict Sociology (New York: Academic Press). Collins, R. and Restivo, S. (1983), “Robber Barons and Politicians in Mathematics: A Conflict Model of Science,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 8(2): 199–227. Dickson, D. (1979), “Science and Political Hegemony in the 17th Century,” Radical Science Journal 8: 7–37. Dolby, R.C.A. (1972), “The Sociology of Knowledge in Natural Science,” in B. Barnes (ed.), Sociology of Science (Baltimore: Penguin Books). Elias, N. (1974), “The Sciences: Towards a Theory,” 21–42, in R. Whitley (ed.), Social Processes of Scientific Development (London: Routledge & Kegan). Feyerabend, P. (1978), Science in a Free Society (London: New Left Books). Harrington, M. (1976), The Twilight of Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster). Hesse, M. (1980), Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Bloomington: lndiana University Press). Hessen, B. (1931), “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” 151–212, in N. Bukharin (ed.), Science at the Crossroads (London: Frank Cass & Co.; Available from Routledge, New York, 2013). Hooker, C. (1975), “Philosophy and Metaphilosophy of Science: Empiricism, Popperianism, and Realism,” Synthese 32: 177–231. King, M.D. (1971), “Reason, Tradition, and the Progressiveness of Science,” History and Theory 10: 3–32. Kuhn, T. (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Kuhn, T. (1983), “Reflections on Receiving the John Desmond Bernal Award,” 4S Review 1(4): 26–30.

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Mackenzie, D. and Barnes, B. (1979), “Scientific Judgment: The Biometry-­ Mendelism Controversy,” 191–210, in B. Barnes and S. Shapin (eds.), Natural Order (London: Sage). Mannheim, K. (1936), Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Marx, K. (1974), Mathematische Manuskripte, edited by W. Endemann (Kronberg Taunus, East Germany: Scriptor Verlag); English translation K. Marx, (2018), Mathematical Manuscripts (Delhi, India: Aakar Publishers). Based on materials written by Marx circa. 1881. See Baksi, P., ed. (2020), Karl Marx and Mathematics (New York: Routledge). Masterman, M. (1970), “The Nature of a Paradigm,” 59–89, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Merton, R.K. (1973), The Sociology of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Merton, R.K. (1977), “An episodic memoir,” 3–141 in R.K. Merton and J. Gaston (eds.), The Sociology of Science in Europe (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press). Mike, B. (1978), “Dialectics in Mathematics,” Prolelariat 4 (Winter): 33–37. Mulkay, M. (1972), “Cultural Growth in Science,” 126–142, in B. Barnes (ed.), Sociology of Science (Baltimore: Penguin Books). Mulkay, M. (1979), Science and the Sociology of Knowledge (Winchester, MA: Goerge Allen & Unwin). Needham, J. (1956), “Mathematics and Science in China and the West,” Science and Society 20: 320–343. Pinch, T. (1997), “Kuhn-The Conservative and Radical Interpretations: Are Some Mertonians ‘Kuhnians’ and Some Kuhnians ‘Mertonians’?” Social Studies of Science 27: 465–482. Reingold, N. (1980), “Through Paradigm-Land to a Normal History of Science,” Social Studies of Science 10: 475–496. Restivo, S. (1975), “Toward a Sociology of Objectivity,” Sociological Analysis and Theory 5(2): 155–183. Restivo, S. (1980), “Multiple Realities, Scientific Objectivity, and the Sociology of Knowledge,” Reflections 1: 61–76. Restivo, S. (1981), “Mathematics and the limits of the sociology of knowledge,” Social Science Information 20: 679–701. Restivo, S. and Loughlin, J. (1987), “Critical Sociology of Science and Scientific Validity,” Knowledge (special issue on National Policies for Optimizing Validity in Applied Social Research) 8(3): 486–508. Rose, H. and S. Rose (1970), Science and Society (Baltimore: Penguin). Sklair, L. (1973), Organized Knowledge (St. Albans, Herts, UK: Paladin). Struik, D. (1967), A Concise History of Mathematics (New York: Dover).

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Suppes, F. (1977), “The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories,” 1–243, in F. Suppe, (ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). Watkins, J. (1970), “Against ‘Normal Science,’” 25–37, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Weingart, P. (1974), “On a Sociological Theory of Scientific Change,” 45–68, in R. Whitley, (ed.), Social Processes of Scientific Development (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Whitley, R. (1974), “Introduction,” 1–10, in R. Whitley, (ed.), Social Processes of Scientific Development (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Woolgar, S. (1981), “Interests and Explanation in the Social Study of Science,” Social Studies of Science 11: 365–394. Zenzen, M. and Restivo, S. (1982), “The Mysterious Morphology of Immiscible Liquids: A Study of Scientific Practice,” Social Science Information 21(3): 447–473.

CHAPTER 2

Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Rewrite Science

Anthropology of Science My mentor in college was an anthropologist and his expectation was that the small band of students he worked with would go on to graduate school and field work. I had no interest in field work among indigenous peoples or in traveling to far off lands to study other cultures. One day, crossing Park Avenue on the way to Professor Aginsky’s Park Avenue apartment, I told the friend I was with that I was going to study scientists as my tribe. This strange thought, which seemed to come out of nowhere, implied an anthropology of science, anticipating my involvement in the revolutionary ethnography of science movement some fifteen years later. My path to this historical moment in the science studies movement began traditionally enough when I did the survey research for my doctorate in sociology. My research involved the use of interviews and questionnaires to study the lives of foreign scientists at American universities. This was a prelude to getting involved in full scale anthropological field studies of scientific practice. The question, “what is science?” had been asked and answered in many different ways by many different scholars for many decades. Until the 1970s, the questions and answers did not depend on extended on-site observations of scientists at work in real time. The scientist was viewed more or less the same way by philosophers and laypersons. The scientist went into the world with h/er special training, special tools, and special methods, made discoveries by interrogating nature directly, and reported © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_2

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h/er results. The philosopher Mary Hesse (1980: vii) described this “naïve realism” perspective on the scientist in detail. To begin with, the scientist assumes that there is an external world that can in principle be “exhaustively described” in the language of science: The scientist, as both an observer and a language-user, can capture the external facts of the world in propositions that are true if they correspond to the facts and false if they do not. Science is ideally a linguistic system in which true propositions are in a one-to-one relation to facts, including facts that are not directly observed because they involve hidden entities or properties or past events or far distant events. These hidden events are described in theories, and theories can be inferred from observation, that is, the hidden explanatory mechanism of the world can be discovered from what is open to observation. Man as scientist is regarded as standing apart from the world and able to experiment and theorize about it objectively and dispassionately.

This is the scientist as a manifestation of the Platonic dream of a pure mentality. This mythical scientist transcends history, culture, society, time, and space and the earthly categories of good and bad and right and wrong. And yet there is an aura of benevolence about this scientist. Everything “he” does is necessarily for the benefit of humankind. This is the scientist portrayed by worshipful philosophers, awed journalists, and adoring biographers. Scientists themselves portray themselves in these naïve realist terms, usually as “elder statesmen” looking back over their earlier achievements. The darker side of this Ivory Snow image of science and scientists was glimpsed by G.K. Chesterton (1905: 71) who wrote: I find extremely difficult to believe that a man who is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas, tearing down temples and stretching out hands to the stars, is really a quiet old gentleman who only asks to indulge his harmless old habit and follow his harmless old nose.

The hermetic philosopher, precursor to the modern scientist, appears in a 1618 portrait by J.T. de Bry. The philosopher, old and far from handsome, is following a mature, attractive, healthy looking woman, Nature. He carries a staff and a lamp to help him find and follow Nature. Carolyn Merchant (1980) proposes a darker view of this scene: the staff can be used to prod Nature and the lamp to probe her. This seduction-rape interpretation is echoed in the works of the nineteenth century sculptor Louis-­ Ernest Barrias. He sculpted a number of statues of women baring their breasts and lifting their skirts. One of these sculptures is labelled: “la

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Nature se devoilant devant la Science.” Here is the scientist one way or the other persuading or forcing Nature to bare her secrets, to reveal herself. The central dogma in the classical sociology of science was derived in great part from the preceding images of science and the assumption that scientific knowledge itself is based on, is in fact, a direct representation of the external world. The extreme interpretation of this view is that scientists have access to the ding an sich. This view is reflected in the naïve realism of the philosopher of science: there are “things in the world” and “terms that refer.” The central dogma of “pure science” supported a number of dichotomies that were taken for granted until the middle years of the twentieth century: social/cognitive; fact/theory; fact/value; description/interpretation; subject/object. Scientific progress followed from the self-correcting dynamics of the social system of science, driven by the assumed inner logic of conceptual development, rationality, and deduction. The important point about this view of “pure science,” of science itself, of science per se, is that it was not based on empirically grounded studies of scientific practice. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that serious ways of objecting to armchair, anecdotal, worshipful, and ideological stories about science began to be mounted. Within that decade, the new sociologists of science launched the ethnography of science. These mutually reinforcing studies, spawned in the 1960s in the radical science movement, gave meaning to ideas about science as a social and cultural process, about science and context, and about science as social relations. On one level, these studies gave substance to classical studies of the social system of science in the Mertonian tradition. But on another level, they opened the door to sociological studies of scientific facts themselves. Science and technology studies (STS) and the new sociology of science it incorporated had given birth to an empirical epistemology. One of the immediate consequences of these developments was that some philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science criticized them as promoting relativism and an anti-science perspective. They were protecting a scientific equivalent of “American exceptionalism” or, at least, Western science exceptionalism. In a later chapter, I will make the case for an ethnoscience approach to modern science that offers a rationale for using the adjective “Western” (as opposed to “universal”) in relation to science. The bottom line is that a relativism that equates all forms of knowledge and belief systems is not part of science and technology studies or the new sociology of science; there will be more about this misunderstanding throughout this book. The ethnography of science sharpens our

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awareness and understanding of the context within which “self-evident truths” are born and bred, and of the ways in which knowledge claims are grounded in particular levels of reality, experience, and localities.

THE Laboratory Studies The “laboratory studies” of the 1970s and 1980s are widely referred to as ethnographic studies of science. There is a traditional tension in studies of cultures between the ethnographer as a scientist of culture, of customs, rituals, norms, values, and beliefs and the anthropologist as a general theorist of culture and humanity. In order to avoid unnecessary professional confusion or any implication that ethnographers are doing “pure science,” we should keep in mind that. whatever disciplinary labels we use, laboratory studies are “on-site” studies of scientific practice. To be clear, and in general, these studies have been carried out by professionals trained in ethnography, anthropology, and sociology who specialize in conducting participant and non-participant observational studies. Some ethnographies of science have been carried out by scholars in such fields as history (Goodfield 1981), linguistics and communications (Jacoby and Ochs 1997), and women’s studies (Cohn 1987; for an annotated bibliography of laboratory studies, see Cool 2016). These researchers rely on more or less standard ethnographic and anthropological methods: observation (as participants and non-participants); interviews, questionnaires, conversational analysis; the collection and analysis of written materials; the description and analysis of social structures and relationships; and the description and analysis of tools, techniques and materials. The degree of intimacy between researchers and their sites and subjects varies. The first major published on-site study of science was Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979). In this study, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar constructed a fictional anthropologist, the detached “Observer,” as a heuristic device. This fictional figure is supposed to conduct the study under the condition of being completely ignorant of scientific culture. Their study represents the extreme low intimacy point on the ethnography continuum. High intimacy characterizes D. McKegney’s (1982) participant observer approach. In the study I conducted with Michael Zenzen, we participated in a “hermeneutic circle” that included the laboratory scientists in our study. Sharon Traweek (1988) conformed to the traditional role of the anthropologist to a greater degree than anyone else in this pioneering group. She spent years in the

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field, immersed in the culture of high energy physics. Karin Knorr-Cetina’s (1981a) field work was less conventional in terms of classical anthropology; she described her work as “empirical epistemology.” Latour and Woolgar (1979: 27–29) used the term “anthropology of science” to draw attention to the “distinctive features” of their work. “Anthropology” denoted “the preliminary presentation of accumulated empirical material: “… we aim to provide a monograph of ethnographic investigation of one specific group of scientists … Secondly … we attach particularqimportance to the collection and description of observations of scientific activity obtained in a particular setting …. Thirdly, our use of “anthropology”denotes the importance of bracketing our familiarity with the object of our study.

Latour and Woolgar, in brief, make a case for “strangeness” as a crucial source for outsiders of insights about insiders. McKegney, by contrast, shows us another way, the adoption of an “insider” “acquainted” approach to understanding scientific practice. The distinction between “strangeness” and “acquainted” anthropology is found in the general practice of the discipline and points to the problem of interpretive and explanatory authority. Anthropological authority develops in three stages. Looked at in terms of “role,” we have the nineteenth century amateur (missionaries, explorers, adventurers), the early twentieth century professional vanguard (natural scientists who created the role of the anthropologist/ethnographer), and finally the role of the professional specialist (the credentialed anthropologist or ethnographer). The professional vanguard stressed the field as the science of ethnography. It included researchers like zoologists Alfred Haddon and Walter Spencer, Franz Boas, a physicist, and Julian Pitt-Rivers, an experimental psychologist. The next generation of full-­ fledged anthropologists tended to carry on the scientific approach (based on a physical science model) to culture initiated by the professional vanguard. Bronislaw Malinowski was among the most prominent of the first generation of anthropologists trained in social science, but he came to the field with a background in physics and chemistry. He epitomized the “go native” approach but with an elitist and racist twist. He writes in his diary about his experiences in Omarakana (Papua New Guinea) and the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia. He had a feeling of ownership about “his natives.” Surrounded by them, he writes about longing for white

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civilization and white womanhood. This darker side of anthropology is behind Malinowski’s claims that his reports are authoritative because “scientific.” Experience and interpretation are two other sources of authority. They are not always easily separated. Experiential authority is based on having “been there” as a participant in native culture. This is, for example, the basis for Margaret Mead’s anthropological authority. Sometimes “going native” goes so far as to involve the anthropologist in initiation rites. Marcel Griaule and Michel Leins sacrificed chickens on the Kono altar in Kemeni, Africa, in order to enter a sanctuary. Some anthropologists participated in sexual rites during the Big-Time spring festivals of the native Americans they studied. Interpretative authority is based on the philological model of “reading a text.” The Princeton anthropologist Clifford Geertz, following Paul Ricoeur’s philological model, understood anthropology as a problem in reading cultures as texts and offering an expert interpretation. Traditional anthropological authority was almost inevitably based on an exploitative relationship between expert and subject. No matter how intimate or friendly the relationship, at the end of the day only one voice comes away from the native culture—the expert’s voice. This is a good place to remind the reader about the controversy over terms used to describe the “Other:” native, Indian, aboriginal, savage, or indigenous. There are some negative connotations associated with the term “native,” but it is in common use and not traditionally considered offensive. It is problematic because it does not distinguish diverse peoples within a broad cultural configuration. Furthermore, it is suspect because it is a term in the language of the Wašíču, people of European descent in the language of the Lakota and Dakota. A “new ethnography” emerged in the second half of the twentieth century associated with arguments for discursive and polyphonic authority. Discursive authority is grounded in the intersubjectivity of speech in an immediately performative context. The ultimate narrator of the culture is a single expert voice. Polyphonic authority introduced the concept of many voices and many authors producing an interpretive narrative constructed by insiders and outsiders. June Goodfield (1981), a philosopher and historian, authored a quasi-­ ethnography of cancer scientist Anna Britt. The cover of the paperback edition of Goodfield’s monograph is a photograph of the author perched on a laboratory bench looking down at Anna. Anna is seated, wearing a

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white lab coat, and has her back to the camera. As in the photographs of Malinowski in the field, this photo shows pretty clearly who the anthropologist is, who the subject is, and what their relationship is. The anthropology of science is a departure from classical anthropology. Here anthropologists and “natives” are members of the same culture, the same social stratum, and even in some cases the same profession, the same “tribe.” Some classical scenarios are still possible in which the relationship between the anthropologist and the “natives” are traditional, even Malinowskian. Some anthropologists of science “go native” in traditional ways; some adopt the method of the hermeneutic circle in which the roles of anthropologist and native are inextricably intertwined and can lead in principle to a polyphonic narrative.

Anthropological Epistemology All anthropologists have to manage a double-bias situation: the bias of the observer’s cultural perspective and the role s/he is given within the group under study. They also have to manage the emic-etic distinction; try to see the world through the eyes of the natives (emic) or “objectively” through the eyes of the observer (etic). There are a few basic approaches that can be used by the anthropologist. The positivistic approach assumes that others can be objectified and that observations can be controlled and repeated. The phenomenological approach assumes the possibility of the mutual identification of observer and observed. This approach assumes the observer can “become” the subject “other” in the process of observing them. Subjective positivism assumes that observation is theory and thus culture laden; that observation is a form of interaction; and that observation implies mutual confidence. In discussing his research on the Dogon, Rik Pinxten (1981) notes that the Dogon gradually develop a certain take on the personality and culture of the ethnographer. As this information develops, the Dogon allow the ethnographer to observe more and more of their culture. This process gives the ethnographer access to higher and higher levels of symbolic knowledge systems. Subjective positivism readily leads to a polyphonic anthropology. Brought together, they lead to a reflexive anthropology. Reflexive anthropology fundamentally changes the nature of ethnography by incorporating the ethnographic (or anthropological) imagination in the world of everyday work.

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The Social Construction of Facts Originally trained in chemistry and physics, Malinowski (1948: 238 f.) was one of the founders of scientific anthropology. But he warned about the cult of the pure fact: … there is a social dimension to a belief, and this must be carefully studied as it moves along the social dimension; it must be examined in the light of diverse types of minds and of the diverse institutions in which it can be traced.

There is a tension in his views signalled by his claim that belief “does not obey the laws of logic.” It is a “fundamental fact” that there is a “general chaos” attached to beliefs. There is a hint of social constructionism in Malinowski but only a hint.

Laboratory Life The on-site ethnographers of science focus on social practice challenged conventional assumptions about science, notably the classical dichotomies I identified above. They gave us a new way to describe science as a constructive, socially situated (contextual, indexical), discursive activity. This new answer to the perennial question “What is science?” was framed by the constructivist paradigm. Constructionism (my preferred term because it connotes “doing” and “making” more clearly than “constructivism”) focuses attention on the production and reproduction of scientific objects in laboratories and other research sites. We live in a two-sided reality: on one side there is “reality in itself,” the ding an sich; we do not have direct access to this reality. On the other side is the everyday reality of our experience. This reality also has two sides: on one side is the reality experienced by John and Jane Doe in their day to day lives; on the other side is the “deeper” reality experienced by scientists. Scientists create artifactual realities (that’s what experiments are), and manipulate them (for example, in terms of dependent and independent variables). They create conditions, select materials, and rely on conceptual and instrumental tools and techniques manufactured by themselves and by other scientists, technicians, and craftspeople. They observe and analyse their manufactured realities and use theory, inference, and speculation to make claims about our everyday reality and “reality in itself.” There can be no definitive-description of

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reality in itself. But everyday reality is characterized by factual closures that make definitive-descriptions-in-practice possible. Laboratory activity is decision-impregnated. Scientific activity involves constantly selecting courses of action, instruments, chemical compounds and other materials from among sets of alternatives available. For the most part in their local environments. Earlier selections reappear later as tools, methods, and interpretations; thus, scientific objects are decision-­ impregnating as well as decision-impregnated. Laboratory activity also involves transforming knowledge claims into more or less durable facts. Latour and Woolgar demonstrated that the laboratory “game” involves moving statements through five stages of modality changes ending in statements denuded of all traces of authorship, statements that appear to float in a Platonic atmosphere of “pure facticity.” These are the Type 5 statements, unqualified facts. Type 1 statements are “linguistically marked conjectures;” knowledge claims by an author are designated Type 2 statements; Type 3 statements are qualified generalizations (X is generally assumed to be…); Type 4 statements are “facts” that are still associated with an author. This same pattern was discovered in the ethnography of a colloid chemistry laboratory I carried out with Michael Zenzen. This study is discussed in detail in Chap. 3. These findings are consistent across the laboratory ethnographies: scientific rhetoric becomes progressively more objective in the move from shop talk to final publication in a scientific journal. Science is in this sense a process of transforming selections into non-selections, the subjective into the objective, and the “fabricated” into “the found.” The “natural” is separated out from the “social” by (temporarily) ruling out certain selections and choosing others. The ethnographies also demonstrated that social and cognitive factors are inextricably intertwined. The cognitive core of science, under the ethnographers’ microscopes, turns out to be a thoroughly social accomplishment. In a weak sense, this simply draws attention to the fact that knowledge is produced by and in social groups. The strong form of this claim is that the type of social group re-produces itself as socially embodied knowledge. Self-reference is another feature of the social production of knowledge. Issues about facts and artifacts, facts and truths, what is true and what is false, and philosophical reconstructions of scientific work are social accomplishments. This does not entail or otherwise imply relativism or subjectivism; social constructionism does not focus on science as a psychological,

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individual, egoistic, or idiosyncratic phenomenon. The social production of knowledge is not “naturalist” in the conventional philosophical sense of that term. This means in part that science as a social accomplishment is not under the jurisdiction of the physical and natural scientists. Social life is part of the natural world, however, and so “naturalism” applies in this sense. It is in this sense, then, that physical and natural scientists may have useful things to say about social and cultural phenomena (a good example being the analysis of scale in cities and organizations: West 2017). We might want to keep in mind here Knorr-Cetina’s notion that we laboratory ethnographers are practicing an empirical epistemology. Indexicality ties facts to social contexts in a variety of ways. The decisions scientists make are conditioned and constrained by contexts, available resources, material and social opportunities, variations in the criteria that dictate the selection of methods and materials, and negotiations on a variety of levels with humans and non-human things. Knowledge is the sum of and embodies these decisions, selections, and conditions. The facts manufactured by scientists in laboratories and other research settings are products of “discursive interactions” that involve scientists and non-­ scientists and material and symbolic resources inside and outside of research settings proper. The locus of this discourse is the general field of epistemic activity—the “transepistemic field.” Indexicality and indeterminacy are linked in social actions (Knorr-Cetina 1981b). In thermodynamics and information theory, indeterminacy, the partial independence of variables, and chance interference thus “occasion” the emergence of information and progressive re-organization. Indeterminacy arises in science because contingencies at the research site and in the transepistemic field are important determinants of scientific facts. This works against efforts by philosophers of science to specify a small number of factors that guide selections in science. This also means that sociologists of science cannot hope to fully account for the products of science by specifying a relevant set of social, cognitive, internal, and external factors. Indeterminacy may indeed be a necessary condition for successful and progressive science. Discursive practices, linguistic and written, constitute scientific objects. We see this in the transformation of modalities (shop talk to published paper), and in the subtle shifts of agreement during conversations in the laboratory (Knorr-Cetina 1981a: 8): Written statements are constantly reconstructed (qualified, transformed, framed, selected) in practical discourse, which means that the significance of

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the properties of written discourse apart from practical discursive reconstruction remains doubtful. Scientists do not take written statements at face value; they tend to reconstruct as they read based on their own and authors’ personal and institutional contexts.

There are additional findings of the laboratory studies: • Analogies are more important than metaphors in the laboratory. • Opportunism, context, and contingency make laboratory science a tinkering process. • The key driving force motivating scientists is not truth per se but rather interest and success. The objective in science is to make things work. The logic of science rests on what scientists actually do with the realities at hand. • Scientific reasoning, like everyday reasoning, is practical, indexical, analogical, socially-situated, literary, and symbolic. Science differs from everyday life in terms of its reliance on inscription devices. These devices modify the scale of the things scientists talk about; they reduce the complexity and unwieldly nature of phenomena to simple forms and letters written on flat surfaces. This process has been complicated in recent decades by computers, big data, and complex technologies for data analysis. But the process is still one of inscription. To “simplify” is more a matter of constructing order out of disorder than of making things less complicated. • Scientific work is therefore a process of simplification in the context of constraints; certain things that have been done are ignored and certain things are just not done. Social, material, and symbolic contingencies are not simply “externalities;” they are constitutive of scientific facts. Scientific facts are manufactured out of contingencies.

A Note on Ethnomethodology Ethnomethodology has played a significant role in the ethnography of science. Michael Lynch (1982: 499, 1983) has been a prominent practitioner of this mode of inquiry in science studies. Ethnomethodologists, a stray sub-set of sociologists who are not motivated by classical scientific motives to search out causes and generalized laws, assume that non-­ sociologists pose and deal with sociological questions as a matter of course in their everyday activities. Lynch agrees with other ethnographers of

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science that scientific products are inextricably linked to the social contexts of their productions. However, he raises the further question of “how the relevance of any of the potentially endless varieties of social contingency is to be established in concrete instances of scientific work”: Commonly, social studies of science specify such contingent relationships by relying on the established methods of the social science disciplines, while ignoring the fact that the natural scientific disciplines studied themselves include inquiries which specify such relationships as a necessary part of their ordinary practice.

Sociological accounts of laboratory life are an integral part of laboratory life itself, and inseparable from the development of a “technical account” of the motives for, directions of, and results of scientific research. The problem with this viewpoint is that it fails to make a distinction between “social accounts” in folk sociology on the one hand and sociological accounts in professional sociology on the other. I will have more to say about ethnomethodology in Chap. 8.

Conclusion-the Laboratory Studies: A Critical Overview The laboratory ethnographers have been criticized for not writing “true” ethnographies; over-emphasizing the “fictive” aspects of science; conflating “facts” and “statements of facts”; overdrawing the methodological and theoretical distinctions between lab studies and traditional and contemporary science studies; taking science studies away from traditional institutional studies; and supporting radical subjectivism and relativism. Insiders have argued over whether given laboratory studies are in fact “ethnographies” and even whether they are sociological (as opposed to philosophical) studies. Steve Woolgar, co-author of the first published monograph in laboratory studies, has argued that the laboratory studies are instrumental studies focused on producing surprising, ironic, demystifying news about science. He defends an alternative reflexive ethnography that may incidentally produce “news,” but that is designed to reflect on and reach a greater understanding of taken for granted aspects of our own culture. In fact, Woolgar (1981), encased in ethnomethodology, has found causal explanation and scientific explanation in general problematic. It is not clear why “instrumental” studies are barred in principle from

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provoking, allowing, or otherwise leading to greater understanding of taken for granted aspects of culture at large. The rational sceptical scientist should join Woolgar in paying analytic attention to possible flaws in the very nature of explanation. This is not an argument for giving up explanation, however. If we take Woolgar over the threshold into irrational scepticism (and he takes us so close to that threshold that it is easy to trip over it and into irrational scepticism), we will find ourselves barred from causality and explanatory strategies. To bring a complicated and essentially philosophical and perhaps metaphysical issue down to earth, the arch-reflexivist arch-sceptic is arguing against a straw-­ man concept of objectivity, an out-of-fashion objectivity that makes correspondence claims, claims about capturing reality as it really is, science as the description and theory of the ding an sich. Once we give up this childish view of science, Woolgar’s arguments lose most of their sceptical power. This is a brief rehearsal that I will take up again in Chap. 8. Early on, Latour was already expressing opposition to the social construction of science. Hints about the “end of the social” in the first edition of Laboratory Life were defended more openly in the second edition. Knorr-Cetina replied to Latour and others by stressing that she was doing “ethnography of knowledge.” She wasn’t interested in carrying forward classical sociological (Mertonian) studies of “the social system of science.” Indeed, this was the novelty and strength of the new ethnography of science. She also emphasized that “empirical epistemology” was not “philosophy of science.” Another area of contention between Latour and Knorr-Cetina was the “credibility model” proposed by Latour and Woolgar. Knorr-Cetina argued that this was a quasi-economic exchange model. The model proposed a cycle of credibility: money is converted into arguments, arguments are converted into articles, articles are converted into recognition, and recognition is converted into funding (money). Like all earlier exchange models of science, this one too insulates scientific knowledge (facts) from social and cultural influences except through mediations. Her book The Manufacture of Knowledge focuses on the making of knowledge rather than life in the lab (an updated social system of science approach with a social construction of facts dimension). She stresses reasoning and interpretation as opposed to inscription, transepistemic fields as opposed to cycles of credibility. Her goal was to dissolve reference into practices, the making of knowledge out of “bits and pieces of the world-to-be from,

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among other things, brute pre-interpreted matter” (Knorr-Cetina 1982: 45–46): Antecedent “reality” continuously enters the picture, for example, as the source material from which worlds-to-be are wrested. But these antecedent realities do not provide for the reference; rather they provide for material (matter-based) practices of achieving certain technical effects.

The philosopher Thomas Nickles (1982), in an effort to rein in relativistic interpretations of social constructionism, pointed out that there is an antecedent reality but there is no antecedent description of the world (in effect, a self-description) we are trying to approximate. I was in the pioneering days of Science and Technology Studies and the new sociology of science at one with Knorr-Cetina and a strong programme in the social construction of science. And I am still at one with her and that programme today, almost a half-century later. I was also aligned with Steve Woolgar on the importance of a reflexive anthropology of science. Social constructionism was not an attempt to undermine realism or the idea of an “objective reality out there.” The science studies revolution was based in part on crystallizing the realization already abroad on the outskirts of the conventional philosophy, history, and sociology of science that naïve realism was indefensible. No aspects of the multi-level multi-dimensional world of our experience can be captured by the traditional formula of “things in the world” and “terms that refer.” I was not interested in coming up with a new story about what science is “really” like without considering the social and cultural contexts of science, and the human and value origins and implications of doing science. The science studies movement was in principle about not repeating old tales; it was not about telling new stories that turn out to be renewed apologies for or worshipful psalms about science. What is the upshot, therefore, of what the ethnographers of science observed in their laboratories? The ethnographers, initially working more or less independently, developed similar vocabularies about laboratory life: negotiation, circumstances, contexts, contingencies, opportunism, fictions, idiosyncrasies, rationalization, tinkering, common sense, and practical reasoning. The rhetoric coming out of the early stages of this movement could be undisciplined and could fuel misconceptions. One misconception was that we were promoting relativism. Another was that we were set on undermining the legitimacy of science. At the end of the day, our

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disciplined observations portrayed scientific practice as a tinkering process of creating order out of disorder. This idea describes natural selection and evolution (François Jacob) and events in the physical world (Ilya Prigogine and David Bohm). Scientific facts are constitutively social because they embody a social history. We can also see ourselves as ethnographers of science constructing our interpretations by creating order out of disorder. What have we accomplished? We ethnographers have succeeded in suspending, in keeping with certain features of postmodernism, conventional dichotomies: social/technical, fact/artifact, internal/external, craft work/theory, and common sense or practical reasoning/scientific reasoning. Bringing new eyes and perspectives to science allowed us to see it as chaotic and disordered and our job as ethnographers (as scientists) became bringing order to scientific practice by viewing it sociologically and anthropologically. From the perspective of reflexivity, we are talking about scientists observing themselves and making a new kind of sense out of what they are doing. Reflexive science studies gives us a tool for monitoring everyday practice in science, following changes in the social structure of science in real time, and giving us access to hitherto unrecognized or unheralded aspects of the doing of science. Reflexive constructionism is not an outsider methodology or theory; it is not a “peep show” epistemology. As students of laboratory life, we are never “the enemy within.” The ethnography of science is the process of science, of scientists, becoming self-conscious.

Bibliography Chesterton, G.K. (1905), Heretics (New York: John Lane Company). Cohn, C. (1987), Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12(4): 687–718. Cool, A. (2016), “Laboratories,” Oxford Bibliographies Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Goodfield, J. (1981), An Imagined World: A Story of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper and Row). Hesse, M. (1980), Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Bloomington: lndiana University Press). Jacoby, S. and Ochs, E. (1997), “Down to the Wire: The Cultural Clock of Physicists and the Discourse of Consensus,” Language and Society 26: 479–506.

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Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981a), “The Ethnography of Laboratory Life: Empirical Results And Theoretical Challenges,” International Society for the Sociology of Knowledge Newsletter 7 (May): 1–9. Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981b), The Manufacture of Knowledge (New York: Pergamon Press). Knorr-Cetina, K. (1982), “Scientific Communities or Transepistemic Arenas of Research: A Critique of Quasi-Economic Models of Science,” Social Studies of Science 12(1): 101–130. Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1979), Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage). Lynch, M. (1982), “Technical Work and Critical Inquiry,” Social Studies of Science 12: 499–534. Lynch, M. (1983), Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Malinowski, B. (1948), Magic, Science, and Religion (New York: Doubleday Anchor). McKegney, D. (1982), Local Action and Public Discourse in Animal Ecology: A Communication Analysis of Scientific Inquiry, Unpublished Masters thesis (Burnaby, BC: Department of Communication, Simon Fraser University). Merchant, C. (1980), The Death of Nature (New York: Harper and Row). Nickles, T. (1982), “Book Review: The Manufacture of Knowledge by K. Knorr-­ Cetina,” 4S: Newsletter of the Society for Social Studies of Science 7: 35–39. Pinxten, R. (1981), “Observation in Anthropology: Positivism and Subjectivism Combined,” Communication & Cognition 14: 57–83. Traweek, S. (1988), Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). West, G. (2017), Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies (New York: Penguin). Woolgar, S. (1981), “Interests and Explanation in the Social Study of Science,” Social Studies of Science 11: 365–394.

CHAPTER 3

Inside a Scientific Laboratory: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice

Preface I have always thought of myself as a sociologist but I could never pretend to any sort of orthodoxy because my education and training has been profoundly interdisciplinary. I spent four years in high school and four years in college studying electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics. My very degrees in sociology came as the result of working with anthropologists and ethnographically engaged sociologists. My graduate program included an historiography tutorial. My undergraduate mentor did his PhD with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. He envisioned me and the small group of his student satellites eventually doing field work among native American groups on the west coast of the United States. I had other ideas. One day, in 1967, crossing Park Avenue on my way to his penthouse apartment, I told the friend I was with “I’m going to study scientists as my tribe.” A little more than ten years later, I was engaged as an ethnographer in a colloid chemistry laboratory

This chapter is an edited version of “The Mysterious Morphology of Immiscible Liquids: A Study of Scientific Practice,” co-authored with M. Zenzen and originally published in Social Science Information, 21, 3 (1982): 441–473. It is re-published here in edited form with written permission from Sage Publications. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_3

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Introduction As the science studies movement unfolded, I was there and aware of the emerging ethnography of science movement. Sometime in the late 1970s, I also became aware that one of my colleagues, the philosopher Michael Zenzen, was close to developments in a campus colloid chemistry laboratory. We decided to explore the possibility of undertaking a laboratory study. Mike was already “inside.” I became a participant, taking on the role of a consultant on theory. I did not have a background in chemistry but I did have a background in theoretical physics. With the cooperation of the lab director and his graduate students we began an ethnographic study of the lab. Our objective was to describe a project in progress from the time it was initiated to the culmination of the project in a published paper. Following other ethnographers, we wanted to follow the paper trail and this involved studying lab notes and the three major documents associated with the project: the report to the funding agency; the manuscript originally submitted for publication; and the manuscript accepted for publication. One of the conceptual tools we already had at hand. Based on the on-going laboratory studies, was the concept of contingencies. We would argue, in conformity with the other ethnographies, that contingencies (social, material, and symbolic) are not simply “externalities” but rather that they are constitutive of scientific facts. In the context of the postmodern atmosphere we were working in, we were cautious about what claims we could make for the account we were going to give of “our” laboratory. We therefore did not want to claim that we were going to construct an account that was more factual than accounts that others (including the laboratory scientists themselves) might give. We therefore claimed modestly that our objective was to give one account, based on mobilizing and utilizing a variety of standard ethnographic methods: in-depth interviews, observations, the analysis of written materials and conversations, and direct participation in the work of the laboratory. The modesty with which we announced our account was conditioned in part by the kinds of methodological horrors sceptics like Steve Woolgar were assembling that urged caution in putting forth causal and explanatory (scientific) accounts. But in retrospect we gave up too much in terms of our commitment to a sociological science which was being challenged by ethnomethodologists and some postmodernist “end of the social” philosophers.

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For approximately two years (1979–1981), we spent two to four days a week in the laboratory, from a couple to several hours for each session. We spent most of our time as observers and interviewers. We also participated in sessions devoted to explaining the results of the experiments at the centre of the project. Our report included a reconstruction of events, based on extended interviews, that occurred before our study began.

The Discipline and the Laboratory The scientists in our study were colloid chemists. Colloid chemists study phenomena ranging from one to one-tenth of a micron. In general, colloid chemistry is the study of mixed states in the phases of liquids, solids, and gases; for example, mixtures of different liquids or liquid-gas systems of particular substances. Colloid chemistry deals with phenomena familiar to all of us in our everyday lives such as bubbles, foams, emulsions, and slurries. Like surface chemistry, colloid chemistry is tied to applications in households and industries. It is used in creating exotic alloys as well as manufacturing salad dressings and beers. The story of our laboratory and the project we entered into begins during World War II. An alarm sounds and sends allied Royal Air Force planes scrambling to meet approaching enemy bombers. As they climb, oil spews from their engines and smears their windshields. This problem provided the head of our laboratory with a post-doctoral project at Stanford University in the early 1940s. He helped to solve the problem, became a colloid chemist of some distinction, and now headed up the university laboratory we were studying. The graduate student leader in the laboratory had majored in physics as an undergraduate. Toward the end of his first year in graduate school, his fellow grad students suggested he might want to transfer to another laboratory headed by Dr. Sidney Ross. His move was motivated by the need to find a funded project and the opportunity to follow his interests in surface and colloid chemistry. Dr. Ross was not known as a grantsman, but Ralph was attracted by what he understood was a “wide-open,” employable, and practical field of study. There were three key members of the research team in the laboratory: Dr. Ross, the head of the laboratory, his number one grad student, Ralph, and Dr. Henry Hollinger. Dr. Hollinger, an expert in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, was what we came to call the resident theoretician. Dr. Ross called on him when he needed help with a theoretical or conceptual dilemma. Sometimes it is a question of providing

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a theoretical framing for an experimental result. In this role, Dr. Hollinger often got little more than an acknowledgement for contributions that should have entitled him to co-authorship.

The Laboratory Atmosphere In most social science studies of this type, the real names of people and places are not revealed. By mutual agreement between ourselves and the laboratory members, we were not under this constraint. Our four room laboratory was located on the third floor of the Cogswell Laboratory Building on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. There is a basement in another campus building that is sometimes used by lab members. The Institute was founded as The Rensselaer School in 1824. It is the oldest school of science and civil engineering in the English speaking world. It became the Rensselaer Institute in 1833, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 1861. Mike and I were both members of the RPI faculty at the time of this study. Dr. Ross worked very closely with one or two graduate students. Three or four other graduate students and undergraduates working on senior theses could also be found working in the lab. Occasionally, an advanced high school student who was about to enter RPI could be found in the lab. Ross shared a professional intimacy with his senior graduate students. He had a zero tolerance policy for “neurotic personalities,” and avoided dealing with his students “personal problems.” He and his students related to the off-campus world via anecdotes and stories about life “out there;” their social and personal lives did not overlap with their lives in the lab. From Dr. Ross’s perspective, the lab did not have a “director;” it was a setting in which “students” became “collaborators.” He tended to assume that innovative scientific ideas were not likely to arise in the interactions and conversations between students. Our observations suggested that there was a lot of “science” going on between students of which he was unaware. As the project unfolded from 1977 on, Ralph became Ross’ “top man” or “senior man” in the lab, his number one doctoral student. By the time we entered the lab, Ralph and Dr. Ross were getting ready to write the first report on the project of immediate concern for the funding agency, NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). There were three full-time PhD candidates, including Ralph, working on the project

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along with two first year MS students and three undergraduate seniors. Ralph, who had started out in the lab working on mechanical problems, was now working on conceptual problems. This was, in Dr. Ross’ perspective, Ralph’s “mature state” signalled by the fact that Ralph had responsibility for writing reports and meeting with NASA officials. But the hands on aspect of laboratory work was still a central feature of Ralph’s day to day work. That work, and the focus of the lab in this period, was morphology research. The research project was focused on the morphology of a liquid-liquid dispersion. The two-component system they were studying involved benzene and water; ethanol was used as a non-reactive solvent. Ralph joined the lab after taking a course with Dr. Ross on the chemistry of interfaces. The morphology project began at NASA where scientists were trying to make alloys of two metals for certain space applications. A NASA researcher about to become a project director called on Dr. Ross, a highly respected NASA consultant. The two discussed NASA’s needs and Dr. Ross’ interests and resources, a research proposal was invited, submitted, and funded. This NASA connection had a significant and continuing influence on the nature and direction of the morphology research. About five years prior to receiving the NASA grant, Dr. Ross had published a paper on liquid-liquid and solid-liquid dispersions. His interest in these phenomena had been prompted by his readings in the history of science. Dr. Ross’ father, a senior partner in the family whisky distillery Ross, Campbell Ltd. of Glasgow, extended the business to North America in 1933. Dr. Ross emigrated, earned a BSc in analytical chemistry at McGill University in Montreal and went on to do a dissertation on foams and brewing at the University of Illinois. His interest in the history of science was manifested in his outstanding library of books and manuscripts on that topic. He was especially interested in the life and works of James Clerk Maxwell and the laboratory methods of Michael Faraday. Against this background, he was well-placed to tackle the morphology problem that had arisen at NASA. NASA metallurgists had been using phase diagrams in their work on creating new alloys, and they were trying to elaborate phase diagrams. The morphology of systems containing two immiscible liquids was not given in their phase diagrams, however. Dr. Ross put Ralph to work on the problem of how to include morphology in the phase diagrams of two-­ component immiscible liquid systems. Ralph, working more or less independently, first had to choose what mix of liquids to study. Aniline was

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considered too dangerous by NASA scientists, so it was eliminated from consideration. A graduate student in the lab had been using a system to study foaming and had a lot of data on surface tensions. Ralph decided to adopt that system, but he was frustrated in his efforts to make up a mixture that behaved predictably at the critical temperature, the inversion point. The literature on this system reported eight different critical temperatures for the system he was studying with a range of fifteen degrees. After devoting an entire summer to this problem, he was advised by Dr. Ross to drop the system he was working with. Another graduate student in Dr. Ross’ lab was having success with a benzene and water system. Ralph liked this idea. The original system required the use of an isothermal bath, a notoriously temperamental method, according to Ralph. Ralph then adopted an innovative approach for studying his new system: manually shaking and visually examining the mixture in a test tube. Dr. Ross, acutely aware of Ralph’s frustration with the first system, suggested setting up a variety of test tube mixtures, each with different volume fractions of benzene and water (soon to be referred to around the lab as the “oil and water” mixture). The test tubes were to be manually shaken and visually examined to determine whether the emulsion type was benzene in water or water in benzene. The shaking experiments led to the morphology mystery. Ralph’s first problem was to determine what emulsion type he had after shaking the test tube. This is not as simple and innocent as it may sound. The mixtures separate rapidly after shaking, and one sees a colourless solution with a highly active interface between the two volumes of benzene and water. All the standard techniques for determining morphology apply to stable emulsions. Ralph literally had to teach himself how to see what was going on in a short-lived emulsion: what does it “look like?” He had to “think about what you have” and hypothesize relevant visual parameters. In other words, he had to make the data manifest themselves. One could hardly ask for a closer parallel between “scientific observation” and “aesthetic seeing” (Hanson 1958, 1969). The foreground-background character of perception is crucial here. It was difficult for Ralph to judge whether droplets were moving up or down against a stationary liquid background or whether the liquid background was moving up or down while the droplets remained stationary. He eventually was able to distinguish “a roving interface.” Droplets seemed to be moving in two directions; “one direction was smooth, the other showed oscillation.” Ralph “saw” that the “emulsified droplets break into their phase.” Ralph learned

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over time to focus on the interface. It formed right after the shaking stopped. He paid attention to how the droplets coalesced and to the direction in which they ruptured. Ralph was able to satisfy himself and others that he had developed a way to determine the morphology of different mixtures. The manual shaking technique was questioned by some scientists outside the lab, but while the results did seem to be reproducible, this wasn’t straightforward. The question at this point was: “Is the result reasonable?” Discussions with Dr. Ross had led Ralph to anticipate certain results that were violated in a rather odd way. It turned out to be impossible to determine the inversion point. Shaking the test tubes led to inconsistent results; sometimes A (benzene) dispersed in B (water) and sometimes B dispersed in A. This turned out to be the reproducible result. Ralph was unwilling to go to Dr. Ross with this result. Instead, he consulted with a fellow graduate student who was working in an adjacent area (“territory”) of the lab. The student recommended trying an “averaging procedure.” Ralph began collecting data on the probability of getting A dispersed in B for a given relative initial volume of A and B.  Plotted logarithmically, the results yielded a straight line relationship. Dr. Ross noticed that the analytic expression for the plotted data was formally analogous to the Boltzmann expression for entropy. Here was a case, according to Dr. Ross’ interpretation, where the Boltzmann W’s (the number of real microstates corresponding to a gas’s macrostate) were proportional to probabilities that are directly measurable. This raised the possibility for the chemists of, roughly speaking, “seeing entropy.” Enter Dr. Hollinger, the resident theorist. Discussions with Dr. Hollinger shed some light on the thermodynamic arguments. This was so promising that Dr. Ross began preparing a manuscript on the results. In so doing, he discovered that the thermodynamics argument that was the grounds for the mathematical description of the observations was actually invalid. The derived curve was quantitatively incorrect and had the wrong slope. The chemists were confronted with two anomalies: First, the experimental one that the inversion point is stochastically related to the volume fraction; second, the thermodynamics arguments that should have worked according to Dr. Hollinger, failed. The theoretical work was in limbo. Dr. Ross was convinced that the experimental results were intrinsically interesting and should be published. It was likely, he thought, that a theoretical interpretation of the results would involve a complicated mathematical model. His interest in the problem was waning, however, and he

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argued against further experiments. Ralph was undeterred. He pressed forward with a “thin films” model in which the forces driving nucleation would come primarily from the cohesion of the liquid. There were now extensive discussions about further experiments. Dr. Hollinger’s episodic inputs amounted to the assumption that “if statistical mechanics ever works, it should work now,” in the case of the liquid dispersion results. He reserved judgment while he examined Dr. Ross’ thermodynamics arguments that had led him to conclude that the slope of the derived curve was wrong. Dr. Ross countered every suggestion Ralph made concerning what could be done experimentally to determine the driving force behind the morphology process. Dr. Ross’ issue was that cohesion effects cannot easily be separated from those due to viscosity and surface tension. It is not possible to treat one parameter as an independent variable. It was pure luck that they had started with a configuration that led to a relation in which the probability of a certain morphology is a smooth continuous function of the concentration. Ralph and Dr. Hollinger, who had continued to explore the theoretical problems, were now at a sticking point. Meanwhile, Zenzen (in his role as a participant observer) had come across an article in Scientific American on critical point phenomena (Wilson 1979) that he thought might help break through the sticking points. At this juncture, Dr. Ross was out of the country and the task of preparing the paper for submission to the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science had been left in Ralph’s hands. Ralph had serious reservations about the claims made in the paper. He had re-examined and re-plotted the data from the original experiments carried out about a year and a half earlier and discovered some arithmetical errors and questionable experimental practices. Nonetheless, the paper was submitted. This paper was a revised version of the earlier report to NASA. We should note that Dr. Ross took full responsibility for any papers co-authored with grad students. In any case, the paper was not accepted. One of the major complaints from the referees was that the paper lacked a theoretical foundation. Dr. Hollinger did some theoretical tweaking and after some additional changes were made the paper was re-submitted and accepted. This paper trail is discussed below, but first, let us consider the phenomenological nature of this laboratory.

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A Phenomenological Laboratory Ralph’s experience in “teaching himself to see” emulsion types in the shaking experiments reflected Dr. Ross’ perspective on research and was not unusual in his laboratory. Dr. Ross greatly admired Michael Faraday. He had written scholarly papers on Faraday and a portrait of Faraday hung in the office adjacent to the laboratory in which the shaking experiments were conducted. Dr. Ross followed Faraday’s model for scientific work, and one heard Faraday’s motto around the lab: “Work, Finish, Publish.” Dr. Ross stressed the importance of the power of observation. The objective in any given situation in the lab is look at it and see what no one has seen before. The creative scientific environment, Ralph said, is one in which “anomalies are everywhere.” These anomalies are not waiting for a Kuhnian resolution, they are just part of the everyday world of the scientist. They can cause consternation, they can be stimulating puzzles, and sometimes they are just ignored. But they are always there, along with and inseparable from the apparent disorder of bits of rubber tubing, Styrofoam, Scotch tape, idiosyncratic test tubes, floor to ceiling tubing, outrageous twists and turns in homemade glassware and random objects, a cabinet filled with randomly scattered electronics (old equipment like oscilloscopes, voltmeters, and radios; resistors, capacitors, batteries, and so on), and aluminium foil; these are the material and conceptual contingencies that alchemic instincts draw on to manufacture facts in this laboratory. But there is more to this lab than the romantic notions of a dead scientist’s spirit and alchemic instincts. The phenomenology of this lab signalled adaptation to an environment of scarcity. The interface between the lab scientist and their technology is stronger here than it is likely to be in a well-funded lab where grants and state-of-the-art equipment can be taken for granted. The test-tube shaking experiments at the heart of the mysterious morphology of immiscible liquids were designed to provide Ralph with a relatively simple and inexpensive path to the PhD. As we travel through the morphology project with him, we see him cleaning glassware, blowing his own glassware, and scrambling for parts from shelves of outdated electronic equipment to tinker up a Wheatstone bridge for a thermocouple. He used this for temperature control instead of an expensive electronic thermometer. Success— and survival—in this lab depended on getting the “hang of putting things

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together out of what’s available.” Generational linkages across graduate student cohorts transmit Faraday’s spirit and work ethic. There’s nothing unusual about transmissions across generational linkages in general. In the case of this particular lab, scarcity makes it more salient and more crucial. To succeed in this chemistry lab, you must be good at electronics, and handy with tools and materials. This is necessary to ensure that the inevitable problems of building, maintaining, and modifying apparatus can be handled, and handled efficiently and cheaply. An environment of scarcity produces a different scientific type than an environment of abundance, one with a keen awareness of and intimacy with a wide range of “things” and “processes” which—in one form or another— can be drawn on to nourish the scientific process. The unaided senses play a crucial role in this context.

The Rhetoric of Persuasion in Science There are three principle documents associated with the morphology project: a quarterly report to the funding agency, NASA (“Emulsion-type inversion for the system benzene, ethanol, and water”), co-authored by Ralph and Dr. Ross; the paper submitted for publication (“Change of morphology of a liquid-liquid dispersion as a stochastic process”), co-­ authored by Dr. Ross and Ralph; and the revised version of the first submission which was published. The paper was submitted to the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science in the Winter of 1980. In March, the journal editor informed Dr. Ross that he and Ralph would have to review the criticisms raised by the two referees and make appropriate revisions before a “final decision on acceptance” could be made. The relationship between documents and scientific practice had been discussed in earlier laboratory studies. Latour and Woolgar (1979: 51–52, 245) argue that there is “an essential similarity between the inscription capabilities of apparatus, the manic passion for marking, coding, and filing, and the literary skills of writing, persuasion, and discussion.” The laboratory is “a system of literary inscription.” Writing is “not so much a method of transferring information as a material operation of creating order.” Knorr and Knorr (1978: 39) analysed texts as media for constructing reality rather than as “data which represent reality.” These authors’ experiences gave us a rationale for focusing on the persuasive aspects of scientific paper production. Persuasion in this context does not connote or denote encouraging false beliefs, nor does it imply that persuasion is the

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only or the main aim pursued by scientists in writing scientific papers. Scientists, however, do need to use a rhetoric of persuasion in order to draw attention to and help legitimate their claims. This is not simply a matter of choosing the “right” words, but of deciding when and how to use analogies, mathematics, theory, and so on. The text of the eighteen page NASA report is all under one heading: “Phase diagrams and morphology.” There are five references, one table, and six diagrams. The paper submitted for publication (M1) is organized as follows: (1) Abstract, (2) sub-headings: (a) Factors affecting morphology; Experimental section; Results. Only two of the five references in the NASA report are included among the seven references in M1. Most of the text changes in M1, as we would expect from the statement modalities discussed earlier, make the argument more general, more conclusive, more technical, and less controversial. This is accomplished by selecting words that indicate greater confidence in what is being reported or by adding qualifications: • The term “certain range” in the NASA report (NR) becomes “intermediate range” in M1 (specification). • “is shaken a large number of times” (NR) becomes “is given a large number of trials” in M1 (technicization). • “Phase diagrams and morphology,” single sub-heading in NR, becomes “Factors affecting morphology” in M1 (generalization). • “defined” in NR becomes “defined operationally” in M1 (specification). • “cohesive forces overcome to some degree by the physical action of shaking” in NR becomes in M1 “cohesive forces must be overcome by an input of energy from mechanical agitation” (technicization). • “This mechanism holds…” in NR becomes “The rule that…” in M1 (generalization). In general, there is a pragmatic aspect to article production illustrated by the changes in the explanatory framework adopted in each document. For example, NR contains a speculative section on entropy; this is replaced by a magnetic coin analogy in M1. In response to referees’ criticisms, M2 eliminates the magnetic coin analogy and introduces a statistical mechanics argument. A number of mathematical discussions in NR including discussions of probability and entropy, along with an allusion to Maxwell’s equations, are eliminated in M1.

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M1 is organized into three sections: factors affecting morphology, experimental section, and results. There are no references in M1 to the Helmholtz Free Energy equations, nor to entropy, both of which appear in NR. The emphasis in M1 is on the stochastic nature of the “ability of the dispersion to invert.” The morphology of two immiscible liquids systems is not a phase diagram variable. It cannot be predicted by any current theory. It must be observed in every case. The dispersion’s ability to invert is spread over a range of compositions. It is thus only possible to determine the probability of one type dispersion inversion rather than another. The entropy discussion and accompanying equations in NR are, as indicated earlier, replaced in M1 by a magnetic coin analogy. This change reflects the uncertainties associated with the otherwise interesting exercise of linking probability and entropy as an explanatory strategy. In M1, esoteric arguments are replaced by a more modest explanation. The authors turn to an everyday phenomenon, coin tossing. The idea of a magnetic coin transforms an everyday phenomenon into a complex physical analogy but one that remains intuitively accessible (at least in the view of the authors). The magnetic coin analogy arose out of lengthy discussions which Zenzen and I participated in in an effort to account for the results of the shaking experiments. Dr. Ross and Ralph were not persuasive enough in M1 to satisfy the two referees. They were persuasive enough, however, to earn a recommendation for publication with revisions from one of the referees. The major criticism in the other review turned on theory. In order to satisfy the second referee, the magnetic coin analogy had to be deleted. The referee claimed that the analogy indicated that their treatment was not “fundamental” and therefore more suitable for a chemical engineering journal. Recall that Dr. Hollinger helped Dr. Ross and Ralph develop a satisfactory theoretical framework. The major change in M2 is the inclusion of a statistical mechanics interpretation in place of the magnetic coin analogy. The abstract for M2 begins: “We report a new phenomenon.” This is followed by a more general statement than those used in NR and M1: the new phenomenon is “that the morphology of an unstabilized liquid-liquid dispersion is predicted by a statistical law rather than a causal law.” This rhetorical move is designed to establish the “fundamental” nature of the results and interpretations. This is the significance of the reference in M2 to “lawfulness,” even though the treatment remains statistical in keeping with the experimental data. This should not be interpreted to mean that statistical results are not lawful (Bohm 1971: 28–32). [NOTE: This is

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stated incorrectly in the original paper where it says, “should be” instead of “should not be.” Indeed, Bohm argues that causal laws and statistical laws “together are what bring together the actual development of things.” By themselves these laws are partial and each one’s representations of reality must be corrected with the aid of the other]. Dr. Ross was satisfied to present the results of the experiments as statistical in nature. In the end, he and Ralph were led to present the results in a theoretical framework that in effect transformed “result” into “law.” The “alchemic” rhetoric of “created” and “disappeared” in M1 is transformed into the mechanistic mode in M2: “disappears” becomes “retraction” and “created” becomes “extended as films;” “…tend toward coalescence of like liquids” becomes “cause the extended liquids to retract” (my emphasis). In general, the rhetoric in M2, in keeping with the sentence modalities thesis, is more mechanistic, causal, and deterministic than the rhetoric in M1. Finally, there is no explicit reference in NR, M1, or M2 to the fact that the morphology research involved shaking test tubes by hand and using unaided visual observation. In M2, the words “shaking” and “agitation” are used synonymously. We find such phrases as “vigorously mixed,” “thorough mixing,” “vigorously shaken up and down,” “mechanically conferred motion,” and “externally applied agitation.” The words “manual” or “hand-shaken” are never used. There is a conscious effort in M2 to portray the agitation procedure as a controlled mechanistic procedure that is in principle reproducible: for example (1) “In the foregoing argument the mode and degree of mechanical agitation in creating the dispersion is taken to be invariable;” (2) “To ensure that shaking produced each time a consistent and thorough degree of mixing, several procedures were maintained. The length of time and manner of shaking were kept uniform for all trials;” (3) the authors cite a paper (Sasaki 1939) in which Sasaki points out that dispersion type is affected by the mode of agitation; they go on to list other factors that are known to affect dispersion type and note that in the present case all relevant variables are “frozen” and only volume fraction is allowed to vary; and (4) “Some variation in shaking technique and method of mixing was tried and gave the same result for the time of separation.” The naïve reader of this rhetoric might think that the authors were not giving a truthful account of the experiment. The failure to specify that the test tubes were shaken by hand and the stress on the controls established to ensure uniform agitation (and replicability in principle) are indeed noteworthy. We participated in two workshops devoted to presenting the

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morphology research prior to publication. The physicists, chemists, and engineers in attendance raised strenuous objections in queries about the shaking method and procedures. Dr. Ross and Ralph appear to have enhanced the persuasiveness of their argument by eliminating any references to “manual” or “hand-shaken.” They claimed, however, that “insiders” reading the paper will know that the test tubes were shaken by hand. In any case, the discussion of the shaking experiments is consistent with the general tendency observed in other lab studies to mechanize and objectivize rhetoric in the movement from the initial to the final stages that take science from practice to exposition.

Reflections on Life Among the Colloids and the Chemists The [Southern Cross] anchored on a short cable in the open bay off the coral reef. Almost before the chain was down the natives began to scramble aboard, coming over the side by any means that offered, shouting fiercely to each other and to us in a tongue of which not a word was understood by the Mota-speaking folk of the mission vessel. I wondered how such turbulent human material could ever be induced to submit to scientific study.

The year is 1928, and the anthropologist Raymond Firth has landed on the small Pacific Island of Tikopia. The reality of their life is going on all around him but he can’t “see” it. Most of what he records at first will turn out to be incorrect or so inadequate as to be useless. Yet he must begin somewhere: He realizes that at this stage he is incapable of separating the patterns of custom from the accidentals of individual behaviour, he wonders if each slight gesture does not hold some meaning which is hidden from him, he aches to be able to catch and retain some of the flood of talk he hears on all sides, and he is consumed with envy of the children who are able to toss about so lightly that speech which he must so painfully acquire. He is conscious of good material running to waste before him moment by moment; he is impressed by the vastness of the task that lies before him and of his own feeble equipment for it; in the face of a language and customs to which he has not the key, he feels that he is acting like a moron before the natives. At the same time he is experiencing the delights of discovery, he is gaining an inkling of what is in store; like a gourmet walking around a feast that is

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spread, he savours in anticipation the quality of what he will later appreciate in full. (Firth 1936/1963: 1–2)

This is the typical trial of the classical anthropologist. Our problems on landing in the colloid chemistry laboratory were not so daunting. Our “natives” spoke our language and there was even overlap with our scientific languages. We had experiences in laboratories and knew something about laboratory culture. We also had the benefit of the ethnographers of science who had come before us. Nonetheless, orienting ourselves to Dr. Ross’ laboratory and the morphology project was a difficult task. Part of the difficulty involved finding a point of entry, something we could identify and access as “the beginning” of a particular phase of the laboratory’s work. Dr. Ross and Ralph viewed research as a continuous process punctuated by the arrival of a new “man” in the lab, a new grant, or other factors entering the lab from “outside.” The lab had two overlapping histories: (1) a continuous story (the “carrier wave”) at the level of ideas, money, people, and experiments; and (2) a story of punctuations (“modulations”) in the continuity caused by the rhythms of people starting and completing projects, and the pushes and pulls of the funding cycle. Initially, we attempted to establish a point of reference by focusing on anomalous aspects of the research in progress. This might have given us something we could organize our research around and help us weave a narrative. Things were not to work out so simply, however. As we grew more accustomed to laboratory life, we discovered that the importance attached to anomalies varied greatly. Sometimes a theoretically-perplexing situation was stressed because publication would be impossible unless the difficulty could be resolved. But if the experimental work was going well, there was a tendency to argue that the data were intrinsically interesting and should be published without theoretical embroidery. The ebb and flow of judgements about the significance of anomalies made it extremely difficult for us to construct a sort of one-dimensional or linear narrative. The day-to-day on-going work in the laboratory seemed to continually overflow simple categories and classifications. This work appeared as a large series of responses to imposed demands, perceived needs, given and novel conditions, and so on. From our perspective as ethnographers the question was: where was our science to be found in this turbulence? From the perspective of the lab scientists the question was: how do we manage the multitude of contingencies: (1) the background knowledge and experience of the researchers; what courses they have taken, what

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journal articles they have read and remembered, with what equipment are they familiar; what experimental techniques did they know; is their orientation theoretical or experimental; did they do exhaustive literature searches before designing an experiment; how creative are they in experimental design; how patient are they with delicate apparatus; how open are they to new, unexpected phenomena; how secure are they in terms of ability, position, and knowledge; how willing are they to make their mistakes known to others; how open are they to advice from others…? (2) what equipment was available, and how much did it cost; how easy or difficult was it to modify given instruments and what were the costs involved? Could they modify or make the instruments themselves or did they have to have technicians modify them or buy them using what budgetary resources? (3) what was the laboratory “style” and how was it organized for research; what funds were available and how did people feel about how they should be used (i.e., was discretion allowed by the funding agency; sometimes, Ralph told us, there were “ropes attached to research funding”); what kind of pressures were there on PhD students to finish quickly, to choose projects that were fundable and likely to lead to publications and job offers? (4) did people respect each other’s judgments; what were the various roles people had to play in the lab, the university, and in their personal lives and what tensions could arise in their interplay; what forms of communication arose in specific relationships; what biases were at play in lab workers’ ideals about science and education? This multitude of contingencies came into focus as our engagements in the lab evolved and we saw them increase in number and form and become part of an interlocking structure, a web that was inseparable from the web of “the research itself.” By focusing initially on anomalies, our research itself became an anomaly! We had been proceeding as if the “real research process” (which we at first identified with the discovery and analysis of certain anomalies) could be separated from the contingencies. As our work progressed we experienced a conceptual gestalt shift: the contingencies were constitutive of the research process. They continually problematized research in such an intimate way that we had to abandon any vestigial ideas about the nature and function of “externalities” in science. In retrospect, it is clear that I (if not Zenzen who was more conventionally scientific) was unconsciously primed for the gestalt shift by my familiarity with earlier lab studies.

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Contingencies and Science Two ideas were abroad as we entered our lab as ethnographers: (1) that contingencies are constitutive of scientific practices and products; and (2) the social construction of scientific facts. However useful these ideas have come to be in science studies, at that time a great deal of work remained to be done to clarify exactly what these ideas meant and how they manifested in scientific practice. We did not in this study presume to offer a systematic and general theory of contingencies and science. More modestly, our objective was to explore contingencies and science in the particular setting of our lab. We imagined putting forth conjectures about our lab but not offering generalizations or prescriptions applicable to science in general. One of the difficulties we faced in trying to convey the ways in which our lab workers created, elicited, and incorporated contingencies was that when we simply enumerated contingencies they seemed quite unremarkable. It is not surprising that certain instruments were unavailable, broke down, or needed to be modified (drastically in some cases). Nor is it surprising that literature searches, professional meetings, and luncheon discussions sometimes led to ideas which could structure and re-structure research in important ways. Taken singly, or in a list, such things present as discrete events, the inevitable “asides” of any directed action in the “real” world. The point is, however, that the research process is not simply or even primarily determined by “nature” or “physical reality.” Scientific knowledge is created out of available resources—including formal and informal modes of communication and instrumentation (Mulkay 1979: 60–61). In the deepest sense, the available resources in a given lab refer to the researchers’ capacities for creative and critical thought, persuasion, communication, conflict, and cooperation. The indeterminacy of scientific criteria, the “looseness” of laboratory research, provide room for exercising those capacities. It is not as if a determinate path to some piece of information, some fact of the matter, some piece of knowledge pre-existed and researchers are deflected off this path by various sorts of perturbations among what we identify as contingencies. Rather, there is always a context, an inherited, assigned, or constructed problem situation which must be continually problematized and kept in motion. This flux (change without direction) can be maintained and eventually given direction by the creative use of relatively forced choices and judicious selections from

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among relatively free choices (that is, where alternatives are available). What we have, then, is a kind of evolution from randomness, the building of an organism—the research process—from an environment that the organism itself helps to create while it itself is growing and transforming. In this evolution, the discrete things and processes called contingencies lose their contingent aspect because of a complex implication. There is literally an enfolding which makes the contingencies constitutive of and not external influences on the social production of knowledge. In retrospect, we revealed aspects of the research process that mirrored tinkering (as I discussed in Chap. 2) and punctuated equilibrium in evolution. It is also important to clarify what we mean when we say that “nature” does not simply and solely determine what we discover and invent in the scientific process. I will discuss social construction in more detail in later chapters. Briefly, social construction means that the only way we humans can discover or invent is by interacting with each other in social settings. “Nature” doesn’t enter here in any of the classical ways assumed by naïve realist philosophers of science. Our social activities, for one, are part of the natural world. Secondly, the world of our everyday experience is “nature’s” first line of defence against false ideas; the recalcitrance of the world-in-­ itself we cannot access is the second line of defence. So “nature” doesn’t enter into the scientific process; it is inseparable from it. To return to our laboratory, the research environment the research process helps to create is the environment of the immediate problem-context and it is structured primarily by the instrumentation and first order mediation of informal dialogue among the researchers. There is also a more remote and subtle background environment that is formed by such things as the social structure of the lab, the styles of the researchers, the nature, levels, and degree of mutual trust and respect, and the reputation of the lab and the researchers in and outside of the university. We were not in a position to explore the relationship between talk and fact construction in our original paper but it is now clear that the process is social and not cognitive. The cognitive in the early twenty first century became absorbed in the social brain paradigm. We think through talk, and thinking is not in individual brains but in the network of talk and interactions (Amman and Knorr-Cetina 1989; Collins 1998; Restivo 2020). Individuals with brains and bodies are the necessary crucibles for processing and communicating the network-generated ideas. The general environmental contexts in which laboratories are embedded functions as a background. Laboratory research does not usually make

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use of this domain to problematize things, nor is it likely to be the source of relatively forced choices. What we have is a sort of complex figure/ ground structure. The figuration (the research process) operates with a general ground that creates and maintains itself distinctly from a more immediate ground it helps to create. This is a more dynamic process than implied by the standard fixed and bounded figure/ground paradigm. The figure/ground structure itself may be radically altered during the flux of research. There is, then, a constantly shifting set of relevant systems that alter the figure/ground structure of the research process (cf. Gurwitsch 1974: 121). The remote comes near, and the near recedes. Thus, while one might be tempted to identify levels of, or a hierarchy of contingencies (instrumental, conceptual, psychological, and sociological), our experience in this lab suggests this would be a fruitless approach. Which choices, relatively free or forced, will be most significant for the research process cannot be determined a priori. In studies such as ours, the ethnographers are themselves contingencies. They view themselves as contingencies and this impacts how they view the nature and function of contingencies in science. The social construction of narratives about laboratory life involves negotiations among ethnographers and laboratory scientists. The story of laboratory science is not constructed in a classically “objective,” “detached” setting and manner. Recognizing the complexities involved in the interactions among contingencies and in the negotiations out of which ethnographic narratives emerge can help to problematize the social research process. (Thinking about these complexities in fact led us to consider the figure/ground model). It seems clear that the internal narrative of laboratory life is mirrored reflexively in the narrative of the ethnography. Retrospectively, it now seems that we and our ethnography colleagues could have done more to address the criticism that we missed much about science by focusing on on-site cases of laboratories. Laboratories are imbedded in a nested network of sites in which science is being done, all linked in a worldwide network of researchers.

Denouement: Indra’s Net The Hindu god Indra inhabits a celestial palace that is covered by a network of jewels arranged so that by looking at any one you can see all the others reflected in it. We were reminded of Indra’s net when we reflected

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on various ways in which our study reflected the morphology study—and even the morphology phenomenon. The Scientific American article Zenzen brought to the attention of the chemists, for example, appeared to have implications for our research too. An often neglected aspect of natural systems is that, in order to study them, the scientist must be able to isolate some limited range of length scales (Wilson 1979: 158): …events distinguished by a great disparity in size have little influence on one another; they do not communicate, and so the phenomena associated with each scale can be treated independently. The interaction of two adjacent water molecules is much the same whether the molecules are in the Pacific Ocean or in a teapot. What is equally important, an ocean wave can be described quite accurately as a disturbance of a continuous fluid, ignoring entirely the molecular structure.

Thus, the causal analysis of multi-scaled complex phenomena presupposes a decomposition into levels which can be treated as effectively non-­ interactive. When we use categories such as “new graduate student,” “experienced” or “older graduate student,” “researcher,” “NASA,” “resident theoretician,” and so on we are already performing a decomposition of the multi-scaled process called scientific research. Now it may be that such a decomposition is significant, but the degree of success one has in developing a causal analysis of the phenomena associated with each scale will depend on the degree to which these scales can be treated as if they were non-interactive. We see no a priori justification for interpreting the social production and construction of knowledge in the restricted manner required by a commitment to causal analysis. This is not the way to make the ethnography of science “scientific.” The success of causal analysis in natural science depends on assumptions about non-interaction among levels of phenomena. Bloor (1976) advocates a naturalistic causal sociology of science that ignores this point. The appropriate “scientific” approach to science studies may be to research the question of interactions and leave open the question of scales. Various decompositions are possible in studying science, and it is probably wise to avoid the naïve assumption that the obvious and the easiest decompositions are necessarily the most important ones or the crucial operative factors in the science under study in particular or in general. We ourselves may have fallen into some methodological and interpretative traps in this study for failing to adequately account for the decomposition

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problem. In retrospect, I now believe that we conceded causality too readily. It is too easy to give up on causality when phenomena challenge us with statistical, probabilistic, and stochastic complexities. This will have to be pursued elsewhere. Our relationship to the chemists and their morphology problem mirrored the relationship of the chemists to the morphology problem. Like Ralph learning to “see changes in morphology,” we had to learn to “see” the statics and dynamics of the morphology of the laboratory. We had to learn to see the changes that occurred as the documentation of the experiment went from NR to M1 and to M2 in something like the same way Ralph had to learn to see changes in morphology in the test tubes he was shaking. There is a certain recursive reciprocity between core features of the physical systems that constituted the morphology problem, the structure of the chemistry laboratory, and the structure of the arguments, descriptions, and interpretations that emerged from our laboratory ethnography. To put it in unqualified terms: the social production and construction of natural scientific facts is mirrored in the social production and construction of social science facts. Such a reciprocal animation of “natural” and “social” is harmonious with foreground/background shifting and with the new ideas about the mutual embeddedness of society and nature.

Conclusion In general, the results of our research are consistent with the constructionist interpretations of scientific practice found in earlier ethnographies of science and associated research in science studies. Scientific facts are produced and re-produced at the sites of scientific practice. They are socially situated, contingent, discursive accomplishments (Knorr-Cetina 1981: 4–5). This conclusion thus does not support radically relativistic interpretations of the new sociology of science. The social construction of scientific facts are events in the history of ideas, stylized by contemporary, local, social, cultural, and environmental factors and contexts (Fleck 1935/1979: 100; cf. Spengler 1926: 59). Neither Latour and Woolgar nor Knorr-­ Cetina adopt relativism. They do not deny that facts are real, that there is a recalcitrant reality. Latour and Woolgar (1979: 180) do argue, however, that the notion of a reality “out there” is “a consequence of scientific work rather than its cause.” And Knorr-Cetina (1979: 369) writes, somewhat more coherently:

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A constructivist interpretation of knowledge is not to be confused with an idealist ontology. I do not maintain that reality is produced (constructed) in the sense that its appearance has no independent existence. Rather, this approach claims that once we see scientific production as selectively carved out, transformed and constructed from whatever is, we will see also that there cannot be any warrant in the claim that we have somehow captured (subject to progressive improvement) what is.

Perhaps the most important and controversial idea that has emerged in contemporary science studies, especially among the ethnographers, is that social constructions are constitutive of truths, matters of fact. We are pushing toward a new conception of science that goes beyond the idea that science is mediated by society or “externalities.” We are witnessing a radical movement away from traditional answers to the “What is science?” question, and beyond the classical dichotomies reflected in external/internal, objective/subjective, and reality out there/socially constructed reality. Post-script (2021). It may occur to some readers that the description of this chemistry laboratory is quite different from the way we might describe a medical laboratory. Medical laboratories require levels of order and cleanliness that are not found in the classic physics or chemistry laboratory. Thus, the concepts of order and disorder are not simply or only instantiated in the physical conditions of the laboratory. “Disorder” is never simply or only the material condition of the laboratory but the general epistemic-cultural disorder of the laboratory from the perspective of the ethnographer. The idea of a phenomenological laboratory suggests the need for a typology of laboratory formations.

Bibliography Amman, K. and Knorr-Cetina, K. (1989), “Thinking Through Talk: An Ethnographic Study of a Molecular Biology Laboratory,” Knowledge and Society 8: 3–26. Bloor, D. (1976), Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Bohm, D. (1971), Chance and Causality in Modern Physics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Collins, R. (1998), The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Social constructivism, Collins writes, is sociological realism. The sociological cogito assures us of the reality “of thinking, language, other people, time and space, material bodies”: p. 860.

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Firth, R. (1936/1963), We, the Tikopia (New York: American Book Company). Fleck, L. (1935/1979), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Originally published in German). Gurwitsch, A. (1974), Phenomenology and the Theory of Science (Evanston: Northwestern University Press). Hanson, N.R. (1958), Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). Hanson, N. (1969), Perception and Discovery (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, & Co.). Knorr, K. and Knorr, D. (1978), “From Scenes to Scripts: On the Relationship Between Laboratory Research and Published Paper in Science,” Research Memorandum 132 (Vienna: Institute for Advanced Studies). Knorr-Cetina, K. (1979), “Tinkering Toward Science: Prelude to a Theory of Scientific Practice,” Theory and Society 8: 347–376. Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981), “The Ethnography of Laboratory Life: Empirical Results And Theoretical Challenges,” International Society for the Sociology of Knowledge Newsletter 7 (May): 1–9. Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1979), Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage). Mulkay, M. (1979), Science and the Sociology of Knowledge (Winchester, MA: Goerge Allen & Unwin). Restivo, S. (2020), Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture, and Social Networks (New York: Palgrave PIVOT). Sasaki, T. (1939), “On the Nature of Foam. IV. Phase Inversion and Foaming of Emulsion Consisting of Acetic Acid, Ethyl Ether, and Water,” Chemical Society of Japan Bulletin 14: 63–72. Spengler, O. (1926), The Decline of the West (New York: Knopf). Wilson, E. (1979), “Problems in physics with many scales of length,” Scientific American 241(2): 158–197.

CHAPTER 4

The Invention of Science: An Orientalist Perspective

Preface Social and cultural studies of science revolutionized our understanding of science during the last quarter of the twentieth century. This achievement has been accomplished in the face of great resistance and at great cost to the critics and theorists of science. In this chapter, the question under consideration is: What are some of the reasons for the resistance to and costs of analysing science as a social fact? Can answering this question help STS regain some of the momentum achieved between 1970 and 1990? The approach adopted is to consider the consequences of bringing science into the dialogues on orientalism and occidentalism. The invention of science is discussed in terms of the traditions against or in opposition to which it was invented. Science, no matter how we define it, is intertwined with the industrial, and military technologies that grounded European movements into and around the world. Social theory is not only a route to critique and theory in science studies, but also a route for saving science as an intellectual enterprise. The strategy here is to adopt a temporary distance ourselves from a taken-for-granted science. This is not meant to undermine science but to reset the conditions for saving science in a post-­truth era. Originally published with Julia Loughlin (2000) as “The Invention of Science,” Cultural Dynamics 12, 2: 135–149. Edited, revised, and published here with the permission of Sage publishers © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_4

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Science and Orientalist Discourse This chapter explores science as a stylized and essentialized image. How was the image of science in the West constructed what happened to that image as it was transported to non-Western cultures. While the orientalism literature has addressed numerous cultural features and social institutions, science has been conspicuously absent from this discourse. This is in part because the orientalist/occidentalist perspective is most readily located in fields with a tradition of reflexive critique and without aspirations to the authority of science. It is also because the very image of science rejects critique: in mythology, science is abstract, timeless and self-correcting. Let’s think, then, about “science” in the context of “orientalist” and “occidentalist” discourse. Once the Orient and Occident were established in Western thought and action they could not be undone. But the West exists only because the East exists. Orientalism and occidentalism are dialectically-­produced constructs of essentializing East and West. It is time to construct an orientalist/occidentalist inspired discourse on science. Science has been neglected in this critical literature. By constructing, creating, and defining science as absolutely different from and superior to other modes of inquiry and especially from non-Western modes, the West essentialized itself, science, and the non-Western world. This essentialization (occidentalism) has impacted the everyday lives of ordinary people in the West and elsewhere, as well as anthropologists and other students of society and culture. The West has appropriated this view of itself as politically, intellectually, and economically advanced beyond the rest of the world, simultaneously with its appropriation of science as its own. Rendering the Third World, the West, the East, and science in essentialist terms makes them “timeless and radically alien” relative to their opposed terms (Carrier 1995; cf. Clifford 1988; Fabian 1983; and see Burke 1945/1969: 24). “Orientalism” and “occidentalism” provide the inspiration for this chapter. Orientalism with a capital “O” generally refers to the study of Islamic civilization and in particular “classical Islam” (Turner 1978: 6). The Orientalist studies the Orient, and in particular the Muslim Orient (e.g. Hourani 1947). For Eastern and Western critics of Western images of the East, the term “orientalism” has come to mean “a particular, suspect type of anthropological thought” (Carrier 1995). Orientalism and occidentalism are of interest in the sociology of science in part because

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they are products of “an epistemology which is essentialist, empiricist and historicist” (Turner 1978: 7). This is precisely why it is important to examine “science” in the context of orientalist/occidentalist studies. We can then begin to understand why science is widely viewed as a “coherent, homogeneous, global entity,” with its own “dynamic history,” “punctuated by constant, progressive revolutions” (cf. Kuhn 1972). In orientalist/occidentalist terms, this view of science is contrasted with the static history of local non-Western knowledge systems (Turner 1978: 7). The objective of this analysis is to avoid essentializing occident and orient, even while doing just that is one of the consequences, even one of the goals, of theory work. These are protean categories. In the academy, in theory work, it is easy to stabilize these categories to the point of essentializing them. But the everyday reality of orientalizing and occidentalizing selves, relationships, institutions, and cultures is a messy business, just as drawing, sustaining, and changing boundaries in general is a messy business. The strategies involved in the production of the West are those of more general cultural processes. People intensify (and essentialize) the boundaries that define who, what, where, and why they are “by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is closer…and what is far away” (Said 1978: 55; see Douglas 1966, for the general sociological theory of boundaries and margins). When we call ourselves “scientists,” we are being scientists against some other form(s) of inquiry (Carrier 1995). But the production of the West as legitimately dominant, as the measure of what is culture, requires more than this development of boundaries. It involves the creation of the Other, the non-West, the repository of the complementary and inferior characteristics which the West may use, appropriate, discipline, and judge. The West requires the invention of sex, gender, and race to explain and legitimate the dominance of the West as both idea and structure (Schiebinger 1989, 1993; Torgovnick 1990). Orientalism includes the notion of the “mysterious East,” and fuels the many “journeys to the East” that Westerners have embarked on in search of riches, new worlds, new knowledge, and new spiritual goals. But all of the ingredients of the mysterious East have been available within the West’s own boundaries (Restivo 1983: 91–120). The science that scientists and their surrogates, imitators, worshippers, and ideologues imagine is as partial and distorted as their renderings of non-Western science and of those who threaten science (see, for a glaring example of this failure of

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the sociological imagination in defending science from alleged postmodern enemies, Gross and Levitt 1994). Efforts to unite science and non-science in most postmodern discourse are imperialist and colonialist in principle. These efforts are grounded in a concept of science and ultimately of the Western subject as universal norms. To approach this in terms of an orientalist/occidentalist or nordist/australist perspective connects the theory and critique of science to “the secular notion of an individual ‘I’ as an abstract and universal consciousness free of all embodiment and locality” (Yegenoglu 1998; on the north/south divide, see Diamond 1998; Richards and Ruivenkamp 1996; Seabrook 1993; Strathern 1992). The Western subject (already gendered to subordinate the female and the feminine) is brought into being as a universal norm in the process of the West’s expansion. This norm denies the subject’s dependence on the Other and produces the illusion of autonomy and freedom. In fact, this abstract and universal consciousness was always embodied, male, and European, whether indigenous or transplanted. Women and non-European men—even if they achieved the required education—could enter science only as surrogates, disciples, or through passing (that is, by adopting the language, gestures, attitudes, and values of Euro-American men). The social institution of science, rooted in the Western subject, analogously denies its dependence on the Other’s knowledge (indigenous, local knowledge). “Science” is not an absolute positivity opposed to an absolute negativity called “non-science.” If we were Hegelians, we might suppose that science and non-science conflicts arise and get resolved dialectically. An alternative to attempting a dialectical resolution of the science/nonscience dichotomy is to revalue non-science, ‘the Other’, and then to locate non-science in the very core of science itself. The objective is to interrupt the economy of science, to go beyond the simple demonstration of the hegemony of (Western) science. The objective is to interrupt the creation and recurring re-creation of the sovereign, possessive, unitary position of science (cf. Yegenoglu 1998).

The Image of Science This chapter is not simply about the social fact that science was invented, however, but about the traditions against or in opposition to which it was invented, and in relation to which it has sustained itself (cf. Thomas 1992a: 216). Science gives the appearance of being firmly grounded in the real

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world with concrete referents, but this is an illusion. Science is neither a special kind of thought, a method guaranteeing truth, nor a unique organization of work. In terms of social practice and discourse, the meaning of science came into focus only in opposition to the terms pre- and proto-­ science. “Modern science” makes sense, in part, by way of its opposition to “ancient” and “medieval” science. All of these terms are created as part of a Europeanized history of the West and of the world. In the context of the anthropologized societies that would later be designated the East, the Dark Continent, the New World, the Third World, the South, the oppositions between science and non-science, and increasingly in the twentieth century between science and local or indigenous knowledge, strengthened. The issue here is not a matter of the word “science” being introduced into the English language, but of the process of integrating the word “science” into vocabularies of meaning, action, and social institutions. It is during this process of integration (and institutionalization) that science takes on its (dis)guise of universality. Orientalism is a knowledge apparatus with a will-to-truth (Yegenoglu 1998; cf. Said 1978). Sociologists of science need to take seriously Edward Said’s demonstration, based on Michel Foucault’s conception of discourse, of Orientalism’s connection to “objective scholarship.” This suggests a certain complicity between general academic discourse and scientific discourse in particular and the structures engaged to subjugate and administer Other cultures. The discursive mechanisms of science define what can be said to be true, what we are allowed to recognize as truth. By linking orientalism, occidentalism, nordism, and australism, we build a bridge to the insight that Western science—modern science—has been essentialized. It is a small step now to understanding Western science as an ethnoscience. Said (1978: 72) considered Orientalism (as language, thought, and vision) “a form of radical realism.” And like the figures, tropes, and images associated with the Orient, those associated with “science” are “declarative and self-evident; the tense they employ is the timeless eternal.” Science in this sense is “per se,” conceived of, written and spoken aboutin the “grammar of the ever-present tense” (Restivo and Bauchspies 1997: 399–400). It takes little more than the copula “is” to essentialize science.

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How Shall We Think About Science? People think about themselves in terms of their encounters with other people, and this principle has a cultural analogue as well as an epistemological one. The colonial nations did not experience intrusive Western science as neutral and objective, any more than the colonialists and their knowledge brokers viewed “native epistemologies” as neutral and objective. Orientalisms are created out of a dialectic that also produces occidentalisms. The overall result in the realm of knowledge is essentialized and opposed epistemologies (Carrier 1995; cf. Collins 1990: 221; Thomas 1992b: 82). These essentialized epistemologies are positioned differently with respect to power in terms of gender, race, sex, and class. They are produced by and for the West, and by and for the East, in pro- and anti-­ colonialist/imperialist contexts and contests. In the textbook versions of science that train the public to appreciate and worship it, science discovers the world. If scientific knowledge changes, if errors occur, these are errors of method, of observation, of logic, or instrumentation; science remains once and always a “truth machine.” Thus science can claim to know, to understand, the peoples of the world better than they know themselves. The self-knowledge of the Other is prejudiced, not objective, and she cannot speak on her own behalf. In fact, like any discourse, scientific discourse creates the very reality it describes. Deborah Root uses PBS (Public Broadcasting System) and National Geographic magazine to make the point that “with educational programs the Western viewer can still find foreign cultures titillating and exotic, but s/he gets to feel good about it, even edified, as the images appear in the name of science” (Root 1996: 34n4). This is not a new idea in science studies, but it has come under attack in the Science Wars and has lost some of its edge in science studies itself. It is therefore necessary to continue to reiterate this fundamental constructionist concept, and to do so in different contexts and frameworks, and from different perspectives and standpoints. It is important to stress that representing, classifying, categorizing, and essentializing are offensive and defensive strategies human beings use in making their way collectively through the world. These strategies, tested in conversation and action, are basic to science, as to all knowledge construction. The point here is not to criticize these processes, but to step back and ask what is going on at some particular historico-cultural juncture.

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When these processes are halted by force, when knowledge becomes static, enforced by authority, organized into inflexible social relationships, taught coercively rather than by way of simulated invention and discovery, then knowledge is in the service of authoritarian power. Dominance is possible only when legitimated by ideologies which can enforce consent and delegitimate resistance. The West orientalized the Noble Savages of the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific first as the enemy; brutal, warlike, and dull. In the next stage, the same lens on the Noble Savages put in view an exotic remnant of a romantic past and revealed them to be generous, peaceful, dignified, and wise ecologists. The West claimed to bring salvation and civilization to the rest of the globe, but now is occidentalized as “violent, rapacious, and heedless” as non-Western scholars challenge and criticize Western society and culture. This critique of the West’s assumed charge of global discipline, imperium, and colony is now part of standard scholarship (Smith 1985: 80–5; see McNeill 1963: 569). The image of science, however, remains for many timeless, abstract, and independent of ideology. The significance of portraying science as an essentialized representation will be missed if it is not seen in the context of the history of Western expansionism. It is impossible for modern science to have escaped from this process, impossible that it could have crystallized outside of the arena of the ideologies, mythologies, and practices of commercial and mercantile revolutions, colonialism, and imperialism. The problem is to determine the impact of this history of modern science on the knowledge it has produced. We need to be able to determine the historical, social, and cultural sources of scientific knowledge without leaving ourselves open to the charge that we are supporting irrationality or adopting anti-objectivity or anti-truth strategies. The fact is that postmodernism in general and the sociology of scientific knowledge in particular have not, as Science Wars critics would have it, destroyed the possibility of telling the truth. Dorothy Smith (1999: 96–130) has elegantly argued that postmodernism and sociology have actually given us grounds for telling the truth and understanding our claims.

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Science and the Creation of the West/East One way to measure the degree to which modern science and the modern world or global system are interrelated is to consider the impact European societies have had on that system. That impact, according to Alfred W. Crosby, Jr. (1972: 218–19), is comparable to “an increase in the influx of cosmic rays or the raising of whole new chains of Andes and Himalayas.” Science, no matter how defined, is intertwined with the agricultural, industrial, and military technologies that grounded European movement into and around the world. Londa Schiebinger (1993: 209) argues that the destruction of cultures and their knowledge of flora and fauna suggests that “the explosion of knowledge associated with the rise of modern science resulted in a loss of knowledge in the long run.” In summarizing her studies, she notes that “Europeans modelled plant sexuality on culturally sanctioned heterosexual unions, saw mammals as essentially breasted, made the investigation of sexual and racial difference a priority of the medical sciences.” This “cannot be blamed on the short-sightedness of a few individuals alone, but rather can be traced to broader social trends of which science was a part” (Schiebinger 1993: 210). It is only when science is defined as “ideas,” and especially as free-standing, free-floating ideas, that science as a social force and as a product and construct of European expansionism, can be made to appear negligible. Fortunately, research and theory in science studies make it difficult to sustain such a conception of science. Another way to demonstrate the intricate way in which modern science is intertwined with the other major institutional structures of the modern West is to follow the lives of individual scientists. Captain James Cook, who played a key role in European expansionism, was elected to membership in the Royal Society in 1776. Shortly after his election, he was awarded the Society’s Copley Medal, “awarded annually to an individual who had made outstanding contributions to science” (Withey 1987: 308). Joseph Banks had convinced Cook and other explorer navigators that it was a good idea to include naturalists on what we euphemistically refer to as “voyages of exploration” (Withey 1987: 194). When the Royal Society planned a voyage to the South Pacific in order to observe the 1768 transit of Venus, it was understood that, following their observations, the expedition would turn into a search across the Pacific for “undiscovered” lands. The French and Spanish, reasonably suspicious of England’s earlier expeditions, understood along with the rest of Europe the scientific

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significance of careful observations of the transit of Venus. Of course, the Royal Society’s scientific rationales included pointing out the importance of astronomy to navigation. The political and economic grounds of the Royal Society’s rationales and arguments were quite evident “in a nation where economic and political power was based on the sea” (Withey 1987: 19). Scientists like Banks understood quite well the meaning of “colonies,” “markets,” and “returns” on investments of people and materials in the “new worlds” (Crosby 1986: 297–8). Representations and images of science were co-­ constructed with representations and images of European explorations, expeditions, and expansions. This is an important part of the rationale for including science in the orientalism/occidentalism analytic framework. Sowell (1998: 37) points out that industrialization produced engineers and mechanics along with materials, machinery and goods. It produced inventors too. It does not require a large leap of inspiration to recognize that industrialization also produced scientists. These scientists were, and would continue to be, employed by the state, by industry, and in education. Essentialized representations or images of science and non-science are not constructed in vacuums, but in complex sociocultural contexts of power and inequalities. They have social and cultural functions and they shape actions and ideas. The West’s capacity to control the essentialization of science and non-science has been proportionate to its control of powerful technologies of violence, economies of violence, modes of communication and transportation, and warfare. Western scientists have for the most part been culture blind to the ways in which their science and they themselves have been occidentalized, and doubly blind to how the occidentalisms infecting science have been shaped by the West’s role in world political economy, and the political economy of the West-in-itself. Whether in their laboratories or as ambassadors of science abroad in the colonial and postcolonial world, scientists bring with them occidentalized selves and sciences. This is the root of the dangers in talk about “universal truths”, and “universal science”; for how far is this from talk about the universal relevance of the morality, logic, and worldview of the West (cf. Carrier 1995)? Scientists’ conception of themselves as practicing a neutral methodology has helped to shape their occidentalist consciousness. The dollar is not the only token of Western superiority notwithstanding the fact that, in the face of the yen and the euro, that superiority faced serious fin-de-siècle challenges. Well into the twenty-first century, the dollar faces challenges from those currencies as well as the Chinese RMB; and

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we are still trying to figure out the impact of crypto-currencies on the global currency market. Science, re-presented by the white lab coat and the sparkling laboratory, is in fact the most important token of Western superiority, especially since it is carried into the non-Western world on the wheels of technologies of peace and war. These technologies are not merely physical machines. They include the bureaucratic organizations of state, education, and labour, legitimated as scientifically efficient and just. It includes the extension of Western religion, which would negotiate a peace with science, and the gender and family systems which support the institutions and are demanded by religious authority (Trexler 1995). It includes language, the English-dominated Euro-American languages of science, state, education, and work, which would make some knowledge unspeakable in other languages. It includes an aesthetic that would define indigenous representations as artifacts and Western representations as art (Price 1989; Root 1996). Orientalisms and occidentalisms draw boundaries between and within societies (Carrier 1995: 22). Thus, the West is scientific, the non-West is not; physicians are scientific, midwives and alternative healers are not; chemists are scientific, wives and husbands in their kitchens are not (P. Collins 1990). This process is most pronounced, in general, in those societies that border occident and orient. If our focus is on science, then the process of orientalizing and occidentalizing should be most pronounced just at the boundary(ies) between science and the humanities, and even more so at the boundary(ies) between physical and natural science on one side and social science on the other. We should expect these essentialisms to be most exaggerated in those cultures and nations that sit on or around the geographico-symbolic boundaries between East and West. The Levant is one such boundary. The resources for challenging Western hegemony started to accumulate in the wake of the social and political fallout from nuclear tests and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A second stage of this accumulation occurred with the emergence of ecological consciousness, and the criticisms of the technoscientific Indo-China war. More recently, various technoscientific activities centred on genetic research have contributed to the accumulation of grounds for criticizing and challenging Western hegemony. The combination of social and political criticisms of science and Westernism and the emergence of a theoretically powerful empirically grounded social analysis of science and technology has fuelled Cultural and Science Wars. Defenders of Westernism have rebelled against

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multiculturalism, feminism, postmodernism, and the sociology of science in defence of traditions from Greek philosophy and Christianity to Elizabethan drama and modern science, that they claim hold universal truths and values. These efforts to maintain the privilege of the West have grown in opposition to efforts by the underprivileged, the underrepresented, the disenfranchised, disinherited, disempowered, and formerly and currently colonized territories, countries, and peoples to enter the world cultural arena as citizens and human beings. These efforts, whether they have emerged in the inner cities of the West or in the emerging nations of Africa, have all been orientalized, that is, they have been defined as ungrounded, emotional, irrational, ignorant, impulsive—in a word, unscientific. Or worse, perhaps, to use the term preferred by P.R. Gross and N. Levitt (1994), they are merely “superstitions. There have, of course, been earlier globalists among historians of science. George Sarton, Paul Tannery, and Joseph Needham (Pyenson 1993) gave us provocative and profound ecumenical views of science decades before the multiculturalists. But their international humanism and ecumenical socialism had limits. Ideology enters everywhere in this discourse as we contrast the views of the ecumenical historians of science with the views of S.Goonatilake (1998) and A.G. Frank (1998). But it is evident that “the complementarity and filiation of East and West” that was thematic in Sarton’s work has been incrementally documented to an extent and with results undreamt of by the Sartons and Needhams. We are now better placed than ever before to move beyond their ecumenical humanism to a more profoundly anthropological understanding of science in history and culture. More importantly, we can move beyond this level of understanding by taking seriously the theory of social construction, but not as interpreted by its critics nor as practiced by its more conservative exponents. Social construction as it is demonstrated in classical social theory is radically transforming in a social science that has failed its heritage. If we conceive colonialism and colonization as structures of domination (of physical spaces), reformation (of indigenous modes of thought), and integration (of local political economies into Western techno-industrial capitalism: Mudimbe 1988: 2), then an interesting conclusion follows. To reach this conclusion, we have to follow the logic of purity and danger, of boundaries and margins. Dominating, reforming, and integrating in the colonial situation reforms the colonizers’ modes of thought and histories. The colonializing structure actualized a dichotomization of modes of thought.

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This is in great part one of the consequences of negotiations, conflicts, and co-optations among elites, and transformations in those dynamics over time. This was not a new situation in general, but under the specific circumstances of colonialism, the dichotomies were exaggerated and multiplied: traditional and modern, oral and written and printed, agrarian and urban, subsistence and techno-industrial economies (Mudimbe 1988: 4). Science is a discursive order; it cannot have escaped transformation during the colonializing process. The project of rethinking science and the possibilities for postcolonial (including feminist) scientific discourses can be compared to the movement by French and African Marxists during the 1960s to construct a new discourse uniting categories and classifications that had been separate (Mudimbe 1988: 177; and see Meillassoux 1964, 1974). As Marxists they worked within a scientific framework that made it impossible for their new discourse to unite science and non-science. This challenge is the objective of the current project. The science celebrated in the West is invented outside of Western awareness in the same way that Western history is celebrated while placing its invention also outside of awareness (Wagner 1981: 158). Foucault (1972: 235) wrote about appreciating exactly the price of escaping, or trying to escape, Hegel. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, remains close to us; it implies a knowledge of that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us. Our immediate task is to escape Plato. Plato did not play the same kinds of tricks in this sense as Hegel. However, Platonized and Hegelianized, we must be aware of tricking ourselves! And indeed, this is what we have done in generating the so-called “Science Wars.” The Science Wars arose in part because of a failure to attend to the distinction between science as a social institution (“modern” science), and science as the basic social activity human beings engage in as they make their reasoning ways through the worlds of everyday life. Scientists such as P.  Bridgman (1950) and E. Schrodinger (1957: 88) found the origin of science in the fundamental requirements of our struggle for life and the fullest exercise of our intelligence. The sociologist Bernard Barber (1952) argued similarly that science is the basic form of human rationality. As one of the first sociologists of science, he added a social dimension missing from earlier views championed by physical scientists and philosophers of science. Science is “a strategy for producing defensible knowledge, grounded in shared experience

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rather than authority—knowledge which has a strong but tentative status as the basis for action” (Loughlin and Restivo 1997: 64). This view of science is opposed to all competing forms of inquiry. Science in this sense is no more invented than our ability to breathe or to think. It is science as a modern social institution that is invented, and it is this invention that we theorize and criticize.

Can Science Be Saved? We intellectuals who value thinking, inquiry, and education want in some way and some sense to save science. But we must be attentive to the sustainable lessons of postmodernism and the social science of science. Science cannot be saved as an excuse for the West’s ambitions. It cannot be saved as a morally autonomous truth machine. Science cannot be saved as a way of organizing labour that subjugates others. It cannot continue to have the luxury of excluding knowledge from Others and knowledge of Others. Science can, however, be saved as a way of telling the truth. To achieve this, we have to understand telling the truth in a radically social non-absolutist way (Smith 1999: 96–130). The chapters in this volume are designed to interpenetrate each other and become integrated in a way that explains how to tell the truth after postmodernism. I will have more to say in future chapters about the implications of the fact that all facts escape the evidence, are presumptive, corrigible, and fallible. No definitive descriptions of anything at all are possible. But the recalcitrance of everyday reality and of the ding an sich create the factual closures that make life and science possible. Definitive descriptions-in-practice are possible. These last sentences are a dialogue with Steve Woolgar; see Chap. 8.

Conclusion Science is always, already, and everywhere constituted within a discourse. This could argue for the suspension of a concern with reference. This follows only from a mistaken reading of deconstruction (Derrida 1984: 123). The problem of reference and realistic knowledge is more complex and problematic than is apparent to the heirs of positivism, naive realism, and scientism and those still carrying the latent forms of these -ism viruses (cf. Yegenoglu 1998). The recent lessons of the history and sociology of science demonstrate more strongly than ever that science is not a unified, universal, homogeneous monolith except in its various Vienna-circled representations (e.g. Galison and Stump 1996). Indeed, if we focus our

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attention on the epistemic machinery of science we find that science “displays different architectures of empirical approaches, specific constructions of the referent, particular ontologies of instruments, and different social machines” (Knorr-Cetina 1999: 3; cf. Dupre 1993; Hacking 1983; Suppes 1984). Science disappears amid a disunified set of epistemic cultures. But each of these epistemic cultures, whether social sciences or physical sciences, exists within the larger culture. Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions (1989) and Sharon Traweek’s anthropology of high-energy physics (1988), are excellent case studies of the social nature of science. Essentialization is correlated with naturalization. It aids in the development of a contagious sense that things could not be otherwise (cf. Butler 1993: 7–8). Some readers will be tempted to regard general theorizing as an essentializing activity. Reasonable, empirically grounded general theorists are not so obsessed with specificities that they can be driven out of general theory by one irrefutable counterexample (cf. Yegenoglu 1998). It is furthermore important to underscore that essentialism is about binary oppositions. The theoretical orientation adopted here does not take us in the direction of dissolving essentialisms but rather of helping to identify how science becomes a naturalized essence in the course of its institutionalization. My objective in this chapter has been to reveal again for the first time and from a different perspective,, a different standpoint, that science is an episteme, and an epistemic regime (Elzinga 1993).

Bibliography Barber, B. (1952), Science and the Social Order (New York: The Free Press). Bridgman, P. (1950), Reflections of a Physicist (New York: Philosophical Library). Burke, K. (1945/1969), The Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Butler, J. (1993), Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge). Carrier, J.G. (1995), ‘Introduction’, 18–32, in J.G. Carrier (ed.), Occidentalism: Images of the West (New York: Oxford University Press). Clifford, J. (1988), The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Collins, P. (1990) Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge). Crosby, A.W., Jr. (1972), The Columbian Exchange (Westport, CT: Greenwood). Crosby, A.W., Jr. (1986), Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansionism of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Derrida, J. (1984), “Deconstruction and the Other,” 105–126, in R.  Kearney (ed.), Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

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Diamond, J. (1998), Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.). Douglas, M. (1966), Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Dupre, J. (1993), The Disorder of Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Elzinga, A. (1993), “Science as the Continuation of Politics by Other Means,” 127–152, in T.  Brante, S.  Fuller and W.  Lynch (eds) Controversial Science: From Content to Contention (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). Fabian, J. (1983), Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press). Foucault, M. (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books). Frank, A.G. (1998), ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press). Galison, P. and Stump, D.J., (eds.) (1996), The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Goonatilake, S. (1998), Toward a Global Science (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Gross, P.R. and Levitt, N. (1994), The Higher Superstition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press). Hacking, I. (1983), Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Haraway, D. (1989), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge). Hourani, A.H. (1947), Minorities in the Arab World (London: Oxford University Press). Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999), Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Kuhn, T.S. (1972), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Loughlin, J. and Restivo, S. (1997),”Race Class and Gender in Science Studies,” 57–75, in J.  Barmark and M.  Hallberg (eds.), Festschrift to Professor Aant Elzinga on his 60th Birthday (Gothenburg: Theory of Science Department, University of Gothenburg). McNeill, W. (1963), The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Meillassoux, C. (1964), Anthropologie Économique des Gourod de la Côte d’Ivoire (Paris: Mouton). Meillassoux, C. (1974), L’Esclavage dans l’Afrique Pré-coloniale (Paris: Maspero). Mudimbe, V.Y. (1988), The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Price, S. (1989) Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Pyenson, L. (1993), “The Ideology of Western Rationality: History of Science and the European Civilizing Mission,” Science and Education 2: 329–43. Restivo, S. (1983), “The Myth of the Kuhnian Revolution,” 293–305, in R. Collins (ed.), Sociological Theory 1983 (London: Jossey-Bass Publishers).

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Restivo, S. and Bauchspies, W.K. (1997), “How to Criticize Science and Maintain your Sanity,” Science as Culture 6(3/28): 396–413. Richards, P. and Ruivenkamp, G. (1996), “New Tools for Conviviality: Society and Biotechnology,” 275–295, in P. Descola and G. Palsson (eds.), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Routledge). Root, D. (1996), Cannibal Culture: An Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). Said, E. (1978), Orientalism (New York: Viking). Schiebinger, L. (1989), The Mind Has No Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Schiebinger, L. (1993), Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press). Schrodinger, E.C. (1957), Science and Theory and Man (New York: Dover). Seabrook, J. (1993), “Biotechnology and Genetic Diversity,” Race and Class 34(3): 15–30. Smith, B. (1985), European Visions and the South Pacific, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press). Smith, D. (1999), Writing The Social: Critique, Theory, And Investigations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Sowell, T. (1998), Conquests and Cultures: An International History (New York: Basic Books). Strathern, M. (1992), Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Knowledge, and the New Reproductive Technologies (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Suppes, P. (1984), Probabilistic Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). Thomas, N. (1992a), “The Inversion of Tradition,” American Ethnologist 19: 213–232. Thomas, N. (1992b), “Substantivization and Anthropological Discourse: The Transformation of Practices into Institutions in Neotraditional Pacific Societies,” 64–85, in J.G. Carrier, (ed.), History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press). Torgovnick, M. (1990), Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Traweek, S. (1988), Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Trexler, R.C. (1995), Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Turner, B. (1978), Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: George Allen & Unwin). Wagner, R. (1981), The Invention of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Withey, L. (1987), Voyages of Discovery: Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific (Berkeley: University Press). Yegenoglu, M. (1998), Colonial Fantasies: Toward a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

CHAPTER 5

The Sociology of Objectivity

Preface This chapter is an edited version of a paper I first published in 1974. It was to my knowledge the first time the phrase “sociology of objectivity” was used in any discipline. The paper anticipated much of my later writings on objectivity and ascertaining “facts of the matter.” There is an aura of the 1960s about the original paper, an aura that reminds us of some of the more extreme subjectivities and spiritualisms of that period. At the end of the day, these features of the paper were harbingers of new and more complex strategies in developing a sociological foundation for pursuing objective results in and about science. The paper set the agenda for much of my future work on science, values, objectivity, and global problems. The discussion of the crisis in science is a recognition that the twenty-first century crisis in science and post-truthism did not begin with the Trump administration. I have included references where relevant that post-date the original publication date of the paper.

Introduction The concept “objectivity” has been described as slippery and used in contradictory and inclusive ways (Bergmann 1947). Gouldner (1970: 102-105) analysed objectivity as a value and an ideology that manifests detachment and alienation from self and society. And Friedrichs (1970: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_5

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207) noted an increasing preference among philosophers and scientists for the term “empirical” 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. Nor do they have access to reality in itself, the ding an sich (Kant). But the knowledge about the world that is possible requires that we exert mental, physical, and social efforts to ascertain facts of the matter. In this sense, objectivity is generally viewed as the product of a social process, widely referred to as “intersubjective testing.” It is also conceived in terms of the public nature of scientific evidence, and the communal enterprise of science (Friedrichs 1970: 209). The generally accepted social theory of objectivity rests on the assumption that communication and exchange in a public forum or community of scientists are necessary and effective means for ensuring that we admit to science only statements which are valid approximations to objective reality and not products of abnormal perceptions, selective and unique subjective cognitions, or uncontrollable and unverifiable introspections. The problem with this theory is that it treats the psychological level of scientific activity as problematic, but not the social level. For example, Joseph Ben-David (1973) concluded that public tests, logic, and experiments, or empirical observation, gradually eliminate personal biases and mistakes. He does not consider the identification and elimination of social biases and mistakes to be of at least equal concern. My objective in this chapter is to suggest some bases for the construction of a sociological theory of objectivity which considers the facilitative and obstructive effects of social structure and culture on scientific activity.

Objectivity as a Social Fact In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1781) 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 (1961) followed Kant in noting that the objectivity of a scientific statement is based on the fact that it can be intersubjectively tested. G.A. Lundberg (1939/1963) noted that objectivity is not a product of universal human consensus. Practically, we tend to rely on corroboration by a limited number of persons, invested

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with the authority to establish “truth” by virtue of their “qualifications,” including credentials. The extent to which a given definition of objectivity expresses its social nature varies from the idea of “universal agreement” to Popper’s (1950: 404-407) conception of social institutions (e.g., laboratories, scientific periodicals, and congresses) as the collective bases for generating scientific (objective) statements. Popper argues 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 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. The reasons are: • There is no one to check this Crusoe‘s results. • There is no one to correct the prejudices that unavoidably result from his peculiar experiences. • No one can help him exploit the inherent possibilities of his results because such possibilities are often recognized in the course of adopting irrelevant approaches to the results. • Having no one to explain his work to, he is unable to develop the ability to communicate clear and reasoned results; this is a discipline that one learnsonly by having to explain one‘s work to others who have not done that work. • He can only discover his personal equation in a revealed way, by discovering changes in his 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 analysed. Popper concludes that objectivity is a social product, and not a product of an individual‘s impartiality: … and the individual scientist‘s impartiality is, so far as it exists, not the source but rather the result of this social or institutionally organized objectivity of science. Scientific criticism and scientific progress, according to Popper, depend on cooperation, intersubjectivity, and public method.

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In a philosophical exercise similar to Popper’s, Norman Campbell (1919) 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 the criterion of the satisfactoriness and coherence of the laws which can be derived from the subject matter. 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 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 work in isolation. And it is with the nature of such a community that the sociology of objectivity is concerned. [NOTE: One of the overriding themes of my work has been to show that even in isolation we are still thoroughly social beings. More on this in later chapters]. 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 has been among the most articulate spokesmen for this laissez-étudier position. Polanyi (1962: 7-8) argues that there is an “invisible hand” that coordinates the independent activities of individual scientists and leads to “unpremeditated” discoveries in science. Goodall’s (1970: 78) view of science as a genuinely democratic system with built in guarantees that it is not going to fail is another example of the laissez- étudier conception of science. 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 the interest of humanity (Seaborg, 1964: 218-232). This viewpoint mirrors the classical model of the market economy and is vulnerable to the same criticisms (Restivo, 2018: 186-193; Collier and Kay 2020; Henderson 2020; Keen 2011). In a more sophisticated approach to the problem of scientific progress, Thomas Kuhn (1970: 166; and see Chap. 3, this volume) argued that normal science is educationally narrow, rigid, and ill-designed to produce creative scientists. But he optimistically added that individual rigidity is

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compatible with scientific progress. He did 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 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 and bureaucratization may lengthen the period between revolutionary peaks, lessen the intensity of revolutions, progressively decrease periods of conceptual crisis in science, and progressively decrease the probabilities that: (1) an individual scientist will conceptualize a revolutionary idea, and (2) such an idea will be recognized and precipitate a crisis. The very idea that an individual scientist could conceptualize a revolutionary idea is suspect given the concept of social networks as the crucibles of ideas (Collins 1998; Restivo 2020). A key overlooked damping source is the cost associated with each revolution. Boulding (1970: 60-61) suggested that the dialectical processes accompanying scientific revolutions are costs, representing the “heat of crystallization in a process of essentially continuous change.” The costs concept can be extended to include the accumulation of costs, and thus the possibility that social systems, like biological systems, can—under certain conditions—progressively lose their capacity to recover. 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. This idea had occurred to Francis Bacon (Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, 1863: 76): That monarchies incline wits to profit and pleasure, and commonwealths to glory and vanity. That universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation,

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cloisters to fables and unprofitable subtilty, study at large to variety; and that it is hard to say, whether mixture of contemplations with an active life, or returning wholly to contemplation, do disable and hinder the mind more.

The systematic development of the sociology of knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is associated with names such as Marx, Mannheim, and Max Scheler. Scheler, for example, associated Plato‘s theory of ideas with the organization of Plato’s Academy; he followed Ernst Troeltsch in arguing that Protestant beliefs determined and could only exist in the form of the 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 (Merton 1973: 24). The generalization of these types of hypotheses led to an intolerable relativism in the sociology of knowledge. For, it was argued, if scientific theories are rooted in social milieu, then the prospect of obtaining warranted knowledge appears utterly futile. Objectivity then appears to be “an arbitrary emulsion of social conditions, regarded as proper in its time as soothsaying was by the Greeks who once stood before the gleaming towers of Troy” (Walter, 1967: 340). 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? The problem can be resolved as follows. First, as Mannheim recognized, the sociology of knowledge can trace the emergence of different types of knowledge to different social milieu, but it cannot judge the truth-value of these systems. Secondly, if types of knowledge are rooted in types of social milieu, 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. The facilitative relationship between science and democracy has been commented on by Tocqueville, Sigerist, and Merton among others. Merton (1973: 269) sees some basis for the provisional assumption that science flourishes in democratic milieux. He notes that science in some form has existed in all kinds of societies; but the crucial question is which societal type(s) facilitate(s) the “fullest measure of development” in science. [NOTE: Much later, I came to argue that anarchistic social formations were most conducive to scientific inquiry and the best form of social organization for science and society: Restivo, 2016].

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The emphasis in these and related inquiries is on external social forces that facilitate or obstruct scientific activity and scientific progress. Internal social forces that affect science as a social activity, process, organization, or institution are treated incidentally if at all. To fully comprehend science as a social fact, we must attend to internal social forces. Professionalization and bureaucratization are examples of such forces. 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. Richard LaPiere (1965: 410-411, 413, 437) argued that the adaptivity of the universities and of the professions has decreased as they have become increasingly bureaucratized: • Rewards for bureaucratic conformity tend to be higher than rewards for innovative behaviour. • Bureaucracies tend to exercise some control, directly or indirectly, over non-members; thus, scientists often have to design their work in accordance with the rules and prejudices of bureaucratic organizations; and • Established bureaucracies tend to resist adaptation to changes in external conditions and to resist adopting available innovations. Bureaucratization tends 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. 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 labour, the knowledge explosion, and the increasing demand for management expertise in highly technical and bureaucratized societies (Jencks and Reisman, 1967: 201-202). [NOTE: This would over time lead to the ascent of the generic administrator with dire consequences for university education and the very ideas of science and objectivity; see Chap. 17]. In the process of professionalization, an occupation becomes relatively colleague- oriented, with practitioners seeking exclusive rights over

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naming and judging their mistakes. The goals of professionalization include standardizing, specializing, gaining status for occupational roles and services to society, and objectivizing, that is, limiting the impact of subjective elements on performance and service. One of the first, and among the foremost, students of professionalization, Carr-Saunders (1928) concluded that this process was one of the more hopeful signs of the 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 perquisites that accompany the rise of a profession lead to the development of a perspective all its own and answerable only to itself (Friedson, 1970: 370). Not incidentally, the founders of the concept of “profession” counted among their members eugenicists like Carr-Saunders. The barriers to biological eugenics were overcome by the idea of a profession, which was in effect a form of social eugenics. In his analysis of the medical profession, Eliot L.  Freidson (1970: 370-371) argued that while professional autonomy may have facilitated significant increments in knowledge about disease and treatment, it tended to obstruct applying that knowledge in the public sphere. Horowitz (1970: 345) affirmed this aspect of professionalization; the professional now has a basis for separating scientific responsibility from the ways in which findings are used. 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” (Parsons, 1954: 34-49; Francis and Stone, 1956: 153-157; Blau and Scott, 1962: 60-63). This research focuses on the independent professional’s resistance to bureaucratic standards, and their conditional loyalty to the bureaucracy. But Scott (1966: 266-267) noted 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, reinforces tendencies in professionalization toward occupational closure and dogma with its demands for responding reliably and with strict devotion to regulations (Merton, 1957: 200). To the extent that the dysfunctions of bureaucratization and professionalization become increasingly salient and converge, we can expect a tendency toward occupational closure, and ethnocentrism of work, and a

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decrease in the capacity of individuals and organizations to respond to problems in critical and creative ways. Horowitz, 1970: 347) remarked that the ultimate consequence of this process may be the “loss of objectivity.” The important point to consider in reviewing the literature on 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 change in science, but they have not given adequate attention to the potential for devolutionary change inherent in science as a social phenomenon. I have drawn attention to the twin processes of professionalization and bureaucratization in part because they have received significant attention from students of “the crisis in science.”

The Crisis in Science Harvey Brooks (1971: 21) asked readers of Science to consider whether contemporary cultural conditions have become inhospitable to cultivating a true science. In the same volume, Arnold Thackray confronted readers with his reflections on the decline of science in America. The title of his paper paraphrased Charles Babbage’s 1830 “Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and on Some of its Causes.” Thackray (1971: 31) concluded that the social costs and social implications of modern science demand the sorts of new organizational forms that led to specialist scientific societies. Earlier, we saw that Bohm argued that causal and statistical laws comprise an integral explanatory framework. Perhaps this is a fully rationalized way to think about the TenHouten-Kaplan propositional-­ appositional model I discuss below. J.D. Bernal (1939: 31; 1964: 211) produced the first comprehensive report on the modern crisis in science. He wrote that the contemporary view of the “fruits of science” was dominated by images of war, economic chaos, the wilful destruction of needed goods, and the fear of more and more terrible wars. Twenty-five years later, Bernal wrote that the potential of science for serving humanity was buried beneath “the actuality of a divided world with greater poverty, stupidity, and cruelty than it has ever known.”

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In the 1930s, Pitirim Sorokin (described by Merton as a sociological Jeremiah) regularly lectured on the decline of science. He warned prophetically that one day scientists would make it possible to destroy all life on earth, and then some of them would be curious to see what happens when the button is pressed. This is reminiscent of Filippo Buonarroti’s concern during the French Revolution that scientists’ successes would lead them to claim deserved and undeserved distinctions, superiority, and exemptions from the burdens of everyday life. They might then act against the rights of a less informed public (Feuer, 1963: 279). [NOTE: This is how some contemporary observers (in the 1980s) viewed AI and robots; in our own time AI and robots have become existential threats according to some observers]. The philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) remarked on the increasing timidity of the mind in the wake of the increasingly abstract formulations of modern science. He noted that “natural man” can tolerate imagination only insofar as it “poses for truth;” and, more troubled by the thought of deception than by the fact of boredom, “he would wish to escape imagination altogether” (Eisley, 1964: 388). Francis Bacon, Thoreau, and Thomas Huxley are among others who have echoed this concern. It was Huxley (Merton 1973: 493) who, as a young man, wrote in one of his letters, You have no idea of the intrigues that go on in this blessed world of science. Science is, I fear, no poorer than any other region of human activity, though it should be.

The root of crises in science is the trivial fact that scientists are human beings. More to the point is the fact that science is a social activity and social process. The biologist Loren Eiseley has expressed the implications of this fact better than many of his colleagues in sociology. Science, he notes, is an institution, and like all institutions ages and exhibits rigidities and conformities. Under the impact of professionalization and bureaucratization, standards in science can lose their traditional function as expressions and guarantors of excellence and become excuses for obstructing or otherwise limiting original and creative thought (Eiseley, 1964: 392). Increasing attention is being given by some social scientists to the crisis in science (Haberer, 1969; Rose and Rose, 1970; Blissett, 1972; Blume 1974). A critical perspective on science is increasingly evident among physical scientists. John Ziman (1968: 65), for example, warns of

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“closure” and “ecclesiasticism” in modern science, arising as a consequence of the increasing control of certification in science by an “establishment.” In science as in other social activities, professionalization and bureaucratization have tended to increase specialization to the point of overspecialization and stimulated the development of excessive competition and a conflictful division of labour. This has led some scholars to speculate about possible decreases in the evolutionary potential of science. The resolution of the crisis in science—and the broader societal crisis to which it is related—is not guaranteed. [NOTE: This was made abundantly clear during the anti-science alternative facts period of the Trump administration]. A necessary condition, however, for resolving the crisis is rethinking the nature of science, and its relationship to values and social organization. In the next section, I consider the problem of value orientations and the generation of objective knowledge.

Science and Values The goal of scientific activity is the comprehension (knowledge, understanding, explanation, and appreciation) of human experience. It assumes a comprehensible reality. The form of this assumption varies. Norman Storer (1970: 80), for example, conceives a single physical reality “out there” which can be discovered through the creative application of scientific methods. Bohm (1957/Bohm 1971: 164-170), by contrast, views nature as: …an inexhaustible diversity and multiplicity of things [e.g., entities, properties, qualities, systems, levels], all of them reciprocally related and all of them necessarily taking part in the process of becoming, in which exist an unlimited number of relatively autonomous and contradictory kinds of motions.

Bohm’s complex and dynamic conception of reality leads more directly than Storer’s view of reality to the conclusion that: Scientific research does not and cannot lead to a knowledge of nature that is completely free from error. Rather it leads and is able to lead only to an unending process in which the degree of truth in our knowledge is continually increasing.

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Any given kind of thing is in principle “knowable,” but “complete, perfect, and unconditional knowledge of reality as a whole” is impossible. The truth of any given theory can only be approximate, conditioned, and relative, but this does not mean that objective reality is a myth or fantasy. Following Bohm, scientific laws are not dependent on our tastes or wills. Our conceptions of these laws must have some objective content if they are going to be useful in predictions and practices. Our experience with predictions in everyday life and in science show that scientific laws, though tentative, have some objective content. Basic reality is a complex, dynamic, infinite realm of things in becoming. Our objective in science is to find more and more of the things of which matter in becoming is composed, to study the relationships among these things to better and better approximations, and to discover the conditions under which specific concepts and laws are applicable in greater and greater detail. Science approaches the absolute by studying a reality that is characterized by an infinite multiplicity and diversity. [NOTE: Ultimately, what matters to humans is that we can extract practical data, information, and knowledge from our experience of the world by way of our senses and our collective reason (science) regardless of the complexity of reality and irrespective of our inability to access the “objective reality out there”]. The question of the nature of objective reality can be examined in a broader historical context by distinguishing between the hypotheses of Parmenides and Heraclitus. The Parmenidean hypothesis states that for the world to be knowable, reality must be eternally immutable. The Heraclitan hypothesis states that the Parmenidean hypothesis is formally true; but it offers no imperative for humans since reality is in constant flux and therefore unknowable. Stephen Toulmin (1972), commenting on these views of reality in terms of the distinction between absolutist and relativist perspectives on acquiring knowledge, notes that this position implies a process of “fixed minds” gaining control over “fixed nature” using “fixed principles.” But it is clear that nature and principles have changed. This experience yields not the Heraclitan hypothesis, but the Bohmian hypothesis, in Toulmin’s terms, of variable minds commanding (or, preferably, comprehending) variable nature using variable principles (Hull, 1973). The concept of nature as an infinite diversity of things expresses more clearly than relatively static alternative conceptions of nature the need to conceptualize science and the search for truth as an endless process. The

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question then arises, what values must direct our activities if we are to engage in science, a cumulative and effectively endless process? In his pioneering work on the social system of science, Merton (1973: 270) attempted to derive the norms of science from the goals and methods of science: he came up with universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized scepticism. Other notable contributions to the study of the norms of science were made by Talcott Parsons (1951: 335-359), B. Barber (1952: 78-80), and N. Storer (1966: 78-80). These contributions have been criticized on several points: • They encourage a view of the norms as those which do and should (logically) prevail in science; the relationship between ideal and actual behaviour and orientation is obscured, and no provision is made for potential or actual changes in the norms due to changes in the organization and goals of science, or to changes in conceptions of the goals and methods of science; • The identification of the norms of science is not based on systematic, continuous, and cumulative empirical and theoretical analyses (Kaplan, 1964: 857; Blissett, 1972: 65-86; Blume 1974: 167; Restivo and Vanderpool, 1974: 334-351). The virtues of the norm studies are that they: • Contribute to the development of a model of science and its logically associated values, and • They do, in fact, identify a number of orientations that must direct the pursuit of objective knowledge. Due consideration, however, has not been given to the humanistic dimensions of the scientific ethos, and to whether this ethos is thriving or threatened by the external and internal social relations of science. Merton (1973: 254-266), for one, does exhibit an awareness of these problems; but he does not pursue the humanistic and radical implications of science, nor dysfunctional changes (actual and potential) in science with sufficient vigour. The idea that scientific activity implies a certain set of values has been lucidly expressed by Jacob Bronowski (1965: 60-62). If, he argues, the goal of scientific activity is “to explore truth,” then scientists must be individually independent and collectively tolerant. These two “prime values”

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are the foundation for a set of values: “dissent, freedom of thought and speech, justice, honour, human dignity and self-respect.” These values manifest “the inescapable conditions” of scientific activity. They are not derived from the virtues of scientists, “nor from the finger wagging codes of conduct by which every profession reminds itself to do good.” Ravetz (1971: 313) concludes that neither the objects of scientific inquiry, nor the social aspects of scientific work, can guarantee “the health and vitality of scientific inquiry.” There must be, he argues, an “effective ethic,” something more refined than a “professional ethic.” The source of such an ethic, he suggests, lies in a sophisticated humanitarian commitment and not in religion, philosophy, or elitist codes of conduct. The specification of the values which should comprise a humanitarian commitment is a relatively new task being carried forward by humanistic social scientists and philosophers. Abraham Maslow’s work in this area stands out and is especially interesting on two counts: first, because it is congruent with Bohm’s “in-­ becoming” conception of nature; second, because it encompasses many, if not all, of the values associated by students of science from Merton to Bronowski with the scientific ethos. Maslow assumes the intrinsic value of truth, and views inquiry as a basic defining activity of human life. Among the being-values Maslow (1971: 133-135) associates with the “good person” and the “good society” are: truth; goodness; beauty; wholeness; dichotomy-transcendence; aliveness; uniqueness; perfection; necessity; completion; justice; order; simplicity; richness; effortlessness; playfulness; and self-sufficiency. The search for a humanistic ethos has often overlapped with some variety of radicalism. The association of science with radicalism can be considered curious only by those who have not thought seriously about the nature and history of inquiry. The scientific ethos tends to conflict with the ethos of other social institutions. Ideally, only science is associated with a full, uncompromising, unfettered commitment to pursuing knowledge. Scientific inquiry must be constantly pressed forward, driven by scepticism and the idea that even fundamental assumptions are ultimately subject to criticism and change. Nothing is protected from the basic query, Why? No other social activity—and in reality not even scientific activity itself—operates fully according to this imperative to inquiry. Scientific activity—good science tuned into a critical realism—must inevitably be perceived as a radical activity relative to the other social activities in a society. When Tom

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Hayden defined the radical style several decades ago, he came intriguingly close to a definition of science (1961/1967: 6): Radicalism as a style involves penetration of a social problem to its roots, to its real causes. Radicalism presumes a willingness to continually press forward the query: Why? Radicalism finds no rest in conclusions; answers are seen as provisional, to be discarded in the face of new evidence or changed conditions.

In addition to humanistic and radical commitments, a related value orientation that must be considered in constructing a scientific ethos is reflexivity. Reflexive sociology (Gouldner 1970: 507): ...sees all men as profoundly shaped by their shared past, by their evolving culture and social systems. Yet it does not see men either as the helpless agents of some inexorable social force to which they must bow, or as the omni-present overlords of an historical process that they can neatly engineer. A Reflexive sociology believes that there is an inevitable “slippage” between man and society.

This has a laudable humanistic ring. The ”’slippage’ between man and society” is Gouldner’s way of protecting agency and free will. From the perspective of structuralist materialism, agency and free are illusions. We should defend freedom instead. It can be understood realistically in terms of resistance to directly imposed coercion and authority. More on this in later chapters. Reflexivity can be generalized as follows: a reflexive life is one in which the things and processes of experience are all and always, at least in part, turned inward, and incorporated in our increasing awareness of who and what we are. Physics can be learned reflexively by analysing ourselves as physical systems. Astronomy and geology can be studied in terms of their meaning relative to our existence in and relationship to the universe— past, present, and future. The most abstract human endeavours have reflexive potential. Mathematics and logic, for example, can be explored as themselves explorations in the structure and processes of thinking. In this way, it becomes possible to realize that the self, as Alan Watts (1967:10) writes, resides “in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body.” [NOTE: I would put this differently today; see my integrated circulation of information-connectome model of

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the social self/social brain in Chap. 18]. Reflexivity is not a one way process. Its relevance for a scientific ethos lies in the fact that increased awareness is a condition of new perceptions and ultimately new conceptualizations and comprehensions. Humanistic, radical, and reflexive commitments are bases for the construction of a scientific ethos. In a sense, they are the specification and elaboration of values apparent in ideal science, and in good scientific research. This complex of values emphasizes open-endedness, process, and change; it is in this sense consistent with Bohmian reality. It is also consistent with—and in part reflects—certain developments in the psychology of science and the theory of inquiry.

The Psychology of Science and the Theory of Inquiry Abraham Maslow (1969: 20-32; 101; 114-118) pioneered in the development of a psychology of science that reflects the realities of human psychology and of scientific activity. He argued that science can be an anxiety-avoiding/controlling mechanism. It can be neuroticized. In that case, it becomes more a defence and less a growth-motivated activity. The growth-motivated scientist eschews compulsive, rigid, and uncontrollable behaviour. Such scientists do not become anxious when they have to postpone the rewards of their scientific activities. Healthy scientists can enjoy the beauty of precision as well as the pleasure of being sloppy, casual, and ambiguous. The education of scientists must therefore expose them to techniques of caution and boldness. Maslow distinguished between caring and not-caring (laissez-faire) objectivity. The former allows scientists to assert their freedom from a priori truths established by the church or state. “Caring” objectivity arises in situations where “not caring” is difficult or impossible. Such situations are not unknown in the scientist’s relationship to physical phenomena, but they emerge most clearly with the development of the human and social sciences. In these sciences, the application of traditional canons of objectivity results in scientists trying to be objective about people, values, and themselves, things that they both love and hate. The basic thesis of caring objectivity is that loving someone or something enough means you will not want to interfere with them or it. By not interfering, you will perceive a love uncontaminated by your own wishes,

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hopes, desires, anxieties and preconceptions. Such contamination can never be entirely avoided, but it is certainly possible to reduce the amount of physical manipulation used in exploring things. This aspect of science must be stressed because it has been subordinated to literal and theoretical analyses and into parts for so long. Both approaches are necessary ingredients of science. In general, according to Maslow, objectivity is psychologically the product of a learned capacity to behave in relation to the following dichotomies: controlled/uncontrolled, tight/loose, sensible/crazy, sober/playful. These are the characteristics of psychological health and of scientific creativity. Maslow identifies two polar activities in science: (1) those grounded in understanding concrete experiences; and (2) organizing the chaos of concreteness into comprehensible abstractions. The former refers to the Taoist conception of non-intrusive, receptive contemplation. Thus, in addition to controlled experiments and quasi-experiments, comprehension of objective reality in its totality requires a second mode of inquiry: receptive, contemplative, “nonactive, noninterfering witnessing and savouring” (Maslow, 1969: 101). R.G.H. Siu (1964: 75) elaborates Maslow’s conception of the Tao in science. He distinguishes three fundamental approaches to reality: 1. Rationality, which is open to “patterned discourse” and capable of being logically reconstructed. 2. Intuition, which cannot be reconstructed, or systematized in the way that rational approaches can; and 3. Sage—or no-knowledge (Tao). Scientists and philosophers have readily admitted intuition into the scientific process. Since intuition cannot, by definition, be incorporated into a paradigm, however, it has been accorded only cursory and anecdotal attention in the methodology of science. But the rational-intuitive process has limits. Beyond these limits, Siu (1964: 75) argues, “Our faltering mind must then seek repose and cure in what it cannot know”: [Sage or no-knowledge] ...transcends events and qualities; it has no shape or time. As a result it cannot be the object of ordinary knowledge. At the highest level of cognizance, the sage forgets distinctions between things. He lives in the silence of what remains in the undifferentiable whole.

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If science is the process of comprehending an infinite variety of things emerging and evolving, then the totality of human creative and critical intelligence must be tapped in order to deal with that infinite variety. Maslow and Siu have helped identify the different modes human beings have used for comprehending reality and have provided a rationale for viewing these different modes as complementary, and as integrally related. It is possible to conceive the scientific process represented by the concepts rationality, intuition, and no-knowledge (R-I-N) as one in which the R-I-N comprehension of reality at any given point in space-time ultimately becomes assimilated into a rational structure and gives rise to a new R-I-N comprehension. This idea is a least implicit in the theory of inquiry proposed by Warren D. TenHouten and Charles D. Kaplan (1973: xii; 4, 26). They hypothesize the existence of a general class of non-scientific inquiries, called “synthetic.” Their thesis is that science involves perception but primarily involves language and clarifying language. This distinction has a neurological basis, according to TenHouten and Kaplan: • Propositional (scientific, analytical) and appositional (synthetic) modes of thought are lateralized in the brain; “...in most persons capacity for abstract logical thought is associated with the left side of the brain and capacity for perceptual and spatial thought with the right side of the brain” [NOTE: The idea of a functional bi-lateral structure in the brain was widely assumed during the 1970s. Evidence has not sustained a strict left-brain right-brain structure.] • “...although...the products of science are founded on rationalities that are primarily propositional, science as a practice is not confined to these rationalities.” • “...the act of constructing a theory...may involve appositional thought integrated with propositional thought. In science, the most creative endeavours may be related to levels of thought that transcend the functions of either cortex.” • 2 and 3 are psychological manifestations of the bilateral cognitive functions. • Synthetic inquiries such as the Tarot and I Ching are mirror-images of scientific inquiries; this manifests the mirror-image relationship between the hemispheric functions (a neurological hypothesis). • Four synthetic rationalities parallel the four rationalities of scientific method identified by Harold Garfinkel (1967: 262-268). The synthetic (non-scientific) rationalities are present in the Tarot, I Ching,

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and the Teaching of Don Juan, an example of “primitive” inquiry (Castaneda, 1968, 1971, 1972 [NOTE: Carlos Castaneda’s best-­ selling books, purported to be based on anthropological field work, are considered to be works of fiction by critical readers]. TenHouten and Kaplan (1973:140) proposed the following transformation in which Garfinkel’s inventory (1, 2, 3, 4) of scientific rationalities is mapped onto an inventory of non-scientific rationalities (1a, 2a, 3a, 4a): Transformation A: (1) Compatibility of ends-means relationships with principles of formal logic. (1a) Compatibility of means-ends relationships with layers of structural perception. Transformation B: (2) Semantic clarity and distinctness. (2a) Semantic veiledness and complexity. Transformation C: (3) Clarity and distinctness. (3a) Veiledness and complexity. Transformation D: (4) Compatibility of the definitions of a situation with scientific knowledge. (4a) Compatibility of the perception of a situation with synthetic knowledge. TenHouten and Kaplan (1973: 222) concluded that scientific theory construction, concept formation, and methodology involve essentially subjective synthetic rationalities. Objective rationalities are employed primarily in linguistic formulations. TenHouten and Kaplan affirmed the analytic duality of objectivity-subjectivity (manifesting the hemispheric duality of the brain), and the transcendence of this duality in total brain functions [NOTE: In this moment, assuming the split-brain concept, it occurred to me that the transcendence of duality might be physically rooted in the corpus callosum which links the hemispheres]. Science represents a dialectical unification of objective and subjective rationalities. TenHouten and Kaplan‘s view of this process is similar to the view I outlined earlier of a rational, intuitive, no-knowledge dialectic. Indeed, it may be that TenHouten and Kaplan have given us a clue as to how intuition and no-knowledge can be rationalized. Instead of passively waiting for moments of insight or flashes of intuition, paradigms like the I Ching may

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be turned to when rational paradigms are exhausted. Such exercises might lead to the systematization, modification, and eventual rationalization in objective terms of the synthetic modes. This would in turn lead to the emergence of a new R-I-N, or, in TenHouten and Kaplan’s terms, propositional-­appositional framework. Rationalization or objectivization would provide closer approximations (in a practical sense) to reality but would also create new frontiers for intuition and no-knowledge, or for appositional modes. The crisis in science reflects in part the fact that the prevailing objectivity-­ subjectivity dichotomy is increasingly an obstruction to scientific inquiry. This reflects novel problems of the human and social sciences, and the emerging ecological-evolutionary challenges confronting the human species. These emerging problems demand a new set of problem-solving values. Two things seem to be necessary for solving these problems in ways congruent with the enhancement of human life. One is a broader and at the same time more sophisticated conception of science, such as suggested in the works of Maslow, Siu, and TenHouten and Kaplan. [NOTE: This paradigm has a decidedly New Age aura about it and while I endorse it, the post-1970s science studies movement has given us a more sophisticated, less psychedelic version of this paradigm; see Chap. 18.] The second is a generalization of this conception of science to other societal activities. The congruencies I have discussed between the scientific ethos and humanistic, radical, and reflexive values should be examined carefully. Such an examination may support current speculations on the essential oneness of a scientific ethos emphasizing wisdom rather than simple technical power and efficiency, and a life-enhancing ethos (cf. Salk 1973). Having sketched an approach to the problem of values, the next task is to examine bases for constructing organizations consistent with the values of science.

The Social Organization of Science Proposals for resolving the crisis in science emphasize the necessity of achieving a closer realization of the ideal communal organization of science. These organizational proposals are usually linked, implicitly if not explicitly, to values that fit into the complex of humanistic, radical, and reflexive values discussed above. Examples of such proposals include Bernal’s (1939) advocacy of “science as communism,” Edmund Husserl’s (1970) association of scientific culture with thoughtfulness and

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enlightenment, and Karl Jaspers’ (1963: 200) conception of science as a basis for world- unity, friendship, and trust where the fundamental drive of science “binds men existentially—where their common work makes them friends.” The communist or communal theme is not radical in science; it has been identified as one of the norms of science. Merton (1973: 273) used communism to mean common ownership, a core part of the ethos of science. Writing in 1942, Merton (1973: 275) identified the conflict between the communal or communist ethos and the private property ethos of capitalism as the root of frustration in science. He noted a variety of responses to the conflict: defensively patenting scientific work to ensure its public availability; urging the promotion of new businesses by scientists; and advocating socialism. This line of thinking eventually led me to anarchism (Restivo, 2016). Marx W. Wartofsky (1974: 202-210) outlined a rationale for socializing science. He argued that science is reason, and the most adaptable and advanced form of cognition in evolution. Nonetheless, it now shows signs of dysfunction. Wartofsky’s vantage point is global ecological and evolutionary history. The question he raises is whether rationality has like other evolutionary species, found itself in a cul-de-sac and no longer able to function for the betterment of humankind. The dysfunctions of science, he says, are the result of reason being used as the instrumentality of conflicting wills. His conclusion is consistent with advocacy of the communal ethos in science except that he emphasizes the sense of responsibility the ethos implies. This implies socialized reason, a socialized science, a science that takes responsibility for human welfare and survival. This is an imperative of science, and reason When science is conceived as a social system unto itself, isolated from other human enterprises and from the psychological and sociological realities of those enterprises, the communal ethos is also isolated; its relevance to broader socio-cultural concerns is obscured. An awareness of the reciprocal relations between science and society, and of the fact that science is a social activity and social process, leads inevitably to a generalization of the communal ethos. Just as this ethos was linked to the survival of science in its relative institutional isolation, it now becomes linked to the survival of the species. The fact that communality is advocated in the traditional normative conception of science, and also in radical conceptions of socialized science is a strong rationale for considering communality [NOTE: communism and later anarchism] a basic organizational imperative in science.

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Progress is a second organizational imperative. Progress is not a function of optimism, but a logical necessity in an infinitely diverse universe. In order to comprehend reality, we must organize in such a way that we maximize actualization of our potential for achieving closer and closer approximations in practice to reality. More generally, if science is conceived to encompass all activities which contribute to human progress and evolution, then the question we must answer is: How must human beings organize in order to adapt, progress, and evolve? Following Lenski (1970: 59), I define progress as the process by which human beings raise the upper limit of their capacity for perceiving, conceptualizing, accumulating, processing, mobilizing and utilizing information and energy in the adaptive-evolutionary process. The relationship between adaptation and evolution is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, survival depends on the capacity to adapt to surroundings; on the other hand, adaptation involves increasing specialization and decreasing evolutionary potential. Adaptation is a dead end. As a given entity adapts to a given set of conditions, it specializes to the point that it begins to lose any capacity for adapting to significant changes in those conditions. Sahlins and Service (1960: 95-97) summarize these ideas as follows: 1. Principle of Stabilization: specific evolution (the increase in adaptive specialization by a given system) is ultimately self-limiting. 2. General evolution (progressive advance measured in absolute terms rather than in terms of degrees of adaptation in particular environments) occurs because of the emergence of new, relatively unspecialized forms. 3. Law of Evolutionary Potential: “The more specialized and adapted a form in a given evolutionary stage, the smaller is its potential for passing on to the next stage.” Sahlins and Service discuss the applicability of these principles to socio-­ cultural change. This is not a new concern in sociology. What is noteworthy is that the revival of interest in evolutionary theory among sociologists is associated with an increasing interest in the sociological relevance of ecology (which by itself is also not a new concern among sociologists). Lenski’s Human Societies outlined an evolutionary-ecological approach that represented a radical departure from mainstream introductions to sociology. Leggett (1973: 1-15) outlined an evolutionary approach to political sociology. The attraction of evolutionary and ecological theories

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is that they are relatively more sophisticated than general sociological theories, and that they tend to converge. In both perspectives, for example, viability is associated with complexity, flexibility, and diversity (Bateson, 1972). In some cases, sociological research seems to have uncovered the operation of principles of social organization that parallel evolutionary and ecological principles (e.g., LaPiere, 1965; Boulding, 1968: 78-80). All of this suggests the possibility of a general approach to systems and change that encompasses ecology, evolution, and social organization. In particular, given the theme of this chapter, an approach that manifested or otherwise allowed for the imperatives of community (as ecology might) and progress (as evolutionary theory might) in science would be ideal. One approach which recommends itself because of its generality and congruence with the open-endedness of reality, the Maslowian psychology of science, the TenHouten and Kaplan theory of inquiry, and the humanistic-radical-­ reflexive value complex, is dialectical sociology.

Dialectical Sociology Friedrichs (1970: 297) suggested that with a change in the self-image of social scientists as scientific agents, a paradigm shift to dialectical sociology would become increasingly tenable for sociologists. But the pervasiveness of dialectical thinking (e.g., in Bohm, TenHouten and Kaplan, Maslow, and others) suggests the possibility that a dialectical perspective may be emerging in a scientific world-view shift. My objective in the following discussion is the modest one of proposing a dialectical strategy for designing progressive scientific communities. If we begin by assuming a Bohmian reality, Maslow, and TenHouten and Kaplan recommend themselves because they are consistent with the assumed nature of the reality their ideas are part of, and because their ideas are conditions for comprehending that reality. It is reasonable to consider the hypothesis that Bohmian reality encompasses social reality. Engels (1927/1940: 26) outlined such a dialectical perspective on physical, natural, and social reality. According to Engels, the laws of dialectics are abstracted from natural and social history. Following Hegel, Engels notes that these laws are the most general laws of historical development: the laws of (1) the transformation of quantity into quality and quality into quantity; (2) the interpenetration of opposites; and (3) the law of the negation of the negation.

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George Gurvitch’s (1962) view of social reality parallels Bohm’s view of reality. He paints a picture of social reality in constant motion, filled with tension, fluctuations, and renewals, always on the threshold of revolution (Bosserman 1968: 232-242). Bosserman summarized Gurvitch’s five operational procedures of the dialectic: 1. Complementarity (contradictory alternatives turn out to be complementary; two polarities are connected by a continuum; polar points pull together, i.e., go in the same direction; and they pull apart, i.e., as a compensatory action). 2. Mutual implication (things that are heterogeneous or opposite exhibit mutuality and interdependency; they turn out to be imminent, at least partially, in one another). 3. Ambiguity (ambiguity can eventually lead to ambivalence, and then to polarization). 4. Polarization (“The tensions between the several factors or aspects [of social reality] are relative; they are observable in different degrees of intensity. Sometimes they reach the proportion of polarization; other times they exist as ambiguities or mutual implication or evidence of complementarity. The paradoxical often resists the dialectical process of polarity”). 5. Reciprocity of perspectives (total identification and separation are denied; mutual immanence, parallelism, and symmetry). The affinity between the dialectical view of social reality and the dialectical views of Bohm, Maslow, and TenHouten and Kaplan makes it reasonable to allow dialectical assumptions to guide us, at least in part, in the construction of scientific organizations. Following Gurvitch’s schema, for example, the organizational imperative would be to coordinate his operational procedures with organizational structures and processes. One possible starting point for such coordination is the research on creative organizations. This makes sense given the fact that science is paradigmatically creative and innovative. Steiner’s (1965: 16-18) summary of the characteristics of creative organizations shows several points of coordination with Gurvitch’s operational procedures, and the more general dialectical laws summarized by Engels. The use of ad hoc devices and approaches, contact with outside sources, a heterogeneous personnel policy, the inclusion of marginal and unusual individuals., assignments for non-specialists, allowances for eccentricity,

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experimentation, decentralization, a risk-taking ethos, cooperation between stable “philistines” and roaming “creators” are all characteristics which allow for the creation of and interplay between and among polarities, contradictory alternatives, ambiguities and ambivalences, and reciprocal perspectives. Creative organizations, in short, seem to be structurally and processually dialectical. (In Chap. 15, we will see that the brain, entrained with society and organizations, is also structured dialectically.)

Conclusion Objectivity is a social fact. The achievement of closer, more detailed, and more exact approximations to objective reality in a universe of infinite diversity cannot be taken for granted. Again, it is important to understand “approximations to objective reality” as a practical goal, a working goal, rather than some absolute we can attain. The view of objectivity as a social fact has been understood by students of the crisis in science but in different ways. The crisis in science is a species-level crisis, one that reflects the emergence of ecological and evolutionary challenges that are new in type and scale. [NOTE: This is why readers will find the crisis is still very much with us and has risen to the level of an “existential threat”]. I do not believe that a new biological response is necessary for dealing with these challenges. New value orientations and new forms of social organization are necessary in order to survive in ways that enhance the lives of individuals and communities. New levels of consciousness concerning the physical, natural, and social worlds must be achieved. This applies to our consciousness of science as a social reality. Our conception of science must be broadened to include all inquiry pursued indefatigably, identifying and encompassing more and more of objective reality. The facilitation of science—or inquiry—depends on developing an integrated perspective on (and, ultimately, theory of) the nature of reality, the psychology of inquiry, and the relationship between inquiry, values, and social organization. The primary concern of the sociologist of science in this endeavour is with social organization and how it facilitates and/or obstructs inquiry in the context of facilitative societal and cultural institutions. Without such considerations no Theory of Everything is possible. Among the tasks that lie immediately ahead are comparative studies of research organizations, theoretical studies of social organizations, and experiments in the design of scientific organizations. Following the strategy I have proposed, these studies would be guided by the dialectical

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strategy I have outlined here. Other promising paradigms, such as general systems theory, should not be ignored (Buckley 1967; Bertrand 1972; Iberall 1972; Berrien 1968; on the promise of a general theory in sociology see Klapp 1973: 286-305 [NOTE: and see my proposal for a general theory in sociology that integrates dialectical, general systems, and ecological-­evolutionary theories in Restivo, 2018, Chap. 4]. These studies must be guided by a sense of current and emerging ecological-­evolutionary challenges, and an unwavering commitment to raising the probability of enhanced human living on this planet. This will involve due concern for the flora and fauna that are integrated with our lives. The present abounds in evolutionary and devolutionary tendencies. To encounter these tendencies without care and passion for one’s self and one’s community, to meet them technocratically and scientistically, or to sit back and rely on Providential goodwill can only court disaster. A sociology of objectivity cannot ensure that we will continue to do science or participate indefinitely in the evolutionary process. It can, however, provide us with a better sense of what has to be done, and what (in terms of available resources) can be done. It can help us identify conditions of evolution and devolution, progression and retrogression. Only our participation in this process of uncertainties can determine whether “wisdom,” a “higher sanity,” and “life and liberation” can take root in this world (Salk 1973; Roszak 1972: 426; Easlea 1973: 341).

Epilogue: Culture Versus Genes in Human Evolution In the decades that have passed since I wrote the paper on which this chapter is based, it has become increasingly clear that culture has been the driving force in human evolution, not genes. Biologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists have been publicizing this idea by re-discovering ideas that sociologists and anthropologists have known since the origin of their disciplines in the nineteenth century. Clearly, the evidentiary basis for this idea has been growing in the life and neurosciences. Explaining sociology and anthropology as discovering sciences can give the general public and scientists a deeper and more robust understanding of how and why culture trumps genes in evolution, and how society and culture offer more robust explanations of the nature of being human, of the social nature of

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the brain, and of the sociological solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness. The basic premises driving this idea are: (1) humans arrive already, always, and everywhere social on the evolutionary stage; they do not arrive as individuals who then become social; (2) humans have only one way to learn, and to construct inventions and discoveries; that is, by interacting and communicating with each other in social contexts and social networks in earth bound environments (and our extra-planetary territorial extensions). Drawing on the anthropological evidence, E.O.  Wilson (2012) writes that the rise of humanity from band and village to chiefdom and state, in short, the ascent of civilization, has been fuelled by culture not genes. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz as early as 1973 was arguing for a culturological theory of brain evolution. By the early 1990s, this idea was surfacing as a social brain paradigm. The radical social nature of humans in evolutionary terms, the emergence of epigenetics, new research on brain plasticity and mirror neurons, and the social brain paradigm mean that nothing in the meaning of “human” escapes social construction. Even genes and neurons must be re-conceptualized as social entities.

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Hull, D. (1973), “A Populational Approach to Scientific Change,” Book Review, Science 182: 1124. Iberall, A.S. (1972), Toward a General Science of Viable Systems (New York: McGraw-Hill). Jencks, C. and Reisman, D. (1967), The Academic Revolution (New York: Doubleday Anchor). Kaplan, N. (1964), “Sociology of Science,” 852–881, in R.E.L. Faris (ed.), The Handbook of Modern Sociology (Chicago: Rand McMally). Keen, S. (2011), Debunking Economics (London: Zed Books). Klapp, O.E. (1973), Models of Social Order (Palo Alto, CA: National Press Books). LaPiere, R. (1965), Social Change (New York: McGraw-Hill). Maslow, A. (1969), The Psychology of Science (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company). Maslow, A. (1971), The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Viking). Merton, R.K. (1957), Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press). Merton, R.K. (1973), The Sociology of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Parsons, T. (1951), The Social System (New York: The Free Press). Parsons, T. (1954), Essays in Sociological Theory, Rev. ed. (New York: The Free Press). Ravetz, J. (1971), Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (Oxford: The Clarendon Press). Restivo, S. (2016), Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism (New York: Routledge). Restivo, S. (2018), “The Black Hole Economy,” 186–193, in S. Restivo (ed.), The Age of the Social (New York: Routledge). Restivo, S. (2020), Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture, and Social Networks (New York: Palgrave PIVOT). Restivo, S. and Vanderpool, C. (1974), Comparative Studies in Science and Society (Columbus, OH: Merrill). Rose, H. and Rose, S. (1970), Science and Society (Baltimore: Penguin). Roszak, T. (1972), Where the Wasteland Ends (New York: Doubleday-Anchor). Sahlins, M.D. and Service, E.R., eds. (1960), Evolution and Culture (Ann Arber: University of Michigan Press). Salk, J. (1973), The Survival of the Wisest (New York: Harper & Row). Scott, W.R. (1966), “Professionals in Bureaucracy – Areas of Conflict,” 265–275, in H.M. Vollmer and D.L. Mills (eds.), Professionalization (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall). Seaborg, G.T. (1964), “A Scientific Society – The Beginnings,” 218–232, in S. Rapport and H. Wright (eds.), Science, Method, and Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press). Siu, R.G.H. (1964), The Tao of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

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Spedding, J., R.L. Ellis, and D.D. Heath, eds. (1863), The Works of Francis Bacon (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin). Steiner, G., ed. (1965), The Creative Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Storer, N. (1966), The Social System Of Science (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston). Storer, N. (1970), “The Internationality of Science and the Nationality of Scientists,” International Social Science Journal 22(1): 80–93. TenHouten, W. and Kaplan, C.D. (1973), Science and its Mirror Image (New YorK: Harper and Row). Thackray, A. (1971), “Reflections on the Decline of Science in America and on Some of its Causes,” Science 173: 27–31. Toulmin, S. (1972), Human Understanding, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Walter, B. (1967), “The Sociology of Knowledge and the Problem of Objectivity,” 335–357, in L. Gross (ed.), Sociological Theory: Inquiries and Paradigms (New York: Harper and Row). Watts, A. (1967), The Book (New York: Collier Books). Wilson, E.O. (2012), The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright). Ziman, J. (1968), Public Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

CHAPTER 6

Social Construction: The Fundamental Theorem

The troubled history of the concept “social construction” in science studies begins with the milestone publication in 1979 of Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. The subtitle of their monograph was The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. That subtitle was changed in the 1986 second edition to read: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Their decision to remove the word “social” from their subtitle reflected a number of factors: (1) the “end of the social” movement (Baudrillard 1983); and (2) the historical Anglo-American resistance to a robust scientific sociology (especially in America). The attack on the very idea of the “social” was behind Latour’s attack on Bloor’s strong programme; the “science wars” (at its height in the mid-1990s; see Segestrale 2000a); the Sokal affair (for critical overviews, see Babich 2001; and Guillory 2002); Harry Collins’ (2006) defence of a weak sociology of science; Langdon Winner’s (1996) views on social construction and the politics of technology; and debates over actor-network theory (e.g., Law and Hassard 1999). Let’s have a closer look at the science wars. In 1976, David Bloor introduced the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge. He argued that this programme adopts the basic methods and values of the successful sciences to study knowledge and science. The strong programme, the

This chapter is based in part on research originally carried out in collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Croissant of the University of Arizona © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_6

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sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and the science and technology studies movement in general soon found themselves under attack by both philosophers and historians of science, and physical and natural scientists. They assumed “social construction of science” meant that facts are independent of nature and culturally relative. The Fort Sumter of the science wars was the workshop organized by Donald T.  Campbell in June 1981 (International Colloquy on Epistemologically Relevant Internalist Sociology of Science, Lake Cazenovia, NY). Campbell’s goal was to bring together leading philosophers and (new) sociologists of science to see if they could reach a common understanding of or approach to studying science that was epistemologically relevant. A “failure to communicate” became evident in the very first session of the workshop. The philosophy contingent, led by David Hull, threatened to walk out following presentations by the sociologists of science (including prominently Karin Knorr-Cetina, David Bloor, Steve Woolgar, Tom Gieryn, and Sal Restivo). Cooler heads prevailed but a contentious atmosphere prevailed throughout the week. Tom Kuhn was overheard by one of my colleagues being coached by one of the philosophers to try to give the edge in the discussions to the philosophers. The naïve realist philosophers tried to instruct the sociologists in the “things in the world-terms that refer” paradigm and by banging cups and saucers on tabletops. Campbell considered the workshop a failure. The actual science wars (Segestrale 2000a) can be said to have emerged in the wake of a debate at the 1994 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science between Harry Collins (science studies) and biologist Lewis Wolpert (Segestrale 2000b: 7; Smith 2006: 33). Segestrale (2000b: 14-18) also discusses the Sokal hoax. In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal published a hoax paper on “transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity” in the cultural studies journal Social Text. The objective of his hoax was to demonstrate that if you wrote about science using a leftist jargon, cultural studies scholars would not be able to distinguish such a paper from a genuine scientific paper. This hoax was just another example of the absurdities that could follow from failing to understand the basic science of social life. This was virtually inevitable given the treatment of “social constructionism” as a philosophical idea combined with widespread dissocism. Latour has not helped his science studies colleagues by trying to systematically refute and reconceptualize sociology from the privileged positions of philosophy and metaphysics, an effort criticized at length by Restivo (2005b). Physicist Alan Sokal and such predecessors as physicist Gross and Levitt (1994) are incompetent interpreters of social science. The arrogance of

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their training helps explain why scientists like these believe social science is transparent to untutored eyes. The rationale for this position is that social life requires that we all be competent folk sociologists. The difference between folk sociology and professional sociology is as great as the difference between the folk physics behind building blocks and LEGOs, and professional physics. Let us take a moment to explore the end of the social idea in more detail.

The End of the Social? The end of the social as a movement is generally traced to the writings of Jean Baudrillard. This ignores the larger context in which the emergence of the age of the social in the 1840s (Restivo, 2018) was destined to be resisted well into our own times. This resistance is fuelled by the myths of individualism, free will, and a biological brain that is the font of all of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. Baudrillard (1929-2007), a French sociologist, was an “end of” philosopher. As the mostly science fiction seer of postmodernity, he “foresaw” the end of political economy; of Marxism; of class conflict; of modernity; of labour; of production; of the signifier/ signified dialectic; of the exchange value/use value dialectic; of the linear dimension of discourse; of the commodity; and the end of the era of the sign (Baudrillard, 1983: 8). The “end of” discourse announced an historical rupture. The classic era of production is replaced by the era of social reproduction (the information society, the knowledge society). We now live in an era of the “hyperreality” of simulations. This is a reality not of capital, labour, and material production but a world of proliferating signs and codes generating a spiral of renewing signs and codes. Political economy (and by implication, sociology) no longer has an explanatory function. We are left with a form of technological determinism that readily deteriorates into the world of The Matrix (the film franchise that draws on Baudrillard’s Simulacres et Simulation, 1981). The “end of discourse” ends everything that could support a political economy or sociological science, thus the end of the social. Here is a world that resuscitates Plato and idealism. Marx’s economic and social determinism (read more softly and, at the same time, more scientifically as his sociological imagination) is stood on its head. There were indeed empirical emergents in the late twentieth century that bolstered Baudrillard’s views: information was increasingly the coin of the exchange process, feeding the development of market transactions that increasingly involved financial instruments divorced from material and subsistence production. These instruments (including, for example,

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derivatives) were used by investors to turn money into more money rather than to develop usable material products. Cryptocurrencies soon followed. And in the broader culture the idea that humans are a simulation gained increasing credibility among notable scientists. These developments did not transcend culture and “the social;” they were, like all symbolic constructs including pure mathematics and logic cultural productions. That is the long and short of it. There is no end of the social. It’s social constructions all the way do. Marx is said to have stood Hegel on his head, so standing Marx on his head should get us back to Hegel. Hegelian absolute idealism is given a new postmodern twist that gives us semiological idealism wedded to technological determinism (Kellner 2019). In strong contrast to this movement, my objective is to (1) demonstrate that “the social” is as central to understanding and explaining human life as “the physical,” “the biological,” and “the chemical”; and (2) that social construction is a core sociological concept and not a philosophical idea or concept. It is, in fact, the fundamental theorem of sociology, and it is a critical explanatory tool in science and technology studies. It is the key to understanding the meaning of a classical slogan in science studies: science is social relations.

Social Constructionism as a Fundamental Theorem Beginning in the 1840s, the emergence and crystallization of the social sciences shed light on the thoroughly social nature of human beings. I expressed this in my slogan “humans are always, already, and everywhere social.” This means that there is only one way available to us for coming to be, to build societies and cultures, and to come to know things; that is through our interactions with others in the contexts of our socio-cultural and material environments. To paraphrase Euclid, there is no royal road to knowledge. In the Plato-dominated worlds of philosophy and the philosophically inclined sciences, social life has no role to play in the creation of knowledge. In these worlds, discovery is all a matter of cognition, rationality, and the logical machinery of the brain. The crystallization of the discovery of the social in the nineteenth century is nowhere better represented than in the works of Émile Durkheim and Marx. Durkheim (1912/1995: 440) linked logic as a collective representation to his remarks on the sociology of religions and the gods. In the concluding pages of this marvellous book, he put us on the path to a sociology of logic, the sciences, and mathematics. There is a curious ambivalence in Durkheim who struggled

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with the idea of how humans became social. He did not grasp that humans arrived social. This imperative, in spite of several aborted adumbrations, did not become a core feature of the sociology of science until the emergence of the science studies movement in the late 1960s which ended the Mertonian hegemony. The question I am posing for myself is whether or not Durkheim understood humans as always, already, and everywhere social. What is clear is that he believed that the social arises naturally and spontaneously as a sui generis formation. It is clear that he did not agree with any of the social contract philosophers (Hobbes, Rousseau, and Spencer in particular); it also seems clear that mechanical solidarity, which precedes organic solidarity, is not the same as precontractual solidarity. Emergentist theory (Sawyer, 2002) is the theory that society emerges from interacting individuals, the primal horde. This is compatible with Durkheim’s belief about the formation of society sui generis but not with the already, always, and everywhere social thesis. The tension between the individual and society was always at the forefront of Durkheim’s thinking about the social and social order. But I argue that this tension arose only after culture emerged as an individuating process. Maryanski (2018: 230) argues that Durkheim surmised that “at the level of the genome humans may be far less social and more individualistic.” This would be the result, she argues, of the “enduring degrees of humans’ derive individualistic heritage from the LCA” (last common ancestor). This is a conclusion Maryanski reaches after reviewing the comparative study of the social lifes of the hominids, primates of the family Hominidae that includes humans and their fossil ancestors and also (in recent systems) at least some of the great apes. The anthropologist Barbara King’s research is more consistent with the always, already, and everywhere thesis. Her work demonstrates that the evolutionary path that connects us to other primates is marked by empathy, compassion, the need for belonging, making meanings through interaction, creating social rules, and displaying imagination. This is consistent with the thesis that the Hominidae arrive on the evolutionary stage long after evolution has created “the social” (collective behavior sui generis) and so they arrive already, always, and everywhere social. Durkheim did not understand this (he might have surmised it but he would have had to rely on imaginative theory given the lack of evidence for the thesis in his time). Had he come to this conclusion, it would have resolved many of the tensions he saw as endemic to the individual in society.

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In the early stages of the development of the sociology of knowledge and science, Karl Mannheim (1936: 79) claimed that there cannot be a sociology of 2+2=4. Such rules existed outside of society, history, time, and space; they were part of a Platonic realm of ideas. Oswald Spengler (1926/1991: 41-69), by contrast, was already setting the foundations for a comprehensive cultural analysis of mathematics in his Decline of the West. Again in this same period, Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979), a Polish microbiologist, embarked on a pioneering study in the historical sociology of science in his Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. And unaware of Fleck’s work, Robert Merton was already engaged in the dissertation project that would lead to his 1938 PhD thesis and launch the fully formed historical sociology of science. Fleck’s influence on Kuhn (1962) is a bit murky. Kuhn says he became aware of Fleck’s work when he read Hans Reichenbach’s (1938) Explanation and Prediction but that he had already formulated his basic ideas on scientific revolutions. If there is a controversy here, for example about priorities and multiple discoveries, this is not the place to adjudicate it. Kuhn and Merton aside, the early ethnographies of science helped to give substance and visibility to the “social construction of science” and in due course to the “social construction of technology” (the so-called SCOT program associated with the contributions of Bijker, Pinch and others (Bijker et al. 1987). The science studies movement upset the applecart of Platonic, value-free, cognitive, and rational views of science. That applecart had already been unsteadied by philosophers and historians of science, beginning in the 1930s and through to the 1950s. This was all too much for the traditionalists and the result was decades of intellectual and disciplinary warfare that culminated in the “science wars” of the 1990s. What did the post-Mertonian sociologists of science really have to say about social construction?

Social Constructionism and the Ethnography of Science Chapter 1 of Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar 1979: 16) begins with an observer’s notes on the comings and goings of scientists in a laboratory: Every ten minutes or so, there is a telephone call for one of the staff from a colleague, an editor, or some official. There are conversations, discussions, and arguments at the benches. “Why don’t you try that?” Diagrams are

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scribbled on blackboards. Large numbers of computers spill out masses of print-out. Lengthy data sheets accumulate on desks next to copies of articles scribbled on by colleagues.

We are informed that anthropologists are at work here reporting not on a primitive society but on a tribe of scientists. The authors are careful to point out that their concern with the “social” is not confined to the sorts of variables associated with Mertonian sociologists of science (norms, competition, and so on). Rather, these “new sociologists of science” are concerned with how these scientists make sense of their observations (Latour and Woolgar 1979: 32). Let us keep in mind that while Latour brings some field work experience to this study, his training and education is fundamentally theological and philosophical; Woolgar was trained as an engineer. These facts bear on the kind of sociology these authors generate in their research, more ethnomethodological than classically sociological. Thus, they are unable to see “the social” beyond what the Mertonians treated as the social facts of science. In any case, they illustrate the focus of their concerns by reviewing the process leading to the discovery of pulsars and, in particular, the observations made by research student Jocelyn Bell. The scientist’s observations are simple psychological operations. Perception itself is socially constituted (Latour and Woolgar 1979: 33). The sociological breakthrough here is to draw attention to how available social and material resources are mobilized to construct an ordered account of the chaos of perceptions, contexts, and data. Latour and Woolgar (1979: 40) allow us to focus on how facts are constructed in a laboratory and how sociologists can account for this process. They also draw our attention to potential differences between constructing facts and constructing accounts of how facts are constructed. Sociologists and anthropologists tend to be by virtue of their training and education reflexive. We find the same sort of reflexivity in Latour and Woolgar’s study that we encountered earlier in the Restivo-Zenzen chemistry laboratory study. While the lab scientists are at work constructing an ordered account out of the relative chaos of observations, data, and interpretations, the ethnographers are constructing an ordered account out of the relative chaos of their experience of laboratory life. And I am now creating another level of order out of the initial disorder, to my eyes, of Latour and Woolgar’s ordered account. One of the important points about Latour and Woolgar’s study that separates it from traditional sociology of science is that we are given an “account of fact construction in a biology laboratory” that stands alongside the account produced by the

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scientists themselves. The two accounts are, in the eyes of Latour and Woolgar, equal in their capacity to give us access to the realities of the laboratory. This is an approach more tied to ethnomethodology than to general sociology, an approach favoured by Latour and Woolgar and by many scientists-turned-sociologists. In the wake of the consolidation and culmination of the Mertonian hegemony (Merton 1973; Cole and Cole 1973), the earlier preliminary consolidation in Storer (1966), and the emergence of the science studies movement, ethnomethodology entered the ranks of the sociologists of science. Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology entered the new science studies in the 1980s (e.g., Lynch, Livingston, and Garfinkel, 1983; Lynch 1985; and Livingston 1986). For a discussion of ethnomethodology and science studies, see Lynch (2008: 715-731). There is a significant tension between general sociology and ethnomethodology and by extension between my understanding of social constructionism and the view of constructionism in general within the ethnomethodological tradition. That view is rooted in a phenomenological everyday-world approach associated with Alfred Schutz. My perspective as a sociologist owes much to the idea of a science of social facts (Emile Durkheim) and to the sociological materialism (historical materialism) associated with Karl Marx. This contrast is not always a simple footnote in the sociological tradition. Restivo (1988: 207) offers specific examples from the sociology of scientific knowledge paradigm (SSK) and science studies in general to demonstrate the explicit commitment to scientific assumptions and methods among the core researchers in social studies of science. Here are some of the seeds of the future “science wars” (Latour and Woolgar 1979: 257): We do not claim to be able to escape from our descriptionof scientific activity: the construction of order out of disorder at a cost, and without recourse to any pre-existing order. In a fundamental sense, our own account is no more than fiction.

No more than fiction? These are fighting words that raise the spectre of relativism! But what do the authors mean by “fiction”? (Latour and Woolgar 1979: 261). They do not mean that scientists make stuff up, or that scientific monographs are novels (the naïve conclusion to which some critics leaped). Perhaps, of course, they were being deliberately controversial, or being STS tricksters. The more charitable interpretation,

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notwithstanding the possibility of a serious innovation, is that fiction simply connotes the key role of literary tools and writing accounts in the process, or as the process, of manufacturing facts. Here they follow the relationship between literature and science associated with the contributions of de Certeau (1986) and Serres (1997); and see Derrida, 1977). On the one hand their use of the term “fiction” is deliberately provocative; they use it in a sophisticated context far removed from the idea that science is somehow “nothing more” than literary fiction. They explicitly distance themselves from relativism (Latour and Woolgar 1979: 180, 238). Facts are real, and there is an objective reality. But facts and reality are not to be taken for granted. Nor can we be uncritical about how we access facts and reality. Everything is more complicated than we thought it was. It is important for us, and especially for our critics, to see that Latour and Woolgar contributed to clearing a sociological path to a new understanding of where and how we stand in the world. Reality is not given to us a priori, innately, or via revelation. It is a social accomplishment. The “out-thereness” of reality is a consequence of scientific work, practically and discursively, not its cause. That this is the general direction of the science studies movement is readily demonstrated (Barnes and Bloor 1982: 44-45; Bloor 1976: 141; Collins 1985: 165-167; Knorr-Cetina 1979: 369; Restivo 1988, 1994). Our critics clearly have not read this material, or read it and not understood it, or otherwise misconstrued it. I recognize that the charge of relativism is due in great part to the provocations of a new field trying to establish itself and bringing a new vocabulary to the study of science. Words like “fiction,” “construction,” “manufactured,” and especially “social” are certain to bring the traditionalists to their feet crying “foul.” There wouldn’t be such a fuss if we ethnographers had kept our explanations about laboratory life anchored in the material world. Our empirical observations, however, revealed the significance of the social in science in ways unknown to earlier students of science. I will say more about the use of the words “relativism,” “realism,” and “absolutism” as we proceed. First, what happened when the second edition of Laboratory Life appeared in 1986? The main body of the Latour and Woolgar monograph was unchanged. Significantly, however, the subtitle was changed from The Social Construction of Scientific Facts to The Construction of Scientific Facts. This change is explained in a new Postscript. “Social construction” had already become contentious among philosophers, historians, scientists, science studies scholars, and even science writers. We were on the threshold of the

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science wars and provocations from critics such as Ian Hacking (1999), Gross and Levitt (1994), and Sokal (1996). The problem was basically that the emphasis on the social was understood by traditionalists still under the influence of Platonism as equal to relativism. This was and continues to be a great curiosity given the fact that the core science studies scholars all explicitly associated themselves with the sciences and realism. As Bloor (1999 notably) has been wont to point out, over and over, the issue has always been relativism versus absolutism, not relativism versus realism. None of the critics of the sociology of scientific knowledge as a relativistic or anti-scientific discipline (notably, e.g., Gross and Levitt 1994; Nanda 2003) address the traditional Platonic, idealistic features of the sciences; not one has discussed Barnes and Bloor’s (1982: 47n) claim that relativism in science studies is nothing more than “disinterestedness inquiry,” a classic definition of what we mean by science. Many scientists and philosophers nonetheless argued and continue to argue that scientific facts are “real” and therefore could not be socially constructed; that would imply, they claim, that they were arbitrary or fictions. Traditionalists believe that scientific controversies about how to represent nature are settled by nature. Science studies scholars argue that nature is the consequence of the settlement. Without further consideration this idea can be unsettling to traditionalists and lead them to label us as relativists (see Bloor’s 1999 remarks on Latour and the settlement controversy). It is necessary in this context to distinguish whether science studies scholars are claiming that Nature is the consequence of settling controversies or if it is beliefs about Nature that are being settled. Nature is not an agent that can settle disputes or controversies. Latour and Woolgar (1979: 27) already signalled the end of the social in the first chapter of their first edition. It is not our job as observers of scientific practices and discourse, they wrote, to “attach particular significance to the achievement of a ‘correct’ balance between ‘social’ and ‘intellectual’ factors.” Scientists themselves, they point out, routinely distinguish between “social” and “technical” factors. As anthropologists of science, they did not want to prioritize social over technical or technical over social factors. Their question, reflecting an ethnomethodological prejudice, was how does the social/technical distinction work for the scientists themselves. Notice that the ethnomethodological prejudice makes the observed—the subjects, the scientists -- the explanatory arbitrators of their own behaviours. In any event, Latour and Woolgar are already positioned here to engage the “end of the social” in their second edition.

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By 1986, they no longer need the term “social” in their subtitle because the “pervasive applicability” of the term has rendered it meaningless. This is the fallacy of pervasive applicability. The pervasiveness of the term “physical,” for example, does not make it meaningless. In the practice of physics, “physical” finds contextual meaning in particular instances of use. The same is true for “social.” Latour and Woolgar claim that the “social” had meaning in the Mertonian era when the content of science was excluded from the sociology of science. It also had meaning in the Edinburgh school’s sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) programme where the objective was to offer an alternative to internalist philosophies and histories of the technical side of science. The “end of the social” for Latour and Woolgar reflects the fact that we now know that everything is social so the term is no longer needed. This is like a magician’s use of misdirection and has the effect of distracting us from the fact that they are eliminating science, sociology, theory, and explanation from their web of inquiry. If everything is social, everything is social in the same way that everything is physical. In that context, “social” and “physical” do not signify transparently. We are obligated epistemologically and ontologically to unpack their meaning. What does the term “social” mean? Before I address that question, let’s consider what happened to the terms “social” and “social construction” after Latour and Woolgar. The second major ethnography of science following Latour and Woolgar appeared in 1981; Karin Knorr-Cetina’s The Manufacture of Knowledge. Her book was subtitled: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Her index includes the terms “social,” “construction,” and “constructive,” but not “social construction.” Several ethnographies of science were already underway by the early 1970s. In 1979, Roger Krohn arranged a workshop at McGill University in Montreal at which the new ethnographers came together to present their work in progress. This was the first time this group met together in the same place, some meeting each other for the first time. Even though they had been working more or less independently their presentations revealed a common vocabulary of “practice,” “contingencies,” “production,” and “reproduction.” There was relatively little attention paid to social construction per se. That concept was introduced slowly as the ethnographers began to publish their results. Zenzen and Restivo (1982): 470; see Chap. 3 this volume), for example, did not discuss construction until their conclusion. Here they noted that their results were consistent with the “constructivist interpretation” beginning to crystallize in science studies:

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“The social construction of scientific facts can be conceived, following Fleck (1935/1979: 100), as events in the history of ideas, stylized by contemporary, local, social, cultural, and environmental factors.” It is striking that in support of their constructivist conclusion the authors turned to Fleck and not to the ubiquitous Kuhn. One reason for this is that Fleck had a more developed sociological argument. It is also notable that they follow up their reference to Fleck with a realist manifesto. This was in line with the realist ontologies defended by all the other core ethnographers of science. It is important to repeat this over and over because the naïve realists in the traditional history, philosophy, and sociology of science as well as scientists in general were already reading anti-­science and relativism into the new ethnographies and associated science studies publications. Latour and Woolgar, Knorr-Cetina, and Zenzen and Restivo argued for “construction” without denying an objective reality and without adopting relativism. But accusations that science studies supported anti-science and relativism would nonetheless haunt the field into the twenty-first century. The ethnographers in Montreal all stressed the significance of “contingencies.” Scientific practice was coming into focus as a process of mobilizing local contingencies to manufacture scientific facts. Knorr-Cetina (1979: 369) put it this way: “We see scientific products as selectively carved out, transformed, and constructed from whatever is.” Critics would mistake Knorr-Cetina’s claim that scientific facts are manufactured not given, which was based on empirical observations in a plant protein laboratory, to imply an anti-science, relativist attitude. The seeds of the science wars of the 1990s and other criticisms of science studies were planted in this view that facts are made, not given. What is at stake here is the very nature of a sociological understanding of the human condition. The general claim is that our lives are continually made and remade, socially achieved anew in every new instance. We don’t do this from scratch every time, but under the inertia of social institutions. The specific claim in the case of science is that the products of scientific practice and discourse are contextually grounded in the situations and contexts in which they are made using the locally available material and symbolic resources, and the interest structure of their production (Knorr-Cetina, 1981: 5). Facts, truths, and knowledge are constructions; they are constitutively social (Zenzen and Restivo 1982: 470). Simultaneously, the social emerged as the key to revolutionizing our understanding of science and as the main object for critics of the idea that facts are made and not given. The one book more than any other that

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signalled a sea change in the sociology of science was Bloor’s Knowledge and Social Imagery (Bloor 1976). Bloor’s programmatic sociology of mathematics was the primary provocation for my turn to the sociology of mathematics. Given the key role played by Durkheim’s ideas in Bloor’s “strong programme,” it is notable that the terms social, construction, social construction, or even sociology do not appear in Bloor’s index. The reason is that Bloor was more a naturalistic philosopher and scientist imbued with the sociological imagination than a sociologist pure and simple. This actually gave his book greater visibility than it would have had had he identified himself more directly as a sociologist and written in a more strongly sociological manner. The index in the second edition of Bloor’s book (Bloor 1991) reveals his sociology of knowledge foundations more clearly than the index in the first edition. Post-Mertonian sociologists of science did not go out of their way to sell “social construction” to the scholarly community. But the idea that science was socially constructed was soon enough picked up by critics inside and outside of science studies. The idea became linked to relativism and anti-science for two reasons. First, the critics were not conversant with the realities of sociological research and findings; they assumed social life was transparent to analysis and theory and that sociology was not a true science. Second, the idea of science as socially constructed, understood superficially, violated long-standing assumptions about and commitments to the idea that science was about revealing reality in all its naked unmediated beauty—facts in themselves, independent of society, culture, history, time, and space. The critics took social construction to mean that scientists manufactured facts in arbitrary ways, used the tools of literary fiction, created facts out of thin air, and even at their whim. Nothing science studies scholars have done in defence of their ideas has been capable of breaking through the wrongheaded ideas of the critics. These difficulties are rooted in the prevalence of traditional Platonic, idealist views of truth and truth-finding and on the dissocism that blinds people to sociological realities. One cannot ignore, furthermore, that the resistance to science studies is in part jurisdictional and the defence of arenas of authority (see Gieryn 1999 for some observations on the sociology of these forces of resistance). More on this later in this chapter and later chapters but I first want to consider the SCOT program. The 1987 volume edited by Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch pioneered the application of social constructionism in technology studies (the SCOT program). One might wonder why the social construction of technology

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followed the social construction of science. Technology is more overtly about inventing and manufacturing than science. For example, we speak about fabricating homes and furniture. The reasons for the lag are (1) the momentum of the internalist history of technology focused on technical details; (2) the idea of a linear logical unfolding of an inevitable evolution; (3) economic ideologies supporting technological progress narratives; and (4) the origin of the history of technology as a twin discipline of the history of science and the ideology of technological determinism. The SCOT program was introduced as a general heuristic. Bijker (1995), following Bloor’s (1976: 5) symmetry principle that the same social mechanisms must be relied on to explain errors and truths, argued that the “working” of a technology is entirely social. Technologies are not invented and adopted based on a simple and superficial internal functionality. It is not enough for bells to be ringing and gears to be grinding, or in science for enzymes to be reacting or atoms to be splitting. Technologies must be materially, symbolically, and rhetorically configured in accordance with users and audiences who must be “enrolled” to ensure that the technologies will function in society. Some historians have expressed ambivalence about SCOT because it is grounded in theory. The exchange between Scranton (1991) and Law (1991) suggests that this ambivalence rests on a false distinction between narrative and theory. Narratives, even the simplest chronological accounts, contain theories (White 1987). To “chronicle” implies selection criteria and modes of causality as well as enfolded worldviews. The resistance to SCOT, based on the belief that it distorts historical descriptions when producing generalizing theories, rests on a false dichotomy. SCOT has also been criticized and resisted on methodological and political grounds. SCOT organizes its explanations around “relevant social groups.” This raises the question of whether or not those social groups would be recognized by participants or whether they need to be adequate only for the analyst’s generalizations. This concern is related to hesitations about theory-driven scholarship not capturing the lived experience of participants. There is also a question about the impact on social groups not directly involved in the construction, but nonetheless engaged with the consequences. Groups apparently irrelevant to the immediate construction process often have to live with the consequences. Mimicking a weakness in political theories of pluralism, technologies that never make the agenda remain invisible to analysis. Furthermore, a latent positivist scientism inhibits normative analysis of the potential “shoulds” and “oughts” of technological change, depoliticizing the field (Winner 1993, 1996).

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Actor-Network Theory (ANT) Under Latour’s command, ANT breaks from the social construction of science and technology. Fully mobilizing “end of the social” resources, ANT seeks to erase the technical-social distinction altogether. More ethnomethodological than social scientific, ANT focuses on how actors-in-­ networks assign things to the categories technical or social. All essentializing features of actors and networks are erased, frustrating the efforts of the more scientifically inclined and causally oriented sociologists and anthropologists to explain science and technology. We are left wondering, for example, if networks are explanatory or if they need to be explained (I discuss ANT in detail in Chap. 9). It is now time to return to the very idea of social constructionism, why it generates controversy, and how it is variously experienced within and outside of STS.

The Variety of Constructionist Experience In sociology, and especially in social problems research, the concept of social construction is associated with (and sometimes synonymous with) labelling theory. Howard S. Becker (1963) argued that deviance is a collective phenomenon and not inherent in specific behaviours. This sounds something like claiming that anything a group labelled “knowledge” would be knowledge. To put it in stronger terms, labelling theory could be interpreted in the context of science as implying that whatever a group labelled “true” or “objective” would be true or objective. This begins to sound like a program for an “anything goes” relativism. Not even the anarchist philosopher of science and “anything goes” thinker Paul Feyerabend (1975) could sustain such an argument. One way to resolve this issue is to introduce the concept of “objectivity community.” Every group, community, society, and indeed every individual represents or embodies an objectivity community or community of consensus. Imagine a world of such objectivity communities each with truths that reflect their perceptions, ideologies, and practical experiences. Their truths aid in the sustenance and perpetuation of the system. What we have then is a sea of truth islands, each one tested in its own context, but also in the theatre of evolution. To the extent that the truths of a community meet the survival tests posed by local ecologies and long-term evolutionary challenges, one can say their truths are general and not merely local and time bound. In general (and perhaps ceteris paribus) scientific objectivity

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communities tend to perform best in the face of ecological and evolutionary challenges (Restivo 1994: 193; Restivo, Weiss, and Stingl, 2016: x, 51, 148). Berger and Luckmann (1966) are credited with introducing the term “social construction” into the social sciences. To expand on their idea, people and groups in social systems create concepts of their thoughts, behaviours, and emotions that, over time, may crystallize into shared parts of their culture. Their creations become habituated at the individual level and institutionalized at the collective level. Knowledge and beliefs about what is real, what is true, what is objective become part of the institutional fabric of a society; thus, objectivity communities or communities of consensus. Reality in this sense is socially constructed. I will introduce a somewhat revised definition of social construction later in this chapter. Realism is the sine qua non of any science, including sociology and the social sciences in general. What is at issue in the sociology of knowledge and science is not whether there is a reality independent of human wishes, dreams, and whims but whether it is possible to know this reality in a way that is independent of who, what, where, and how we are. Who, what, where, and how we are is grounded in the fundamentally social nature of ourselves, our societies, our very individualities. The upshot of this is that things are not true and false in simple, noncontextual, unsituated ways. The truths of science, of scientific objectivity communities, are presumptive, corrigible, fallible, tentative, and subject to change. At some point, however, what is true in the conclusions of science becomes convincing enough, through experience and communication, that we stop worrying very much about the possibility that we might be wrong. We come to closure, but we do so as scientists with an ever-present sceptical vigilance. The earth is not flat; the moon is not made of green cheese. There does not seem to be much epistemological or ontological danger in adopting these as closed truths that do not need to be explored further. On the other hand, we could claim with equal conviction that the earth is an oblate spheroid wobbling in precession and still leave open the possibility that a novel conception of time, space, mass, and energy (say, along the lines of the theories proposed by the late David Bohm, e.g., Bohm 1973) might lead us to reconceptualize the physical nature of the earth. It would be unreasonable to entertain the possibility, however, that we would at some point in the future discover that the earth is flat after all. Philosophers have the luxury at this point of armchair philosophizing on the possibility the flat earth reality will return. Scientists do not have this luxury.

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There is something else here, and that is that concepts, ideas, theories, and claims do not exist in vacuums. Every word is embedded in a network of all the words of its cultural contexts, and as the complexity of those contexts varies and changes so do the meanings of terms. 1+1=2 looks harmless enough as an example of a fact that can claim universal assent across all human cultures (and even in settings without humans, according to Martin Gardner 1981). And yet, if we look at what this term has meant to mathematicians and logicians across the ages, we discover that it has meant different things in different times and places, as we move from Plato to Leibniz to Peano and to Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. In the context of an everyday world of trees, cows, pigs, and lakes, the meaning of 1+1=2 is stable across time and places. So, a Plato transported to early twentieth-century Europe could readily trade two cows for two pigs with Bertrand Russell or gather up one apple and one orange and agree with Russell that he now held two fruits. However, if Plato tried to step into the world of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (3 vols., 1910-1913), he would be lost. He would not be able to grasp their notion of 1+1=2 in that logical world. Russell and Whitehead are heirs to a culture of mathematics and logic grounded in more than two thousand years of historical experience beyond what Plato experienced in his lifetime, including about two hundred years of specialized developments in the professional culture of mathematics. Cultural and professional developments change the meanings and contexts of words, ideas, and concepts. They are players and victims in the unfolding and overlapping dramas of history. The complexities of the mathematical and logical worlds of the early 1900s could not be mapped onto Plato’s worlds. Some sociologists, never mind science studies critics, are convinced that the idea of “social construction” is controversial. They get confused because they conflate or fail to distinguish social construction as a fundamental theorem of their discipline with social construction as a synonym for labelling theory. This error is in part responsible for generating confusion among non-sociologists. As the fundamental theorem of sociology, social construction signals that we humans have no other way to be human, to be and become in the world, and to find our way through truths and falsehoods than as social beings interacting in social contexts. The confusion persists because the prestige of philosophers keeps social construction trapped in the realm of philosophical ideas.

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Where Do We Go From Here? Philosopher and historian of science Ian Hacking (1999: 4-25) argued that there are few, if any “universal constructionists.” Few people would argue, that is, that the sun or DNA are socially constructed and exist only as social constructions. The rational argument is that our images and representations of objects in the world are socially constructed. So are our social relationships and interactions with those objects socially constructed. In society, however, as opposed to the physical world, social realities (money, for example) can exist by virtue of their social construction by people during the unfolding of culture. Philosophers like Hacking must at this point leave us with the idea that there are objects in our world such as “the sun in itself” and “DNA in itself” and scientists have access to these objects. However, the sociological claim is not that the sun is socially constructed in the same way that money is socially constructed. Hacking and others imply that there is a difference, institutional, social, or cultural, between facts and brute facts. But those philosophers have to explain how we come to know brute facts and how they become brutes. Brute facts are the facts of naïve realism. Once we eliminate naïve realism we eliminate brute facts. And indeed naïve realism has been eliminated across the intellectual spectrum except for some radically resistant philosophical enclaves still ruled by metaphysics and Plato. The “sun-in-itself” does not come directly and unmediated to individual humans, individual perceptual systems, or individual brains. Those are the only ways the brute fact of the sun could present to us (see Hanson 1958: 4-15 on sunrises). Metaphysicians and Platonists do not seem capable of making this move. If, like sociologists, they start from the fact that we are social beings, then every thing, event, and process has to be the result of our interaction rituals, interaction ritual chains, and social networks (cf. Collins 2004). The fact that we are social beings is not a brute fact but one we have established over the course of thousands of years of inquiries into the nature of the human condition. Interaction rituals and ritual chains do not exist as independent social eddies of dancing individuals but rather as links in networked interaction ritual chains. This is the stumbling block for those philosophically-inclined paradox mongers who demonstrate their armchair cleverness by inventing the classical sociology of knowledge self-refutation claim (elegantly refuted by Bloor 1976: 17-18). The mongers’ claim is that if knowledge is social, then the sociology of knowledge itself is social, thus negating…what? If

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knowledge is social (socially constructed), then of course the sociology of knowledge is social (socially constructed). The fallacy is that, if something is social, it must be wrong or false. There is no paradox here unless we want to claim that there is a pathway to knowledge that somehow bypasses interaction ritual chains. Hacking’s argument is that because everything is socially constructed, social construction cannot explain anything. This is a spurious argument because it collapses the different kinds of social analysis and important distinctions between levels of analysis and mechanisms appropriate to various scales of inquiry into one term. No one has been clearer, no one more consistent in defining and defending social construction than Karin Knorr-Cetina (1993: 555-557). She recognizes that efforts to reconcile science studies with classical philosophy of science are Biblical efforts to bring home “the sheep that has gone astray.” Science explores and exposes an unending stream of entities and relations that make up our world and the cosmos (this echoes Bohm’s concept of “an infinity of things in becoming”). The naïve realist assumes the accessibility of pre-existing specific objects, events, and processes before they have been identified, delimited, and defined by science. Constructionism eliminates transcendental ontologies (Knorr-Cetina 1993: 557). Even when we, like core science studies scholars do, grant the pre-existence thesis, we have to confront the historico-cultural contingency of pre-existence (Knorr-Cetina 1993: 558). Subatomic particles are granted pre-existence status only after scientists make up their minds about entities that emerge from their laboratory interventions.

Who Is a Social Constructionist? Is Latour a social constructionist? The answer is somewhere between “no” and “not quite.” The word “social” was used in the first edition of Laboratory Life (1979) and then dropped in the second edition. What did “social” mean in the first edition? It was used more like the concept of “practice” and not as an explanation of science in terms of interests, power, and social structure. The subtitle of the first edition could have read “The Practical Construction of Scientific Facts” and we then might have avoided all of the problems with the term “social.” Since Laboratory Life, Latour has been bent on showing that science is a better analyser of society than society is an analyser of science. If he is not a social constructionist, however, he is still some kind of constructionist.

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A theory of how society constitutes itself is at the same time a theory of how human cognition constitutes itself. In other words, society and cognition are produced by and in interaction rituals and ritual chains. Knowledge about reality—the sun, DNA, money—is socially accomplished. Interaction ritual chains are collective representations in action. Consciousness is simply conscious existence, self-aware activity (Marx and Engels, 1845/Marx and Engels 1947). Things do not exist in themselves but only through shared and shareable representations and interventions. Whether these social constructions have some connection to the “thing in itself,” reality “out there,” is determined by how successful we are in using them to navigate the worlds of our everyday experience, and how successful we are in convincing each other of our success. These navigations can be variously successful in local, regional, and global contexts. Successes in one of these contexts given a certain time frame may not translate into successes in any of the other contexts. Short-term successes may not predict long-term success. Local, culturally specific short-term strategies for survival and navigating everyday life are not going to be automatically relevant to the long-term ecological and evolutionary conditions for survival and survival with quality of life.

Social Construction and Forms of Life When we defend an idea, we are defending a form of life. That is one of the reasons debates, controversies, and conflict over ideas tend to be interminable. Trying to clarify what I mean by “social construction” is not likely to persuade critics because we are both defending a form of life, not merely an idea. At this point, we should be wondering whether the social construction controversy means the end of sociology (as Latour tends to argue, 2004; and for another specious argument on the end of sociology see Denis Pageau’s views at http://denispageau.com). Or does the controversy mean the end of epistemology, metaphysics, and indeed of philosophy (as Restivo 1994: 199-207 argues)? Social constructionism has had demonstrable success in ethnographic studies of scientific practice. Critics claim that these studies have, at best, given us a sociology of error and, at worst, a relativistic view of science; or worse still, they have reinforced anti-science attitudes. Social construction has been called “extremist” (e.g., Shakespeare and Erickson 2000) and reductionist (e.g., Van Kerkhove 2004–2005). These criticisms have been repeatedly and cogently addressed (Barnes and Bloor 1982; Bloor 1999;

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Knorr-Cetina 1993; Restivo 1988; and see Restivo 2005a for an answer to critics within science studies). Social construction, to reiterate, is nothing more than what human beings do as social beings. The extremism challenge is a category mistake. Social constructionism has been compared to biological determinism. The reductionism claim is a misuse of the term reductionism. Physics is not reductionist because physicists study physical problems. In the same way, sociology is not reductionist because it studies social life. This is a function of the unexamined belief that the physical world is transparently a world of scientifically determinable facts and that the social world is too chaotic, too complex, too mired in free will and agency to be an arena of scientifically determinable facts. Or else, it is an area of scientifically determinable facts but facts that are only discoverable by physical and natural scientists. One final criticism to note is Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s (2006:4-5) claim that social constructivism is opposed to “constructivism”; it is more engaged in social and political criticism. Smith is a literary critic, not a sociologist. Her position has some merit, but obscures the concept of social construction as the fundamental theorem of sociology as a discovering science. The potential explanatory value of social construction in the study of texts and films is already evident in the world of postmodern cinema; it is finding its way into the analysis of many consumer products, and the quality management of large-scale construction and infrastructure projects. We are still in the early stages of imagining the various ways and contexts the analysis of the social construction of facts and culture in general can enhance veracity and legitimacy (Croissant 2000: 233). Critics of the sociology of science, sociology, and social constructionism tend to be burdened by an essentialist view of science per se, science written in the grammar of the ever-present tense (Restivo and Loughlin 2000: 139). On this view, Science, once it was established during the West’s “scientific revolution,” became a once and only once event. In this sense, science can be discussed in the form “Science is this, Science is that.”

What Have We Learned? After we’ve sorted through all the detritus of the science and culture wars and organized the inventions and discoveries of the science studies movement, what can we post-Mertonians/post-Kuhnians say about science? We have forged a more critical, heterogeneous, and pluralistic view of

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science as practice and discourse; we have empirically grounded the phrase: There is no Science, only sciences. We have revealed that different ways of life are associated with different forms of science. In this arena ,we have been aided by cultural theory (Thompson et al. 1990; and see Douglas 1973: 77-92). We have lost our “unity of science” innocence. We have established that science studies (STS, SSK) are neither relativist, reductionist, anti-science, nor naively deterministic. Our stress on the social does not eliminate the various physical and natural substrata on which our social relations rest. On the other hand, the social has given us new insights on the nature of those substrata. Genes and neurons are not irrelevant to who and what we are. But we find ourselves today remaking the systems of categories and classifications that have for millennia separated mind, body, brain, society, culture, and world. Sociology has begun to theorize genes, neurons, bodies, brains, minds, societies, and the world as integrated reciprocally interpenetrating and interacting connectomes of elements energized by a circulation of information. My work in this direction, manifested in my social brain paradigm (Restivo 2017; Restivo 2020: 114-117; see Fig. 1, Chap. 18), has built on the contributions of neuroscientists (e.g., Brothers 1997; Rose 2005), psychologists (e.g., Donald 2001), and biologists (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These scholars reflect a revolutionary interdisciplinary convergence focused on conceiving new ways of categorizing and classifying the traditional units of our experiences and experiments.

Who Conceives Society? Social Constructionism Redux In his paper on “Who Conceives Society,” Ernst von Glaserfeld (2008) raises issues central to the history of sociology concerning the status of the social sciences among the scientific disciplines. The debate about whether there is an entity we can call “society” and access and analyse scientifically seems interminable. The debate has been sparked by philosophers and politicians from Karl Popper to Margaret Thatcher, not to mention sociologists (Wickman, 2012). Is the very idea of “society” ideologically classed, gendered, and/or raced? It must be one or all of these since it gets constructed in a classed, gendered, raced, and indeed patriarchal West. Like any scientific concept or unit of analysis, it must go through transformations over time as class, gender, race, and patriarchy become noticed and eliminated or attenuated to different degrees. This is an on-going process.

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Is “society” nothing more than an extension of the few people we’ve come to recognize, as von Glasersfeld argues (2008: 39)? His problem with the sociology of society is grounded in the fact that his approach is cognitive, psychological, and individualistic. This is completely alien to the idea of the social that I have been unfolding in this chapter and in my writings over the course of my career. Where and how can someone like me enter a dialogue with von Glasersfeld? He begins his analysis of society standing on an ontological fabrication: the atomistic individual. It is necessary to engage with von Glasersfeld because his viewpoint is widely shared across the academic disciplines, the media, and the public. On the other hand, one could imagine a third party stepping in to mediate between Restivo and von Glasersfeld, a grand critic who might argue that both the “individual” and “society” are ideological constructs and not natural kinds. That critic might argue that societies and individuals are too mutable to be natural kinds. There are two replies to this argument that come immediately to mind: one could adopt the Aristotelian concept of a second nature; or one could view society, culture, and humans as part of nature. Von Glasersfeld (2008: 41-42) claims that socialization is carried out by way of drives, interests, purposes, and inclinations. This is consistent with his view that we form our concept of society individually by generalizing from our own personal experiences. This methodological individualism leads to the view that the individual is a natural kind, and society is an artifact. Methodological individualism is problematic in two respects: (1) it violates the fundamental experiences and observations that lead to sociology; and (2) it ignores the research results of the new sociology of science. In spite of this, von Glasersfeld’s perspective seems reasonable because the realm of the social is widely assumed to be transparent to any undisciplined gaze. It is, however, no more transparent to the non-­ sociologist than is the realm of quantum reality to the non-physicist. The fact that I can “see,” “feel,” “taste,” “smell” and “hear” features of the physical world is the starting point for my training and education as a physicist; but these characteristics do not by themselves make me a competent physicist. What are we to make of a scholar like von Glasersfeld (2008: 32) who has no credibility as a sociologist but believes that “everyone is free to invent his or her own metaphysics.” What good is that if you want to discuss sociology while claiming, as von Glasersfeld does, not to be well-versed in that discipline? What he actually writes is: “[I am] not well versed in sociology, but….” That “but” is an invitation to an implausible suspension of disbelief. Could such a “but” then sanction my claim

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that “I am not well-versed in physics, but I am going to offer some ungrounded, untutored, and perhaps incredible remarks on topics ranging from geometrodynamics to tensors and from black body radiation to string theory”? In trying to engage von Glasersfeld, I am at an impasse. He, the scholar not well-versed in sociology, says X about society. Restivo, the credentialed sociologist says Y about society. But Y can only mirror what von Glasersfeld objects to about the sociological enterprise. What sorts of sociological resources does von Glasersfeld mobilize to ground his remarks? He draws on two classical thinkers: Simmel and Schutz, whose ideas have long ago been incorporated into the sociological corpus or been surpassed by it; and one contemporary, Niklas Luhmann, one of the most advanced theorists in modern sociology. Are these the best places to turn to if you are not well-versed in sociology? To come back to the basic problem here, all of von Glasersfeld’s ideas are based on a sociologically untenable view of the “individual” as an entity independent of society that manifests subjectivity. I, by contrast, understand society as an evolutionary emergent adaptive strategy that reflects evolution’s invention of collective life forms as adaptive mechanisms. This mechanism is already visible in cellular cooperation and grouping behaviour long before humans arrive on the evolutionary stage—already, always, and everywhere social. Von Glasersfeld cavalierly uses the terms “individual” and “subjective experience,” taking for granted what must be interrogated. These terms have indeed been made problematic in sociology, not to mention in the works of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Sociologists simply do not understand or describe the way we come to know society in individualistic terms. Karl Marx (1844/1956: 104) provides us with one of the earliest and most concise statements on the social nature of self, mind, and consciousness: Even when I carry out scientific work, etc. an activity which I can seldom conduct in direct association with other men—I perform a social, because human, act. It is not only the material of my activity—like the language itself which the thinker uses—which is given to me as a social product. My own existence is a social activity.

This insight has been theoretically refined and empirically substantiated in the works of G.H. Mead (1967); Erving Goffman (1967); Mary Douglas (1986); C.W. Mills (1959); Randall Collins (1998, 2006); Dorothy Smith (1999); and others. For what sociologists of mathematics have to say on

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this matter, see Restivo (1991); Bloor (1976); and MacKenzie (1981). This is just the tip of an iceberg of sociological literature, and illustrates the danger of imposing a “freely chosen” metaphysics onto the complex and diverse landscape in sociology. Sociologists do not arrive at society by way of individual experience, but by way of social elements such as play, games, rituals, structures, and networks. Consciousness itself is a network phenomenon, an idea already in the works of Nietzsche, Durkheim, Marx, and Mead (see Restivo 2020). Von Glasersfeld understands “social constructionism” as one of several possible philosophical background theories in sociology. My view of social constructionism as the fundamental theorem of sociology is supported by many sociologists, but not all. That “but” may signal a rationale for a more congenial evaluation of von Glasersfeld’s contributions in the context of contested networks of concepts in sociology.

Conclusion Social construction does not mean, critics notwithstanding, that ideas, concepts, theorems, laws of nature, or objects like the sun and moon, are arbitrary creations of human beings driven by religious, economic, political, ideological or other interests and imperatives. It rather underscores the fact that there is one and only one way for humans to invent and discover: that is, through our interactions with each other in our earthly contexts. Durkheim (1912/1995; see especially his remarks on logic on pp. 433ff) crystallized this discovery and applied it in his theory of religion and the gods. Of course, there are ideological flaws and scientific errors in his works, as there are in the works of any great scientist. But his rejection of transcendental and imminent reasoning, and the cult of the individual, set the foundations of the sociological imagination, perspective, and cogito. Look again at the problem von Glasersfeld addresses: “How can constructivists speak of social interaction or communication with others, when, as they claim, their experiential world is their own construction? This question is frequently asked and is perfectly reasonable.” This is the classical philosophical way of undermining sociological reasoning, the argument from self-refutation. The fallacy, as I pointed out earlier, is that the question assumes that if something is socially constructed it is not “real.” Is the sociology of knowledge as much a social construction as the knowledge systems it analyses as social constructions? Of course, we have no other way to do things, feel things, or think things than by way of our

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social interactions in their social and material contexts. I draw your attention once again to Bloor’s (1991: 17-18) elegant refutation of the self-­ refutation criticism. The flawed foundation of von Glasersfeld’s argument is that the philosophers stand on a “higher ground” from which they judge the presuppositions, theories, logic, and methods of all the other disciplines. Untutored social scientists claiming a philosophical or metaphysical “higher ground” would find it impossible to publish a treatise on Bell’s theorem in any reputable physics journal. Philosophers who write critical pieces about such topics in physics are expected to have a competence in physics that matches that of physicists. This same criterion does not appear to be a necessary condition for critically judging or otherwise commenting on sociology. Von Glasersfeld’s discussion of sociology demonstrates that Durkheim’s struggle against prevailing psychological and individualistic assumptions continues to require our due vigilance and action. Is it possible to imagine a way to resolve the differences between Restivo and von Glasersfeld? Can they debate, engage in a series of conjectures and refutations, refine the logics of their positions? Is there any rational path to a meeting of their minds? I think not. The reason (following Hooker’s 1975 paradigm for comparing philosophical systems) is that our positions hide entire world views. We would have to compare those world views, element by element. We cannot oppose sociology to philosophy or philosophy to sociology -- we cannot oppose metaphysical systems. If it is indeed world views that are at stake here, we may be early witnesses to the demise of one or both of these disciplines.

Bibliography Babich, B. (2001), “Sokal’s Hermeneutic Hoax: Physics and the New Inquisition,” Research Resources 20. https://Fordham.bepress.com/phil_research/20. Barnes, B. and Bloor, D. (1982), “Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge,” 21–47, in M.  Hollis and S.  Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press). In this chapter, and Bloor define relativism as “disinterested inquiry.” It is unlikely that Daniel Dennett or any of the philosophers who associate STS science studies with relativism have read this piece, or the defense of science and “objective reality” one finds in the writings of all the key founders of STS including the realist philosophers most prominent target, Harry Collins. Baudrillard, J. (1983), In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotext(e)). Becker, H. (1963), Outsiders (New York: Free Press).

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Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966), The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday Anchor). Bijker, W.E. (1995), On Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Towards a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Bijker, W.E., Hughes, T.P., and Pinch, T., eds. (1987), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Bloor, D. (1976), Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Bloor, D. (1991), Knowledge and social imagery, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Bloor, D. (1999), “Anti-Latour,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30(1): 81–112. Bohm, D. (1973), “Quantum Theory as an Indication of a New Order in Physics. Part B: Implicate and Explicate Order in Physical Law,” Foundations of Physics 3(2): 139–168. Brothers, L. (1997), Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind (New York, Oxford University Press). Cole, S. and Cole, J. (1973), Social Stratification in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Collins, H. (1985), Changing Order (Beverly Hills: Sage). Collins, R. (1998), The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Social constructivism, Collins writes, is sociological realism. The sociological cogito assures us of the reality “of thinking, language, other people, time and space, material bodies”: p. 860. Collins, R. (2004), Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Collins, H. (2006), A personal introduction to sociology of science for non-­ sociologists. Retrieved September 19, 2006, from www.cardiffac.uk/schoolsanddivisions/academicschools/socsi/staf f/acad/collins/gravwave/ personal.html. Croissant, J. (2000), “Critical Legal Theory and Critical Science Studies: Engaging Institutions,” Cultural Dynamics 12(2): 223–236. de Certeau, M. (1986), Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Derrida, J. (1977), Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Donald, M. (2001), A Mind so Rare (New York: Norton). Douglas, M. (1973), Natural symbols (New York: Vintage Books). Douglas, M. (1986), How institutions think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press). Durkheim, E. (1912/1995), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. by Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press).

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Segestrale, U. (2000a), “Science and Science Studies: Enemies or Allies,” 1–40, in U. Segestrale (ed.), Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about Science and Society (Albany: State University of New York Press). Segestrale, U., ed. (2000b). Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about Science and Society (Albany: State University of New York Press). Serres, M. (1997), The Troubadour of Knowledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Shakespeare, T. and Erickson, M. (2000), “Different Strokes: Beyond Biological Determinism and Social Constructionism,” 229–247, in In H.  Rose and S. Rose (eds.), Alas, Poor Darwin (New York: Harmony Books). Smith, D. (1999), Writing The Social: Critique, Theory, And Investigations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Smith, B.H. (2006), Scandalous knowledge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Sokal, A.D. (1996), “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46(47): 217–252. Spengler, O. (1926), The Decline of the West (New York: Knopf). Storer, N. (1966), The Social System Of Science (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston). Thompson, M., Ellis, R. and Wildavsky, A. (1990), Cultural Theory (Oxford: Westview Press). Van Kerkhove, B. (2004–2005). Naturalism and the foundations of mathematical practice: A metaphilosophical essay, Unpublished doctoral dissertation (Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium). von Glasersfeld, E. (2008), “Who conceives of society?” Constructivist Foundations 3(2): 59–64. White, H. (1987), The content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Winner, L. (1993), “Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding it Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology,” Science, Technology and Human Values 18(3), 363–378. Winner, L. (1996), “The Gloves Come Off: Shattered Alliances in Science and Technology Studies,” Social Text 14(1/2): 81–91. Zenzen, M. and Restivo, S. (1982), “The Mysterious Morphology of Immiscible Liquids: A Study of Scientific Practice,” Social Science Information 21(3): 447–473.

CHAPTER 7

Wild Men and Winnowers: Donald T. Campbell

Introduction As a graduate student during the late 1960s, like many of my peers, I had Don Campbell as a virtual teacher. There was no way I could know that in a few short years we would meet and become friends. His influence was most salient in my methods courses. My fellow grad students and I read, studied, and were examined on unobtrusive or nonreactive measures; quasi-experimental designs; multiple operationism (better known, perhaps, as methodological triangulation); internal and external validity; convergent and disciminant validation; regression-discontinuity design; and more. More generally, much of what made social science (and, in particular, sociology and social psychology) science for my mentors could be traced to the contributions of Don Campbell. But it wasn’t clear to them—or to me at that time—that the science Don was helping or trying to put into social science had two important features: First, it reflected and was relevant to the diversity and complexities of social life and culture. Second, it reflected a sophisticated post-positivist, anti-foundational understanding of the physical and natural sciences inheritance as complex, dynamic, and processual social and cultural phenomena. For this reason, it may be that Don was partially responsible for putting me on the road to a critical sociology of science and a sociology of objectivity. The sophisticated understanding of science as a human activity, reflected in Don’s early contributions to methodology, contained the seeds of his © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_7

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later contributions to the philosophy, psychology, and sociology of science. He rejected definitional operationalism and advocated multiple operationism and he struggled to reconcile the opposition between behavioural and phenomenological inquiry. He did not merely and simplistically adopt the methods of science, but adapted them to the settings of social and cultural activities and processes. Don defended a critical epistemological relativism and described himself as a fallibilist and anti-foundationalist opposed to direct realism, naive realism, epistemological complacency, and ontological nihilism. And he relished describing himself as a critical realist. Don’s research agendas and career seem in retrospect to have led him inexorably to develop a social science of science. It is here that our agendas overlapped and our careers intersected. My objective here is to honour Don’s memory by critically thinking about and engaging his ideas in a continuation of at least one part of his agenda and our conversations.

Wild Characters and Selective Winnowers In a handwritten note Don wrote to me many years ago, he referred to me as a “wild man” and to himself as a “winnower.” I suppose Don’s characterization of me had something to do with a lecture I’d given, or a paper I’d published. But most likely it was provoked at the 1981 Lake Cazenovia workshop where I was wrongly perceived by Don as leading a constructivist assault on the philosophers of evolutionary epistemology. Whatever the source of his personology, it struck me that he had seen past my tranquil mediterranean exterior through to the Nietzschean turmoil boiling away inside of me. He would have many occasions during the course of our interactions to rehearse this descriptive personology. This personalized his famous slogan, “blind variation and selective retention.” But I was surprised to find that in characterizing me, Don put me in company with Hanson, Polanyi, Popper, Toulmin, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Quine—all, in Don’s (Campbell 1988: 316) view, “wild characters.” And yet, in recalling Don’s defence of “oddball” methods as part of his triangulation approach, his speculations on the experimenting society, his anti-­ foundationlism, his epistemological relativism, his humanism, his cautious affection for Paul Feyerabend, we should all be reminded that there was at least a little bit of wildness in Don Campbell and in his theories. Don was more like the sociologists of science he liked to engage than he sometimes seemed to think. He made much of the fact that he was not an ontological nihilist. But there were no ontological nihilists among the sociologists of science he disputatiously engaged. He wrote (Campbell

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1988: 290–91) that “if pure or applied social studies are to merit the term scientific, their problem areas will have to be ‘colonized’ from the successful sciences,” and that “Such colonization will be dependent upon a valid theory of the social system of validity enhancing belief change of the successful sciences.” Here he was defending a version of a key tenet of Bloor’s (1976: 141) strong programme: “Only proceed as the other sciences proceed, and all will be well.” In general, Don tried to engage sociologists of science who shared his respect for science. But these sociologists of science were, as Don knew and lamented, absolutely unwilling to seriously consider (or consider at all) issues such as “the experimental society” and enhancing validity. There are a few sociologists of science—I count myself, Daryl Chubin, and Julia Loughlin among them (Chubin and Restivo 1983; Restivo and Loughlin 1987)—who have considered such questions. But their (our) role in his disputatious community was marginalized by their (our) failure to be awed by or worshipful of modern science. At issue in these differences were questions of the epistemological relevance of the (internalist) sociology of science (ERISS).

ERISS and Civilization The epistemological relevance of the sociology of science can be established in at least three ways: First, the sociology of science can link sociological and epistemological rationality, and so link the standards of what constitutes “correct” sociological work with the standards of science. This is one way of formulating what Bloor christened the “strong programme in the sociology of knowledge.“ The second way in which a sociology of science can be made epistemologically relevant is by focusing attention on the social structural requirements of scientific practice and progress. I take this to be the goal of Don’s work on descriptive evolutionary epistemology. Don’s approach shares a demarcationist perspective with the strong programme (that is, it distinguishes and separates science from other modes of inquiry), but it is based on a more explicitly dynamic conception of scientific process and change. For this reason, I called this the “mild (or moderate) program in the sociology of science” (in relation to Bloor’s strong programme and Chubin and Restivo’s (1983) weak program). Don, for example, referred to the “iterative oscillations of theoretical emphases” and to a “continual dialectic that never achieves a stable synthesis” (Campbell 1988: 503), but he remained (like Merton, Kuhn,

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Bloor, and others) committed to the Grand Paradigm of modern science: “Of all the analytically coherent epistemologies possible, we are interested,” Don wrote, “in those (or that one) compatible with the description of man and of the world provided by contemporary science” (Campbell 1988: 393). He described himself as an “ontological realist, positing and seeking a reality shareable by all knowers, but which can only be known presumptively and indirectly” (Campbell 1988: 447). One of the fundamental queries of the mild program is: “In what kind of world, would what kind of procedures lead a knowing community to improve the validity of its model of the world?” (Campbell 1977: 22). Consider this the objectivity community with the highest probability of leading humanity’s long term adaptations. Don argued that to fit theories and the world described (just as in fitting organisms and environments) “a wasteful non-prescient variation (blind variation) and selective retention process is required” (Campbell 1974: 153, 158). The variations are, to be sure, bound to be restricted. But the wider the range of variations, the more likely a novel solution. The recommendation to speculate wildly thus belongs in the guidebook to the strategy of discovery, if not the strategy of logic. Of course, selective retention is blind, too, since there are a variety of levels of, contexts for, and criteria for selection. Don did of course consider the problem of levels, but he didn’t stress this idea sufficiently (Campbell 1988: 399–418, 476). He argued that the idea of “stubborn facts that speak for themselves, independently of any scientist’s whim [is] in some sense literally untrue;” it is an “ideology” (Campbell 1974: 196). This sounds compatible with constructionism, but Don believed that the ideology of facticity is “an extremely important norm to preserve, and one that has a functional truth.” Don thus always had one foot in the Mertonian-Kuhnian camp (in his defence of a functionalist theory of science) and one foot in the Feyerabend camp, the camp of Dadaist or anarchist inquiry (in his defence of “wildness” or “unjustified variation”). But Feyerabend, Don complained, “is so in love with variation as to totally neglect selection and to see retention only as variation’s enemy.” That this is not a fair reading of Feyerabend (1978) is illustrated by a careful reading of Against Method, and especially the closing pages (Feyerabend 1978: 214): We may even admit that at the present stage of philosophical consciousness an irrational theory falsely interpreted as a new account of Reason will be a better instrument for freeing the mind than an out-and-­out anarchism that is liable to paralyze the brains of almost everyone …. I shall

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therefore join Lakatos rather than continuing to beat the drum of explicit anarchism. In fact, already by page 21 Feyerabend had abandoned anarchism in favor of dadaism. In any case, Don did have a cautious affection for Feyerabend’s wildness, and I daresay the wildness of some of his other colleagues. The third way in which the sociology of science can be epistemologically relevant is by drawing attention to problems of authority and competence in the process of discovering and justifying scientific knowledge. More broadly, it can lead to a critique of science and to consideration of alternative modes of thought and inquiry. This is the basis for a critical realist sociology of science. Numerous hidden and uncritically accepted assumptions guide the selection of problems, research methods, explanatory modes, and the legitimation of logics and rationalities in the sociology of science. Research advances clandestinely, supported by assumptions about the nature of reality, the legitimate ways to study reality, and the legitimate ways to explain reality. Methods and theories are developed, utilized, and changed with scarce regard for what they imply about how one comes to know things, what one does with such knowledge, the nature of the researcher, the social relations of research (in the critical, introspective, and unobstructive reflexive sense), and the values and ethics of research. It is a small (although non-obvious) step from the idea of hidden or taken-­ for-­granted assumptions to the idea that methods and modes of explanation, problem-selection criteria, and rationalities and logics are imbedded in world views. This insight is implied in one of the various interpretations Kuhn gives to “paradigm,” and in some of the literature in the post-­ Mertonian/Kuhnian sociology of science. Two examples from the philosophy of science include the “sequence of widening perspectives” sketched in Radnitzky’s (1970) call for metascience studies, and Hooker (1975). Hooker is more explicit in construing philosophies of science (such as empiricism and realism) as world views. Meta-philosophy is then the process of making the world view associated with any given philosophy of science explicit. The central idea in David Bohm’s (1976) book on Fragmentation and Wholeness is that scientific theories are world views. Bohm conceives of world views as being concerned with all aspects of our lives—nature, ourselves, and our relations to others and to nature. For Bohm, the function of metaphysics is to unveil the world views in theories. Feyerabend’s

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Galilean studies and critique of method are yet another affirmation and exemplar of the meta-analysis of science-as-worldview. Bohm has another way of putting all this: science and scientific theories are “insights; and insights are neither true nor false. They are clear in some domains (and perhaps in some time frames), and unclear when extended to other domains.” Let’s consider then critical realist sociology of science, the program I have pursued as an alternative to the various strong programmes, but which at the end of the day has much in common with Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology and even more perhaps with Hooker’s (1987) evolutionary naturalism. The divergences, however, are not without significant consequences.

Critical Realist Sociology of Science Critical realist sociology of science (CRSS) is based in part on the nature and implications of the meta-analysis of science, following Radnitzky, Hooker, and Bohm. It changes the focus of the sociology of science from Science (the Grand Paradigm of modern science) to the broader epistemic activity, “inquiry” (and what Nietzsche referred to as “thinking”). And it replaces such terms as “objective statement” and “truth” with the term “insight.” It operates under the following principles: (a) no insight (more broadly, “world view;” more narrowly, “objective fact,” or “truth”) can ever be final or absolute; (b) no system for arriving at insights can ever be universally valid and unchanging in its foundations; (c) there is always a broader context, or higher level, for establishing an insight than that of any given system of inquiry; (d) all insights are rooted in  locations or standpoints, and (e) there is no justification for investing any of these principles with absolute value. Since these assumptions are not proposed as “truths,” no truth paradoxes arise here. As a critical realist sociologist of science, I do not—and perhaps cannot—affirm a priori that science is a privileged mode of inquiry. In this respect, CRSS is more radical than the Marxist program with which it shares many assumptions and theoretical guidelines. And it is compatible with conflict sociology insofar as that program is materialist and constructionist. CRSS does not focus on science-as-it-is or “speak” of science in the grammar of the ever-present tense. Science is not assumed to be an immanent (let alone transcendent!) process that can only be facilitated or obstructed by the sociocultural context within which it unfolds. Rather, I am concerned with inquiry and thinking as unfolding human activities

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with evolutionary and devolutionary tracks; therefore, progress is not left out of our vocabulary, but it is not assumed and it is not universalized. CRSS is grounded in explicitly non-elitist and liberatory values, reflexivity as a freeing and not an obstructive activity, and dialectical thinking. God tricks are eschewed, and the locations and standpoints we operate in and from are recognized. But this does not mean we cannot and do not adopt god tricks now and then heuristically or strategically to assist us in keeping our inquiries going. Finally, CRSS is a relativistic program -- but in a Protagorean, not a philosophical, sense. Philosophical relativism, as Feyerabend (1978: 82ff.) noted, affirms that “all traditions, theories, ideas are equally true or equally false, or in an even more radical formulation, that any distribution of truth values over traditions is acceptable.” Protagorean relativism, again following Feyerabend, “pays attention to the pluralism of traditions and values … it does not assume that one’s own village and the strange customs it contains are the navel of the world.” This political relativism (which I find compatible with Biagioli’s (1996) “contingentism”) affirms that “all traditions have equal rights”(Feyerabend, 1978: 82–83). The claim isn’t that Aristotle is as good as Einstein. Rather, the claim is that “Aristotle is true” is relational. It refers to a certain tradition. It may change when that tradition changes. It is asserted and argued that “Aristotle is true” is a judgement that presupposes that there may exist a tradition for which Aristotle is as true as Einstein, but there are other traditions for which Einstein is too uninteresting for examination. This is in my framework a recognition that there are objectivity communities, communities of consensus. Value judgements are not “objective” and cannot be used to push aside the “subjective” opinions that emerge from different traditions. The appearance of objectivity that is attached to some value judgements comes from the fact that a particular tradition is used but not recognized. Absence of the impression of subjectivity is not proof of “objectivity” but of an oversight. The research agenda of CRSS encompasses both traditional and new themes in the sociology of science and knowledge. It is distinguished by a concern for ethical and value issues and problems common to what C. Wright Mills called “the sociological imagination.” This is perhaps as good a point as any to remind my readers that I follow Nietzsche in affirming that the question of values has priority over the question of knowledge certainty. The certainty question only becomes serious once we’ve answered the values question. CRSS moves easily and

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regularly between a broadly interdisciplinary conception of sociology and one that is narrowly focused on the pervasiveness of the social and the causal primacy of social structures. The narrow focus is, occasionally at least, necessary to avoid confusing “social” references or rhetoric with sociological analysis (as occurred in the case of Kuhn’s analysis of scientific change), and CRSS from those sociologies of science that are conceived as sources of support for the ideologies and myths of science, in particular the physical sciences. Thus, CRSS treats the social organization of science, scientific change, and patterns of communication and power in science as problems, not givens. It is not based on “awe” of science and scientist (the Sartonian turn) or worshipful, ritualistic orientations to objectivity, rationality, rigor, and the other “good” aspects of scientific inquiry (the Campbellian turn). It does not assume that the development of science as a human activity with negative and positive consequences for people and their environments (as part of a cultural apparatus) is necessarily progressive. It does not accept “intersubjectivity” as a panacea for the fallibilities and pathologies of individual perception, cognition, motivation, and choice. Intersubjectivity is a social process and thus as vulnerable to fallibilities and pathologies as individuals. Social organization is, in science as elsewhere, a dynamic process with the potential for temporary or permanent pathological transformations (including, for example, goal displacement and manifestations of the “iron law of oligarchy” in professionalization and bureaucratization). One of the common signs of an uncritical sociology of science is the assumption of “efficacy,” “success,” and “progress” in science. A CRSS must evaluate efficacy, success, and progress in terms of how science is perceived within the various social classes, institutions, communities, and organizations, and by the individuals who make up “science in society.” To what extent is it created and controlled by classes, etc., and individuals? And how does it affect classes, etc., and individuals? The fact is that while modern science is part of the general social process of epistemic activity in modern societies, it is grounded in aggressive, domineering, exploitative relationships between people and their social, physical, and material surroundings. Focusing on the “successes” of science without considering the negative personal, social, and environmental consequences of those “successes” is analogous to focusing on the Gross Domestic Product as a sign of economic prosperity without considering the Gross Domestic Disproduct which would measure waste, pollution, and alienation if we had such a measure. It would measure the negative consequences of the production,

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distribution, and consumption of goods and services. And—to take up one of Don’s major interests—any focus on scientific validity that is restricted to a concern with problems of measurement and ignores general problems of truth and objectivity is consistent with the prior analogy.

Validity in Question Optimizing validity can become a narrow organizational and administrative goal, and not the best way to ensure that we are getting high-quality results in our research. Validity (internal and external) is a concept rooted in a quantitative, measurement-oriented conception of science. In this sense, it can be an especially appealing criterion for legitimating research findings from the point of view of governmental or other administrative and social control agents and agencies. A focus on validity in this narrow sense separates the research community (or research communities) from its audiences, clients, subjects, and funding sources and reinforces the notion of a social system of science that is immune to “external” social forces and values. But the concern for establishing, sustaining, and reinforcing a research community producing knowledge that is “useful” is better served by focusing on the social relations of science, and on the problem of generating a sense of the social nature and value of valid knowledge among researchers and users alike. As in the case of objectivity, so in the case of validity, we are talking about social processes and different levels and degrees of social organization. As informal modes of consensus formation become stabilized and institutionalized, they become transformed into “truth tests” that appear to be independent of social and cultural forces. These tests can then be used as official guarantors of the validity of research results. More specifically, professionalization and bureaucratization (for example) cause creative and innovative ideas and actions to be devalued. Such ideas and actions are a threat to the internal stability of a profession. They also threaten the established social order that underwrites the profession, and the position of the profession in that social order. This is why Don’s “social system of science” approach is so problematic. It is a theory of science that is not merely grounded in the findings of science as a profession, but that is also (and not incidentally) congruent with the conservative requirements of scientific ideology. A CRSS cannot for any reason ignore the fact that epistemic communities develop self-validating knowledge-use systems. Nor can it ignore the

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possibility that the claims, predictions, recommendations, and theories of a prestigious epistemic community can be taken as warnings, become self-­ fulfilling prophesies, and facilitate social control. Ignoring these social realities can only undermine the sorts of efforts Don supported -- to apply social science knowledge in ways that are both effective and humane. It is worthwhile rehearsing some of the results of research in science studies over the last quarter century. This research has brought into question, at least, the uniqueness of the rationalities used in science. It has at least suggested that reliability, validity, truth, and objectivity are achieved in science (as a specific social institution) in the same ways that they are achieved in general epistemic activity in any organization, or culture. It has also shown that rigor is not a sine qua non in science: it is part of the cycle of inquiry, and can coexist in the same field of research—and even in the same project or problem domain—with non-rigorous methods and concepts. Standards of rigor and validity are historically and culturally situated. Loosening the canons of rigor is often a condition for solving intractable problems, developing new approaches to get around obstacles, and generally for getting things done. As standards of rigor, validity, rationality and so forth are generally established by or associated with orthodoxy and authority, we should not forget the stake scientists have as professionals, as workers, in demarcationist strategies. Admitting that scientists have ideological and professional interests and goals, but ignoring these factors in the interest of some sort of idealistic model of inquiry, only veils the complex social realities that link discovery and validation with issues of status, power, and prestige. It also hides the fact that cognitive “correctness” is context dependent, and obscures the links between theories and methods on the one hand and social organization on the other. Just as science can be a label for the general problem-solving activities of humans and the variety of cultural, organizational, and institutional manifestations of epistemic work, so enhancing or optimizing validity (Don’s major project in his sociology of science) can be viewed as a label for routines in the realm of argument, demonstration, and proof that are standard features of a culture that is self-sustaining and on some sort of “growth” or “developmental” curve. I do not object to the idea that we can develop the epistemic potential of human beings through the study and application of principles of sociology and social psychology. Thus, while I find Don’s focus on optimizing validity too narrow, I do not object to the more general idea that it is possible to enhance or optimize the human capacity for generating objective knowledge. This is the aim of a

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sociology of objectivity carried out in the arena of an emancipatory epistemology (Restivo 1994). Don’s program in evolutionary epistemology and the sociology of validity is a conserving program: trust the validity of the great bulk of our beliefs while revising a subset of them; emphasize the social message of the rigidity of biological duplication processes; and coopt the radical critics by recognizing their actual or potential value for established interests but not their potential as an alternative to those interests. Don’ s 99/1 variation/ retention formula is a biological prescription for a Kuhnian system of scientific change. But the alternative is a fully assimilative science, a science in permanent revolution, an emancipatory science (as conceived in the writings, for example, of David Bohm). Don developed a model of social organization based on the “naturalness” of biological rigidities. But he ignored, or didn’t take seriously enough, the possibility that biological rigidities may be the basis of a certain “looseness” at the sociocultural level that has a positive evolutionary or developmental function. “Natural selection” cannot have any feeling or concern for the human condition; neither can “God,” which is sometimes used as a synonym for natural selection in these kinds of arguments. No humane, practical, epistemology can therefore take natural selection seriously as a starting point or principle. Emancipatory epistemologists are valuing, creating, criticizing, epistemic agents. They are responsive to encounters with more or less recalcitrant realities such as breaking pencils, and planets without margarine in their cores. But they are never under any obligation to be bound by or loyal to “lessons” of these encounters in any rigid way, and certainly under no obligation to be bound by or loyal to the authority of natural selection. Here it may be helpful to consider the words of Umberto Eco’s (1983: 491) fourteenth-century Sherlock Holmes, William of Baskerville: Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passions for the truth.

This message has been broadcast in many forms: Kafka’s (1964/1937: 286) assertion in The Trial, “Logic is doubtless unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living,” would find ready endorsement in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and others. Those thinkers and critics held such views not because they were “relativists” but rather because they had

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an appreciation for the dialectical complexities of social structures, and the pervasiveness of the social. Along with some modern students of science, they were critics of the “Cult of Science,” and that Cult’s intense “faith in science.” In at least one of its forms, relativism is synonymous with “good” inquiry or science. Barnes and Bloor (1982: 47n44) wrote: A plausible hypothesis is that relativism is disliked because so many academics see it as a dampener on their moralizing. A dualist idiom, with its demarcations, contrasts, rankings, and evaluations, is easily adapted to the tasks of political propaganda or self-congratulatory polemic. This is the enterprise that relativists threaten, not science …. If relativism has any appeal at all, it will be to those who wish to engage in that eccentric activity called disinterested research.

In order to appreciate Kafka, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Eco—let alone Barnes and Bloor—we must appreciate that when we talk about science, truth, logic and related ideas we are always talking about social relations. This sensitizes us at once to the progressive and regressive aspects of words, concepts, and terms that as social relations can embody inequalities, destroy environments, inhibit individual growth and development, and undermine inquiry. In our experience of ourselves as epistemic agents, we pursue inquiry under certain limitations because we find the social, personal, or ecological costs of “knowledge for its own sake” unacceptable. When Campbell writes about “fit-increasing processes,” the emancipatory epistemologist wants to know “fit for what?” If the answer is “fit to the natural world,” it must be remembered that we are always changing the world (intentionally or not). By changing the world, by constructing and reconstructing the world we study, we also affect the object world and therefore the “laws of nature” to which we have access. Finally, it is important to realize that social life is not only the source of concepts of nature and scientific theories, but itself part of the “reality as a whole” we are in fact studying. One of the problems with Don’s program is that it promotes interdisciplinary approaches but insists, at the end of the day, on separating social and physical worlds, and social and physical sciences. Don gave us a “strong programme” of sorts in the sociology of science. The problem is that sociology is considered an “immature” science, but is called on to give an account of science that encompasses the “mature” natural and physical sciences. Simultaneously, sociology is called on to help promote the maturation of the social sciences, including. Presumably, the sociology of science. Aside from any contradictions implied in this

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approach, sociology is placed under the banner of modern science (in its prevailing organizational and ideological form) and sociology of science is made a demarcationist junior partner to epistemology. The contrast here is with a sociology of science that draws attention to problems of authority and competence in science as a central feature of its agenda.

Conclusion Science is a social institution, and scientific activities, representations, and products are intimately implicated in that institution. Therefore, any evaluation or critique of science is an evaluation or critique of social relations, social power and social control, the tensions between conserving and transforming social forces, and values. Any call for an alternative science is a call for an alternative way of organizing for and thinking about the production of knowledge, and alternative ways of, and reasons for, pursuing, producing, distributing, and utilizing knowledge. Don stressed visual demonstration as a basis for science: “In the paradigm instance, the ‘facts’ are visually supported beliefs shared by the community and visual demonstrations introduced in a persuasive process.” But while he gave vision a social dimension, he did not always stress that the foreground-background relation is sensitive to context nor the social construction of validity in visual demonstrations. This social construction-­ social context perspective must be the starting point for any critical realist sociology of science. Emancipatory epistemology adds a concern for revealing and opposing (1) the fetishisms of cognition, representations, and knowledge, especially in the theory and practice of science; (2) the fetishism of such ideas as objectivity, reality, rationality, truth, validity, and science; and (3) the alienation of knowledge specialists (including science workers), and people in general from the processes and products of inquiry. In emancipatory epistemology—or better, emancipatory theories of inquiry—the program for a liberated society and personal liberty is simultaneous with—and in any case never subordinated to—the program for open inquiry. We can apply sociological theory to the problem of enhancing validity or producing objective knowledge. But once we recognize that validity and objectivity are community products—social constructs—we are obliged to recognize that valid or objective knowledge has qualitative features. Thus, we need to be concerned with the ways in which the intersection of various standards of validity might affect our evaluation of knowledge claims. Cultural content of various kinds and levels pervades

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valid or objective knowledge. The problem for sociologists of science, then, is to clarify this thoroughly social conception of validity and objectivity and to contribute to developing new standards for evaluating knowledge, including of course their own.

Epilogue: ERISS and Civilization Revisited Don introduced the collection of his papers published by Chicago in 1988 with a sketch of his scholarly career. There were three sections of this sketch I found especially interesting, since I think they may be the root of why our sociologies of science diverge. The most significant is the section he titled “Respect for Tradition and Evolutionary Theory.” Don affirmed a commitment to creating a thoroughly scientific social psychology but an unwillingness “to jettison traditional wisdom about how to live life and rear children.” My experience, by contrast, has led to a commitment first to the naïve goal of a scientific sociology and later to a more sophisticated goal of theoretical inquiry combined with a sometimes volatile rejection of traditional ways of life. I found nothing at all to salvage from religious teachings (which is not to say that there was nothing to salvage in terms of ritual and community), and while I had very caring and loving parents, I found nothing to imitate in a form of life characterized by deprivation, job dissatisfaction, alienation, and so on. Once I learned to see our family and community situation as a product of traditional ways of doing politics, economics, and religion, my form of anarchism (nourished by Marx and Nietzsche as well as Kropotkin, Bakunin and Goldman) followed. At the ERISS (epistemologically relevant internalist sociology of science) conference in June, 1981, Don and co-organizer Alex Rosenberg assembled (and I quote Don here) “ideal groups of naturalistic philosophers of science and relativistic sociologists of science … “In the wake of the conference, Don wrote that “the conference failed utterly to address the agenda I had intended, mainly because the sociologists focused on a well-articulated skepticism, being unready for speculative comparison of social systems of belief change and belief retention.” I was one of the “ideal” participants in that conference (along with David Bloor, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Tom Gieryn, and Steve Woolgar), and I found it unfortunate that Don placed the blame for a key failure so baldly on the sociologists. In fact, the very theme of the conference could not have been satisfactorily imagined without the revolutionary contributions of the assembled sociologists to our understanding of science as a social and cultural phenomenon (the label of “relativism” in this context is a red herring).

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It was, from where I stood, the philosophers who resisted or were ignorant of the pervasiveness of the social and advocated naïve realisms about things in the world and terms that refer and an insulting attitude in the face of sociologists who were transforming our understanding of science in fundamental ways. Finally, Don wrote that he “read many of Stendhal’s works but found Dostoevsky too threatening to complete.” By contrast, I was never able to finish anything by Stendhal, but found Dostoevsky an enlightening companion. I read “Notes from the Underground” as an undergraduate, and realized many years later that this was a treatise on the sociology of mathematics. I think there is a key here to some of our differences, but I have not thought through the relevance of these literary tastes.

Postscript: Farewell to the Winnower The agenda the sociologists tried to articulate at the 1981 Lake Cazenovia conference on epistemologically relevant internalist sociology of science fell on deaf and resistant ears. Then, philosophers tried to pound naïve realism into us by banging coffee cups on table tops and rehearsing infantile realism at the blackboards. At a 4S meeting. I once saw the relativism-­ realism debate—or debacle—carried on by breaking pencils and threatening a philosopher with a water pitcher. That we are still haunted and hounded by charges of relativism, that the term reductionism is unsheathed at the mention of the word “social,” that social constructionism is imported into philosophy and treated as just another philosophical idea amenable to being chopped to pieces using the traditional tools of philosophical surgery, either signals we sociologists are totally mad, or that we are the targets of a resistance to discovery. Bernard Barber alerted us to resistance to scientific discovery many years ago, and Mary Douglas could help us understand resistance to scientific discovery better than anyone. Barnes and Bloor defined relativism as disinterested inquiry, a definition that has gone virtually unnoticed and unheeded as our critics continue to illustrate that a sacred realm is under siege. Even a wild character like me can recognizes that a little selective winnowing would go a long way to cleaning up this field of controversy and confusion. Don will be missed for his lessons in selective winnowing, and for all of his major contributions to methodology and epistemology in the social sciences. I will miss him—and I should think all of you will miss him too—for the childlike curiosity, even naivete, with which he approached the world, his intense interest in playing with ideas across the disciplines, and his tolerance for wild characters.

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Bibliography Barnes, B. and Bloor, D. (1982), “Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge,” 21–47, in M.  Hollis and S.  Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press). In this chapter, and Bloor define relativism as “disinterested inquiry.” It is unlikely that Daniel Dennett or any of the philosophers who associate STS science studies with relativism have read this piece, or the defense of science and “objective reality” one finds in the writings of all the key founders of STS including the realist philosophers most prominent target, Harry Collins. Biagioli, M. (1996), “From Relativism to Contingentism,” 189–206, in P. Galison and D.J. Stump (eds.), The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Bloor, D. (1976), Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Bohm, D. (1976), Fragmentation and Wholeness: An Inquiry into the Function of Language and Thought (New York: Humanities Press). Campbell, D.T. (1974), “Unjustified variation and retention in scientific discovery,” 141–161, in F. Jose Ayala and T. Dobzhansky (eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology: Reduction and related problems (London/Bastingstoke: Macmillan). Campbell, D.T. (1977), “From Evolutionary Epistemology Via Selection Theory to a Sociology of Scientific Validity,” Evolution and Cognition 3: 5–38. Campbell D.T. (1988), Methodology and Epistemology for Social Science: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Chubin, D. and Restivo, S. (1983), “The ‘Mooting’ of Science Studies: Research Programs and Science Policy,” 53–83, in K. Knorr-Cetina and M. Mulkay (eds.), Science Observed (Beverly Hills: Sage). Eco U. (1983), The Name of the Rose (New York: Warner). Feyerabend, P. (1978), Science in a Free Society (London: New Left Books). Hooker, C. (1975), “Philosophy and Metaphilosophy of Science: Empiricism, Popperianism, and Realism,” Synthese 32: 177–231. Hooker C. (1987), A Realistic Theory of Science (Albany: SUNY Press). Kafka F. (1964/1937), The Trial (New York: Vintage). Radnitzky, G. (1970), Contemporary Schools of Metascience (New York: Humanities Press). Restivo, S. (1994), Science, Society, and Values: Toward a Sociology of Objectivity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press). Restivo, S. and Loughlin, J. (1987), “Critical Sociology of Science and Scientific Validity,” Knowledge (special issue on National Policies for Optimizing Validity in Applied Social Research) 8(3): 486–508.

CHAPTER 8

Cavaliers & Pointillists: Steve Woolgar

Overture Provocation has been a recurrent ingredient in Steve Woolgar’s contributions to the field of Science & Technology Studies and beyond since the 1970s. His subject matters of choice are phenomena that are consequential to social life, yet accorded a certain stability, definitiveness or “just so-ness.” Examples include the production of scientific discoveries and facts, human-machine relations, and the infrastructures of everyday governance. Interrogating that which remains uninterrogated; asking questions about the social, conventional basis for what seems remote from social relations; investigating how compliance is orchestrated and how discretion or disagreement is made difficult to do in practice—these are provocations in the political sense of questioning the status quo. Analytically, this interrogation is designed to upend “common sense” by exposing the conditions of its production and sustenance. Much of such provocation has been pervasive in the field of STS itself, which Steve has helped shape in the direction of key methodological sensibilities and cautions. Yet in his own work, the importance of provocation is magnified—and it is executed with characteristic humour, wit, and a sense of mischief. In addition, Steve has been keen to mobilize STS for provocations in the broader realm of social theory. He has been a trickster in STS and social science.

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Preface My objective in this chapter is to return now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when Bloor argued with Lynch about Wittgenstein, Latour and Collins debated social construction, Laudan and Bloor yelled at each other in various venues, Harry Collins was publicly abused for being a relativist and fought back with one brilliant study after another. And in Cazenovia, New  York in the early 1980s philosophers and sociologists of science abused each other while a shocked Donald Campbell tried to create a détente around evolutionary epistemology. Woolgar has championed ontological and epistemological disobedience and defended his position using scepticism and a masterful command of wit, irony, scepticism, and reflexivity. Thus, I come not to bury Woolgar, but to praise him and offer an alternative path to disobedience and provocation in STS. We share an agenda in which our research problems address the “just-so-ness” of societies, interrogating that which seems remote from social relations. Woolgar has focused on the production of scientific discoveries and facts, human-­ machine relations, and the infrastructures of everyday governance. My entire career has been devoted to upending common sense about science, yes, and technology to some extent; but I have focused on upsetting the applecarts of maths, logics, gods, and brains. Like Woolgar, I have studied the production of scientific facts. Where he studied human-machine relations, I studied robots and the effort to humanize them. We’ve both been attentive to the brain industry, though our approaches are very different. Many years ago, while walking together in some European city, Woolgar identified a key difference between us: he said I was a cavalier and he was a pointillist. Perhaps he meant to say I was cavalier in a pejorative sense. Given Steve’s gift for irony and scepticism it occurred to me, on further reflection, he might have meant I was somehow like a Royalist supporter of King Charles and his son during the English Civil War. He might have meant that I was somehow like a certain kind of small spaniel. But he might also have meant that in my way of life and in my scholarship I showed a lack of proper concern, I demonstrated an offhand attitude. I would like to think that he meant to compare me to someone with a proper political attitude and agenda, whether Royalist or anti-Royalist. Perhaps, but while Woolgar may be mischievous, he is not mean-spirited. In any case, my objective here is to point out the difference between his conservative disobedience and my radical disobedience in STS. Chapter 6 will have demonstrated that I am no stranger to

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ontological and epistemological disobedience. My associations with the Radical Science Movement, Science for the People, Students for a Democratic Society, and the anarchist movement will have demonstrated that I am no stranger to political disobedience. Dennis the Menace: IF I WENT ONLY WHERE I’m INVITED I wouldn’t have gotten to go anywhere!

The Journey Begins Ever since I first learned Stevin Simon’s personal crest motto I have quoted it on many occasions. The motto is: Wonder en is gheen wonder. Simply translated, it means “magic is not magic,” or “nothing is the miracle it appears to be.” Well, in my case, the miracle may be the miracle it appears to be. The miracle is that I grew up as a street kid in Brooklyn New York. I wasn’t the kind of street kid who stole hub caps and excelled in thuggery and sports. I was a “bookworm.” But thug or bookworm, growing up in the mean streets teaches you unvarnished lessons about how the world works. Educated in the culture of the working poor, I eventually found my way to the presidency of the leading professional society in STS, the Society for Social Studies of Science. Much earlier than that, I found myself in the bizarre situation of riding in a limo with another street kid, David Bloor from Edinburgh by way of Darby in the East Midlands, on our way to a reception at the home of one of the Rockefeller’s, arguing playfully about which one of us had had the rougher experience growing up. We went back and forth for a while and I finally won with “I once woke up with a rat in my crib.” My disobedience in STS is grounded differently than Woolgar’s. Mine is based on the fact that I have never left my working poor background or my street culture behind me. Had Steve been in the back of the limo with David and me he would have come in a distant third. His disobedience seems to rest on the foundations of an amazing capacity for scepticism, reflexivity, and irony. I have played a marginally central role in the field and consider myself an amateur among professionals. My successes and failures have come with surprising ease and I have never strayed far off the path of least resistance. While Woolgar and I have always gotten on together, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in STS that he has liked. I have been critical of his scepticism, reflexivity, and command of irony because they

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can stop inquiry in its tracks, especially if sociological inquiry has any pretentions to theory and science. All of us in STS have contributed to revealing how deliciously complicated science is and demonstrated why we should speak of sciences and not Science in the grammar of the every-present tense, Science per se. Within that sphere of influence, I have pressed on with agendas that are unapologetically scientific, materialist, and lawful or deterministic depending on how open or closed the system under consideration. My approach to reality is not based on its wildness but on its recalcitrance. I will not let butterflies, rainbows, and daffodils distract me from volcanoes, earthquakes, and tornadoes. For this reason, I build my science on the reality of the street. If you don’t look both ways, you are likely to be hit, maimed, or killed by a car. If you move from New York City to London, you’d better look down at the curb to confirm which way to look and even then look both ways. This still isn’t science. It is an imperative of the profundity of the surface. O those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial- out of profundity. F. Nietzsche (1882/1974, sec4)

But the profundity of the surface is not the end of inquiry. It is a portal to deeper and more complex levels of causality and explanation. No one method, no one experiment, no one lab, no one person can do science or be a scientist. Science is a collective intersubjectively-tested process across linked generations. It is always in becoming because (to quote an old friend, David Bohm) reality is an infinity of things in becoming. If STS is to survive and realize Woolgar’s sophisticated visions of ontological and epistemological disobedience, and my vision of institutional disobedience, it must mirror that infinity of things in becoming. My provocation is that Woolgar’s disobedience has been conservative, whereas mine has been radical in leading STS and sociology into the arenas of maths, logics, brains and gods. On the handful of occasions in which I have presented my work in a venue that allowed us to speak face to face, Woolgar’s reaction has always been the same: “Why didn’t you do this instead?” This question always called on some brand of ethnomethodology. Since I believe that this is at the heart of where and why we find each other mutually un-citable, I want to pay detailed attention to my issues with

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ethnomethodology. I turn now to this idea as a way into clarifying where Woolgar and Restivo stand in relation to each other, to sociology, and to science studies.

Ethnomethodology? (The Woolgar “?”) and Sociology? I have always thought of myself as a sociologist but I could never pretend to any sort of orthodoxy because my education and training has been deeply interdisciplinary. My very degrees in sociology came as the result of working with anthropologists and ethnographically engaged sociologists. My undergraduate mentor did his PhD with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. My graduate professor did field work among native Americans and in India and other areas of East Asia. I was originally trained and educated in electrical engineering, theoretical physics, and mathematics, a process that started in an elite high school of science and engineering and progressed through four years of university study. My high school mentor in electrical engineering was the professional engineer who had overseen the construction of the Queens subway line in New York City. I have also in the later years of my career been tutored in neuroscience over the course of several years by Leslie Brothers, who introduced the concept of the social brain into the core neuroscience literature in 1990; and in my collaborations with Mario Incayawar, the first traditional Inca healer to earn a medical degree. I have never thought of or imagined myself in any way aligned with ethnomethodology. With due acknowledgement of the diversity of approaches that go by or are asserted to go by the term “ethnomethodology,” my basic understanding has always been that ethnomethodologists do not grant special epistemological status to sociology in relation to the practices (scientific and others) they study. Sociology is not considered a basis for authoritative explanatory access to scientific and other practices. Ethnomethodologists claim that their approach has an ordinary basis in communal life rather than any academic epistemological foundation. This is the position adopted by Michael Lynch (2015), arguably the preeminent ethnomethodologist of science. In order to underscore the different ways ethnomethodologists and sociologists approach science and to skirt around the diversity in ethnomethodology, let me take as my foil a self-consciously ethnomethodological study in my core specialty, mathematics: Eric

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Livingston’s The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics (1986). I’m going to take some time with this because it is an important piece of the Restivo-Woolgar map. Livingston’s work on the sociology(?) of logic in practice is a curious piece of work. He said nothing about logical and mathematical practice that had not already been said by Wittgenstein and Lakatos—and less obscurely. While whatever he reiterates is an important reminder, he doesn’t contribute to furthering the agendas in the sociology of mathematics. The limitations of his work follow directly from the sociologically idiosyncratic methods and assumptions of ethnomethodology. The two basic concerns Livingston addresses are both foundational in the sociology and philosophy of mathematics: (1) what are mathematical objects? and (2) what is the source of the compulsion associated with mathematical and logical reasoning? One approach to answering these questions is to attend to the moment-to-moment work of mathematical or logical reasoners at the site of their work. Here Livingston and I appear to agree. In attending to what he calls “the living foundations of mathematics” Livingston seems to be aligning himself with the ethnographic approach to scientific practice pioneered by Latour, Woolgar, Knorr-Cetina and others in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Livingston’s objective was to reveal the social processes behind logic as the abstract manipulation of formal symbols, that is, of logic as understood in the classic tradition. Livingston considered two cases: the complicated case of Gödel’s theorem and the simpler by comparison case of Euclid. The question in brief then is: What is going on in the unfolding of a proof? Walking us through the proof process, it becomes abundantly clear almost immediately that he has a firm grasp of the mathematical and logical technicalities needed to pursue his objectives. In this context we are dealing with a form of ethnomethodology that does not pretend to theoretical explanation and is not oriented to debunking or demystifying. Nor does Livingston seek to promote our understanding by way of historical and sociological analyses. This is by any measure an innovative and informative study. But sociological reasoners like myself and David Bloor (see further on) are left to wonder what exactly Livingston has achieved here. My answer, echoed in Bloor’s review of Livingston’s work, is that Livingston gives us a translation, not an explanation. This is classical ethnomethodology. Rosental (2008: 45) disagrees with this common interpretation. He points out that the readers of Livingston’s book he has identified commonly read the work as a paraphrase of Gödel. An innovative empirical investigator of the work of

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logicians, Rosental only sees an ethnographic method unfolding in Livingston’s study and fails to see the lack of any theoretical intention. It’s not surprising that Rosental misses the lack of a sociological agenda. His two bachelor’s degrees are in logic and philosophy, he has Master’s degrees in philosophy and engineering, and a PhD (after all of that) in sociology. This is the sort of education that can make ethnomethodology appear to be a legitimate sociological discipline. From the ethnomethodologist’s standpoint, the translation description is not a criticism. In this case, Livingston achieves what he sets out to achieve: to give some sort of account of what it is like to do the work of a logical reasoner. To do ethnomethodology is to fail to do sociology, to fail to offer an explanatory account, to fail to do science. This is a failure from my point of view, and Bloor’s, because we expect explanation and theory; we expect science. Livingston fails to do theory because as an ethnomethodologist he is obliged to make the distance between himself and his subjects as small as possible. The result is that in this study he does more mathematics than sociology—or philosophy for that matter. It isn’t the case that there is no theory here. There is an unacknowledged theory. Bloor (1987) identifies it as a locality theory. More on this soon. But as an ethnographer of science, I expect to find science, theory, and explanation in the contexts, contingencies, and conditions of a work environment such as the one Livingston takes as the object of his study. While he does in fact lead us in the direction of just such a sociological objective, he doesn’t end up there. Instead, he ends up in an abstract “primordial setting,” a system of pure mathematical work in a closed system apart from history, culture, society, profession, and time and space. Bloor (1987: 339) raises some of the same concerns in his review of Livingston’s book. Bloor understands Livingston to be acting as a guide and commentator as we follow him through the proofs in Euclid and Gödel. He wants us to understand that everything is as it should be. He is not helping us to understand anything about the history and development of the proofs: Nor, again, does he see himself as propounding a theory about what he is describing. Rather, the exercise is one of making us aware of what is, and always has been, immediately before our eyes. He is offering us what he calls a “descriptive analysis.”

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The idea of “natural accountability” is central to Livingston’s discussion. The natural accountability refers to the “rigorous and compelling character” of mathematical and logical reasoning (Bloor 1987: 340–341). The term “embodies the very claim [Livingston] is making”: …that he can solve the problem of the ontology of mathematical objects, and the nature of logical compulsion, by a study of the detailed, local, moment-by-moment work of mathematical reasoning.

But natural accountability is not an unproblematic feature of a proof that solves long-standing problems in the philosophy of mathematics. It’s only once we are satisfied Livingston has solved these problems that we can accept that it is legitimate to speak of the “natural accountability” of a proof. After all of this, what Livingston tells us is that a mathematical object is discovered in the course of some mathematical work. But the ontology of the object and the nature of the proof process are no clearer for Livingston’s discussion. We (scholars like Bloor and Restivo, anyway) want to know “how local ‘work’ can produce transcendental results” (Bloor 1987: 343): A revealing answer would either challenge the terms of the question, for example by denying the transcendence of the mathematical result, or it would throw a new light on the local reasoning process.

Neither of these things happen. In general, Livingston suggests that mathematical reasoning proceeds as if the reasoners are “instinctive Platonists” who are convinced that there are such things as ideal, perfect circles. Livingston is not effusive on this point. He remarks somewhat cryptically that the origin and mechanics of this instinct reflects a “projected gestalt” in our reasoning. We don’t hear much about this because ethnomethodological investigations are not construed as psychological. One could also say that such investigations are not construed as sociological. These are unexplained self-imposed restrictions (Bloor 1987: 347). Bloor notes some points about proofs and proof work that Livingston is surely right about but they fall short of the analyses we find in Lakatos’ historical study of Euler’s theorem. Livingston’s remarks on the difference between the cognitive processes of theorem discoveries and their “tidied­up, streamlined” presentation (Bloor 1987: 349) are correct but hardly

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novel (see Lakatos again). Bloor points out a general tendency toward circular reasoning in Livingston’s effort to offer a novel perspective on proof work. He offers a detailed illustration of this process which involves the prover in background practices and a structure of objective features (Bloor 1987: 350): I therefore conclude that the account we have been given of how objective structures are supposed to emerge from local work-site practices in fact take us round in an uninformative circle.

I interpret this circularity as a function of ethnomethodology as a process of translation. Livingston is quite clear about what an ethnomethodological approach entails. Keep in mind that, as a student of Harold Garfinkel, he is as close to the source of this approach as one can get. He wants to solve problems in the foundations of mathematics. This is not going to involve a literature review of the philosophy or history of the foundations of mathematics, nor will it rely on a theory of social action. Neither does it involve historical or cultural analysis. While he sees himself as having just begun to unravel the problems he addresses, he is certain the procedure is not going to go forward by invoking philosophical, historical, or sociological “elaborations.” He offers no argumentative foundation for this position, nor is his approach “so conspicuous and overwhelming in its success that the mere question of any alternative can be brushed aside” (Bloor 1987: 351). What do we have here at the end of the day? First, a refusal to do theory. Second, a desire to minimize the distance between the ethnomethodologist and the mathematical worker (Bloor 1987: 351): But we can’t just do mathematics; there must be some reflection on the activity if we are to gain any insight other than mathematical ones. Unfortunately, reflection means distance, and this is what we want to minimize. So we are caught in a trap. We both want, and don’t want, distance between the activity of the describer and the activity described. The result is the strange, circular, vacuous gloss on the activity of mathematics.

This is the same trap Woolgar often finds himself in as he tries to be a stranger to an activity and a participant in (member of) that activity. Unlike Livingston, Woolgar does not distance himself from theory and has a sophisticated understanding about negotiating the stranger-member

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distinction. From my perspective as a sociologist who does theory work, this doesn’t keep him out of trouble. But, as Bloor (1987: 351) correctly claims, we all have theories. In spite of his denials, Livingston has a theory that Bloor identifies as “the locality thesis:” the ontology of mathematical objects and the nature of logical necessity can all be understood by reference to the “primordial setting” of mathematics…

Livingston doesn’t directly argue for such a theory. Nonetheless, because Livingston is in the midst of a study of some kind, social reality does make inroads and we even find the beginnings of a cultural analysis. But, at the end of the day Livingston’s theory, his “explanation,” his understanding is this: the answer to questions about ontology and necessity are to be found within the strictly defined confines of the work-site (Bloor 1987: 32): This is surely implausible. A host of experiences are brought into each work-­ site encounter.

Another way to see this is in terms of the work-site as a network within a nested network of systems and subsystems that link the work site to the larger society, culture, the global network of mathematics, and the history of mathematics, too. Bloor further notes that an “innocent reader” of Livingston’s work might readily conclude that ethnomethodologists initiated non-classical studies of the foundations of mathematics. Classical studies of those foundations rely on mathematical methods that cannot uncover the work that grounds mathematical reasoning. Yet there is a long tradition of non-­ classical studies of foundations, from J.S.  Mills’ Logic (1848) to Wertheimer’s studies of mathematical reasoning, and then Polya, Piaget, and the two names that we should be shocked to find missing from Livingston’s work, Lakatos and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is notable for noticing the “natural tendency towards a Platonic or Realist self-­ understanding of our reasoning processes” (Bloor 1987: 353). Wittgenstein doesn’t recommend himself to Livingston because he elaborates a theory, a theory that combines Millsian empiricism and Durkheim’s theory of the sacred. One of Livingston’s (1986: 177) most remarkable claims is that “a mathematical proof is itself a classical study of its own practices.” This is a particular instance of a general ethnomethodological claim (Bloor 1987: 355):

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…all rule-following…is in fact nothing but the organized practices of rule following [cf. Livingston 1986: 193]. The rule itself then becomes a “classical” study of its own practices.

This is either wholly redundant or leads to an infinite regress. Here Bloor (1987: 355–356) follows Wittgenstein (1953: 1–201): Wittgenstein insisted that there must be a way of following a rule that wasn’t an interpretation, and that because of this we must, in the last analysis, follow a rule blindly.

Finally, there is nothing specifically original here; we haven’t been led past Lakatos and Wittgenstein. The locality thesis is hidden in two respects: it is hidden from the author and it is not demonstrated in the study. We are left with “empty circularity…question begging, or redundancy” (Bloor 1987: 356); and the life world of the mathematician remains veiled in mystery and secrecy. Fortunately, the fearless and unapologetic theorizing in the sociology of mathematics by Bloor, Mackenzie, and Restivo has thrown some light on this matter.

Woolgar and Skepticism Scepticism has long been considered an important feature of the scientific worldview. Even in the classical sociology of science, which did not challenge the Grand Paradigm of science, organized scepticism was identified by Merton (1942) as one of the basic norms of science: scientific claims should be scrutinized critically before being accepted, however provisionally, as part of the canon. But the “just-so-ness” of science itself escaped this norm. Donald Campbell can also be counted among the science sceptics, but again not as a sceptic of the just-so-ness of science itself. While adhering to the Grand Paradigm of science, he does dent it a bit by adopting an epistemological scepticism. All knowledge claims escape their evidence and must be considered highly presumptive, corrigible, and fallible (Campbell 1959, 1988: 337–359). I have advocated institutional scepticism, as evidenced in my identification of the institution of modern science as a social problem (Restivo 1988). I have also introduced a Campbell-like principle of negation in my “paradigm for a humanistic sociology of knowledge” (see Chap. 18) following Hooker (1975). There is no justification for investing any scientific claim with positive or absolute belief; everything is in flux, and subject to

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criticism and change. Grounding our sciences in our experience of crossing the street modifies the idea that everything is in flux. Our world gives us levels of closure that make social life possible and subject to absolute-­ belief-­in-practice. In this volume, I identify my version of institutional scepticism by distinguishing between Science and sciences. My Science has some kinship with Woolgar’s (1988: 107) use of the term SCIENCE to identify the mythical, idealist form of science. What I don’t find in Woolgar and do find in myself, Campbell, and Hooker, is an effort to preserve “sciences,” the term I reserve for the basic human capacity for reason. Nothing has cost us so dearly, Nietzsche (1881/2007: 26) wrote, as that “little bit of reason and sense of freedom…which now constitutes our pride.” My distinction between Science and sciences preserves for sciences and, for what we must now recognize as reasons, the idea that the knowledge gained by way of discourse and practice in sciences and reasons is presumptive, corrigible, fallible, and comes without positive or absolute belief. How do I now understand what Woolgar has achieved? Whatever else he has done to construct an exemplary career, he has mobilized and strategically applied scepticism, irony, and reflexivity to advance critical thinking about science and to promote the unfettered interrogation of the just-so-ness of science. My earliest readings of this feature of Woolgar’s work (1988: 30–38) was that he deployed methodological horrors with such skill and sophistication that I felt paying serious attention to his achievements would force me to give up science. Woolgar might reply that it certainly hasn’t stopped him. Yet, by adopting ethnomethodology, he has had sociology, “the social,” and social construction under attack since Laboratory Life. He wouldn’t say “attack,” of course, he would simply align himself to some extent at least with Latour’s project of transforming or redirecting sociology as we know it in the traditions (notably) of Durkheim and Marx. This is why he always asks me why I didn’t ask different kinds of questions and adopt different research strategies. My answer to him lies in my distinction between Science and sciences, my Nietzschean gambit of probing the profundity of the surface, and my grounding my understanding of sciences and reasons in the science of crossing the street. When one is caught in the path of a huge boulder while standing at the edge of a cliff there is no room for worrying about representations, no place for scepticism, irony, or reflexivity. Such a situation does not place us at the mercy of the ding an sich, but it does leave us—in that moment before we are crushed or fall to our death—on the threshold of an objective reality “out there.” That “objectivity out there” can’t be accessed but its force penetrates into the everyday worlds of our experience.

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These differences hide similarities. Woolgar and I both value and practice disobedience and provocation. We helped to give birth to STS, which early on became a spectre haunting science and scientists, a Hydra of science studies, postmodernisms, and multiculturalisms. All the powers of the old and new science and science studies entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Hobsbawns and Kuhns, Mertonians and neo-­ Mertonians, relativists and anti-science spooks, evolutionary epistemologists and naïve realists, philosophers and scientists. Woolgar and Restivo responded to this spectre by using two different weapons: ethnomethodology for him and sociology for me. Ethnomethodology has led him to litter the pathways of uncritical scientists with methodological horrors; sociology has led me to try to bring some order and clarity to a crisis. The knowledge gained by way of discourse and practice in sciences and reasons is indeed presumptive, corrigible, fallible, and comes without positive or absolute belief. The caveat of course is rooted in the recalcitrance of everyday reality’s factual closures that make life possible. Anything goes, but even Feyerabend left buildings through front doors and not by leaping out of windows. And those factual closures are what make a practical explanatory, causal science possible. Woolgar is right when he claims no definitive descriptions are possible. But because we live at the boundary of the ding an sich and the everyday reality of our experience, definitive-­ descriptions-­in-practice are possible. Look both ways when you cross the street, my friends That is a “definitive prescription.” As a sociologist, I have been assigned to the “School of Resentment” by the literary critic, Harold Bloom and haunted by the Groucho Marxist motto: “Whatever it is, we’re against it.” My reaction to the crisis in science and in science studies was not to obstruct their inquiries, but to wonder about how to criticize science without going or appearing insane (Restivo and Bauchspies 1996). When it comes to what I view as a certain obstructionism in Woolgar’s scepticism, my reaction is to paraphrase Kafka’s assertion in The Trial: Woolgar’s Logic is doubtless unshakeable, but he cannot withstand a person who wants to go on doing science. This slogan would find ready endorsement from Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Goethe, William Blake, and others, and not because they were relativists, or anti-science, or under-valued inquiry. They criticized science because they appreciated the cultural complexities of social structures and cultures. They were not critics of science per se, but rather of the “Cult of Science” and that cult’s intense “faith in science.” I think Woolgar and I could find common ground here. And we have to some extent if we consider his interrogation

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of the “just-so-ness” of science and my interrogation of the “hard cases,” those cases—scientific knowledge, mathematics, logic, the brain, and God—that traditionally defined the limits of the interrogative prerogatives of sociology. All knowledge claims escape their evidence and must be considered highly presumptive, corrigible, and fallible. There is no justification for investing any scientific claim with positive or absolute belief; everything is in flux, and subject to criticism and change. That doesn’t leave us entirely groundless. Grounding our sciences in our experience of crossing the street, an imperative of pursuing the profundity of the surface, modifies the idea that everything is in flux. The profundity of the surface is not the end of inquiry, but the first step in constructing a way of life made possible by the factual closures and recalcitrance of the world of our primary experience. For the scientist, it is portal to deeper, more complex realms of understanding.

Bibliography Bloor, D. (1987), “The Living Foundations of Mathematics,” Rev. of Livingston, The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics, 1986, Social Studies of Science 17: 337–358. Campbell, D.T. (1959), “Methodological Suggestions from a Comparative Psychology of Knowledge Processes,” Inquiry 2(3): 152–183. Campbell D.T. (1988), Methodology and Epistemology for Social Science: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Hooker, C. (1975), “Philosophy and Metaphilosophy of Science: Empiricism, Popperianism, and Realism,” Synthese 32: 177–231. Livingston, E. (1986), The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Lynch, M. (2015), “Ethnomethodology of Science and Technology Studies,” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Elsevier). Merton, R.K. (1942), “Science and Technology in a Democratic Order,” Journal of Legal and Political Science 1: 115–126. Nietzsche, F. (1881/2007), The Dawn of Day (Mineola, NY: Dover). Nietzsche, F. (1882/1974), The Gay Science (New York: Vintage). Restivo, S. (1988), “Modem Science as a Social Problem,” Social Problems, 35(3), 206–225. Restivo, S. and W. Bauchspies (1996), “How to Criticize Science and Maintain Your Sanity,” Science as Culture, 6(3), 396413. Rosental, C. (2008), Writing Self-Evidence (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Wittgenstein, L. (1953), Philosophical Investigations (London: Basil Blackwell). Woolgar, S. (1988), Science: The Very Idea (London: Tavistock).

CHAPTER 9

Surely, You’re Joking, Bruno Latour?

Introduction Bruno Latour has been one of the most prominent students of science and society over the last fifty years. Like Thomas Kuhn, his fame and influence are rooted in style more than substance. Scholars like Latour and Kuhn reach large audiences and draw readers across the disciplines because their writing is relatively simple (not simplistic), vivid, lucid, and more philosophical than scientific. To achieve what Latour has achieved, one must be an uber-networker and good self-publicist and marketer and tackle topics and issues that address widely interesting philosophical questions. His antipathy to classical sociology and the very idea of “the social” have actually helped him gain widespread credibility. In spite of some recent upticks in the visibility and reputation of sociology, it still does not attract favourable interest, especially in an American society guided by the myth of individualism and the idea that every human problem falls under the jurisdiction of the psychologists, biologists, or neuroscientists, and especially that of the physicists. Adrian Bejan (2019, p. 4) a distinguished professor of physics is a typical representative of the latter discipline—physics, he says, “covers everything.” Latour has been part of a post-1970s conflict between naïve realists (who believe in an accessible “reality out there”) and social constructionists. The naïve realists believe that social constructionists are challenging classical assumptions about an external reality that objective scientists can © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_9

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access through their expert methods and theories. In fact, the social constructionists, as part of the science and technology studies movement, have been reconstructing the narrative about what science is, based on empirical studies of science in practice. This conflict included direct confrontations between individuals (Bloor versus Laudan; Bloor versus Latour; H. Collins versus various scientists and philosophers), collective engagements between philosophers and sociologists (Donald Campbell’s Cazenovia workshop in 1981), and the science wars of the 1990s. For details on this conflict see Restivo & Croissant, 2007, p. 225ff.). Latour, whatever his original intentions as an on-site investigator at the Salk Institute, became concerned about perhaps alienating scientists and philosophers. That concern led him to join them in opposing a certain kind of sociology (scientific, causal) or perhaps all sociology, per se. One of the main reasons Latour has been critical of the scientific, causal, and theoretical claims of sociology is that he has been strongly influenced by ethnomethodology in the wake of an education that stressed philosophy and theology. Ethnomethodology, as we saw in Chap. 8, focuses more on the accounts people give of their own lives and sense-making activities than on the accounts of scientific observers and analysts. That difference is at the same time a source of tension between Latour’s “sociology of associations” and classically-driven sociology. Latour views “the social” within sociology as too general, too encompassing, and a “garbage” or residual category. Latour comes from a family of Burgundy wine producers (Maison Louis Latour), and was born in 1947  in Beaune, Burgundy (close to Dijon, in France). His early education in Dijon focused on theology and philosophy. His philosophy PhD was earned at the University of Tours in 1975 for a dissertation on Charles Péguy, the Catholic writer. One of the early influences on Latour’s thinking was Michel Serres. Serres developed a theory of translating between accounts that opposed a privileged metalanguage for science. Serres (1983) drew on first the mythical figure Hermes and later on angels as models for the agent (messenger) who translates across accounts and domains. Latour’s taste for the empirical was stimulated while he was performing his alternative to military service in Africa. There he met Marc Augé, an anthropologist, who directed Latour’s study of colonialism, race, and industrial relations in Côte d’Ivoire. He is mainly associated with the École des Mines de Paris, Centre de Sociologie de l’innovation where he taught from 1982 to 2006. He is now an emeritus professor associated with Sciences Po in Paris.

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Latour is a founding member of the Society for Social Studies of Science (1975), a former president of the society (2004–2005), and a recipient of the society’s J.D. Bernal Prize for distinguished contributions to the field (1992). He began his career as a participant in the innovative science and technology studies movement, but unlike those who were there at the beginning with him, he went on to become a dominant French philosopher. His career path largely followed the path to becoming a dominant French philosopher schematized by sociologist Michelle Lamont (1987) in her analysis of the career of Jacques Derrida. Like Derrida, Latour’s career has been characterized by a strong theoretical trademark; an ambiguous and adaptable research program with a high potential for diffusion across the intellectual landscape; attention to fundamental questions that appear in one form or another in all intellectual arenas; going beyond classical treatments of those questions; and diffusion by publishing in prestigious journals, enrolling prestigious scholars in his interlocutory network, and in addition using various media to publicize his views and writings beyond the traditional academic lectures and papers paradigm. Latour strategically addresses problems of wide interest generated in the contexts of structuralism, postmodernism, grammatology, narrative, and the cultural critique of history and theory. His status has been enhanced by his criticisms of the scientific claims of traditional sociology, since he works in an intellectual world characterized by widespread scepticism of social science, the myths of free will and of the individual, and dissocism. His efforts to portray himself as a sociologist or anthropologist have increasingly devolved into philosophy and metaphysics, to which he seems more suited, given his training and background. Latour was associated with a breakthrough moment in the science and technology studies movement, the launching of the ethnography of science. His book Laboratory Life (1979), co-authored with Steve Woolgar, was the first monograph in this novel anthropological approach to studying scientific practice on site, in real time. This is magic, this is absolutely what we need, this kind of sceptical analytical distance on the practice of what is going on in the lab. (Latour and Woolgar at the Salk Institute, Mikami, 2018, p. 306)

Laboratory Life There is an element of serendipity in the story of this innovative study. It so happened that one of Latour’s neighbours in Dijon was the neuroendocronologist (and future Nobelist) Roger Guillemin. In 1975, Guillemin

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invited him to La Jolla and the Salk Institute. Latour, a skilled intellectual opportunist in the best sense of that term, brought Woolgar to the Institute and together they carried out their celebrated laboratory ethnography funded by Fulbright and NATO fellowships. This book (reissued in 1986) contained an agenda that unfolded into a career that has taken Latour far beyond science studies. The specific contributions Latour would make to science and technology studies were presaged in the initial findings from the Salk study he presented at the first meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in November 1976. His paper, “Including Citation Counting in the System of Actions of Scientific Papers,” already hinted at an actor-network theory (ANT), Latour’s major contribution to social theory (e.g., as explicated in Latour, 2005). The development of ANT is also the work of Michel Callon and John Law (e.g., Law & Callon, 1988, 1989).

A Career Unfolds I’ve discussed the laboratory studies in detail in earlier chapters. They were carried out simultaneously with other innovative studies of science and technology by Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch, David Edge, Michael Mulkay, David Bloor, Donald MacKenzie, Steve Shapin, Daryl Chubin and others. In the early years of the field’s development, there were four main centres of activity: Bath (“the Bath School,” represented by Harry Collins); Edinburgh (the home of David Bloor and the “strong programme”); Cornell University (where they were transforming traditional Mertonian sociology of science); and the University of Sussex, which was bringing science and technology policy into the emerging STS movement. The science of science that was being pursued in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was exploring a quantitative scientific revolution paradigm. Among the new topics that were coming “on-line” at these centres and elsewhere were: replication, discourse, mathematics, and social histories of science, as well as a host of ethnographies of science. From the beginning, Latour was pursuing a broader agenda than most of his science studies colleagues. He quickly became one of the most prominent guides to our liminal times. It is easy to criticize Latour. Consider his book, The Politics of Nature (2004). The subtitle, “How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy,” sizzles and sings with the promise of a liberatory political agenda for humanity, so grand that it reads like an application for the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a false promise. The book is another platform for Latour’s by-now infamous attacks on sociology, social construction, and the very idea of “the social.”

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The book is a crucible for the continuing crystallization of his agendas in metaphysics and philosophy. His Platonic reasoning has a quaint antiquarian quality. Once a pioneer in the study of scientific practice and part of the choir of science studies critics announcing the end of the Mertonian hegemony, he is now a dominant French philosopher wending his way through the mazes of metaphysics. Bringing the sciences into democracy? “Democracy?” Surely you’re joking, Mr. Latour. And, yes, perhaps he is joking. Here, once again, he challenges his reader to distinguish brilliant insights from frivolous word play. He is at once elegantly literate, logically clever, and cleverly logical. He hypnotizes readers with neologisms, doodles, and wit amidst often obscure insights and exercises in self-indulgence. He muses and amuses us with clichés (humans are born free yet everywhere in chains); pithy fortune cookie Confucianisms (Today’s enemy is tomorrow’s ally); and some Latin seasoning (Non nova sed nove). His reviewers variously describe his works as provocative; important; radically original; witty; stylistically dazzling; and bold. Everywhere we turn in Latour’s world we are confronted by dangerous counterintuitives. The danger is that we might incorrectly dismiss well-­ grounded, sociologically warranted counterintuitives; or be seduced by the idiosyncratic counterintuitives of Latour’s metaphysical imagination. Looking for a reader’s dialogue with Latour? In this book, we are told we are witnessing Latour raising questions for himself and himself alone. And why do we ask him if he is joking? Because he himself sometimes refers to his work as a joke, as he goes about tweaking and teasing his readers with ambiguities and contradictions. But wait! Is this comedy or something more serious, a kind of encounter with a Zen master? Latour is not Einstein, or Marx, or Darwin, but more like Rousseau or Hobbes—and not even that, perhaps more of a Zen master. He is always playing in the sandpiles of humanity’s most pressing problems, writing about them with a naïve self-confidence about society and democracy innocent of or dismissive of the basic insights of the sociological imagination. Is he perhaps, as philosopher Graham Harman contends, an empirical metaphysician? Latour counters by claiming that the main thrust of his approach is empirical research. He accepts with good humour the claim that he is a serial re-describer. This makes sense if we recall his roots in ethnomethodology, a translation methodology, not a scientific one. Latour is now meandering on the playground of philosophers who worry more about bats, armadillos, Martians, and vampires than about real human

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beings. These exercises in science fiction are then offered to us as social philosophy and maybe even social science. Latour is either sloppy or deliberately inconsistent, depending on how charitable his critics are. On the issue of politics and nature, he tells us first that he has no definitive answer to the question about what we are to do with political ecology. But almost immediately he tells us that political ecology is already doing what he thinks it should be doing—and yet, political ecology still needs his help. In the wake of both Latour’s most rational and most vicious critics, we might be tempted to dismiss him out of hand. If we tend to be impressed by the taken-for-granted, the singular grammar of science, nature, and politics, we will be turned off by Latour’s game of transforming singulars into plurals. But not so fast. His game of plurals takes place on the solid grounds of what we have learned from him and others about Science, Nature, and Politics since the middle of the last century, and especially in the years since the early 1970s. If, on the one hand, he keeps us off balance with his jokes, counterintuitives, and misdirection, on the other hand, he is a master at helping us see the multitude of traditionally unacknowledged difficulties and complexities that are everywhere in the world. Going back to his critical analysis of political ecology, in order to understand what is at stake in political ecology, we have to be the tortoise and not the hare. The tortoise is going to give us a meticulously organized argument. But if you are a hare in a hurry, Latour creates a six page “crib sheet” for you. Why shouldn’t we just skip the meticulous argument, especially since it is virtually incomprehensible for readers unfamiliar with Latour, science studies, and postmodernism? Real politics, real political economy, fades away in the rear-view mirror almost as soon as Latour gets his analysis underway. Our starting point is not going to be Marx, classical political economy, Weber, Keynes, or any contemporary political economist. We are going to start with Plato’s allegory of the cave. You may recall this fairy tale from your college courses in philosophy. I learned about it in a philosophy course that featured dialogues between the professor and an invisible rabbit that was constantly hopping around the classroom. (Take this as a warning about philosophy and about Plato—and about Latour, the hare, and the tortoise!) The allegory in Latour’s hands is the myth of the relationship between science (SCIENCE in institutional terms) and SOCIETY (which may or not be an objective scientifically accessible reality from an anti-sociological perspective) in the West (which is another questionable concept, as I

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showed in Chap. 4). Here is where we discover the distinction between the world of truth and the social world. In terms of social roles, the allegory defines the philosopher-scientist and everyone else. The former can travel between the world of truth and the social world. The latter, the rest of humanity, only knows the Cave’s shadows. Latour wants us to distinguish between politics and power politics. This will allow us to distinguish between “militant ecology” and the “philosophy of ecology” (Naturpolitik, a concept that mimics the concept of Realpolitik). Latour’s beef with the ecology movement is that it has sought to “protect nature” while adhering to a concept of nature that disempowers their politics. We are therefore obliged to leave the idea of “the social” behind because sociology has given us a concept of the social as a prison. What is to be done? When he poses that particular question, is it an accident that he echoes Lenin’s famous call, recycling the title of Nicholas Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, “What is to be done?” Is Latour a revolutionary? Surely, you’re joking, Mr. Latour. If Latour is a revolutionary, he is a revolutionary the way Kuhn was a revolutionary, not through his own theories and actions but through the tortured efforts of his acolytes. This exemplifies Latour’s strategy of portraying himself as a saviour of public life. How is he doing this? By struggling to marry liberal metaphysics to a metaphysics of revolutionary theory and practice. What, then, is to be done? First, Latour wants to get rid of Scientists as the special envoys who have the unique ability to move at will between nature and society (Plato’s allegory). He wants scientists and politicians to work collaboratively on behalf of society’s basic functions: perplexity; consultation; hierarchy; institution; maintenance of the separation of powers; and scenarization of the whole. (These terms are hardly edifying in the context of Latour’s idealist philosophy, but those readers in a hurry can consult Latour’s glossary). What we have, then, is nothing less than a solution to the crises of our time. Until Latour, public life (recall the Cave again) was based on a bicameral politics: the “nature” house (an assembly of things) and the “society” house (an assembly of humans). Latour wants to eliminate the distinction between nature and the representations we make of nature. Curiously, the new due-process constitutional structure (“No reality without representation”) Latour proposes already exists in tentative forms. The greater curiosity, however, is that in spite of (and because of) “due process” all of the old forms—subjects and objects, the external world, humans, and a cosmos—will be back. But we no longer have Scientists

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returning to the Cave with stories about objective reality. The sciences and politics are no longer respectively concerned with nature and interests. If the myth of the Cave reflects, nourishes, mirrors, or in any way supports the institutional development of SCIENCE in the West, then Latour is on the right track, even if his starting point is questionable. Science studies has been undermining this myth since the late 1960s and early 1970s, however. We have outgrown traditional history, philosophy, and sociology of science; we are no longer the slaves of journalistic and anecdotal narratives and biographies glorifying science and scientists. Supporting the findings of the field he helped to launch is not enough for Latour. He is going to draw an additional lesson from Plato and science studies that requires “the end of the social.” Latour’s path to this conclusion involves blurring the boundaries between nature and society, between things and humans. Moreover, he is going to ask us to continue the gentlemanly philosophers’ conversation of the West that began with Plato, and all will be well. The problem, from where I stand in sociology and science studies, is that this conversation cannot sever the umbilical cord that ties contemporary science and philosophy to the Cave from which Latour wants us to escape. Just as we have to distinguish Science from the sciences, and engage in the pluralization of our conventional singulars and dichotomies (and here we can walk with Latour), we must also distinguish the political economy and science of the Cave from a progressive political economy. The Liberal supporters of the myths of the West, like Latour and Richard Rorty (the John Wayne epistemologist) give us conversations that do not sweat, bleed, urinate, or defecate and never stoop to conflict or outright violence. After all is said and done, it is hard, however, not to credit Latour with having the kind of vision necessary to see the world in liminal times, though all times are liminal in some way. Our time is liminal in a unique way because we possess an awareness of the flux of categories and classifications unavailable in earlier periods of human history. The categories and classification at stake in our era are the foundations of human culture: male-female, person-fetus, life-death, human-machine, nature-society have all become problematic. Science itself, the fundamental roots of everyday and cosmic epistemology, is in flux. Dichotomous thinking is giving way to complexity; non-linearity; chaos; fractals; and non-­traditional forms of logic. Liminal times produce conceptual and material, fictional and real hybrids and monsters: cyborgs, robo-sapiens, cloned sheep, and artificial intelligences that provoke warnings about existential threats.

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It is in this arena of novel challenges that Latour has stood out as a describer-in-chief, a prophet, a Jeremiah. He has understood better than almost everybody else how to exploit the opportunities in this situation for intellectual advancement. The network of competing exploiters of this moment of existential threats is necessarily generating awkward, counterintuitive, and obscure provocations. Latour’s bag of such tricks deserves our attention because it enhances our awareness of existential threats. I agree with Latour that there are many things we have to throw overboard, if we are going to successfully navigate the future; sociology, contra-­ Latour, is not one of those things, however. The liminal times we are living through are different in quality from earlier liminal periods. This one threatens to engulf all of our values, beliefs, norms, goals, and even our sciences and objectivity. New phenomena and new experiences across time, space, history and culture travel in waves back and forth across the planet from east to west and north to south. Enormous leaps in our knowledge about how the world works have forced us into new epistemological and ontological territories. At the same time, we can feel the cultural inertia that sustains classical worldviews. It is important not to ignore this inertia that sustains classical dichotomies. That inertia is fuel for caution when reading Latour’s criticisms and challenges. Nonetheless, it is difficult to ignore the signs of worldview and paradigm shifts, the essential tensions that are widely visible features of our everyday and professional lives. Latour’s prominence on the liminal stage has tended to obscure the innovative contributions in this arena by feminist social theorists, beginning with Mary Daly in the 1970s and including scholars such as Donna Haraway, Gloria Andalzua, and Susan Leigh Star. Nonetheless, Latour has been a leader in exploring new ways of reworking our systems of categories and classifications. He has been among the leaders documenting the changes in worldview that our emerging human ecologies are calling forth. Such efforts, now as in all liminal eras, necessarily strike us as awkward, counterintuitive, and obscure to different degrees. In a world of hybrids, monsters, and uncertainties, it should not surprise us that Latour has produced theories and concepts that are themselves hybrids, monsters, and embodiments of uncertainty. Latour can appear, on the one hand, as a charlatan and, on the other, as a creative strategist in the midst of uncertainties and complexities. Like science in one of his best-known graphics, he is Janus-faced. One face knows, the other face does not yet know. This

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image gives us “science and technology” on one face and technoscience on the other. Perhaps, to understand Latour, we must look both ways ourselves— forward and backward in time. His advice is to recognize that we need to shift our activities and viewpoints just as science, nature, and actors/ actants in general shift theirs. Here we have the foundation for a strategy that avoids dichotomies old and new as we move through time and space. Latour is not dogmatically opposed to dichotomies per se, only to those that are uninteresting and obstruct our research (Gane, 2004, p. 79). Latour belongs to those students of science who have not learned their own lessons. Even the most critical of these students (and one must without painting each one with the same brush include Bloor and H. Collins, for example) have not been prepared to overturn the Grand Paradigm of Science. Neither have the more radical social critics, such as Restivo, Ravetz, H. and S.  Rose, or Levidow. But the latter group has at least understood what a new paradigm for science might look like, if it were the outgrowth of a new paradigm for society and culture. What all of these representatives of the new science studies have in common is an orientation to study the actual content of science, and this is what upset so many scientists and their ideologues in philosophy, history, and sociology. Latour became their main target because he was so widely and wildly visible. At the end of the day, what was behind the attacks on science studies was a fervent resistance to sociology as a causal science. Games, tricks, jokes, and Zen metaphysics aside, Latour has clearly helped draw our attention to the importance of focusing on scientific practice. As he built the foundations and edifices of ANT, he simultaneously undermined the sociology project and contributed to the theory that it takes more than a great man or woman to make, ground, and promote a discovery or invention (see especially his work on Louis Pasteur (Latour, 1988). In his study of the pasteurization of France, Latour demonstrated that Pasteur (1822–1895) was not an isolated genius, but an actant in a network of actants that included French farmers, industrialists, scientists, and politician—and also the action of microbes. What he gives us is a “thick description” (as per Geertz) of actants and a network. This appears to reinforce the network theories on genius and creativity advocated by Mialet (2012, his student), Restivo (2020) and R.  Collins (1998). But Latour’s network theories have kept the myth of individualism alive, a myth that would show itself more clearly as Latour’s theories matured.

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The Pasteur study showcases two Latourian axioms: (1) “science and society” does not make sense (a recurring and evolving theme in Latour’s work); and (2) the case of Pasteur cannot be “reduced” to classical sociology. These axioms, according to Latour and his acolytes, demonstrate the triumph of “irreductionism” over sociological reductionism. Latour’s critics see just another example of disciplinary sociology (Restivo, 2005; Star & Griesemer, 1989; Amsterdamska, 1990). Driven by ethnomethodology, Latour cannot “see” social facts; he is a victim of dissocism. In order to understand the mistake Latour is making here and throughout his “end of the social” campaign, consider what it would mean to have an ethnomethodological physics opposed to physics. For physics to make sense, we have to assume a more or less knowable physical world. Studying that world using the methods and theories of physics would not be reductionist, it would simply be scientific. “Simply” does not signal that we shouldn’t be prepared to follow Woolgar and interrogate the “just-so-ness” of science. However, an ethnomethodological physicist would deny the existence of a physical world that was anything more than what the ordinary person could access and account for. The ethnomethodological Latour denies the existence of a social reality that is also nothing more than what the ordinary person can access and account for. Yet if social reality exists in the same way that the physical world exists, if there are social facts in the same way that there are physical facts, then studying the social facts using the methods and theories of the sociologist cannot be reductionist. Latour’s beef with “Society” is that he understands it in classical terms to be formed with the social alone. But his work, and especially the Pasteur study, is designed to show us that we cannot speak of something—science—done in laboratories and then speak of groups, classes, interests, and laws in a separate narrative. Instead, we have to speak of actor-­ networks, and instead of thinking in terms of “forces” that cause this or that, we must think and speak of “weaknesses,” “entelechies,” “monads,” or more generally “actants.” Latour uses “actor,” “agent,” or “actant” without assuming actions or properties. They are “autonomous figures,” and they can be individuals or crowds, figurative or nonfigurative. The concept of “actant” has the advantage that it can refer to humans and things. People and things now have “spokespersons” in the actor network. Pasteur now can be seen to speak for microbes, Marie Curie for radium, Einstein for photons, Hawking for black holes, and so on. Enter the trickster. Latour (2004, p. 237) now pairs “actor” and “actant” in the same definition. “Actant” applies to humans and non-humans; “an actor

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is any entity that modifies another entity in a trial.” This is how we should understand “actant,” the non-anthropomorphic sibling of “actor.” Perhaps we might get at what Latour is up to here if we return to “actant” in its original narrative context. “Actant” was developed in designing a narrative framework for fairy tales. Characters could now be defined in terms of a typology of actants along three axes: conflict, project, and communication; respectively defining helper or opponent; subject or object; and sender or receiver. Characters could also be combinations of two or more actants. In the classic fairy tale, a villainous act causes something or someone—the object— to disappear. The subject needs or wants this object. The sender and receiver contract to find and retrieve the missing object. The receiver becomes obligated to the sender who possesses status, power, and privilege. The subject, alone or with the helper fights an opponent for the object and retrieves it (“the test;” Hawkes, 1977; Tesnière, 1959). Latour (1987, pp.  89–90) translates and imports this framework into science studies. The “things” that stand behind scientific texts are analogous to the heroes of epics. In some stories, heroes defeat dragons and save maidens. In other stories, scientist heroes “resist precipitation” or “triumph over bismuth.” We should now be able to understand that actants need spokespersons to transform them into actors (Akrich & Latour, 1992). Once humans and non-humans are paired, we no longer have to defend subjects from reification or defend objects from social construction. Subjects are no longer threatened by things; objects are no longer weakened by social construction (Latour, 2004, pp. 80–81). The creation of the actor-network is known as a translation. Just as in ethnomethodology, we find translation being substituted for analysis. Remember earlier I warned the reader that the myth of individualism was buried inside actor-network theory? We have now penetrated into the core of ANT and there indeed is the individual. Latour’s focus is the single actor (“actant”). Translation occurs from the single actor’s perspective, not as an act of analysis by a scientist. There are four stages in this translation: (1) the problematizing stage: the actor identifies and aligns itself with other actors who share its identity and interests; the actor makes itself “indispensable” by setting itself as an “obligatory passage point” (OPP; Callon, 1986); (2) the interessement stage: the actor works to engage others to accept its definitions of identities and interests; (3) the enrolment stage: others accept the actor’s definition of the situation; and (4) the mobilization stage: now the shape, form,

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and scope of the network is made concrete. There are two important points to notice here: first, actor-network theory is rooted in a psychological foundation (thus, the appeal of Tarde over Durkheim for Latour); second, this theory is a condensation of Latour’s image of himself as a hero battling opponents on the agonistic field of science studies. Gabriel Tarde is a complex figure but he is (by contrast with Durkheim) more grounded in psychological paradigms. He locates the origin of social changes in the “individual” and the “single mind” (cited by Latour, 2005, p. 15). But he was also influential in the development of pragmatism and the Chicago school of sociology. His insights and subtleties are on display in Tarde (1899/2009). Recall the significance of identifying the fundamental role of inscription in science announced in Laboratory Life. In the context of ANT, inscription designs technologies that protect the interests of actors and networks (cryptography technologies are a transparent exemplar). Interessement involves interrupting and ultimately triumphing over competing definitions; Latour introduces the concept of irreversibility to refer to the likelihood of the interruption causing a return to a situation in which alternatives still existed (Walsham, 1997): These strategies help create convergence by locking actors into the network. The more fixed or stable it appears, the more ‘real’ and durable it becomes, and the less controversy and ambiguity are evident…The aim, then, is to put relations between actors in ‘black boxes’ where they become a matter of indifference—scientific ‘facts,’ technical artifacts, modes of thought, habits, forces, objects. (Hardy et al., 2001, p. 538)

The laboratory studies in this perspective describe a process of translation from the “outside” world to the laboratory, from laboratory activity to laboratory inscriptions, and from the laboratory and its inscriptions back to the outside world (Callon et al., 2009). Welcome to the new allegory of the Cave! One of the characteristics of complex systems is that their components are inaccessible to users. In the 1950s, I could easily remove the back panel of a broken TV or radio and repair it. The home electrician is unable to do that today. A car that breaks down today is much harder for the nonspecialist to repair than cars of the 1950s and earlier. Latour introduced the term punctualisation to capture the idea that the components of a complex system are hidden from the user’s view. If the car breaks down,

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the user becomes aware of the fact that the car is a system of parts, not just a vehicle that can be driven about. Depunctualisation occurs when one becomes aware of the fact that some part or parts of a network have come to be in conflict with the network as a whole. Social order, like the working automobile, is the achievement of actants interacting in actor-­networks. Such creations are designated “tokens” or “quasi-objects” that get passed from actants/actors to actants/actors across actor-networks. The more tokens circulate in a network, the more they become punctualized and reified. Lower circulation leads to depunctualization. Technoscience is one of the key terms introduced into science studies by Latour (1987, p. 29, pp. 174–175). Latour borrowed the term from Belgian philosopher Gilbert Hottois (1984) who introduced it in the 1970s in reference to Percy Bridgeman’s notion of operationalization. In Hottois’ and Latour’s cases, the objective was to broaden our concepts and understanding of science and technology. In Latour’s sense, technoscience refers to all the matters tied to scientific contents including what is dirty, unexpected or foreign. This is the unsettled stage of science. “Science” and “technology” designate what is left of technoscience once we’ve achieved closure and settled on the facts of the matter; that is, when all the trials of responsibility have been settled. Notice that once again Latour turn the focus of our attention to unsettled science. In Latour’s terms, we can speak of “science and technology” (not science and technology) when the trials of responsibility have been settled. This helps explain his concept of a sociology of associations that locates social, emotional, and cognitive processes inside individuals. In the sociological reality I advocate, these are all in-between, relational phenomena. A concept of actants may be able to help us is in recognizing that relational phenomena emerge when humans interact with things, as well as with other humans. There are forms of emotion and cognition that characterize our relations with the shells we pick up as we stroll along a beach, or interact with computers, robots, TVs, and movies. The more humanoid the interlocutor or interface, the more salient and powerful the emotional relationship will be. The concept of actants and ANT can be enlightening in this sense, but we must not lose sight of the uniqueness of human-to-human relations. We are different kinds of humans when we are interacting with other humans and when we are interacting with objects.

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Bruno Latour Vs. David Bloor: ANT Versus the Strong Programme Latour’s “end of the social” agenda reaches a dramatic focus in his “vehement” (Bloor, 1999, p.  81) opposition to David Bloor’s “strong programme,”(SP) initially articulated in Bloor (1976). Latour’s failure to grasp the nature of sociology leads him to misrepresent Bloor’s SP. ANT, Bloor, argues is “unworkable.” In terms of specific differences, Latour rejects the “subject-object” schema. Bloor understands the schema in more sophisticated terms; it has many levels, interpretations, and forms. One of those forms is sociologically viable. Latour (1992, p. 278) claimed that SP relies on “Society” to explain things. This restated his opposition to the Durkheimian view of explaining social facts with social facts. Recall that Latour objects here to leaving non-­ social things out of “Society.” He co-opted the term “anthropology” for his non-sociological, non-reductionist, non-naturalistic, non-causal approach. This conception of anthropology is a radically idiosyncratic break with anthropology as we know it from Durkheim to Mary Douglas. It is this tradition that grounds SP, so Bloor’s (1999, p. 87) basic reply to Latour is that SP is not aimed at explaining “nature,” but “shared beliefs about nature.” The upshot of this debate is that ANT and SP cannot be reconciled. It is not just a matter of a simple philosophical disagreement. Entirely different worldviews are at stake here, enfolding differences in epistemology, methodology, ontology, ethics, values, and metaphysics (see Hooker, 1975 for an elegant comparative discussion unpacking these worldviews). Latour wants to interrogate everything at once willy-nilly: science, nature, society, causality, and all features of reality. His toolkit comes from ethnomethodology, so causal science is not available to him. Bloor, by contrast, wants to follow the ways and methods of the successful sciences. Latour accuses Bloor of anti-absolutism, the very idea Bloor has accused his critics of not grasping in SP. For Bloor, SP is opposed to absolutism; the supposed relativism of SP is nothing more nor less than “disinterested research,” a classic definition of science (Barnes & Bloor, 1982, p. 47n). Could all the smoke and fire be hiding the fact that Latour and Bloor, like Kuhn and Merton, and like Feyerabend and Lakatos are more at one with each other than first appearances suggest? Remember that after Latour interrogates all the old forms applying due process—the subject/object schema, external reality, society, and nature—in his new constitution and

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parliament, all the old forms will be back: “No reality without representation.” With all the old forms back, does that mean that ANT has simply become SP and SSK? That is exactly what Bloor (1999, p. 113) argues: Latour has given us SP and SSK translated into a “fancy vocabulary.” Once again, will the real Bruno Latour please stand up! Is he a constructionist, a relativist, does he believe machines have agency? He is maddeningly ambivalent on this question. He himself tells us he is not a social constructionist. He says he is a relativist, but only the way Einstein is a relativist. What does this mean? Einstein is a theorist of invariance and a principled determinist. Naming his invarianttheorie “relativity theory” doesn’t make him any kind of relativist. I don’t believe it makes sense to try to assign Latour to a discipline; he is a dominant French philosopher, nothing more and nothing less. Nor does his own occasional self-­ designation change this fact. Looking back over Latour’s collected works, the answers to the questions above can all be answered “yes and no.” What else can we expect from this Zen master, clown, trickster, and master of elegant language who runs around in undisciplined ways opening black boxes, challenging our un-interrogated assumptions, drowning us in language games to shake us out of our complacency? It is interesting to compare Latour with another observer of our liminal age, the physicist David Bohm. Bohm’s Hegelian science shows striking similarities to Latour’s metaphysics (Restivo, 1985, pp. 121–125). Liminal ages need these kinds of courageous and imaginative thinkers. Bohm, however, views the liminal dynamics of our time through the very lenses Latour opposes. Bohm (1976) even sketched the outlines of a verb-based language that maps onto an increasingly complex reality. Liminal times breed hybrids and monsters. Extraordinary liminal times breed extraordinary hybrids and monsters. Where there be hybrids and monsters in our liminal time, modernity totters on the threshold of mythology. And this is what Latour proclaims in his We Have Never Been Modern (1993). And if “the modern” is a myth, so is one of its defining features: progress. Here he can actually find some sympathetic readers among his critics. But this is just a step to his next invention, a new genre, “scientifiction.” His Aramis (1996a) is a cautionary tale about technology and progress. As a reflection of our liminal time, it is a hybrid, a monster, described as quirky, filled with stylistic excrescences, strange, and deep, and—for all of that—eminently readable. His story about a robotic Parisian transit system introduced during the 1970s and early 1980s is a Rashomon-­ like tapestry portraying the limits of sociology and the promise of

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ANT. Nowhere do we have a better demonstration of Latour’s extraordinary ability to mobilize wit, style, ideas, perspectives, authors, facts, and theories in order to create hybrid, indeed monstrous, narratives. There is a positive way to view this Shiva of science studies. Nietzsche (1887/1989: 119) argued that the more eyes one brings to a phenomenon, the more objective the account that can be given. Sociology is a discipline of many eyes brought to the study of social life. One of those eyes is symbolic interactionism, a theory that at times is competitive with ANT and, at others, in conjunction with ethnomethodology as a resource for ANT. “The end of the social” movement in Latour’s hands has not yet exiled sociology. We get a little bit closer to this state of affairs in Latour’s Pandora’s Box (1999b). This is Latour’s answer to the question we all want to ask him: “Do you believe in reality?” Once again we sociologists have to bracket our concern with his efforts to destroy us so we can see that Latour has posed a challenging question. Technology and science, the material and the human merge, Latour tells us, as our pictures and understanding of reality evolve, change, stabilize, destabilize and continue this cycle over time. In the middle of all this dynamic movement, how is it we came to believe in a reality “out there” that we could grasp? People like me and many if not most of my colleagues have pursued the answer to this question by championing science, a science that is complexly pluralistic and not governed by naïve realism. Latour, by contrast, wants to champion ordinary people and help them to shed their submissive posture with respect to the scientists, the experts. We “ordinaries” do not need to be intimidated by the warring claimants to the facts and truth. By 2004, in his book on politics and nature, Latour’s empirical metaphysics has cleansed itself of whatever was left of realism and he is fully in the camp of the idealists. In 2007, we have what can be described as a mobilization of the mobilizations and the construction of a fairly robust Latourian social studies paradigm. The basic strategy is to follow society the way we originally followed the scientists, so that we can reveal all of society’s connections. What we will find is that classical sociology leaves out too many things that are part of the social domain. Classical (Durkheimian) sociology explains social facts with social facts; this means that stable things are being explained in terms of other stable things. For just a moment, translate this narrative in the terms of a physics that explains physical things in terms of other physical things. We are now, in Latourian social studies, going to forego assuming what is and what is not social. Again, imagine doing physics but foregoing what

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is and is not physical. Latour’s (2007) approach to the “end of the social” is to focus on “assembling the social.” The problem here is endemic to philosophies of society. Searle, representing the old guard in this game, and Latour, leading a small band of young Turks, have a lack of feeling for the social in common; and they are either ignorant or dismissive of the very best of what sociologists have achieved. Some of us have been using Latour’s “follow the…” strategy to “follow Latour.” Let’s now follow him into the heart of actor-network theory and see if there is anything new or salvageable in the process of “assembling the social.” Understand, however, that Latour sees the relationship between his “sociology of associations” and classical sociology as parallel to the relationship and distinction between pre-relativity physics and relativity physics. This comparison is, in his hands, a cartoon without substance. In any case, his “relativity sociology” is composed of ethnomethodology, material semiotics, and the sociology of Durkheim’s contemporary, Gabriel Tarde. This is where we have arrived as a result of following the scientists, the engineers, and society—ANT. ANT focuses on actants, a term used by Lucien Tesnière as early as 1959, and later by A. J. Greimas (1966/1986) and Julia Kristeva (1967). Latour borrowed the term to avoid using the terms “actors,” “acting,” and “systems” behaving. Definitions don’t concretize in Latour. Nothing does because he is always focused on transitions. When he does offer definitions, they seem to flow from him like Zen koans (cf. Zammito, 2004, p. 189). As we saw earlier, critics are all over the place in trying to pin him down: charlatan and clown, or creative genius? Many of his critics see him as engaged in shallow manoeuvring comic strategies, and attention-­getting activities. On the other hand, perhaps these are just the necessary strategies required to engage a world of great and increasing complexity and uncertainty, a world in which cultures and ecosystems are under severe stress. There are many examples in history that demonstrate the value of reducing logical rigor in the face of the routinization of rationality (Restivo, 1983, p. 110; pp. 129–156). Latour is chained to focusing on transitions in part due to the legacy of the laboratory studies. That research almost necessarily paid attention to scientific matters that were as yet unsettled, not yet closed, still mired in conflict and controversy. The very process of ethnography forced Latour to focus on chains of conflict, controversy, and modalities. Inscription emerges as an under-appreciated process in science. He defines “literature” as a continuum of drafts; edited manuscripts; privately and publicly

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circulated preprints; lectures; poster sessions; abstracts; and (eventually) published papers, reprints, and copies. We can understand why Latour doesn’t see “facts,” but only a continuous chain of activities designed to create order out of disorder. The “fact,” at the end, is ultimately elusive for Latour, strategically. Following the postmodernists toward the end of the first millennium found us challenging reigning categories and classifications and recognizing the need to adopt new strategies for survival in the face of existential threats. One of Latour’s strengths is that he has been a leader in this movement to leave the old ways behind us. From Laboratory Life on, he has helped us to see life at every level as a matter of creating order out of disorder, or creating new orders our of old orders (Latour, 1988, p. 61). But following Latour has shown that all the novelty he kept promising looked like various imitations of classical ethnography (see the discussion of Firth in Tikopia in Chap. 3). This revealed that at least some sociologists of the social appear to be operating essentially as Latourian sociologists of associations, but without losing their Durkheimian sense of the social. If the novelty of the account of accounts we have from Latour and Woolgar (1979) on is that their accounts are not privileged over the accounts given by the scientists themselves, we can read into this not only classical ethnomethodology, but (more charitably) anticipations of an anthropology that gives the Other a voice in accounts. Of course, this is an overreach; Latour himself is not prepared to go beyond ethnomethodology and to embrace either the new ethnography or the new anthropology. At the end of the day, Latour has made important contributions to the sociology of science independent of the misleading distinction between “the social” and “associations.” He has neither denied the “out-­thereness” of reality, nor the existence of facts. Yet, like his colleagues in science studies (including Bloor, Knorr-Cetina, R. Collins, Leigh Star, and Restivo), he has helped to demonstrate that facts and realities are social accomplishments. He and his colleagues have done this without eliminating reality “out there” and without eliminating classical sociological reasoning which shadows them into a new metaphysics of the social. Looking more closely at the most problematic feature of ANT, it seems to assign agency to non-humans. For example, consider what happens when we observe a bank. We do not just see interacting humans; rather, we see a network of interactions involving people, ideas and concepts (one might add norms, values, and beliefs), and technologies. The bank is a network that can under certain conditions be treated as a unit, an ­actor/

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actant. Networks are transient, constantly constituting and re-constituting themselves. Why is ANT described in this way any different from the way anthropologists view culture in terms of the network of socifacts, mentifacts, and artifacts (Bidney, 1967; and see Fleck, 1935/1979 who anticipates most of what is sociologically cogent in Latour, not to mention Kuhn)? Mary Douglas (1986), in fact, has written a credible analysis of the significance of Fleck and Durkheim for any sociology of knowledge. If anthropology has already given us a sociology of associations, Garfinkel and Goffman (in their idiosyncratic sociologies) have also already given us the concept of social life that constantly constitutes and reconstitutes itself and, more generally, of society and culture as social achievements. It is easy to dismiss these two examples because their principles and theories are idiosyncratic in the context of mainstream sociology. Yet we could as easily demonstrate the points in this paragraph using Weber and those sociologists who have followed in his wake, Merton no less than R.  Collins. Of course, Latour would claim “new ground” by virtue of what he sees as a more radical and more inclusive network of associations. But sociologists as different as George Lundberg, Nicolai Bukharin, Howard Becker, and Randall Collins have all addressed the issues and problems Latour claims require ANT. Like other philosophers, he claims jurisdiction over sociology and the right to define what is and what isn’t sociology, not to mention the right to re-configure and ultimately dissolve sociology as a discipline. These philosophers take on these practices without grasping the full scope of sociology and the very best of what sociologists have achieved. Sociology is therefore more diverse than Latour imagines. By abandoning social construction, the only recourse humans have for engaging the world, he has trapped himself in a caricature of a sociological universe he does not inhabit. We must continually remind ourselves that Latour’s take on sociology and the social is derived from his commitment to ethnomethodology. Like his actants, he sees himself in a battle captured by David Berreby (1994) in his essay, “And now [one can almost hear “in this corner”], overcoming all binary oppositions…that damned elusive Bruno Latour.” Disagreements with his critics do not trouble Latour. After all, they are logically entailed in his self-exemplifying theory. Latour champions a philosophical imperative akin to Richard Rorty’s (1981): just keep the conversation going and all will be well. The problem with such an imperative is that it comes without stop signs. Disagreements are not sinister; they are part of a natural order of ANT, played out on the

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field of politics. The pluralism in ANT is not nourished outside the Franco-­ American orbit of intellectual inquiry, in the arenas of feminist, black, queer, and minority voices in Brazil, Africa, India and elsewhere. Like Rorty, Latour does not engage the Other, but continues the conversation of Plato’s progeny in the West, a conversation that takes place in the polite atmosphere of a gentlemen’s club. Yet just as the West’s democratic of, by, and for the people ideology barely hides a pugilistic history, Latour’s philosophy is couched in a vocabulary of warfare. This does not carry the substance of Marxist or conflict theories, but is just another strategy for mobilizing followers. In her review of Science in Action, Olga Amsterdamska (1990) criticized Latour for what she claimed is a “might makes right” approach to understanding science, a constant rhetoric of warfare, and a confused understanding of reality. Latour started his career in line with his new STS/4S colleagues promising to contribute to a Copernican revolution in the sociology of science; he has evolved, instead, into a metaphysician dismissive of the social sciences. We can credit him with helping us see the sciences as social practices and discourses. This is an indisputable empirically verifiable social fact. The further lesson he draws—that sociology’s classical agenda and toolkit must be eliminated—is not empirically warranted. The distinction Latour makes between sociologists of the social (who study social order) and sociologists of association (who study social orders in process) is a red herring. This assumes that you need two different modes of interrogation, two different kinds of science or inquiry, to study statics and dynamics. If we “accuse” the Durkheimians of claiming that everything is social, we lose sight of the significance that humans come onto the evolutionary stage always, everywhere, and already social. Latour’s approach cannot capture the fundamental nature and functions of belongingness; compassion; community; rituals; solidarity; and emotional coupling. Durkheim grasps this fundamental fact: society—the very idea of the social—precedes the individual. Humans do not arrive as individuals who at some Hobbesian point choose to come together socially by way of a social contract. Latour’s preference for Tarde over Durkheim is an attack on the sociological imagination (Mills), the sociological cogito (R. Collins) and of course social construction (Restivo, Knorr-Cetina). He also distances himself from the form of symbolic interactionism inspired by Anselm Strauss. One of the many contradictions Latour entangles himself in is his tendency to embrace and identify with anthropology while he is trying to

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dismantle sociology. The distinction between the two disciplines is based on professional, disciplinary, and historical contingencies and not so much on perspective and foundations. The attraction for Latour is that anthropology has a reputation as an “interpretive discipline,” as opposed to sociology as a science. This allows him to mobilize and enrol more humanities scholars and anti-quantitative STS scholars and social scientists than might otherwise be the case.

Will the Real Bruno Latour Please Stand Up Latour (1999, pp. 299–300) claims that his critics are attacking someone with his name who defends all the absurdities he disputes. The “real” Bruno Latour opposes the idea that science is socially constructed, that it is nothing more than discourse, that there is no “objective reality out there,” that “everything goes” in science, that science is conceptually empty, that everything is politics and power, that subjectivity and objectivity are inextricably intertwined, that the more ignorant you are the better, and the most powerful scientists always win as long as s/he has enough allies in high places. How could his critics have been so mistaken? It’s easy to explain why his critics have been “mistaken.” He has become a metaphysical story-teller. Everything in Latour’s world is always unsettled, including Latour and ANT.  ANT doesn’t work, he says (Latour, 1999, p. 1). Actor, network, theory and the hyphen are broken. Yet ANT works very well for him (Latour, 2005, p. 9). Are networks the key idea in Latour’s theory or is circulation? (The latter is not indexed in Latour (2005), the former is.) Another reason his critics are baffled is that, like his colleagues in science studies, he has demanded that we rethink taken-for-­ granted ideas about science and upset the applecart of traditional philosophy, history, and sociology of science. At least this reason is rooted in empirical research in a relatively new field of study. Furthermore, Latour and his colleagues have invaded territories long controlled by scientists and their ideologues. Finally, the very idea of a sociology of science (to which he has some marginal link) breaches powerful ideologies and myths of science. After a detailed review of Latourism, after weighing the pros and cons of Latourism, after reviewing the applause of acolytes and the boos of critics we are left with what? A highly educated academic con artist? A social theorist with whom to conjure? A clown who jokes, using complex and elegant language? Or one of the most eloquent guides to our liminal era?

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Conclusion: Latour and Facts In 1996, at an anthropology conference in Brazil, a psychologist asked Latour “Do you believe in reality?” This question has haunted Latour and STS since its origins, because the field challenged the long-standing unexamined belief that scientists discovered facts and entities that existed in a world “out there,” an objective world outside of society, history, and culture and in some cases outside of time and space. But Latour and his colleagues nowhere claimed that there was no “out there.” What they did claim was that “out there” was a construct of social actions. Scientific facts and entities were constructed and sustained by social networks, institutions, and cultures. Facts and entities lived and died in alignment with the birth and death of cultures and civilizations. To be clear, the way I see it, there is both an “out there” to which humans do not have direct unmediated access, and an “out there” they constructed based on the world to which they do have sensory and experiential access. There is no more an absolute “fact of the matter Latour” than there is an absolute “fact of the matter electron.” Latour’s biggest problem is that while he is basically right on “construction,” he is right in a way that erases humans as always, already, and everywhere social, discounting that humans have no alternative way of manufacturing facts than through their interaction rituals, interaction ritual chains, and general social activities in societies and cultures. This can’t be erased by claiming, more or less correctly that, for example, Pasteur collaborates with molecules; or Einstein collaborates with photons; or Barbara McClintock collaborates with maize, just as Durkheim collaborates with the social. Latour’s claim echoes Evelyn Fox Keller’s concept of a “feeling for the organism,” writ large. What makes truths robust and sustainable is ultimately the robustness and sustainability of the world. Science would be impossible if we lived in an environment where earthquakes occurred randomly all day long, along with random eruptions of volcanoes, materials that constantly shifted through solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasmic phases. Science requires a relatively stable environment with predictable parameters of statics and dynamics, and social groups capable over time of mapping those parameters in a process of permanent epistemological revolution. We are capable as humans in social groups of discovering facts—a process that can lead us in many instances to closures (established facts whose questioning is at the very least no longer cost-effective). That the earth is not flat is not the only

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story that has come to an end, that has reached closure-in-practice at the highest level. On the road to epistemological and ontological metaphysics, Latour has not lost his empirical bearings. We find him from time to time on sites like the critical-zone observatory in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace-­ Lorraine, the Amazon rain forest, or the Kenyan savanna. There is something inevitable and ironic about the fact that this master metaphysician has come around to writing a book titled Down to Earth (2017). Latour is critical of efforts to start problem solving the globe at the local level. Politics should lead us toward the Earth, not toward the local, the national, or the global. If metaphysics has become the royal road to bringing politics down to earth, Latour deserves our applause. As a policy maker and policy advisor, however, Latour is still too mired in the mud of ethnomethodology, the myth of individualism, and dissocism.

Epilogue: Reading Latour Understanding Latour requires crutches. One of the best ways to grasp what he is up to is to “follow the interviews” for his views on sociology (Gane, 2004) and the atmosphere in science studies on the eve of the science wars (Crawford, 1993; and see Crawford’s [1994] review of We Have Never Been Modern). For an in-depth reading of Latour as a social theorist, see Zammito (2004). J. Zammito locates Latour and Quine at opposite ends of a postpositivism continuum, discussing Latour in relation to such prominent colleagues in science studies as Haraway, Longino, Bloor, and Pickering, and tending to side with Latour in the Latour-Bloor debate. G. Harman (2009) is the best introduction to Latour as a philosopher. For those readers who know Latour and science studies, I recommend D. Harris’s (2005) guide to Latour’s Science in Action and the basic ideas of ANT. One of the earliest and most formidable critiques of ANT in the context of the concept of boundary objects was developed by Star and her colleagues (Star, 1989; Star & Greismer, 1989; Bowker & Star, 1999). Rudy and Gareau (2005) give us a Marxist critique of Latour. Their symposium highlights the most prevalent criticism of Latour and ANT, the failure to address issues of social justice and social inequality (see also from inside STS, Restivo, 2005; and Amsterdamska, 1990). These critics underline the fact that Latour’s increasing interest in democracy and world peace take place at a rather substantial distance from reality, though these criticisms are somewhat muted by his recent travels in the critical zones to

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publicize climate change. Gad and Jensen (2010) defend a “post-ANT” ANT era in science studies. In their analysis, ANT seems to be a distillation of what we learned from the ethnographers of science, minus causality and plus a deification of complexity and uncertainty. Latour himself can be as good a guide to his ideas as his champions and translators. For one example, see Kofman (2018), and his essay in WIRED (Latour, 2003). Kofman’s essay shows that Bruno Latour is quite capable of moderating his penchant for metaphysics and getting his hands and feet dirty in the field.

Postscript: A Last Word on Latour At the end of the day, Latour transcends all the critics, acolytes, and worshippers with the sheer scope of his interests, command of scholarly resources, and elegance and wit as a writer. Even where his politics fails to satisfy progressives and where his creativity leaves one wondering whether he is a genius or a madman (or both!), there can be no criticism of his industry, his command of facts and literatures, and his capacity to mobilize networks to foster his scholarly presence. He is his own objectivity community and one to conjure with.

Bibliography Akrich, M. and Latour, B. (1992), “A summary of a convenient vocabulary for the semiotics of human and non-human assemblies,” 259–264, in Bijker, W.E. and Law, J. (eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). Amsterdamska, O. (1990), “Surely You Are Joking, Monsieur Latour!” Science, Technology, and Human Values 15 (4): 495–504. Barnes, B. and Bloor, D. (1982), “Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge,” 21–47, in M.  Hollis and S.  Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press). In this chapter, and Bloor define relativism as “disinterested inquiry.” It is unlikely that Daniel Dennett or any of the philosophers who associate STS science studies with relativism have read this piece, or the defense of science and “objective reality” one finds in the writings of all the key founders of STS including the realist philosophers most prominent target, Harry Collins. Bejan, A. (2019), Freedom and Evoluion: Hierarchy in Nature, Society and Science (New York: Springer). Berreby, D. (1994), “And now, overcoming all binary oppositions, it’s… That Damned Elusive Bruno Latour,” Lingua Franca 4 (October): 26. Bidney, D. (1967), Theoretical Anthropology (New York: Schocken Books; 2nd ed., 1995). (Edison NJ: Transaction Publishers).

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Bloor, D. (1976), Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Bloor, D. (1999), “Anti-Latour,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30(1): 81–112. Bohm, D. (1976), Fragmentation and Wholeness: An Inquiry into the Function of Language and Thought (New York: Humanities Press). Bowker, G.C. and Star, S.L. (1999), Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Callon, M. (1986), “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,” 196–233, in J. Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Callon, M., Lascoumes, P., and Barthe, Y. (2009), Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay On Technical Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Collins, R. (1998), The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Social constructivism, Collins writes, is sociological realism. The sociological cogito assures us of the reality “of thinking, language, other people, time and space, material bodies”: p. 860. Crawford, T.H. (1993), “Interview with Bruno Latour,” Configurations 1(2), 247–268. Crawford, T.H. (1994), “Book review: B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern,” Configurations 2(3), 578–580. Douglas, M. (1986), How institutions think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press). Fleck, L. (1935/1979), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Originally published in German). Gad, C. and Jensen, C.B. (2010), “On the Consequences of Post-ANT,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 35(1): 55–80. Gane, N. (2004), “Bruno Latour: The Social as Association,” 77–90, in N. Gane (ed.), The Future of Social Theory (New York: Continuum). Greimas, A.  J. (1966/1986), Sémantique structural (Paris: Presse universitaires de France). Hardy, C., Phillips, N. and Clegg, S. (2001), “Reflexivity in Organization and Management Studies: A Study of the Production of the Research ‘Subject,’” Human Relations 54(5): 3–32. Harman, G. (2009), Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press). Harris, D. (2005), http://www.arasite.org/latour.html. Hawkes, T. (1977), Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of California Press). Hooker, C. (1975), “Philosophy and Metaphilosophy of Science: Empiricism, Popperianism, and Realism,” Synthese 32: 177–231. Hottois, G. (1984), Le signe et la technique. La philosophie à l’épreuve de la technique (Paris: Aubier Montaigne).

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Kofman, A. (2018), “Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science,” New York Times Magazine: October 25. Kristeva, J. (1967), “L’Expansion de la sémiotique,” Information sur les sciences sociales 6(5): 169–181. Lamont, M. (1987). “How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” American Journal of Sociology 93(3): 584–622. Latour, B. (1987), Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Latour, B. (2007), Reassembling The Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Latour, B. (2017), Down to Earth (Cambridge: Polity Press). Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1979), Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage). Law, J. and Callon, M. (1988), “Engineering and Sociology in a Military Aircraft Project: A Network Analysis of Technical Change,” Social Problems 35: 284–297. Law, J. and Callon, M. (1989), “On the Construction of Sociotechnical Networks: Content and Context Revisited,” Knowledge and Society 9: 57–83. Mialet, H. (2012), Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Mikami, K. (2018), “STS as a Program of Ontological Disobedience: Koichi Mikami Talks With Steve Woolgar,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 4: 303–319. Nietzsche, F. (1887/1989), On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage). Restivo, S. (1983), The Social Relations of Physics, Mysticism, and Mathematics (New York: Springer). Restivo, S. (1985), The Social Relations of Physics, Mysticism, and Mathematics (New York: Springer). Restivo, S. (2005), “Politics of Latour,” review essay, Organization and Environment 8(1): 111–115. Restivo, S. (2020), Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture, and Social Networks (New York: Palgrave PIVOT). Restivo, S. and Croissant, J. (2007), “Social Constructionism in Science and Technology Studies,” 213–229, in J. Holstein and J. Gubrium (eds.), Handbook of Constructionist Research (New York: Guilford). Rorty, R. (1981), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Rudy, A.P. and Gareau, B.J., eds. (2005). “Actor-Network Theory, Marxist Economics, and Marxist Political Ecology,” A symposium, Capitalism Nature Socialism 16(4): 85–90. Serres, M. (1983), Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Star, S.L. (1989). “The Structure of Ill-structured Solutions: Boundary Objects and Heterogeneous Distributed Problem Solving,” 37–53, in L.  Gasser and M.N. Huhns (eds.), Distributed Artificial Intelligence, vol. 2, Research Notes in Artificial Intelligence (London: Pitman).

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Star. S.L. and Griesemer, J.R. (1989), “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science 19(4): 387–420. Tarde, G. (1899/2009), Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (Bibliolife, Open Source. Originally published by Macmillan in London). Tesnière, L. (1959), Eléments de syntaxe structural (Paris: C. Klinksieck). Walsham, G., (1997), “Actor-Network Theory and IS research: Current status and future prospects,” 466–480, in A. Lee, J.S. Liebenau and J.I. DeGross (eds.), Information Systems and Qualitative Research (London: Chapman and Hall). Zammito J. (2004), “Women, ANTs, and (Other) Dangerous Things,” 183–231, in J. Zammito (ed.), A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Special Reference Section: Bruno Latour Latour, B. (1988), “A Relativist Account of Einstein‟s Relativity,” Social Studies of Science 18: 3–44. Latour, B. (1992), “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” 225–258, in W.E.  Bijker and J.  Law (eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Latour, B. (1996a), Aramis, or The Love of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Latour, B. (1999), “Factures/fractures: From the Concept of Network to the Concept of Attachment,” Research 36: 20–31. Latour, B. (1999b), Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Latour, B. (2003), “The Promise of Constructivism,” 27–46, in D.  Ihde and E. Selinger (eds.), Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Latour, B. (2004), Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Latour B. (2004a), “How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies,” Body and Society 10(2/3): 205–229. Latour, B. (2004b), “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30(2): 225–248. Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

CHAPTER 10

Science East & West: Joseph Needham

In honour of Joseph Needham (Li Yüeh-Sê 李约瑟) 1900–1995, friend and interlocutor on the “Big Problem” of why science emerged in Western Europe and not in China: with thanks from Sal Restivo —大龙 Dà long

Needham’s Legacy Joseph Needham (Li Yüeh-Sê), already a distinguished biochemist, became head of the British Scientific Mission in wartime China in 1941. He had already engaged Chinese culture about six years earlier when three young Chinese scientists arrived at Cambridge University to work in Sir Frederick G.  Hopkins’ (1861–1947) laboratory. The three scientists were Shen-­ Shih-­Chang, Wang Ying-Lai, and Lu Gwei-Djen. All three became close friends with Needham. He would eventually marry Lu Gwei-Djen in 1991, two years after the death of his first wife, Dorothy. Dorothy, like her husband, had been a fellow of the Royal Society. Joseph Needham was born near London on 9 December in 1900. His father, Joseph, was one of the first Harley Street anaesthesiologists. His mother, Alice Montgomery, was a pianist and composer. In 1924, This chapter is an enlarged and edited version of one of two lectures delivered at the 2007 China STS Conference, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China, August 24–29th © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_10

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Needham became a fellow of Caius College at Cambridge and, in 1933, succeeded J.B.S.  Haldane as Sir William Dunn Reader in Biochemistry. He published Chemical Embryology in three volumes in 1931. An early section of this work was later published separately as A History of Embryology, Biology, and Morphogenesis (1942). The young Chinese scientists unintentionally helped Needham to see that there was nothing in the “Chinese mentality” that could have prevented the rise of modern science there if the conditions (cultural and ecological) had been propitious. Keeping in mind that, up to this time, even the Chinese were not aware of a significant history of science in China, Needham’s interactions with the Chinese scientists, Lu Gwei-­ Djen’s apothecary father, and his readings in Chinese history and culture led him to formulate some working hypotheses about science East and West. These hypotheses would guide his studies of “The Big Problem” and lead to the publication of Chinese Science (1945) and Science Outpost (1948), and eventually his monumental multi-volume study of Science and Civilization in China (1954–1998). By 1948, one could say that Needham had been converted to the Chinese world view. The Big Problem, the Needham Problem, was: Why did modern science emerge in Western Europe and not in China? and: Why was China more advanced in science and technology than Western Europe during the nearly two millennia prior to the West’s Scientific Revolution? The problem of the nature of organic form was central to his interests and he applied himself to tracing human thought on this topic from antiquity onwards. He was also interested in Christian theology. His religious education spanned the Society of Friends and the Oxford Movement, and he was a lay brother in the Anglican order, the Oratory of the Good Shepherd. He was also deeply conversant with Marxism as a member of that extraordinary invisible college of socialist scientists active in the 1930s that included Haldane, Hogben, J.D. Bernal (“Sage”), Julien Huxley and others. Our own correspondence included some of his Sunday sermons or addresses. In his last address as Master of Caius College, delivered at the college chapel on Whit Sunday, June 5th, 1976, he said: …if the principle of increasing organization has been the keynote of evolution on our earth and in our solar system, then libido must have been winning the day over mortido aeons past—Ahura-Mazda [God—the creative spirit—in Zoroaster’s Persian worldview] triumphing over Ahirman [the destructive spirit in Zoroastrianism]. This brings us back again to another

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favourite theme of ancient writers, most epigrammatically expressed in Dante perhaps when he spoke of “l’amor que muove il isole e l’altre stelle” (that love which moves the Sun and the stars)….I remember many years ago being astonished that the great Lucretius prefaced his immortal poem De Rerum Natura with an invocation to Aphrodite as the goddess of union, cohesion, solidarity, aggregation, reproduction and mutual love—libido, in fact, though he did not use that word. She was the mainspring, he said, of the universe….

A Chinese friend gave Needham a badge with the saying, Wei renmin fu wu: In everything you do, do it for others. Needham wore this badge on his scarf. In one of his most provocative remarks, he said that the belief in scientific truth (as our only route to understanding the world) was a Western disease. He believed China could restore humanistic values to a world science. Needham’s legacy, then, is twofold: first, his stress on the scientism of the West’s ethnoscience and the humanism in China’s ethnoscience; and second, his stress on the value of love, understood in evolutionary and sociological terms as a manifestation of the principle of cooperation and community (Restivo, 2018, pp.  90–113). There is an echo of Marx’s vision of “human science” in Needham’s vision of a Chinese-inspired humanistic science Their legacies are linked in many ways.

Karl Marx (1818–1883): Marx’s Legacy It is of great interest to me that Marx’s notion of “human science” (which he opposed to bourgeois science) has not been addressed in STS, nor in the old or new sociology of science. It is obvious that Marx’s vaguely articulated human science has some kinship to Needham’s libido-­ humanistic science. Needham’s concept of a World Cooperative Council has much in common with Marx’s vision of communism, and it would be no great stretch to connect these two visions of science and communism to Nietzsche’s (1887/1974) The Gay Science. The scientific communities East and West have in modern times sought to embrace such visions of science, from Science for the People in the United States; the Radical Science Movement in England and the earlier efforts of the socialist scientists of the 1930s; to the Dutch science shops; and China’s principle of “Science Walks on Two Legs.” In STS, Brian Easlea; Daryl Chubin; Julia Loughlin; Jennifer Croissant; Wenda Bauchspies; Sal Restivo, Elizabeth

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Fee and others have advocated for a liberatory or humanistic science. Looking more closely at Marx’s ideas on “human science” (1844/1956, pp. 110–111; 1857–1858/1973, p. 699ff.), we find that in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he introduced the idea of the convergence of natural science and the science of man: History itself is a real part of natural history—of nature’s coming to be man. Natural science will in time subsume under itself the science of man, just as the science of man will subsume under itself natural science; there will be one science.

This is the Martin Milligan translation we are given in the Foreign Languages Publishing House (Moscow, 1956) edition. It is interesting to compare this translation with Ria Stone’s (1949, p. 22): Sensuousness (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Science is real only when it proceeds from sensuousness in the dual aspect both of sensuous consciousness and sensuous needs, in other words only when science proceeds from nature. All of history is the history of preparation for “man” becoming the object of sensuous consciousness, and the need of “man as man” becoming the basis of needs. Such a history is an actual part of the history of nature, of nature’s development into man. Later, natural science will become the science of man, just as the science of man subsumes natural science under it. It will be a science.

All other translations, to my knowledge, render the last sentence “…there will be one science”; the German “…es wird eine Wissenschaft sein” lends itself more readily to “a science” in English. In Grundrisse (1857–1858/1973, p. 699ff.), Marx explicitly links the development of science to the development of material production. He did not spend much time clarifying the distinction between “bourgeois science” and “human science.” More significantly, he understood that science and scientists themselves were social relations. In the 1844 manuscripts (1844/1956, p. 104), he wrote two paragraphs that should stand side by side with transformative moments in the history of human consciousness, from Euclid’s postulates on geometry to Einstein’s 1905 papers. Here he gives us the revolutionary idea that science, the scientist, the person, language, thinking, and consciousness are all social constructions. He envisions the negation of science-as-it-is and the emergence of a new form of science—dealienated, integrated (but not unified), wholistic,

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and global. Science today, in its modern guise as Science per se, Science in the grammar of the ever present tense (our contemporary science-as-it-is) is a part of the hegemonic ideology and materiality of modern techno-­ industrial society (ideologically, capitalism). The fallacy of Science per se is that science as we know it in the West and throughout the world from the seventeenth century on in Europe (the so-called “scientific revolution”) is universal in application, relevance, truth, objectivity, and lawfulness. The alternative to Science per se as universal is the view that it is an ethnoscience. Modern science (as a social institution) is a product of and an ingredient of modern techno-industrial society. Consider, for example, David Dickson’s (1979, pp. 23–24) observation on the formal similarity between mathematics and the forms of representations required by labour production under capitalism. In the seventeenth century, algebra provided the calculating mechanism for commodity transactions; later, the calculus was used to represent the quantitative relationship between process and product, thus fully articulating and controlling the links between labour and commodity. One of the strategic moments in the sociological history of science, and perhaps an event of singular significance in that history and the history of STS, was Boris Hessen’s 1931 defence of the thesis that notwithstanding the abstract mathematics of his Principia, Newton was centrally engaged with the physical and technical problems of his time and the interests of the commercial communities—the banks, politics and economics in general, commercial navigation, and warfare. G.N.  Clark (1937) raised one of the standard criticisms of Hessen’s argument: Clark argued that the role of socioeconomic factors in science is restricted to utilitarian motives and trumped by the scientist’s disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, unencumbered by socioeconomic motives. While I have referenced Clark’s criticism earlier (along with Merton’s reply), here I want to present Merton’s reply in more detail. Clark assumed that scientists can be aware of the social forces conditioning and constraining their behaviour and that conscious motivations are sufficient to explain the behaviour of scientists. Merton (1968, pp. 662–663) replied: Motives may range from the desire for personal aggrandizement to a wholly “disinterested desire to know” without necessarily impugning the demonstrable fact that the thematics of science in seventeenth century England were in large part determined by the social structure of the time. Newton’s

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own motives do not alter the fact that astronomical observations of which he made considerable use, were a product of Flamsteed’s work in the Greenwich Observatory, which was constructed at the command of Charles II for the benefit of the Royal Navy. Nor do they negate the striking influence upon Newton’s work of such practically-oriented scientists as Halley, Hooke, Wren, Huygens, and Boyle. Even in regard to the question of motivation, Clark’s thesis is debatable in view of the explicit awareness of many scientists in seventeenth century England concerning the practical implications of their research in pure science. It is neither an idle nor unguarded generalization that every English scientist of this time who was of sufficient distinction to merit mention in general histories of science at one point or another explicitly related at least some of his scientific research to immediate practical problems. But in any case, analysis exclusively in terms of (impugned) motives is seriously misleading and tends to befog the question of the modes of socio-economic influence upon science.

It is curious that someone so imbued with the sociological imagination that he could see the value in Hessen’s analysis and explain his argument, still could not fully embrace the strong programme or post-1970 social constructionism in science studies. Yet Merton demonstrated again and again that generally Marxian assumptions pervade sociological reasoning. The pathway to a view on the past and future of science and society East and West takes us next to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): Nietzsche’s Legacy Nietzsche is rarely (if ever) thought of in connection with the history of STS. Yet he possessed a profound understanding of the social relations of science and in particular the parallels between Science, Church, and State as mendacious institutions. When I originally delivered these remarks, standing on Chinese soil and on the site of China as the once and always Central Kingdom, I said Nietzsche might be especially relevant in this context as a critic of Western epistemology. Throughout his work, one finds a concern with distinguishing and validating statements as “true” or “false” and a commitment to critical realism (or what I sometimes refer to as mundane or prosaic realism). For example, (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 266): There exists neither “spirit,” nor reasons, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth [nor, of course and infamously, no God]; all are

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fictions that are of no use. There is no question of “subject and object” but of a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience).

I understand this statement to reflect a recognition of the cultural loss of significance for these categories and a need to reconsider their roots and meaning for the humanity of the 1800s. There is a correspondence between Nietzsche’s view of these “fictions” and how Marx renders them. If Nietzsche demonstrates an awareness of the limitations of these concepts, Marx provides a vision of how they should be transformed. Marx (1844/1956, pp.  104–105) shows a profound understanding of the human as a social being: But again when I am active scientifically, etc.,—when I am engaged in activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others—then I am social, because I am active as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.

Second, he writes: My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that of which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present day general consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such antagonistically confronts it. Consequently, too the activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is my theoretical existence as a social being. What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of “society” as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His life, even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life, carried out together with others—is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life.

Unless the significance of these passages, as adumbrations of Durkheim, Mead, and the sociological imagination in general, is fully comprehended, it will be impossible to grasp the meaning of the social construction theorem and the concept of scientific knowledge as socially constructed. Without a clear notion of what this means, we cannot mount a critique of science, nor can we pursue the notions of indigenous and ethno-sciences.

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The traditional naïve realist orders the world of truth and knowing around “things in the world,” an objective observing eye, and “terms that refer.” This idea has been all but erased from epistemology in the wake of the critical contributions of Hanson, Kuhn, Feyerabend and others, a conclusion furthered and cemented in the post-1970s new sociology of science. The ideas of theory-ladenness and social construction leave no room for traditional epistemology. Philosophers of science from Hooker to Rorty have followed up on these developments and given us pragmatic anti-foundational philosophies of science that challenge classical approaches to epistemology. Nietzsche already understood that words and signs in general do not connect us directly to referents or to the ding an sich. Nietzsche defends a social (human) constructionism as opposed to a transcendent view of knowledge, truth, and facts. We create more than we discover; or perhaps the distance between creating and discovering is narrower than we imagine. In this sense, Nietzsche expresses the emergence in the nineteenth century of a rejection of transcendence and advocacy of social constructionism that we find in the core social thinkers of that period. Just like the new sociologists of science of the early 1970s, Nietzsche seems to embrace relativism, but also like them, he is a critical realist. He doesn’t question ontological certainty or the recalcitrance of being and the world but rather the absolute certainty that our words and concepts somehow capture the “out-thereness” of reality. In brief, he anticipates the anti-foundationalism and the stress on context and contingency that crystallizes in the ethnographers of science of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Legacy of Human Science Needham, Marx, and Nietzsche provide a foundation for thinking about science in a different way—a way that recognizes the diversity of the sciences (there is no Science per se) and a way that recognizes science as a social institution but also as a basic survival mechanism, an activity that enfolds the human species-specific ways of solving problems and answering questions. What are we to make of “science East and West” against the background of their ways of viewing science? First, we must consider the dialectical construction of the West-East division (I showed what this means in Chap. 4 where I brought science into the discourse on orientalism-­ occidentalism). Second, we must focus on the evolving global dynamics of science and civilization.

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As a new global (Earth-wide) ecumene crystallizes under the burden of existential threats, the traditional cultural and civilizational boundaries between East, West, North, and South are collapsing although there are still powerful, countervailing nativist and tribalist forces across the world. Increasingly, nations and cultures mirror each other, their histories and interactions across time and space. Travel away from one’s home even across vast oceans and continents no longer means landing in an alien world. Without underplaying language and cultural barriers that still exist, it becomes easier and easier to navigate airports, surface transportation networks, work environments, and so on (on the recurrence of contexts, environments, relationships, and structures—Recurrence Theorem—see Restivo, 2020, pp. 23–26). The most viable new institutional forms of science can be expected to emerge out of new political economic formations looking for footholds in the new Earthal (to borrow an inspiration from Latour) environment. Based in part on its history and in part on its present trajectory, China has a privileged position in this transformation. Cultural and civilizational changes do not come with guarantees of social justice and peaceful coexistence. The existential threats we face will constrain the ways in which these changes unfold. If they unfold in conventional ways, they will feed the existential threats and lessen the likelihood of a new world order taking root. There are good reasons, however, to look to China and the East ethnoperceptively for the next stages in the development of science and technology studies and for new narratives on science and society. It no longer makes sense to “look to the West” or “look to the East.” There is, however, reason to see more potential in China’s ethnoscience than in the West’s ethnoscience (e.g., Sahlins & Service, 1960, pp. 109–110). China is a more likely site than the West for the visions of Needham (World Cooperative Council), Marx (human science), and Nietzsche (joyous wisdom) to take root. It would be folly to imagine such a development in utopian terms, however. In practical terms, we could hope for something flawed but workable in the contemporary Earthal system, something a little better for our species and planetary health than what we have at present. The volatility of political economies and the potential for international conflict and violence are enhanced by the existential threats we face, so there is certainly nothing that can be taken for granted as we search for new ways to guide our human and planetary futures.

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Forming one’s own judgement without one’s prejudice being involved is just like starting today but arriving yesterday, that is, entirely impossible. Chuang-tzu (Song dynasty)

Chuang-Tzu’s Legacy In considering the significance of “East” and “West” and “North” and “South” for the propositions before us, we must take note of the thousands of years of transportation, exchange, and communication linkages that have been forged across the world’s geographical, national, and cultural boundaries. Not only that, but sometimes we confuse things by comparing contemporary culture A to premodern culture B.  The more we restrict our comparisons to comparable historico-cultural junctions and periods, the more parallels we will find between ways of life and knowing that are often considered to be polar opposites. All of our histories and cultures are mutually contaminated—in fact, the three legacies I have discussed here already escape the bounds of East, West, North, and South. But shouldn’t we then expect to find Chinese legacies to complete the picture I’ve sketched? Needham did indeed identify Chinese parallels to Western thought and thinkers; perhaps in the current context Chuang-tzu could be considered China’s Nietzsche. In this regard, I am considering the Song philosopher’s ideas on naturalism, the very idea of being human which parallels Nietzsche’s “ubermensch” in the sense of self-­actualization, the re-evaluation of all values, and an atheism grounded in a religious sentiment. It is parallels like these that may explain why Nietzsche is more widely translated in China than most (if not all) other Western philosophers. It’s not easy to say who Chuang-tzu (2020) was or what he actually said, wrote, and meant, but is his work anymore corrupted by commentators, editors, translators, and interpreters than Nietzsche’s? Taking this into account, there appear to be enough parallels between the two thinkers to make us wonder if they represent a certain mode of thinking one finds in all high civilizations. The issue is not to find a once and for all interpretation or understanding of such thinkers, but to use their legacies heuristically as we consider new directions for science, science studies, and the possibilities of a viable Earthal ecumene. On the one hand, Chuang-tzu sees that the world is infinite and knowledge inexhaustible; on the other hand, he realizes that there exists diversity in individual thought and finitude in human knowledge. Integrating

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these two forms constitutes Chuang-tzu’s tolerance, his respect for human epistemic law. He tolerates the coexistence of different conceptions, thoughts, and theories. This doesn’t mean that he abolished knowledge and failed to distinguish right from wrong. Rather, he affirmed human rationality and the pursuit of knowledge. The individual has a definite lifespan and limited experience; thus, the capacity to master knowledge is finite. The imperative then is to learn what you can and stop searching for what one cannot learn or know (shades of Wittgenstein!). Life is limited, knowledge is unlimited. Pursuing unlimited knowledge, given one’s limited life, is dangerous. It is even more dangerous if one realizes this and still keeps on with the pursuit.

Conclusion: History of Chinese Science in Perspective Persons like Chuang-tzu, Ko Hung (Ge Hung, fourth century Eastern Jin) and Chu Shi could be considered pre-cursors of a potential Chinese scientific revolution identified by Needham. Ko Hung was a Taoist alchemist and originator of first aid in Chinese medicine. Chu Shi (Song-Ming) was one of the great synthesizers of Chinese neo-Confucian philosophy. Other factors Needham points to support his claim that China had pre-­ cursors like those of the West that held the potential for a scientific revolution. Besides the tricky search for China’s Aristotles and Galileos, Needham pointed to the concepts of Yin-Yang; the Five Elements; Fan Kuan (“objective observation”); Wu Chi (“omnipresence of the universal pattern”); the logic of the Mohists and Logicians; Taoist appreciation of the problems of causality and relativity; and precise tabulation in Chinese linguistics (precise tabulation is one of the roots of coordinate geometry). Such features of Chinese history persuaded Needham that China and Europe were both on the path to modern science. The sinologist Nathan Sivin (1975) believed they were on different paths, however. The argument for “different paths” is based in part on the fact that Chinese thought was more organicist and less mechanistic than European thought. Other sinologists have made this observation, along with noting China’s emphasis on pattern and organicism and its own forms of logic and causality. Needham (1969, p. 323) argues that, if modern science had emerged in China, it would have been “profoundly organic and non-mechanical.” This suggests we might have reached Einstein-Planck without going

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through Newton. The philosopher Clifford Hooker remarked in a conference discussion I was part of that Newtonian mechanics was a “disaster.” If modern science had emerged in sixteenth century China, it would have been closer to twentieth century science than to Newton. The value of such speculations is hardly clear even to those of us who gain insights from them. There is in all this a rationale for the Needham problem. China does seem to have had key pre-cursors of a scientific revolution and a head start by centuries over the West on inventions and discoveries in science and technology. The heuristic value of wondering about what a Chinese scientific revolution might have given the world is in part dependent on the characterization by Needham and others of Chinese thought as “organicist.” Does this mean that Chinese thought had some affinity with Whitehead’s philosophy or is it simply a label for a kind of pre-modern thought that was as much a part of the West’s intellectual history as it was of China’s? At the end of the day, the question we can answer with some certainty is why China did not experience a scientific revolution. As Needham’s work and my own (Restivo, 1994, pp. 29–48) demonstrate, the obstacles to such a revolution are not answered by the culture-and-cognition hypothesis. Questionable right-brain left-brain and other structural neurological hypotheses have not proven productive. Neither have efforts to look to general metaphysics, specific modes of logic and causality, and cultural psychology. At the end of the day, the most plausible explanation for the lack of a scientific revolution in China must be rooted in comparative human ecology. In 1938, Merton concluded that the formal organization of Puritan values unwittingly led to the emergence of modern science. The problem was in fact not a matter of working out the reciprocal influences of Puritanism, capitalism, and science. Neither the Merton thesis, Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis, nor the “utilitarian hypothesis” favoured by Ben-­ David offer a satisfactory solution. We should ask instead what structural conditions supported the struggles of a minority of science advocates to fight for its general recognition, what interests were actually represented in that minority, and what ecological and organizational conditions made the institutionalization of science possible. The “Restivo thesis” is that the reciprocal relations between Puritanism, capitalism, and science reflected parallel institutional responses in religion, economics, and knowledge systems to the decentralization of the European political and cultural ecology, beginning as early as the 1300s. The

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scientific revolution was not a revolution in metaphysics, or neurological structures, or values, methods, techniques, and epistemological orientations. It was not a simple matter of marrying craft and reason, math and experiment. It was an organizational revolution in the context of a decentralized human ecology. This made possible the sustained emergence of a division of labour and an exchange economy that supported specialization and the development of a merchant class and a class of scientists. This was not possible in China which, relative to the West, was too centralized to allow for organizational and institutional specialization on the level increasingly possible in Europe especially by and after the sixteenth century. In Needham’s suggestive terms, which were the starting point for my human ecology theory (respectively [a] 1975, v. 5, pt. 2, p. xxiii; [b] xxvi; and [c], 1969, p. 298): [a] Whatever the ideological inhibiting factors in the Chinese thought-­ world may turn out to have been, the certainty always remains that the specific social and economic features of traditional China were connected with them….In just the same way, of course, it is impossible to separate the scientific achievements of the ancient Greeks from the fact that they developed in mercantile, maritime, city state democracies. [b] …while ideological, philosophical and theological differences are never to be undervalued, what mattered most of all was facilitating pressures of the transition from feudalism to mercantile and then industrial capitalism, pressures which did not effectively operate in any culture other than that of Western, Frankish, Europe. [c] If Chinese civilization did not spontaneously develop modern natural science as Western Europe did (though much more advanced [up through the pre-Renaissance centuries] it was nothing to do with her attitude towards time. Other ideological factors, of course, remain for scrutiny, apart from the concrete geographical, social and economic conditions and structures, which may yet suffice to bear the main burden of the explanation. Needham’s work shows that the mandarinate opposed any and all social activities, mercantile, scientific, or whatever, that might have threatened their position. The structural foundation of their power was a centralized bureaucracy. There was little opportunity for increasing the mobility, status, and autonomy of individuals or classes in imperial China. Human ecology helps to theorize all of these factors in order to explain why China did not experience an autonomous scientific revolution. The key point is that the strength and persistence of centralized bureaucratic power was due to the geographical scope of the public works literally required to “control the waters.”

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The need for productive control (for irrigation and transportation) and for protection (flood control) made China a paradigmatic example of a hydraulic civilization (Wittfogel, 1957). The control of the waters was an imperative across all of the large area controlled by China, and this required a centralized bureaucracy. The relatively homogeneous ecology of China was not a force for the development of an exchange economy. By contrast, Western Europe was more diversified, and this facilitated the development of an exchange economy and a more decentralized political economy. This was the fertile ground needed for the relatively autonomous development of mercantile and scientific groups, classes, and eventually professions. This was the key to the West’s scientific revolution, not the mathematization of hypotheses, or the interaction of theory and experiment, and not universalism and rationalism as basic normative orientations. In fact, these factors were dependent on continuities in communication and innovation made possible by the functional differentiation and institutionalization of relatively autonomous scientific activities. The scientific revolution was an organizational and institutional revolution provoked by a decentralized political economy, facilitated by a diversified and heterogeneous ecology. The contemporary question we are left with is this: if the political economic centre of the world is shifting to the East and in particular more to China than to Japan or India; and if China is going to be the crucible for the further development of science; then to what extent will Chinese history and culture dictate the future of science, as opposed to the influence of the flowing together of all the rivers of knowledge from all of the world’s cultures?

Bibliography Chuang-tzu. (2020), Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co.). Clark, G.N. (1937), Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Dickson, D. (1979), “Science and Political Hegemony in the 17th Century,” Radical Science Journal 8: 7–37. Hessen, B. (1931), “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” 151–212, in N. Bukharin (ed.), Science at the Crossroads (London: Frank Cass & Co.; Available from Routledge, New York, 2013). Marx, K. (1844/1956), The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House). Marx, K. (1857–1858/1973), The Grundrisse (New York: Harper & Row).

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Merton, R.K. (1968), Social Theory and Social Structure, Enlarged ed. (New York: The Free Press). The older Merton may have been ambivalent about the social construction of scientific facts but he was the master of clarifying the distinction between “the motivation and the structural determinants of scientists’ behavior”: see pp. 661ff. where he defends Hessen’s sociology (historical materialism) of Newton’s Principia against Clark’s (1937) focus on individual motives and pure interests. Needham, J. (1969), The Grand Titration (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Needham, J. (1975), Science and Civilization in China, Vol 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Nietzsche, F. (1968), The Will to Power (New York: Vintage). This book is based on Nietzsche’s notebooks from 1883–1888. It is a treasure house of ideas on mind, thinking, and consciousness. Nietzsche, F. (1887/1974), The Gay Science (New York: Vintage). Restivo, S. (1994), Science, Society, and Values: Toward a Sociology of Objectivity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press). Restivo, S. (2018), The Age of the Social (New York: Routledge). Restivo, S. (2020), Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture, and Social Networks (New York: Palgrave PIVOT). Sahlins, M.D. and Service, E.R., eds. (1960), Evolution and Culture (Ann Arber: University of Michigan Press). Sivin, N. (1975), “Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China,” Paper presented to the Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society, April 22. Stone, R. (1949), Translation of K. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (mimeographed, n.p.). Wittfogel, K. (1957), Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press).

CHAPTER 11

Dangerous Abstractions: STS and the Unabomber

Dear Dr. Restivo: The mission of the UNABOM Task Force is complex and demanding. It is made easier through the assistance of persons like yourself who are concerned about making our society a better place to live. Sincerely, the FBI (1996).

Introduction Early one October morning in 1994, Wes Shrum (the 4S secretary) and Iwalked into a nondescript diner in New Orleans with A.J., a special agent for the FBI, and T.C., a postal inspector. This was the first of two 4S meetings I would preside over as the 4S president. We were meeting for breakfast across the street from the Clarion Hotel where the annual meeting of the 4S was getting underway. How did it happen that a former adviser to Students for a Democratic Society, Nation subscriber, and self-styled anarchist was sitting down to breakfast with the FBI, more or less voluntarily? A few weeks earlier, Wes had called to tell me that the FBI wanted toattend our conference, and in particular they wanted to meet with the 4S Council, the governing body of the society. As Wes told me what little he knew, I began imagining bomb threats and some terrorist group that had targeted 4S for destruction (perhaps led by some deranged vanguard of the Science Wars). Since Wes couldn’t tell me why the FBI wanted to meet © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_11

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with us, I told Wes to tell them “No” (Could I do that? Say “No” to the FBI? Well, at least I could ask Wes to say “No” to them; after all, I was the president!). In the end, I agreed to meet with the agents so that they could tell us what was going on and I could decide whether the situation warranted letting the FBI disrupt our meeting. We needed to proceed cautiously because, in my view, the barbarians were at the gates of an intellectual sanctuary. Well, the barbarians turned out to be as civil as you could imagine (if you closed your imagination to the apparatus of power and violence that sustained them) and no apparent threat to Greek democracy or the 4S thought collective. The two agents were members of the UNABOM TASK FORCE, so this was about the Unabomber. They shared the basic facts of the case with us, showed us charts and clippings, and then we exchanged business cards. I handed my Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) card to the postal inspector sitting beside me. He looked at it, sat back in his chair, and turned to me. “This is where it all started,” he said. I suddenly felt that I had become a suspect, and decided it would be prudent not to give away any of my anarchist credentials! Nonetheless, there were eventually Internet rumblings about my being a suspect. The RPI story turned out to be a little confusing. Early on, I got the impression that the first bomb was mailed to Professor Edward Smith, an electrical engineering professor at RPI, a little over twenty years earlier. The bomb was apparently mailed from Chicago, and never reached Smith. Later, the agent who delivered the Unabomber’s manifesto to me in my RPI office told me that the first letter bomb was mailed to Northwestern University with an RPI return address for Professor Edward Smith. Wes and I listened as the agents unfolded the Unabomber story. They were interested in getting a scholarly reaction to a surviving letter, appended to a letter bomb mailed to that worm runner scientist at the University of Michigan. We all remember his planaria worm experiments on cannibalism and memory, don’t we? How many of us, though, remember that he founded the Worm Runner’s Digest and confused scientists by publishing bona fide scientific articles alongside parodies and satires? This created a scandal because readers couldn’t tell which was which. It was a nice little exercise in a pre-Sokalian era in the sociology of science. I decided to allow the agents to present the letter to Council, but with as little disruption of our normal business as possible. Wes (Shrum 2001) has given the details of this meeting and the aftermath. It was, incidentally, awesome to watch some of our scholarly community’s most talented text analysts work on that letter without any hint of its context.

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STS and the Unabomber On our way out of the diner, the postal inspector, musing on whether they were going to catch this guy, said he didn’t know, but that if he was ever in the same room with him, he would know. A chill ran up my spine. What if I were the Unabomber? Would he know? No bombs went off at the Clarion, no Science Wars terrorists invaded the lobby to kill and maim social constructionists. Soon after the manifesto was published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, I received a call from the FBI’s Albany, New York office. Special agent N.M. wanted to see me about the Unabomber case. We discussed the RPI connection and I learned that the FBI had been investigating on the RPI campus for nearly twenty years on account of the Edward Smith return address on the first letter bomb. A couple of days later, N.M. delivered the manifesto to me, with the request that I read it in the next couple of days, if possible. We would then get together again to discuss my reactions. I was one of sixty people around the country asked to evaluate the manuscript. The agent gave me the clear impression that things were coming to a head and that the Task Force was confident it was closing in on the Unabomber. I was hesitant about reading the manifesto under such a deadline, but I did read it. Just a few pages into the work, I began to get the same sorts of feelings I had gotten when during my undergraduate years I read parts of Mein Kampf. Further on, the voice I heard coming from the blue paper in my hands reminded me of the Weatherman taxi driver I regularly rode with in E. Lansing, Michigan during 1968. On my short rides from the train or bus station to my apartment, I had to endure the driver’s outbursts about how much he hated his father and how he was getting back at him by bombing banks. The profile that came into focus for me as I read through the manifesto contradicted some of the statements I had been reading in the papers. I concluded that the writer was trained in computer science, mathematics, or engineering and that it was extremely unlikely that he had had any disciplined exposure to the history and sociology of science. I also concluded that he had had an abusive father who coerced him in his studies. I found it very curious that when T.K, was captured and his story began to emerge that his father was never, to my knowledge, mentioned. Was he dead? Living apart and alienated from the family? Did I actually see him interviewed on a television news program? Was the Unabomber sending bombs to “his father?” The agent I discussed this with had a psychology background and was

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sympathetic to my (check one) learned insights/wild Freudian speculations, but T.K.’s father had in fact died in 1990. Sometime later, before T.K. was captured, I was invited to a Unabomber workshop in San Francisco organized by the Task Force. I declined the invitation. Later still, with T.K. now under arrest, I received a call from a law clerk in San Francisco. It wasn’t clear whether she was working out of the local FBI office, the offices of the Task Force, or the San Francisco District Attorney’s office. She wanted me to tell her about my experiences with the FBI, which agents I had met with, and under what circumstances I had been interviewed or otherwise offered expert testimony to them. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, could, or should divulge that information. I told her I wanted to ask the Albany FBI special agent I had discussed the manifesto with what, if anything, I could discuss/divulge. The agent was very upset, said they shouldn’t be bothering me, and that she would take care of things. I never heard from the law clerk again.

Conclusion The Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of anarchy prominently feature terms like political disorder and lawlessness. An anarchist is “one who upsets settled order.” But they also do some justice to the idea that anarchy is about resisting arbitrary and unwanted Authority, and supporting individual liberty “without the implication of disorder.” T.K. was not the neo-Luddite some of us wanted him to be. And his rhetoric notwithstanding, he was not a technocritic, nor was his primary motivation technosocial criticism in the interest of progressive social change. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t even an anarchist. He was a mathematician and, as John Allen Paulos put it in an OP-ED piece in The New  York Times, “Dangerous Abstractions” (7 April 1996):“The Unabomber a mathematician? It figures.” Nonetheless, in a 4S banquet speech following the 4S/FBI episode, I thanked my colleagues for electing me president and giving one type of anarchist an opportunity to help the FBI capture another type of anarchist. A sociologist of mathematics? It figures.

Bibliography Shrum, W. (2001), “We Were the Unabomber,” Science, Technology and Human Values 26(1): 90–101.

CHAPTER 12

The Yin and Yang of Scientific Practice: Philosophers and Sociologists

Preface This chapter explores the concept of “practice” as used by sociologists and philosophers in their studies of “scientific practice.” It begins with a dialogue between the author, a sociologist of scientific practice, and John Paul Van Bendegem, a philosopher of scientific practice. The dialogue was initiated by the author to understand what philosophers of scientific practice do and how what they do differs (if at all) from what sociologists of scientific practice do. This is followed by a YIN discussion of the issues in the framework of the author as a defender of disciplinary boundaries and represents at its extreme a form of disciplinary imperialism. The YANG discussion is based on the need to address disciplinary decadence and to decolonize the disciplines. It takes into account the late twentieth century inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary movements across the fields of inquiry. At the end of these discussions, the question of the meaning of social construction in studies of scientific practice poses a challenge to philosophers of scientific practice: in a world in which humans have evolved as already, always, and everywhere social what is the alternative to “the world” as socially constructed? In order to understand what this question means, I underscore the technical meaning of “social construction” as the fundamental theorem of sociology.

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Overture I have made many claims and offered descriptions of my agendas and my worldview as a sociologist and science and technology studies scholar. I have called myself (and been labelled) a Marxist; a Marxian; an anarchist; a materialist; an advocate of sociological materialism; a defender of the sociological cogito; a conflict theorist; and an anti-philosopher. I have called for the end of epistemology and, indeed, the end of philosophy. My opposition to philosophy has been provoked by the clownish antics of particular philosophers such as John Searle, Daniel Dennett, Richard Boyd, and Selmer Bringsjord. At the same time, I have found some philosophers I could comfortably live with, notably Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and my dear friend Jean Paul Van Bendegem. Against this background the reality is that I have never been anything but (to be appropriately immodest) a Nietzschean thinker. It wouldn’t be going too far to claim that we learn something about thinking from every one of Nietzsche’s sentences, but there are a couple of gems of which I am particularly fond. “Nothing has been more dearly bought,” he writes in Aphorism 18 in Dawn “than the minute portion of human reason and feeling of liberty upon which we now pride ourselves” (Nietzsche, 1881/2007). Hollingdale (1968, p. 7), in his introduction to Nietzsche’s (1889/1968) Twilight of the Gods & The Anti-Christ, writes that Nietzsche teaches us “independence” and philosophy as a discipline that stimulates the mind to become productive and “airborne.” For me, it is not philosophy but science that provokes us “to think well, to think at all, to think differently” (Hollingdale, 1968, p. 8); and we should add “to think critically.” In his letter to his sister Elizabeth (1865), Nietzsche (Middleton, 1969, p. 7) writes: “Faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth. Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”

Introduction To illustrate the nature of my problem with philosophers, consider the case of John Searle. Searle has made himself a student of “the problem of society” without taking into account the decades of work on this problem by sociologists beginning most notably with Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). It is as if some physicist equal in stature and reputation in that field to

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Searle in philosophy had taken on “the problem of relativity” in the late twentieth century, without acknowledging or otherwise demonstrating any knowledge of the works of Albert Einstein. Searle (1992, p. 128) recognized that “other people” must be taken into account if we are going to explain consciousness, but at the start he didn’t know how to do this. He also doesn’t consider whether someone else, some other discipline, has developed ways to do this (as indeed is the case for sociology, anthropology, and social psychology). Instead, five years later, from the comfortable isolation of his philosopher’s rocking chair, he announced that he had “figured out” that social institutions exist as a result of human agreement rooted in the capacity to symbolize. His 1997 book, The Construction of Social Reality intimated a relationship to Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality; but that also didn’t occur to him. In 2010, Searle gave us Making the Social World. Here, working in a sociological vacuum, he invented a “new” discipline devoted to the study of human society: “The Philosophy of Society.” It is important to emphasize that Searle does not understand society as sui generis. It is for him a logical and linguistic phenomenon and not proper subject matter for an empirical science. Things became even more bizarre when Searle, who criticized social contract theory because it assumed language speaking creatures, affirmed a social contract theory based on “meaningful utterings.” In an effort based in equal parts on arrogance and innocence, he claimed that meaningfully uttering individualized humans wilfully get together and form a society (ignoring the fact that all forms of social contract theory violate the evolutionary reality of humans as always, already, and everywhere social.) As for sociology, it has been my tyrant. To paraphrase Freud (1895/1954, pp. 119–120): A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion—in Schiller’s words, a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is sociology, it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and since I hit upon the hard cases of scientific knowledge, mathematics, logic, the brain and god, it has come so much nearer. This chapter was conceived under the gaze of my tyrant. Even then, however, I was already mellowing, giving myself over to a more benign yet more radical and more dangerous passion—thinking. I shall therefore reach less anti-philosophical conclusions in this chapter than I had in mind originally.

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Now a confession. My college mentor was an anthropologist who defended his doctoral dissertation in front of a committee led by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. The first question they asked him was could he define and clarify the concepts of epistemology and ontology. He told them the truth—he could not. They laughed and said they couldn’t either and then turned to the substance of my mentor’s dissertation. This story imbedded a prejudice in me that has led to my keeping my distance from these two concepts (not always successfully) and from philosophy in general. That does not mean that I have avoided reading and absorbing the philosophers I needed to be acquainted with in order to participate in the intellectual dialogues of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, from Plato to Kant, Descartes to Hegel, Merleau-Ponty to Foucault, and Derrida to Derrida. I do not have the kind of (“pseudo”?) sophisticated stand on issues in this realm one finds in the works of, for example, Markus Gabriel (2015). I cannot find a place to stand in a world populated by his sorts of unicorns and apples. I agree with Gabriel that the world, the universe, the cosmos is not just one big container of everything. But I side with David Bohm’s (1971, 1976) Hegelian-Marxist view of the universe as an infinity of things in becoming. On the everyday level of my research, I build up what most philosophers and scientists would call my epistemology, ontology, and ontoepistemology from the street level. This is a ground on which it matters which way you look when you cross the street, where Americans and others who drive on the right side of the road would do well to look down at the directions on London streets to decide which way to look before they step off the curb, and where an American in Paris or Rome would do well to cultivate a flexible neck for crossing their boulevards where you have to look in all directions at once to cross the street safely.

First Movement This particular symphony began when I started to think about two words in the title of a symposium in which I was to speak: scientific practice. My immediate response was: what are philosophers doing here? The study of any kind of practice should come under the disciplinary jurisdiction of sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists. It was sociologists, anthropologists, and recruits to social science from the sciences, engineering, and mathematics who had initiated the on-site study of scientific practice in the 1970s. I thought it wise to ask my philosopher friend of many years, Jean Paul Van Bendegem, what he and his colleagues meant by the

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philosophy of scientific, mathematical, and logical practice. The result was the following dialogue: SR: My dear philosophical friend: what does the philosophy of scientific, mathematical, and logical practice do that the sociology of those practices doesn’t already do? Yours, Simplicio, president of The Pigeon Society. This is a serious question. JP: Dear Sal, Sorry it has taken a bit of time to answer your question, but it is a tough one. An important indication that people studying mathematical practices are themselves not quite certain what it is they do, is that the field is referred to in different ways: “the study of mathematical practice(s)”, “the philosophy of mathematical practice(s)”, or “the philosophy of the study of mathematical practice(s).” If one is not particularly impressed with the philosophical aspects then it seems clear to me that “the study of mathematical practice(s)” will coincide with “the sociology of mathematical practice(s)”. There are however some researchers who have a different agenda: their aim is to show that a study of mathematical practice(s) will show that “traditional” philosophy of mathematics is not asking the questions it should ask and that therefore philosophy of mathematics should refresh its agenda. This need not imply that the study of mathematical practice(s) itself is in whatever way a form of doing philosophy and hence, I think, the confusion at present.

This still leaves the question of course whether there will be a difference between “refreshed” philosophy of mathematics and sociology of mathematics. I am tempted to say yes and my strongest argument is a sociological one. If I can make a sociological difference between the two then it is acceptable to treat them as distinct. But sociologically speaking it seems clear that philosophers of mathematics are asking different questions than sociologists. Ontological statements are good examples, I think. (And this has to be distinguished from a sociological explanation of why philosophers in a given context are asking these kinds of questions). Does all of this make any sense? Best wishes, Jean Paul. SR: This is a helpful beginning. Do you think ontological statements are outside the province of sociology? If ontology is about what a fact is or in other terms what it means to be or to exist or about whether something has the quality of being or existing (do I have this right?) then clearly

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sociology has a concern with ontology. In the matter of God for example the ontological question is resolved by pointing out a mistake in reference. There “is” a God but God does not exist as an entity per se but is rather a symbolic representation of society. It seems then that ontology and facts (Durkheim and Fleck for example) are not the exclusive property of philosophers. Thanks for your ideas. Cheers, Sal JP: A great deal depends, I think, on the phrase “ontological statements are outside the province of sociology”. If it means “Sociologists have nothing to say about ontological statements” then I agree: this is horribly wrong. Philosophers are still human beings in a social context, saying stuff about things, and that can always be analysed sociologically. What I meant in my previous mail is that if we do a kind of Turing test for sociology and philosophy where you have to listen to two lectures, one by a sociologist, one by a philosopher, will you be able to tell who is who? There I think the answer is yes. In that sense they have different practices. If so, the question becomes what the differences are and that is a hard problem. All of this does imply, it seems to me, that indeed philosophers can never claim that this or that topic can only be dealt with by them and no one else. In that sense the same story can be told when putting mathematicians and sociologists together (and here I am quite confident that you agree!). Does this help to shed some more light on what I have in mind? SR: Let’s consider a Turing test designed to test whether we can tell if a philosopher of practice is speaking or if a sociologist of practice is speaking. Take a specific practice, some observable behaviour that any healthy adult without any special qualifications could describe in answer to the question: What is that person doing? Imagine then someone writing with chalk on a blackboard in a language or using symbols unknown to our naïve observer. Our observer could report that “S/he is writing with chalk on a blackboard.” This would already require participating in a culture that has writing, writers, chalk, and blackboards. Let’s look at this situation again and assume that the writer is writing mathematical equations on the blackboard. Given an observer asked to report this behaviour—writing equations on the blackboard—this could only be achieved as part of a problem-solving process—“What is going on here?

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Intervention Vocabularies of motive is a concept introduced by the literary critic Kenneth Burke (1945/1969) in his outline of the five dramatistic terms: who, what, when, where, and why? The term was first developed sociologically by C.  Wright Mills (1940) to capture the language by which people describe their motivations and account for their conduct. The important point is that Mills’ idea is not rooted in a psychology of motivation: he was not interested here in needs, drives, or inner compulsions, as was, for example, Sigmund Freud. Rather, his concern was with the ways in which people talk about their motives in particular social contexts. Motivational talk is usually part of a wider ideology, such that certain stated motives will be much more acceptable in given contexts than in others, and motivational statements are hence relative. For instance, irrespective of the underlying psychological motivation, a thief may make different motivational claims about his thieving behaviour to his peers, his family, the courtroom, to a criminologist, or even to him-or herself. The contexts and significant others shift what will be said in the motivational account. Let’s now go back to our blackboard. From a perspective and using their professional vocabulary and vocabulary of motives. everyone with the necessary senses and cultural preparedness can “see” someone writing symbols on the blackboard but they will tell different stories. The simplest story would be “someone is writing with chalk on the blackboard. I don’t understand what s/he is writing and I don’t understand why s/he is writing on the blackboard.” Other stories would be variously told from the phenomenological to the empirical/empiricist to the speculative and theoretical. A suitably trained mathematician could tell a very detailed story about what was going on at the blackboard and put it into historical and contemporary contexts using the technical vocabulary of the mathematician for the most part. The sociologist would report what is going on in a vocabulary that used words like “social class,” “sociohistorical context,” “status,” “power,” “social roles,” “discourse networks,” “social achievement,” etc. There could be some overlap in their stories, but at the end of the day they would tell different stories. Is one story better than the other or simply different? The stories about scientific practice told between 1500 and 1970 by scientists, science watchers, journalists, science worshippers, historians, philosophers, and even sociologists were impoverished compared to those told by philosophers, historians, and sociologists beginning

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in the middle of the twentieth century. They were impoverished because they were not grounded in the actual practices of scientists. Sociologists led by Mannheim and Merton, for example, left the social construction of facts out of their stories—Mannheim claimed there could be no sociology of 2+2=4. Merton, the first president of the Society for Social Studies of Science, was suspicious of the idea that facts were socially constructed. The Mertonians recognized that there was a community of scientists that sociologists had access to; the facts the scientists invented or discovered were not accessible to the sociologists. Among historians and philosophers of mathematics, Kitcher (1983) was among those who understood mathematics was a community affair but he was infected by the “it has to be rational” virus. Everything changed already by the 1970s when sociologists entered laboratories with their ethnographic tools, tools unavailable to philosophers and historians except in rough, rusted, and truncated forms, if at all. Now for the first time we had on-site detailed studies of scientific practice and we didn’t have to rely any longer on logical and speculative musings about what science is or should be. In recruiting people for this study of “what is going on here,” it is important to keep Wittgenstein’s (1999/1922, p. 27) caution in mind: “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent” (Proposition 7 in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1922]). Interpreting this broadly, I would apply it as follows: Some people should be prevented by law from commenting on some things. John Searle should shut up about “society;” Stephen Hawking should shut up about “God” (he has but not willingly). I should not be allowed to lecture about brain surgery per se. This line of thought has been complicated by the interdisciplinarity of today’s scholarship. So perhaps everyone is entitled to tell his or her story, but I think story tellers should be up to the task of their subject matter. Not everyone should be asked or answer the question “Is O.J.  Simpson innocent or guilty,” especially before all the evidence is in. So, Roger Penrose should stop talking about brains and minds. Daniel Dennett should stop talking about consciousness. Steven Pinker should just shut up. Are there also sociologists who should just shut up? Yes—Nick Rose. He was originally trained in biology and this predisposes him to biologizing sociology and makes him arguably at best a pseudo-sociologist; all the more reason he should shut up and leave more room for his sociologically

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c­ ompetent neuroscientist brother Steven Rose and sister-in-law sociologist Hilary Rose.

Of course, I’m not literally asking these distinguished scholars to “shut up.” I simply want to draw attention to the problem of “having opinions” as a form of free speech, especially in the academy. The spread of information and communication technologies embodied in social media that give everyone a public voice, and the media a reason to use these technologies to actively engage people at random in polls and interviews, is fuel for the alternative facts universe. Summa Sociologica: Ceteris Paribus, only sociologists have ALL the tools in their most refined and up to date forms to study human behaviour, human practices. Further, there are many accounts in principle for any given event. Accounts should have a rationale and their relevance should be manifested. Accounts are not all equal and are not all imagined as having to be tied to evidence. Those that are by definition tied to evidence are the most reliable and valid for those who are interested in facts of the matter.

Second Movement In order to bring some focus to my discussion, I am going to examine the mission statement of the Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice. I am going to approach that statement, however, by way of wandering for a while in the landscape of practice and, in particular, navigating the “practical turn.” In order for the term “practice” modified by “social” (so social practice) to refer, humans must be collectively engaged in recurring, sustained and patterned activities of doing and making. Strictly construing the hierarchy of disciplines and disciplinary boundaries, the study of practice comes under the jurisdiction of the social sciences. In particular, sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists are the only scientists with the requisite skills, training, tools, and experience needed to study and report on social practices. We are forced by the empirical reality of disciplinary transgressions to drop a strict constructionist interpretation of disciplinary jurisdiction. In the light of real-world events, the strict constructionist, the disciplinary imperialist, can appear to be an idiosyncratic discipliner of disciplines. So, we are forced to admit and accept that the study of social practice is a free for all. Why is social practice a free for

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all? Certainly, relatively speaking, physics, chemistry, and biology are not free-for-alls. What is it about social practice that makes it a free-for-all, a game anyone can play—journalists, scientists, social critics, random folks walking the street, and philosophers of all shapes and sizes? It is the intuitive transparency (an illusion) of human behaviour, there for all to see, reinforced by the fallacy of the introspective transparency of our own behaviour.

Third Movement: The Practice Turn I take the 2001 publication, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, as a site for investigating the basic issues and stakeholders in the study of scientific practice. The book is a limited example of the free-for-all to which I referred earlier, involving contributions from eight sociologists, four philosophers, and three hybrids: sociologically-inspired philosophers/ philosophically-­inspired sociologists. The book was edited by three well-­ known scholars, the sociologist and S&TS researcher Karin Knorr-Cetina, and two philosophers, Theodore Schatzki and Eike von Savigny. Schatzki (2001) identified the motivations for the turn to practice. First, it is an effort to move away from dualisms and traditional ways of thinking. In this sense, it can be viewed at least in part as a child of postmodernism. I can endorse this effort as part of the move toward interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary scholarship. This move developed in the mid- to late twentieth century as a reaction to confronting the increasing awareness of the complexity of contemporary problems of the disciplines and of society at large and the widening failures of our reigning rationalities, our categories and classifications. Second, the turn to practice opposed approaching the science of society in terms of “objectified” social structures and systems. This reveals the turn to practice as an effort to save agency and free will from the causal science of a structuralist, materialist, causal sociology championed by sociologists like Randall Collins and myself. (It should be noted that even in our collaborations, Collins has been friendlier to philosophers than I have been.) The third motivation was rooted in the development of S&TS’s focus on scientific activity as opposed to (a) the traditional focus in the sociology, philosophy, and history of science on representation, and (b) the humanist dichotomy between human and non-human entities or actors.

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The challenge to dualism is well-grounded and I can support that without reservation. The philosophers at the centre of this challenge mentioned in this volume are Wittgenstein, H.  Dreyfus and C.  Taylor. Wittgenstein added anthropological weight to this trio of philosophers. Their sociological counterparts included Boudreau, Giddens, and the ethnomethodologists. One can see here a sociological effort to support some form of structuralism and, at the same time, save agency and free will (notably in Giddens’ structuration theory). The ethnomethodologists were escapees from what they view as the iron cage of a causal, structural, materialist science of society, indeed from science itself. The cultural theory counterparts to these thinkers were represented by Foucault and Lyotard and, again, we find a concern with saving agency and free will. The problem with the S&TS contingent in this arena was not the focus on activity, but the championing of non-human entities as factors, indeed partners with humans, in the making of society and social change. This is the foundation of actor-network theory which (whatever its virtues) is an effort that undermines causal sociological thinking and tries to save agency and free will. If we take Bruno Latour as its titular leader, ANT is a coup that restores the dynasty of the metaphysicians, opposed to science, sociology, and philosophy. The upshot of all this is that “practice” displaces mind as the central feature of human life. Fine so far. The mind, as Gilbert Ryle argued in The Concept of Mind (1949) is not a Cartesian entity; it is not a ghost in a machine; it is not a different kind of stuff than the brain or the body. It is possible, Ryle argues, to dispense with talk about mental life and to translate mind talk into behaviour talk. In short, the mind is nothing more (nor less) than what we do. Viewing mind, or more generally mentality, as what we do brings us into the realm of the priority of practice. Whatever our take on practice, it is important not to distance ourselves from the conclusion that talk about “shared practice” and “agreement in practice” is not compatible with individualism (Turner, 2001, p.  120). These terms can only be identified with a strongly sociological account of social life, an account that understands accomplishments—doing and making—as collective activities of human beings sustaining their social lives. Such human beings “cannot be understood as independent calculative, individuals; they stand revealed in their practice as profoundly interdependent, mutually susceptible social agents” (Barnes, in Knorr-Cetina et al., 2001, p. 26).

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Social order arises out of and is sustained by “a complex evolving nexus of interwoven practices” (Schatzki, in Knorr-Cetina et al., 2001, p. 55). This statement suggests that at least some philosophers can grasp the social nature of humans; the question is can they grasp the radically social nature of humans as always, already, and everywhere social and the social construction implications of this fact? All practices are not equal. Some, known as “anchoring practices,” “play key roles in reproducing larger systems of discourse and practice.” Some public ritual practices are central to reproducing constitutive rules (Swidler, in Knorr-Cetina et al., 2001, pp. 90–91). Rules take us back to Wittgenstein and thinking of rules as institutions. We find the meaning of a concept in its use; thus “technology” equals “technology-in-use” and “concept” means “concept-in-use.” This establishes the priority of practice and the sociologist’s interest in practice. The focus on practice suggests to Pickering (in Knorr-Cetina et  al., 2001, p. 164) that the sociology of the visible is enough; we do not need to assume a search for hidden structures in our explanations: “Nothing in Fleck’s account of the Wassermann reaction is hidden.” All there is, is “the mutual tuning of material procedures and human agents.” This suggests that practices are—in a strongly phenomenological sense—“visible-in-­ and-of-themselves,” a suggestion too closely remindful of the “thing-in-­ itself.” Whether there might indeed be something hidden here is suggested by Knorr-Cetina’s argument (in Knorr-Cetina et al., 2001, p. 186) that the conjuncture of the relational and libidinal dimensions gives practice a flavour and quality distinctly different from that of routines and habits. Let us assume that we can, on the basis of this review, construct a mutually-­ agreeable definition or conception of “practice.” With this promise in mind let me now turn to what the philosophers claim to be doing when they turn their attention to scientific practice. In the wake of my earlier dialogue with Jean Paul, let’s take up his “The Who and What of the Philosophy of Mathematical Practices” (van Bendegem, 2018: 55–56) and see if we recognize in his paper anything that resonates with our review of concepts of practice. Whereas the sociologists and philosophers in The Practical Turn identify Wittgenstein and Heidegger as their starting points, Jean Paul begins with Lakatos. (His focus, remember, is already on mathematical practice and not on practice per se.) Jean Paul acknowledges that choosing an historical starting point or turning point is partly reconstructive and symbolic. With that in mind, his starting point is Lakatos’ Proofs and

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Refutations (1976), a work inspired by Polya’s How to Solve It (1945). In the case of Lakatos, the logic of discovery was beginning to converge with the practice of discovery. He analyses the proofs for the statement that for polyhedra in 3-dimensional Euclidean space V(ertices) − E(deges) + F(ace s) = 2. Notice that he refers to “proofs” not “a” or “the” proof. The plural is an anticipation of the pluralization of unities and dualisms characteristic of postmodernist movements in the mid- to late twentieth century. The bottom line of Lakatos’ analysis is that proofs have histories. They do not appear ab novo as once-and-for-all phenomena. Moreover, Lakatos discovered that there were patterns in the unfolding of proof histories, patterns of proofs and refutations. With Kitcher (1983), we begin to see the emergence of an awareness that by including aspects of mathematical work usually excluded in formal, logicist views of mathematical theory we get closer to the ways in which mathematicians actually work. Kitcher was on the threshold, already blurred by the science studies movement, between a purely formal, Platonic view of mathematics and a fully sociological view of mathematics as discourse and practice. Teetering on this blurring threshold, Kitcher felt he had no recourse even while defending mathematics as a community practice to defend mathematics as a rational enterprise. But wait! To be rational is to adopt a certain culturally defined epistemology and ontology. This threshold philosophy of mathematics stands at the intersection of where Lakatos meets Kuhn. This tension has characterized the study of mathematics up to the present day. What we have here is a version of the classical tension in the philosophy of science between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In mathematics, as in science generally, this reveals itself as the assumption that the search for a proof is independent of the “finished” proof. The justification for the proof then proceeds by checking its formal correctness and validity. This view is opposed by Lakatos and defended with caveats by Kitcher. Notice that by assuming an unbridgeable gap between discovery and justification scientists can claim that while science is a social enterprise, scientific facts are independent of history, society, culture, and time and space. Still in 2008, in Mancosu’s edited volume on The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, the two main traditions leading to the new practice paradigm are Lakatosian and Kitcherian. If this is the first tension, the second tension brings sociologists into the picture as educationalists and ethnomathematicians.

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After further perambulations through the history of mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics, Jean Paul notes: 1. Practices are “carried” by people; 2. People have to be educated. 3. 1 & 2 establish the link with education. 4. Practices are socially embedded and thus culturally situated; 5. 3 & 4 forge the link with ethnomathematics. Completing this history for the moment gives us the following approaches to the philosophy of mathematical practice: • The Lakatosian approach (“maverick” tradition); • The descriptive analytical naturalizing approach; • The normative analytical naturalizing approach; • The sociology of mathematics approach; • The mathematics educationalist approach; • The ethnomathematical approach; • The evolutionary biology of mathematics; • The cognitive psychology of mathematics Given this review, Jean Paul asked if we might be dealing with a division of labour. He rejects this because such a division suggests all the parts can be put together “to form a minimally coherent whole.” This is not the case here, so what is to be done? Jean Paul writes that we should develop a greater coherence in the field and keep the conversation going—“with the other philosophers of mathematics.” Surely, though, in a field that involves doing, and behaving, discourses and practices, sociologists, social psychologists, and anthropologists should be part of the conversation? Yet what part should they play?

YIN I am of two minds on this question. In a YIN framework, I am a tyrannosociologist rex. To reiterate my paraphrase of Freud (1954/1895): A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion—in Schiller’s words a tyrant. My tyrant is sociology, so from this perspective I am all about protecting disciplinary territories and jurisdictions.

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Along with my colleagues, I have been specifically trained and educated to observe, report, and theorize human behaviour. I have a toolkit with tools and measuring devices and observational skills designed for this purpose. These are adapted for the world of human activity in social and cultural environments. Philosophers are not trained and educated in this way, however. Their toolkit is restricted to logical and linguistic devices that do not plug into the world of human activity, but tend to stand and operate apart from it. So, by virtue of training and education, they have no business studying scientific, mathematical, or any other kind of practice. That they are drawn to scientific and mathematical practice is based on a view of science and math as in fact standing apart from the world, accessible only to the tools of logic and language. Where, for example, is the philosophy of criminal practice, or sexual practice, or political practice? Of course, there are philosophies of these kinds but one would hardly call them studies of criminal behaviour, or sexual behaviour, or political behaviour in any sense that competes with sociological and anthropological studies. In this sense, philosophers have crowned themselves the arbiters of all things on the assumptions that all things reduce to the movement of logical and linguistic symbols, signs, and tokens through a Platonic aether. They have nothing to contribute to the study of scientific practice.

YANG On the other hand, there is a YANG perspective one can adopt here. Robert Pirsig’s (1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance taught us that there are many paths to the same truths. Maybe that’s just Zen bullshit, but perhaps it is true, and philosophers and sociologists travel different paths to arrive at converging or complementary truths of scientific practice. Do the paths converge; diverge; run parallel? I am willing to ignore that question and grant that both groups can be expected to at least arrive at truth points and, from there, communicate what they find to each other. In a less metaphysical framework with which I am infinitely more comfortable, we can simply abandon the labels and practices of disciplines. I agree with the efforts of Lewis Gordon (2006) and others to decolonize the disciplines. This involves in part critiquing Euro-West-Centrism (Prasad, 2016). Disciplines, however, like selves and perhaps all cultural entities, are large and contain multitudes (in Walt Whitman’s sense). Let us keep in mind, with Hacking (2006), that disciplines are administrative

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and educational categories. So, as we see new pathways in the light of such criticisms, let us not be so quick to see fixes in inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary movements, as they are equally subject to the same criticisms. They are experimental solutions to the colonizing, arbitrary, and administrative nature of disciplines, while also being legitimate means of dealing with the increasing complexity of problems at all levels in our contemporary world. They are however, contaminated by Euro-Western Centrism, so what is to be done? Our efforts to get ourselves out of disciplinary ruts is part of the quality of multitudes of the disciplines themselves. Every word is a multitude. Perhaps we can resolve things by returning, not to disciplines, but to disciplines-­in-use, to multitudes-in-use; here is where we should locate the intentions, motives, ethics, and values of any discipline. In this sense, the lower the multitude quotient of a discipline, the more decadent it is. Unless we make such a move, we will find ourselves confronted by a decolonizing barrier at every turn. Let’s be clear that decolonizing here is restricted to modern science as it has been bred and nurtured in the West. We do not want to find ourselves in the position of arguing that cross-culturally relevant facts of science cannot be forged within ethnosciences, including modern Western science. The Chinese, Indians, Americans, and Russians who want to send a rocket to the moon will not get there by criticizing the tyranny of the ideal rocket equation as an imperialist child of Euro-Western science. In order to reach low Earth orbit from the ground, your delta-v must equal at least 9.4 km/sec. To get that value you’ll need to adjust the other variables in the equation. Initial mass (m0): The total mass of your spacecraft plus the mass of your fuel tanks and fuel; Final mass (m1): The total mass of your spacecraft after the take-off manoeuvre is complete; and the effective exhaust velocity (ve): This is basically how much thrust your spacecraft can produce. No matter where we launch on the planet and no matter who launches, in what language, from what nation, society, or culture—given a starting point and a destination, the energy expenditure to escape Earth’s gravity is a given. In choosing a propellant for our spacecraft, we (East, West, North, or South) are constrained by the amount of energy that can be extracted from a chemical reaction—combustion of a fuel and oxidizer. When we take on Science as a form of Western imperialism or an ethno-­ science, we need to make our point without stranding or blowing up our rockets. Chinese ethnoscience gave us the compass that works everywhere;

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Indian ethnoscience gave us zero as a number and trigonometric functions. As long as science unfolds continuously over time, collectively and with generational continuity, ethno-impurities will be filtered out and we will get ideas and things that work on the human stage free of an ethnic stamp, though not free of any human or social stamp. In the YANG perspective we should think of the disciplines in a similar way. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let us pursue our inquiries without being constrained or stopped in our tracks by disciplinary police officers.

The Social & Social Construction Revisited This does not mean that I can let philosophy of scientific practice off the hook. Against the background of all that we now know about defining practice, the practical turn, and the reality of multitudes, let us examine the mission statement of the Society for the Philosophy of Scientific Practice. This statement includes the claim that science and technology studies wilfully disregards “the world except as a product of social construction.” Is it true that the predominant tendency in science studies is to wilfully disregard the world except as a product of social construction? Yes—what other way is there to consider the world? The philosophers who wrote the mission statement, along with many philosophers and scientists, failed to understand the meaning of “social construction.” The philosophers assumed “social construction” is a philosophical idea subject to philosophical analysis and deconstruction, when in fact it is a scientific concept and the fundamental theorem of scientific sociology. To some extent, the criticism of social construction is based on the myth of individualism and the widespread contamination of social thought across the disciplines by “dissocism,” the inability to “see” the social as a nexus of causal forces. The theorem is grounded in the findings of evolutionary sociology and in particular in the concept that humans, as the most social of the eusocial species, are always, already, and everywhere social. Social scientists have been making this point, in more or less radical versions, for more than two centuries. The most direct and detailed defence of this idea has been made by E.O.  Wilson in his The Social Conquest of Earth (2013; and see Gorney, 1972), The upshot of this is that we can only know the world by way of our social interactions with each other, in human made and natural earth bound (planetary) environments. This is all that social construction claims. The challenge to philosophers is to propose an alternative to social construction that gives us access

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to “the world” without invoking the radically social nature of human beings. Anything short of this will prove to be one or another version of naïve realism. This failure to understand the nature of “the social” is already evident in the Dieudonné challenge. Jean Dieudonné (1906–1992) was a French mathematician associated with the pseudonymous Nicholas Bourbaki group. The challenge is to show how society can influence how mathematics is done. Specifically, Dieudonné’s challenge is (1982, p. 23): To the person who will explain to me why the social setting of the small German courts of the 18th century wherein Gauss lived forced him inevitably to occupy himself with the construction of a 17-sided regular polygon, well, to him I will give a chocolate medal.

The problem here is that “the social” does not start and end with society writ large (the macro-level) nor with social organizations, social institutions, groups, cliques, and networks. The “emerging research discipline” Jean Paul Van Bendegem refers to in the closing sentence of his paper on “The Who and What of the Philosophy of Mathematical Practices” already exists in the sociology of mathematics. The emerging discipline Jean Paul has in mind “has the power to let us see mathematics as we have never seen it before because we were looking at the sky and did not notice what was happening at our feet.” But this is precisely the virtue of the relationship between macro- and micro-sociology. That said, Jean Paul is able to give a sociological answer to Dieudonné’s challenge inspired by my remark (Restivo, 2011, p. 47) that “The sociological way is first to look to both “external” and “internal” contexts, networks, and organizations.” I give the sociological details here as they are presented by Jean Paul (Van Bendegem, 2018, pp. 55–56): So how did life at the small German courts of the eighteenth century force Gauss to occupy himself with the construction of a 17-sided regular polygon? Of course, if the answer is to show a direct connection, the task is outright silly. But, if we are allowed to have a broader outlook, then we could think of the following. What were the political-social-circumstances that gave rise to a system such as the small German courts of the eighteenth century? This question is answerable and it will also shed light on the status of the sciences, including mathematics, during that process. We will understand why mathematicians were given the opportunity to continue their work and we will probably also understand why particular

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concepts were deemed more important than others, e.g., because of theological connections [e.g., infinity]. This in its turn invites us to see how the relative isolation of the mathematics at these courts, led to an internal dynamic wherein certain topics were favoured over others, where the research community of the eighteenth century mathematicians decided what problems were interesting and what problems not, to a certain extent co-determined by societal elements. Now we can focus on the internal, more local development and understand the importance of the study of polygons and, if we focus on the most detailed micro-level, the importance of the 17-sided regular polygon. Then we see Gauss drawing such a polygon and understand the social act that he is performing. What better example could we give of convergence between sociology and philosophy that argues against disciplinary imperialism and for the blurring (if not the elimination) of the traditional academic disciplines as professionalized and bureaucratized arenas of inquiry? Philosophers like John Searle are perfectly comfortable “theorizing” about society as if they are its first discoverers. The concept of consciousness is a perennial challenge to thought; philosophers and philosophically-inclined scientists carry out their inquiries without knowledge of, or without concerning themselves with, the works of G.H. Mead or the possibility that they are looking for consciousness in the wrong places. Perhaps some of us outside philosophy have already identified the nature and locus of consciousness (see Charles Whitehead, editor, On the Origin of Consciousness in the Social World, 2008). Here I exempt Nietzsche from the realm of myopic philosophers; he long ago recognized, along with Durkheim and Marx, that consciousness is a network of social relations. So, what is the mission of the philosophy of scientific practice; what does it do that sociologists of science do not already do? Are the fields complementary, supplementary to each other or what? The focus: Mission Statement of the Society for the Philosophy of Scientific Practice (http://philosophy-­science-­practice.org/about/ mission-­statement/: Philosophy of science has traditionally focused on the relation between scientific theories and the world, at the risk of disregarding scientific practice. In social studies of science and technology, the predominant tendency has been to pay attention to scientific practice and its relation to theories, sometimes wilfully disregarding the world except as a product of social construction. Both approaches have their merits, but they each offer only a limited

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view, neglecting some essential aspects of science. Consider a philosophy of scientific practice, based on an analytic framework that takes into consideration theory, practice and the world simultaneously: Philosophers have ignored scientific practice; Science studies researchers have ignored the world.

The first point is true; the second point is false. The truth of the first point I shall take as self-evident. The falsity of the second point I shall have to explain, and my explanation comes in the form of a question to the philosophers: what alternative is there to the world as a social construction? First, I insist that social construction cannot be defined any way you wish and that the definer cannot be someone from outside of sociology (including anthropology and social psychology). Just as I cannot decide how to define the mass of an electron (this comes under the jurisdiction of the physicists), philosophers cannot decide how to define social construction. So let me tell you what it means. It is not a philosophical concept any more than the mass of an electron is a philosophical concept; if you insist that it is a philosophical concept in the same way that the mass of an electron is (that is, accessible to philosophical inquiry), then I will grant that it is a concept that can be analysed and deconstructed logically and linguistically in the same way. But this does not impact the concept of the mass-­ of-­the-electron-in-use within physics. Similarly, the philosophy of social construction does not impact the concept of social construction-in-use as the fundamental theorem of sociology. The philosophy of social construction destroys its essence and meaning in sociology. The term social as in social construction is not a synonym for political, religious economic, or ideological, nor does it connote or denote false or arbitrary. To say that facts (scientific or otherwise) are socially constructed is not to say that they are false, arbitrary, fabricated out of thin air, or the direct causal products of external political, religious, economic, or ideological forces. Social construction is the fundamental theorem of sociology The social construction of science refers to the moment-to-moment, day-to-day, night-to-night minutiae of materially and culturally grounded social interactions that make up the social processes and institutions of invention and discovery. The social is not only in the external social and cultural milieu or contexts of science but in the social organization of science, and indeed in scientists themselves. The social in this sense is pervasive and no more transparent than quantum or gravitational forces.

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Conclusion: For the Philosophers • Given that humans are always, already, and everywhere social; • That they interact with each other and their environments as social entities through and through; • That these interactions are manifested in the fundamental theorem of sociology (including anthropology and social psychology); • That that theorem embodies the reality that facts as inventions and discoveries are manufactured by humans as social beings interacting in social networks networked to local, regional, and global environments and social ecologies; • It follows that we can only know the world as a social construction. • The challenge to philosophers is therefore three-fold: 1.  Demonstrate that the radically social nature of humans (as sketched in Wilson, 2013)—that they are always, already, and everywhere social and the most social of the eusocial species—is wrong or limited in some way; 2. Demonstrate that if (1.) is wrong the “world as a social construction” is wrong; 3. Accepting that humans are radically social, offer an empiricallygrounded alternative to the “world as a social construction.”

Bibliography Bohm, D. (1971), Chance and Causality in Modern Physics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Bohm, D. (1976), Fragmentation and Wholeness: An Inquiry into the Function of Language and Thought (New York: Humanities Press). Burke, K. (1945/1969), The Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Dieudonné, J. (1982), “Mathématiques vides et mathématiques signifi catives,” 15–38, in F. Guénard and G. Lelièvre (eds.), Penser les mathématiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Freud, S. (1954), The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887–1902 (New York: Basic Books). Gabriel, M. (2015), Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press). Gordon, L. (2006), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers).

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Gorney, R. (1972), The Human Agenda (New York: Simon & Schuster). Hacking, I. (2006), “Making Up People,” London Review of Books 28(16–17): 23–26. Hollingdale, R.J. (1968), “Introduction,” 7–17, in F. Nietzsche (ed.), Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ (New York: Penguin Books; orig. publ. 1889/1895). Kitcher, P. (1983), The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press). Lakatos, I. (1976), Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mancuso, P., ed. (2008), The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice (New York: Oxford University Press). Middleton, C. (1969), Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Mills, C.W. (1940), “Siituated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” American Sociological Review 5(6): 904–913. Nietzsche, F. (1881/2007), The Dawn of Day (Mineola, NY: Dover). Nietzsche, F. (1968), The Will to Power (New York: Vintage). This book is based on Nietzsche’s notebooks from 1883–1888. It is a treasure house of ideas on mind, thinking, and consciousness. Pirsig, R. (1974), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (New York: William Morrow). Polya, G. (1945), How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Prasad, A. (2016), “Discursive Contextures of Science: Euro/West-Centrism and Science and Technology Studies,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2: 193–207. Restivo, S. (2011), “Bruno Latour: The Once and Future Philosopher,” 520–540, in G. Ritzer and J. Stepinsky (eds.), The New Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists (Boston: Blackwell). Ryle, G. (1949), The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Schatzki, T.R. (2001), “Introduction,” 10–23, in T.R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina, and E. von Savigny (eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (New York: Routledge). Searle, J. (1992), The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Turner, S. (2001), “Throwing Out the Tacit Rule Book: Learning and Practices,” 129–139, in T.R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina, and E. von Savigny, (eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (New York: Routledge). van Bendegem, J.P. (2018), “The Who and What of the Philosophy of Mathematical Practices,” 39–60, in P. Ernest (ed), The Philosophy of Mathematics Education Today (New York: Springer). Whitehead, C., ed. (2008), The Origin of Consciousness in the Social World (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic). Wilson, E. O. (2013), The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright). Wittgenstein, L. (1999/1922), Tractatus, Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

CHAPTER 13

Requiem for Plato: The Sociology of Mathematics

All thought, in its early stages, begins as action. The actions which you [King Arthur] have been wading through have been ideas, clumsy ones of course, but they had to be established as a foundation before we could begin to think in earnest. Merlyn the Magician (White 2011: 14) A young Brazilian woman, Mônica Mesquita, applies for a visa to go to the United States to study the sociology of mathematics with Sal Restivo. Her friend and teacher in São Paulo, Ubiratan D’Ambrosio, has advised her to do this. When she tells the visa official why she wants to go to the United States, he refuses to grant her visa. He spreads his hands as far apart as he can and says: “Sociology? Mathematics? IMPOSSIBLE!”

This chapter draws on research materials used in preparing three contributions to the sociology of mathematics: Restivo and Collins (1982), Collins and Restivo (1983), and Restivo (1983a). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_13

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The Stage Is Set Karl Mannheim and Oswald Spengler defended diametrically opposed positions on the possibility of a sociology of mathematics. Mannheim argued that mathematics is exempt from sociological explanation; mathematics is not an ideology, and mathematical truths are not culturally relative. This view has been reinforced by Pythagoreans and Platonists who believe that mathematical truths are eternal objects that exist independently of the flux of historical experience. Most historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science traditionally adopted a Mannheimian view of mathematics. Spengler, on the other hand, held that mathematics is culturally relative; each culture has its own conception of number. Only Durkheim, Marx, and Wittgenstein rivalled Spengler in his grasp of the anthropology of mathematics. While Spengler’s notion of the “soul” of a civilization cannot provide the basis for an adequate sociological analysis, his goal of explaining mathematics (in terms of the particular social and historical forms in which it is produced) is one that makes good sociological sense. Spengler’s (1926: 56–70) argument can be summarized in two statements: (1) There is no such thing as number-in-itself. There are several number-worlds, as there are several cultures; and (2) There is no Mathematik, but only mathematics. Spengler’s objective in his analysis of “number” is to exemplify the way in which a soul seeks to actualize itself in the picture of its outer world—to show, that is, how far culture in the “become” state can express or portray an idea of human existence. He chooses number because (1) all of mathematics is founded on number, (2) mathematics, fully accessible to only a few of our kind, holds a peculiar position among our mental creations. The chapter on number (the chapter I have been told, by many colleagues, that nobody reads) has been prominently placed at the beginning of his treatise because it is a key to understanding humans and culture. The “peculiar position” of mathematics rests on the fact that it is at once a science, an art, and a metaphysic, as well as fuller and more comprehensive than logic. Spengler draws two analogies in sketching the nature and origin of number. Number is a symbol of causal necessity. Like God, it embodies the ultimate meaning of the natural world, and like myth, number originated in the naming processes through which humans sought to gain power over nature, power over their world. Nature, the numerable, is contrasted with history, the aggregate of all things that have no relationship to number.

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One of the key ingredients of Spengler’s general perspective is the idea that Cultures are incommensurable. Another is his view of historical change as cyclical. It follows from these two keys that we should not think of mathematical development as unilinear or following a logical sequence. Numbers in all their forms and complexities are world views. There is a limit to the naturalistic approach to number. There do appear to be certain characteristics of numbers and mathematics that have very wide-ranging validity. One plus one equals two seems to possess this nature. Yet, along with items like this that seem to be independent of Culture and century, there is a necessity of form that underlies the cognizing individual’s thoughts. This necessity of form is axiomatic, and the individual is subject to it by virtue of belonging to one culture and no other. The frontier between these two different kinds of a priori thought is, according to Spengler, unlikely to ever be defined, let alone demonstrated. We can derive two working hypotheses from Spengler’s views on numbers and Cultures. First, he claims that the greatest mathematicians have made their decisive discoveries driven by a religious intuition. This is consistent with his idea that numbers and the world view of a Culture are profoundly related. Second, he claims further that mathematical insight and intuition do not require the science of mathematics. The invention of the boomerang required only a feeling for higher geometry. Sociologists of mathematics have boldly challenged Platonism in mathematics, but they have been hesitant to tackle Spengler. His ideas must seem mad to both those inside and outside mathematics and science for whom number relations are self-evident. There are, nonetheless, insiders and outsiders who have challenged the self-evidence of mathematics, metaphorically and mathematically. Dostoevsky (1864/2020: 37) for example, wrote: …twice-two-makes-four is not life, gentlemen. It is the beginning of death. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of insolence… a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice-two-makes four is an excellent thing; but if we are to give everything its due, twice-two-makes-five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

In 1984, George Orwell (1949: 223) reversed the metaphor 2 + 2 = 4, the interrogator O’Brien tells Winston. But sometimes they sum to five and sometimes to three; sometimes they are all those sums at once. Challenging

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2 + 2 = 4 is not simply a matter of literary privilege. Mathematicians and historians of mathematics also find mathematical reasons to challenge conventional wisdom. Everyday arithmetic does not apply in all of nature’s settings. We have to consider each situation in order to know how our arithmetic applies. This can get quite sophisticated and technically intricate, but here’s a simple example: If I place one apple next to another apple, I can describe the situation with simple arithmetic: 1 + 1 = 2. If I use the same arithmetical paradigm to describe two clouds coming together, I get 1 + 1 = 1. We can actually construct viable algebras based on 1  +  1  =  1. The rationale for pursuing a sociology of mathematics is already signalled in Durkheim’s (1912/1995: 433ff.), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In the closing pages, he introduces the idea that logical concepts are collective representations; they are communal creations. The project of the sociology of mathematics involves examining (1) the development of mathematics, or more generally, number work, at different times in the same and different cultures; (2) identifying noted mathematicians and examining their social positions in the network of their peers, and how they stood as workers or professionals relative to other workers and professionals; (3) considering the social conditions inside and outside of the networks of number workers and mathematicians and the social dynamics of progress, stagnation, decline, and recovery; and (4) inquiring into the degree of “community” and institutional autonomy among mathematicians, and the nature, diversity, and relations among different specializations across historical epochs and cultures.

The Variety of Mathematical Experiences It is possible to reconstruct a logical, historical development of mathematics. Yet this development is variable across cultures, not inevitable. It is not a self-generated logical unfolding, as Platonists might infer. The horizonal variations are a straightforward confirmation of Spengler’s thesis. So are the long-term trends, as we can see if we remove our Platonist lenses. These mathematical developments are socially determined. The long-term development of mathematics shows cumulative results, but not without interruptions. Nor does the cumulative development of mathematics unfold in a single cultural or civilizational area. Concepts of truth and proof change over time; sociologists of mathematics, however, want to know why. What accounts for the end of a development (such as the

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calculus in ancient Greece) and its resurgence at a later period (notably in the period during which Newton and Leibniz worked)? What determines which mathematicians make and which get credit for major advances? Mathematics is driven to two ways. In its earliest stages of development, it is driven by everyday needs and wants. People have to do number work to parcel out territories, construct structures from dams to cathedrals and pyramids, and to sort out trades and exchanges. As civilizations develop into large scale agricultural and industrial forms, number workers and then more specialized mathematicians are called on to solve problems of navigation, ballistics, and economics. Once mathematics becomes institutionally autonomous, it begins to generate its own problems, which are increasingly disconnected from everyday social needs and wants. This is the origin of abstract mathematics. Mathematicians then become increasingly self-conscious about their own work. The weak form of Spengler’s thesis is that mathematical forms and structures vary across cultures. The strong form is that number in itself is a social construction. The world history of mathematics does not unfold in a simple straightforward way. For example, despite all of the achievements of the Greeks in mathematics, they did not reach the levels of the Babylonians in notation. What we see over historical time is different mathematical systems developing in different cultures and eventually flowing into centres of mathematics in the major civilizations. The West became the ultimate end point of this flow because of the network of informational pathways it sent out across the globe through military, economic, religious and political expansionist actions. Hindu mathematics was episodic, and was unique in placing emphasis on large numbers at the expense of geometry, arithmetic, number theory, and algebra. Social and cultural situationally sited schemas can be found in the Upanishads (700–500 BCE). We find references to the 72,000 arteries, 36,000 syllables, and 3306 gods. Such numbers do show variations across versions of these and other Hindu texts, but the tendency is unmistakable. The Buddha can count out numbers on the order of eight times twenty-three series of 107. His wisdom and magnificence are illustrated by the huge numbers of celestial beings who populate his sutras. Hindu cosmology is based on huge blocks of years, yugas. There are four yugas covering 432,000 to 1,728,000 years. They add up to one thousandth of a kalpa or over four billion years. These large numbers in the classical Indian world view are the consequence of a spiritual, mystical, transcending quest. This is mathematical

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(or more accurately numerological) rhetoric, not rational or scientific mathematics. They had a special utility in inspiring awe in listeners and motivating them to adopt religious postures. There was, nonetheless, a mathematically significant result of playing with these cosmological numbers: the invention of the zero (ca. 600 CE). The route to the mathematical zero went through the invention of the concept of sunya in Madhyamika Buddhism (ca. 100 CE). There is a sociology of cosmological numbers. India developed religious specialists who achieved a high status and devoted themselves to mystical appropriation of everyday cultural forms. Numbers were especially useful to them because they already had a transcendental quality; they seemed to exist outside of time and space. With essentially nothing else to do, these religious specialists kept spinning numbers into larger and larger configurations. There was also a social reality behind all of this: Indian society was a cacophony of ethnic groups, institutionalized in an elaborate caste system. China developed a mathematics of survival. Chinese mathematics and number work was practical, not mystical. The representation of numbers never strayed far from concrete pictures and eventually developed into an ideographic system, a system that was more concrete than abstract. Chinese number work was embodied in the hexagrams of the I Ching, one of the five classics of ancient China (The Classic of Poetry; the Book of Documents, the Book of Rites, the Spring and Autumn Annals, and the I Ching). These texts were already part of the Confucian canon in the Warring States Period (fifth century BCE). By the time of the Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE), they had become part of the state-­ sponsored curriculum and came to be considered collectively and named the Five Classics. The I Ching was a book of divination. This book, still in use today, went through several interpretations of the changing universe, giving us a succession of Chinese cosmologies. The concrete focus of Chinese culture, captured in the slogan “Control the Waters,” helped to sustain the concreteness both of the ideographs and of mathematics. The stability and sustenance of Chinese culture depended on a water-based political economy. Everything depended on dams and canals. The ecological imperatives that fostered a mathematics of survival were reinforced by intellectual imperatives. The limitations of ideographic writing, with respect to an alphabet or a mechanical symbolism, actually served the interest of the intellectual class. Ideographs were hard to learn and

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required a lot of memorization. This and other limitations gave Chinese intellectuals a social advantage that helped preserve their status and power. Neither the Hindu emphasis on numerological excess, nor China’s ideographic system, could match the algorithmic imperative required for developing an expanding commercial economy. Writing and mathematics in general were developed as esoteric skills in the ancient world. Learning their notations took a long time and so became the exclusive possession of state and religious leaders. Conserving the forms of these notational systems helped to conserve and even consolidate the power, status, and privileges of the elites. Sanskrit and Egyptian writing were equally difficult and conservative in this respect. Sanskrit was written without vowels or spaces. The same is true for China, with the notable exception that these styles in writing and mathematics lasted longer than in any of the other classic civilizations. China is sometimes called an ever-Bronze Age culture. The development of writing and mathematics in dynastic China was characterized by aggregative complexity and aesthetic elaboration rather than rational mathematical and linguistic generalization. Chinese intellectuals made access to writing and mathematics progressively more difficult, and this (combined with an examination system) helped them maintain their unusual power, status, and privilege in the Chinese state apparatus. The lack of a good notation in mathematics accounted for the lack of progress of mathematics in various world centres. The failure to develop a progressive notation was tied to conflicts over access to writing and mathematics. The monopolistic control of access to writing and mathematics was continuous over long stretches of history in the highly centralized classical administrations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. In Greece, and notably Ionian Greece, and during various periods (episodes) in India, democratic forces held more sway and fostered more progressive mathematics. This didn’t eliminate conservative forces. This was especially the case in the Alexandrian period; difficult expository forms limited the development of algebra. In general, then, we find that the specific nature of mathematics, at any given time or period in any given culture, is a function of the character of the conflict between democratic and conservative forces. The Greeks emphasized geometry, generalized puzzles, and formal logical proofs. Western mathematics arose from these roots, but it also has roots in the legacy of an Alexandrian numerology based on the association of numerals with the letters of the Hebrew and/or Greek alphabets. The

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system was connected with verbal symbolism, through a set of correspondences between numbers and letters of the Hebrew and/or Greek alphabets. This was used to represent a mystical cosmology. These developments were conditioned by religious movements including Hebrew Cabbalism, Christian Gnosticism, and a neo-Pythagorean revival associated with Philo of Alexandria (ca. 50 CE). Nicomachus (ca. 100 CE) was a leading advocate of this numerological movement. He and Philo were part of the Jewish-Greek intellectual milieu of the Levant, the centre of the major religious movements flourishing in that period. These double roots seeded variants in the consolidation of European mathematics. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were rife with conflicts over alternative notational systems, especially priority disputes over the invention of the calculus involving supporters of Newton against supporters of Leibniz. Major disputes also arose in the nineteenth century, pitting Riemann, Dedekind, Cantor, Klein and Hilbert against Kronecker and Brouwer. By the early twentieth century, we find these splits showing up in battling schools of formalists and intuitionists, as well as conflicts over the foundations of mathematics. These conflicts arose from social factors in the society at large, and within the mathematical community itself.

The Social Roots of Mathematics Arithmetic and geometry, the two core areas of mathematics, developed in conjunction with literacy across the ancient world, out of the mundane concerns of everyday life. The development of arithmetic is stimulated by both (1) secular problems in accounting, taxation, stockpiling of resources, commerce and (2) by religious, magical, and artistic concerns in astronomy, the development of the calendar, in the construction of altars and temples, in the design of musical instruments, and in divination. Problems in measurement, surveying, and engineering gave rise to geometry. Arithmetic and geometry were not originally in the hands of mathematicians. We can identify three stages in the development of mathematics: number and numeral workers; part time mathematical workers and numerological workers; and finally mathematical and numerological specialists. The mathematical disciplines arose by way of the assembly of sets of arithmetic and geometric problems to facilitate codification and teaching, and through mathematical studies. Assembling problems stimulated the unification of mathematics and fostered generalization (abstraction). Efforts were being made to identify general rules for solving different

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categories of problems. Problems originating in everyday affairs were increasingly pressed into service as games and puzzles more or less independent of any practical considerations. Among the earliest examples of such puzzles, we find three famous puzzles proposed by Greek geometers of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE: to double the volume of a cube (duplication of the cube); to construct a square with the same area as a given circle (quadrature of the circle); and to divide a given angle into three equal parts (trisection of the angle). These problems may have arisen in part from the riddles that religious oracles posed for each other. My expectation as a sociologist is that such problems must at least have some roots in practical problems of the time. The problem of duplicating the cube may have originated in the oracle at Delos’ reply to an appeal from the Athenians concerning the plague of 430 BCE. The oracle recommended doubling the size of the altar of Apollo, a cube. We also find problems about the size and shape of altars already in the early Hindu literature. This tradition may have been passed on to the Greeks through the Pythagoreans (a secret religio-political society), though the problem is also a translation into spatial geometric algebra of the Babylonian cubic equation x3 = v. The Sophists were a collection of fifth and fourth century Greek teachers who taught virtue to young statesmen and the nobility. If you have a basic familiarity with Greek history, you should recognize the names of some of the prominent Sophists, such as Protagoras and Gorgias. They specialized in debates, and they were especially fond of the puzzles surrounding the duplication, quadrature, and trisection problems. When Plato (ca. 423–428 BCE to ca. 347/348 BCE) came along, he introduced the constraint that the only valid methods for solving the three classic problems in competitive settings were those that relied solely on an unmarked straightedge and a compass. By prohibiting the use of specialized mechanical devices in these competitions, Plato put controls on the competitions that stressed intellectual means and gentlemanly norms. What did he gain by this? The extreme separation of hand and brain served the interest of his Academy, organized to educate and train elite intellectuals for political power. The emphasis on intellectual purity reflected (in the hands of the Oligarchs) the aristocracy’s opposition to democracy and commerce. The Plato school thus promoted mathematical games involving challenge-and-response. These kinds of games remained important throughout the subsequent history of Western mathematics. Prior to the nineteenth and twentieth

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centuries, these competitions were often initiated, endorsed, and rewarded, initially, by patrons and then later by scientific academies and governments. Prizes were often offered for solutions to practical problems. These problems tended to come from commerce and navigation, but the rewards also fostered intellectual pre-eminence. Two further developments followed on the introduction of mathematical contests. First the Greeks insisted that problems should be solved using a formal, logical argumentative form. They extended this idea to create systems of interrelated proofs. Second, this in turn led to Euclid’s Elements, published around 300 BCE. This work was a collection of problems, along with sets of generalizations in the form of definitions, postulates, and axioms. Euclid, like Aristotle, did not use the term “axiom” but something closer to “common notion.” This term is a key to the origin of Euclid’s generalizations. He was in effect raising the level of generalization found in Aristotle’s efforts to codify past human experiences. This was one of the two major ways of constructing new mathematical forms: systematization-­ and-­abstraction; and applying existing mathematics to new areas of life and work (the empirical path). Most of the early Greek geometrical puzzles concerned flat figures, but the methods of plane geometry could be easily extended to solid geometry, and then to the properties of spheres and of conic sections. The work on conic sections eventually led to work on curves of various shapes. These extensions appeared during creative mathematical periods in Alexandria. (especially from 300–200 BCE and 150–200 CE). Trigonometry followed on these developments and some new specialties arose. It took until the 1800s to fully take the next step, to spherical geometry and developing the set of non-Euclidean geometries. The same kinds of processes we’ve seen with geometry also affected arithmetic. The search for general rules led to algebra. Challenge mathematics arose here too. One of the most famous challenges is attributed to Archimedes (287 BCE to 212 BCE). The so-called “cattle problem” is to compute the number of cattle in one of the sun god’s herds given a set of constraints. The problem involves unknown quantities and, over time, gave rise to various kinds of notations and symbolisms. The Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and Europeans during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance developed different forms of these systems. Abstract symbol and notation systems that could be mechanically manipulated to solve problems didn’t appear until the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, however. Algebra went through various empirical extensions across the world.

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Mathematicians, increasingly becoming professionalized, created problems that increased the number of unknowns and raised them to higher and higher powers. The complexity of equations could be increased indefinitely. In the late sixteenth century, for example, Vieta was challenged to solve an equation with forty-five unknowns. Such levels of complexity fuelled the search for general rules for solving higher order equations. Inevitably, empirical extensions led to abstract extensions. This search for general rules reached into elementary arithmetic. All of these efforts were hindered by the variety of cumbersome notation systems. Classically, mathematical problems were expressed in words. As number systems and then mathematics developed and spread within and across the core civilizations—northward and westward to Europe from Greece, the Arab world, and China—a great deal of mathematical activity was devoted to creating easily manipulated notational systems. These efforts led to such important innovations as decimal place notation and the zero sign (India), standardized positional methods for multiplication and division (Europe, ca. 1600), and Napier’s invention of logarithms in 1614. Another line of development led to the development of number theory, focused on the properties of numbers. As early as Eratosthenes (ca. 230 BCE), efforts were made to find a general formula for identifying prime numbers. The early fascination with prime numbers (integers that can only be divided by 1 and themselves) is that they are the basic building blocks of numbers. This is reflected in the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic: every integer has a unique prime factorization. That is, every number can be divided into prime numbers in only one way. The composition of numbers was also an important focus for the ancient number workers. The Pythagoreans worked on triangular and square numbers. This eventually led to a famous theorem by the seventeenth century mathematician Fermat that every prime number of the form 4n + 1 is a sum of two squares. An occult form of number theory was popular during the Alexandrian period, and it has been popular among number workers and mathematicians in its puzzle-solving form since the Renaissance. Descartes and Fermat combined algebra and a coordinate representation in geometry to create analytic geometry. In the 1600s, problems of motion, change in motion, and the study of curves in navigation and ballistics resurrected the ancient procedure of the method of exhaustion. Calculus was reborn and evolved into a critical tool in the mathematics of

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industrial-technological culture. The empirical extension of the calculus led to its application to increasingly complex functions. By the 1800s, abstract extension generalized it into a theory that was applied to rules for solving equations, and the general properties of all functions. The creation of new fields by empirical and abstract extension tends to be a feature of highly competitive periods. Beginning in the early 1800s geometry went through a series of branchings that led to topology as well as non-Euclidean; descriptive; projective; higher analytic; and modern synthetic geometries. Klein, Hilbert, and Cartan contributed to unifying these geometries in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Parallel developments in algebra (also beginning around 1800) led to the creation of the theory of groups focused on abstract patterns among the coefficients of equations. Abstract algebras were created by Boole, Cayley, Sylvester, Hamilton, and Grassman. A great deal of cross-fertilization followed. Dedekind applied set theory to the calculus; Cantor applied it to the concept of infinity; and others applied it to topology, number theory, and geometry. By the late 1800s, these developments led to the field of “foundations” focused on the nature of mathematical objects themselves and the rules that guided working with them. Foundations research in mathematics and logic produced some of the most intense controversies in the history of mathematics. As we have seen, the basic forms of mathematics arose from practical problems in the mundane world. These practical problems continued to motivate number work and mathematical work throughout the history of mathematics and humanity. The evolution of arithmetic, trigonometry, and logarithms was fuelled by the need for solutions to practical calculations. The development of the calculus was linked to problems in ballistics and navigational astronomy. Descriptive geometry and Fourier’s analysis answered problems in the production of new machinery during the Industrial Revolution. Innovative mathematical activity was stimulated by the growth and expansion of commerce and the development of new technologies of warfare, transportation, and communication. These movements also led to more intensive administrative modes of organization. Thus, there are clear reciprocal, causal links between mathematical growth and the development of modern industrial-technological societies. Not surprisingly, there is a substantial literature on the relationship between mathematics and capitalism. This relationship is better viewed as linking mathematics and economic systems. Capitalism is a smoke screen; it is an ideology, not an actual or even possible working economic system

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(Restivo 2018: 186–193). What we see is what Spengler saw, that the form and content of mathematics is a product of specific lines of cultural development. The roots of mathematics in practical concerns are more apparent in some cases than in others. I’ve already referred to the episodic history of mathematics in India and China’s mathematics of survival. The specific ways in which mathematics in various cultures can be described are not exclusive, being more a matter of emphasis. Chinese mathematics never ventured far from problems of everyday life, such as taxation, barter, canal and dike construction, surveying, warfare, and property matters. The highly centralized bureaucracies characteristic of China’s dynastic history, and its ecological dependence on controlling the waters were barriers to the development of autonomous professional classes. Chinese mathematicians, for example, like Chinese scientists and merchants, could not organize an autonomous mathematical community. Thus, they were unable to establish a generationally continuous network of cumulative mathematics. This helps to explain why the Chinese did not develop the more abstract forms of higher mathematics or experience a scientific revolution (Restivo 1994: 29–48). Conditions in ancient Greece were more favourable for abstract mathematics. The commercial expansion in Greece in the 600s BCE stimulated mathematical growth. The roles of merchant and philosopher were often inseparable. Master-student relationships involved teaching and learning number work, thinking, and commerce and persisted across generations. This allowed for an extended period of mathematical progress. Political and economic changes in Greek civilization led to the development of an increasingly elitist and self-perpetuating intellectual community, culminating in the oligarchic conditions and intellectual elitism of Plato’s time. A division of labour emerged that reflected the separation of hand and brain, announced in Socrates’ time and elaborated in Plato’s era. Aristotle would begin to bring hand and brain together again. Some leisure time is needed for the development of a thinking class, however, and this became a reality in Plato’s Greece. The entrance to Plato’s Academy is supposed to have displayed the motto: “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.” This signified the interests of the elite intellectual class and the ruling elites. Geometry was considered better suited to their interests than arithmetic, which was left in the hands of slaves and householders. This is the era of what we now know as “Greek mathematics.”

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Sociologically, the development of specialties within a division of labour, if left unchecked, tends to foster virtuosity. Virtuosos are by definition divorced from the interests of everyday life. They become the bearers and defenders of ideologies of purity and the value of abstract thought. Abstract thought is the concrete thought of highly specialized communities of work, especially professions. This was the case in classical Greece. It would reach extreme dimensions with the development of modern professions in the twentieth century. Hand and brain slowly reunited following Plato’s death; there is already evidence of an increased interest in linking mathematical and practical concerns in Aristotle. In the Alexandrian period, hand and brain were more or less united, but the ideology of purity retained some vitality. This is notably illustrated by Archimedes, whose work clearly exhibited a unity of hand and brain, but whose philosophy echoed Platonist purity. Inevitably, Greek commercial activity declined and, with it, the evolving mathematical and scientific culture. Archimedes represents the peak of Greek mathematics. Afterwards, Greek advances in what we know as the calculus came to an end. When mathematics was revived in the European commercial revolution (beginning haltingly as early as the twelfth century CE), many aspects of Greek science and mathematics were resurrected, notably their work on the calculus. By 1676, Newton was writing about mathematical quantities “described by continual motion.” The concept of function, central to practically all seventeenth and eighteenth century mathematics, was derived from studies of motion. Newton and Leibniz helped to reduce the basic problems addressed in the development of the calculus—rates of change, tangents, maxima and minima, and summations—to differentiation and anti-differentiation. Infinitesimals nurtured earlier in the debates of theologians and scholastics, entered into the process of production. Abstract intellectual ideas of a Euclidean realm of the straight, the flat, and the uniform gave way to the ideas of an increasingly energetic world of guns, ships, and machinery, characterized by skews, curves, and accelerations. The industrial machine of modern industrial-technological society was fashioned in synch with the machine of the calculus. From the Leibnizian/ Newtonian calculuses to Descartes’ analytic geometry, this period was characterized by an algorithmic imperative. Conflicts between Cartesians and Newtonians failed to interrupt the association between developments in analytic geometry and the calculus. Mathematics became a manufacturing process. The historical association between calculus and capitalism was

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echoed in Japan, where a “native calculus” was developed along with the establishment of a money economy and a commercial revolution. The foundations for Japan’s industrial revolution during the early Meiji era (1868–1912) were established during the Edo period (1603–1868). An advanced mathematical system known as wasan was developed during this period. Seki Takakazu (1642–1708) founded an indigenous calculus known as enri (“circle principles”) and laid the foundations for the development of wasan. Seki was a contemporary of Newton and Leibniz and is sometimes referred to as Japan’s Newton. We don’t see European influence here, but we do see the same narrative of the connection between calculus and industry. Just as with the Greeks and Archimedes, the period of the development of the Japanese calculus came to an end with the Meiji Restoration (May 3, 1868) following the fall of the Edo regime. There is a possible pathway from European to Japanese mathematics, however. Portuguese merchants heading for China were blown off course and landed in Japan in 1543. The Portuguese established a foothold in Japan, brokering commerce between China and Japan. In 1580, Nagasaki was granted to the Jesuits as a result of a political rivalry between Omura Sumitada and Takanobu. While this is speculative, the presence of Portuguese merchants and Jesuits in Japan for many decades might have been a pathway for European mathematics to enter Japan.

Puzzles and Proofs Western mathematics, more so than other mathematical traditions, has from the earliest times featured puzzle cultures. The practice of having mathematicians pose puzzles for each other tended to make mathematics in part a competitive game. Public challenges were common in some periods: Emperor Frederick’s court mathematician posed puzzles to Leonardo Fibonacci (ca. 1200); Tartaglia and Cardano challenged each other in sixteenth century Italy; and, in the late sixteenth century, Vieta achieved eminence at the French court by excelling during such challenges. These puzzle contests are sociologically important because they tend to lead to increasingly abstract mathematics. Urged on by competition, mathematicians would invent problems that had little or nothing to do with problems in everyday life. Significant achievements in mathematics were tied to these competitions, including Tartaglia’s general solution for cubic equations and Vieta’s solution for the reduction of equations.

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Competitive mathematics also pushed the development of proofs. This was already evident among the Greeks who rationalized the concept and methods of proof. The context for these competitions was the focus on power and attention among intellectuals. The Sophists were notable for challenging each other to debates. Canons of logic started to crystallize in this debate atmosphere. The emphasis on proofs helped to clarify the rules of the game and escalated the intensity of the competition. Mathematics followed a similar route, a reflection of the facts that (1) many of the Sophists were mathematical workers, and (2) many of the formal philosophical schools in and around this period used mathematical skills among their members to establish their superiority over competing schools. Plato’s Academy was exemplary in this way. It is important to emphasize again that the term “mathematicians” which is connotative in this context is more accurately replaced by number workers. In general, competitive puzzle- contests are probably responsible for much of the inventiveness characteristic of Western mathematics. All of this is not to minimize the economics of proof behaviour and the institution of proof. The Babylonians and Egyptians, after all, developed basic notions of proof. It was the advent of the philosopher-merchant among the Greeks, however, that signalled the serious systematization of proof concepts and methods. Thales was the key representative of this early stage of systematic proofs. He represented the need to gain a better understanding of the material world in the context of an increasingly well-­ organized economy. Thales personified this need, and he is credited with generalizing the crude rules for checking calculations. This was increasingly important as the Greek economy was systematically organized and rationalized. This process continued for about three hundred years and led to the construction of Euclidean-type proofs. The Greeks concern for proofs was not paralleled in China and India. Their mathematicians showed very little interest in proofs and their problems often came without solutions or with incorrect solutions. There are several reasons for this lack of attention to proofs, but one would be the lack of competitive mathematical practices. The social density of mathematicians outside of classical Greece and later European society was low. Very few mathematicians were at work at any given time in China and India. In Greece and Europe, however, the numbers were relatively high, especially during especially creative periods across the sciences, humanities, and arts. Mathematicians in the East were government officials and not in competitive networks within or outside

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their country’s boundaries. In the West, by contrast, mathematicians (or number workers) were private individuals or teachers in competitive informal or formal networks. If India’s mathematical tradition was episodic, and China practiced a mathematics of survival, the Islamic-Arabic world experienced a Golden Age of mathematics between 700 and 1400 CE. They showed some concern for proofs but not as much as we see in classical Greece. The reason is they had a less densely populated network of mathematicians/number workers and therefore less intense competition. Their master-student chains and schools were not as well organized as what we find among the ancient Greeks. Once the centre of mathematics moved to Europe, proof work grew steadily. In the 1600s, Fermat presented his theorems without proofs, and Euler’s proofs in the 1700s were not very rigorous. This started to change in the early 1800s. More rigorous proof standards were put in place that made earlier solutions look vulnerable and led to their rejection even where they were technically correct. New forms of reasoning that were more general and universal had come into play. These changes followed on the expansion of educational systems, which supported large scale increases in the numbers of people engaged in mathematics as an increasingly professionalized activity. These developments were especially notable in Germany and France. Professionalization in general results in increasing generality of the products of professional activity. To outsiders, these products have the appearance of being more abstract, more removed from the concerns of everyday life, but they are concrete products of the activities of insiders. The professionalization of mathematics also led to more abstract and more rigorous forms of proof. This in turn stimulated concerns about the very foundations of mathematics, a key feature of late nineteenth and early twentieth century mathematics. This provoked mathematicians to an awareness that they themselves were creating new levels of generalization/abstraction. The naïve realism of earlier Hindu, Arab, and medieval European mathematical activity was now being left behind as European mathematicians stopped dropping negative roots of equations and started incorporating them. The apparent absurdity of negative numbers disappeared and they came into general use. Gauss created a way of representing complex numbers and ushered in new foundations for modern algebra. As mathematics professionalized, the field blossomed and mathematicians started feeling more comfortable with constructs that they had deliberately invented.

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They were climbing level by level above common-sense representations of the mundane world. Nineteenth century higher mathematics took off from this point, especially with new geometries, notably the non-Euclidean geometries. They correspondingly encouraged the development of new algebras and increasingly general forms of analysis. We have to understand apparently absurd forms of mathematics in a new way. The imaginary number “i,” for example, is a shorthand for a real activity, the operation of extracting a square root from a negative number. This operation. of course, cannot be carried out. Symbolizing a solution by an arbitrary designation (e.g., x) was common practice in mathematics. Such arbitrary symbols represented the results of imaginary operations. The operation of producing “i” could not be achieved but it could be used in other mathematical operations. More generally, the ordinary arithmetic operations, and the concepts of group and function and so on are all more or less complex operations. A natural whole number is the operation of counting. What was going on here, in modern mathematics? Increasingly professionalized communities of mathematicians, engaged in more and more institutionally autonomous activities, were taking operations as their units of work. These became crystallized into new symbols that could be manipulated as if they were things. This amounts to a process of reification, driven by the evolving self-consciousness of mathematicians who saw themselves as creating these abstractions. As the social processes of professionalization and institutional autonomy evolved, mathematical ideas increasingly became tools and resources for generating new mathematical ideas and concepts. What sometimes appeared to be mathematical developments that represent the unfolding of an inner logic were in fact the communal generational activities of mathematicians. In this sense, mathematics embodies its own history. Mathematical dynamics are rooted in organizational forms and will follow those forms and not a simple “inner logic” of linear evolution (cf. MacKenzie 1981). Cultural continuities and discontinuities are therefore reflected in the history of mathematics. That history is occasionally interrupted. These interruptions may delay progress or at least cumulative achievements, but they haven’t interrupted the links across generations of mathematicians intersubjectively testing their results and communicating them internally and externally. This is the history that impressed Eugene Wigner (1960) and motivated him to write his famous paper on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural science. That “effectiveness” is actually

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quite reasonable as long as mathematics and natural science are interacting. As the professional boundaries of mathematics become thicker and more impermeable, we can expect the effectiveness of mathematics outside of mathematics to diminish. By the late 1970s, Bos and Mehrtens (1977) had recognized that was in fact occurring. The generational continuity I’ve referred to is sustained by student-­ teacher, student-researcher, student-student, and researcher-researcher networks and competitive links across different mathematical lineages. Once the professionalization and relative autonomy of mathematics has reached a self-perpetuating critical point, competitiveness and self-­ consciousness strengthen and escalate self-reflection and innovation. These innovations have an inward focus that makes them useful only in mathematics, however. The progress of these developments led to the hyper-reflexive focus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on foundations.

The Robber Baron/Saintly Politician Thesis I’ve had a lot to say about competition, contests, and conflicts in the previous sections. Sometimes they can escalate to scandalous proportions. Randall Collins and I (Collins and Restivo 1983) showed how prominent scandals in the history of mathematics signal shifts in the social organization of mathematics and transitions to new competitive conditions. We also showed that a conflict sociology of mathematics or science fit the facts better than the idealist and functionalist sociologies of science championed by R.K. Merton and T.S. Kuhn. We reached these conclusions by studying watershed scandals in the history of mathematics: Cardan and Tartaglia; Newton and Leibniz; Cauchy-Abel-Galois; and Cantor and Kronecker. Classically, sociologists of science portrayed idealized scientists guided by the norms of science (Merton 1957: 551–561; Barber 1952: 122–134; Parsons 1949: 343–345). Deviations from the norms were enfolded into the norms themselves. Priority disputes, for example, demonstrate that scientists are committed to the value of knowledge. This was one feature of a supposedly autonomous social system of science self-correcting itself and staying on track in pursuit of verifiable scientific knowledge. We’ve already engaged Thomas Kuhn and shown he was “at one” with the idealist models that guided Merton. Nonetheless, he represented forces in the sociology, history, and philosophy of science that were beginning to shift

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the idealist argument. He was still defending the idea that deviations from the norms of science are actually commitments to those norms. Resistance to new ideas and discoveries, for example, demonstrate consensus maintenance. Kuhn and Merton tended then to interpret deviations from the norms in the best possible light. Scientific revolutions are not the result of social causes but rather the sheer accumulation of empirical anomalies. These force scientists to introduce a new paradigm. Every action and process in science, in the Mertonian/Kuhnian framework—no matter how negative or positive it seems—contributes to sustaining science as a viable discovering institution. Based on their case studies, Collins and Restivo proposed that major scandals and controversies revealed significant historical shifts in the social organization of science. What endures in science and related intellectual activities is not norms but the pursuit of wealth, fame, and the power and the desire to control the flow of ideas and impose those ideas on others (Collins and Restivo 1983: 200–201): Under some conditions, ideas are considered most useful when held as secret resources; they can then be the basis for prestigious cults or used as weapons in competitive situations. In some cases, egotistical scientific “robber barons” appropriate or suppress the ideas of other scientists in order to build new or maintain old, dominant organizations and intellectual systems. In other cases, “saintly,” community-conscious scientists meticulously recognize the contributions of peers and subordinate themselves to the ideal of scientific progress. Scientific behaviour is a variable. The ideals of science do not cause scientific behaviour but emerge from the struggle for individual success under different conditions of competition.

It is not just or mainly individual success that is at stake here. Collective success—the success of particular groups or networks, schools of mathematics—is at stake. Individuals stand out in those cases as tokens and agents of the collective conflict. But as Collins and Restivo point out (see below), these conflicts are not simple matters of individual personalities. The great scandals in the history of science were signs of changes in the organizational conditions of scientific work. The dynamics of science are not driven by the breakdown of established paradigms under the pressure of accumulated evidence. Ideas and empirical findings are not agents of change in science or mathematics. Opposition to innovators do not usually come from defenders of the reigning paradigm, nor are they functions

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of the accumulation of empirical or logical anomalies. Puzzle challenges between rival innovators are the roots of new paradigms. The forces leading to new paradigms are rooted in the social structure of competition, contests, and conflict (Collins and Restivo 1983: 201): In Kuhn’s model, innovation is unpredictable; our view is that the probability of innovation varies according to the organizational conditions of scientific competition. Certain minimal levels of competition produce a continuous drive towards new ideas. When organizational resources shift and new forms of competition emerge, extraordinary changes in mathematical ideas occur. The analysis of scandals reveals these aspects of mathematical change. Mathematics is the theoretical core of most empirical sciences that have reached any level of complexity. Thus, if mathematics reveals the dynamics of theoretical competition in more or less pure form, then it may be a model for innovation in all sciences insofar as they are theory-driven.

Collins and Restivo identify both a robber baron era in the history of mathematics and a saintly politician era. Cardan v. Tartaglia (1540s), Newton v. Leibniz (1670–1730), and Cauchy, Abel, and Galois (1826–1832) mark the robber baron era of egotistical competitiveness. Cantor v. Kronecker (late 1800s) represents the transition from the robber baron era to an era of conflicts among schools that mark twentieth-­ century mathematics. The saintly politicians of this era stress the collective, non-­egotistical side of mathematics. The cases Collins and Restivo consider are not focused on individual personalities, which sociologists understand to be formed in part and to reflect working conditions. Nor are their cases trivial or epiphenomena of the history of mathematics. Moreover, they are also not simple matters of multiple discoveries and priority disputes (Collins and Restivo 1983: 221): The general solution of the cubic equation was an epochal event. It marked the first time that European scientists had solved a problem the ancient Greeks had been unable to solve.

In this sense, Cardan’s Ars Magna can arguably be viewed as the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. It also initiates an era of new algorithms and a trend toward higher and higher levels of abstraction. Leibniz and Newton were involved in developing the basic methods of analysis. They opened new vistas to mathematicians and established the foundations for

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most of eighteenth-century mathematics. Cauchy, Abel, and Galois developed the theory of groups, and introduced new abstract methods and rigorous proofs, the keys to the great nineteenth-century developments in higher mathematics. Cantor’s treatment of the infinite marked the beginning of a period in which foundational issues became central in mathematical work. Hilbert, Russell, and Bourbaki were the major systematisers of the entire period of mathematics after Euclid, and together with their anti-­ systems opponents (Brouwer, Gödel) established the major schools of twentieth-century mathematics. The scandals and controversies Collins and Restivo examined reveal changes in organizational forms. The Cardan-Tartaglia dispute marks the end of patrimonial control over intellectual property and mathematical contests. This period of secret general methods and public announcements of particular problems and solutions gives way to competition over increasingly general and abstract ideas. The Newton-Leibniz controversy marks a shift from traditional episodic patronage to a more stable and predictable government patronage carried out in a system of scientific academies. Informal communication networks linked by message centres (personified by the French polymath Marcel Mersenne, 1588–1648) were superseded by a more formal system of scientific journals. And the Cantor-­ Kronecker disputes arose during a period when a network of small elite universities was expanding into an increasingly global mathematical and scientific community. The saintly politicians were “civilized” robber barons. As a general scientific phenomenon in the twentieth century, they are associated with new scandals focused on highly salient sciences such as the bio-medical sciences. These scandals have involved fabrication of data, pirating papers by referees, and publishing other scientists’ research under different titles. The emergent era of saintly politicians is also a source of Merton’s “universal” norms of science. Self-interested competition still drives scientific and mathematical advances. The key to the Collins/Restivo thesis is the change in the form of competition. Structural changes forced the decline of individualistic forms of competition and the rise of collective forms. There is no evidence, at this moment, of major scandals or violent controversies in mathematics of the kind Collins and Restivo studied. This suggests that we are not at an organizational watershed in mathematics or in the sciences, more generally. Given technological revolutions in AI and Big Data, however, we may be

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on the verge of significant organizational changes. Perhaps either the scandals and violence we might otherwise expect are occurring under veiled conditions or they may be manifesting differently than they have in the past. Collins and Restivo did not claim that they’d discovered inevitable predictable stages of social change in the organization of mathematics and science. The historical causes underlying their cases might have gone differently than they did. As secrecy has been a key feature of the history of mathematics before, it might become a factor again. There are, indeed, some indications that such a revival may be in the works with the efforts by governments to label mathematical advances in cryptography as “classified information.” Another source of change that could resurrect earlier systems is dependence either on military funding or upon needing expensive computers. If commercial laboratories became the centres of mathematical work, the old patrimonial organization (and its competitions) might return.

Conclusion This chapter has made the case for a sociology of mathematics. The early sections explored the history of mathematics as a reservoir for sociological analyses. In the final section, I juxtaposed the conflict model of science with the Mertonian and Kuhnian models. Kuhn’s model proposes that the accumulation of empirical anomalies eventually breakdown a dominant paradigm. The Mertonian model is even weaker. It identifies a static set of norms (and in a later stage complicates the system a bit with anti-norms), doesn’t identify any social or cultural causal variables that can affect the productions of science, and leaves scientific knowledge itself outside the domain of sociological discourse. There is of course some attention to the possible facilitative features of democracy for progressive science. One model from the late period of Merton and the early period of Kuhn is congruent with our data: that is the theory-group model proposed by Griffith and Mullins (1972; Mullins, 1973). After all, “Leibniz was a theory-­group builder. He was both an intellectual and an organizational leader” (Collins and Restivo 1983: 223–224): The Bernoullis and I’Hopital provided training centres at Basle and Paris, and a standard text. All this constitutes what Griffith and Mullins call the “network stage.” The English attacks on the Leibniz school, and the counterattacks and increasing dogmatism during the period 1700–1720 are

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exactly what the model predicts for the “cluster stage.” The timing of these stages is roughly congruent with Mullins’ findings for theory groups in twentieth-century social science and other fields. The model might be integrated with a more general perspective on scientific innovation if it could be extended to encompass the structure of rival theory groups and the long-­ term sequences through which they move.

In the next chapter, I will discuss genius clusters and their association with periods of rapid ascent or decline in civilizations and cultures. Such periods align with the intensity of scientific creativity and shifts in the forms of organization and communication networks. Such eras will tend to generate scandals, while intellectually placid eras are likely to be scandal free. There’s still a lot to be learned about the sociology of these periods, however. Such a sociology of genius and genius clusters—in association with the dynamics of civilizations, cultures, and organizations—could lead to a general sociology of all theory-driven systems.

Epilogue: What Is Mathematics Redux Karl Mannheim wrote in 1936 that 2 + 2 = 4 exists outside of history; and Merton championed a sociology of science that focused on the social system of science and not on scientific knowledge. It was assumed that such knowledge escaped the influences of society and culture. There are a couple of curiosities here. In the case of non-Euclidean geometry, for example, even a cursory review of the facts reveals that NEGs have a history that begins with Euclid’s commentators, runs through names like Saccheri, Lambert, Klügel, and Legendre, and culminates in the works of Lobachevsky, Riemann, and J. Bolyai. Moreover, far from being independent, the latter three mathematicians were all connected to Gauss who had been working on NEGs since at least the 1820s. One has to wonder why in the face of the facts of the case serious students of mathematics such as the MIT Marxist mathematician, Dirk Struik, and the dean of twentieth century historians of mathematics, Carl Boyer, chose to stress the emergence of NEGs as “remarkable” and “startling.” Even more curious in the case of the sociology of knowledge is the fact that already in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life published in 1912, Emile Durkheim had linked the social construction of religion and the gods to the social construction of logical concepts. Durkheim’s program in the rejection of transcendence languished until the emergence of

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the science studies movement in the late 1960s and the works of David Bloor, Donald MacKenzie, and Sal Restivo in the sociology of mathematics. It is interesting that a focus on practice as opposed to cognition was already adumbrated in Richard Courant’s and Herbert Robbins’ classical text titled What is Mathematics? (1941). It is to active experience, not philosophy, they wrote, that we must turn to answer the question “what is mathematics”? They challenged the idea of mathematics as nothing more than a set of consistent conclusions and postulates produced by the “free will” of mathematicians. Forty years later, Philip J.  Davis and Reuben Hersh (1981) wrote an introduction to “the mathematical experience” for a general readership that already reflected the influence of the emergent sociology of mathematics. They rejected Platonism in favour of grounding the meaning of mathematics in “the shared understanding of human beings” (Davis and Hersh 1981: 410). Their ideas reflect a kind of weak sociology of mathematics that still privileges the mind and the individual as the creative fonts of a real objective mathematics. Almost twenty years later, Hersh, now clearly well-read in the sociology of mathematics, wrote What is Mathematics, Really? (1997). The allusion to Courant and Robbins is not an accident; Hersh wrote up front that he was not satisfied that they offered a satisfactory definition of mathematics. In spite of his emphasis on the social nature of mathematics, Hersh viewed this anti-Platonic, anti-foundationalist perspective as a philosophical humanism. While he makes some significant progress by comparison to his work with Davis, by conflating and confusing philosophical and sociological discourses, however, he ends up once again defending a weak sociology of mathematics. There was a clear turn to practice, experience, and shared meaning in the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mathematics education, and in the work of reflexive mathematicians in the last third of the twentieth century. This turn reflected and supported developments in the sociology of mathematics, developments to which I now turn in order to offer a “strong programme” reply to the question “What is mathematics?” We are no longer entranced by the idea that the power of mathematics lies in formal relations among meaningless symbols, nor are we as ready as in the past to take seriously Platonic and foundationalist perspectives on mathematics. We do, however, need to be more radical in our sociological imagination if we are going to release ourselves from the strong hold that philosophy has on our intellectual lives. Philosophy, indeed, can be viewed as a general Platonism, and equally detrimental to our efforts to ground

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mathematics (as well as science and logic) in social life. How, then, does the sociologist address the question, What is mathematics? Technical talk about mathematics—trying to understand mathematics in terms of mathematics or mathematical philosophy—has the effect of isolating mathematics from the turn to practice, experience, and shared meaning. It ends up “spiritualizing” the technical. It is important to understand technical talk as social talk, to recognize that mathematics and mathematical objects are not (to borrow terms from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’ analysis of speech: 1983: 96–98) simply “concatenations of pure form,” “parades of syntactic variations,” or sets of “structural transformations.” To address the question “What is mathematics?” is to reveal a sensibility, a collective formation, a worldview, a form of life. This implies that we can understand mathematics and mathematical objects in terms of a natural history, or an ethnography of a cultural system. We can only answer this question by immersing ourselves in the social worlds in which mathematicians work, in their networks of cooperating and conflicting human beings. It is these “math worlds” that produce mathematics, not individual mathematicians or mathematicians’ minds or brains. Mathematics, mathematical objects, and mathematicians themselves are manufactured out of the social ecology of everyday interactions, the locally available social, material, and symbolic interpersonally meaningful resources. All of what I have written in the last two paragraphs is captured by the shorthand phrase, “the social construction of mathematics.” Everything we do and think is a product of our social ecologies. Our thoughts and actions are not products of revelation, genetics, biology, or mind or brain. To put it the simplest terms, all of our cultural productions come out of our social interactions in the context of sets of locally available material and symbolic resources. The idea of the social seems to be transparent, but in fact it is one of the most profound discoveries about the natural world, a discovery that still eludes the majority of our intellectuals and scholars. What is mathematics, then, at the end of the day? It is a human, and thus social, creation rooted in the materials and symbols of our everyday lives. It is earthbound and rooted in human labour. We can account for the Platonic angels and devils that accompany mathematics everywhere in two ways. First, there are certain human universals and environmental overlaps across biology, culture, space, and time that can account for certain “universalistic” features of mathematics. Everywhere, putting two apples together with two apples gives us phenomenologically four apples.

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But 2 + 2 = 4 is culturally glossed and means something very different in Plato, Leibniz, Peano, and Russell and Whitehead. And consider that if we put two apples together at room temperature our arithmetic works; if we put them together in an oven, they will lose their integrity and placed close enough together will fuse. This will defeat our everyday arithmetic. Second, the professionalization of mathematics gives rise to the phenomenon of mathematics giving rise to mathematics, an outcome that reinforces the idea of a mathematics independent of work, space-time, and culture. Mathematics is always and everywhere culturally, historically, and locally embedded. There is, to recall Spengler, only mathematics and not Mathematik. The concept-phrase “mathematics is a social construction” must be unpacked in order to give us what we see when we look at working mathematicians and the products of their work. We need to describe how mathematicians come to be mathematicians, the conditions under which mathematicians work, their work sites, the materials they work with, the things they produce, and the origins of the resources they require to do mathematics. This comes down to describing their culture—their material culture (tools, techniques, and products), their social culture (patterns of organization—social networks and structures, patterns of social interaction, rituals, norms, values, ideas, concepts, theories, and beliefs), and their symbolic culture (the reservoir of past and present symbolic resources that they manipulate in order to manufacture equations, theorems, proofs, and so on). This implies that in order to understand mathematics at all, we must carry out ethnographies—studies of mathematicians in action. To say, furthermore, that “mathematics is a social construction” is to say that the products of mathematics—mathematical objects—embody the social relations of mathematicians. They are not free standing, culturally or historically independent, Platonic objects. To view a mathematical object is to view a social history of mathematicians at work. It is in this sense that mathematical objects are real. Arithmetic, geometry, and the higher mathematics are produced originally by arithmetical or mathematical workers and later on by professional mathematicians. Ethnographies and historical sociologies of mathematics must, to be complete, situate mathematics cultures in their wider social, cultural, and global settings. They must also attend to issues of power, class, gender, ethnicity, and status inside and outside of more and less welldefined mathematical communities.

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I have been exploring hard cases in the sociology of science for half a century—the Needham problem (why modern science emerged in the West and not in China); the social realities of scientific practice; the physics-and-mysticism nexus; and the sociology of mathematics, mind, brain, and consciousness. Slowly, I realized that the transcendental represented the limit of the hard case, and that we had to be able to sociologize God in order to tame the brute fact, along with pure science, math, and logic. We have just about buried Plato once and for all in mathematics, philosophy of mathematics, and mathematics education but we must still solve the God problem before we can complete the process of bringing mathematics out of the clouds, out of the heavens, and down to the earth and the sites of real human labour. This also means solving the problem of the soul, of heaven, and of the after-life. I have addressed all of this in detail in Restivo (2021). We sophisticated ones, we educated ones, we scientists, unapologetically claim that we are equipped to understand the diversity of ways of knowing, the perversities of positivism, and the obstacles to social justice, cultural development, and the growth of knowledge posed by commitments to and defences of CAPITALIZED Objectivity, Logic, Rationality, Truth, and Science. These are not words to avoid in general, except that in their capitalized forms they serve as God adjutants or surrogates. Among some sophisticated students and practitioners of ways of knowing, my brand of sociological materialism, and my defence of a Durkheimian social constructionism, may seem out of place. Sociological materialism may appear to advocates of diverse ways of knowing and multiple realities to be too sociological (i.e., sociologistic), too deterministic, too classically positivist, and too traditionally scientistic. I have been accused of being reductionist and a vulgar materialist. So, let me say that whatever impresses or strikes me about the world we live in, nothing impresses me as much as the recalcitrance of reality. I am sympathetic to and an advocate of multiple realities and diverse ways of knowing, but my multiple realities and my diverse ways of knowing are grounded in the profundity of the surface, the science of crossing streets. It matters which way you look when you cross the street. It matters whether our drinking water is safe to drink or not, and whether our air is safe to breathe no matter where we live and no matter what ways of knowing we practice and defend. This reality is the reality within which my life, my research, and my theories unfold.

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What about my fantasies, you may ask, my dreams? These, too, unfold in this reality of streets, pedestrians, directional signs, automobiles, and drinking water. As individuals (social beings to be sure), we live our lives of labour with our feet on the ground (even if we are among the few who walk on the moon or float around two hundred and fifty miles above the earth), framed by our births and deaths. Societies are evolutionary outgrowths, and if they do not progress, develop, or evolve through distinct stages, they certainly change; they rise and decline technologically and economically; and they appear and disappear socially, culturally, and geopolitically. I have engaged over the course of my career with people who see things differently than I do, who think differently than I do. Conversations and communications will necessarily be different in different cases. I do not adhere dogmatically to any gentlemen’s or gentlewomen’s agreement about polite, respectful dialogue. I have in mind here a particular dialogue, the dialogue between science and religion. I view this dialogue in the same way I view the dialogue between flat earthers and sane people. We have so much evidence and even proof—at the very least by ensemble of probabilities and consilience of evidences—that religion, God, and theology have—like the flat earth hypothesis—dropped out of the conversations that engage the most progressive thinkers, and that there is no longer any grounded justification or warrant for traditional religious institutions and beliefs. This happens from time to time, does it not? Certain ideas drop out of the conversation, certain social institutions fall by the wayside. Complex, traditional, and dearly held ideas and institutions do not drop out of the conversation easily, however. The Ptolemaic universe did not drop out easily, nor did paganisms and polytheisms in the West. Plato, Kant, and Hegel continue to be taken as worthy conversation partners in a world that has dramatically changed, materially and intellectually, from the worlds they knew and within (and out of) which they constructed their ideas. My question then is, are there limits to polite and respectful dialogue when matters of life and death, even the life and death of a species and a planet, are at stake? Are we required by the norms of civil discourse to be ecumenists to the bitter end?

Bibliography Barber, B. (1952), Science and the Social Order (New York: The Free Press).

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Bos, H.J.M. and Mehrtens, H. (1977), “The Interaction Of Mathematics and Society in History: Some Explanatory Remarks,” Historia Mathematica 4: 7–30. Collins, R. and Restivo, S. (1983), “Robber Barons and Politicians in Mathematics: A Conflict Model of Science,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 8(2): 199–227. Davis, P. and Hersh, R. (1981), The Mathematical Experience (Boston: Birkhauser). Dostoevsky, F. (1864/2020), Notes from (the) Underground (London: iBoo Press). Durkheim, E. (1912/1995), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. by Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press). Geertz, C. (1983), Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books). Griffith, B.C. and Mullins, N.C. (1972), “Coherent social groups in scientific change,” Science 177: 959–964. MacKenzie, D. (1981), Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press). Merton, R.K. (1957), Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press). Orwell, G. (1949), 1984 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Parsons, T. (1949), The Social System (New York: The Free Press). Restivo, S. (1994), Science, Society, and Values: Toward a Sociology of Objectivity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press). Restivo, S. (2018), The Age of the Social (New York: Routledge). Restivo, S. (2021), Society and the Death of God (New York: Routledge). Spengler, O. (1926), The Decline of the West (New York: Knopf). Wigner, E. (1960), “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics XIII: 1–14.

CHAPTER 14

Your Social Brain: Searching for Mind and Consciousness in John Wayne’s America

Loneliness Writing about the larger human context of social distancing in the age of COVID-19, Gregory McNamee (2020) quoted Blaise Pascal’s remark that all of our problems stem from our “inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” COVID-19 has forced us to test that idea. Loneliness has been a concern for many observes of the human condition, especially in America, for some time now. The late John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist, pioneered research on the effects of loneliness. Social isolation or rejection disrupts our thinking, our will power, and our immune systems. It is for this reason that solitary confinement should be considered “cruel and unusual punishment.” Loneliness—lack of connections—may be the key to violent behaviours ranging from bullying to street violence and school shootings. It is not too much of a leap to suggest that it might play a role in terrorism and warfare. Not only should we not underestimate the relevance of the loss of community to violence, given our radically social species we should also pay more attention to the relevance of touching. Fear of and barriers to touching are implicated, along with loneliness, in many if not most of the problems of the human condition, as Ashley Montague helped us see in Touching (1986). Alienation is a related problem. In general, it is considered a psychological or social ill that follows on the problematic separation of self and other. The classic discussion of alienation is associated with the Marxists and Hegelians. Separation of self and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_14

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other is or becomes problematic because of our radically social nature. We can become alienated from ourselves, our ideal concept of ourselves, from others, from our everyday lives at home and at work, classically from the products of our labour, and from nature. In so far as alienation and loneliness are aligned with each other, they are a powerful combination contributing to the problems of violence to which I referred above. Loneliness, after all, is not just an individual phenomenon. The separation of groups and cultures may cause collective loneliness and alienation. Ecumenical thinkers like Karen Armstrong (Charter for Compassion) and the Dalai Lama have argued that world peace could be based on the compassion that is at the centre of all religious traditions. The problem is that compassion is a centripetal force and reinforces the boundaries that separate groups and cultures. This force tends to overwhelm any centrifugal forces that might help to link us across our cultural differences. There are certainly cases in which the centrifugal forces of compassion can be mobilized to support imperfect and limited communication and exchange across national borders, and across barriers of sex, gender, class, and ethnicity. Such cases, in transportation and communication for example, may suggest ways of strengthening centrifugal compassion The pathological version of our radical social natures, our need for community, compassion, belonging, and solidarity is tribalism. When group boundaries are threatened or there is a perceived threat, humans reinforce, enhance, or otherwise beef up those boundaries. This is tribalism; in the extreme, I speak of this pathology as triballistics. The rapid and widespread changes that accompanied the industrial revolution have been ratcheted up by the information, communication, technological, and knowledge revolutions of the last seventy years. This is the major fuel for the triballistics that is opposing ecumenical movements all over the planet in these early decades of the twenty-first century. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam (2001) documented the ways in which we have become increasingly disconnected from each other. Putnam may indeed have deftly diagnosed the damage that loneliness has done to our individual and collective health, but this kind of analysis is not new. It became visible as part of the collateral social damage of the industrial revolution. It is iconically represented in the distinction between gemeinschaft (communal society) and gesellschaft (associational society) societies. That dichotomy was voiced in such English pairings as rural-urban; country-­ city; informal-formal; primary-secondary; status-contract; and community-­ society. There was a sense of loss—the loss of community, the loss of

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connection—in these dichotomies, not a sense of progress. It is time we gave serious attention to the evolutionary sociology lesson that humans arrive on the evolutionary stage already, everywhere, and always social. We do not arrive as individuals who become social; we arrive as the most radically social of the social animals, and culture individuates us. Our mutual presence turns out to be a powerful phenomenon which I will examine next.

Mutual Presence When human persons come into contact with other human persons a field is generated that engages a process of rhythmic entrainment. This field carries emotional communication and the fuel of consciousness. Human bodies are rhythmic systems, essentially vibrating entities. Our postural vibrations are constantly adjusting to what comes under our gaze, whether an object like a painting or plants, animals, and other humans. When two such human vibrating entities come close together they are enveloped in a field that conducts emotions and consciousness. Dance is the gross expression of the fine-grained rhythmicity that is innate to all levels of life from cells to bodies; and even social systems have their rhythms, even societies and groups dance. When we sociologists and anthropologists argue, contrary to the physicists and biologists, that consciousness originates in the social world (C. Whitehead, ed., The Origin of Consciousness in the Social World, Exeter UK, Imprint Academic, 2008), we are pointing to the innate rhythmicity of humans and their capacity for dance as the in-­ between conduits that generate consciousness. Socialness is a fuel and our social being must be constantly re-fueled. The amount of fuel in our “self-­ tank” is measured in units of cultural capital. The larger the tank and the more cultural capital it holds at any given time establishes the limits of sanity when alone or in isolation. Loneliness is a social disease and can kill you or disable you in various ways and to different degrees. Putting anyone including a prisoner in isolation should be understood to be cruel and unusual punishment. The Pascal problem of being alone arises in part because of our innate radically social nature but also because and to the extent that we go into the room alone with a fuel tank almost empty of cultural capital. The more cultural capital in our tank the easier it is to be alone, within limits (Restivo, 2018: 81–83).

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Genius Few personalities in human history are more entitled in the public imagination to the epithet “genius of all geniuses” than Albert Einstein. There are a handful of other contenders—notably, for example, Newton, Leibniz, Da Vinci, Goethe. In John Wayne’s America, genius has “Big Shoulders” (the Comanche chief Scar’s name for Wayne’s character in “The Searchers,” 1956) and little room for women who might want to claim the genius mantle. Gertrude Stein had “big shoulders” and made room for herself by saying out loud, “I am a genius.” She went on to domesticate the concept in documenting her relationship with Alice B. Toklas. But Albert Einstein is our genius of geniuses. In 1916, and not yet forty years old, he predicted gravity waves (a consequence of the General Theory of Relativity). It took one hundred years before scientists had technologies and computers that were a match for Einstein’s brain in the conventional imagination and could detect gravity waves. When I was a young boy in love with science and math, Einstein was already a scientific saint. And when he died on April 18, 1955, his brain became a sacred relic. Dr. Thomas Harvey famously removed Einstein’s brain during the autopsy at Princeton Hospital, in Princeton, New Jersey. He did this on his own initiative, probably inspired by Oscar Vogt and Cécile Vogt-­ Mugnier’s study of Lenin’s brain. The Vogts, at the behest of the Soviet government, were looking for the origins of political genius; Harvey thought he might be able to discover the origins of scientific genius. It was years before the sliced preserved pieces of Einstein’s brain began their journey across John Wayne’s America, from sea to shining sea. The search was on for Einstein’s genius in the architecture of his brain. This seemed perfectly reasonable in John Wayne’s America. When we identify Einstein as a genius, and when we assume the secrets to that genius are in his genes and neurons, however, we actually learn more about ourselves and our culture than we do about Einstein. When Orson Welles was asked to name his three favourite directors he said “John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.” Ford constantly toyed with the relationship between truth and fiction, fact and legend. In “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” (1962) Ford created an exit line that belongs in the definition of the American mythos. Maxwell Scott (played by Carleton Young) is ready to publish a story about senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and the mythical figure he has become for killing the villain Liberty Valence (Lee Marvin). In the closing scenes, Scott

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learns that Stoddard didn’t kill Valence. Scott tears up his notes. Stoddard says: “You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?” Scott replies, “No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Valence was actually killed by Tony Doniphon, John Wayne’s character. Here Wayne is associated with the conflict between the autonomous hero affirming the myth of individualism in tension with the eternal recurrence of the myth. It seems to get defeated, from time to time, as collective, community interests come into play. Ethan Edwards (Wayne’s character in “The Searchers”) again embodies the American myth of individualism, the hero who stands outside of society and its surface norms, values, and beliefs. Edwards, like many of our heroes, appear often enough to feed our need for violence, and then disappear to wander across America’s spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties, and fruited plain. He leaves a trail of masculinity, patriotism, self-reliance, and self-­ responsibility in his wake. Occasionally we may get images of something more than a cowboy riding or walking off into the sunset. There may be a hug, a kiss, a look of longing, a farm saved from disaster, villains dispatched and a town’s solidarity restored, something that has the scent of community. But it doesn’t last for long in John Wayne’s America. Individualism returns again and again. This is why John Wayne, bracketing the reality of his complexity and contradictions as a real human being, is the embodiment of the myth of individualism and even a kind of genius of masculine posture, pride, and stride. He is our icon of heroic individualism and rugged masculinity. One doesn’t usually associate Einstein with rugged masculinity, but his numerous affairs and his attraction for women speak to some kind of masculinity and certainly something gendered about his genius. It made the role of his wife, Mileva, virtually invisible, in everyday life and in terms of her possible contributions to his science.

The Myth of Individualism John Wayne’s America sings the hymns of individualism, of self-interest, of capitalism not as an actual economy but as an ideology. The classic Robber Baron, individualist to his core, is also a philanthropist—and this tension is revealed in all of our heroes. Einstein is in this context a transformation of that mythology and of its conflict with the other mythology of “we the people,” E Pluribus Unum. He was unique, individual, living in his own world by his own impenetrable rules—but he was also the great

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humanitarian. That is why it seemed so natural to imagine that the secret of Einstein’s genius could be read from the architecture of his brain, the inner landscape of a unique individual outside of society, culture, history, time, and space. And what a landscape we imagined it might be like, too— awe-inspiring, of course, like the landscape of Monument Valley, Utah, in the opening scenes of “The Searchers.” If individualism is a myth, if as Nietzsche claimed the “I” is a grammatical illusion, can we say anything about Einstein with confidence that doesn’t erase his obvious uniqueness? Developments in neuroscience (especially environmental enrichment studies, mirror neurons research, and plasticity research), social neuroscience, epigenetics, social science, and network theory between 1950 and the 1990s do pose challenges to Einstein’s uniqueness. They don’t erase it, but they do force us to re-think the nature of his uniqueness. With respect to his physics, for example, the idea of mass-energy equivalence was not new; it was already in the conversations of physicists by the 1870s. Poincaré published papers on relativity theory in 1904 and 1905 (Einstein’s annus mirabilis). Uniqueness is not a matter of genes, neurons, quantum phenomena, nor of the biological brain. Einstein’s uniqueness is defined by the uniqueness of the social networks he encountered, as his life unfolded. If his brain holds any clues to his creativity, those clues would be functions of how his social and cultural environments affected the architecture of his brain. This idea is reflected in the social brain paradigm, introduced into the neuroscience literature by Leslie Brothers in 1990. Einstein’s dead brain could not be a narrative of innate genius. The story of his genius has to be a story of connections in the world at large. The lone wolf genius only lives in John Wayne’s America. The term “genius” rests on the concept of the individual as an entity that stands apart from society, history, and culture. Genius even escapes time and space. The mythical genius is “an island entire of itself” but he is not alone; etymologically, the genius has a guiding spirit, a tutelary deity. This makes the genius not only an island unto himself, but also a god. If genius were simply a matter of genes, neurons, or “ineffables,” geniuses would appear at random, scattered willy nilly across various disconnected cultural landscapes. But genius clusters, and genius clusters do not appear randomly. They are associated with the rapid decline or ascent of civilizations and cultural areas. At the centre of Einstein’s genius cluster in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century stand relativity pioneers like Lorentz and Poincaré, and geniuses across the full spectrum of the

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sciences, humanities, and arts including Edison, the Wright Brothers, Planck, D.H.  Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Sibelius, and Picasso, all anchored by the sympathetic mutuality that linked Cubism (see especially Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) and relativity theory. They both challenged conventional ideas about absolute time and space. Stein associated her writing with Cubism and thus with relativity theory. These developments give us a new way to think about consciousness. The so-called “hard problem” of consciousness is the problem of explaining the relationship between the physical (material, “hard”) phenomena of the brain and brain processes, on the one hand, and mind and consciousness (immaterial, “soft”), on the other. Classically, the problem is: how do brains create minds and consciousness? Theologically, the problem revolves around bodies and souls. The very statement of the problem has trapped it in the jurisdiction of philosophers, psychologists, biologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. Physicists, who believe they can explain anything, and theologians who can explain things that don’t exist, are also prominent players in the consciousness game. The “hard problem” is hard because students of consciousness have been looking for it in the wrong place. They have been looking for it in the brain and ignoring an idea that has been around since at least the 1800s, that consciousness is a network of social relationships. But social relationships as the source of causes that impact our behaviours, emotions, and thoughts are invisible in John Wayne’s America and world. They are made invisible by the myth of individualism. This in turn invalidates sociology both as a science and as a science that might have the key to the hard problem.

Consciousness Explained Psychologists and philosophers of brain and mind regularly start to home in on this reality. They might recognize, for example, that we are more sociological entities than single unified psychological entities. But if they interpret this as a metaphor, as some do (the prominent psychologist Michael Gazzaniga (1985), for one) they will be diverted to their default biological explanations for consciousness (and see Epstein’s transducer theory discussed in Chap. 15). Their failures create an explanatory vacuum that physicists are all too enthusiastic to fill with their tool kit of quantum concepts. So now we have the wrong scientists with the wrong tools looking in the wrong place, guided more by what they experience as the introspective transparency of their own minds (an illusion) than by

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science. It is not my intention to drive the physical, natural, and behavioural sciences out of the game. Rather, it is more a matter of giving sociologists and anthropologists some playing time. Consider that philosophers of mind like John Searle and neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have recognized that social and cultural factors must play a role in cognition and consciousness. Searle (1992) says he doesn’t know how to mobilize these factors and Damasio (1994) finds trying to bring them to bear in brain studies too daunting. Neither one of these particular players seems to be aware that sociologists exist who do know how to mobilize these factors—and do not find this daunting. They certainly know that sociologists exist, so I can only conclude that they are not prepared to take them seriously. The myth of individualism reinforces social blindness, the inability to see the social, and then to fail to see it as a causal force shaping our behaviours, thoughts, and emotions. I call this dissocism, and there is a dissocism spectrum disorder. To the extent that we are all to varying degrees victims of social blindness, what I’ve been writing will undoubtedly be counterintuitive for many readers. Let us make it intuitive. Consider that, as individuals, we do not experience the earth in motion. Yet it spins on its axis wobbling in precession; at any point along the equator it is rotating at about one thousand miles per hour; it travels around the sun at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour; and it is part of a solar system orbiting the centre of the Milky Way. The Milky Way is part of a cluster of galaxies (The Local Group) traveling toward the centre of the cluster, and The Local Group itself is speeding through space at three hundred and seventy miles a second. None of this motion is accessible to individual experience. Yet we have knowledge of these motions through the collective generationally linked intersubjectively tested experiences of scientists. What if the introspectively accessed free-willing self is as much an illusion of individual experience as is a stationary earth? The studies of Einstein’s brain proved in the end to be sterile. They were guided by neuroist assumptions (mind and consciousness are brain phenomena); a dissocist perspective; the fallacy of introspective transparency; and a conspiracy of mythologies: the myth of individualism; the myth of the brain in a vat; and the myth of brain-centric thinking reinforced by gene-centric thinking. In a 2006 study of Einstein’s brain, J.A. Colombo and his colleagues found nothing distinctive about the four blocks they studied. They saw a diseased brain, rather than the brain of a genius. They criticized the earlier studies of Einstein’s brain for their

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inconsistencies and methodological flaws, and doubted whether microscopic neuroanatomy studies could ever prove useful. At the end of the day, the most insightful discussion of Einstein’s brain can be found, not in the halls of science and philosophy, but in TV land. On July 21st, 1999, the David Letterman audience was allowed to ask “Einstein’s brain” (a model brain in a beaker of green Jello) questions. After each question, the questioner is told that due to Einstein’s death in 1955, the questioner is addressing dead tissue. This comedic vignette does more for the neuroscience of Einstein’s brain than all of the papers and lectures on Einstein’s brain in the scientific literature. Once upon a time in John Wayne’s America, I met a man about my age at a party. We can call him Bill. Our lives had unfolded in much the same ways. Poor childhood, uneducated parents, local school and home environments poor in the resources for enriching young minds—and yet here we were, successful professionals. He attributed his success to his individual spirit; his will to overcome. his freedom to choose. His story was overrun with “I’s;” I did this, I achieved that, I chose this, and so on. That is also how I would have told my own story, had I not come to understand sociology, social contexts, and social networks. On the surface, it appeared that I had chosen to go into engineering freely. But “I” made this “choice” in the middle of a technological revolution driven by lofty visions of space travel. Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, was launched into an elliptical low earth orbit by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. Five years later on September 12, 1962, John F. Kennedy told an audience at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas: “We choose to go to the Moon.”

Individual Choice in Context It was no accident that my interests were evolving from dinosaurs and star gazing to engineering, rockets, and space travel. The government was pouring more and more funding into science and science education, especially applied science and engineering research. Pamphlets and films were produced and made available to school guidance counsellors that encouraged students to go into science, math, and engineering. Private industry got into the act, too. General Electric produced a series of comic books that featured scientists and engineers as superheroes. These heroes didn’t leap over tall buildings in a single bound or save damsels in distress falling off skyscrapers. They invented things and solved problems in physics and math. Issue number 3 of GE’s adventure series comics, Adventures in

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Electricity, told the “thrilling story of America’s vital network of power.” One of the issues featured electrical engineer Charles Steinmetz, the wizard of Schenectady. In the wake of the Sputnik launch, statistics showed extraordinary growth in a variety of science indicators, such as the number of science articles, conferences, and degrees granted. The growth curves showed a Sputnik “bump,” a jump in the growth curves for science indicators in the mid- to late ‘50s. All of this made it possible for me to go to graduate school on stipends, and tuition-free. On September 2, 1958, just as I was entering tuition-free City College of New York (an old idea that had nothing to do with Sputnik), President Eisenhower authorized the National Défense Education Act (NDEA). Sputnik spurred this act, along with other United States science initiatives including DARPA and NASA.  Even the social sciences benefited from these developments. My acceptance into graduate school came with a three-year NDEA fellowship in comparative social structures. This wasn’t simply a matter of the government wanting to fund social science per se. As the Cold War heated up, the study of non-US and non-Western cultures became an issue of national defence, national security, and American interests in the internal affairs of various nations. My fellowship was an investment designed to train me potentially to assist the government in their regime change and counter-revolutionary actions in the “Third World.” President Johnson’s Great Society poured tons of money into federal fellowships and stipends so kids like me—children of the poor, and especially of poor immigrants—could get to graduate school and study societies and cultures, and other things we never knew existed. When my NDEA funds were used up, the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950) chipped in to help me complete my Ph.D. Of course, I was also shovelled out of the regular public school system earlier and into the elite public school system. It is fair to ask: Didn’t an “I” have to play a role in taking advantage of the resources available in the various contexts I’ve described? Didn’t “I” have to work hard in order to pass the exam for an elite high school or to compete for an NDEA fellowship? The answer is counterintuitive: the “I” is a grammatical illusion. We are all social in a radical sense, as opposed to being individuals in a radical sense. From birth to the present, contexts and networks have been shaping my thinking and my “choices”—and yours, too.

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Whatever earlier social forces in my life had made me imagine myself as an astronomer on Mt. Palomar, guidance counsellors and science teachers were now working to funnel my interests into engineering as I progressed through grades 5–8. Their advice was being shaped by forces at work in the larger society. Bill, the guy we met earlier, without the benefit of a sociological imagination, was at the mercy of our culture’s myths of individualism, individual initiative, and self-interest. His story was all about “I’s;” my story was all about contexts and networks. His story was a small tale within the larger narrative of the Great Man theory of history. That theory claims that history is the result of the actions of “Great Men” (individuals): Gabrilo Prinzip started World War I by assassinating Archduke Ferdinand; Adlof Hitler caused the Holocaust. Lev Tolstoy proposed an alternative to this theory in his novel, War and Peace (1869/1996). The closing pages are a treatise in the philosophy of knowledge, causality, and the illusion of free will. The Great Man Napoleon is portrayed as a baby in a carriage holding a couple of strings and imagining he is driving the carriage. What actually propels the carriage, however, are social, cultural, and historical forces. Wait. Isn’t it possible that there is some sort of dialectical relationship between the “I” and social structures or networks? Some social scientists take this path. For those who do, there is always a volatile potential for prioritizing psychology and biology over social science. There is always the danger that their introspective sense of self will override the science of the social. That’s why I think it’s wise to assume that it’s social networks all the way down.

Conclusion: The Myth of Horatio Alger Remember Ragged Dick? Unless you’re around my age, the name may not resonate. Ragged Dick, Richard Hunter, is the “rags-to-riches” literary invention of Horatio Alger, Jr. It has become absorbed into the American mythos as the story of the “self-made man.” The curious thing about Alger’s rags-to-riches boys is that their success depends in the end on the luck of finding wealthy businessmen mentors and patrons. Alger himself sponsored philanthropic efforts to help the Richard Hunters of the world. There were two female protagonists in Alger’s writings, Helen Ford and Tattered Tom. Tattered Tom dressed and lived like a boy and (like many Alger heroes) she was a news boy. Girls are not prominent in Alger’s

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writings, because the possibility of finding a mentor or patron in the business world was not open to them. The Horatio Alger myth of individual success through will and initiative is not just a myth about America; it is a myth about the Alger stories themselves. If you read my biography psychologically or (what is essentially the same thing) from the perspective of the American mythos, it looks like the story of a strong-willed boy taking initiative and pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. To tell the story this way requires being blind to social forces and social contexts. This is a trained incapacity in the families, churches, and schools that “educate” us to think in terms of individuals, individual self-interest, mythical heroes and icons, and the rags-to-­ riches narrative. Remember what you learned about opportunity and social mobility as part of the story of American exceptionalism? Social mobility rates in the US are not substantially different than they are in any modern industrial nation-state. In any given era, they depend on political and economic factors that can raise or lower rates of social mobility. Incidentally, the phrase “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” comes from an eighteenth-century fairy tale and was a metaphor for an impossible feat of strength. The early phases of my life story superficially support the Horatio Alger myth. The later phases show how the nature and power of social structures slowly came into view for me. I was then able to build on this as I went on to a professional transformation that opened up new vistas of understanding and explanation. Not all sociologists go as far as I do, but everything before graduate school primed me for taking the concept of social structure and running with it. It was easier than you might imagine to discard free will and agency along the way.

Bibliography Damasio, A. (1994), Descartes’ Error (New York: Grosset/Putnam). Gazzaniga, M. (1985), The Social Brain (New York: Basic Books). McNamee, G. (2020), “Degrees of Loneliness,” Virginia Quarterly Review 96(2): 216. Putnam. R. (2001), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Rev. and updated ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster). Restivo, S. (2018), The Age of the Social (New York: Routledge). Searle, J. (1992), The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Tolstoy, L. (1869/1996), War and Peace (New York: W.W. Norton). Whitehead, C., ed. (2008), The Origin of Consciousness in the Social World (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic).

CHAPTER 15

Romancing & Dancing With Robots

Overture My objective in this chapter is to provide the reader with a few new tools for their robot, brain and mind studies tool kit. By the very nature of what they do as scientists, sociologists and anthropologists are necessarily always in the midst of other people. They are in the midst of other people the way physicists are in the midst of electrons and detectors, the way chemists are in the midst of chemicals and test tubes, the way biologists are in the midst of cells and frogs. The very best of them have a “feeling for the social” (Durkheim is exemplary) in the same way that Barbara McClintock had a “feeling for the maize,” Tolman a “feeling for the rat running a maze,” and Einstein a “feeling for the photon.” Very often now, on account of developments in social studies of science since the late 1960s, sociologists and anthropologists find—or rather plant—themselves in the midst of other researchers. Sometimes, and sometimes annoyingly, they plant themselves in the midst of other researchers while they are engaged in their research or related professional activities. Sometimes the sociologists and anthropologists are participants who contribute to the research agenda of their subjects; sometimes they observe and interview as non-­participants. Given this reality of their work, sociologists and anthropologists can or must appear (at least on occasion) as intruders, pricks of conscience, moral entrepreneurs, and obstacles rather than facilitators of research. This role of ethnographer of science, however, has proven itself over and over to be © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_15

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a source of important new insights and understandings about the nature of scientific practice. They can, of course, at the same time serve as the consciousness as well as the conscience of the research group. I have planted myself in the midst of chemists (see Chap. 3); sailplane engineers; researchers in a structural composites laboratory; a CVD laboratory (Chemical Vapor Deposition); and a metrology laboratory (Croissant and Restivo 2001: 139–162). This chapter is about my life among the robotics engineers. My interest in robotics was motivated by my interests in mind, brain, and artificial intelligence.

Introduction I will begin by addressing some questions I was asked about social robotics by Illah Nourbaksh, Kerstin Dautenhahn, and Terry Fong in their invitation for me to speak at a conference they organized in 2001. The questions in their survey are as follows: 1. How would you define “social robot”? Do you feel that “sociable robot” is a better term for this type of human-robot interaction? 2. What features/characteristics distinguish “social robots” from other robots and from other social interaction systems (e.g., software agents)? 3. What do you think are the most significant social robot systems? Who are the most significant researchers and organizations? 4. What do you consider to be the most important references to “social robots” (please list 3 or more papers, books, etc.)? 5. What do you think is the most significant problem (technical, ethical, etc.) in “social robots” today? They go on to point out that the term “social robot” is used in at least two ways. It means (1) “robots that socially interact with humans,” and (2) “collective robots inspired by social animals.” My answers to these questions are given in the context of my work during the late 1990s and early 2000s. I have been using the term “social robot” to refer to a robot designed for social interaction with humans and in principle capable of expressing emotions, demonstrating consciousness, and thinking and moving about autonomously (Restivo 2001; Restivo and Steinhauer 2000). More than this, such a robot would be able to move rhythmically in conversations, both in terms of speech and in terms of body. Such robots would be important from the perspective of a social

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theory of mind. They could be used in experiments testing fundamental ideas in the social theory of mind. The more “social” the robot, the more humanoid it would be. In this regard, then, the term “sociable robot” is not appropriate. “Sociable” in ordinary dictionary terms means “fond of company,” or “characterized by friendly companionship.” Cynthia Breazeal (2002: 1) writes: …a sociable robot is able to communicate and interact with us, understand and even relate to us, in a personal way. It should be able to understand itself and us in social terms. We, in turn, should be able to understand it in the same social terms—to be able to relate to it and to empathize with it. Such a robot must be able to adapt and learn throughout its lifetime, incorporating shared experiences with other individuals into its understanding of self, of others, and of the relationships they share. In short, a sociable robot is socially intelligent in a human-like way and interacting with it is like interacting with another person. At the pinnacle of achievement, they could befriend us, as we could them.

Breazeal immediately goes on to point out that science fiction has demonstrated how such technologies “could enhance our lives and benefit society.” There are, however, cautionary tales (she refers, for example, to Philip K. Dick’s (1968) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which raise issues about approaching dreams of robots (sociable or otherwise) responsibly and ethically. Cute and adorable robots like Kismet, interestingly enough, have already provoked worried reactions (e.g., Nightline 2002). I also have some evidence from preliminary studies of similarly worried and cautious reactions to My Real Baby (a robot baby developed by the iRobot Company and Hasbro in the late 1990s) by children and adults. iRobot was founded by Rodney Brooks, director of MIT’s AI Lab at the time and Cynthia Breazeal’s Ph.D. advisor. One of my questions is then what is the counter-reaction to such views by social robotics engineers?

Social and Sociable Robots When I (as a social scientist) say that humans are social, I mean that they are constructed out of social interactions, that they are social structures. I also mean that their social nature must be constantly reinforced through social interactions. What we experience as and conceive of as individuals are, from this perspective, networks of social relationships. This is a given, whether we are sociable or sociopaths, likeable or not, normal or deviant. To reiterate a refrain, humans are everywhere, always, and already social.

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To be human means to have potential for conflictful as well as companionable relationships, and the potential to make mistakes. In constructing sociable robots, especially based on the more psychologically-grounded social theories, robotics engineers seem to be driven to program out aspects of being human that for one reason or another they don’t like. or that make them personally uncomfortable. Such robots might eventually have a place in our society, but they will not be social robots. Kismet, Cynthia Breazeal’s Ph.D. project robot at MIT could become Mr. or Mrs. Rogers (from the U.S. children’s TV program, Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood) but Kismet could never become Nietzsche or Virginia Woolf. It is a short step to recognizing that not much—or perhaps not enough—is being done in social robotics that acknowledges the potential for unintended consequences in this field. Instead, we should be working up models and scenarios that explore unintended consequences. Articulating unintended consequences in a sense violates the principle of what makes consequences unintended, but once we bring the principle into our sights, it will not be too difficult to play out some hypothetical stories. In this way, we may be able to lower probabilities for the more disastrous unintended consequences to become actualized, even if we cannot in principle avoid all such outcomes. For example, social robots should be distinguished from other socially interactive systems (e.g., software agents, swarms, distributed and collective intelligences). The mark of a social robot should be its capacity for rhythmic entrainment with the humans (and robots) with which it is interacting. It should have many (if not all) of the characteristics Breazeal (2002: 229–242) outlines in her grand challenges (e.g., embodied discourse), but in the end it must be able to participate in interaction rituals and ritual chains. Without the possibility of building robots capable of participating in the rituals of everyday life, robotics engineers will fall short of their most ambitious visions in this field. Their robots will be little more than coded complexes of mimicry, little more than expensive toys with chips.

Theories of Mind Traditionally, theories of mind—primarily coming out of philosophy and psychology—have been asocial. These theories include Hegelian mentalism; idealism; some forms of materialism; dualism; various forms of monism; and variations on these themes including Cartesian; bundle; interactionist; parallelist; behaviourist; logical behaviourist; functionalist;

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phenomenological; central state or identity theories; and various attribute theories (Armstrong 1968; Priest 1992). One of the most intriguing things about how philosophers and psychologists think about minds is the effort to explore the nature of the human mind by imaginings about everything from brains in vats, armadillo minds, thinking bats, to Martian brains. No wonder we can’t find social human beings anywhere in these theories! These traditional (and prevailing) approaches to mind and mentality, in general, centre on the brain. Mentality is viewed as either caused by or identical with brain processes. Given this perspective, John Searle (1984:18) could argue that “Pains and all other mental phenomena are just features of the brain (and perhaps the rest of the central nervous system).” But Durkheim’s analysis of different degrees of social solidarity and the social construction of individuality suggest a culturological conjecture on pain: the extent to which a person feels pain depends in part on the kind of culture of which they are a product, and (in particular) the nature and levels of social solidarity in the social groups to which they belong. “Pain” has a context of use and a grammar. Such a conjecture was indeed already formulated by Nietzsche (1887/1989: 199–200) in The Genealogy of Morals. Wittgenstein’s (1953) writings on pain in his Philosophical Investigations provide additional ingredients for a social theory of pain based on the role of language in our pain narratives. While he invokes the social, however, Searle does not know how to mobilize it theoretically, and so argues that consciousness is caused by brain processes. We will see, as we proceed, why this claim that has seemed so reasonable for so long must be reconsidered in light of what we now know about the relationship between social life and consciousness, and what we are learning about social life and the brain. Cognitive psychologists have traditionally viewed the mind as a set of mental representations. These representations are then posited to be causes behind an individual’s ability to “plan, remember and respond flexibly to the environment” (Byrne 1991: 46). Cognitivists also tend to equate cognition and consciousness. Yet, long ago, Nietzsche had the insight that consciousness is a social phenomenon. He was one of a number of classical social theorists that had pioneering insights into the social nature of mentality. We can approach the history of discourse on mind in terms of (1) the conflict between rationalists (intellectual descendants of Descartes and Leibniz) and empiricists (followers of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume); (2)

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the behaviourist challenge to the radical empiricists by Watson and others, and the challenge in turn to the behaviourists by the ethologists (Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch); and (3) the Kantian counterpoint to empiricism, represented in our own time, for example, by Jerry Fodor’s (1983) conception of the mind as an entity possessing organizing capacities and an innate “language of thought.” Why is it that we “locate” mind, thinking, and consciousness “inside” heads? Certainly in the West, mentalities and the emotions have been associated with the brain and the heart since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. More recently, localizationalist physicians and neuroscientists have reinforced the idea that mentalities are “in the head” (Star 1989). On the other hand, in sociological perspective, mentalities are not produced out of nor in states of consciousness; they are not products (and certainly not simple products) of the evolution of the brain and brain states. Rather, they are by-products or correlates of social interactions and social situations. This implies that the “unconscious” and the “subconscious” are misnomers for the generative power of social life for our mentalities—and our emotions. There is no more an unconscious than there is a God, but there are cultural mechanisms for translation and transference that point us to referents that do not exist. The thesis here is that social activities are translated into primitive thought “acts,” and must meet some filter test in order to pass thoughts into our awareness (cf. Wertsch 1991: 26–27; and see Vygotsky 1978, 1986; and Bakhtin 1981, 1986). L.  Vygotsky and Mikhail Bakhtin should be considered independent inventors of the modern social theory of mind alongside their contemporary, G.H.  Mead. Wertsch (1991: 14) stresses that mind is mediated action, and that the resources or devices of mediation are semiotic. Mind, he argues, is socially-distributed, mediated action. This sounds like a distorted echo of Ryle’s argument that the mind is just the body at work.

Getting to the Beginning of Our Story In 1939, C.  Wright Mills (1963) argued that the sociological materials relevant to an understanding of mind had not been exploited by sociologists. Mills had in mind in particular the work of the American philosopher and social theorist, George Herbert Mead. Fifty years later, Randall Collins (1988) wrote that Mead’s writings on the sociology of mind were still underdeveloped and unexploited. As I write these words many decades later still, the same claim can be made. Indeed, the failure of sociologists

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to pick up the track of Mead’s social theory of mind was underscored by the publication of a social theory of mind guided by Mead’s work written not by a sociologist but by a neuroscientist/psychiatrist (Brothers 1997).

Resources for a Sociological Theory of Mind The basic resources I draw on for constructing a sociological theory of mind include but are not limited to the following: the concepts of collective representations (Durkheim) and generalized other (Mead); Goffman’s (1974) theory of frames (cf. Wertsch 1991 on recontextualization); the literature on culture and thought (Levy-Bruhl 1926/1985; Levi-Strauss 1966; Goody 1977; Cole and Means 1981); studies of the evolution of human language and its social context; (Caporael et al. 1989), and studies on the relationship between social relations and rule- governed systems such as language (Caporael 1990: 10–11). Researchers in artificial intelligence have been increasingly incorporating into their work the idea that AI machines have to be programmed with “cultures” (e.g., Norman and Rumelhart 1975; Keesing 1987: 381). It is also important to mention that sociology has something to say about the brain. Clifford Geertz (1973: 76) has pointed out that the brain is “thoroughly dependent upon cultural resources for its very operation; and those resources are, consequently, not adjuncts to but constituents of mental activity.” The evidence for this conjecture in humans has been accumulating in recent years along with a breakdown of the brain/mind/ body divisions (e.g., Brothers 1997; Pert 1997). Geertz (1973: 74) writes in more detail: The synchronic emergence in primates of an expanded forebrain, developed forms of social organization, and, at least after Australopithecines got their hands on tools, institutionalized patterns of culture, indicates that the ­standard procedure of treating biological, social and cultural parameters serially—the first being taken as primary to the second, and the second to the third is ill-advised. On the contrary, these so-called levels should be seen as reciprocally interrelated and considered conjointly.

If we think of the brain and central nervous system as “logically and genetically prior to society and culture” (Geertz 1973: 75; and see his latter-day musings on the anthropology of the brain in Geertz 2000), then we will be prompted to focus our attention on genetic and brain parameters in

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accounting for human behaviour. If Geertz is right, then we may be “asking too much of neurons, or, if not too much, at least the wrong things.” Our understanding of mentalities has been obstructed by some deeply ingrained assumptions about human beings. One is that affect and cognition are separate and separated phenomena. This division began to break down during the latter decades of the twentieth century (e.g., Zajonc 1980 1984; Gordon 1985; Damasio 1994; and Pert 1997), and will have to be eliminated as part of the process of constructing a sociology of mind. Another assumption is that learning and cognition can be decontextualized. I argue with other social scientists, by contrast, that learning and cognition are linked to specific settings and contexts, that is, they are indexical. Their long-term efficacies are in fact dependent on contextual recurrence, contextual continuity, and recursive contextualizing. The latter process helps explain the process of generalization without recourse to epistemological mysteries or philosophical conundrums.

Theory of Mind Revisited Breazeal (2002: 8–9) assumes a theory of mind is necessary for us to “correctly attribute beliefs, goals, perceptions, feelings, and desires to the self and to others.” One of the grand challenges she puts forward is giving a theory of mind to a robot. What kind of a theory of mind is Breazeal working with? According to Astington (1996: 184), Gopnik (1996) claims there are only “three games in town” when it comes to theory of mind: theory-theory, simulation theory, and modularity theory. But Gopnik (1996: 169, 182) distinguishes “theory-formation theory” from “theory-­ theory.” Nonetheless, the psychologism in these theories fits the necessarily “give to” rhetoric of mechanisms at this stage in the development of social robots. There is another game in town, however, and it goes with the sociological resources I have sketched. The alternative to children deriving their theories of mind from their direct experiences of such states, of developing such theories the ways scientists supposedly derive their theories, or of giving rise to them innately as they mature, is an enculturation theory. The prevailing theories of theory of mind emphasize development within the individual. We need a theory that looks to outside-in causal circuits. From a sociological or anthropological perspective, theory of mind and mind itself are cultural inventions (Astington 1996: 188). Social construction of mind has not been ignored, but it has not been centrally

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represented in either mind studies or social robotics. The reason is a problem in the sociology of knowledge. It may be, for instance, that it is easier to link psychology and engineering because psychology appeals to the illusion or fallacy of introspective transparency. The problem with sociology is that while it holds unparalleled promise for social and sociable robots engineering, it is (by comparison with the psychological sciences) introspectively counterintuitive and appears to those unfamiliar with sociology to be technologically sterile. These are not failures of sociology, but rather failures of the sociological imagination in robot science and engineering.

The Social Mind The sociology of mind and thinking has a long and distinguished pedigree, yet it has traditionally been virtually invisible in contemporary theories of mind (Valsiner and van der Veer 2000). A renewed interest in mind, brain, consciousness and thinking (along with the new life evident in the search for God (the two quests are indeed related in sociology’s program for the rejection of transcendence) is evident in the steady stream of books, articles, lectures, news stories, and television programs crossing today’s intellectual landscapes. One of the main features of this literature is that one can see some evidence of a sociological orientation emerging, albeit timidly and fearfully, out of the shadows. This feature is far more developed today than when I began my studies of robots in the 1990s. An archaeology of these developments would also reveal a “journey to the social” across the entire landscape of intellectual labour. Virtually without exception, those who undertake this journey are not sociologists or anthropologists (or more generally, social scientists), and so they stop short of their mark or otherwise abort the trip. This is, indeed, a much more treacherous journey than the Westerners’ journeys to the East that have captivated (and captured) so many Western seekers. The very fact of the journey to the social, however, reveals the emergence of a new discursive formation, a new episteme. This episteme is new in the sense of a birth or an originating activity, but absolutely new in the scope of its impact. Beginning in the 1840s, the West entered the Age of the Social, an era of worldview changes that will carry well into the twenty-first century (and likely beyond) before it begins to embody itself in the everyday ecologies and technologies of mind in new global civilizations.

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Nothing captures the spirit of this renewal better than philosopher John Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind. Searle (1992: 128), for example, wrote: I am convinced that the category of “other people” plays a special role in the structure of our conscious experiences, a role unlike that of objects and states of affairs…But I do not yet know how to demonstrate these claims, nor how to analyse the structure of the social element in individual consciousness.

And the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1994: 260) wrote: To understand in a satisfactory manner the brain that fabricates human mind and human behaviour, it is necessary to consider its social and cultural content. And that makes the endeavour truly daunting.

To give one more example, consider the following remarks by Stan Franklin (1995: 10) at the beginning of his tour of mind studies. Franklin is a mathematician and computer scientist: Let’s not leave our discussion…without pointing out its major deficiency. There’s no mention of culture. How can one hope to understand mind while ignoring the cultural factors that influence it so profoundly? I certainly have no such hope. I clearly recognize that the study of culture is indispensable to an understanding of mind. I simply don’t know how to gently include culture….Perhaps anthropology and sociology should share a corner with cognitive psychology.

At the beginning of the new millennium, this assessment of the situation was offered in the introduction to a conference on social agents, Starting from Society—the application of social analogies to computational systems (Edmonds and Dautenhahn, co-chairs 2001): Understanding how societies work and the role they play in the construction and function of intelligence has turned out to be much more complex and important than most researchers in AI would have predicted. This is in marked contrast to sociology and social cognitive science where this has been common knowledge for some time. It is now time to pay attention to these social phenomena in their own right so that they can be analysed and applied in AI.

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The introduction went on as follows: This symposium is to consider how ideas and analogies drawn from observations of real societies might be applied to computational systems. Recently biology has been a source of inspiration for AI, e.g. spawning the field of evolutionary computation. Now ideas and analogies drawn from the social sciences are starting to be used in computational systems. This is partly because it is being recognized that controlling interacting societies of artificial agents is difficult—traditional methods cannot anticipate the emergent outcomes, so that some researchers are looking to real societies. Another strand is the increasing recognition that much of what we had labelled as individual intelligence derives from the society it inhabits. A third strand can be traced to the influence of social simulation techniques. This symposium will focus on these areas, welcoming especially interdisciplinary work and work grounded in observation of real societies and real problems.

The case Randall Collins and I have been arguing since the early 1990s has (without much direct effort on our part) finally begun to emerge among the ranks of the social agent, social robotics, and social AI researchers themselves. The next step is to take seriously the problem of understanding human social life and the social life of the person in terms familiar to sociologists and anthropologists. The advantage of this goes beyond the simple disciplinary transparency of the imperative. It moves us beyond social analogies to serious sociological theory. This social turn of the social turn would instantly eliminate certain types of unintended consequences and dead ends. Of course, it will generate its own unintended consequences and dead ends, but they are more likely to lead to constructive and productive consequences in the long run. Once this strategy begins to be followed, it will be easier for social and sociable robot engineers and scientists to figure out how to build mechanisms related to specific sociological constructs than it apparently is now. In particular, I want to encourage thinking about mechanisms to implement interaction rituals and interaction ritual chains. This became easier with the publication of Randall Collins’ book on interaction rituals and ritual chains (Collins 2004). Technical problems have social, cultural, ethical, and historical contexts and consequences (immediate, long-term, intended and unintended) that are not always available to the engineer or designer focused on solving those problems. Those who walk in the footsteps of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes continue to promise riches for all “mankind” that will flow from our laboratories and workshops in science and technology. We have

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been dealt many harsh, and in some cases perhaps irreversible lessons, as the promises of one technology after another have turned into environmental and ecological disasters. The promises of social or sociable robots certainly have some of the flavour of the classic progressive claims for technologies of the past. The problem here is that the potential targets of unintended consequences are no longer merely environmental ones, but human ones. I mean “human ones” in a more profound sense than might be understood at first glance. For surely, humans have suffered from the unintended (and intended!) consequences of technologies before. Now, however, the spectre is raised of new kinds of impacts on human cognitive and emotional well-being, as well as social and cultural states and processes. I am not worried as some are about “post-human” futures, about humans beings “replaced” by machines. Sooner or later, we are going to be replaced by something (or nothingness); that shouldn’t be the issue. The more immediate issue is what will happen to us if more and more of us spend increasing amounts of time with robots capable of becoming Mr. Rogers or Kate Smith and incapable of becoming Nietzsche or Virginia Woolf?

Robots ‘R’ Us and Robots as Robots We can look forward to robots in “just like us” terms, robots that have human forms of mentalities and emotions. We could also, on the other hand, look forward to robots in “robots as robots” terms, robots that have machine mentalities and emotions. In either case, humans are going to be the “likeness” against which we will measure the qualities and achievements of social or sociable robots. Social robots in our midst will confront us with questions of what alternative forms of embodiment and semio-materiality mean for us as humans; as men, women, and children; as people of culture, ethnicity, class, sex, race, gender, and age. Who are social and sociable robots for? Are they for all of us, or just for some of us? Are they for all of us or just for certain parts of us? What and who are they good for? There are invidious implications in these sorts of questions, but I have no doubt (on the positive side) that social and sociable robots will help us understand our dynamic and social selves and bodies. They will problematize our embodiment, our senses, our sensuo-erotics. And as these robots come into the world, we will come to be in the world differently, and we will matter differently as a result.

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Social and sociable robots should be understood in the context of specific and overlapping social locations, and not simply in terms of the ideas and practices of individual scientists and engineers. Attention to social locations means (more broadly) attention to historical locations and contemporary processes of glocalization. In the end, the limits of social and sociable robots are not found in the limits of silicon and steel, but in the limits of our interpretative courage and recklessness. We really have no more and nothing different to fear from these robots than we do from our fellow humans. When we meet these robots, we will meet ourselves. Social, sociable, and Other robotics are important vectors in the movement of science and technology across the world. This movement is a multilinear, multicultural dialectic that heralds the creation/emergence of a new form(s) of social order. The story of this social order begins: “In the beginning was information…” And perhaps this social order will intersect with a new evolutionary order, THE TECHNIUM or some new order of bio-social-technological entities.

Singing the Body Information The body is a boundary object between information and control in an era of bioinformatics. We have been witnessing a shift from a cryptographic to a pragmatic paradigm in biological discourse, and the emergence of hybrid bodies. The general process has been a commodification of the body, something we should recognize in more general terms as part of the commodifying blitzkrieg of latter day “capitalism” (the economy that never was and never could be: Restivo 2018: 186–193). Consider, for example, Robert Mitchell’s (2004) views on body wastes, information, and commodification. We are living in transitional economies organized around an informational mode of production. As we informaticize objects, bodies, and relationships, everything becomes more readily commodified, including body parts and body wastes. The global economy, as discourse and information, reaches its apex (as a system of inclusion and exclusion) in commodity imperialism, colonialism, and market expansionism. New forms of embodiment abound; for example, in the form of virtual informatic surgeons, digibodies (a third space between mind and body), and informatic emotions. Finally, we find ourselves at the intersection of bioinformatics and the visual arts, engaging installations such as “Einstein’s Brain” (Dunning, Woodrow, and their collaborators), and Kac’s “Genesis.” Here are the results of moving from conceptual criticisms of

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biotechnology to using it in aesthetic formations. A cult of information arises out of a sea of media bodies, reality-transforming symbols, and the mindbody concept. The meaning of the human genome is not simply the province of scientists but a boundary object batted about and battered in the arenas of art and culture. As we move through this world, representation fades away and data is made flesh. Simultaneously, the flesh becomes more complicated. Nietzsche (and certainly our own contemporary students of body) helped make a place for new kinds of bodies, with new kinds of lives. It is in our (will to) power to construct new bodies, new entities, and new forms of life and kinds of lives. Bodies are systems of meaning, of interpretations, and this means that what counts as a “body” is a cultural decision. One could easily imagine that we are witnessing the end of the body. Claude Levi-Strauss (1967) argued that academics tend to focus their attention on things just at the point they are coming to an end. On closer inspection, however, endings are more likely to be transitions and transformations. This is implied, for example, in Martin’s (1990:1) contention that one sort of body is coming to an end and another kind of body is coming into being. In an era of postmodernisms, it is more prudent to think in terms of plurals rather than singles. Just as we are cautioned in science studies to think in terms of sciences instead of science (or Science), so we should be prepared to think of the body, and especially the emerging body, as bodies. This is simply postmodernism at work pluralizing our classifications and categories. The body, always in fact the focus of a pluralizing discipline if we think about it in historical cross-cultural terms, is arguably at the centre of more intense disciplining actions than ever before. One reason is that the body is centrally linked to all the other entities now being subjected to pluralizing disciplining. Judith Butler (1993) expressed her frustration with how resistant the body is to being disciplined. In order to get some purchase over her subject (and perhaps over her own body, her own self), she adopted a Foucauldian posture to address the regulatory norms through which the body is materialized. She found herself engaging with constructivism and questions about agency, but she problematized these ideas contra constructivism (or “constructionism” as I prefer) in a way that was prohibitively narrow sociologically. Notice that pluralization and disciplining impose new restraints and regulations on bodies and simultaneously provoke multiple forms of bodies (e.g., transgendered and trans-sexed bodies, and LGBTQ+, homo- hetero- and trans-normative relationships).

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In How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles (1999) analytically distinguished the body from embodiment. Like many of us who are struggling to escape dualistic thinking, Hayles found it difficult to stay the pluralist or holistic course. More recently, she tried to complete her escape by adopting the strategy of positing “relation” rather than pre-existing entities (on relational thinking as a recurring intellectual strategy see Restivo 1983: 40–41), She adopted Mark Hansen’s term “mindbody” to denote the emergent unity of body and embodiment in a dynamic flux of biology, culture, and technoscience. The relational stance gives us mind, body, and world as constructions of our experience (Hayles 2002; cf. Noë 2010; Clark 1998; and Restivo 2017: 33–34; the model described here is reproduced at the end of Part II in Chap. 18). The body as subject and object is a locus of tensions that emerge around new technologies. The powers behind these technologies announce them as gateways to utopias—it was atomic power in the mid-twentieth century, it’s the human genome and bio- and nano-technology today. These announcements call forth critics who respond with dystopic and doomsday scenarios. As the body technology, increasingly fluid and evasive, emerged in the last century, Wells, Kafka, Orwell and others imagined the dark futures that might lie ahead of us (Dyens 2001). Authors such as Don DeLillo, Caleb Carr, Dan Brown and Michael Crichton opposed the utopias of the utopitechnologists and the utopinformation engineers with visions of bodies and cultures transformed in near future dystopias. Experiments in robotics and artificial intelligence are blurring the boundary between the living and dead (perhaps the source of the zombianism that is so prominent in popular culture). We need to consider more critically what is at stake in the development of socially intelligent, sociable, and emotional robots. Woodward (2004) took steps in this direction in her “low key manifesto in favour of respect for the material lifeworld that we are creating in our image.” She discussed the Kasparov-Deep Blue chess match that was billed as a “man versus machine” event, and reinforced predictions about the emergence of machines with emotions. Her defence of “artifacts” spilled over into a Latourian world of machines with voices. It is important to remember that Latour is at best ambivalent and at worst maddeningly obscure on the issue of whether he believes machines can speak for themselves (Restivo 2011). Let’s reconsider the Kasparov-Deep Blue match. The rhetoric of “man versus machine” masked the fact that Kasparov and Deep Blue were stand-­ ins for two networks of humans (including experts on chess and

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computers) and machines. “Man” is already a cog in a cyborg network. As for machines with emotions and consciousness, the problem resolves itself differently if we proceed from the idea of “robots ‘r’ us,” which gives us a new life form, or if we think of “robots as robots” which gives us machines; and of course there is a middle ground, the Technium (Kelly 2011). The Technium is the self-organized global network of interlocked technologies; it is not alive but it exhibits life-like behaviours. It is the “inevitable” next stage in the process that gave us self-organized life. This idea should make us think of Latour’s actor-networks, except that Latour’s concept explicitly includes humans whereas Kelly’s concept is more generally technocratic. The “robots ‘r’ us” position leads to scepticism about whether robots could ever be conscious in the way that we are conscious or experience emotions in the ways that we humans do. If we adopt the “robots as robots” position, we are encouraged to think in terms of machine consciousness and machine emotions. It’s important to remember that we humans are organic machines, so we already know that machines can be conscious and feel. It might then be possible for inorganic machines to develop their own forms of consciousness and emotions. Actor-network and Technium concepts suggest, on the one hand, hybrid machines and, on the other, sociologically impoverished futures. I am not dismissing the concept of the Technium here, only asking that it be less a technological fix than a concept that signifies a profound integration of the organic, the inorganic, and the social. In all of these cases, robotics engineers and futurists are going to have to pay more attention to the role of mimesis in the evolution of human communication, consciousness, and emotions (Donald 2001: 259ff.); the nature of interaction rituals and interaction ritual chains (Collins 2004); and their significance for the emergence of consciousness and emotions. The technological materialization of mimesis, rhythm, and entrained imitation may be sufficient to generate machine consciousness or embryonic awareness. We can now see the significance of dancing and why robots should be able to dance. Dance is the gross expression of the fine-grained rhythmicity that is innate to all levels of life from cells to bodies; and even social systems have their rhythms, even societies and groups dance. When we sociologists and anthropologists argue, contrary to the physicists and biologists, that consciousness originates in the social world (Whitehead 2008), we are pointing to the innate rhythmicity of humans and their capacity for dance as the in-between conduits that generate consciousness and

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emotions. If we want to build robots that are conscious and emotional, we will have to teach them to dance and build rhythm into their silicon and steel. There is, in fact, a movement in robotics that recognizes the importance of dance, without yet connecting it to consciousness and emotions (Marino, T. et al. 2016; Heimerdinger and LaViers 2019; LaViers et al. 2011, 2018). If you do not have access to this social model and you are restricted to brain-centric thinking, you might solve the hard problem by proposing a transducer theory. This is exactly what Robert Epstein has done (2021). Epstein is aware of certain mysteries that require explanation. Epstein’s mysteries include spirits, dreams, and the immaterial realms transcending the reality we know. We have had a sociological theory that explains these phenomena since the late 1800s in the work of Emile Durkheim. Once we understand rituals, emotions, and collective effervescence we have the basic ingredients for explaining the origin of religious experience and the gods. These form the foundation for a rejection of transcendence and the explanation of Epstein’s other mysteries then fall readily into place. Epstein’s transducer theory is a mechanical solution— and an admittedly brilliant one—but it assumes a brain that doesn’t exist, an isolated biological brain that operates independently of its cultural environment. The social brain paradigm which I discuss in detail at the end of Chap. 18 is a theory that stays within the framework of sociocultural phenomenon and doesn’t require an electro-mechanical solution. Nonetheless, perhaps what we have are two sides of the same coin. We have a phenomenon which lends itself to two different theories depending on whether the approach is brain centered or social centered. The evidence for a social brain gives the edge to the social theory as the level appropriate explanation for the phenomena at issue. The work on social and sociable robots and affective computing has created a social space of border tensions between minds, brains, bodies, machines, and humans, and scientific and theologico-religious authority. Not only are we reinventing bodies, but we are also reinventing science and posing new challenges to religion and ethics. As a species, we are working globally on so many different planes of action that we are faced with the unintended, unpredictable, and unknowable consequences of a multiplicity of multiplier effects. Information technologies are ready targets for social criticism and critical theory, and for ethical analyses. Information itself has until recently escaped these critical and analytical tools. The Critical Art Ensemble collective (see the CAE reference section in the Bibliography) draws

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attention to the theological rhetoric that surrounds the human genome project and how it masks the eugenic origins of this discourse. Genesis creator Kac (1999) explains that he has tried to represent the continuity between imperialist ideology and reductionist genetics. He accomplishes this artistically by translating a passage from the King James Bible into Morse code and then translating the Morse code into a gene. What is at stake here? Transgenic artists such as Eduardo Kac may be creating early-warning systems to alert us to the consequences of the world(s) we are fashioning for “nature,” species, culture, and self in their independent and networked forms. The quotes around “nature” signal an increasing awareness that the very idea of Nature is not as transparent, unified, or universal as we once assumed. Indeed, that signals that we should probably put quote marks around all of the forms I listed with nature. We need to become comfortable with the idea of natures, just as we are learning to become more or less comfortable with the idea of sciences instead of Science and bodies instead of Body (and so selves instead of self—I am multitudes). Indeed, we are moving toward a pluralization of all of our basic categories and classifications. When Oswald Spengler wrote in the 1920s that there is no Mathematic, only mathematics, he foreshadowed the emergence of ethnomathematics and helped usher in a world of multicultural pluralities and multiplicities. In this (brave?) new world of pluralities, even the bodies and identities of children are at stake. What sorts of children will come from a world in which the forms of family life, sexual and gender identities, and relationships are multiplying side by side with novel child-machine images? The future holds new ways of inscribing the body with desires and erotics, and the uncertainty of what lies ahead means the end of (depending on how much reality you ascribe to the Freudian notion) the Oedipal child (Poster 2004). Perhaps we are harvesting lessons about children and humanity we have been taught by history (e.g., in the work of Phillipe Aries) and imagined in science fiction (notably in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End). Pluralities and multiplicities do not mean that the future will be messier than the past. Unities, dichotomies, and trichotomies are connected to dimensional shifts. Things become multidimensional and blossom into pluralities and multiplicities; pluralities and multiplicities in many dimensions eventually resolve into unities that provoke polarities, the multiplication of dimensions, pluralities and multiplicities again, and so on. Life in this sense is cycles and spirals of thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis, thesis,

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anti-­thesis and on and on. What drives this process is the innate dialectical nature of living things. The late twentieth century may have ushered in the Age of the Body, the era in which echoes of Plato’s complaints about the body finally faded away and thinking men and women began to rally around Nietzsche’s claim that there is only body. All efforts in the post-Phaedo world to dissociate minds and brains from bodies have failed. Today, what remains of the Platonic vision and its transcendental progeny have become victims of the embodiment movement. What is this, but the triumph of materialism(s)? We need to mobilize efforts that reject transcendence and spiritualisms and eradicate vulgar versions of materialism without rejecting materialism. Marx brought the calculus down to earth; Spengler and Wittgenstein went further and anthropologized mathematics. Durkheim is the modern locus classicus for the general rejection of transcendence. He is well-known (though in a limited way considering the scope of the world intelligentsia) for the argument that God is a collective formation and a collective elaboration—a symbol of society. What is not so well known is that, in the closing pages of the study in which he argues that God is a cultural construction, Durkheim also demonstrates that logical concepts are cultural constructions. With the coming of science studies and cultural studies we disciplined mathematical and scientific knowledge as cultural and social constructions. The next phase of this rejection of transcendence is now underway in the sociology and anthropology of mind and brain (e.g., Restivo 2017, 2020). The final phase comes with the sociology of the gods, religion, the supernatural, and transcendence itself (Restivo 2021). Information has classically been as recalcitrant as mathematics and logic in resisting embodiment and materialization, but now it, too, is falling under the disciplining regimes of embodiment and materialism. The Age of Information might be enveloping the Age of the Body, even as both fall under the umbrella of the Age of the Social (Restivo 2018). R. Doyle (2004) affords us another opportunity to consider what is at stake in the informatic understanding of life by linking LSD and DNA narratives. He asks: What if Timothy Leary and Francis Crick were speaking the same language? The language of information becomes a locus of the organic and the machinic (or mechanic) enfolding each other helically, with the result that sometimes “the capacity for replication goes through the ceiling.” Imagine this as at one with the cycles and spirals of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis and you have some idea of the roots of the

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complexities of life forms. Doyle perceptively infers a Nietzschean joyous science (or science of joy) from life as information. He comes very close to embracing my claim that the best science is practiced anarchistically and within anarchistic social formations. If life emerges at the edge of chaos, moreover, we may as well say that it emerges at the edge of information, that life is informatic and that bodies are at once and already bodies of information. It is a relatively short step to recognizing where the “feeling” for the cyborg (Woodward 2004: 194) comes from; embodiment is necessary for learning emotions and generating consciousness. The possibility of “peaceful collaboration” between humans and other forms of artificial entities (collaboration between organic and inorganic machines) is dependent on the cross-species communication of the “caring emotions” (especially empathy and sympathy). We are at the threshold not simply of understanding the conditions for relating to machines, but to other humans, and most generally to the Other. Success depends on everyone coming to the dance. All of the visionaries imagining The Age of the Body and The Age of Information are haunted by the spectre of The Age of the Social. They must turn around and face this terror squarely (as must we all) in order to ground embodiment and bodies in social discourses and social practices. We and everything we invent and discover are socially constituted; there is no other way for us to make our worlds than through our interactions with each other as socially constructed selves, as members of a species that is always, already, and everywhere social. Here is where we will find the re-solution of the mind/body and mind/brain problems and the hard problem of consciousness. The turn to the body is a significant reply to the mistaken focus on neurons and genes as the seats of our humanity, our creativity, our consciousness. It is not brains and genes that learn and act but an integrated informatic system that erases the boundaries between brain, body, and world. We socialize this informatic system, not selves, persons, or individuals in the classical senses of these terms. We “inform” this system. Some move in this general direction is necessary if we are going to overcome the cults of the brain, the gene, and the body.

Conclusion: What Now, That Robots Can Dance? These are liminal times. Perhaps all times—or recurring moments in history—are liminal in some way. When I say “our time” is liminal, here in the early decades of the twenty-first century, I do so in recognition of a

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radical flux of categories, classifications and cultural configurations local, regional, and global unlike anything we have ever seen and experienced. The categories, classifications, and configurations at issue at this juncture of history, culture, and biographies are fundamental. They represent the foundations of the world’s cultures, values, norms, interests, and goals. Social movements and social changes in general have made such primordial classifications as male-female, life-death, nature-society, human-­ machine, person- fetus and the classifications of sex and gender problematic. I don’t mean to ignore earlier examples of this sort of problematic but rather to suggest that we are engaging a fundamentally qualitatively and quantitatively different problematic. The very idea of science has become problematic in three ways: (1) science and cultural studies have led us to a more complex social and cultural understanding of the sciences and the good terms associated with them: truth, objectivity, logic, and reason; (2) the related engagement of Western modes of science with non-Western modes of thought and philosophy; and (3) the challenge of fake news, fake science, pseudo-science, and the triumph of media-driven opinions over evidence-based truths. Dichotomous and hierarchical thinking across the spectra of intellectual life have given way to thinking in terms of complexities, non-linearities, chaos, fractals, multiple logics, heterearchies, and networks. One of characteristics of our liminal era is the proliferation of hybrid and monstrous entities and ideas. We are everywhere, in and out of the academy, in and out of the business community, in and out of all of our institutions, accosted by inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinarities. Competing theorists are charged with exploring new ways of organizing our categories and classifications, and producing new ways of ordering the world that work under our new and radically changing circumstances. These efforts will in general and inevitably strike us as awkward, counterintuitive, obscure, and even monstrous; but they draw our attention to the need to reconfigure, reconstitute, reform, and revolutionize our reigning categories and classifications. If sociology has to be reconfigured as the “end of the social” movement suggests, so be it. Bruno Latour has tried to do this without understanding first what it is that sociologists do and then ignoring the very nature of what science is and what a social science is and could be. There is no doubt that, as an intellectual industry, he has attracted an enormous amount of attention by being (above all else) an ideological entrepreneur and presenting his messages in the languages and rhetorics of theology,

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philosophy, and metaphysics. Our intellectual elites and public intellectuals are more comfortable with these languages and rhetorics than they are with the language and rhetoric of the social sciences. Those sciences are viewed as less robust than the physical and natural sciences, even though they have unrecognized levels of robustness and scientific integrity (see Restivo 2017, 2018). Intellectuals, journalists, and science watchers in general miss this because they are sociologically myopic and suffer from dissocism, the inability to “see” the social and to see it as a nexus of causes. Latour’s efforts to develop an alternative to the constituting and constructive activities of social relations have failed because he is at heart antiscientific (or better non-scientific), reflecting his allegiance to ethnomethodology, non-­evidentiary philosophy, theology, and metaphysics and the cult of individualism (Restivo 2011). The traditional world of brains, minds, and bodies can no longer support our experiences and experiments. We need to think about things— ourselves above all—in new ways not grounded in categories, classifications, and configuration that have reigned for hundreds of years and in some cases for millennia. This has already taken root within the inner sanctum of the neurosciences (see Brothers 1997; Donald 2001; and Rose 2005) and among at least some postmodernists in the humanities and social sciences. Dancing robots now possess the basic rhythmicity needed to engage each other in rhythmic entrainment, the foundation for the emergence of consciousness and emotions. Continuing research and development and experiments will test the theory that non-organic machines can develop consciousness, emotions, and thinking.

Epilogue: The Social Turn in Social & Sociable Robotics The increasing interest in this area (the slow turn to the social in social and sociable robotics) is indicated by the following illustrative list of workshops, issues, and paper titles: “Socially Intelligent Agents”; “’Intelligence’ on “Socially Intelligent Agents”; “Simulation Models of Social Agents”; “Mathematical Organization Theory on ‘Social Intelligence’”; Research in “Consciousness”; Research on “Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology”; International Conference on Artificial Intelligence on “Issues in Cross

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Cultural Communication: Towards Culturally Situated Agents.” Some of the key names associated with this social turn are: Rosario Conte; Kerstin Dautenhahn; Jim Doran; Daniela Hinck & Marcel Martens; Sven Heitsch; Bruce Edmonds; Ian Wright; Alexander Staller & Paolo Petta; Lindsay Marshall & Savas Parastatidis; Leslie Henrickson; Christopher Nehaniv; Michael Schillo, Steve Allen, Klaus Fischer & Christof Klein; Bob Price & Craig Boutilier. Research topics in the social turn include: “Agents in interaction—acquiring competencies through imitation”; “Imitation in Animals Artefacts; Intelligent Social Learning; Engineering of Societies”; “A Biological Perspective”; “The Inconstructability of Artificial Intelligence by Design—the necessary social development of an agent that can pass the Turing Test”; “A New Look into Garbage Cans—Petri Nets and Organizational Choice”; “Having a Sense of Ourselves: Technology and Personal Identity”; “Modelling Agents using the Hotel Analogy: Sanitised for your Protection?”; “The Making of Meaning in Societies: Semiotic & Information-Theoretic Background to the Evolution of Communication”; “Imitation and Reinforcement Learning with Heterogeneous Actions”; “Socially Competent Business Agents with Attitude—Using Habitus-Field Theory to Design Agents with Social Competence”; “Introducing Emotions into the Computational Study of Social Norms”; “The Society of Mind Requires an Economy of Mind.”

Postscript: Will the Real Cynthia Breazeal Please Stand Up Cynthia Breazeal has been a leading researcher in this area and the AI and Media Labs at MIT rank at or near the top on any list of organizations in this field. Her book Designing Sociable Robots (2002); R.  Brooks’ Flesh and Machines (2002); Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio’s Robo Sapiens (2000) were pioneering contributions to the field. The heart of the matter is the question of the most significant problem in social robotics today. No one has outlined the technical problems better than Breazeal. They are not simply technical; Brezeal thinks of her robots as her children, and this is reflected in the Grand Challenges she listed in her pioneering book: to develop personality; to be able to engage in discourse; to have a sense of self that comes from memory of its experiences; and to recognize people it has met before. What would it take to build a robot that could be your friend? She has continued to develop her robotics research program. Among her recent contributions:

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• “Small Group Interactions with Voice-User Interfaces: Exploring Social Embodiment, Rapport, and Engagement,” Ostrowski, A. K.; Zygouras, V.; Park, H. W.; & Breazeal, C. (2021, March). “Small Group Interactions with Voice-User Interfaces: Exploring Social Embodiment, Rapport, and Engagement.” In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 322–331). “Toward Designing User-centered Idle Behaviours for Social Robots in the Home,” Arias, Kika; Jeong, Sooyeon; Park, Hae Won; Breazeal, Cynthia“ T oward Designing User-centred Idle Behaviours for Social Robots in the Home.”, 1st international workshop on Designerly HRI Knowledge. Held in conjunction with the 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2020).

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Heimerdinger, M. and LaViers, A. (2019), “Modeling the Compound Effects of Environmental Context and Stylized Gait on Perception via an Affective Model,” International Journal of Social Robotics 11(3): 495–513. Kac, E. (1999), GENESIS by Eduardo Kac, Archive of Digital Art. https://www. digitalartarchive.at/database/general/work/genesis.html. Keesing, R.M. (1987), “Models, ‘Folk’ and ‘Cultural’: Paradigms Regained?,” 369–393, in D. Holland and N. Quinn (eds.), Cultural Models in Language and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kelly, K. (2011), What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin). LaViers, A., Chen, Y., Belta, C. and Egerstedt, M. (2011), “Automatic Sequencing of Ballet Poses: A Formal Approach to Phrase Generation,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (September): 87–95. LaViers, A., Cuan, C., Maguire, C., Bradley, K., Brooks Mata, K., Nilles, A., Vidrin, I., Chakraborty, N., Heimerdinger, M., Huzaifa, U., McNish, R., Pakrasi, I. and Zurawski, A. (2018), “Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems,” Arts MDPI (Special Issue on Machine as Artist for the 21st Century). Levi-Strauss, C. (1966), The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago). Levi-Strauss, C. (1967). The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Levy-Bruhl, L. (1926/1985), How Natives Think (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Marino, T., Widdowson, C., Oetting, A., Lakshmanan, A., Cui, H., Hovakimyan, N., Wang, R., Kirlik, A., LaViers, A., Stipanovic, D. (2016), “Carebots: Prolonged Elderly Independence Using Small Mobile Robots,” Mechanical Engineering 138(9): S8. Martin, E. (1990), “The End of the Body,” Distinguished Lecture, American Ethnological Society, Atlanta, Georgia. Mills, C.W. (1963), “Language, Logic, and Culture,” 423–438, in I.L. Horowitz (ed.), Power, Politics, and People (New York: Ballantine). Mitchell, R. (2004), “$ell: Body Wastes, Information, and Commodification,” 121–136, in R.  Mitchell and P.  Thurtle (eds.), Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (New York: Routledge). Nietzsche, F. (1887/1989), On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage). Nightline (2002), ABC-TV, August 19 (discussion of socially intelligent robots). Noë, A. (2010), Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang). Norman, D. and Rumelhart, D.E. (1975), “Memory and Knowledge,” 3–32 in D. Norman and DE. Rumelhart (eds.), Explorations in Cognition (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman). Pert, C. (1997), Molecules of Emotion (New York: Scribner’s).

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Poster, M. (2004), “Desiring Information and Machines,” 87–102, in R. Mitchell and P.  Thurtle (eds.), Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (New York: Routledge). Priest, S. (1992), Theories of Mind (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.). Restivo, S. (1983), “The Myth of the Kuhnian Revolution,” 293–305, in R. Collins (ed.), Sociological Theory 1983 (London: Jossey-Bass Publishers). Restivo, S. (2001), “Bringing Up and Booting Up: Social Theory and the Emergence of Socially Intelligent Robots,” Proceedings of the 2001 Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Conference, Tucson AZ, October 7–10. Restivo, S. (2011), “Bruno Latour: The Once and Future Philosopher,” 520–540, in G. Ritzer and J. Stepinsky (eds.), The New Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists (Boston: Blackwell). Restivo, S. (2017), Sociology, Science, and the End of Philosophy: How Society Shapes Brains, Gods, Maths, and Logics (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Restivo, S. (2018), “The Yin and Yang of the Sociology of the Philosophy of Scientific Practice,” Invited lecture, International Conference on Practice Based Approaches to Science, Mathematics, and Logic: Challenges and Prospects, September 28–29, University Foundation, Brussels, Belgium. Chapter 17 in this volume. Restivo, S. (2020), Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture, and Social Networks (New York: Palgrave PIVOT). Restivo, S. (2021), Society and the Death of God (New York: Routledge). Restivo, S. and Steinhauer, A. (2000), “Toward a Socio-Visual Theory of Information and Information Technology,” paper presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society, Department of Electronic Engineering, La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy, September. Rose, S. (2005), The Future of the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Searle, J. (1984), Minds, Brains, and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Searle, J. (1992), The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Star, S.L. (1989). “The Structure of Ill-structured Solutions: Boundary Objects and Heterogeneous Distributed Problem Solving,” 37–53, in L.  Gasser and M.N. Huhns (eds.), Distributed Artificial Intelligence, vol. 2, Research Notes in Artificial Intelligence (London: Pitman). Valsiner, J. and van der Veer, R. (2000), The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Vygotsky, L. (1978), Mind in Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Vygotsky, L. (1986), Thought and Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Wertsch, J. (1991), Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Whitehead, C., ed. (2008), The Origin of Consciousness in the Social World (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic).

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CHAPTER 16

Sustainable Journeys: Daedalus, Icarus, Tantalus and the Future of Science and the World

Preface How serious are we about using resources in ecologically sound ways and in ways that consider basic human needs for nourishment and the reality of unrenewable resources? FACT 1: Times Square has 55 giant LED displays, so it’s not surprising that it costs about $27,000 per day to run, using 161 megawatts. The Las Vegas Strip uses around 8,000 megawatts of electricity per day—costing about $1.3 million, 365 days a year. FACT 2: In a world of limited resources Americans spend about 1 percent of their gross annual income on alcohol. For the average household, that’s $565 a year, $5,650 in 10 years, or a whopping $22,600 over a 40-year period. Nourishing foodstuffs are used in producing and using alcohol including rice, apples, grapes, plums, pineapples, pears, raspberries, grapefruits, rye, and barley. Whatever the virtues of alcoholic beverages, they do not have the survival relevance of the resources they use. If you had an ultimate choice between producing beer or producing barley, the choice would be obvious. We are not making obvious choices in our lives individually or collectively. FACT 3: Things we produce that we don’t absolutely need unnecessarily add pollutants to our air, water, and lands and damage non-renewable resources. I am not asking people to give up pets, alcohol, or luxuries.I am asking people to recognize that resources are limited and that there is a morality of land and resource usage.

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Prelude In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a skillful craftsman and artist, and was seen as a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and power. He is the father of Icarus, the uncle of Perdix, and possibly also the father of Lapyx. Daedalus was the first mortal inventor, a demigod who was not granted immortality by the gods. His career is marked by fantastic ingenuity coupled with jealousy, intrigue, and murder. He invented a machine that allowed King Minos’s queen Pasiphae to copulate with a bull. The issue of that affair is hidden away in a labyrinth designed by Daedalus, and later killed by Theseus who uses a device invented by Daedalus to negotiate the labyrinth. Eventually, Daedalus falls out of favour with the king and is imprisoned in a tower. He and his son, Icarus, devise a plan to escape by using wings made of wax that Daedalus had invented. They escape, but sadly Icarus does not heed his father’s warnings and flies too close to the sun. The wax melts and Icarus falls to his death. This leaves Daedalus heartbroken, bitter, and lamenting his own genius. In the earliest priority dispute, Daedalus and his nephew Talos argue over who invented the saw. Daedalus resolves the dispute by pushing Talos off a tower. In 1923, the biochemist J.B.S.  Haldane published an essay titled Daedalus, or Science and the Future. Haldane painted a picture of an attractive future society created by applying science to the promotion of human happiness. Bertrand Russell replied to Haldane in an essay on Icarus, or the Future of Science. Russell wrote that much as he would like to agree with Haldane’s forecast, his experience with statesmen and governments forced him to predict that science would be used to promote the power of the ruling classes rather than to further human happiness. We are likely to suffer Icarus’ fate as people science has taught to fly; indeed, we seem to be metaphorically flying closer and closer to the sun and increasingly likely to plunge to our deaths as a species and as a planet. Where is science, objectivity, and truth in a world of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” the rise of authoritarianism and fundamentalism, nativism, anti-science, and the perils of religious tolerance? Tantalus was the mythical rich but wicked king of Sipylus. For attempting to serve up his own son at a feast with the gods, he was punished by Zeus to forever go thirsty and hungry in Hades, despite being stood in a pool of water and almost within reach of a fruit tree. His terrible punishment was set as a warning for humanity not to cross the line between mortals and gods. This may stand as a symbolic omen of the consequences

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of humans behaving as if they were the gods of the earth, instead of the earth’s caretakers.

Modern Science as a Social Problem The social problems and promise of science as humanity’s method of inquiry are masked by icons, myths, and ideologies: Archimedes drawing pretty figures in the dust, Newton searching for shapely pebbles at the beach, and Einstein riding light beams in his mind. The uncritical worship and awe of these geniuses has fuelled the myth of pure science. And all the while we have been learning to think and act like the technological machines and processes that have become a dominant part of our cultural landscape. The hagiography that makes scientists collectively ingenious, creative, and benefactors of humanity does not tell us anything about what types of human beings scientists are, or what type of world they are helping to build. Scientists and technologists are not leading us on a sustainable journey. A tyrannical world of abstractions and technological heroics has been wedded to the tyrannical rule of robber barons. What is to be done? In 1940, J.D. Bernal noted that the image of science was dominated by militarism, economic chaos, and the threat of increasingly terrible wars. Twenty-five years later, Bernal looked out on a world divided with “greater poverty, stupidity, and cruelty than it has ever known.” Just twenty-one years later, C. Wright Mills (1961) described science as a set of Science Machines operated and controlled by technicians, businessmen, and military men, “operated by technicians and controlled by economic and military men who do not embody or understand the ethos and orientation of science.” Mills’ conception of science transformed by “military metaphysicians” into a Science Machine echoes Marx’s concept of modern science as alienated and Veblen’s critique of modern science as a machinelike product of our “matter-of-fact” industrial and technological era. What would Bernal have to say about what he saw if he were here today? If we begin with Marx’s view, then science has long appeared to thoughtful men and women as an “instrument of terror,” an assault on the natural world, and a tool of war, greed, and violence. In order to understand the grounds for such views, we must distinguish clearly between isolated scientific biographies, methods, findings, experiments, and theories, on the one hand, and modern science as a social institution, on the other. This allows us to embed modern science in the networks of robber

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barons and military-industrial complexes that have marked the industrial-­ technological era from 1840 to the present. This also leads to viewing scientific biographies and activities as social facts. How are we to understand sustainability from a sociology of science and society perspective? My objective in this chapter is to articulate an agenda for sustainability that realistically assesses its problems, prospects, and prognoses. This agenda is rooted in several key ideas: (1) the ascendancy of the cooperative principle in biological and cultural evolution; (2) the emergence of the Age of the Social (1840–1930) and the development of sociology, anthropology, and social psychology as robust sciences; (3) the recognition of connectivity as a basic feature of the world; (4) the evidence that suggests that creativity is not a matter of “standing on the shoulders of giants” but rather a matter of “standing on the shoulders of social networks”; (5) a new social brain paradigm; and (6) the new science of the death of God. These are key ingredients that ground the proposition that anarchism, understood following Kropotkin as one of the social sciences, is our best chance for achieving the goals of a sustainable journey. Let there be no doubt: this is a perilous journey in which we face the accident and flaws of our humanity, an indifferent universe, and the ultimate futility of trying to map out a sustainable journey. We are doomed to failure in the long run and increasingly facing failure in the short run. Some of us find ourselves, nonetheless, on this journey and it is important that we do not let daffodils, sunsets, and kisses distract us from the obstacles we face. I am obliged to paint a picture of the future of science and the world, and I cannot promise the reader that the outcome will be pretty. I have known romance in my life but I have been unable to allow romance to distract me from critical realism. This chapter is designed to capture that dialectical relationship and where it has left me in these final years of my life.

The Ten Pillars of Sustainability 1. The Cooperative Principle: the ascendancy of the cooperative principle in biological and cultural evolution. Contrary to popular views of Darwin, the myth of the survival of the fittest, the unjustified apotheosis of competition, and Social Darwinism cooperation has been the key adaptive mechanism in evolution since the emer-

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gence of multi-cellular animals (Montagu 1952; Gorney 1972; Wilson 2012). 2. Social Construction: The Fundamental Theorem of Sociology: the emergence of the Age of the Social (1840–1930) and the development of sociology, anthropology, and social psychology as robust sciences. The second Age of the Social was 1930–1970, an age marked by the emergence of the sociology of knowledge and science. The third Age of the Social is 1970–2050, with 2050 as an arbitrary decade in which I presume sociology joins physics, chemistry, and biology as a basic, robust science. The first three decades of the third Age of the Social are marked by the development of the sociology of scientific knowledge, objectivity, and mathematics. The first decades of the 2000s saw the emergence of a social constructionist theory of the brain and the crystallization of a Durkheimian sociology of God and the critique of transcendental, immanent, and psychologistic paradigms. 3. The Universal Connectome: The Connectivity Prinicple: the recognition of connectivity as a basic feature of the world. See the discussion of the connectome in Chap. 18. 4. Social Networks as the Locus of Ideas: The Myth and Culture of the Individual Dethroned. Standing on the Shoulders of Social Networks: the evidence that suggests that creativity is not a matter of “standing on the shoulders of giants,” but rather a matter of “standing on the shoulders of social networks;” the individual as a social being who serves as a repository and transmitter of the thinking constructed in the crucibles of social networks; the individual as a voice box for social networks. 5. The Social Brain Paradigm: Dethroning the Brains in a Vat Paradigm and Neuroism: a new social brain paradigm and Restivo’s universal connectome model of the brain/mind/culture/world (see Chap. 18). 6. The Generational Principle of Science: No Individual, No Research Team, No Experiment, No Organization or Group Can on Its Own Be Scientific or Do Science: Science is a Process of Approaching and Constantly Reapproaching Facts, Truths, and Objectivity on the Wings of Critical Realism and Critical Skepticism Communally and Generationally: science understood as the collective activity of scientists as embodiments and representatives of human reason and

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the intersubjectively tested propositions they propose, test, confirm and dis-confirm across generational continuities. 7. The Consilience of Evidences, The Durkheim Thesis and the Truth That There is No God; Sustainability Cannot Be Based on Delusions or Falsehoods Without Diminishing Its Capacity to Be Realized in Reality: the new science of the death of God; proof by consilience of evidences, ensembles of probabilities, and sheer sociological theory (Restivo 2021). 8. The Salk Theorem: Epoch A and Epoch B: the end of the era of growth and the beginning of the era of sustainability—or else the END (Salk 1973; Salk and Salk 2018). 9. The Myth of Capitalism, The Absurdity of the Free Market Concept, and the Reality of the Black Hole Economy: capitalism as myth and ideology and not economics; the dangers of the black hole economy (Restivo 2018: 186–193). 10. Anarchism, Chaos, and Social Order at Last: To Dream the Impossible Dream: standing at the apexes of the physical and cultural light cones; staring into the abyss of the end of time and space without losing your balance (Restivo 2021: 38).

Data, Data, and More Data Unless governments establish competent monitoring systems, the world will not reach the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. While we seem to be overwhelmed by dire statistically based warnings about the state of our global environment, we are also falling short of gathering the data we need to get an accurate up-to-date picture of our environment and the impact we are having on that environment. The data we do have is not being used efficiently to leverage public policy and international cooperation. Even where we are doing our best sustainability research and applications, we are not taking full account of the hows, whys, and whens of confronting social injustices and the need for inclusive policies. Gaining a statistical and data-rich foothold on the sustainability problem is being seriously hampered by the global divide in statistical capacity and research infrastructures. Many national statistical offices in low-income countries are not able to meet international reporting requirements. Non-traditional information sources such as enrolling and enabling citizen scientists and broadening the use of private sector data are still being developed and deployed around the world. We are faced, as always when we are trying to

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integrate East, West, North and South cooperation, with the possibility that information colonialism based in the rich West and North ignores local contexts in the East and South. The failures around the response to COVID-19 caused by not disaggregating data by race or ethnicity is one example of the need to do this across the board for each of our sustainability goals. In general Espey (2019: 299) writes: Cash-strapped, infrastructure-limited national data systems run by staff who lack training and authority are common among poor countries. They are the biggest barrier to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)— covering everything from cleaner water to fairer societies—set by 193 countries and the United Nations in 2015, meant to put the world on a path to a sustainable future by 2030. [SDG forums] must consider this fact: none of these goals can be met without a data revolution. Many national statistics are compiled on paper, manually inputted to old computers, and unavailable or inconsistently accessible online. Thus, government statistics are not referred to for day-to-day (or even week-to-week) decisions. Those data that are available are usually out of date: only 35% of sub-Saharan countries have poverty data that were updated since 2015. The creation of fit-for-purpose systems will require a massive, coordinated commitment from governments and the international community. Espey argues that the building blocks for such a commitment include “strong governance; appropriate policies and standards; a culture of innovation; and a case that can convince global donors and national governments to make sufficient investments.”

Agricultural systems that have nourished the growth and evolution of human societies and civilization for millennia have become the objects of and themselves existential threats (Tollefson 2019: 171). Human social and cultural activities tend to smooth out and homogenize environments. We paint over diverse green habitats with uniform urban formations, with the general result that our ways of living—and agriculture in particular— destroy the diversity of species and habitats. Experts use phrases like the need for “transformative changes” that are not registering with sufficient clarity to motivate the urgent actions required as part of a global agenda. Unself-conscious food production has significantly altered three-quarters of land areas and about two-thirds of the oceans. Agricultural activities are among the largest contributors to the emission of greenhouse gases. Harvesting, logging, hunting, fishing, climate change, pollution, land degradation caused by legal and illegal activities, and the spread of invasive

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species, enhance the existential threat we are creating by our ways of feeding ourselves. The damage this is causing to ecosystems undermines efforts to reduce poverty and hunger around the world, never mind their negative impacts on sustainability efforts. Government agencies and scientists warn about the need for proactive environmental policies, sustainable agricultural and industrial processes, and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The general public, however, is by omission allowed to think that all these positive efforts can go on without significant changes in how we live our lives. While homeowners try (to different degrees) to conform to local recycling efforts, their efforts are offset by even the most environmentally conscious efforts of governments, the military, and businesses to minimize waste and recycle. This is a prime example of the Law of Marginal Futility. Species extinction is a natural process. The problem we face is that it has been estimated that we are losing species at a thousand times the natural rate of extinction. In the light of these severe threats, it is hard to find solace in the good news about the growth of terrestrial (up 0.3%) and marine (up 13.8%) protected areas in the Asia-Pacific region over the last twenty years or so. Thomas Brooks of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), would like to see less emphasis on scientific assessments and the generation of piles of reports and more attention to supporting policy initiatives especially at the local level.

The Morality of Science It is widely taught and accepted that science cannot give us answers to questions about values and ethics. This is paired with the assumed truism that science doesn’t imply or entail specific values or morals. Yet clearly, if we think of science as a communal activity, we are thinking of science as a culture, as a form of life. In that sense, it must be associated with norms, values, morals, ethics, and beliefs. Only a conception of a science alienated from humans and from society could give rise to the aforementioned truism. Imagine constructing a culture of science. What would we build into such a culture in terms of values and morals? The ethics of science would include investing belief or trust in findings, with a level of conviction warranted by the evidence. Ethical behaviour implies moral integrity, not as a matter of individual will and behaviour, but as a collectively grounded and enforced orientation humans to humans and humans to nature. This would entail adherence to valuing goodness, kindness, generosity, a

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concern with quality, and virtue. The ethos of science demands reporting results with an allegiance to authenticity and a commitment to communicating all the information relevant to a particular research outcome. That ethos also requires scientists to treat living subjects, humans, animals, and the constituents of ecological niches with an appreciation for the integrity of subjects and the contributions of ecological systems to a sustainable human community and planet. The ethos of science includes a concern for the health and security of all living things, in the context of their contributions to a sustainable human community and planetary ecology. We need to generalize the medical ethos, “above all, do no harm” to the sciences. Recognition that there are moral imperatives in science, however, would be a barrier to using our scientific resources and capacities against human and planetary life. If the culture at large and the scientific community is organized according to the humanitarian principles of a culture that can be variously described as democratic, socialist, communist, or anarchist, then we would not expect scientists or laypersons to be driven by a lust for fame, recognition, greed, or monetary rewards. Nor should they be expected to express values that reflect and encourage social injustices and inequalities. Some might argue that science, along with other creative endeavours, represents the dignity and integrity of the human animal both as a human and as one of the animals. A consciousness of these issues and a critique of classical ideas about distancing the scientist from ethics, values, and morality will help to focus all of our attentions on the requirements for a sustainable natural environment and a humane and sustainable human environment. Thus, the relevance of biodiversity studies does not lie in the province of pure science, but in the valuing science of an ethical and moral people (Zohoor 2003: 92–96): …it is a wrong approach to consider science as being value-free or objective. In practice, science incorporates cultural values. Values, in turn, can be objective when they are based on generally accepted principles. Scientists strongly abhor fraud, error, and pseudoscience, while they value reliability, testability, accuracy, precision, generality, and simplicity of concepts. The pursuit of science as an activity is itself an implicit endorsement of the value of developing knowledge of the material world. Whenever science is publicly funded, the values of scientific knowledge may well be considered in the context of the values of other social projects.

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These are ideals we must somehow raise to the level of routine practices across the sciences. We need to think about the “intrinsic” values of science—such as objectivity, rationality, honesty, accuracy—not as complements to humanitarian values such as empathy, compassion, and kindness, but as integrally synthesized with them. John Staddon (2019), a professor of psychology and biology, offers a classical rebuttal to the idea that science entails an innate system of morals and values: It is certain that some cultures will survive longer than others. It seems very likely, moreover, that the ones that survive will have many beliefs that were in fact essential to their survival. But the importance of at least some of those beliefs could not have been foreseen, even in principle. This is the fatal flaw in Skinner’s belief and E.O. Wilson’s claim that the fact of evolution allows all morality to be reduced to science. A comprehensive evolutionary ethics is impossible. Scientific imperialism is simply false.

The counter-point to Staddon is first, that I am not advocating scientific imperialism or scientism, which are in any case imbued with their own systems of morals, values, and ethics. Second, I am not arguing that we have fool-proof grounds for establishing the values, morals, and ethics conducive to survival and sustainability. I do claim, however, that a culture oriented to the well-being of humanity and the planet will generate a scientific system with the same orientation (and thus values, morals, and ethics) conducive to survival and sustainability. As the reader will find throughout this book, science and knowledge in general do not announce findings, inventions, and discoveries with guarantees attached to them regarding their potential for promoting or obstructing survival and sustainability. As the experiential knowledge base in such a culture expands over time, however, probabilities are going to favour (but not determine) outcomes that are more likely to be successful than not. Some philosophers allow their free-wheeling willy-nilly logical and linguistic gymnastics to imagine, for example, that maybe cultures that promote smoking will turn out to have better survival potential than those that ban smoking. This begins to sound like the kind of irrational scepticism that drives out rational scepticism.

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Survival Wisdom Exponential growth goes to infinity in the irreality of mathematics. In the real world it saturates asymptotically, overshoots the carrying capacity, or cycles around the carrying capacity. If overshooting or cycling destroys crucial non-renewable resources the carrying capacity is lowered. Sal Restivo

In 1973, Dr. Jonas Salk had already identified the point of inflection between two distinct periods: an upward facing, accelerating curve called Epoch A, and a downward facing, decelerating curve, Epoch B. In 2018, his son updated his father’s thinking in a book that captures the limits of the human condition visually in a series of variations on the basic sigmoid epochA-epoch B curve. This book is a stark and dark contrast with technopositive futures predicted by transhumanist futurists (e.g., Goertzel and Goertzel, eds. 2015). Let’s use the Goertzel and Goertzel book, which includes contributions by some of our leading futurists (for example, John Hewitt, Aubrey Grey, Robin Hanson, Chris Odom, and for the Chinese perspective, Mingyu Huang). According to their scenarios, we are looking forward to a coming age of post-human intelligence described and predicted by environmental futurism, Kondratiev long-wave analysis, generational cycle analysis, geopolitical futurism, and the study of technological revolutions. Based on these theories and from their perspective in 2015, we are told we are very likely looking toward two intense periods of technological innovation, one in the 2040s and another in the 2100s. One of these periods will give rise to an artificial general intelligence and the “singularity.” Their arrival depends on how successfully we can complete current engineering models and on whether we can get the funds to implement one or more of these models. Both of two major scenarios these futurists sketch involve a world dominated by machine intelligence. One scenario predicts a gradual transition with a model of anticipation; the other scenario predicts a rapid and potentially disruptive transition. The first transition assumes that we will continue on our current paths based on accumulating better and better software; the second transition depends on our ability to fully emulate the human brain. Technopositive futurism deals with issues of a declining population and the extension of the life span and quality of life—with the use of medical implants to conquer disease and enhance human functionality. Imagine adaptive implants that permit your organs to send you messages if they are experiencing problems. This could lead to

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open-source implant technologies that would give us more direct control over our own bodies. On the dark side, one can imagine implant hackers who could do various sorts of damage to our systems. Aubrey de Grey developed a complementary hypothesis to the Singularity hypotheses— the Methuselarity concept, which envisages plausible ways of conquering aging and extending lifespans indefinitely. Methuselarity is the point in time at which anyone then alive can expect to live for thousands of years or more. We can also look forward to robotics and AI impacting every aspect of our lives, for the better if we believe Daryl Nazareth and Ray Kurzweil; or to darker visions in which robotics and AI become existential threats. Technopositivists see a future with diminishing needs for human labour. Several scenarios are emerging that refer to a post-scarcity economy; a super-educated society; a super entrepreneurial society; a society of shareholders; the guaranteed minimum income society; the cyborg society; and contraction of the job market. This starts to look like just another round of over-hyping the potential benefits of new and possible technologies guided by a philosophy of the technological fix. Incidentally, the STEM hype for all of its unstable grounding in social issues of gender equity, diversity, and social justice, is just another form of the technological fix. To avoid this dead end, we should be thinking in terms of adding the arts, humanities, and social sciences to this program, in which STEM becomes STEAM. Here the “a” for arts is broadly conceived, but does not explicitly include the social sciences, as it should. An acronym is therefore needed to summarize Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. I leave this an exercise for the reader. We will have to deal with the morality of the machine as our lives become increasingly populated with AI driven robots, expressing different degrees of autonomy. Defense department engineers are already looking forward to robot armies. We can give the technofuturists some credit for conceiving the possibility of negative outcomes and existential threats, but (on balance) they remain technopositivists. As I pointed out in my chapter on robots, we have no more to fear from machines regarding issues or morals and autonomy then we already have to fear from our fellow humans. Organic and inorganic machines pose similar threats to each other and to themselves. We can also look forward to an Artilect War (Garis 2005) in which Terrans opposed to a Robot Takeover battle Cosmists who favour a Robot Takeover. This pits a vision of the value of traditional humanity in opposition to a transhuman vision of humanity.

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Here again, the Technopositivists see dystopian possibilities, but tend to put their faith in more positive if not fully utopian futures. One of the most glaring examples of the failure of the sociological imagination revealed in the visions of the Technopositivists is the work of the Global Brain Institute at the Free University of Brussels. They imagine an end to a world dominated by individual human minds/bodies/brains (which is part of the myth of the individual and the “I” as a grammatical illusion) and the emergence of collectives and/or combinations of humans as expressions of the structure and dynamics of practical intelligence. The humanistic and sociological failure in Technopositivism is nowhere better expressed than in the Global Brain project’s promise of connecting all humans and artifacts in an all-knowing, all-powerful God-like network. This takes us to the absurd vision of Eden on Earth. Everything will be predictable and foreseen: we will have built in translators so we can speak to anyone in any language; implanted AI that will allow us to evaluate the people we meet whether for friendship, business, or intimacy; and we no longer will have to engage in petty chores. There is some value in the visions of the Technopositivists. If the Singularity isn’t coming, some future is coming, a future that is uncertain. These Technopositivist visions, especially where they realistically include negative as well as positive possible outcomes, can serve as bridges between “now” and “then” that might make the transition easier. The envisioned future will not spring only or primarily from the activities of Silicon Valley or Wall Street, however. The world order either will be formed or will self-destruct, based on what happens in China and Africa. Finally, we must engage with economic futures that are already promising an end to conventional concepts of markets and money. The Technopositivists foresee a decentralized system for financial and legal transaction, fuelled by cryptocurrencies. More critical political economists think in terms of a black hole economy, that will be the key piece of the puzzle that brings life on earth and the planetary ecology to an end. When the Technopositivists do get around to bringing real social human beings into their scenarios, they do so predictably from a psychological perspective, which prevails even where sociology is recognized as part of the picture. What does “Mind and Society” look like in the Technopositivist perspective? Their immediate starting point is an “individual self” that doesn’t exist. They see that morphing into some sort of collective intelligence (which can’t exist). Their assumptions are flawed because of the evolutionary fact that humans are already, always, and everywhere social,

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and the widespread disability I have labelled dissocism. Their vision of the most positive post-Singularity view of society seems curiously similar to Karl Marx’s vague visions of a future communist society. They actually use the vocabulary of a shift from an “era of scarcity” to an “era of abundance” that echoes Marx’s distinction (1894/1981: 959) between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. In the Technopositivist’s era of abundance, just as in Marx’s realm of freedom, the focus of human life shifts from survival labour to creative pursuits. In a related speculation, Kevin Kelly (2010) gave us the Technium, which extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. Most importantly, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technologies, and more self-enhancing connections. It is a self-­ reinforcing system of creation. At some point in its evolution, our system of tools and machines and ideas becomes so dense in feedback loops and complex interactions that it begins to exercise some autonomy. As the seventh kingdom of life, the Technium marries the technological fix to a technopositivist, teleological transhuman era. The Technihuman Age emerges immediately out of the Anthropocene Age. This new kingdom is not biological, but it is not cultural either. If it is envisioned as a merger of the technological and the biological, the technological is understood to be the stronger partner.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Alongside the Technopositivists and the Dystopian futurists among scientists, intellectuals, and novelists, we find the more realistic goals, more humanistic visions, relatively speaking, of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): • 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere. • 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. • 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. • 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. • 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

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• 6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. • 7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. • 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. • 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation. • 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries. • 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. • 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns. • 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. • 14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development. • 15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss. • 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. • 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.

Conclusion: Key Barriers to Global Problem Solving I’d like very much to make a confident picture. I would like to be as good as nature, which, with a shower, produces flowers and grass to cover the destruction. But we are surrounded by human fragmentation, by pessimism, and it is difficult to talk of other things. Federico Fellini (1993)

• 1. Triballistics. The fact is that we are surrounded by threats. Some are existential threats; some are cultural threats. The result is that many people and groups feel that their basic cultural norms, values, and beliefs are under attack. Their tendency to enhance their tribal tendencies leads to triballistics, tribalism that increasingly turns to means of violence to defend itself.

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• 2. The Centripetal Force of Compassion. Compassion is a core feature of every society, every social group in evolutionary terms. It should be a way to bridge gaps between and across cultures, something that would make meeting existential threats easier to coordinate. But compassion is a centripetal force, and powerful centrifugal forces are required to override the centripetal forces. The classic science fiction solution is to use an invasion from outer space to unite the world’s cultures. But we are facing invasions from “alien” viruses and climate change that impact the world. Does the fact that these invasions come without flying saucers mean that it will be difficult to achieve the cooperation required to face our existential threats effectively? • 3. Culture as a Speciating Mechanism. The centripetal force of compassion contributes to speciating cultures. Using a loose analogy, cultures can no more engage in constructive intercourse than animal species can cross-breed. • 4. Resistance to Turning Out the Lights. We have become dependent on resources that (from the perspective of basic needs) are luxuries. We cannot afford those luxuries anymore. It’s not just a matter of living without fossil fuels or gas-guzzling vehicles, or recycling, or reducing our carbon footprints. We must go much further if we’re going to address our existential threats and give up things that are not even on our most basic list of things we have to give up. We are going to have to turn off the lights. • 5. Humanity Decoupled From Co-Evolution By Culture. Assume that humans were a product of co-evolution, evolving closely coupled with the means for their survival. The evolution of culture has de-­ coupled humans from any degree of co-evolution that might have characterized our origins. And that coupling was never simple; evolution was characterized by many conflicting coupled co-­ evolutionary systems. • 6. Culture as a Planetary Pandemic. As a result of 5, culture is the most effective and efficient planet destroying mechanism ever developed. Adding up everything in the lists in this chapter, our prospects for survival into the next century with some reasonable level of quality of life must be realistically assessed as dim at best.

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Guest Commentary: Peter Denton1 Sal Restivo and I have been kindred spirits from the start. While we would disagree fiercely on some of the details, or on how to represent them, our visions of the sustainability problem are at the very least complementary. For me, however, social networks are also fundamentally historical, morphing over time; so, when Sal asked for my comments on this chapter, I looked more closely at the historical context in which he began his narrative about science and sustainability, in discussing Daedalus, Icarus and Tantalus. My dissertation focused on Anglo-American social network in the 1920s and 1930s that developed around the themes of science, religion and society. Bertrand Russell was a prominent participant in this network, but there were many others whose identities and important contributions were not as widely acknowledged, especially later on. Much of my book explored this network, using as connecting tissue the Today and Tomorrow series that began in 1924 with J.B.S. Haldane’s Daedalus or Science and the Future, Bertrand Russell’s rejoinder in Icarus or the Future of Science, and F.C.S. Schiller’s Tantalus, or the Future of Man. One line in Schiller’s book was later paraphrased by Raymond Blaine Fosdick to title a collection of his college commencement addresses: The Old Savage in the New Civilization (1928). That title brilliantly encapsulated the concerns of a generation about the implications of the Great War for the future of science and society, and what (in both a religious and philosophical sense) was the meaning of life—or anything else, for that matter. Their mutual concern was not about the sustainability of civilization as we know it (the most congenial way the problem would be phrased today), but the dubious prospect of its very survival. Long before a realistic spectre of nuclear annihilation appeared, the self-immolation of society by those who had already orchestrated the destruction of the Great War was a worrisome prospect, especially as science and technology continued to provide newer and deadlier tools. Before the ink was even dry on on the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, the Anglo-American popular press worried about “the Next War,” predicting its combatants and the likely means of mutual (and therefore total) social destruction. 1  Peter Denton is Adjunct Associate Professor of  History at  the  Royal Military College of Canada, an activist, and an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada. Author/ editor of  nine books, his profoundly interdisciplinary work focuses on  the  ethical nexus of science, technology and society, primarily on technology and sustainability.

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Thus, the chitchat about science found in these short books by Haldane, Russell and Schiller in the Today and Tomorrow series was anything but frivolous or inconsequential. Situated in the context of their post-war social network in the 1920s, their prescience about what are still crucial issues a hundred years later is unsettling. Moreover, that mythological triad of Daedalus, Icarus and Tantalus (referred to at the start of this chapter) also provides a useful framework for what Sal himself says about science, sustainability and the way ahead. There is a strong streak of Daedalus in what Sal writes about “science and the future.” Whether it is artificial intelligence (AI), social robotics, or the effects of science and technology on the world around us (and within us), the “techno-positivists” have reified technology-as-tool into Technology-as-Future. While Sal demonstrates enthusiasm for some elements of the techno-positivist outlook, whatever sympathies he might have for Man-and-Machine wither at the prospect of Machine Man. Kevin Kelly’s “Technium” does not represent a future in which Sal’s loved ones (or any human) would want to live. It is also the kind of dystopia that J.B.S. Haldane feared was possible, even likely, in the coming century. Haldane, whose book was derived from a lecture given (appropriately) to another social network—the Heretics at Cambridge—was not as sanguine about the effects of science on the future as some of his commentators later observed him to be. He saw a two-fold path, with Man at the mercy of forces that could “at any moment hurl him into the bottomless void” or reduce him to “a mere parasite of Machinery” (1924: 4). His positivity about science (at least in comparison to many of his contemporaries) rested on the conclusion that science would inevitably tend “to increase indefinitely man’s powers for good and evil” (1924: 20), and led him, logically, to the conclusion that the best outcome for all would be a kind of benevolent worker state: “I believe that the progress of science will ultimately make industrial injustice as self-destructive as it is now making international injustice” (1924: 22). Haldane was among those who felt that the potential for self-destruction in war was also the strongest logical argument for avoiding international conflict and therefore ensuring peace, at least on a global scale. Disarmament was therefore a bad idea, and would actually make future conflict more likely if armaments were not equally distributed among all potential combatants. His other contribution to the Today and Tomorrow series, Callinicus: A. Defence of Chemical Warfare (1925), excoriated those who tried to assert a morality about certain weapons that was otherwise absent from international affairs—if a

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fight is inevitable, no sensible person discards any of the available weapons ahead of time. For Haldane (a Marxian iconoclast whose politics were at best contrarian), Daedalus “was the first to demonstrate that the scientific worker is not concerned with gods” (1924: 48), despite his obeisance to machinery. Claiming “the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day” (1924: 77), he professed fascination with the idea of better living through chemicals, along with the applications of science to improving the human species. While what they meant by “eugenics” varied from person to person, many in this social network of the 1920s and 1930s held out the prospect of genetic redesign as the only pathway out of the ethical problem posed by the Old Savage in the New Civilization. Haldane wanted there to be a heart at the centre of the new machine civilization, but he feared such a desirable outcome was likely impossible, given the general moral indifference of science and the absence of any other rational path to a humane future society. This same kind of techno-fatalism is found throughout Sal’s work. We can always hope for some overall, divinely-directed trajectory out of our current situation into some bright, sustainable future, but that hope reflects delusion more than logic. As Sal puts it: “Let there be no doubt: this is a perilous journey in which we face the accident and flaws of our humanity, an indifferent universe, and the ultimate futility of trying to map out a sustainable journey. We are doomed to failure in the long run and increasingly facing failure in the short run.” Yet while Haldane’s book concludes with some cringe-worthy doggerel on the grim and ghastly mission of the Daedalus-scientist in the modern age (1924: 93), Sal remains compulsively dialectical: “Some of us find ourselves, nonetheless, on the journey and it is important that we do not let daffodils, sunsets, and kisses distract us from the obstacles we face. I am obliged to paint a picture of the future of science and the world, and I cannot promise the reader that the outcome will be pretty. I have known romance in my life but I have been unable to allow romance to distract me from critical realism. This chapter is designed to capture that dialectical relationship and where it has left me in these final years of my life.” For Sal, that dialectical relationship between romance and critical realism is inescapably social, of course, expressed in social networks (like the one we share here). From where I sit in the circle, however, technology itself is also inescapably social. If our individual ideas are found/bound within social networks, so, too are the tools we use. Considered as tool,

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not idea—as technology, not Technology, as I wrote in Technology and Sustainability (2014)—technology is best understood as instrumental knowledge and its practice. The technology we develop and use is thus the result of the choices we make. We make choices for reasons, and those reasons reflect our values—what we think is important. The most desirable outcome of our choices, therefore, should be human autonomy, not autonomous technology. Human autonomy, expressed within the social networks of local communities, is what our science and technology need to support if there is to be a sustainable global society for everyone. Yet the question remains: will future science enhance individual freedoms, or make them impossible? Both Bertrand Russell (in Icarus, or the Future of Science) and Sal Restivo are pessimistic that science—as currently construed or constructed—is headed in the right direction. Whether or not Russell saw Haldane’s Daedalus before writing his own contribution, he knew enough of Haldane’s intentions to make Icarus something of a counter-point. He is not convinced scientific discoveries will be used “to promote human happiness” (1924: 5), given that “a long experience of statesmen and governments has made me somewhat skeptical” of benevolent outcomes: “I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.”. Nor does physical science provide a route to achieving such happiness in society, however much the lives of some individuals might be improved by it. Russell focused on the social dimensions of science, and how, through increased organization, it enhanced the negative aspects of groups without enabling any ethical improvement in the life of the Old Savage: “Man’s collective passions are mainly evil…That is why science threatens to cause the destruction of our civilization” (1924: 63). Science, for Russell, was an enabler with three goals: increasing the population; raising the standard of their comfort; and providing more energy for war. Whatever sense of accomplishment Icarus felt in donning his wings, and regardless of the view from on high, Russell focused on the catastrophic conclusion to that mythological flight: Icarus died because of a lack of discernment and wisdom, not a lack of scientific or technical knowledge. Russell’s concerns in Icarus resonate with much of Sal’s work on science, technology and society, especially its social and political dimensions. After all, we stand not on the shoulders of past individuals, but on the shoulders of the social networks, past and present, within which we are situated. Science is a social activity. Period. Neither individuals nor their

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scientific achievements can be abstracted from their context to any meaningful end, while the interconnectivity of twenty-first century society makes even the attempt at such abstraction increasingly absurd. While Russell was more of a political iconoclast than Haldane—and one of the first in his social network to dismiss (from a pragmatic perspective) the viability of Bolshevism in Russia—he refused to surrender the idea that “the scientific outlook” could not improve “the prospects of industrial civilization” (to cite two of his book titles from this period). Though (at best) an uneasy democrat, he had no illusions that other forms of government held any more promise. Like Sal, he was somewhat intrigued, however, by the anarchist theories of Pyotr Kropotkin that Russell’s Anglo-American social network wove into its conversations about science, organization and industrial society. While in Russell’s other works from the 1920s and 30s, he reflected wistfully on the possibility of a “scientific outlook” in government, we know today that this possibility founders on the inherently social nature of science, from which the machinations of people cannot be excluded. So, while we can depict the tantalizing fruits of an enlightened, respectful, scientific and sustainable society, in which we all would delight to live together in harmony, that ideal seems forever just beyond our grasp, no matter what we do. This, of course, is why the third book in the Today and Tomorrow triad, Schiller’s (1864–1937), focused on the figure of Tantalus. After his death, Schiller was the least-remembered of the proponents of pragmatism. An inheritor of the ideas of William James and C.S. Peirce, he proposed a pragmatic humanism more suited to the post-War milieu, however. He was a frequent contributor to the 1920s and 1930s Anglo-­ American intellectual network—which is why he would have been asked to complete the triad started by Haldane and Russell—but his solution to the problem of the Old Savage was not popular with his contemporaries, especially after they witnessed the implications of Nazi race theory. Schiller contrasts the ideas of Haldane and Russell in the opening paragraph of his Tantalus, or the Future of Man (1924), disputing neither. Either outcome is entirely possible, because both could result from the choices people make. For Schiller, the end of civilization through global war was only more dramatic, not more fatal, than continued artistic decline and moral decay (1924: 47). His Tantalus is unable to reach up for the fruit, because his feet are trapped by the paleolithic debris of his animal existence: “If scientific eugenics can put a stop to the contra-selection incidental to civilization, Man will recover the plasticity and

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progressiveness he once possessed, and will be able to evolve further—in whatever direction seems to him best” (1924: 60). This would be accomplished by “the elimination of defectives at the bottom of the social scale, and by the increase of ability at the top” (1924: 61). While Raymond Fosdick obviously liked the argument that the Old Savage had not evolved along with civilization, thus posing a threat to our collective survival, his solution was not the kind of “scientific eugenics” that Schiller had proposed. Fosdick, who was first a trustee (1920–1935) and then President of the Rockefeller Foundation (1936–1948), was a primary driver in shifting its philanthropy from the physical sciences to funding the new social sciences instead. The “age of the social” thus would not have unfolded in the same way without Fosdick’s vision for finding ways to educate the Old Savage and so improve the quality of his choices. Thus, within the historical nexus of this inter-war social network, lies a demonstration of how science and values are inter-woven in the choices we make about many things, including the technology we use. As Sal puts it: “We need to think about the ‘intrinsic’ values of science—such as objectivity, rationality, honesty, accuracy—not as complements to humanitarian values such as empathy, compassion, and kindness, but as integrally synthesized with them.” If science is inherently social, then it is also inherently moral or immoral. Thus, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that Sal lists are an important distillation of what science could offer for the future of humanity, if we choose to be guided by sustainability: “A culture oriented to the well-being of humanity and the planet will generate a scientific system with the same orientation (and thus values, morals, and ethics) conducive to survival and sustainability.” Ending the chapter with six pithy “Key Barriers to Global Problem Solving,” however, Sal gloomily concludes: “Adding up everything in the lists in this chapter, our prospects for survival into the next century with some reasonable level of quality of life must be realistically assessed as dim at best.” Yet life is more than lists; while choosing a sustainable future may require more chaos theory than scientific management, it still needs both. After Bertrand Russell was challenged for his own gloom in Icarus, he wrote What I Believe (1925) for the same series, saying: “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge” (1925: 10). Admitting he could not prove this, “I can only state my view, and hope that as many as possible will agree” (1925: 9).

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Living in a society that desperately requires critical realism to survive, however, Sal seems to want some justification for also embracing the romance he has experienced, some proof of concept. Yet perhaps Russell was right: if proof is impossible, we should just state our case, call for another round, break out the accordion (Sal’s instrument of choice)—and hope someone is inspired by what they hear. A hundred years into the tomorrow envisioned by Haldane, Russell, Schiller, Fosdick and their social network, we can still appreciate their tune. And who knows? Perhaps the Old Savage is finally learning how to dance.

Bibliography Espey, J. (2019), “The Missing Ingredient for a Better World: Data,” Nature 571: 299. Fellini, F. (1993), Interview, Baltimore Sun, November 3 https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-11-03-1993307200-story.html. de Garis, H. (2005), The Artilect War: Cosmists Vs. Terrans (Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press, Carnegie Mellon University). Goertzel, T. and Goertzel, B., eds. (2015), The End of the Beginning: Life, Society and Economy on the Brink of the Singularity (Los Angeles: Humanity+ Press). Gorney, R. (1972), The Human Agenda (New York: Simon & Schuster). Haldane, J.B.S. (1924), Daedalus, Or, Science and the Future (New York: E.P. Dutton). Kelly, K. (2010), What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin). Marx, K. (1894/1981), Capital, Vol. 3 (London: Penguin). Mills, C.W. (1961), The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Montagu, A. (1952), Darwin: Competition & Cooperation (New York: H. Schuman). Restivo, S. (2018), “The Yin and Yang of the Sociology of the Philosophy of Scientific Practice,” Invited lecture, International Conference on Practice Based Approaches to Science, Mathematics, and Logic: Challenges and Prospects, September 28–29, University Foundation, Brussels, Belgium. Chapter 17 in this volume. Restivo, S. (2021), Society and the Death of God (New York: Routledge). Salk, J. (1973), The Survival of the Wisest (New York: Harper & Row). Salk, J. and Salk, J. (2018), A New Reality: Human Evolution for a Sustainable Future (Stratford, CT: City Point Press). Schiller, F.C.S. (1924), Tantalus, or the Future of Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

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Staddon, J. (2019), “Science and Morals: Can Morality be Deduced from the Facts of Science.” https://sites.duke.edu/behavior/2019/04/08/ science-­and-­morals-­can-­morality-­be-­deduced-­from-­the-­facts-­of-­science/. Tollefson, J. (2019), “One Million Species Face Extinction,” Nature 369: 171. Wilson, E.O. (2012), The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright). Zohoor, H. (2003), “The Impact of Moral Values on the Promotion of Science,” Appendix J, 92–96, in The Experiences and Challenges of Science and Ethics: Proceedings of an American-Iranian Workshop (Washington, DC: National Academies Press).

CHAPTER 17

Post-truthism: An Era or an Intellectual Strategy?

Introduction: Anti-intellectualism Comes Home to Roost; America 2016–1984 The main lesson of the POTUS-45 era in the United States is that our Constitution needs to be updated. We have learned that it cannot protect us from actions that undermine the rule of law, democracy, and progress toward a more perfect union. It cannot protect us from demagoguery and authoritarianism in the Oval Office itself, never mind in other governmental arenas. I write this in the wake of draconic measures introduced in Texas to curtain women’s reproductive rights and the increasing efforts to get around and in the end overturn Roe v. Wade. We need to codify Roe v. Wade because the Constitution’s protection of states rights should not be used as an excuse to protect fascism at the state level. We should consider several new amendments to reinforce the Constitution’s protections of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a democratic society. It is long past the time for a Constitutional Convention. We are no longer living in 1776 or 1791. In September of 1789,Thomas Jefferson, writing to James Madison from Paris, argued that the Constitution should be updated every nineteen or twenty years. He wanted to prevent the document from becoming “an act of force and not of right.” What is to be done?

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• Eliminate the Electoral College. • President can introduce legislative proposals directly to Congress, to be voted up or down by a simple majority.. S/he would have to agree to any amendments. If Congress does not act within 60 days, the proposal would become law. • Appoint Supreme Court justices for staggered 18-year terms. • Congress must act on all executive nominations within 60 days by a simple majority vote. If not acted on within 60 days, a nomination would be considered confirmed • Public funding for all national electoral campaigns. • Require compact and contiguous electoral districts for all House seats. • Federal voting rights laws and oversight for all national and state elections. • Pass the Equal Rights Amendment; and make a strengthened Roe v. Wade decision a federal law or part of a human rights Constitutional Amendment. • Amend the 2nd Amendment in areas where it is miscarrying (by analogy to the relationship between the 19th and 21st amendments). • Reinforce the checks and balances provisions. • Resurrect the legislative veto which allows Congress to turn back presidential orders by majority vote. Something must be done to limit the use of Executive Orders (never mind tweets) as instruments of domestic and foreign policy. Such orders should, with due consideration of prior rationales for such orders, require approval by a majority of the House of Representatives. The Senate has become— well, let’s let Mark Twain explain: There are many Senators whom I hold in a certain respect and would not think of declining to meet socially, if I believed it was the will of God. We have lately sent a United States Senator to the penitentiary, but I am quite well aware that of those who have escaped this promotion there are several who are in some regards guiltless of crime–not guiltless of all crimes, for that cannot be said of any United States Senator, I think, but guiltless of some kinds of crime. —Mark Twain in Eruption, ed. DeVoto (1940) Senator: a person who makes laws in Washington when not doing time. —More Maxims of Mark, ed. Johnson (1927)

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• Relax the standards for impeachment by three-fifths vote in the House, including making clear that the president can be impeached for non-criminal offenses. • We need clearer guidelines for invoking the 25th amendment, a stronger means of insuring that violations of the Constitution do no go unremarked and unenforced. Perhaps we need an independent ombudsman/woman with serious powers to insure adherence to the Constitution. Such a person would be nominated by one or more state governors and voted into office by a majority of the governors of the fifty states. That person would not have executive powers beyond the power to petition the courts, including the Supreme Court, concerning Constitutional transgressions. These recommendations ignore the basic problem that a great many of our lawmakers are averse to a politics of compassion and are enemies of science, education, and the life of the mind. They believe the individual should bear the burdens of social structural outcomes that interfere with the quality of life. The absurdity of using the Dow Jones average as the main indicator of the health of an economy marked by intolerable levels of poverty and gaps in wealth and income, should finally be recognized. The lack of a politics of compassion means that health care, social security, and other parts of the social safety net are always going to be at risk. We may need to test the capacity of the law to institute compassion in the short run and hope that, in the long run, compassion will become a norm of our culture. We have seen such an achievement in practical (not utopian) terms in other nations. Keep in mind, though, that compassion is a centripetal force that reinforces boundaries and restricts connections across social groups, cultures, and nations. This is one of the reasons Karen Armstrong’s Charter of Compassion is not viable. Compassion is indeed a feature of all religions and by definition of all societies, but, as a centripetal force, it requires strong centrifugal forces to achieve cross-cultural cooperation. Many observers of the fake news culture and populist trends that oppose science have been mystified by these developments. Yet America has been historically characterized by a tension between access to education and excellence in education. The historian Richard Hofstadter told this story in 1963 when he documented American Protestantism’s value of spirit over intellectualism. Unlike their European cousins, Americans have a history of resenting the life of the mind. They have sung the praises of the common man with a

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sound and fury that has drowned out science and reason. The learned class has been portrayed as “immoral, dangerous, and subversive.” In 1962, columnist Stewart Alsop introduced the word “eggheads,” which Republicans began to toss at Adlai Stevenson. By the time Reagan reached office, his vice president Spiro Agnew was on “egghead” steroids and transforming it into “nattering nabobs of negativity.” This epithet was widely interpreted to apply to journalists but Norman Lewis (2010) argues that it was meant for Nixon’s political enemies. Yet the inherently anti-intellectual tone was certainly not impossible to hear, given Agnew’s own cognitive credentials. Of course, there may have been moments in American political life when something like a positive view of the life of the mind had its day. Jefferson Morley (1986), writing in The New Republic, said: NOT SO LONG ago, intellectuals seemed to be the most picked-on weaklings in the school yard of American politics. When George Wallace ran for president in 1972, he blamed “pointy-headed intellectuals” for everything from rising crime and changing sexual mores to busing and the stalemate in Vietnam. Vice President Spiro Agnew had exploited the same theme in 1970 when he attacked the country’s “effete corps impudent snobs,” those “nattering nabobs of negativism” who opposed the Nixon administration. Two decades earlier the vocabulary was different but the mood was similar. Eugene McCarthy was referred to as a “sardonic intellectual” in 1968.

The term “egghead” was applied to Stevenson and the intellectuals and professors who supported him. Things were changing by the 1980s. Even televangelist Pat Robertson boasted about his Yale law degree. Mario Cuomo stood on his “bookish learning,” Jack Kemp was an “idea” man, Gary Hart was the “new ideas” politician, and Jeane Kirkpatrick’s reputation as a “steely-willed intellectual” was a political asset. Some politicians readily and publicly called on support from “think tanks.” These episodes are blips in a history that does not raise the life of the mind above the hymns to the common man and, at worst, the support of a common denominator citizenship paradigm. And if you have any questions about this, follow the money. How much money and support do we provide for teachers and schools and how much for athletics and entertainment? As a university professor for half a century I witnessed part of this American nightmare in student populations mired in medieval worldviews.

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As I came to the end of my teaching career, I witnessed teachers and students becoming increasingly victimized if not actually represented by generic administrators fostering secrecy, suspicion, and subversion and proliferating tools of surveillance, accountability, and assessment. Their goal has not been to facilitate quality teaching and research but rather to control the genesis and transmission of ideas in support of an ideologically conservative agenda. Some have not been smart enough to think in these terms, but have simply sought to avoid lawsuits in our pathologically litigious society, which allows students and parents in principle to sue to suppress ideas and educational practices they oppose. The schools and notably the universities have become crucibles for the commodification of inquiry and the reduction of knowledge to a pablum. The convergence of the twin processes of bureaucratization and professionalization are fuelling the end of the university, the end of science, and the end of objectivity. Our educational system has become a breeding ground for post-truthism. The most difficult problem America has to face, in a sense, is leaving childish things behind when it comes to religion. Americans are being left behind, not only by their European counterparts, but by the theologians. Our general abilities to confront the existential threats to our species and our planet will not be up to the task if we continue to live as if is not simply 1776 and 1791, but 1500. We have seen the kinds of achievements I am recommending brought to fruition in practical and not utopian terms elsewhere. If I point to Sweden as having a more favourable political climate for compassionate social policy, there is no point in arguing that their system is not perfect. We need realistic models, not utopian ones. It is foolish to think anyone would take seriously a proposal for an intelligence test for anyone who wants to run for office. This idea has in fact entered the ethersphere of political discourse (e.g., Reynolds, 2013; Perrie, 2021). Yet is this any more foolish than the system that allowed people to run for (and win) Senate seats who would not stand in Donald Trump’s way during four years of bullying, authoritarianism, unbridled nepotism, policy by tweet, and insane appointments and firings, never mind failing to convict an impeached president? I’m not recommending a standard intelligence test, but one that focuses on questions of citizenship and the Constitution. We can do better. We have seen the kinds of achievements I am recommending brought to fruition in practical and not utopian terms elsewhere. We can’t do better without the missing ingredient that our democracy requires: education for critical citizenship, as opposed to education for

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patriotism, nationalism, obedience, and vocations. We should, for example, learn about the Bill of Rights by practicing them the way law students practice in moot courts. Students should engage in moot protests, moot free speech rallies, moot elections, and so on. We should teach real history, not icons and myths. When I studied the presidents in school, I drew shadow profiles of Washington and Lincoln. By at least fifth grade, I should have been reading a book like Howard Zinn’s (1980) A People’s History of the United States. It is also past the time when we should revisit the religion clause of the 1st amendment. It is time to leave childish things behind, not simply because it is the realistic thing to do, but because our survival as a species depends on it. Our problem-solving abilities (in the face of the existential threats to our species and our planet) are compromised by unrealistic beliefs and delusionary imaginings about gods and angels. We should be protecting the freedom to teach, to learn, and to do science.. We need a stronger way to enforce the establishment clause. The current version has not prevented using the Bible at swearing in ceremonies and in courts, the active use of chaplains in political events, and the seasoning of our money, pledges, and anthems with God.

The Post-truth Paradigm Post-truthism is only new in terms of depth and scope. It was characteristic of political and media practices in eighteenth and nineteenth century America (Pazzanese, 2016). The so-called “pamphlet wars” of the 1600s and thereafter represented a kind of material Internet, propelled by printing technologies. Slander and vitriol travelled easily and fomented dissent, wars, and revolutions (New Scientist, 2016). Its resurrection around the world in contemporary society must be attributed in part to the globalization of an out-of-control “information” system cantered on the Internet. America’s anti-intellectual tradition nourishes “fake news.” Internationally, cynicism about the political process has made a mockery of politics, a process already underway in the post-war period (Londsdale, 1957). Facts, understood properly and in context, nourish our survival, feed our curiosity, form a dynamic, dialectically and paradoxically flexible concrete foundation on which we build, mobilize, and use the tools, technologies, techniques, and cognitive devices we require to solve problems of every type we can encounter in our lives, in our history, on our planet. An increasingly substantial segment of the population (and America seems to

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be leading the way here) has morphed rational scepticism into an irrational scepticism, rational freedom from unbridled authority into an irrational defence of absolute freedom. This has been done under the umbrella of the myth of individualism. The “people” have had enough of experts, and have come to view facts as negative, pessimistic, and unpatriotic (Deacon, 2016). Post-truthers live off and spread conspiracism (Boston, 2016; Cillizza, 2016). Examples of how conspiracism breeds violence have become all too common, notably in America (Kang & Goldman, 2016). One of the pathologies of democratic thinking sometimes linked to the politics of freedom of speech is that everyone is entitled to an opinion. Every school room from pre-school to graduate school should have a flag emblazoned with Wittgenstein’s (1922/1990, p.  189) “last words,” Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

A Post-truth Era In 2015, Jayson Harsin (2015) coined the phrase “regime of post-truth.” The term encompassed many aspects of post-truth politics and captured a shift from regimes of truth to regimes of post-truth. We now began to hear about “truth markets.” Readers should hear echoes of the concept of “objectivity communities” and “communities of consensus” when they recall Foucault (1976/1997, p. 130): Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth.’ That is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

Regimes of truth circulate through the controlling machinery of cultural institutions (academic, military, media, and information). References to regimes of post-truth, like references to post-industrial, post-modern, and post-capitalist, reflect the growing awareness that conventional regimes of rationality are no longer functioning as effective foundations for problem solving. I refer to this as the “routinization of rationality.” Liminal eras are characterized by the routinization of rationality(ies) and the decline in the efficacy of conventional categories and classifications. This is a recurring feature of history in motion, and such eras are characterized by the

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loosening of canons of logic and reason that permit the proliferation of new strategies for re-newing categories, classifications, and rationalities capable of dealing with a new realm of issues and problems. Most students of our post-truth era have relied on a narrow explanatory framework that, at its widest point, goes back as far as the 1600s and the breakdown of the Westphalian order. As recurring intellectual strategies, however, post-truth regimes are ubiquitous throughout civilized history. Steve Fuller has consistently challenged Bruno Latour for the title of clown prince of STS or STS’s most powerful trickster. Let us ease into his views on post-truth with a little background, once again focusing on the modern era and bracketing the historical routinization of rationality. This helps to keep us within Fuller’s frame of reference. What are the key factors at work in transforming cultures to post-truth regimes? They are part of the strategy of managing perceptions and beliefs in populations segmented by the rise and fall of modern technological-­ industrial society: microtargeting (which relies in part on strategically using rumours and lies); the fragmentation of media and media gatekeepers in an economy of information overload and acceleration, user-­generated content, and the collapse of a core of societal authorities entrusted with monitoring the borders that separate truths from falsehoods. We can encapsulate these developments within two terms: tabloidization (Esser, 1999) and infotainment. This is not simply a matter of post-truth politics, but a regime of post-truth (Harsin, 2015). We cannot leave out the consequences of the anti-democratic anti-American activities of foreign private and public agents (Pomerantsev, 2016; Drezner, 2016). We are living in an age of misinformation, in which everyone feels equally qualified to make claims. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that a survey industry is constantly asking people their opinions about everything from “Do you think O.J. is guilty?” to “Do you approve of the president’s economic policies?” The problem is that we don’t associate the people we ask with any information about their credibility. The anti-expert mongers see this in distorted power-to-the-people terms, but they have different standards depending on the context and frame of reference for the questions. Everyone is entitled to express an opinion about O.J. Simpson’s guilt or innocence; and we’ll even ask public opinion questions about pandemic policies. But we wouldn’t base our own actions regarding open heart surgery on public opinion. So, we encourage opinions, not studied, educated, fact-based statements. Many of my students considered their opinions about sociology

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(and even about my specialties) equal in value to my own. In America, more than anywhere else, an anti-intellectual cultural predisposition has produced a least common denominator school system that is as much to blame for the emergence of a post-truth regime as any of the other factors I’ve mentioned. We are in an age of misinformation where limits of plausibility have vanished and where everyone feels equally qualified to make claims that are easily shared and propagated (Helfand, 2018). Anti-intellectualism in America may seem like the foundation for the post-truth era. But in terms of our history, and in the context of a wider view of world history, we have always lived in a post-truth world. Steve Tesich, a Serbian-American playwright introduced the term “post-truth” in 1992. The new century became marked by post-truth messaging. Keyes (2004) introduced the term “post-truth era.” In the wake of misleading statements by the post-9/11 Bush administration, Alterman (2004, p. 305) wrote about a “post-truth political environment” and “the post-­ truth presidency.” Crouch (2004) used the term “post-democracy,” an environment of public electoral politics managed by spin doctors. “Post-­ truth politics” looked like it was taking its lessons from the advertising business. In 2016, the German Language Society named “postfaktisch” (post-­ factual) the word of the year. They followed many other journalistic and scholarly sources by linking it to the rise of right-wing populism. “Post-truth” was named Word of the Year in 2016 by the Oxford English Dictionary where it is defined as “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. Trump’s election occurred in the midst of this troubling worldwide phenomenon. Already by the 1990s, the term “post-democracy” was showing up more and more in the writings of sociologists. There were examples of forged evidence and historical revisionism in India (Gopalakrishnan (2016). Snodgrass (2017) wrote about distrust of academics in South Africa. Arron Banks, founder of the Leave EU campaign in the UK, said that you had to learn from Trump’s success and connect with people emotionally, not rely on facts. These developments all seem to be echoing I.F. Stone’s (MacPherson, 2006) remarks on government: “Every government is run by liars.” MacPherson’s book is titled All Governments Lie. This suggests something more pervasive and pernicious than what standard ideas about the “post-truth society” point to.

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The United States historically has generated various forms of denialism. The modern forms include the anti-vaxxers; resistance to evolutionary theory and genetically modified foods; birtherism; climate change denialism; and the promulgation of dietary strategies and health products unregulated and with very little expert counterevidence in view, even when available. In every case, counter-vailing factual evidence was in fact extensive and readily available. Counter-vailing forces are coming “on-line,” however. These include new and improved fact-checking technologies, giving scientists more visibility, state-led efforts to oppose fake news (which come with a dangerous potential for censorship). In March 2017, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Organization for American States issued a Joint Declaration on “Freedom of Expression and Fake News, Disinformation and Propaganda” to warn against the effects of fake news, but, at the same time, condemned any attempts at state-mandated censorship (United Nations, 2017; Kutner, 2018).

Post-truth, Analytically As a philosophical and political concept, the term post-truth is relatively recent; the concept can be traced back to earlier moral, epistemic, and political debates about relativism, postmodernity, and mendacity in politics, including untruthfulness, lies, deception, and deliberate falsehood (Arendt, 1972). This perspective makes it possible to create a false link to science and technology studies. The post-truth atmosphere gave rise to a new specialty, agnotology: the study of deliberate, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, typically to sell a product or win favour, for example through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The term also highlights the condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before (Croissant, 2014). Post-truth writers, who have identified Nietzsche as one of the chief fashioners of the concept, fail to recognize that his arguments about the human creation of concepts anticipated the science studies movement. In his 1873 essay, “Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche holds that humans create truths about the world through their use of metaphor, myth, and poetry. He writes:

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If someone hides an object behind a bush, then seeks and finds it there, that seeking and finding is not very laudable: but that is the way it is with the seeking and finding of “truth” within the rational sphere. If I define the mammal and then after examining a camel declare, “See, a mammal,” a truth is brought to light, but it is of limited value. I mean, it is anthropomorphic through and through and contains not a single point that would be true and universally valid, apart from man. The investigator into such truths is basically seeking just the metamorphosis of the world into man; he is struggling to understand the world as a human-like thing and acquires at best a feeling of assimilation.

This, along with Marx and Durkheim on the social construction of facts, is less about a post-truth agenda and more about an emerging argument against purist and Platonic conceptions of science. Revealing the messy realities of scientific practice was taken by some careless observers to mean that science could not be trusted. We also need to pay attention to the argument that facts and values are separate and distinct realms of experience, a position Max Weber famously advocated in his essay on “Science as a Vocation” (1922). The philosopher Leo Strauss (1965, pp. 35–80) worried that if we accept Weber’s viewpoint then we are left no way to evaluate scientific truths according to ethical standards. Strauss was too strong in his claim that Weber was trying to isolate reason from opinion, but he was right in arguing that the “ought” ought to be within reach of human reason. For somewhat different reasons, philosophers as different as Foucault, Derrida, and Latour expressed scepticism about the traditional division between facts and values. Hannah Arendt (1972, pp.  6–7, 12) distinguished defactualization, from falsehood and lying. She wrote): What these problem-solvers have in common with down-to-earth liars is the attempt to get rid of facts and the confidence that this should be possible because of the inherent contingency of facts.

Deception and self-deception are meaningless in a defactualized world that destroys the distinction between truth and falsehood. In a defactualized environment, the individual (Arendt, 1972, p. 36) “loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world, which will still catch up with him because he can remove his mind from it but not his body.” The Vietnam era problem solvers led us to defactualization by “translating all factual contents into the language of numbers and percentages” and by

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being divorced from the facts of “given reality” (Arendt, 1972, p. 11, 18). They eagerly reduced factual reality to formulae “expressed in a pseudo-­ mathematical language…” Her definition of post-truth did not rely on the triumph of emotions over facts and evidence, however. Defactualization identified hyper-rationality as the mechanism that blurred fact and fantasy. Enter Steve Fuller (2018), the most prominent STS scholar writing on post-truth. As an STS scholar, Fuller is especially well-placed to understand that putting “facts” in scare quotes is a recognition that facts are socially constructed, contextual, and networked. All this is fine, but Fuller gives us what has been described as a “gonzo” melding of erudite philosophy, counter-narratives, and shocks to the social solar plexuses of elites. The result is that the empirical grounds of our critical and even radical understanding of social injustice and social inequality are overshadowed by self-indulgent philosophy seasoned with sociologisms and a self-­ righteous sense of having become king of the hill. To put this in less combative terms, he could be seen as standing at the opposite end of one of the continua that defines one axis in science studies, the one that has Bruno Latour as king of the hill at the other end. These opposite poles are both weakly positive and tend to collapse into each other. Like Latour, Fuller is a self-styled “game changer” and what goes with that is active self-promoting and staking out territory that some like-minded thinkers occupy, but without acknowledging them. There is every reason not to put our full faith and promise in the hands of unquestioned authorities and experts, and this is a position Fuller exploits with all his might. He sees a “culture of intellectual deference” where I see “anti-intellectualism.” The two can co-exist, but my position is that anti-intellectualism, certainly in the American context, is the proximate source of modern post-truthism, which is not new but has only become more public and more virulent. There is a broader context for understanding post-truthism, however, as I will show. Fuller and I certainly agree that knowledge has an ethical component. I reached this point through the results of empirical studies by a community of researchers in science studies. Fuller knows and uses these same results, but his path to enlightenment is through the philosopher Karl Popper and an Athenian concept of democracy. He boils down the debates about facts and values, and facts and alternative facts, to a conflict between technocrats and rhetoricians. Using the Brexit vote as a case study, he argues like a good Athenian that the rhetoricians are more democratic; and of course it is democracy we should wish for. Skipping over all the

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erudition and Latourian word play, Fuller and I can agree that education is the key to achieving a common humanity. An academy with an interest in promoting the public good should be an academy that educates us in what we should desire (shades of Aristotle and Kant). I will also skip over the relevance and accuracy of his Brexit case analysis, which is brought into question, for example, by Peter Mair (2013). In what sounds like a variation on Latour’s “we have never been modern,” Fuller argues that “we have always been post-truth.” If his intention is to argue that politics, like sex, is everywhere, he is at one with many thinkers over the centuries. Further, the more you read, the more Fuller sounds like the inventor of Plato 2.0. Without bulldozing all of the subtleties and complexities of ancient philosophy, it is precisely the adjective “ancient” that should worry us as we read Fuller. At the end of the day, he is a mirror image of Latour, asking us to buy a good story and ironically (given the way he trashes the academy) to give him a gold star for academic excellence. Arguments about whether post-truth politics is here to stay or not (e.g., Fuller versus Hewitt, 2020) miss the point that post-truth eras are a recurring feature of history which consists of cycles of crystallizing and routinizing rationalities followed by the fracturing and reconstitution of rationalities. The process, schematically, looks like this. Rationalities required for survival emerge and crystallize as societies emerge and crystallize or come out of revolutionary periods and crystallize. They become routinized and stagnant presaging eventual failure. If failure doesn’t lead to the destruction of the society, innovative candidates for a new configuration of rationality emerge, proliferate, and a new dominant rationality crystallizes, a new order of categories and classifications. This is rarely a wholesale revolution, but comes close to that in liminal times. Liminal times require paradigm shifts, changes in worldviews. Such times give birth necessarily to post-truth regimes as segments of post-rationality regimes. The novel quality of our liminal era is that we face more and greater existential threats to humanity and planet earth than at any time in the era of the human species. This helps explain the virulence of contemporary post-truth regimes. Fuller’s sociological pretensions are belied by the main sources he draws on, which are inevitably philosophers. This tends to ground his already questionable ideas in philosophical fantasies rather than in sociological realities. Societies do not “get used to” post-truth regimes and the routinization of rationalities. That is a pathway to civilizational decline,

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and in our current state, a path to a more rapid than necessary extinction. Populism and post-truth politics are not a pathway to greater democratization in science and society. That is an Athenian fantasy. There is something pathologically STS in the way the oppositions between Latour and Fuller are both nourished by an overabundance of Platonism. My answer to the question “For whom does the bell toll in science, knowledge, and thinking” has for a long time been “It tolls for you, Plato.” Fuller identifies four common post-truth tropes: in abbreviated form and in my own words, they are that (1) scientific research in process is unsettled, settled science is demonstrated in the scientific paper; (2) truths, (3) consensus, and (4) normative epistemic categories are all contingent. These well-established STS tropes are not, as Fuller contends, endorsements or supports for post-truthism, any more than they entail relativism or anti-science sentiments. In his review of Fuller (2017) and Sismondo (2017) offers a list of more appropriate tropes: 1. The emotional resonances and feelings generated by statements are coming to matter more than their factual basis. 2. Opinions, especially if they match what people already want to believe, are coming to matter more than facts. 3. Public figures can make statements disconnected from facts, without fear that rebuttals will have any consequences. Significant segments of the public display an inability to distinguish fact and fiction. 4. Bullshit, casual dishonesty and demagoguery are increasingly accepted parts of political and public life; this should not, however, be confused with ordinary lying, which is nothing new. 5. There has been a loss of power and trust in traditional media, leading to more fake news, news bubbles and do-it-yourself investigations. In the post-truth critical literature, there is still a sense that post-­ truthism has roots in modern culture rather than (as I claim) being a recurrent intellectual strategy in the history of ideational structures. The widespread belief that post-truthism was born in post-modern epistemology and the cultural debates of the 1960s–1970s (e.g., Baer & Hennefeld, 2017) makes it an easy matter to connect it to STS.  One has to take a wider look around to get a more realistic perspective on the social and historical forces at work here. But Fuller has pathologized the connection to STS as a way of gaining attention and claiming a share of the market in ideas. Fuller takes Kuhn’s ideas on paradigm shifts and normal science

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literally, and as accurate descriptions of scientific practice. Based on this questionable view of science, he criticizes the very idea of consensus in science, labelling it “cognitive authoritarianism” (Fuller, 2017, pp. 49–50). This traps him into erasing the boundary between fact and fiction. STS gets absurdly linked to reducing nature to a linguistic fiction, embedding truth in the empty concept of a “free market” no longer taken seriously by critical realist economists. He defends a caricature concept of economic man “homo homini lupus.” What this all comes down to is a pathologized version of critical science studies. He wanders, blinded by idiosyncratically-­ embraced ancient philosophers, into a maze of pseudo-STS defences of climate denial, creationism, and other nonsense. Like Latour, Fuller has set himself an agenda that involves mobilizing attention at all costs. He has a distorted set of assumptions about the democratization of knowledge and information. The Internet, that has made all this possible, is not the Internet we know to be influenced by commercial and monopolistic interests and goals, but rather a Platonic form. Laissez-faire, Fuller cries, building a “free market” for truth and expertise on the model of Friedrich Hayek’s economic models, not to mention a wildly distorted version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” Elites and power contaminate all aspects of science and society in Fuller’s Pareto-influenced version of STS, and in his defence and generalization of neo-liberal economic models. He wants to disabuse us of an absolutist view of science that Bloor, Restivo, and others in STS dismissed, with a view of “relativism” that did not mean “anything” and “everything” goes but “disinterested inquiry.” Are we going to join Herman Kahn and begin to “think the unthinkable”? Surely, you’re joking, Mr. Fuller? Omodeo (2019, pp. 10–11) writes: At no point in Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game [Fuller, 2018] can the reader be enlightened on the most pressing questions of today. In fact, the red thread of Fuller’s labyrinth—the quintessence of post-truth—is the constant refusal to face reality and take responsibility; but fleeing from problems will never lead to their solution. At no point does Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game step back from its paradoxical partisanship and provocation in order to address the more compelling historical development behind these contemporary slogans, beginning with the breakdown of the Westphalian order and the catastrophic environmental problems of the age that we are currently living through.

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Conclusion Failing to pay attention to these problems in critical realist terms is, as I have argued, perilous. That failure will obstruct our ability to re-energize democracy and democratic debate and to give us some purchase on the global problems we face. Surely, Fuller is right about challenging our elites, but he does this in a way that fractures professionalism and specialization. Omodeo raises the spectre of the 1930s, evoked by the resurgence of race and nation-based ideologies. This is a foreboding omen of failure in our efforts to identify and address the existential threats of our time. Fuller’s outrage (which reminds one of the 1960s rage at “The Man” and “The System”) is an outrage that traps us inside the very framework that is both obstructing our view of the problems and undermining our ability to construct solutions. Both technology companies and governments have started to make efforts to tackle the challenge of “post-truth politics.” In an article for the journal Global Policy, professor Nayef Al-Rodhan (2017) suggested four particular responses: 1. Improve the technological tools for fact checking. For example, Germany has already asked Facebook to introduce a fake news filtering tool. 2. Greater involvement and visibility for scientists and the scientific community. The UK, for instance, has a series of Parliamentary committees at which scientists are called to testify, and present their research to inform policy-making. Similarly, in Canada, the role of Chief Science Advisor was re-established and each department with even a small scientific capability was required to develop a policy for scientific integrity. In countries such as the Czech Republic, new units have been set up to tackle fake news. The most important challenge here is to ensure that such state-led efforts are not used as a tool for censorship. 3. Securitizing fake news. It is important to treat post-truth politics as a matter of security and devise global efforts to counter this phenomenon. Let’s add to this list President Biden’s resurrection of the role of the science advisor and its elevation to Cabinet status. These are all short-term solutions that may play out to our benefit, if they help to reconstruct our rationalities, our categories, and our classifications.

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Kutner, M. (2018), “Diamond and Silk Hit Back at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook ‘Censorship:’ ‘We Are Not Terrorists,’” Newsweek https://www.newsweek. com/diamondand-silk-facebook-zuckerberg-882332 Lewis, N.P. (2010), “The Myth of Spiro Agnew’s ‘Nattering Nabobs of Negativism,’ American Journalism 27(1): 89–115. Londsdale, K. (1957), Is Peace Possible? (New York: Penguin). MacPherson, M. (2006), “All Governments Lie”: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone (New York: Scribner’s). Mair, P. (2013), Ruling the Void: The Hollowing-Out of Western Democracy (London: Verso). Morley, J. (1986), “The Washington Intellectual: From the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution,” New Republic 195: 11–12. Omodeo, P.D. (2019), “The Political and Intellectual Entanglements of Post-­ Truth,” ARCA, Universita Ca’Foscari, Venezia. http://hdl.handle. net/10278/3720244: 1–11. Pazzanese, C. (2016), “Politics in a ‘Post-Truth’ Age,” Harvard Gazette. https:// news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/07/politics-in-a-post-truth-age/ Perrie, S. (2021), “There Are Calls for Aussie Politicians to Undergo IQ Tests,” https://www.ladbible.com/news/latest-calls-grow-for-aussie-politicians-toundergoiq-tests-20210823. Pomerantsev, P. (2016), “Why We’re Post-Fact,” Granta https://granta.com/ why-were-post-fact/ Reynolds, G.H. (2013), “We Need an IQ Test for Politicians,” New York Post, April 8: https://nypost.com/2013/04/08/we-need-an-iq-test-for-politicians/ Sismondo, S. (2017), “Not a Very Slippery Slope: A Reply to Fuller,” EASST Review 36(2). Snodgrass, L. (2017), “Academics can’t change the world when they are distrusted and discredited,” The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/academics-­ cant-­change-­the-­world-­when-­theyre-­distrusted-­and-­discredited-­77420. Strauss, L. (1965), Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). United Nations (2017), “Report on the Role of Digital Access Providers,” Special Rapporteur’s 2017 report to the United Nations Human Rights Council https://www.undocs.org/A/HRC/35/22 Weber, M. (1922), “Science as a Vocation” (‘Wissenschaft als Beruf,’ from Gesammlte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehrem Tubingen: 524–555. Originally delivered as a speech at Munich University, 1918. Published in 1919 by Duncker & Humbl). Wittgenstein, L. (1922/1990), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge). Zinn, H. (1980), A Peoples’ History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins).

CHAPTER 18

Conclusion: Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge

Part I. The Fallacies A great part of humanity, including rich and poor, educated and uneducated, continue to be guided by millennia-old fallacies. The rationale for eliminating these fallacies from our lives and our cultural frameworks is based on wide experiences across the sciences, broadly conceived. I arrived at these fallacies through a lifetime of study across the physical, natural, and social sciences, and by standing on the shoulders of social networks across these disciplines. The Transcendental Fallacy (also known as the theologian’s fallacy) is that there is a world or that there are worlds beyond our own—transcendental worlds, supernatural worlds, worlds of souls, spirits and ghosts, gods, devils, and angels, heavens and hells. There are no such worlds. They are symbolic of social categories and classifications in our earthly societies and cultures. There is nothing beyond our material, organic, and social world. Death is final; there is no soul, there is no life after death. It is also possible that the so-called “many worlds interpretation” in quantum mechanics is contaminated by this fallacy as the result of mathegrammatical illusions. Such illusions also power the idea that we are a simulation. The world, the universe, may be more complex than we can know or imagine, but that complexity does not include transcendental or supernatural features. Stated positively, this is Durkheim’s Law.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7_18

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The Subscendental Fallacy (also known as the logician’s fallacy or eponymously as the Chomsky fallacy) is that there are “deep structures” or “immanent structures” that are the locus of explanations for language, thought, and human behaviour in general. Such “structures” are just as ephemeral and ethereal as transcendental and supernatural worlds. They lead to conceptions of logic, mathematics, and language as “free standing,” “independent,” “history,” “culture,” and “value-free” sets of statements. They also support misguided sociobiological, genetic, and brain-centred explanatory strategies. Restivo’s Law. The Private Worlds Fallacy (also known as the philosopher’s fallacy) is that individual human beings harbor intrinsically private experiences. The profoundly social nature of humans, of symbols, and of language argues against intrinsically private experiences, however, as Wittgenstein, Goffman, and others have amply demonstrated. Goffman’s Law. The Internal Life Fallacy. When we engage in discourses about surrogate counters, imitation, and artificial creatures that mimic us, we need to remind ourselves that we are working in an arena of symbolic and materialized analogies and metaphors. Such efforts carry a high emotional charge because they take place at the boundaries of our skins as interfaces. Analogy and generalization, if they can be shown to have constructive scientific outcomes, need not obligate us to embrace identity. Consider, for example, the case of building robots. Robots (mechanical machines) will not have to have “gut feelings” in the identical sense humans (organic machines) have gut feelings. Even this “fact” needs to be scrutinized. What we “feel” is given to us by our language, our conversations, our forms of talking, our cultures and social institutions. At the end of the day, feelings are not straightforward matters of bio-electro-chemical processes that we experience as “our own” feelings. Mechanical creatures will turn out to be just as susceptible to internal life experiences as humans, once they have developed language, conversation, and forms of talk. They will have electro-mechanical “gut feelings.” This implies a social life and awareness. Roboticists may already have made some moves in this direction, with the development of signal schemas and subsumption-based hormonal control (Arkin 1998: 434ff.). The development of cyborgs and cybrids may make this point moot. What possibilities lie ahead of us as we implant chips in humans and fit them with artificial mechanical limbs and organs, while we also use organic materials in building our robots? The Asimov Law. The Psychologistic Fallacy (or neuroistic fallacy) is that the human being and/or the human brain is/are free standing and independent, that

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they can be studied on their own terms independently of social and cultural contexts, influences, and forces. This is also known as the neuroistic error. It encompasses the idea that mind and consciousness are brain phenomena. Human beings and human brains are in fact constitutively social. This is the most radical formulation of the response to this fallacy. A more charitable formulation would give disciplinary credibility to neuroscience and cognitive approaches to brain studies and psychological studies in general. These approaches might produce relevant results in certain contexts. Then, there might be fruitful ways to pursue interdisciplinary studies linking the social sciences and the neurosciences. It may indeed be possible to construct a neurosocial model of the self. This would entail that socialization operates on a brain-central nervous system-body (signifying an integrated entity that eliminates conventional brain/mind-body and brain-mind divisions) and not on a “person” per se. Moreover, the body here is conceived as a node in a network of interaction ritual chains (Collins 2004; Restivo 2020). Brother’s Law (after Brothers 1997, 2001). The Eternal Relevance Fallacy or Intellectual Fallacy is that ancient and more recently departed philosophers should be important and even leading members in our inquiring conversations about social life. An act of intellectual courage is needed to rid us of Plato and Hegel. Once they are eliminated, an entire pantheon of outmoded and outdated thinkers, from Aristotle to Kant, will disappear from our radar. This move might also go a long way toward eliminating the worshipful attitude that intellectuals often adopt to the more productive and visible members of their contemporary discourse communities. The caveat is that some ancient and some modern thinkers (departed ones, as well as some who are still with us) who can be claimed for philosophy are still extremely valuable for us. (Marx, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein come immediately to mind.) The issue here is that philosophy is overwhelmingly contaminated by the myth of individualism; logicist, linguistic, and symbolic reductionism; and unbridled speculation masquerading as rational thought. The idea that philosophers hold the keys to the logical foundations of all disciplines is based on the idea that there is one logic that fits all. The limitations of that logic arise from the fact that it originates in the world of physical phenomena. Most of the problems of philosophy are now re-imagined as problems in sociology and anthropology, the pre-eminently empirical social sciences. Philosophers as philosophers (psychologists as psychologists, and theologians as theologians) have nothing at all to tell us anymore about the social world. In the wake of the work of sociologists from Emile Durkheim

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(1912/1995) to Mary Douglas (1986), all the central human problems of traditional and contemporary philosophy, psychology, and theology resolve into (not “reduce to”) problems in sociology and anthropology. Restivo’s 2nd Law. The neque demonstra neque redargue fallacy; the “neither provable nor unprovable fallacy” is that one can neither prove nor disprove some claim, proposition, or statement. In some cases where this claim appears to be true, it is because a claim is made in the context of the physical and/or natural sciences that properly falls under the jurisdiction of the social sciences. Consider: One can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. This has not kept theologians, philosophers, and mathematicians from Anselm to Gödel from proposing proofs for the existence of God; and other scientists and philosophers from offering proofs that God does not exist. While all proofs build conclusions into premises, God proofs are universally and transparently contaminated by this strategy. The fallacy has not, on the other hand, kept social thinkers and social critics from proposing proofs for their theories about God as a delusion or a myth, but it has certainly tied their hands. In fact, proofs are situated, contingent, contextualized, community matters, and indeed, social constructions and social institutions. Therefore, within the world of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms and what follows, a proof that God does not exist is clearly possible. Durkheim’s 2nd Law. The NOMA Fallacy. This is the fallacy, defended by S.J. Gould (1997), that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria. Once we admit social science into the science and religion dialogue, this fallacy is revealed. Restivo’s 3rd Law. The Tolstoy Fallacy. That experience and feelings are trustworthy modes of interrogating and knowing reality. Consider that our immediate sensation is that the earth is fixed in place; we do not experience the earth rotating, wobbling in precession, or racing through the galaxy. In order to understand and explain the earth in motion, we have to abandon our immediate experience of fixity, our feeling that the earth is stable. If we assume fixity and stability, we will arrive at absurd conclusions about the earth and ourselves. If, based on information garnered by expanding the scale, scope, and depth of our experiences collectively, we come to admit that the earth moves, then we can discover laws. In the case of history, society, and culture, we do not experience, we do not feel, we are not conscious of our dependence on the external world and on others.

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This is not straightforward. We are, in fact, more aware of our dependence on the material world than we are of our dependence on the social world. We do, of course, recognize the social influences of peer pressure and the interpersonal enforcement of rules of decorum and demeanour and so on. This is not the same as consciousness of the way social relationships and interactions cause our thoughts, behaviours, and emotions, however. Differences in our levels of awareness across our material and social environments do not readily override our feeling that we are free-willing beings. In the prior instance, we had to discard a sense of an immobility that was not real and admit a motion we did not feel. In this instance, we are required to renounce our experience of free will and admit to a dependence,and especially a dependence on social causes and forces, that we do not feel. It may be easier to admit to ourselves that we are subject to recalcitrant physical laws, that we are thermodynamic systems subject to the laws of thermodynamics, than to admit that we are social systems subject to sociological laws. But we are just as subject to one set of laws as to the other set of laws. Here it is important to keep in mind the distinction between open and closed systems, and the distinction between lawful and determined, in order to avoid the fallacy that being subject to causes is the same as unmitigated determinism. On our experience of the earth as fixed in space and the reality of its various motions, see Chap. 14. For the most compelling compendium of sociological laws in propositional form see Collins (1975). Tolstoy’s Law. The Napoleon Fallacy is that heroic, larger-than-life individuals make history. How we think about and experience freedom and necessity depends (here I follow Tolstoy’s analysis in War and Peace) on three things: (1) the relationship between the person carrying out an action and the external world in which the action is carried out; (2) the relationship between the actor and time; and (3) the actor’s place in the causal nexus out of which the action arises. All things being equal, there are fewer degrees of freedom for the drowning person than for the person on dry land. If we focus on the persons standing apart, alone in their room or within the woods, their actions seem to us and to them to be free. If instead we focus on their relation to the things (material and symbolic) and people around them now and in the past, we will begin to multiply the influences on who and what they are as whole persons. As we

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multiply the influences, we diminish the degrees of freedom of their actions and thoughts and see how necessity weighs on them. It is also the case that our own current actions and thoughts appear to be freer by comparison with those of someone who lived a long time ago and whose life is open to our scrutiny in a different way than our own. That person’s life appears to have fewer degrees of freedom than does our own; but from a future perspective, ours too will appear to have had fewer degrees of freedom than we can now perceive. This is the fact of the matter for untutored introspection; the trained observer can already see fewer degrees of freedom than the untutored person observing their own life. The more time passes, and the more my introspections and judgments sharpen, the more I will find myself doubting that I have freedom of action and thought. History makes events, actions, and thoughts seem less arbitrary and less subject to free will. The Austro-Prussian war appears to us undoubtedly the result of the crafty conduct of Bismarck. The Napoleonic wars still seem to us, though already questionably, to be the outcome of their hero’s will. In the Crusades, however, we already see an event occupying its definite place in history and without which we cannot imagine the modern history of Europe, though to the chroniclers of the Crusades that event appeared merely due to the wills of certain people. Finally, attending to the unfolding of our understanding of the nexus of causal chains leads us inevitably to seeing actions and thoughts as consequences of what came before, contradicting the transparency of free will in action at the moment that a particular idea occurs to us or we perform a particular act. Understanding is the greatest enemy of the ideology of free will; ignorance its greatest nourishment. As for “responsibility,” that will appear to be greater or lesser dependingon how much we know about the circumstances of the person under our judge’s eye, how much time has passed since the judged act, and how well we understand the causes of the kind of act being judged. Sociology forces us to reconsider the nature and limits of individual responsibility. Let us consider the tale of the scorpion and the frog: The scorpion wants to cross a river, but he cannot swim. He asks a frog to carry him across the river. The frog is sceptical: “If I agree to carry you across the river you will sting and kill me.” The scorpion promises not to sting the frog: “I really need to get to the other side.” The frog agrees. The scorpion climbs on the frog’s back and off they go. Halfway across the river,

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the scorpion stings the frog. “What th…,” cries the frog, “you promised not to sting me.” The scorpion replies: “But it is in my nature to sting.” And so we should consider whether perhaps with humans, too, it is in our nature to behave as we have been socialized—or programmed. Or more generally, we behave the way we evolved to behave. Are we any more responsible for our actions than the scorpion? It makes as much sense to condemn the scorpion for stinging the frog, as it would to condemn a human for a criminal act. This doesn’t mean, however, that society should not act to protect itself from further transgressions by the criminal, but it does mean we need to reconsider our ideas about responsibility and punishment. The failure to understand “responsibility” in the context of evolution led to a period in European history when animals (mostly domestic, like pigs and cows but also insects and rats) were put on trial by Church and State, charged with everything from murder to criminal damage (Evans 1906; Kadri 2006). Corpses and inanimate objects could also be charged for criminal behaviour. This legacy survived into modern times when children and the mentally ill were charged and punished for criminal acts. It is time to take the next step and consider whether our treatment of “mentally competent” criminals is any different from our treatment of the “mentally ill” and animals. Tolstoy’s 2nd Law.

Classic Fallacies from Philosophy The fallacy of misplaced concreteness, described by philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, involves thinking something is a “concrete” reality when in fact it is an abstract belief, opinion or concept about the way things are. The fallacy refers to Whitehead’s thoughts on the relationship of the spatial and temporal location of objects. Whitehead rejects the notion that a real, concrete object in the universe can be described simply in terms of spatial or temporal extension. Rather, the object must be described as a field that has both a location in space and a location in time. This is analogous to lessons learned from E.A. Abbott’s Flatland (1884/1952): just as humans cannot perceive or even imagine a line that has width but no breadth, humans also cannot perceive or imagine an object that has spatial but no temporal position, or vice versa (Whitehead 1929: 58, 1919):

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… among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location … [Instead], I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.

A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error by which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. For example, the statement “the business of the book sleeps eternally” is syntactically correct, but it is meaningless or nonsense or, at the very most, metaphorical, because it incorrectly ascribes the property, “sleeps eternally,” to business, and incorrectly ascribes the property, “business,” to the token, the book. The term “category mistake” was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind (1949) to remove what he argued to be a confusion over the nature of mind introduced by Cartesian metaphysics. It was alleged to be a mistake to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance, because predications of substance are not meaningful for a collection of dispositions and capacities. The mind is just the body at work.

Part 2. Paradigm Principles: An Experiment in Abnormal Discourse This paradigm is designed to save sciences, not Science (Restivo) and not SCIENCE (Woolgar). It is designed to save sciences from pathological scepticism and runaway feedback in the reflexive posture. It is a provocative heuristic, presumptive, corrigible, fallible. It does not invite any absolute commitments to belief or truth but it does ground itself as a presumptive practice in everyday life and in science.

A. The Social Construction Conjecture As the Fundamental Theorem of Sociology There is only one way to make one’s way through the world, only one way to discover and invent, and that is by interacting with others in series of interaction rituals and interaction ritual chains in social and material

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environments on planet Earth which retains its contextual primacy even when humans and their prosthetic technologies travel in space. Expanding our experiences into space and other cosmic objects does not change this principle. Knowledge, facts of the matter, true and false beliefs have no other sources. The fundamental theorem supports the following conjectures which I have gleaned from a network of scholars including most prominently Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Kropotkin, Abraham Maslow, Elizabeth Fee, David Bloor, Clifford Hooker, Ludwik Fleck, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Mary Douglas, Hilary and Steven Rose, Rita Arditti, Randall Collins, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Feyerabend, David Bohm, and the scholarship in sociological and anthropological theory and science studies 1840–2020. 1. Societies, communities, and thought collectives are sustained through discursive and social practices that continually make and remake the order of society and culture. 2. Social practice integrates physical, biological, and neurological states and processes, social relations and activities, and material things. 3. Thoughts (cognitions) are products of, sustained by, and embody social practice. The mind and consciousness are the social body at work. 4. Knowledge is carved out of social practices. 5. The brain is socially and culturally constituted. 6. Predicates, classifications, and representations are organized into rules, laws, and norms. Rules, laws, and norms are organized into networks. These rule networks are associated with and guide behaviour in every social context. There are no rules for following rules. Rule networks are metaphorically interconnected. This means that meaning flows or leaks from one context to another across structural similarities. Every social action therefore tends to be laden with meaning, overflowing from the whole of the concerns of social life. 7. Representations are products of, sustained by, and embody social practice. They are socially constructed assemblages of cultural resources that get their meaning from their role in everyday life, from local to global networks of meaning and most generally generate and manifest worldviews. They do not derive their meaning

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from any presumed correspondence to an objective world “out there.” 8. Representations arise out of social practice. They carry within themselves the social forms of the settings within which they are produced, diffused, or distributed, mobilized and utilized. They are locally and historically-stylized solutions in the service of social interests. 9. Representations “re-present” social practices and social interests. 10. Representations are multi-dimensional tools (or adaptive mechanisms, or strategies) for adapting to and transforming the world. They are designed within agonistic arenas of diverse social practices and with the objective of developing, furthering, or protecting social interests. The degree to which their original production renders them generalizable varies. 11. Depending on the level and intensity of competitive social practices, representations will be used more or less as remonstrances, protests, expostulations, calls to battle, or slogans. 12. Because representations embody social practices and social interests, they carry within themselves the particular social locations of their production, diffusion, distribution, and/or utilization; and they become located in the structure of the sacred and profane, conservative and radical values, and purity and danger networks. They are not ideational but elements of the mind understood as the body at work. 13. Some of the representations of dominant groups are likely to be labelled “self-evident” and put to use to enforce conformity, put a subject beyond dispute, and deal with ambiguous and anomalous events. These representations will be prime targets for those who want to criticize, change, or demolish the reigning social order. 14. In general, the wider and more diffuse the social interests embodied in a representation, the more it qualifies as “objective.” Objectivity, in other words, is a variable and a function of the generality of social interests. 15. Aesthetic and truth motives are not denied, but they are viewed as rooted in individual and social interests, ranging from making one’s way in the world to tension management; to exercising control over a cultural environment; to self- and social-consciousness goals related to species and planetary survival; and to survival with

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quality of life. There are no “pure” motives, cognitions, representations, or modes of thought. 16. Social interests are any material or symbolic resources perceived to be relevant for a group’s survival and for gaining advantages in relative power, privilege, and prestige. Attributed interests are social interests perceived to be relevant to a group by “outsiders” and may be more or less congruent with a group’s self-perceptions. Interest attribution is a social interest. 17. Social interests are manifested in the claims individual make on cultural resources on behalf of the groups they represent, are members of, or aspire to membership in or association with. 18. Social interests are always relevant to a particular arena of competitive social practices. 19. ACTION CONJECTURE. An epistemic agent’s current states are functions of imagined states, of preferred, probable, and possible future states; and of past states and current contexts. This shifts Hooker’s (1975) analysis from an engine metaphor to an agent model without granting the agent agency or free will. 20. VALUE CONJECTURE. The Free Inquiry program is subordinated to the Free-Society-Free-Person program (following Feyerabend 1978). 21. THE WELL-BEING CONJECTURE.  The healthy, viable epistemic agent is (a) cautious, prepared to act on—regardless of the strength of their convictions—the possibility that things might be otherwise; (b) willing to accept that certain facts are well-founded while refusing to participate in linguistic communities that harbour “necessary truths,” “proofs,” etc.; (c) practices a mode of inquiry, a way of thinking, that sings, sizzles, and sighs (after Nietzsche); (d) views the search for a reality all knowers can share as a search for a community of consensus, an objectivity community, a truth community; (e) is an anarchist in all things and all ways, where anarchism is understood following Kropotkin to be one of the sociological sciences underwriting a social order and form of life; (f) accepts theories-in-use, not theories-as-truth; (g) understands “objectively real” to mean real in practice, real for a community of consensus; (h) constructs an edifice of meaning out of h1: there are fundamental limitations to consistent formal systems with self-­ images (Gödel); h2: there is no infallible method for telling theorems of the predicate calculus from non-theorems (Church); h3: a

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termination tester is impossible (such a decision procedure would allow all problems of number theory to be solved in a uniform manner (Turing); h4: there is no decision procedure for arithmetical truth (Tarski); therefore the conjecture h4.1: there is a general limitative theorem (GLT) that transforms metamathematics into a strategy for everyday life. The GLT operates on every level of practical reality but allows jumps; thus, the GLT is not a barrier but a motive for jumping to a bird’s eye view of Science and sciences. This is a necessary condition for critique and renewal in sciences and more generally in inquiry; h4.2: there are limits to self-­ representation but they may be inherently asymptotic in practice or it may be possible to push them to a Kierkegaardian leap. The capacity to live with contradictions is crucial in this respect. 22. PRACTICE CONJECTURE. The best possible epistemic strategies are tinkering strategies. A range of dominant utilities should be available in any given culture to maximize the potential for problem-solving. 23. PERMANENT REVOLUTION CONJECTURE. Lives and societies should embody the principle of permanent revolution; every social unit should be designed to overturn itself periodically. One needs to think in terms of evolutionary principles here, however, rather than the political principles of Trotsky and Jefferson. Political principles do have a practical function, for example, in Jefferson’s proposal for revising the Constitution every eighteen to twenty years. 24. RATIONALITY CONJECTURE.  A rational act maximizes the probability of actualizing problem-solving potentials; this includes but is not limited to becoming a maximally efficient information processor. A theory of rationality, if one is needed, is not a theory of science. Rationalities go with cultures. As cultures adapt, they behave like species and lose their adaptive potential. This is reflected in the routinization of rationalities. The problem of continuity in the human species and its cultures is the problem of solving the problem of losing adaptive potential. This is the problem the permanent revolution conjecture is designed to solve, within ­ delimited time periods built into all systems. 25. LANGUAGE CONJECTURE. Language is skimmed off the surface of a complex, rich set of cortically-localized socially-­constituted information processes; these processes are transformed and simpli-

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fied from the totality of experiential inputs. Speech emerges after passing through a set of culturally programmed filters which may be in various states of openness or closure. 26. DEMARCATION CONJECTURE. It is possible to tell the difference between an amoeba and a Zande (North Central Africa), and between a Zande and an evolutionary epistemologist. This is not a rationale for pursuing a traditional demarcationist strategy for distinguishing science and non-science, science and pseudo-science. What this does do, however, is expand the idea of a best possible epistemic strategy. A best possible epistemic strategy is determined by the scope of the schema of criticism; the capacity for critical, reflexive meta-inquiry; by the scale, level, scope, and depth of past successes; and by the probability of future successes on a larger or higher level, with greater scope, and with greater depth. Keep in mind Joseph Needham’s warning that scientism, the promotion of science as the best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values, may be nothing but a Euro-American disease. Needham of course viewed China as the source of a humanistically-driven normative science rooted in all forms of human experience. 27. CRITICAL CULTURE CONJECTURE. The determinant of the general patterns of evolution and devolution is the “shape” (after Hooker 1975) of the total net of individual and collective ecologies and its accrued wisdom. 28. REALITY CONJECTURE. Reality is a never-ending layered process of unfolding in which new things are continually emerging; this process is lawful but indeterminate. “Discoverable” regularities, patterns, and laws are indicators of mechanisms that produce the phenomenal stabilities, irregularities, and fluxes we humans are able to experience. It is a multi-dimensional, multi-level, heterarchical, open and effectively infinitely decomposable system; that is, there is no effective limit to the ways in which we can experience the world, trace causal chains, etc. Local- or micro-sites can generate statements of wide (macro-) applicability due to isomorphisms and couplings. Locality is manifested in and at the intersections of nature, biography, and culture. 29. THE COMPREHENSION, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND COMMUNICATION CONJECTURE.  The comprehension of any given thing is a dialectically changing configuration of rational,

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intuitive, and trans- and sub-rational/intuitive modes of knowing and consciousness. The domain of “rationality” is always changing; it is not restricted forever to what we now consider the best mode of inquiry or to realms accessible to conventional symbols or language. Language, ordinary or formal is not preferred a priori as the medium of communication and comprehension, understanding, knowledge, and appreciation. There are no statements or systems in any self-styled foundational discipline(s) that are logically, ontologically, or epistemologically prior to or independent of social and discursive practices. There is no God, there is no First Philosophy, there are no Ultimate Grounds (phenomeno-logical or otherwise. 30. PATHOLOGY CONJECTURE. Any conjecture can be pathologized. Pathologies may impact human life mildly and without serious consequences or with reversible consequences, but they can also lead to irreversible damage and death at the level of cultural ecologies. A preventative approach is inherent in self-consciousness and reflexivity, but doctoring is not ruled out. Labelling a potentially useful change a pathology and aborting it is a risk of the first kind (Type 1); not taking evidence of a pathology seriously or delaying action due to uncertainty or for other reasons is a risk of the second kind (Type 2). Systems tend to get into ruts and to lose adaptive/transformative potential. The concern with well-being and pathology extends to experiments designed to determine whether we can “jump” to a new epistemic strategy without losing local and phylogenetic continuity. 31. POSSIBILISM CONJECTURE. “Anything Goes” (Feyerabend) and “Anything is Possible” (Arne Naess) are rejected as indefensible, but adopted anyway as policies to help prevent and doctor pathologies, and to foster open inquiry. 32. ADAPTATION CONJECTURE. There are numerous and overlapping contexts of adaptation. They are not necessarily coordinated, coupled, synchronized or compatible and their spatial and temporal boundaries vary. Selection processes across these contexts are competitive. 33. TRUTH CONJECTURE.  All truth claims reflect real intersections of nature, biography, history, and culture at the impenetrable interface with the ding an sich. The world is an arena, a field, of competing truth claims reflecting communities of consensus. The

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competition is carried out in various contexts of adaptation. Success accrues in ways that do not necessarily lead to adaptation on the evolutionary scale. There is no guarantee (but some non-zero probability) that exploiting local opportunities will foster development on the larger scales of human experience. Various conjectures in this paradigm can be called on to improve the chances for synchronizing or integrating local and global, micro- and macro-levels of discourse and practice. Following Fleck, truth is viewed as a stylized thought constraint. 34. RIGOR MORTIS CONJECTURE.  Rigor and predictability are not positively correlated; they are therefore not useful criteria for good inquiry. 35. DIS-UNIFORMITY CONJECTURE.  Interesting things may happen when we abandon the assumption of uniformity in nature, or when the assumption breaks down. 36. HISTORY is conceived as a reservoir of strategies, successes, failures, etc., which we can survey and draw from in our present; this reservoir is not a collection of past things, but of things in the present; not things to respect but things to scan, play with, succeed and fail with, discard, reclaim, transform. It is necessary to ask about every strategy: what good is it, in what context(s), within what boundaries, for whom, with what costs, risks, and so on for individuals, classes, genders, ethnic groups, societies…? 37. SCIENCE, known to us in practice as sciences, is subject to all the pathologies and perversions that can transfigure and misdirect humans and societies and their value correlates (for example, over-­ specialization, bureaucratization, professionalization, ecclesiasticism, elitism, co-optation, etc). SCIENCE is particularly susceptible to algorithmitis, numberitis, and scientism, giving us Gresham’s Law for SCIENCE: successful procedural rules (bad sciences) drive out good sciences. 38. TINKERING.  The tinkering principle is that similar problems tackled contextually and using contingent resources by different people in different environments will yield different solutions. But the “limited possibilities principle” constrains solutions to different degrees and in different ways. The constraints operate at more or less general levels and can apply to materials, forms, or principles. Evolution is a tinkering process and a good model for sciences.

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Part 3. The Social Brain Paradigm The original version of this model was designed with Sabrina Weiss. I have taken it through a number of revisions designed to keep pace with developments in neuroscience, and in social neuroscience and neurosociology (see Fig.  18.1). It was designed to graphically represent and expand Neural nets

Neurons

Brain

Phenotype Information Flows

Gut Biome

Epigenetics

Organs

Genotype Environment

Interaction

Unit Of Socialization

Interaction Ritual Chains Artifacts

Co-making

Macrosystem

Mentifacts

Society/Culture

Socifacts

Exosystem Mesosystem Microsystem Person Eco-evolutionary Context

Nature as Repository of Resources/affordances Flora Fauna

Human-made human-incorporated technologies

Nature & Cosmos Writ Large

Object

Inner World Subject

Perception organ Counter structure Effect organ

For

Effect world

Fig. 18.1  The social brain paradigm

Receptor Perception - mark - carrier Counter structure Effect-mark-carrier Effector

Umwelt

Circulation of Information

Circulation of Information

Body

Mind emerges in The Midst of ircs

Central Nervous System

Biogenetic system

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Clifford Geertz’s argument for the synchronic emergence of brain and culture. In review, then: (1) biological, social, and cultural causal forces are reciprocally intertwined and conjointly causal; (2) human behavioural repertoires emerge from the complex parallel and recursive interactions of cells, genes, neurons, neural nets, organs, biomes, the brain and central nervous system, other elements of the body’s systems and subsystems, and our social interactions in their ecological and umwelt contexts; (3) socialization is re-­imagined as a process that simultaneously informs and variably integrates the biological self, the neurological self, and the social self to construct personality and character; (4) each element in the model is a dialectical entity containing its own internal “seeds” of change, and as following a temporal dynamic that may be at different times synchronous or dyssynchronous relative to other elements; (5) each element is conceived as an information system with all systems multiply inter-linked by the circulation of information; (6) the diagonals with double-headed arrows which crisscross the model map the chaotic dynamics and cooperative neural mass discussed by C.A. Skarda and W.J. Freeman (1990, 1997); (7) the unit model is activated in a triad of unit models and it is that triad that is the basic model of brain/mind/culture/world. This reflects the idea that the triad is the basic unit of social life (Restivo et al. 2014: 104n1); and (8) the diagram is a first level General Connectome. A connectome maps the elements and interconnections in a network. The term has been used specifically in connection with mapping the neural connections in the brain. Connectomes may range in scale from maps of parts of the nervous system to a map of all of the neural interactions in the brain. Partial connectomes have been constructed of the retina and primary visual cortex of the mouse. In line with these developments, my model represents a first level connectome of connectomes. Researchers in neuroscience have been exploring the vagus nerve which forms a complex network linking the brain and the internal organs. This network is being viewed as shaping thoughts, memories, and feelings. This network is implied in my model (Underwood 2021). Based on the ideas introduced in the previous chapters, I can now offer an initial concept formula for the probability of an “innovative thought:” iTp = qc2 (K + G), where qc2 is the amount of cultural capital the person commands and K is a constant that represents the cultural context and network structure the person is embedded in; qc2 because doubling the amount of cultural capital, for example, quadruples its impact factor.

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K = C + Nt. C = Cultural Context, an index that takes into account a variety of demographic, class, gender, and institutional diversity indicators; N  =  the density and diversity of the network structure of the society. G = the genius cluster quotient at time t. When considering the etiology of behaviours traditionally considered to be genetically grounded, it is now important to recognize that the brain, like humans, arrives on the evolutionary stage always, already, and everywhere, social. Therefore, what we have considered to be linearly transmitted genetic phenomena must now be viewed in the context of a brain that is -- at no stage of development -- separated from the social and cultural imperatives that form us. The very notions of “genes” and “genetic” must now be revised in the context of the social brain paradigm. The next stage in this project is to embed the basic triad of this first level General Connectome in the nested networks of the social and cultural connectomes locally, regionally, and globally so that we now visualize a Global Connectome driven by the circulation of information across nested networks. On the rationale for a global connectome (my interpretation), see Khanna (2016) on “connectography.” CONNECTOMICS. A connectome comprehensively maps neural connections in the brain. More broadly, a connectome maps all the neural connections in an organism’s nervous system. Hagmann (2005) and Sporns et al. (2005) independently and simultaneously introduced the term “connectome,” inspired by the efforts to construct a genome. Connectomics is the science of assembling and analysing connectome data sets. Hagmann and Sporns discussed research strategies for developing comprehensive structural descriptions of the brain’s networks, a dataset they called the “connectome.” Such a connectome would help us understand the emergence of functional brain states from their structural substrate. Connectomics, the production and study of connectomes, can be applied at different scales from the full set of neurons and synapses in a part or all of an organism’s nervous system to macro-level descriptions of the connections between all cortical and subcortical structures. The full connectome of the roundworm has been constructed along with partial connectomes of a mouse retina and primary visual cortex.

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Penultimate Principles From L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophica (1922/1990: 189): 6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it).He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. SERENDIPITY PRINCIPLE.  Science is about looking, not looking for something. But sometimes it IS about looking for something. The trick is to be just looking WHILE you are looking for something. Ultimate principle: Tractatus Logico-Sociologicus: An imagined book I never got around to writing that would have formalized this paradigm and ended this way: This paradigm mirrors in words a form of life, my form of life, the way I made my way through my life through the networks through which I travelled. There are no warrants here for knowing anything at all. We leave life knowing nothing about ourselves, life, the universe and everything. The fruits of our research and theories have been nourishment and nothing more. THE HOOKER-RESTIVO FAIL-SAFE THEOREM: There is no justification for investing any scientific claim or any claim at all with positive or absolute belief; everything is in flux, and subject to criticism and change. Ontological, epistemological, and institutional scepticism and disobedience are vaccines; they do not block behaviour,

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Index1

A Abbott, E. A., 349–350 Abel, Niels Henrik, 249–252 Abstract mathematics, 243, 245 Actant (concept), 171–174, 178 Action conjecture, 353 Actor-network theory (ANT), 101, 115, 163–164, 170–182, 184–185, 219, 287–288 Adaptation, 92 Adaptation conjecture, 356 Against Method (Feyerabend), 134–135 Age of Information, 291, 292 Age of the Body, 291, 292 Age of the Social, 281–283, 291, 292, 304, 322 Agnew, Spiro, 327–328 Agnotology, 334 Agreement in practice (term), 219 Agriculture, environmental impact of, 306–308

Agriculture, sustainable, 314 AI machines, 279 Algebra, 240–242, 247–248 Alger, Horatio, 271–272 Alienation, 261–262 Al-Rodhan, Nayef, 340 Alternative facts universe, 216–217 American exceptionalism, 17–18 Amsterdamska, Olga, 180–181 Analogies, 25 Analytic geometry, 241–242 Anarchism, 91, 306 Anarchy, 208, 353–354 Anchoring practices, 220 Ancient science (term), 58–59 Anglo-American social network, 317, 321 Animals, criminal charges against, 349 Anomalies, 45, 46 Anthropocene Age, 314 Anthropological authority, 18–20 Anthropological epistemology, 18–21

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Restivo, Inventions in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8170-7

395

396 

INDEX

Anthropologist(s) on consciousness, 267–268 defined, 18 in fiction, 18–19 phenomenological approach of, 21 positivistic approach of, 21 sociologists and, 273–274 typical trial of, 44–45 Anthropology (term usage), 18–19, 175 Anthropology of science, 15, 18–19 Anthropology vs. sociology, 181–182, 282, 345–346 Anti-intellectual tradition, American, 327–328, 333, 336 Aramis (Latour), 176–177 Archimedes, 240–241, 244, 245, 303 Arendt, Hannah, 335–336 Aristotle, 137, 240, 243, 244, 345 Arithmetic, 238–239, 241, 243, 256–257 Armstrong, Karen, 262, 327–328 Ars Magna (Cardan), 251–252 Art, Western superiority and, 63–64 Artifactual realities, 22–23 Artificial entities, human relations with, 291–292 Artificial intelligence (AI), 252–253, 312–313, 318 Artificial intelligence, experiments in, 287 Artilect War, 312–313 Asimov Law, 344 Associations, sociology of, 162, 174, 177–178, 181 Astington, Janet W., 280 Attributed interests, 353 Austro-Prussian war, 348 Authoritarian power, knowledge in service of, 61

B Babbage, Charles, 79 Bachelard, Suzanne, 6–7 Bacon, Francis, 75–76, 80–81, 283–284 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 278 Bank as network, 179–180 Banks, Joseph, 62–63 Barber, Bernard, 66–67, 83, 145 Barnes, Barry, 110, 141–142, 145 Barrias, Louis-Ernest, 15–17 Bauchspies, Wenda, 191–192 Baudrillard, Jean, 103–104 Becker, Howard S., 115, 180 Bejan, Adrian, 161 Belief, theories regarding, 22 Ben-David, Joseph, 3–4, 72, 200 Benedict, Ruth, 31, 151, 211–212 Benzene and water system, 35–38 Berger, Peter L., 116, 211 Bernal, J. D., 79, 90–91, 190–191, 303 Berreby, David, 180 Biden, President, 340 Big Data, 252–253 Big Shoulders (movie character), 264 Bijker, Wiebe, 113–114 Biodiversity studies, 309–310 Biological determinism, 120–121 Bio-medical sciences, 252 Bismarck, Otto von, 348 Bloor, David, 7–9, 50–51, 101–102, 109–110, 112–114, 125–126, 132–133, 141–142, 144–145, 148, 149, 152–157, 164, 175–176, 184, 254–255, 339, 350–357 Boas, Franz, 18–19, 31, 151, 211–212 Body(ies), 285–292 Body technology, 287

 INDEX 

Bohm, David, 5–6, 42–43, 79, 81, 135–136, 176, 212, 350–357 Boltzmann expression for entropy, 37 Bos, H. J., 248–249 Bourbaki, Nicolas, 252 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 262–263 Boyd, Richard, 210 Brain constitution of, 351 insights on, 279–280 interest in, 281 sociology and anthropology of, 291 Breazeal, Cynthia, 275–276, 280, 295–296 Brexit vote, 336–337 Bridgeman, Percy, 174 Britt, Anna, 20–21 Bronowski, Jacob, 83–84 Brooks, Harvey, 79 Brooks, R., 295–296 Brooks, Rodney, 275 Brooks, Thomas, 308 Brothers, Leslie, 151 Brother’s Law, 344–345 Brouwer, L. E. J., 238 Bukharin, Nicolai, 180 Buonarroti, Filippo, 80 Bureaucratization, 77–81, 139, 328–329 Butler, Judith, 286 C Cacioppo, John, 261–262 Calculus, 241–242, 244–245 Callinicus: A Defence of Chemical Warfare (Haldane), 318–319 Callon, Michel, 163–164 Campbell, Donald T., 7–9, 102, 131–135, 138–145, 148, 157–158

397

Campbell, Norman, 73–74 Cantor, Georg, 238, 242, 249–252 Capitalism, 242–243, 306 Cardan, Gerolamo, 249–252 Carr-Saunders, Sir Alexander Morris, 77–78 Cartan, Élie, 242 Category mistake or error, 349–350 Cauchy, Augustin-Louis, 249–252 Cave, allegory of the, 166–168, 173 Certain range (term), 41 Chaos, 306 Charter of Compassion, 327–328 Checks and balances, 326 Chemical Embryology (Needham), 189–190 Chemistry and medical laboratories compared, 52 Chesterton, G. K., 15–16 Children, bodies and identities of, 290 Children, criminal charges against, 349 China mathematics in, 236–237, 243, 246–247 science in, 189–191, 197–202, 224–225, 258, 355 Chinese and Western thought compared, 198 Chinese Science (Needham), 190 Chomsky fallacy, 344 Christian theology, 190–191 Chu Shi, 199 Chuang-Tzu, 198–199 Chubin, Daryl, 9, 132–133, 164, 191–192 Civilization, ascent of, 97 Civilization, survival of, 317 Clark, G. N., 6–7, 193–194 Classical social theory, social construction in, 65–66

398 

INDEX

Classifications, challenges to established, 292–293 Classified information, 252–253 Climate change, 184–185, 315, 316 Climate change denialism, 334 Co-evolution, humanity decoupling from, 316 Cognition, learning and, 280 Cognitive psychologists, 277 Cognitive psychology, 282 Collective representations, 279 Collins, Harry, 101, 102, 148, 164 Collins, R. (Randall), 170, 180, 218, 249–253, 278–279, 282–283, 350–357 Colloid chemistry (defined), 33 Colloid chemistry laboratory, 31, 44–49, 52 Communal ethos, 91 Communism, science as, 90–91 Communities of consensus, 115–116, 137, 331, 353–354, 356–357 Compassion as centripetal force, 262, 316, 327–328 politics of, 327–328 Complex systems, characteristics of, 173–174 Comprehension, consciousness, and communication conjecture, 355–356 Concept of Mind, The (Ryle), 219, 350 Conflict sociology of mathematics, 249 Conflict sociology of science, 10–11 Conflict theory and Marxism, 7 Connectivity principle, 304, 305 Connectome, 358–361 Connectomics, 360–358 Consciousness in dancing robots, 294 defined, 120 embodiment role in, 291–292

interest in, 281 machines with emotions and, 287–288 mentalities vs., 278 nature of, 227, 266–267, 277 as network phenomenon, 124–125 origin of, 263 overview of, 267–269 re-solution of problem of, 292 as social body, 351 Conspiracism, 330–331 Constitution, 325–330 Constitutional Convention, 325–328 Constructionism, 22–23 Constructionist perspective, 7 Construction of Social Reality (Searle), 211 Contemplation, 87 Contingencies concept, 32 ethnographers as, 49 multitude of, 45–46 and science, 47–49 Cook, James, 62–63 Cooperative principle, 304–305 Corpses, criminal charges against, 349 Courant, Richard, 255 COVID-19, 261–262, 306–308 Creative organizations, 94–95 Critical Art Ensemble collective, 289–290 Critical citizenship, education for, 329–330 Critical culture conjecture, 355 Critical realism, 194–196, 304, 319–320, 323, 340 Critical realist sociology of science (CRSS), 135–140 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 72–73 Croissant, Jennifer, 191–192 Crosby, Alfred W., Jr., 62 Crusades, 348

 INDEX 

Cryptocurrencies, 63–64, 103–104, 313–314 Cubic equation, solution of, 251–252 Cultural context, 359–360 Culture(s) adaptive potential of, 354 co-evolution vs., 316 destruction of, 62 vs. genes, 96–97 nature of, 233 as planetary pandemic, 316 as speciating mechanism, 316 and thought, 279 Curie, Marie, 171–172 D Da Vinci, Leonardo, 264 Daedalus (Greek mythological character), 302, 318, 319 Daedalus, or Science and the Future (Haldane), 302, 317, 320 Dalai Lama, 262 D’Alusio, Faith, 295–296 Damasio, Antonio, 268, 282 Dance, 263 Dancing robots, 288–289, 294 Darwin, Charles, 165–166 Davis, Philip J., 255 de Bry, J. T., 15–17 de Grey, Aubrey, 311–312 Decline of the West (Spengler), 106 Dedekind, Richard, 238, 242 Defactualization, 335–336 Demarcation conjecture, 355 Democracy, 165, 184–185, 253–254, 336–337, 340 Denialism, 334 Dennett, Daniel, 210, 216 Denton, Peter, 317n1 Derrida, Jacques, 163, 335 Descartes, René, 241–242, 283–284

399

Descriptive geometry, 242 Designing Sociable Robots (Breazeal), 295–296 Devolution, 355 Devolutionary tendencies, 96 Dialectical sociology, 93–95 Dickson, David, 193 Dieudonné, Jean, 226 Disciplines, decolonizing, 223–225 Discourse, end of, 103 Discursive authority, 20 Discursive practices, 24–25 Dissocism, 102, 113, 163, 171, 184, 225, 268, 293–294, 313–314 Dis-uniformity conjecture, 357 Dollar, challenges faced by, 63–64 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 141–142, 144–145, 159–160, 233 Double-bias situation, 21 Douglas, Mary, 145, 175, 179–180, 345–346, 350–357 Down to Earth (Latour), 184 Doyle, R., 291–292 Dreams vs. reality, 259 Dualism, challenge to, 219 Durkheim, Emile, 7–9, 104–105, 108, 112–113, 125, 156, 158, 172–173, 175, 177–181, 183, 210–211, 227, 232–234, 254–255, 277, 279, 289, 291, 334–335, 345–346, 350–357 Durkheim’s 2nd Law, 346 Durkheim’s Law, 343 E Earth, existential threats to, 337–339 Earth, human relations with, 302–303 Easlea, Brian, 191–192 East and West, science in, 62–67, 190–191, 196, 199 East, Western notion of, 57–58

400 

INDEX

Eco, Umberto, 141–142 Ecology, 93 Ecology movement, 166–167 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx), 191–192 Economic chaos, 79, 303 Economic growth, sustainable, 315 Education, American attitude concerning, 327–329 Education, benefits of, 336–337 Egghead (term), 325–328 Egyptian writing, 237 Einstein, Albert, 137, 165–166, 171–172, 176, 183, 210–211, 264–266, 268–269, 273–274, 303 Eisley, Loren, 80–81 Election reform, 326 Electoral College, 326 Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The (Durkheim), 233–234, 254–255, 346 Elements (Euclid), 240 Emancipatory epistemology, 143 Emergentist theory, 105 Emic-etic distinction, 21 Empirical (term), 71–72 Enculturation theory, 280 Energy, sustainable, 315 Engels, Friedrich, 93–95 Epistemic strategy, 355 Epistemology, 211–212, 221 Epstein, Robert, 288–289 Equal Rights Amendment, 326 Equations, analysis of, 233–234, 254, 256–257 ERISS (epistemologically relevant internalist sociology of science) conferences, 132–136, 144–145 Espey, Jessica, 306–308 Essentialisms, 64, 68 Essentialization, 56, 57, 59, 60

Establishment clause, 330 Eternal Relevance Fallacy, 345–346 Ethics, challenges to, 289 Ethnographer (defined), 18 Ethnography(ies), 26–27, 31 classical, 179 process of, 178–179 Ethnography of science causality in, 50–51 field studies, 31–33 laboratories, 28–29, 31, 34–40, 44–49, 52 launching of, 17 as online topic, 164 publications, 111–112 role of, 273–274 scholars carrying out, 18 social constructionism and, 106–114, 120–121 Ethnography of science movement, 32 Ethnomathematics, 290 Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics, The (Livingston), 151–157 Ethnomethodology, 25–26, 108, 110, 115, 151–157, 159, 162, 165–166, 171–173, 177–180, 184, 219 Ethnoscience, 17–18, 59, 193, 197–198, 224–225 Euclid, 152–154, 240, 252 Eugenics, 77–78, 319, 321–322 Euler, Leonhard, 247 European mathematics, 238, 244–245, 247–248, 251–252 Euro-West Centrism, 223–224 Everyday reality, 22–23 Evolution, 92, 96–97, 355, 357 Evolutionary principles, 354 Evolutionary tendencies, 96 Evolutionary theory, resistance to, 334 Exchange economy, 200–202

 INDEX 

Executive nominations, 326 Executive Orders, 326 Existential threats, 169, 179, 197–198 Experiential authority, 20 Expert-subject relationship, 20–21 Explanation and Prediction (Reichenbach), 106 Exponential growth, 311 F Fact-checking technologies, 334, 340 Facts vs. brute facts, 118 elusive nature of, 178–179 Latour and, 183–184 social construction of, 22, 48, 112–113, 179, 216, 334–335 vs. values, 335 Fake news, 292–293, 302, 327–328, 334, 338, 340 Fake news culture, 327–328 Fallacies, 350 False beliefs, 7–9, 40–41, 350–357 Faraday, Michael, 35, 39–40 FBI, 205–208 Fee, Elizabeth, 191–192, 350–357 Feminist social theorists, 169–170 Fermat, Pierre de, 241–242, 247 Feyerabend, Paul, 7–9, 115, 132, 134–136, 159–160, 175–176, 196, 350–357 1st amendment, 329–330 Firth, Raymond, 44–45 Five Classics, 236 Flatland (Abbott), 349–350 Fleck, Ludwik, 106, 111–112, 179–180, 350–357 Flesh and Machines (Brooks), 295–296 Ford, John, 264–265 Fosdick, Raymond Blaine, 317, 322, 323

401

Foucault, Michel, 59, 66, 219, 331, 335 Foundations, field of, 242, 249 Fourier, Joseph, 242 Fragmentation and Wholeness (Bohm), 135–136 Frames, theory of, 279 Franklin, Stan, 282 Freedom, degrees of, 347–348 Free Inquiry program vs. Free-Society-­ Free-Person program, 353 Free will, 348 Freud, Sigmund, 211, 215, 222 Friedrichs, Robert W., 71–72, 93 Friedson, Eliot L., 78 Fuller, Steve, 332, 336–340 Function (concept), 244, 248 Functionalism, 7 Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, 241 Fundamental theorem of sociology, 305, 350–357 Fundamental theorem, social constructionism as, 104–106, 117 G Gabriel, Markus, 212 Galois, Évariste, 249–252 Garfinkel, Harold, 88–90, 108, 155, 180 Gaston, Jerry, 1–2 Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 226–227, 247–248, 254 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 191–192 Geertz, Clifford, 20, 97, 255–256, 279–280, 358–359 Genealogy of Morals, The (Nietzsche), 277 General limitative theorem (GLT), 353–354 General systems theory, 95–96

402 

INDEX

Generational linkages, transmissions across, 39–40 Generational principle of science, 305–306 Genes, culture vs., 96–97 Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Fleck), 106 Genetic redesign, 319 Genius, 264–267 Genius clusters, 253–254, 266–267 Geometry, 238–243, 257 German Language Society, 333 Gieryn, Tom, 144–145 Global Brain Institute, 313 Global Connectome, 360 Global environment, data concerning, 306–308 Global problem solving, barriers to, 315–316 Global war, 321–322 God(s) commentary about, 216 as cultural construction, 291 death of, 304, 306 establishment clause and, 330 existence of, 278, 346, 355–356 human condition, lack of concern for, 141 mathematics and, 258 number compared to, 232 origin of, 289 search for, 281 sociology of, 291 tricks, 137 Gödel, Kurt, 152–154 Gödel’s theorem, 152 Goertzel, Ted and Benjamin, 311–312 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 159–160, 264 Goffman, Erving, 180, 279 Goffman’s Law, 344 Goldman, Adam, 144

Goodfield, June, 20–21 Gopnik, Alison, 280 Gordon, Lewis, 223–224 Gould, S. J., 346 Gouldner, Alvin, 71–72, 84–85 Graham, Harman, 165–166 Grand Paradigm of science, 5, 133–134, 136, 157, 170 Gravity waves, 264 Great Man theory of history, 271 Great War, aftermath of, 317–318 Greece, ancient, mathematics in, 235, 237–238, 243–247, 251 Greek mythology, 302–303 Greenhouse gases, 306–308 Gresham’s Law for Science, 357 Griaule, Marcel, 20 Griffith, Belver C., 253–254 Gross, P. R., 64–65, 102–103, 109–110 Groups, theory of, 242, 250–252 Grundrisse (Marx), 192–193 Guillemin, Roger, 163–164 Gurvitch, George, 94–95 H Hacking, Ian, 109–110, 118–119, 223–224 Haddon, Alfred, 18–19 Hagmann, P., 360–361 Haldane, J. B. S., 302, 317–321, 323 Haldane, Robert, 190–191 Haraway, Donna, 68, 169–170 Haraway, Robert, 184 Harman, G., 184 Harris, D., 184 Harsin, Jayson, 331–332 Harvey, Thomas, 264 Hawking, Stephen, 216 Hayden, Tom, 84–85 Hayles, Katherine, 287

 INDEX 

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 66–67, 104, 259, 345 Helmholtz Free Energy equations, 42 Heraclitan hypothesis, 82 Hersh, Reuben, 255 Hesse, Mary, 15–16 Hessen, Boris, 6–7, 193–194 High-energy physics, anthropology of, 68 Hilbert, David, 238, 242, 252 Hindu mathematics, 235–236 Historical change, cyclical nature of, 233 History, 357 History of Embryology, Biology, and Morphogenesis, A (Needham), 189–190 Hitler, Adolf, 271 Hobbes, Thomas, 165–166 Hollinger, Henry, 33–34, 37–38, 42 Hooker, Clifford, 135, 136, 157–158, 199–200, 350–357 Hooker-Restivo fail-safe theorem, 361 Horowitz, C., 78–79 Hottois, Gilbert, 174 House of Representatives, 326 How We Became Posthuman (Hayles), 287 Hull, David, 102 Human activity, environmental impact of, 306–308 Human autonomy vs. autonomous technology, 320 Human condition, limits of, 311 Human culture, foundations of, 168 Human ecology, 200–202 Human ecology theory, 200–201 Human genome project, 289–290 Humanitarian values, science values and, 309–310 Humanity decoupling from co-evolution, 316

403

existential threats to, 337–339 Human knowledge, limits of, 198–199 Human language and its social context, 279 Human relations with earth, 302–303 Humans, artificial entity relations with, 291–292 Human science, 191–192, 196–198 Human Societies (Lenski), 92–93 Human-to-human relations, 174 Huxley, Julien, 190–191 Huxley, Thomas, 80 Hybrid bodies, 285 Hybrid entities and ideas, 293 I Icarus (Greek mythological character), 302, 318, 320–321 Icarus, or the Future of Science (Russell), 317, 320, 322 I Ching, 236 Ideas, decline in discussion of certain, 259 Ideas, suppression of, 328–329 Ideographic writing, 236–237 Imaginary number i, 248 Impeachment, 327 Inanimate objects, criminal charges against, 349 Incayawar, Mario, 151 Indeterminacy, 24 Indexicality, 24 India, historical revision in, 333 India, mathematics in, 235–236, 243, 246–247 Individual choice, 269–271 Individualism, myth of, 161, 170, 172–173, 184, 219, 225, 265–269, 271, 330–331, 345 Individual self, myth of, 313–314 Indra’s (Hindu god) net, 49–50

404 

INDEX

Industrial revolution, 262–263 Infinity (concept), 242 Information, Age of, 291 Information colonialism, 306–308 Information system, 358–359 Information technologies, 289–290 Innovative thought, probability of, 359–360 Inquiry, theories of, 10–11, 88–90, 93 Insight (term), 136 Insights in critical realist sociology of science, 136 Institutions, decline in discussion of certain, 259 Intellectual Fallacy, 345–346 Intellectualism, American attitude concerning, 327–328 Interaction ritual chains, 120 Internal Life Fallacy, 344 Internet, 339 Interpersonal relations, 291–292 Interpretative authority, 20 Invasive species, 306–308 iRobot Company, 275 Irreversibility, 173 Islamic-Arabic world, mathematics in, 247 J Japan, mathematics in, 244–245 Jefferson, Thomas, 325–328, 354 Joint Declaration on Freedom of Expression and Fake News, Disinformation and Propaganda, 334 K Kac, Eduardo, 289–290 Kafka, Franz, 141–142, 159–160 Kahn, Herman, 339 Kant, Immanuel, 72–73, 259, 345

Kaplan, Charles D., 88–90, 93 Kasparov-Deep Blue chess match, 287–288 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 183 Kelly, Kevin, 314, 318 King, Barbara, 105 Kitcher, Philip, 216, 221 Klein, Felix, 238, 242 Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 18–19, 23–24, 27–28, 51–52, 111–112, 119, 144–145, 152, 218, 220, 350–357 Knowledge human, limits of, 198–199 science impact on, 62 social practices and, 351 social production of, 23–24 sociology of, 75–79, 133, 157–158, 280–281 Knowledge and Social Imagery (Bloor), 112–113 Ko Hung, 199 Koyré, Alexander, 4–5 Krohn, Roger, 111–112 Kronecker, Leopold, 238, 249–252 Kropotkin, Peter, 144, 321, 350–357 Kuhn scientific revolutions paradigm, 5, 10–11 Kuhn, T. S. (Thomas), 1–9, 11, 74–75, 102, 106, 112, 135, 161, 166–167, 175–176, 196, 221, 249–251, 253–254, 338–339 Kuhnian paradigm, 1–7 L Labelling theory, 115 Laboratories, 31, 34–40, 44–49, 52 Laboratory life, 22–25, 49, 109 Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar), 18–19, 27, 101, 106–110, 119, 158, 163–164, 173, 179 Laboratory life studies, 7–11, 25–26

 INDEX 

Laboratory studies, 18–21, 25–29, 52, 164, 173, 178–179 Laissez-étudier, 74 Laissez-faire, 339 Lakatos, Imre, 154–157, 175–176, 220–221 Language conjecture, 354–355 Language, limitations of, 355–356 Language, Western superiority and, 63–64 LaPiere, Richard, 77 Latour, Bruno, 18–19, 23, 27–28, 40–41, 51–52, 101, 102, 106–112, 115, 119, 148, 152, 158, 161–185, 287–288, 293–294, 332, 335–339 Laudan, Larry, 148 Law, John, 114, 163–164 Law of Marginal Futility, 306–308 Lawfulness (term), 42–43 Learning and cognition, 280 Legislative proposals, 326 Legislative veto, 326 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 244, 245, 249–254, 256–257, 264 Leigh Star, Susan, 169–170 Leins, Michel, 20 Lenin, Vladimir, 166–167 Lenski, Gerhard, 92–93 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 286 Levitt, N., 64–65, 102–103, 109–110 Life span, extension of, 311–312 Life, forms of, 120–121 Life, informatic understanding of, 291–292 Liminal times, 168–170, 176–177, 292–293, 331–332, 337 Limited possibilities principle, 357 Liquid-liquid dispersion, morphology of, 34–40 Literature (defined), 178–179 Literature-science relationship, 108–109

405

Livingston, Eric, 151–157 Locality, manifesting of, 355 Locality theory, 153 Locality thesis, 155–157 Logician’s fallacy, 344 Loneliness, 261–263 Loughlin, Julia, 132–133, 191–192 Luckmann, Thomas, 116, 211 Luhmann, Niklas, 124 Lundberg, G. A. (George), 72–73, 180 Lynch, Michael, 25–26, 148, 151–152 M Machine intelligence, world dominated by, 311–312 Machine, morality of, 312–313 Machines with emotions and consciousness, 287–288 Mackenzie, Donald, 156–157, 164, 254–255 Madison, James, 325–328 Magnetic coin analogy, 41, 42 Making the Social World (Searle), 211 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 19–22 Man vs. machine, 287–288 Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance, The (movie), 264–265 Mancosu, Paolo, 221 Mannheim, Karl, 7–9, 75–76, 106, 216, 232, 254 Manufacture of Knowledge, The (Knorr-Cetina), 27–28, 111–112 Marx, Karl, 75–76, 103–105, 108, 124, 144, 158, 165–166, 191–195, 197–198, 227, 232, 291, 303–304, 313–314, 334–335, 345, 350–357 Marxism, 1–3, 7, 76, 190–191 Marxist paradigm for science and scientific change, 5–7

406 

INDEX

Marxists, categories and classifications united by, 66 Marxist sociology of science, 10–11 Maryanski, Alexandra, 105 Maslow, Abraham, 84, 86–88, 90, 93, 350–357 Mass-energy equivalence, 266 Materialism, 291 Material production, 192–193 Mathematical games and puzzles, 238–240, 245 Mathematical objects, 257 Mathematical physics, 6–7 Mathematicians (term), 246 Mathematics anthropologizing of, 291 capitalism and, 193 defined, 255–257 foundations of, 155, 156 history of, 5–6, 117, 234–254, 290 modern, 248 practices, 213 science and, 251 sociology of, 112–113, 144–145, 156–157, 212–213, 226–227 study of, 6–7, 221–222 Maxwell, James Clerk, 35 McClintock, Barbara, 183, 273–274 McKegney, D., 18–19 McNamee, Gregory, 261–262 Mead, G. H. (George Herbert), 124–125, 227, 278–279 Mead, Margaret, 20 Medical ethos and sciences, 308–309 Medical laboratories, 52 Medieval science (term), 58–59 Mehrtens, H., 248–249 Mentality brain processes and, 277 social nature of, 277 understanding of, 280

Mentally ill, criminal charges against, 349 Menzel, Peter, 295–296 Merchant, Carolyn, 15–17 Merton social system of science paradigm, 5 Merton, Robert K., 1–4, 6–9, 76, 83, 91, 106, 157, 175–176, 180, 193–194, 200, 216, 249–250, 252–254 Mertonian-Kuhnian camp, 134 Mertonian-Kuhnian paradigm, 6 Mertonian-Kuhnian paradigms, revisionist, 10–11 Mertonian sociology of science, 1, 3–4 Meta-philosophy, 135 Methodological individualism, 123 Methuselarity concept, 311–312 Mialet, Hélène, 170 Military-industrial complexes, 303–304 Mills, C. Wright, 137, 215, 278–279, 303 Mind interest in, 281 practice vs., 219 as social body, 351 sociology and anthropology of, 291 sociology of, 280 theories of, 276–281 Mindbody (term), 287 Misinformation, age of, 332–333 Misplaced correctness, fallacy of, 349–350 Modern mathematics, 248 Modern science, 58–59, 193, 199–200, 224–225, 258, 302–304 Montague, Ashley, 261–262 Morley, Jefferson, 327–328 Morphology research, 34–40, 43–44, 51

 INDEX 

Motives, 352–353 Mullins, Nicholas, 253–254 Multi-scaled complex phenomena, analysis of, 49–50 Mutual presence, 263 Mysterious East, Western notion of, 57–58 N Naive realism/realists, 15–17, 28, 67, 102, 112, 118, 119, 132, 145, 162, 177, 196, 247 Napoleon, 271 Napoleon Fallacy, 348 Napoleonic wars, 348 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 35, 36 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) reports, 34, 38, 40, 42 Native (term usage), 20 Natural accountability, 154 Natural science facts, 51 Natural science, mathematics in, 249 Natural selection, 141 Natural systems, study of, 50 Nature, 17, 48, 81, 82, 84, 110, 168, 290, 357 Needham, Joseph, 65, 191, 197–201, 258, 355 Neo-functionalism, 4 Neque demonstra neque redargue fallacy, 346 Neuroistic fallacy, 345 Neurosciences, 294 New technologies, pros and cons of, 287 Newton, Isaac, 6, 193, 194, 244, 245, 249, 251, 252, 264, 303 Nickles, Thomas, 28

407

Nicomachus, 238 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 124, 137, 142, 144, 150, 158, 159, 177, 191, 196–198, 210, 227, 266, 276, 277, 284, 286, 291, 335, 345, 351 NOMA Fallacy, 346 Non-Euclidean geometry, 254 Non-European men, status in science, 58 Non-science, science and, 58, 63, 64 Non-scientific inquiries, 88 Number(s), analysis of, 232 Number theory, 241 O Objectivity, 71, 72, 74, 75, 87, 95, 131, 139, 140, 144 Objectivity communities, 116, 134, 137 Objects, spatial and temporal location of, 350 Occidentalism and orientalism, 56, 58 Office, tests for, 329 Oil resources, reducing dependence on, 316 Old Savage in the New Civilization, The (Fosdick), 317 Omodeo, Pietro Daniel, 339, 340 Ontology, 212, 214, 221 Operationalization, 174 Opinions, encouraging expression of, 333 Organization for American States, 334 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, 334 Orientalism, 56, 58, 59 Orientalist discourse, science and, 58 Orwell, George, 233 Other, 11, 20, 179, 279, 292

408 

INDEX

P Pain, 277 Pandora's Box (Latour), 177 Paradigm principles, 357 Paradigm shifts, 169 Pareto, Vilfredo, 3 Parmenidean hypothesis, 82 Parsons, Talcott, 83 Pascal, Blaise, 261 Pasteur, Louis, 171, 183 Pathologies, preventing and doctoring, 356 Pathology conjecture, 356 Peano, Giuseppe, 257 Penultimate principles, 361 People's History of the United States, A (Zinn), 330 Perception, foreground-background character of, 37 Permanent revolution conjecture, 354 Persuasion, rhetoric of, 44–46 Phenomenological approach of anthropologist, 21 Philo of Alexandria, 238 Philosopher as scientist precursor, 17 Philosophers, 223, 227, 229, 267 Philosopher’s fallacy, 344 Philosopher-scientist, allegory defining, 167 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 277 Philosophy, 210–212, 346, 350 Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, The (Mancosu), 221 Physicists, 267, 268 Piaget, Jean, 156 Pickering, A., 184, 220 Pinch, Trevor, 2, 113, 164 Pinxten, Rik, 21 Pirsig, Robert, 223 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 19 Planck, Max, 267

Planetary pandemic, culture as, 316 Plato, 66, 76, 103, 117, 166, 168, 239, 243, 244, 246, 257–259, 291, 338, 345 Poincaré, Henri, 266, 267 Polanyi, Michael, 74 Political ecology, 166 Political principles, 354 Political revolutionaries, 3 Politicians, 167, 250, 253 Politics of Nature, The (Latour), 165 Polya, George, 156, 221 Polygons, 227 Polyphonic anthropology, 21 Polyphonic authority, 20, 21 Popper, Karl, 72, 73, 122, 336 Populism, 338 Positivistic approach of anthropologist, 21 Possibilism conjecture, 356 Post-democracy, 333 Post-human intelligence, 311 Post-truth (term), 333, 334 Post-truth era, 334 Post-truthism, 329, 339 Post-truthism tropes, 338 Post-truth paradigm, 331 Post-truth politics, tackling, 340 Practice, 209, 218, 220, 225 Practice conjecture, 354 Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, The (Schatzki and Knorr-Cetina), 218, 220 Predictability, 357 Primate Visions (Haraway), 68 Prime numbers, 241 Principia (Newton), 6, 193 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead), 117 Prinzip, Gabriel, 271 Private Worlds Fallacy, 344 Problem-solving potentials, 354

 INDEX 

Professionalization, 79–81, 139, 329 Progress, 92, 93 Proofs and Refutations (Lakatos), 221 Proofs in mathematics, 240, 246, 247 Protagoras, 239 Protagorean relativism, 9 Protestant ethic thesis, 200 Psychologistic Fallacy, 345 Psychologists on consciousness, 267 Psychology of science, 90, 93 Publication, requirements for, 45 Punctualisation/ depunctualisation, 174 Pure science, 17, 18 Puritanism, 200 Putnam, Robert, 262 R Radicalism, 85 Radical realism, 59 Radical science movement, 17 Radnitzky, G., 135, 136 Ragged Dick (Alger), 271 Rashomon theorem, 10 Rationality conjecture, 354 Rationality, domain of, 356 Rationality, intuition, and no-knowledge (R-I-N), 88, 90 Ravetz, Jerome R., 84, 170 Realism, 59, 116, 145, 195, 196, 304, 319, 323, 340 Reality, 82, 93–95, 109, 116, 120, 150, 177, 179, 183, 196, 258, 259 Reality conjecture, 355 Recurrence Theorem, 197 Rediscovery of the Mind (Searle), 282 Reductionism, 145 Reflexive anthropology, 21 Reflexive constructionism, 29 Reflexivity, 86

409

Regime of truth, 331 Reichenbach, Hans, 106 Relativism, 17, 28, 51, 108–110, 113, 115, 137, 142, 145, 196 Relativity theory, 266, 267 Religion, 259, 289, 291, 329, 330, 346 Religious experience, origin of, 289 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), 34 Representations, 352 Research environment, 48 Research process, 47–49 Resources, using, 301, 316 Responsibility and punishment, 349 Responsibility, nature and limits of individual, 349 Restivo, Sal, 9, 10, 18, 112, 126, 131, 132, 144, 145, 149–154, 157, 159, 170, 192, 208, 215–217, 223, 249, 253, 255, 269, 271, 272, 283, 311, 317–323, 336, 337, 339 Restivo-Chubin weak program, 9 Restivo’s 2nd Law, 346 Restivo’s 3rd Law, 346 Restivo’s Law, 344 Restivo thesis, 200 Richard Hunter (fictional character), 271 Ricoeur, Paul, 20 Riemann, Bernhard, 238 Right-wing populism, 333 Rigor, 140 Rigor mortis conjecture, 357 Robber baron/saintly politician thesis, 250, 253 Robber barons, 266, 303, 304 Robbins, Herbert, 255 Robo Sapiens (Menzel and D’Alusio), 295 Robotics engineers, 274

410 

INDEX

Robotics, experiments in, 287 Robotics, future developments in, 312 Robotics research, 296 Robots, 148, 275, 280, 284, 288, 289, 294, 344 Robot science and engineering, 281 Roe v. Wade, 325, 326 Romantics, 3 Root, Deborah, 60 Rorty, Richard, 168, 181 Rose, H. (Hilary) and S. (Steven), 170, 217, 351 Rose, Nick, 217 Rosental, 153 Ross, Sidney, 33, 36–40, 42–45 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 159, 165 Routinization of rationality, 332, 337, 338, 354 Royal Society, 63 Rule-governed systems, 279 Rule networks, 351 Russell, Bertrand, 117, 252, 257, 317, 318, 321–323 Ryle, Gilbert, 219, 278, 350 S Sahlins, Marshall D., 92 Said, Edward, 59 Saintly politician/robber baron thesis, 250, 253 Salk theorem, 306 Salk, Jonas, 311 Sanskrit, 237 Santayana, George, 80 Sarton, George, 65 Scandals in mathematics, 249 Scandals in science, 251 Scarcity, environment of, 40 Schatzki, Theodore, 218 Scheler, Max, 76 Schiebinger, Londa, 62

Schiller, F. C. S., 317, 318, 322, 323 Schutz, Alfred, 108, 124 Science, 7–9, 21, 23, 28, 52, 55, 58, 59, 61, 67, 81, 86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 95, 122, 136, 157–159, 165, 167–169, 171, 194, 197, 228, 253, 259, 271, 286, 290, 293, 302, 306, 310, 322, 346, 350, 357 Science and Civilization in China (Needham), 190 Science and technology studies, post-truth and, 334, 339 Science in Action (Latour), 181, 184 Science Outpost (Needham), 190 Science studies, 11, 170, 177, 184, 225 Science studies movement, 255 Science studies revolution, 28 Science wars, 66, 101, 102, 106, 108, 110, 112, 162, 184 Scientific facts, social construction of, 51 Scientific knowledge, assumptions regarding, 17 Scientific objects, 24 Scientific practice, 215–218, 220, 225, 228 Scientific reasoning, 25 Scientific research, decomposition of, 50 Scientific revolution(s), 5, 193, 200, 202, 243, 250, 251 Scientifiction (literary genre), 176 Scientific work, 25 Scientists, 17, 25, 29, 46, 74, 167, 250, 303, 319, 340 Scorpion and the frog, tale of, 349 Scott, W. Richard, 78 Scranton, Philip, 114 Searle, John, 178, 210, 211, 216, 227, 268, 277, 282

 INDEX 

2nd Amendment, 326 Seki Takakazu, 245 Self-made man, myth of, 271 Self-reference, 23 Senate, 326 Serendipity principle, 361 Serres, Michel, 109, 162 Service, Elman R., 92 Set theory, 242 Shapin, Steve, 164 Shared practice (term), 219 Shrum, Wes, 206 Simmel, Georg, 124 Simulations, hyperreality of, 103 Singularity hypotheses, 312, 313 Sismondo, Sergio, 338 Siu, R. G. H., 87, 88, 90 Sivin, Nathan, 199 Skepticism, 160 Sklair, Leslie, 2, 4 Smith, Barbara Hernstein, 121 Smith, Dorothy, 61 Smith, Edward, 206, 207 Sociable (term), 275 Sociable robot engineers, 283 Social (term), 119 Social action, 351 Social and sociable robotics, 295 Social and sociable robots, 275, 276, 284, 285, 287, 289 Social and sociable robots engineering, 281 Social being, human as, 195 Social brain paradigm, 97, 122, 151, 266, 289, 304, 305, 360 Social Conquest of Earth, The (Wilson), 225 Social construction, 101, 121, 126, 210, 225, 228, 305, 357 Social constructionism, 106, 114, 117 Social constructionist experience, 117

411

Social constructionist sociology of science, 8 Social construction of mind, 281 Social Construction of Reality, The (Berger and Luckmann), 211 Social construction of technology (SCOT), 106, 114 Social, end of the, 104, 111, 115, 168, 171, 175, 177, 178, 293 Social groups, 114 Social interests, 352, 353 Social mind, 284 Social mobility, 272 Social networks, 304, 305, 317, 322 Social order, 174, 220, 306 Social organization, new forms of, 95 Social practice, 218, 352 Social problem, modern science as, 304 Social relations and rule-governed systems, 279 Social robot engineers, 283 Social robotics, 275, 276, 281, 318 Social robots, 275, 276, 284 Social robots engineering, 281 Social science facts, social production and construction of, 51 Social studies paradigm, 177 Social world, dependence on, 347 Society, 125, 167, 168, 171 Society for Social Studies of Science, 149, 163, 164, 216 Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice, 217, 225, 228 Socio-cultural change, 92 Sociological theory of mind, 280 Sociology of science, 11, 51, 121, 179, 182, 196, 206, 207, 254, 304 Sociology of science knowledge (SSK), 102, 108, 111, 176

412 

INDEX

Socrates, 243 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 6 Sokal, Alan, 102, 103, 110 Sokal affair, 101 Sophists, 239, 246 Sorokin, Pitirim, 80 South Africa, 333 Space travel, 269 Species extinction, 308 Spencer, Walter, 19 Spengler, Oswald, 106, 232, 233, 243, 257, 290, 291 Spengler’s thesis, 234, 235 Sporns, O., 360 Stabilization, principle of, 92 Staddon, John, 310 Star, Leigh, 184 STEAM, 312 Stein, Gertrude, 264, 267 Steiner, Gary A., 95 STEM, 312 Stendahl, Krister, 145 Stevenson, Adlai, 328 Stone, I. F., 333 Storer, Norman, 81, 83 Strauss, Anselm, 181 Strauss, Leo, 335 Strong, weak, and moderate programmes, 10 Structuralism, 219 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 1, 3, 4, 11 Subconscious, 278 Subjective positivism, 21 Subscendental Fallacy, 344 Supreme Court, 326, 327 Survival wisdom, 314 Survival, values, morals, and ethics conducive to, 310 Sustainability, 306, 310, 317, 322 Sustainable human community and planet, 309

Sweden, 329 Symbolic interactionism, 177 Synthetic inquiries, 88 Synthetic modes of thought, 88 Synthetic rationalities, 90 T Tantalus (Greek mythological king), 303, 318, 321, 322 Tantalus, or the Future of Man (Schiller), 317, 322 Taoism, 87 Tarde, Gabriel, 173, 178, 181 Tartaglia, Niccolò Fontana, 245, 249, 251, 252 Technihuman Age, 314 Technium, 288, 314, 318 Techno-fatalism, 319 Technological innovation, 311 Technology and Sustainability (Denton), 320 Technology, unintended consequences of, 284 Technopositive futurism, 314, 318 Technoscience, 174 TenHouten, Warren D., 90, 93 TenHouten-Kaplan propositional-­ appositional model, 79 Terrestrial ecosystems, sustainable use of, 315 Tesnière, Lucien, 178 Test-tube shaking experiments, 37, 40–42, 44, 51 Thackray, Arnold, 79 Thales, 246 Theologians, 267 Theologian’s fallacy, 343 Theory of Everything, 95 Theory-driven systems, sociology of, 254 Theory-group model, 253

 INDEX 

Think tanks, 328 Thought, culture and, 279 Thoughts, 351 Tikopia (Pacific Island), 45 Tinkering, 357 Tocqueville, Alexis, 76 Tolstoy, Lev, 271 Tolstoy’s 2nd Law, 349 Tolstoy’s Fallacy, 347 Tolstoy's Law, 347 Touching, 261 Tractatus Logico Philosophica (Wittgenstein), 361 Tractatus Logico-Sociologicus, 361 Transcendental Fallacy, 343 Transducer theory, 289 Traweek, Sharon, 19, 68 Trial, The (Kafka), 159 Tribalism/triballistics, 262, 315 Troeltsch, Ernst, 76 True beliefs, 8, 9, 351 Trump, Donald, 329, 333 Truth conjecture, 357 Turing test, 215–217 Turn to practice, 225 Twain, Mark, 326 25th amendment, 327 Twilight of the Gods and the Anti-­ Christ (Nietzsche), 210 Type 1 statements, 23 Type 5 statements, 23 Type 4 statements, 23 Type 3 statements, 23 Type 2 statements, 23 U Ultimate principle (Tractatus Logico-­ Sociologicus), 361 Unabomber, 208 UNABOM Task Force, 205, 206 Unconscious, 278

413

United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, 334 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, 306, 307, 315, 322 Universal constructionists, 118 Upanishads, 235 Utilitarian hypothesis, 200 V Vagus nerve, 359 Validity, 143, 144 Value conjecture, 353 Value judgments, 137 Values, 86, 90, 335 Van Bendegem, Jean Paul (John Paul), 209, 210, 215–217, 221–223, 227 Vieta, François, 245 Vocabularies of motive, 216 von Glasserfeld, Ernst, 122, 124–126 von Savigny, Eike, 218 Voting rights laws, 326 Vygotsky, L., 278 W Wallace, George, 328 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 271 War, preventing vs. fighting, 319 Wars, 79, 303 Wartofsky, Marx W., 91 Water, sustainable management of, 315 Watts, Alan, 85 Wayne, John, 264, 265 Weber, Max, 180, 200, 335 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour), 176 Weiss, Sabrina, 358

414 

INDEX

Well-being conjecture, 354 Wertsch, James, 278 West, 57, 61 Western expansionism, 61 Western hegemony, challenges to, 65 Western mathematics, 240, 245–247 Western religion, 64 Western science exceptionalism, 17, 56 Western subject, relationship to Other, 58 Western superiority, science and, 64 Western vs. non-Western modes of thought, 293 What I Believe (Russell), 322 What is Mathematics, Really? (Hersh), 255 What is Mathematics? (Courant and Robbins), 255 Whitehead, Alfred North, 117, 257, 350 Wigner, Eugene, 248 William of Baskerville, 141 Wilson, E. O., 97, 225 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 124, 148, 156, 157, 210, 216, 219, 220, 232, 277, 291, 331, 345, 351, 361 Wolpert, Lewis, 102 Women and science, 58 Women’s reproductive rights, 325 Woodstock and New Age generation, 3

Woolf, Virginia, 267, 276, 284 Woolgar, Steve, 18, 19, 23, 27, 28, 32, 40, 51, 67, 101, 108, 109, 111, 112, 144, 147, 148, 151, 152, 156, 158–160, 164, 171, 179 Work-site, 156 World as social construction, 210, 225, 227–229 World Cooperative Council, 191, 197 World, Europeanized history of, 57 Worldview approach to science studies, 9 Worldview shifts, 169 World views, numbers as, 233 World War II, 33 Writing, 40 Written statements, 25 Y Yin and yang discussions, 209, 225 Z Zammito, J., 184 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig), 223 Zenzen, Michael, 10, 18, 23, 33, 38, 42, 46, 50, 112 Ziman, John, 81 Zinn, Howard, 330