The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Steve Fuller
Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History of Our
Times
from Chapter Two:
The Last Time
Scientists Struggled for the Soul of Sciencepp. 129-149
Content
7. Re-Platonizing the Politics of Science: Implications for Education and
Research
8. Life after the Fall: Polanyi’s Escapist Strategy for Sanctifying Science
7. Re-Platonizing the Politics of Science: Implications for Education and
Research
A common assumption of the
realism-instrumentalism debate as it is conducted today is that science is, in
some significant sense, autonomous from the rest of society.
At the very least, the success of
science can be explained without referring to the societies that have
supported it. However, once RID is
fought in the arena of educational policy, such autonomy becomes difficult to
maintain: How can science justify its autonomy, while at the same time
meriting inclusion, if not privilege, in the key processes of social
reproduction? From the Mach-Planck
debate, two kinds of answers can be discerned that, over the course of this
century, have proved as influential as they are unsatisfactory.
The realist appeals to science as an
exceptionally rational world picture whose adoption promises to add
disciplined thought to any line of work. The
instrumentalist portrays science as an economizing tool that can assist
everyone in pursuing her ends without imposing any value orientation of its
own. In practice, these alternative
visions of “autonomy” have amounted to the dilemma: Use or be used.
When positions are developed dialectically, it
is common for each side to scrupulously avoid the interlocutor’s shortcomings,
yet to remain unwittingly blind to one’s own deficiencies.
For Mach, the biggest threat posed by
Planck’s realist educational policy was clearly indoctrination.
This fear led Mach to conceptualize
the cultural significance of the natural sciences in terms that closely
conformed to the liberal doctrine of “academic freedom” as applied to both
researcher and student. Unfortunately,
this doctrine was originally designed with the humanities as the center of the
educational system. By the first
decade of the twentieth century, the range of applications of
natural-scientific knowledge had become wider and potentially more dangerous
than those of humanistic knowledge. Thus,
to deny science its own value orientation was to license indirectly the
appropriation of scientific knowledge for any purpose, including destructive
ones, as World War I would ultimately demonstrate.
For every Mach who resolutely refused
to involve his scientific expertise in the war effort, there were plenty of
Machians, especially among the chemists (including the “pacifist” Wilhelm
Ostwald), who “freely” enrolled in the kaiser’s cause. [67]
Unlike Mach, Planck did not believe that the
problem of scientific autonomy would be solved by a sharp separation of
science and values, for that would only make science captive to those who have
the power to impose their values on it. Science
had to be socially recognized as its own
67. Johnson 1990, 180-83.
129
value orientation, alongside yet noncompetitive
with the state, religion, and industry. An
elite functionary for most of his career, Planck was alive to corporatist
tendencies in the modern nation-state that eluded Mach’s democratic
liberalism. Thus, Planck organized
scientists in ways that enabled them to take collective control of the
direction and application of their work, a strategy that included insinuating
a distinctive natural-scientific perspective throughout the educational
system. Nevertheless, as the religious
rhetoric of the Mach-Planck debate brings out, the realist strategy placed
science - especially an advanced science like physics - in an awkward
political position of its own. For if
the ends of science are not merely distinct, but increasingly divergent, from
other societal ends, then students will need to be given early exposure to the
scientific world-picture, in order to be attracted, or at least rendered
sympathetic, to scientific careers. Thus,
increased control of the curriculum would seem to be necessary for continued
control of the research agenda.
As suggested earlier, a crucial factor in Mach’s
long-term loss to Planck was his strict, perhaps even anachronistic, adherence
to the old Socratic ideal of dialectical inquiry, admittedly the very one
promoted by Wilhelm von Humboldt under the guise of “Enlightenment” when he
reinvented the German university in Berlin at the dawn of the nineteenth
century. Most closely associated with
the classical humanistic mission of the university as citizen education, it
was a resolutely praxis-oriented view in which the ends of science were
regularly realized together by professor and student in the classroom.
All students were, as the social
psychologist Jean Lave now puts it, “legitimate peripheral participants” in
the knowledge production process, active inquirers in their own right, not
passive recipients of knowledge. [68]
In Mach’s
idiosyncratic version of this vision, the trac-
68. On learning as legitimate peripheral
participation, see Lave and Wenger 1991. Lest
Mach appear completely atavistic, I should say that the fall from Humboldtian
grace had become obvious only in the generation prior to the Mach-Planck
exchanges. Even in the late nineteenth
century, students in the natural sciences were treated as researchers in that
they were encouraged to try out experimental possibilities to see what worked.
In that sense, there was no discrete periodization of “training” and
“research.” See Olesko 1993, esp. 22.
A brief history of the decline of the
Humboldtian ideal in the German university system may be found in
Schnaedelbach 1984, 12-32.
For German academics who lived through the final
stages of the decline, such as the sociologist Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900) symbolized the “man of science” who lost his faith after the
Humboldtian ideal had died. Nietzsche
was a precocious philologist who fell into a permanent depression after his
first book was severely criticized on “scholarly” grounds.
(The rest is history.)
His The Birth of Tragedy in the
Spirit of Music (1872) invited readers to use the contemporary music of
Richard Wagner to re-create in their own times the context that had enabled
Greek tragedy to flourish over two thousand years earlier.
Encapsulated in Nietzsche’s fate is a
profound difference in sensibility between what “teaching” and “research”
cultures in the academy have wished to conserve as the collective memory of
their societies. Nietzsche represented
the teachers, who stressed the recovery of the [contexts
of the past that could continue to enliven the present, whereas the
emerging tendency was to stress the recovery of past contents, even if
that meant stressing the “otherness” of the Greek conceptual universe to our
own. Implicit in the latter, now
dominant, viewpoint is that the past is very much a “foreign country” best
left as a preserve to specialists. The
Priggishness of contemporary relativism discussed in sections 4-5 of the
introduction should be seen as coming from this perspective,
rather than the one Nietzsche represented, which would erase any clear
boundary between the past and the present. On
the trade-off between context and content as goals of translation more
generally, see Fuller 1988, chap. 6; Fuller 1998b.]
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130
tability of science to common modes of
experience should constrain the development of science nearly as much as
science should revise and discipline common modes of experience.
Translation, not reduction, was his
principle of scientific unification. Consequently,
the research and education functions of the university were never sharply
distinguished in his mind. Moreover,
Mach imagined that the absorption of the natural sciences into the
universities (and the Gymnasien) would serve to divest these
institutions of their residual elitism.
However, ends need to be tied to institutions,
in which case the desirability of the ends turns out to rest on the
feasibility of the institutions. And
here Mach’s vision came up short. Notwithstanding
its Humboldtian provenance, the image of students in active inquiry with their
professors was quickly molded by the institution of the seminar in the
historical disciplines, which subsumed teaching under research, thereby
converting the classroom into a market for recruiting the next generation of
the discipline’s practitioners. This
mentality was transferred to the laboratory, once the experimentally based
sciences were brought into the universities, with psychology providing an
especially instructive case in point, since most of the early labs were housed
in philosophy departments, the core of the humanities. [69]
Gradually, an
alternative vision emerged, namely of a community of scientific researchers
whose real work occurs in settings quite separate from the lecture halls where
students are encountered en masse. Whatever
remained of the old praxis-based ideal in what became Planck’s vision, it lay,
as we shall see below, in the role that science plays in reproducing the
social order, not in the conduct of science itself, which increasingly lost
any sense of a realizable end. [70]
69. Danziger 1990, 17-67.
70. Given the current fashion of speaking of the
work done in a modern scientific laboratory as consisting of “practices,” it
is worth stressing that a citizen of the Athenian polis would find little in
this usage that cohered with his understanding of praxis.
For a thoroughgoing critique of the appeal to practices in social
science, see Turner 1994, which was subject to a symposium review in Human
Studies, July 1997, including responses by two of the leading practice
theorists in contemporary sociology of science, Andrew Pickering and Michael
Lynch. In what follows, I draw partly
on the French Marxist anthropologist Godelier (1986, 130-37).
For the Athenian, a praxis was an activity
that was done “for its own sake” in a special sense of that expression.
The activity had to have a natural
trajectory and ending that would [be
recognized by the person engaged in the praxis.
In addition, a praxis could
define the trajectory and ending of other activities that did not have such
self-defining qualities built into them. For
example, before the introduction of slavery, agriculture was the paradigm case
of a praxis. The cultivation
and harvest of food were not interminable affairs, but ones pursued only as
long as was needed to sustain a household. The
emphasis was placed not on transforming nature but on participating in an
activity pursued by many at once. Such
praxis was the primary means by which a sense of civility was instilled, as
each household tilled the soil in ways that enabled others to sustain
themselves. However, after slaves
started doing the agriculture, praxis was limited to free speech, that is,
speaking one’s mind (and only one’s mind).
Two related notions need to be introduced here:
techne and poiesis. The
former designates any of a variety of client-oriented trades that require
specialized (usually esoteric) training, while the latter refers to the
characteristic products of such a trade. The
client engages in praxis by directing the tradesman to make something to the
client’s specifications. The
tradesman’s job is to realize the client’s idea in the medium of his trade.
The client might oversee the
tradesman’s work, just to make sure all is going to plan.
If the final product is judged good,
then the client, not the tradesman, would receive credit for its
successful execution. (The tradesman
would receive payment for his labor, of course.)
While such a merit system may seem odd
by modern standards, consider the case of today’s teacher who typically
receives credit for the excellent performance of her students on exams.
In both the ancient and modern case,
merit lies more in the design of realizable standards of performance than in
the sheer ability to realize those standards in performance.
If techne enables a tradesman to
infuse matter with form, praxis enables the client to infuse the tradesman
with direction.
Various complications can be added to this story.
For example, what if some enterprising
people try to turn speech itself into a techne?
Would undergoing the relevant training
enhance or diminish the status of speech as praxis?
Such were the worries that animated
Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical response to the Sophists.
Nevertheless, our Athenian forebears
would be in agreement that crucial features of today’s “scientific practice”
disqualify it from counting as praxis. First,
consider the claims made for the open-ended, indeed interminable, nature of
scientific inquiry, as well as the stress placed on the essentially unintended
(“serendipitous”) character of major scientific achievements.
But perhaps even more telling is the
image of a mounting body of scientific literature that seemingly diminishes in
its ability to capture its objects of inquiry.
More and more is written about less and less.
In short, the sorts of reasons that
have often been given for why the Greeks would never have countenanced the
unbounded market mentality of capitalism can be used to show why they would
refuse to dignify contemporary natural science with the title of praxis.
Someone endlessly driven to make money
maybe quite skilled, in the sense of possessing a techne, but the lack of
purposeful closure to his activities would mark it as pathological.
At this point, Alasdair MacIntyre’s objection to
this characterization of praxis is worth facing.
His list of praxes includes scientific
inquiry, as well as musical performance.
See MacIntyre 1984, 187 ff. However,
the difference between the two kinds of cases are important.
A musical performance is properly
regarded as a praxis because each moment of a competent performance
recognizably contributes to an overall goal, the execution of a piece of
music, during which both the performer and the client-audience experience
pleasure. With the notable exception
of improvisational performances, one’s musicianship typically depends on the
ability to execute a piece of music that reaches a scripted end.
There is no such clear connection
between technical proficiency and success in scientific practice.
Given the long hours of unproductive
labor often involved in laboratory science, scientists are taught not to tie
their efforts too closely to the likelihood of success.
Rather, they are taught to see
themselves as]
[potential players in a story
that will eventuate in a complete world picture: see Kuh 1970b, 38.
For example, Max Planck was quite
explicit about the vicarious character of the pleasure that most
scientists would receive from their activities.
And if Planck is right, that a mark of
mature science is that increasing effort is needed to achieve comparable
results, it would seem that we have on our hands less a praxis and more an
addiction - with hallucinatory elements thrown in to capture the virtual
status of any given scientist in his paradigm’s narrative of progress!]
HHC: [bracketed]
displayed on page 132 of original;
[bracketed]
displayed on page 133 of original.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to
explain exactly how Planck’s vision came to triumph, but the signs of its
success are relatively easy to mark. In
the first place, the unity of research and teaching of the classical humanist
university underwent a subtle metamorphosis, one that can already be detected
in the reactions to Max Weber’s famous “Science as a
132
Vocation” address of 1918. [71]
Few academics any longer talked about
students’ intellectually maturing as they participated in the professor’s
scholarly interests. Rather, the
professor herself is the one who now undergoes self-transformation through the
process of scholarly discipline. Weber’s
particular way of characterizing this process - which involved subsuming one’s
ego to an endless and largely vicariously realized quest - was roundly
criticized for its obvious reliance on the image of natural-scientific inquiry
fostered by Planck and the physics community.
Thus, humanists familiar with the classical pedigree of praxis, such
as Ernst Robert Curtius, found Weber’s vision a monstrous perversion of the
ends of inquiry. [72] However, in
its place, Curtius could only invoke the scholar’s solitary participation in
the thought of past minds, and the intuitive sense of private closure that it
brings. Yet this too was
certainly a far cry from the dialectical participation of professor and
students in the Humboldtian classroom. It
had become clear to all that academics were no longer in the business of
bringing their students to intellectual maturity, let alone to personal
empowerment. [73]
In short, Planck did not forsake Plato but
shifted the Platonic imagery from Socrates to the philosopher-king.
Planck sharply divided between the
research and educational functions of the university.
In practice, the state and the
scientific community struck a deal. The
state heavily invested in cutting-edge research as “bets” on the curriculum
that will be needed to credential the next generation of citizens in jobs that
will ensure the smooth operation of the social system. [74]
In return, the
scientific community offered its services in designing new principles of
social stratification, ones based not on “status” or “class,” but on “general
intelligence” and
71. See Weber 1958.
72. Curtius (1989) catches Weber’s
implicit reliance on a physics-driven model of inquiry, but he neglects
Weber’s explicit tendency to accept the convertibility of thought styles
common to modern academic and corporate culture: entrepreneurship requires
inspiration, and an efficiently organized scientific enterprise conforms to
the same principles as govern a successful company.
Interestingly, Weber sees this
convertibility as not only inevitable but also of American provenance, when in
fact the Americans refashioned it from the Germans.
In chapter 4, section 3, this history
comes to the fore, as Conant is largely responsible for importing the German
model of academic research to the natural sciences after World War I.
The model, in turn, was forged in the midst of heavy state and
industrial involvement. See note 20
above. My thanks to Nigel Pleasants
for helping me crystallize these connections.
73. Ringer 1979, 19.
74. Stinchcombe 1990, 312-13.
“problem-solving ability.”
These qualities supposedly pertained
to all kinds of jobs, but ultimately they were modeled on one’s facility with
the kind of “work problems” found in classical mechanics textbooks.
Indicative of this new insertion of
science into the mechanisms of social reproduction and control was the
attitude of Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Koehler toward the widespread use of
intelligence tests in schools.
Not only had Koehler originally studied physics with Planck in
The influence of this physics-centered view of
thinking and intelligence was felt throughout Gestalt psychology.
In their textbooks, Gestaltists were
at pains to deny the Machian-popular view that physics was an inappropriate
model for studying normal psychological processes because of its preoccupation
with unobservable entities in artificial settings. [77]
The earliest
Gestalt-oriented experiments on problem solving were based on accounts of the
electrical discoveries made by Benjamin Franklin and Michael Faraday. [78]
These experiments, conducted by Otto Selz, highlighted the ability of
subjects to transform their environments - essentially turning them into
thought laboratories - and thereby remove the obstacles in the way of their
problem-solving tasks. Moreover, while
the subjects typically could not recount their thought patterns as a train of
images, they nevertheless felt an
75. Koehler 1971, 112—13. On the vexed
sociohistorical situation of the Gestaltists, see Ash 1991. The view
that Koehler derived from Planck— that physical reasoning is ordinary
reasoning rendered self-conscious—was popularized in late nineteenth century
Berlin by Hermann von Helmholtz. See
Hatfield 1990b, chap. 5.
76. Koehler 1971, 237=51.
77. Koffka 1935, 57.
78. See Humphrey 1951, 142-43.
I say “Gestalt-oriented” because Selz,
a member of the Wuerzburg school of psychology, held to a sharp split between
the character of thought and perception, the former being “imageless.”
The classical Gestalt psychologists
typically held to a monistic view of the mind.
On the significance of this difference for epistemology, see Berkson
and Wetterstein 1984, 8-10, 106 ff.
134
unconscious “determining tendency” that kept
them motivated until a solution was reached. The
report of such experiences suggested that even ordinary people normally
partook of some of the committed and slightly mysterious character of physical
inquiry as Planck portrayed it. So
perhaps Mach had overstated the case for the exotic nature of physics.
At least, this was the verdict of the
instigators of the “second cognitive revolution” of the late 1950s. [79]
Nevertheless, younger adherents to Mach’s
critical approach to science, such as Karl Popper (1902-94), remained
concerned. Popper’s doctoral
dissertation was partly devoted to showing that these early cognitive
psychology experiments did not clearly distinguish between thought that was
simply driven to fit the facts into preexisting patterns - as is often
connoted in the idea of a “mental set” - and a genuine scientific
breakthrough, which addressed the facts in ways that substantially
reconfigured preexisting patterns. We
see here a psychological basis for Popper’s famous falsifiability criterion.
[80] Given this lineage, it is hardly
surprising that Kuhn found his studies of paradigm acquisition in the physical
sciences moving him toward more general considerations of how children learn
concepts. [81] The relevant
developmental psychology experiments, which built upon the early Gestalt work,
presuppose that children are inchoate physicists before they are anything
else.
On the specific topic of intelligence tests,
Koehler revealed his Planckian sensibilities most clearly. [82]
He sharply separated the
administrative role of the tests from their proper scientific merit.
In fact, Koehler held that the primary
function of the tests was to reduce uncertainty in how teachers classified
students when tracking them through the educational system.
Such bureaucratic efficiency was worth
whatever interpretive confusions the tests’ coarse-grained measures might
breed in the public - as in encouraging the idea that “intelligence” is a
univocal substance that people have in varying amounts.
Psychological researchers would not be
so fooled, since (so Koehler believed) intelligence tests are clearly
artifacts of the cul-
79. A good historical source on this revolution
(and its learned despisers) is the series of interviews presented in Baars
1986, esp. 365-66 (interview with Herbert Simon on the influence of Otto Selz
and the early Gestaltists on his own work). An
indication of the continued closeness between psychology and physics is the
story recounted by the early cognitive revolutionary Jerome Bruner concerning
the controversial atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (in his later
capacity as director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies), who
asked of Bruner’s own neo-Gestalt experiments: “Perception as you
psychologists study it can’t, after all, be different from observation in
physics, can it?” From Bruner 1983,
95-96.
80. A good source on Popper’s resonances with the
history of psychology is Berkson and Wetterstein 1984.
81. Kuhn
1977a, 308-19.
82. Koehler
1971, 187-88.
135
tures that construct them and not the royal road
to cognitive capacity. The ease with
which Koehler could harbor such vastly different attitudes toward the
educational value and the research value of these tests is reminiscent of
Plato’s tolerance for “noble lies” that serve to stabilize the social order.
While Planck and Mach would disagree
on the import of this resemblance, both would agree that only practices that
appear to have the warrant of the natural sciences are in a position to
manufacture such myths in the twentieth century.
Planck’s view was effectively “naturalized” with the publication of The General Theory of Knowledge in 1925, written by Moritz Schlick, who acceded to Mach’s chair in
Such an explanatory narrative had been
previously used by the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in order to show that
teleological and deontological ethics were earlier and later phases in the
moral development of humanity. Schlick
had now purported to show an evolution in the conception of economy, with Mach
representing the earlier phase of “minimal effort” and Planck the later phase
of “minimal principles,” the pursuit of which may actually involve much
(pleasurable) effort. The crucial
ambiguity in Schlick’s account, which carries over into contemporary
philosophy of science and science policy, is whether he is talking about the
development of the individual inquirer or that of a community of inquirers.
The ambiguity matters when
interpreting the idea that other life needs come to be subordinated to
scientific ones: Is Schlick talking about the self-sacrificing scientist or
the society that increasingly adapts its other functions to the needs of
scientific institutions? The elision
of these two interpretations clearly worked to promote Planck’s vision of
science in society.
The social historian Fritz Ringer has examined
the long-term effects of basing access to secondary and tertiary education on
entry and exit exami-
83. See Schlick
1974, 94-101.
136
nations, the so-called merit-based system that has prevailed in
As the employment opportunities of academically
credentialed people have increased over the last century, they have also
displayed a distinct pattern, which Daniel Bell originally took to mean “the
coming of post-industrial society.’ [85]
The pattern is one of intermediation, that is, the
increasing need for academically credentialed people to survey, digest, and
translate the work of other academically credentialed people for a third group
of academically credentialed people. In
some recent popular works, this labor process has been described as “symbolic
analysis” and “knowledge brokerage.” [86]
For science policy analysts,
intermediation is the institutional correlate of cognitive complexity; for
critical political theorists, it marks the corporatist sublimation of
democratic impulses. [87] For still
others, especially the German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, these are two
ways of talking about the same positive development, namely, an increase in
social integration brought about by the continual redistribution of
uncertainty across the various “intermediators.” [88]
In contrast to these diagnoses, intermediation
can equally be seen as symptomatic of the growing disparity between the
content and function of
84. Ringer
1979, 27-29.
85.
86. See esp. Reich
1990.
On the strength of his analysis, Reich became President Clinton’s
first secretary of labor in
1993.
87. See, respectively, Pavitt
1991 and Held 1987, esp.
143-220.
88. Luhmann 1983. Academic intermediation is the
intellectual wing of the state’s assumption of welfare and security functions
that shelter the citizenry from the advances of capitalism.
On how the need for such
intermediation arises, see O’Connor
1973. Fuller 1999b,
chap. 5, offers a severe critique of academic intermediation.
137
scientific knowledge, a tolerance for which we
can already see in Planck and especially in his students Koehler and Schlick.
If the ends of science are not merely
distinct, but increasingly divergent, from other societal ends, then greater
efforts need to be taken to render the two compatible with each other.
The problem is exacerbated if the
ultimate Weitbild seems to recede into the indefinite future and
scientists are left with sheer “productivity” as their metric of progress,
especially if the productivity of Big Science follows the familiar trajectory
of product life cycles in Big Business. Later
research is enabled by the rapid obsolescence of earlier research.
Indeed, according to standard science
indicators, the “harder” sciences are also the more “brittle,” as measured by
the rate at which research is superseded. [89]
However, the plethora of fads and jargons
associated with such volatility is quite unlike the stabilizing function that
science continues to serve as the premier mechanism of social reproduction.
Indeed, all the more reason - as we
shall see James Bryant Conant argue in the next two chapters - for a segment
of the scientific community to take a special interest in stabilizing
background social conditions so that whatever changes do occur in the research
agenda are the result of specifically scientific concerns.
Yet the need to make the diverging
ends of science and society meet increasingly require “intermediators” who
rationalize bits of the difference to each other, but none who can make it all
the way around from content to function, showing, say, how the continued
administration of aptitude tests squares with our best theories of how human
cognition develops. Given such a
disparity, one might suspect that both science and society have lost
their ends. [90]
To conclude, we still live with the mutual
suspicions that made the original rounds of the Planck-Mach debate so
memorably rancorous. What is to
be feared more: a closed science that has been reduced to an off-the-shelf
technology (Planck’s fear of Mach’s policy implications) or the mass
indoctrination of a scientific theory that affords it an extrascientific
significance that it would not otherwise deserve (Mach’s fear of Planck’s
policy implications)? The Technological Menace or The Ideological
Menace? This
89. De Mey
1982, 111-31.
90.
One of the most celebrated expressions of the
disparity between the content and function of science is the reflexive
modernization thesis associated with the work of the sociologists Ulrich
Beck and Anthony Giddens. See Beck
1992; Giddens 1990. Although usually
attributed to the emergence of global environmental hazards, reflexive
modernization may equally be the result of our increasing reliance on experts
whose opinions change sufficiently often (perhaps
because of their sensitivity to evidence) that the sheer publicity
of these changes may be more responsible for the general perception of risk
than any putatively “objective” source of risk.
138
polarization reflects the inherent instability
of science as objective knowledge. Importantly,
it is an instability that emerges more from the classroom than the laboratory.
Contrary to Kuhn’s Planck-like view of
the history of science as the circulation of research elites - the
cutting-edge innovators versus the gatekeeping traditionalists - the
Mach-Planck debate reorients us to the struggle within the educational
community to represent those features of science that are worth reproducing in
society at large.
On the one hand, if science is portrayed as the
search for the most reliable means of adapting the material world to human
ends, as Mach thought, then the success of science could be measured by the
ease with which anyone can appropriate those means without having to rely on
the presence of scientists. On the
other hand, if science is portrayed as the search for the most comprehensive
picture of reality, as Planck thought, then someone whose perspective is
reduced or, in some sense, marginalized by science’s current trajectory will
interpret it as that imperial form of cognitive relativism known as
“hegemony,” the imposition of one special interest group’s view of the world
on everyone else. On the one view, the
scientists are invisible; on the other, they are overbearing.
A closely related tension obtains
between saying that science is both “universal” and “expert” knowledge at the
same time. If it is universal, then
presumably it is codifiable and perhaps even automatable, which would number
the days of an elite scientific community. But
if science is expert knowledge, then presumably it is esoteric and of limited
inherent relevance unless scientific standards are attached to some mode of
domination. [91]
8. Life after the Fall: Polanyi’s Escapist Strategy for Sanctifying Science
If anyone epitomized Whewell’s vision of the mechanic remade as high humanist for the generation who came of age in the wake of the Mach-Planck debate, it was Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), autonomous science’s most eloquent twentieth-century champion. Although Polanyi had received his training in Mach’s favored field, chemistry, at the
91.
The trade-off between universal and expert forms
of knowledge is pursued in Fuller
1991, which is followed by several comments and a response by
Fuller. We can also think about the
choice between Planck and Mach in terms of the science education policy issues
that helped motivate their debate: What best reveals that students have made
progress in their knowledge of arithmetic - that they no longer need to
memorize the multiplication tables because they have access to calculators (a
Machian criterion) or that they have mastered the relevant parts of number
theory needed to explain how multiplication works (a Planckian
criterion)?
139
German science and raising its moral tone. [92] Polanyi ended the German phase of his professional career at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry under the directorship of Fritz Haber (1868-1934), the 1918 Nobel Prize winner (for his work on ammonia synthesis) who had developed poison gas warfare during World War I, while struggling to keep his institute’s military commitments separate from those relating to “pure research.” [93] However, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 forced both Haber and Polanyi to emigrate, with Polanyi settling in the
Polanyi wrapped himself in the rhetoric of
nineteenth-century humanism to offer a passionate defense of the culture of
science in the face of barbarous bureaucrats and creeping socialists.
But by virtue of his participation in the quotidian battles that
science fought in the public arena, Polanyi could not manifest the sort of
detached “scientific” rhetoric that pervades most of The Structure
of Scientific
Revolutions, a point in no small
measure responsible for many of Polanyi’s original insights subsequently being
attributed to Kuhn. Nevertheless, it
is not hard to see that Kuhn owed more to Polanyi than the appreciative
footnote to his magnum opus, Personal
Knowledge, would suggest. Consider
what Kuhn says here:
If authority alone, and particularly if
non-professional authority, were the arbiter of paradigm debates, the outcome
of those debates might still be revo-
92.
Polanyi’s opinion is reported in Shils
1997, 253-54.
The only other name Polanyi
mentioned was Einstein’s.
93. Johnson
1990, 195-98.
Polanyi had first encountered Haber as
a student when the latter was a lecturer at the Karlsruhe College of
Technology. It is worth noting that
one possible source of Polanyi’s humanistic tendencies was his original
training as a medical doctor in his native
94. Polanyi
1962, which was followed by
responses in the journal over the next five years, including one by Stephen
Toulmin, which itself generated significant response (see chapter 6, section
8).
140
lution, but it would not be scientific revolution. The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community. Just how special that community must be if science is to Survive and grow may be indicated by the very tenuousness of humanity’s hold on the scientific enterprise. [95]
As Kuhn proceeds to discuss the special
character of the scientific community, it becomes clear that he trades on the
Polanyiesque trope of converting cognitive virtues to moral ones, qualities of
understanding to ones of trust. Thus,
in place of scientists holding beliefs on the basis of defeasible evidence,
Kuhn finds scientists committed to a vision of reality on the basis of
intuitive judgment. The sort of
radical criticism that is the philosopher’s stock-in-trade appears, in the
Kuhn-Polanyi lexicon, as a failure to respect the difference between one’s own
social station and that of another inquirer. It
challenges the soundness of trusting expert judgment during times of
disagreement over the relevant standards of judgment. [96]
Of course, Polanyi did not believe that all experts deserved to have
their discretion so respected. In
particular, he believed that social scientists could not be left to their own
devices because of their tendency to extend some philosophical caricature of
scientific practice - a “methodology” - to aspects of everyday life where it
played no constructive role and, indeed, where it could be quite destructive
if used to challenge established scientific judgment, the grounds for which
may not be easily explained to the public. [97]
Polanyi’s dissatisfaction with social-scientific
appeals to methodology
95. Kuhn 1970b, 167; Polanyi 1958, based on his
Gifford lectures of 1951-52.
For Kuhn’s acknowledgment of
Polanyi, see Kuhn 1970b, 44 n. 1.
96. A leading sociology of scientific knowledge
practitioner, Harry Collins, sides with Polanyi in a way that reveals the
conservative implications that can be drawn from the day-today openness of
scientific inquiry: “Even among the experts themselves, who have been trained
to many levels above what can be expected of the public’s understanding,
radically different opinions are to be found… It is dangerously misleading to
pretend that the citizen can judge between the competing views of technical
experts when even the experts cannot agree.” See
Collins 1987,691. Ironically, then,
while sociologists can step into the breach when philosophers cannot decide
among themselves which methodology best explains a certain historical episode
of scientific theory choice, the sociologists’ lack of scientific expertise
prevents them from intervening
in contemporary disputes among scientists trying to resolve their own theory
choices! The underdetermination of
theory choice by the evidence thus licenses, for the SSK practitioner, not the
introduction of specifically sociological variables, but rather the
discretionary judgments of the local experts.
97. Aside from the atomic bomb, the public image
of the natural sciences was tarnished by the attempts of leaders of the
scientific community to suppress without testing Immanuel Velikovsky’s
best-selling Worlds in Collision
(1950), which
challenged the received wisdom of physics and chemistry by psychoanalyzing the
creation myths of several cultures. When
it turned out that some of Velikovsky’s astronomical predictions were correct,
several social scientists took the opportunity to chastise natural scientists
for failing to live up to their own avowed standards.
This was the episode that specifically
caused Polanyi to retrench his own position about the necessarily inexplicit
character of true scientific expertise. See
Polanyi 1967.
141
reflects an important but neglected point about the terms on which he advocated an “autonomous” scientific enterprise. Polanyi was no positivist. In fact, his low opinion of social science can be traced to its positivistically inspired doctrine of “value-free science,” which effectively established a division of labor between sociologist and policy maker: The policy maker dictates the ends she wishes to be pursued, and the sociologist designs the most efficient means for achieving them. This view, which Polanyi associated with Max Weber, enables the sociologist to live a Janus-faced existence as both policy instrument and pure inquirer. [98] The Weberian sociologist refuses to participate in deciding the external ends to which her expertise is put because her vocation dictates ends of its own. Thus, the sociologist appears to be the unholy hybrid of Cassandra and Cyclops, a seer who is at the same time professionally trained to turn a blind eye. While this position still haunts sociology today, not least sociology of science (as we shall see in chapter 7, sections 5-6), Polanyi would have recognized its origins in his own discipline, specifically as the stance adopted by his fellow chemists in the years leading up to the First World War. Arguably, this attitude was responsible for the wholesale recruitment of chemists to the kaiser’s cause, the ultimate failure of which eventuated in the massive public reaction against science that characterized the
At the turn of the last century, it was common
for chemists to claim that they were engaged in “basic research” but in a
sense that was intimately tied to practical ends.
To today’s ears, this sounds
contradictory, but an examination of the rhetoric of such leaders of the
German chemistry community as Emil Fischer (1852-1919) and Wilhelm Ostwald -
the respective winners of the 1902 and 1909 Nobel Prizes in chemistry -
reveals that when they spoke of pursuing science as an “end in itself,” they
meant to include the human intellect’s penetration into what had been
traditionally regarded as “natural barriers,” especially the scarcity of land
and raw materials that many Germans felt had given the Americans and Russians
an advantage in the race to global domination. [99]
Since the advent of polymer chemistry
in
98. Polanyi 1974.
99. Johnson
1990, esp.
1, 9 n. 26, 73,
202.
142
the mid-nineteenth century, an important
research strategy of the German chemistry community was to replace natural
resources with human-made ones by analyzing naturally occurring materials into
their essential elements and then introducing catalysts to rearrange the
molecules into new materials according to their durability, resilience, and
other humanly desirable qualities. Among
the enduring fruits of this strategy were plastics and synthetic fibers. [100]
Ostwald himself was famously converted
to this ideology once Germany’s ill-fated support of the Dutch in the Boer War
of 1899-1902 led to a
restriction on German imports of fertilizer nitrates from South Africa. [101]
Most chemists espoused an “energeticist”
philosophy that resembled Aristotelianism
in many respects,
especially its denial of any ultimate atomic constituents to matter coupled
with an image of “nature” as a realm of pure potentiality that is given a
specific form only through the application of human intelligence.
The idea that nature might have an
inherent character that scientific theory aims to represent was associated
with the contemplative stance of the physics community, which (from the
chemists’ standpoint) seemed to draw an artificial distinction between the
“human” and the “natural.” Following
Max Planck, physicists gave direction to their inquiries by sharing a common
world picture in terms of which their particular research projects made sense,
regardless of their remoteness from practical affairs.
And as Kuhn would later do, most
famously with his concept of “paradigm,” Polanyi appropriated this last aspect
of the physicist’s world-view in order to prevent science from being further
compromised in the public sphere.
However, considering Polanyi’s own scientific
work in chemistry, the emphasis he placed on the “passion” and “commitment” of
scientists to their object of inquiry must be understood in a special light
that cuts against some recent attempts to make him out to be a latent
feminist, if not a postmodernist more generally.
Nowadays Polanyi is often read as
having claimed that scientists need to empathize with what they study, that
is, to adopt the object’s standpoint to the greatest possible extent - to
“know it from the inside,” as it were. [102]
However, it is not
at all clear that Polanyi the chemist believed that objects were by nature
so sharply defined as to have the sort of intrinsic qualities associated
with a distinct “standpoint” or
100.
Bernal 1971, 825-27.
101. Johnson
1990, 39.
102. A major case in point is the celebrated
feminist biography of the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock,
who spoke of her method of understanding maize chromosomes in terms of
becoming one with them. For the
biographer, Evelyn Fox Keller, McClintock’s manner of expression pointed to
the characteristically holistic way in which women, by virtue of their early
rearing, relate to the world. See Fox
Keller 1983.
143
“subjectivity.”
Rather, Polanyi’s assimilation
of scientific inquiry to “personal
knowledge” is better understood as a matter of scientists coming to
realize the Promethean power their work contains and hence to take
responsibility for defining the terms in which that work is used, that is, the
contribution they make to materially constituting the objects of their
inquiry. What can be too easily
interpreted as the scientist’s receptiveness to nature is in fact the very
opposite, a manifestation of the scientist’s will to power that is constrained
only by a sense of moral responsibility, which in turn requires community
reinforcement.
In short, Polanyi drew a very sharp ontological
boundary between the human and nonhuman aspects of nature, but not between
humanity and nature as such.
[103] The
problem with the “kaiser’s chemists” was that they believed their
responsibilities as scientists ended with a demonstration of technical
proficiency and usable results. Thus,
regardless of the rigor of their training, they were not properly constituted
as a moral community, a flaw that is all the more glaring precisely because
the objects of inquiry by themselves did not exert sufficient constraint on
the ends to which they may be put. In
this respect, despite his Platonist sensibilities about the politics of
science, Polanyi - like Ostwald before him - comes close to an Aristotelian
metaphysical perspective that regards “artifice” positively as the mark of
completion that humans impose on an otherwise unformed nature when they
operate by the principle of intelligent design.
At the same time, the elitist undercurrent in
Polanyi’s account of science is unmistakable, especially the unflattering
analogy he frequently drew between, on the one hand, medieval self-governing
guilds and indentured servants and, on the other, basic and applied
researchers. (He seemed to think that
all social scientists could be fitted into the latter category, perhaps in
light of his Weberian interpretation of what they do.)
This point has been typically missed
by practitioners of science and technology studies who have attempted to
contribute to the public understanding of science.
When Polanyi alluded to science as a
craft, he was envisaging it as an
103.
This distinction can be understood in terms of
the history of German idealism in the period between Kant and Hegel.
Johann Gottlieb von Fichte
(1762-1814) and Friedrich
Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854),
two ideologues of the modern German university, represent the intended
contrast. Schelling held that “Nature”
has a will of its own that can be in either conflict or harmony with that of
humanity. This view, integral to many
an ecological sensibility, was not Polanyi’s, though it is presupposed in the
sharp distinction between Geisteswissenschafl and Naturwissenschaft
that had begun to dominate German academic life in the mid-nineteenth
century. Rather, like Fichte, Polanyi
stressed the primacy of the human will, with nature characterized in largely
negative terms as resistance to the will’s strivings, but without any positive
characterization of its own: pure passivity to the will’s pure activity.
On this period of the history of
German idealism, see Beiser 1987,
1992.
144
aristocratic leisure activity comparable to a
sport or game in that its value lay in its intrinsic pursuit, not in some
specifiable consequences. What Polanyi
most certainly did not intend was that science was like more proletarian forms
of labor, such as auto mechanics. [104]
However, Polanyi was not above mixing his
metaphors, even when it made a mockery of the history of economics.
He likened the mutual adaptability of
basic researchers to a market in which the knowledge producers treat each
other as the primary consumers of each other’s products, thereby yielding a
“spontaneous coordination of individual initiatives.”
Unfortunately, had the medieval guilds
oriented themselves in such an exclusive fashion, it is unlikely that enough
wealth would have been generated to enable the transition to capitalism. [105]
Furthermore, Polanyi
believed that the published record of scientists would function as the
analogue of prices in the marketplace, especially insofar as the scientific
literature indicated the researchers on whose shoulders their authors were
standing. However, here Polanyi seemed
not to distinguish between current and future prices, and hence failed to
account for the fact that unproven products may appear more attractive to
speculative investors than proven ones - and, more to the point, that these
speculations may be right just often enough to motivate investors to seek a
speculative big gain over an assured modest one.
This phenomenon, amply in display in
the boom-and-bust cycles of the world’s stock exchanges under advanced
capitalism, was the raison d’être for John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory
of Employment, Interest, and Money and the subsequent financial safety
nets introduced by governments
104.
As portrayed in, e.g., Shapin 1992b,
1992c. This perspective was
expanded in the first STS book explicitly aimed at a popular market: Collins
and Pinch 1993.
The book consists of some
well-known STS case studies, shorn of their controversial philosophical
implications, presented in the spirit of opening the door of the laboratory
and letting the reader judge for herself what she sees.
Collins and Pinch advised scientists
that their own interests would be served by dropping inflated talk of
“rationality,” “objectivity,” and “truth,” and by promoting instead the more
ordinary image of science as “craft” described in the case studies.
In that way, the public would learn to
have more reasonable expectations of science, and scientists would not feel a
need to promise what they cannot deliver. Despite
the authors’ intent of providing friendly advice to scientists, the
proletarian overtones of their craft rhetoric seriously backfired and only
served to fuel the ongoing “Science Wars” discussed in chapter 7, section 5.
105.
Polanyi
1962. A comprehensive
critique of Polanyi’s pseudoeconomics of science is provided in Philip
Mirowski, “On Playing the Economics Card in the Philosophy of Science: Why It
Didn’t Work for Michael Polanyi” (paper delivered to the 1996 Philosophy of
Science Association biennial meetings).
The main reason it didn’t work, according to Mirowski, is that
Polanyi’s “free” pursuit of science would have required coercing the rest of
society to produce enough surplus to allow scientists to pursue potentially
fruitless avenues of research with impunity. In
other words, society would have to be adapted to the trajectory of science.
For a similar diagnosis, see Fuller
1993b, 283 ff. We shall later see that
Kuhn’s account of scientific change helped instill precisely this attitude in
policy makers who defined ours as a “knowledge society.”
145
under Keynes’s name.
This would seem to justify a science
policy of protected risk seeking over that of enforced risk aversion. [106]
One plausible explanation for the metaphorical
malfeasances in Polanyi’s economics of science is that ultimately his frame of
reference was neither medieval guilds nor modern markets, but rather the
fiduciary exchanges of nonliterate societies, especially two Sudanese tribes -
the Nuer and the Azande - as described by Edward Evans-Pritchard
(1902-73), professor of
social anthropology at Oxford in the second half of Britain’s imperial period
in Africa. [107] The spontaneously reciprocal
exchanges of information and insight that enable the political economy of
science to work so smoothly may be traced to the remarkable level of trust
that scientists place in the integrity of those exchanges.
In short, an unquestioning faith in
the overall system allows for the identification and often tolerance of
discrepant beliefs in particular cases. A
precedent for this extraordinary behavior may be found in nonliterate
societies, which typically lack objectified traces of their history, a fact
that extends beyond the sheer lack of written records to the absence of any
institution designed to preserve and interpret artifacts as vestiges of the
tribe’s past. [108] Individual accountability is
thus based on
106. The disanalogies between Polanyi’s normative
political economy of science and advanced capitalism run even deeper, for
Polanyi suggested that it is better to suppress novel results than allow
foolish error to infect the body of scientific knowledge and perhaps provide
a pretext for alarming
the general public. Yet
capital-intensive science has caused modern societies to endure exactly the
opposite, such that novel but untested scientific results, when produced in a
major research facility, are often not only publicized but also used as the
basis for policy, so as to thereby instantly prove their worth.
One would probably expect Polanyi to
disapprove of these developments, were it not that the public’s belief in the
efficacy of science rests largely on just this instant applicability to policy
matters.
Interestingly, the contrary case - that research
should be restricted to that which can be communicated freely- has been
forcefully argued by the
107.
Polanyi 1958, 287-294, draws explicitly on
Evans-Pritchard. A sympathetic
introduction to his work by one of his former students is
108. See
146
qualities that tribespersons manifest at the
moment of questioning that reveal their affirmation of tribal values.
The viability of such a system obviously depends
on the exercise of considerable control over the initial acculturation of
tribal members, thereby alleviating any lingering doubts that the requisite
virtue could be easily simulated in performance.
Likewise, while publications are very
much constitutive of the fabric of scientific knowledge, nevertheless they are
not treated as a historian or lawyer would, namely as evidence of something
that underlies and potentially undermines their surface pronouncements.
Rather, they are treated as acts of
“virtual witnessing,” in Steven Shapin’s terms, as if the reader were
encountering the author face-to-face. It
is this sense of epistemic transparency - rather than efficiency or precision
- that should be seen as crucial to Polanyi’s analogy between the scientific
publication and the price mechanism.
The complexity of scientific and tribal exchanges may be unfathomable
to all but the initiated, but it must be fathomable at least to the
initiated. In both cases, the security
attached to the knowledge that insiders possess is a measure of the security
of their collective grasp on what lies outside themselves.
Polanyi was only among the first of a half-century’s worth of philosophical thinkers who have turned to Evans-Pritchard’s ethnographic fieldwork to test their intuitions concerning the possibility of cross-culturally valid standards of reasoning. [109] Nowadays the only vestiges of this late imperialist legacy are puzzles involving Nuer claims to have descended from birds and Zande adherence to oracles even in the face of substantial contradictory evidence. The work that generated these puzzles was conducted in the southern
109.
This debate’s more celebrated participants
include Ernest Gellner, Peter Winch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor,
Steven Lukes, Martin Hollis, and Ian Jarvie. See
110. On Evans-Pritchard’s keenness to mobilize
the natives in
This meant operating within the tribal
cosmologies. It was not enough to do
as Evans-Pritchard’s teacher Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) had done, to
reveal the socially functional character of native beliefs and actions in
Darwinian and Freudian terms. That
would be to provide a sense of rationality that went above (and, in the case
of Freudian explanations, “below”) the heads of the natives.
Rather, Evans-Pritchard relied as much
as possible on the natives’ own accounts of why they believed or acted as they
did. Besides advancing the
philosophical fortunes of cultural relativism, this strategy enabled the
British to maintain the confidence of the natives by showing that they could
deal in their terms. Indeed,
Evans-Pritchard was unique among his contemporaries in insisting on the need
for anthropologists to eschew interpreters and master the native languages
themselves. [111]
From the standpoint of the history of the
sociology of knowledge, Polanyi’s deployment of Evans-Pritchard to fuse the
moral and cognitive orders in science marks Emile Durkheim’s revenge on Max
Weber’s largely accepted account of rationalization as the mark of progress in
complex societies. For Weber,
rationalization incurs greater levels of potential scrutiny and accountability
than ever before, as people have less firsthand knowledge of things that bear
on their lives; hence, the increasing importance of such bureaucratic
procedures as examinations and audits - not to mention recorded trials and
experiments - where the adjudicative significance of written records
presupposes a distrust of the inconstancies of personal observation, memory,
and testimony. In contrast, Polanyi’s
Durkheimian vision upgrades these cognitive deficits to moral virtues by
inserting a curious form of what economists call time-discounting.
[112]
Time-discounting is normally presented as a
problem in rationality. People often
favor short-term gain even if it means forgoing a much larger gain in the long
term. In that sense, people discount
the future in favor of the present. The
processes of rationalization described by Weber arguably fall in this
category, as the meticulous keeping of records ensures accountability only in
the short run, since in the long run the number of stored records undermines
the ease with which they can be accessed in future accounting exercises. [113]
From this perspective, the Durkheimian discounts
111. On the need for anthropologists to master
native language and customs, see Evans-Pritchard 1964, 79-80.
112.
For an examination of time-discounting from an
economic and psychological standpoint, see Price
1993; Ainslie
1992.
I
apply these ideas to the
historiography of science in Fuller 1997d,
95-101.
113.
Even when records can be translated into computer
files, a cost is incurred, and indeed the specific mode of computerization may
impede access after several generations of improvements in computer
technology.
148
in reverse, preferring long-term goals to
short-term advantage. In the long
term, the members of a tribe or a scientific community must be able to live
with each other, given the indefinite duration of their collective projects.
Thus, a premium is placed on social
mechanisms designed to avoid the introduction of friction into its members’
interactions, unless some clear collective gain is in sight.
The burden of proof is shifted so that
one trusts unless there is reason to doubt. In
more individualistically competitive societies, the requisite “reason” may
have just as much to do with personal as collective gain, but in both cases,
the challenge to the status quo will succeed only if it
serves the collective: i.e., I
alone cannot stand to gain by doubting a colleague’s word, others must as
well. It follows, in the scientific
context, that the period of doubt is likely to lead to a still stronger
commitment to the collective enterprise. This
attitude is evidenced in not only Kuhn’s account of scientific change, but
also the quotidian practices of scientific journal editors who refuse
publication of negative results or theoretical critiques, unless the path
ahead is as clear as the one being rejected. [114]
114. This position should be contrasted with the
provocative approach of the French anthropologist Dan Sperber, who has
promoted the concept of “quasi-beliefs” to capture native epistemic states.
Whereas Durkheim and Evans-Pritchard
(as well as Polanyi and Kuhn) assume that native knowledge claims imply a
deep, almost religious, commitment to the associated propositions, Sperber
argues that if alien cultures incorporate metaphor and irony the way we do,
then perceptions of radical difference may simply reflect a misplaced
literalism on our part, an interpretive failure born of an invalid
methodology. In other words,
relativism may be itself a quasi belief shared by Western anthropologists,
which the natives realize and use as
a basis for telling them what they want to hear and otherwise
playing inside jokes on earnest Western inquiries.
(The case of Margaret Mead amongst the
sexually active youth of
149