Philosophy of social science pdf download

There is a sense just whatthis sense is has, of course, been very and made possible a revolution in the sociology of scientific knowledge. The history of science is, thus, a philosophers of science, Kuhn's earlier thesis of radical incommensurability 'discontinuous' process, periods of cumulative and consensual 'normal' science between different paradigms, and the absence of theory-neutral tests to choose alternating with periods of crisis, 'revolution' and 'paradigm shift'.

Feyerabend The peculiar character of paradigm shifts in Kuhn's account is what makes was the boldest and best known of these. He was a self-styled 'anarchist' his model of science so challenging to earlier views of scientific rationality.

There are, in short, no subversive irreverence. Like Kuhn, Feyerabend took his philosophical views standards for judging rival candidates to become the new paradigm which are from his interpretation of episodes in the history of science.

He argued that neutral as between the contenders. It is as if there are two political parties, one what came to be recognized as key advances in scientific thought were in fact offering a way of keeping inflation down, the other a way of reducing unem- achieved by deliberate breaches of accepted scientific method.

If sciences ployment, but with no way of deciding which achievement would be the more progress by breaking the rules, then the appropriate motto should be 'Any- desirable. The problem may go even deeper than this. Even where, as in the thing goes'. For Feyerabend, there are no methodological principles which paradigm shift from Newtonian mechanics to the relativistic physics developed distinguish science from non-science, and so no reason for thinking science is by Einstein, there are terms that the rival theories have in common, such as superior to other forms of understanding of the world.

This position supports 'mass' and 'time', they are defined in different ways. The consequence of this a tolerant pluralism within science, but also, more broadly, a dethroning of 'meaning variance' is that dialogue between advocates of the rival theories is science itself from its privileged social position: at cross-purposes. This is the strongest sense in which rival theories can be said to be 'incommensurable': that they are mutually unintelligible. And yet science has no greater authority than any other form of life.

Its aims are This very radical thesis of incommensurability has the paradoxical con- certainly not more important than are the aims that guide the lives in a religious sequence that rival theories do not contradict, but just talk past one another. If community or in a tribe that is united by a myth. At any rate they have no business this were really so, then it is hard to see how they could be in conflict.

Kuhn sub- restricting the lives, the thoughts, the education of the members of a free society sequently retreated into a less radical version of incommensurability, but still where everyone should have a chance to make up his own mind and to live in accord- held that there were no objectively justifiable decision procedures for basic the- ance with the social beliefs he finds most acceptable. The separation between church ory choice.

This leaves the way open for a sociological approach to understanding and state must therefore be complemented by the separation between state and such changes in science. In the absence of objectively rational, paradigm-neutral science.

Feyerabend criteria for theory choice, scientific revolutions are accomplished by way of power struggles in the scientific community, in which editorial control over However, others, most influentially Imre Lakatos, a follower of Karl Popper, key journals, capture of particular university departments, the use of rhetoric attempted to use historical analysis to defend the rationality of science Lakatos and propaganda may all have a place.

In fact, however, Kuhn himself remained Lakatos's term 'research programme' is close to Kuhn's concept of committed to the view that science does progress through revolutions, and that 'paradigm'. Like the paradigm, a scientific research programme provides rules the successful new paradigm does constitute an advance over its defeated rivals. Unlike Popper, Lakatos accepts that early on in the development of transformations in concepts of what science itself was and the role of social a research programme scientists may be justified in holding on to their basic processes within the scientific community in bringing about such transform- propositions, or hypotheses the 'core' of the programme in the face of appar- ations.

Although Kuhn himself was not a relativist, and believed that science ently adverse evidence. This is necessary to entertaining report on the confrontation between Wolpert and Collins at a give the supporters of an embryonic research programme a chance to develop British Association meeting by Irwin and the debate between Collins it to a point where its explanatory potential can really be shown. Where research programmes fail to do this over a prolonged period of time, they are said to be Gender and Science: The Feminist Vision 'degenerating', and a shift to a successful programme is 'progressive'.

Since Lakatos's work, considerable ingenuity has been devoted by philosophers of Once science had been shown, by the radical science movement and by soci- science to the task of offering historically and sociologically sensitive defences of ologists of science, to be a thoroughly social process, the way was open to an the rationality of science. Examples include Newton-Smith , Hacking exploration of a variety of different aspects of this sociality: science could be , Brown , Longino and others.

The work of the critical real- seen as following the dictates of instrumental reason in its 'modernist' mission ists discussed at greater length in Chapter 8 can also be understood in this way. The seen as liberating the discipline from the requirement to treat the content of emergence of a renewed and energetic feminist movement at the end of the natural scientific beliefs as a special case: as outside the scope of sociological s ensured that yet another dimension of science's social character would explanation because determined exclusively by evidence and logic.

Influential be exposed: its relation to gender. In his analysing the mechanisms by which this exclusion took place for accounts of classic statement of this approach, Bloor defined it in terms of four commit- this literature, see Harding part 1; Rose chs.

They ments: to seek causal explanations; to treat 'true' and 'false' beliefs impartially; held not that women were absent from science, but that their presence was to explain 'true' and 'false' beliefs, as far as possible, in the same sociological predominantly confined to ancillary and supporting roles, providing the terms the 'symmetry' principle ; and to accept these commitments as also practical support for research almost always defined by men.

The aim of this applying to the explanations provided by the sociology of knowledge itself 'liberal' feminist research was to bring the obstacles to female participation and die principle of reflexivity. That science itself would benefit This new approach to the sociology of science satisfied at least one of from greater female participation followed from the obvious fact that a huge Lakatos's criteria for a progressive research programme: it inspired a large reservoir of talent was simply not being tapped.

Studies of the work of that These studies showed the extent to which social processes of negotiation small minority of women who have been allowed to make their mark as scientific and consensus-formation were involved in the construction and authorization of innovators see Keller ; Rose ; also this volume, Chapter 9 revealed scientific knowledge-claims.

Despite some disclaimers for example, Bloor , interesting answers to both questions. Despite immensely greater obstacles, 7 , the tendency was to give the impression that sociological explanation some women clearly had made important contributions to science - this could account wholly for the content of science.

So scientific knowledge-claims dispensed with the prejudice that women were somehow constitutionally about nature were presented as 'constructs' of the social processes whose out- incapable of major scientific achievement. But at least some of these women come they were. Further, given the symmetry principle, no special status could scientists who did not necessarily identify themselves as feminists, or even justifiably be assigned to scientific as against other sorts of belief.

There was no attach significance to their gender in relation to their work as scientists - see direct access to nature-in-itself by which to compare alternative representations Keller could be shown to challenge the ruling self-image of of it. The drift towards radical relativism about knowledge, and a social construc- science by their distinctive visions and ways of working.

In the face of this, the liberal feminist agenda of increased to defend the objectivity and rationality of scientific work; see, for example, the female participation in science was clearly far too narrow. Here feminists remain divided, and we will consider some of the masculine virtues contributed to a consolidation of new gender divisions in the subsequent debates in Chapter 9. For the moment, however, we focus on an wider society. The link between femininity, emotion and subjectivity was influential line of feminist analysis of the natural sciences which explores the rela- opposed to masculine objectivity and rationality as the 'separation of spheres' tion between the prevailing ideology and practice of science, on the one hand, came to characterize the division of labour between men and middle-class and gender and sexuality on the other.

This approach does not abandon science women in early industrial capitalism. That approach emphasizes the problems encountered by the Merchant and Brian Easlea established connections between developing infant in forming a stable sense of self-identity.

These problems are witch-hunting and male challenges to previously female roles in medicine and different for boys and girls, and they may lead, especially in the case of boys, to midwifery, especially , on the one hand, and the shift away from an organic, hol- the formation of defensive personalities which can maintain their autonomy istic and feminine vision of the world to the impersonal, mechanical philosophy only through a sharp boundary between self and other, and by aggressive, of nature proposed by the New Science of the seventeenth-century, on the other.

The association of object- Evelyn Fox Keller draws upon this work, but subtly shifts its emphasis. She describes the rivalry between two versions. One, the underlying psychological dynamics. The division of mothering and fathering hermetic tradition, deriving from the ideas of the sixteenth-century physician roles, the cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity, and the gendered Paracelsus, saw matter as infused with spirit, so that knowledge involved 'heart, character of science are thus a mutually sustaining system.

Both philosophies such. By contrast, the mechanical instead of a masculine project, and the renunciation of the division of emotional and philosophy emphasized its masculine pursuit of truth and renunciation of the intellectual labour that maintains science as a male preserve.

Keller emotions: But as the phrase 'from within science' implies, this is not some Utopian [W]here the Will or Passion hath the casting voyce, the case of Truth is desperate I vision imposed from without. Keller reworks the object relations approach to The Woman in us, still prosecutes a deceit, like that begun in the Garden; and our develop a vision of a personality structure in which objectivity, power and love Understandings are wedded to an Eve, as fatal as the Mother of our miseries.

Joseph might be connected in ways denied by current formations of both masculinity Glanvill, quoted in Keller and femininity. In this alternative, self-identity becomes sufficiently secure to soften the boundaries between self and other, and to recognize interdepend- What Keller interprets as the 'hermaphrodite' image of science in the hermetic ence and relatedness. For such a personality, other humans and non-human tradition was attacked by the advocates of the mechanical philosophy as complicit beings in the outside world can be acknowledged in their independence and with witchcraft, disorder and the radical sects.

So, the establishment of the Royal integrity, without the need to dominate or destroy. These emotional dynamics Society after the English Civil War consolidated the victory of a self-consciously make possible a cognitive relationship to the world of objects which does not masculine and socially conservative view of science as committed to the rational frame them in the perspective of our own desires and purposes.

In this sense, 'penetration' of the secrets of nature. For the mechanical philosophy, nature was what she calls 'dynamic autonomy' is the basis for a 'dynamic objectivity' - an still represented as female, though no longer as 'mother', or as partner, but rather objectivity which respects and loves its object.

Keller draws on Ernest Schachtel's as the object of dispassionate exploration and rational control. In turn, and by contrast with animals as subjects of research, and anxiety about the wider ecological destruc- perception that is dominated by need or self-interest autocentric perception it tiveness of modern capitalism.

Lynda Birke, herself a former researcher on permits a fuller, more 'global' understanding of the object in its own right. Keller animal behaviour, has explored the interconnectipns between a certain 'masculine' training in scientific method and the suppression of sensibility to the suffering of animals as subjects of laboratory research Birke Keller's optimism about the possibility of a different science is grounded in But she goes further than this in analysing the complexities in the intersecting her perception that the victory of the mechanical philosophy was never dualisms of nature-culture, feminine-masculine and animal-human.

Freeing complete. The practice of science has always been pluralistic, with rival and ourselves from the desire to conceptualize 'animals' as other and inferior to the subversive visions persisting despite their marginalization by the dominant human, and as appropriate subjects for objectifying and reductionist science, is approaches. Moreover, nature itself, given the methodology of orthodox essential to the struggle against maltreatment of non-human animals. But it science, can be expected to be an ally in bringing about change: is also necessary to the feminist opposition to biological determinisms which denigrate women: recognizing the individuality and subjectivity of non-hiiman But nature itself is an ally that can be relied upon to provide the impetus for real animals is a key to resisting attempts to represent humans themselves as change: nature's responses recurrentiy invite re-examination of the terms in which biological 'automata'.

Keller The complex and indefinable work of Donna J. Haraway has also addressed the woman-human-animal-science nexus, with a particular focus on the And once we acknowledge that nature itself is active in requiring scientific A I, discoxirses of primatology - both in their 'scientific' forms, and in the popular traditions to adopt new ways of thinking, and new methods of investigation, cultural forms of TV documentary, cartoon, advertisements and so on the hope for change from within looks more plausible.

Keller argues that, in Haraway A recurrent theme in her work is the post-modern one of fact, current developments in the sciences, and most especially in the life dispelling dtialisms, transgressing boundaries and the proliferation of hybrid sciences, are leading to a recognition of complexity and interaction in dynamic forms symbolized with the image of the 'cyborg' - see Haraway This systems, as against the mechanical philosophy's pursuit of unified laws which takes material forms in the replacement of human organs by mechanical parts, nature 'obeys'.

The way we represent our McClintock Keller illustrates the persistence, at least in the work of this primate kin, especially the great apes, is clearly a very fertile field to explore this scientist, of a cognitive relation to her subject-matter very like that identified shift.

Haraway's analysis remains ambiguously poised between several of the by Schachtel. In McClintock's vision, nature is infinitely complex and approaches we have discussed in this chapter, and which she calls 'tempta- resourceful, so that there is no hope for science to encapsulate it or subdue it in tions'. But Haraway's apparent abandonment of any clear cognitive or simple formulae. Rather, the method of science should be one of attention to normative stance, as implied by this ambiguity, seems problematic.

As Birke particularity and difference, and of humility in 'listening' attentively to what points out: the object of study has to say. This attitude of reciprocity and affection between scientist and subject of study is not a sacrifice of objectivity, but a necessary condition for it. As Keller puts it: We are already witnessing suggestions that pigs be bred to supply hearts for human patients; and transgenic animals sometimes become factories for human use.

These The crucial point for us is that McClintock can risk the suspension of boundaries kinds of boundary transgressions are not ones I would wish to celebrate. Birke between subject and object without jeopardy to science precisely because, to her, science is not premised on dial division.

Indeed, the intimacy she experiences with the objects she studies - intimacy born of a lifetime of cultivated attentiveness - is a wellspring of her powers as a scientist. Keller The Reflexive Turn: 'Constructing' Nature and Society The themes of respect and love for nature, and the recognition of the integrity, complexity and particularity of the objects of scientific knowledge, By the early s the followers of the 'strong programme' in the sociology of are widely shared among feminist commentaries on science.

They are acutely science, and related approaches, were facing criticisms from a new direction. There were, in fact, two However, for all Beck's use of the term 'reflexivity', his work remaiw distinct lines of criticism.

According to one, the sociologists of science, in their about the ecological risks he describes. The work of other leading focus on controversies, and talk of 'strategies', 'interests', 'sides' and so on, the reflexive turn has been strongly anti-realist see, for example, Wynne were committed to a 'decisionist' model of social life as constructed by the or deeply ambiguous.

The very influential work of the French conscious 'rational choices' see Chapter 5 of agents. Against this, the critics sociologist Bruno Latour and his associates comes into this latter category, emphasized the importance of studying the embedded routines and cultural work, known as 'actor-network' theory, shares with the feminist contexts of scientific practice. Consistency could be restored only by 'reflexively' extending opposed to the abstract representations of the philosophers and the retrospeO- scepticism to the sociologist's own explanatory concepts and methods.

Soci- -tfitf ive certainties of the historians. Both social and natural worlds were now to be treated as 'constructs'. This reflexive turn in the sociology of science was connected to a wider debate in social theory between advocates of post-modernism see Chapter fi existence' Latour One implication of this is that the instrumccav buildings, reagents, microbes, particles and 30 on involved in laboratory prams?

For some, the authority of scientific knowledge-claims, and of practices such as vaccination, of information technology, of robotics atxf of scientific rationality, was taken to be definitive of 'modernity', so that the so on are at the core of transformations of modes of life.

For Beck, 'reflexivity' At the heart of actor-network theory is this intention to break free of the referred to the way modern institutions, most especially science and tech- dualism which separates off, or 'purifies', society from nature.

These micro-organisms, instruments, devices and so on. Under certain circumstances risks were literally incalculable, potentially universal in their scope, and these generated 'objects' may escape from the lab to participate in the wider exceeded the capacities of private and public sector to insure or guarantee constitution of both nature and society.

These 'objects' are, at first, Latour security. In the face of these risks, the scepticism about particular knowledge- claims, no more than a set of readings or measurements, and they acquire claims which had always been central to scientific method was now being established status as real 'things' only to the extent that the scientists in whotc generalized to science itself.

A new 'sub-polities' was emerging, in which the labs they are generated are successful in acting as their 'representatives' in the authority of science was under question, with the hopeful prospect of wider wider world of science, and so persuading, or 'enrolling', other scientists into democratic participation in scientific and technical decision-making for an alliance.

The visual displays provided by laboratory demonstrations add further But this leads to a second departure from more traditional sociologies of authority, and this in turn is made possible only by virtue of the success of science.

If our lives are lived through participation in collectives, which are, in teams of scientists or engineers in enrolling into their alliance political and eco- turn, made up of heterogeneous networks of human and non-human nomic support from those who already command authority and resources in elements, and if society and nature are merely secondary, 'purified' constructs, the wider society: the state, business, and, above all, the military; the following it follows that we can't use 'society' to explain science.

What we have con- quotation is from his Science in Action : structed as 'pure' society is a consequence of scientific and technical practices, and so cannot be used to explain them. This conclusion he calls, following Essentially, R.

This is the first mas- Gallon Constractivist where focuses on the way modern science and technology 'technoscience', as he calls Nature is concerned, it is realistic about society. Latour 94 it is constantly proliferating new 'objects', as candidates for subsequent ratification, or 'stabilization', as accepted, taken-for-granted realities, pieces of Latour's proposal, then, is to treat both society and nature as constructs equipment, measuring devices and so on.

These objects typically involve fusion which stand in need of explanation, and to place the weight of explanation on of human agency with natural substances or beings: frozen embryos, expert the centre 'between' these poles - that is, on the networks of actants, and the systems, digital machines, hybrid corn, databanks, whales outfitted with radar processes by which they get put together, extended and stabilized.

However, it sounding devices, gene synthesizers, psychotropic drugs, the hole in the ozone is not at all clear that these concepts are up to such a demanding task. For one layer and many other examples. This ever-proliferating multiplicity of pro- thing, Latour's key concepts for defining 'actants' are those of 'hybridity', duced objects is at the centre of our social life, yet its components cannot be 'quasi-object', 'quasi-subject', and so on. These terms get such meaning as allocated to either side of the great divide between nature and society: they are they have only in terms of the prior understanding of what 'subjects', 'objects' 'hybrids', 'quasi-objects' and 'quasi-subjects'.

Latour contravenes his own Successful science and engineering consists in deploying the whole gamut of methodology in the very act of defining his most basic ideas.

Crucially, these alliances are into seamless networks leads to metaphorical excesses which carry little convic- composed out of previously unconnected elements which cut across conven- tion. An example is his account of the way the windmill succeeded in forming tional divisions - they are heterogeneous 'networks of actants', which include a more powerful network than the pestle and mortar Latour , human groups, animals, pieces of equipment, synthetic materials, measuring binding together corn, machinery, bread and the wind.

He writes of devices, and so on. The term 'actant' is used to include the full range of 'translation' of the 'interest' of the wind, and 'complicated negotiations' which elements which play a part in the establishment and consolidation of the have to be conducted with it to secure its alliance. Far from representing the network, irrespective of our subsequent wish to allocate them to one side or windmill as something irreducible either to nature or society, Latour's the other of the nature-society dichotomy.

What is of value in the account is that nature and society are constructed as separate, unconnected domains. At the recognition of the independent causal power of the wind, and its role in this point, Latour is establishing a double distance between his approach and shaping the range of possible human responses to this, but this insight is put at that of more orthodox sociology of science.

On the one hand, he brings non- risk by the resort to anthropomorphism. Latour more powerful groups that have already solved the same problem on a larger scale. That is, groups that have learned how to interest everyone in some issues, to keep Much of today's 'big science' conforms well to this description, but even as a them in line, to discipline them, to make them obey; groups for which money is not description it is selective and one-sided.

Not only have many courageous a problem and that are constantly on the look-out for new unexpected allies that can scientists sacrificed their careers out of a sense of social responsibility, but also make a difference in their own straggle. Most seriously, however, the cyni- businesses This certainly looks very much like an explanation in terms of the cism of Latour's demonic view of contemporary technoscience leads him to an forbidden 'society'! But if we abandon the means of criticizing So, despite his rhetoric, it seems that in practice Latour has not moved far power exercised in the name of science, or military force posing as reason, if we from the sociologists of science whose approach he criticizes.

Even what seems have no vision of an alternative practice of knowledge creation, what then does most distinctive - his inclusion of the activity of non-human 'things' in the Latour's strong language amount to? What things are'? The positive visions of an alternative science, respectful of its exactly is the status of the 'objects' 'quasi-objects', 'hybrids', and so on which objects, democratically accountable to its wider citizenry, and open to full science 'generates'?

In his Pasteurization of France we read: 'Did the participation on the part of previously excluded or marginalized human groups, microbe exist before Pasteur? From the practical point of view -1 say practical, which are offered by the feminist and other radical critics of science, provide an not theoretical - it did not' p.

In Science in Action he writes of the alternative to this apparent defeatism. He goes on: Conclusion This situation, however, does not last. New objects become things: 'somatostatin', 'polonium', 'anaerobic microbes', 'transflnite numbers', 'double helix', or 'Eagle This chapter has noted the shift, closely associated with the influence of the computers', things isolated from the laboratory conditions that shaped them, things French tradition of historical epistemology, and the work of Thomas Kuhn, with a name that now seem independent from the trials in which they proved their away from the prevailing empiricist orthodoxy in the philosophy of science.

This has frequently given rise to scepticism about the special scientists themselves in shifting 'modality' from relativist non-realism in status generally claimed for scientific knowledge, and to various forms of relat- periods of controversy to conformist realism when controversy is settled.

But ivism in the theory of knowledge. In the absence of any 'direct', or unmedi- can any coherent sense be made of a world in which 'objects' simply come into ated, access to reality, on the basis of which to compare rival accounts of it, one existence and depart again in a ballet perfectly choreographed with the power set of beliefs is as good or bad as any other. If success in defining reality is just a matter of superior But if we take as a methodological requirement that all scientific knowledge- strategic skills, owing nothing to either rational argument or what the world is claims are to be treated with equal scepticism, then what about the knowledge- actually like, why should we meekly accept the outcome?

After all, a new power claims made by the sociologists and historians of science themselves? This is might be installed tomorrow! But such radical scepticism is both self- allies and material resources, as 'part of a war machine', and as an 'intolerable contradictory and unwarranted. Such radical scepticism is unwar- ranted since, though we may lack unmediated access to external reality, we do have mediated access to it. The volume is indispensible reading for students and scholars interested in epistemology, philosophy of science, social social studies of knowledge as well as social studies of technology.

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The philosophy of the social sciences considers the underlying explanatory powers of the social or human sciences, such as history, economics, anthropology, politics, and sociology. The type of questions covered includes the methodological the nature of observations, laws, theories, and explanations to the ontological — whether or not these sciences can explain human nature in a way consistent with common-sense beliefs.

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