The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
November 2002
Joseph Rouse
*
**
The Politics of Postmodern Philosophy of
Science ***
Philosophy of Science,
58 (4)
Dec., 1991, 607-627
Department of Philosophy
III – The Autonomy & Authority of Science
IV – Shapere’s Historically Contingent Enterprise
V - MacIntyre ‘s “goods internal to practices”
HHC: Titles & Index added
Modernism in the philosophy of science demands a
unified story about what makes an inquiry scientific (or a successful
science). Fine’s “natural ontological
attitude” (NOA) is “postmodern” in joining trust in local scientific practice
with suspicion toward any global interpretation of science to legitimate or
undercut that trust. I consider four
readings of this combination of trust and suspicion and their consequences for
the autonomy and cultural credibility of the sciences.
Three readings take respectively
Fine’s trusting attitude, his emphasis upon local practice, and his
antiessentialism about science as most fundamental to NOA.
A fourth, more adequate reading,
prompted by recent feminist interpretations of science, offers less
restrictive readings of both Fine’s trust and his suspicion toward approaching
science with “ready-made philosophical engines” (Fine 1986b, 177).
I – Local Context vs.
Global Interpretation
Since the heyday of Vienna Circle positivism in
the 1920s and 1930s, the philosophy of science has been thoroughly intertwined
with what it is now fashionable to call the politics of modernity.
In the case of the Vienna Circle itself, the parallels to modernist
movements in other domains of culture are very strong.
Peter Galison (1988, 200-20 1) has
recently noted that the militant internationalism and antitraditionalism of
the Vienna Circle’s manifestoes for unified science echoed the contemporary
pronouncements of the Italian Futurists and the Bauhaus.
But the parallel was more than just
rhetorical. Logical positivism was a
sweeping program for the critique of culture, whose basic motivation was
formalist. Where geometrical form was
the basis for the minimalism of modernist
*Received April 1989; revised October 1989.
** I would like to thank Mark Stone and Margaret
Crouch, who offered very helpful comments upon an earlier draft of this paper;
the two anonymous referees for Philosophy of Science, whose reports
prompted several significant clarifications and extensions of the argument;
and the audiences to whom I presented versions of it at the University of
Connecticut, the College of William and Mary, and Oberlin College. The paper
is an outgrowth of a presentation to Arthur Fine’s National Endowment for the
Humanities Summer Seminar in 1987, and I thank Professor Fine and the
Endowment for their support.
*** Send reprint requests to the author,
Department of Philosophy, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06457.
607
painting and architecture, the positivists
grounded austere constraints on admissible discourse in an account of formal
logic as both the structure of any meaningful language and the basis of
mathematical truth. And, of course,
the resulting rejection of metaphysics, religion, and traditional ethical and
political discourse also belonged to the modern legacy of the Enlightenment
attacks on superstition and tyranny. The
positivists’ aim was the legitimation of those discourses which could be
reconstructed in accordance with formally rational procedures.
All other forms of inquiry could be
rejected as noncognitive, nonsensical, or both.
Although the early critics of positivism and
their scientific realist and social constructivist successors have largely
rejected its formalism and its opposition to metaphysics, I believe they still
belong very much within the philosophical tradition of modernity.
What I take to be central to that
tradition, at least in the philosophy of science, is the idea that a unified
story ought to tell about what makes an inquiry (or its outcome) scientific
(that is, a successful science). The
importance of such a unified story is that, like the positivists’ proposed
rational reconstructions, it would be of general scope, and would legitimate
the autonomy and cultural authority of the sciences.
Richard Boyd’s (1984) scientific
realism is a good example. Realists
typically reject the positivists’ attempts at a formal theory of confirmation,
but they still represent science as employing a characteristic argument form,
abduction. The successful employment
of abductive argument serves to legitimate the authority and autonomy of the
“mature” sciences by showing us that theories in these disciplines put us in
touch with the real, mind-independent structure of the world.
Ironically, some of the most outspoken critics
of both positivist and realist legitimations of science also belong within the
philosophical tradition of modernity. Sociological
constructivists, or radical postpositivists like Paul Feyerabend, may deny
that either positivists or realists can make good on their claims to a global
legitimation of scientific knowledge, but they are in full agreement that the
autonomy and cultural authority of the sciences require some such unified
legitimating story; otherwise, their insistence upon the failure of the
modernist projects of legitimation would not have its proclaimed cultural and
political consequence of challenging the preeminence of the sciences.
Thus, I take the quintessentially
modernist feature of much recent philosophy and sociology of science to be the
posing of a stark alternative: either realism or rational methodology,
on the one hand, or relativism and the debunking of the alleged
cultural hegemony of the sciences on the other.
The debates cast in these terms have been
notoriously unsatisfactory ever since they reemerged within postpositivist
philosophy of science in the 1960s. Recently,
however, several philosophers of science have suggested a way out of this
frustrating dialectic. Arthur Fine
(1986a, b, and
608
forthcoming) and Ian Hacking (1983), among
others (e.g., Cartwright 1983, Galison 1987, Hesse 1980), cheerfully accept
the postpositivist rejection of any global legitimation of science in terms of
rationality or truth, but make no concessions to the allegedly relativistic or
antiscientific consequences of doing so. They
seem to deny that science is in any need of philosophical legitimation, or
that the failure of the various legitimation projects has any profound
cultural or political consequences.
In this paper, I explore further the cultural or
political significance of adopting such a cheerfully postmodern debunking of
the global legitimation (or delegitimation) of the sciences.
Thus, I am less interested in the
traditionally philosophical arguments proffered in support of Fine’s “natural
ontological attitude” or Hacking’s “experimental realism” and “dynamic
nominalism” than I am in reflecting on how such attitudes redound upon the
cultural status generally accorded to the sciences, at least in the
industrialized West. I will primarily
discuss Fine’s view since he develops his opposition to any global
legitimation project more centrally and explicitly, but I believe that similar
arguments could be worked out for Hacking, Cartwright, Galison, and others, as
well as for the pronouncements on science by more familiar postmodernists such
as Rorty and Lyotard.
Before proceeding further, however, it may be
useful to say something further about the taxonomies implicit in this project.
The classification of “modern” and
“postmodern” texts and practices is both slippery and controversial.
Discussions of “modernity” or
modernization typically invoke a disparate family of attributes -
secularization, rationalization, formalism, individualism and/or the
construction of the “subject”, capitalism and industrialization, Western
imperialism, and so on. Different
features often come to the fore when modernity is examined from the
perspectives of politics, the arts, social theory, or science and technology.
It is unclear whether “postmodernity”
is supposed to represent a decisive transformation of culture, merely a new
disguise for the reproduction of modernity, or a recognition that stories of
modernity have always been fictions, and whether postmodernity is a situation
we already occupy or a possibility which still needs to be achieved (or
opposed).
My discussion of modernity and postmodernity in
the philosophy of science focuses around the theme of global narratives of
legitimation for several reasons. This
theme provides perhaps the closest thing there is to a common denominator in
recent discussions of modernity. Emphasizing
this theme also allows me the advantage of remaining uncommitted to the
accuracy of the various depictions of modernity: Even those who regard the
stories of modernity as fictions agree that they have been influential
stories. Most important, however, the
emphasis upon narrative legitimation seems especially relevant to thinking
about “modernity” in science
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and the philosophy of science.
On the one hand, the development of
scientific knowledge and its technological applications has been crucial to
every narrative legitimation of modernity (and to the counternarratives which
reconstruct the story of modern progress as one of unfolding disaster).
On the other hand, a central and
increasingly controversial theme throughout twentieth-century philosophy of
science has been the justification for interpreting the history of science in
terms of a modernist story of progress or rational development.
We should not be deterred by the unusual
bedfellows whom we find together when we think about “modernity” and
“postmodernity” in this way. A
philosophical taxonomy which associates Feyerabend or Pickering with Carnap,
Laudan, and Boyd, but distinguishes all of these from Fine, Hacking,
Cartwright, and Rorty will seem initially odd.
It will seem less odd if we think of “modernity” not as a position,
but as a shared field of conflict for which there must be a great deal of
underlying agreement in order to make sharp and consequential disagreement
possible (Hacking 1983, 3-6). Realists,
rationalists (in a sense which includes empiricists), and constructivists tend
to agree about the significance of being able to tell a certain kind of story
about the history of science. Roughly,
they agree that the cultural preeminence afforded the natural sciences in the
“West” is in need of global justification. It
is perhaps not so difficult to imagine them all offering similar descriptions
(albeit different evaluations) of the hypothetical consequences if all
attempts at such justification (including, for diverse example, those of
Carnap, Laudan, or Boyd) were known to fail utterly.
By contrast, Fine, Hacking, and
Cartwright, or Rorty and Bernstein if one ranges more widely, are likely to
view such across the board failures with some equanimity.
II - Fines’ Natural
Ontological Attitude
Fine begins his recent polemical papers (1986a,
chaps. 7-8; 1986b; forthcoming) with broad attacks upon the standard realist
interpretations of science and their most prominent antirealist alternatives
(constructive empiricism, epistemological behaviorism, neo-Peircean
pragmatism, and sociological constructivism).
His objections concern not just the specific positions and arguments
provided by various realists and antirealists, but also the shared assumptions
which make the issues between these positions seem both intelligible
and important. In their stead, Fine
proposes not another position on the realist/antirealist axis, but an attitude
toward science, the “natural ontological attitude” (NOA), which is supposed to
remove any felt need for a unified philosophical interpretation of science.
The path to NOA begins with Fine’s observation
that, despite all of the differences between realists and antirealists, they
share a basic ac-
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0
ceptance of scientific discourse.
No participant in the realist debates,
according to Fine, rejects the results of scientific research; each only wants
to add an interpretation of what that research and its outcome really mean.
Realists interpret scientists’ claims
about electrons as true descriptions corresponding to a definite world
structure. Empiricists accept these
claims as empirically adequate. Pragmatists
and constructivists take them to be true in some sense which is less robust
than correspondence. Fine’s view is
that we would do better to take scientific claims on their own terms, with no
felt need to provide any further interpretation.
Thus he cheerfully advises us that the
“naturalness” referred to in NOA is “the California natural - no additives,
please” (1986b, 177).
Underlying Fine’s California naturalism is the
claim that science does for itself what the various philosophical additives
were supposed to do for it, namely, situate science in an interpretative
context:
What binds realism and antirealism together is
this. They see science as a set of practices in need of an interpretation, and
they see themselves as providing just the right interpretation.
But science is not needy in this way.
Its history and practice constitute a rich and meaningful setting.
In that setting, questions of goals or
aims or purposes occur spontaneously and locally. (1986a, 147-148)
In particular, Fine argues that science itself
utilizes for its own purposes the supposedly philosophical concepts of truth,
reality, justification, explanation, and so forth.
These are not concepts which science
needs but cannot provide for itself. They
are the everyday material for scientific disagreement over what counts as
adequate evidence, which phenomena are real rather than artifactual, and when
a surprising occurrence has been satisfactorily explained.
The crucial difference between philosophical
accounts of these concepts and their function within ongoing scientific
practice is supposed to be that in the one case their application is global
and essentialist, while in the other it is local and pragmatic.
Thus, scientists are not concerned
with whether unobservable entities exist, but rather with whether
gravitational lenses or releasing hormones exist.
They would not be concerned to provide
a general demonstration that the results of some “mature” sciences are
approximately true, but would settle for finding out whether the Weinberg-Salam
model in high-energy physics, or some version of the Eldredge-Gould punctuated
equilibrium view in evolutionary biology, is true (or merely empirically
adequate). Thus, despite the claims of
realists like Richard Boyd, abductive arguments for realism as an explanation
for the success of science are not scientific hypotheses on Fine’s view
in the sense that they occur at a different level than scientists’ concerns
about explanation. Scientists’
concerns about explanations are localized
611
to a particular field of investigation, and
their extension beyond that field is an open question which must also be
settled locally.
On Fine’s account, these local questions which
concern scientists can be answered adequately with the exercise of imagination
and judgement. He illustrates what he
has in mind in his criticism of van Fraassen’ s scruples about belief in
unobservable entities:
Are we supposed to refrain from believing in
atoms, and various truths about them, because we are concerned over the
possibility that what the electron microscope reveals is merely an artifact of
the machine? If this is our concern,
then we can address it by applying the cautious and thorough procedures and
analyses involved in the use and construction of that machine, as well as the
cross-checks from other detecting devices, to evaluate the artifactuality (or
not) of the atomic phenomena. If we
can do this satisfactorily according to tough standards, are we then still not
supposed to frame beliefs about atoms, and why not now? (1986a, 146).
The suggestion is that we are only compelled to
doubt those scientific beliefs for which we have specific reasons
underlying those doubts, where specific doubts are those which could suggest
particular theoretical, experimental, or instrumental adjustments to assess
their cogency. When all such specific
doubts have been removed, or at least settled according to our best judgement,
there can be no further reason to suspend belief.
This emphasis upon the local, scientific use of
supposedly philosophical concepts does not mean that there is no place
for philosophical reflection upon or criticism of the ways scientific practice
trades in these concepts. Nor does it
rule out generalizations about their use, although Fine does suggest that such
generalizations are likely to be of limited use (1986b, 174-175).
What the adoption of NOA would require
is that philosophical discussion engage the actual scientific use of these
concepts, and respect the contextualized concerns which circumscribe that use.
There are, then, two sides to the natural
ontological attitude, and to postmodern philosophy of science more generally.
Postmodernists generally adopt what
Fine calls a “trusting attitude” to the sciences:
NOA... trusts the overall good sense of science,
and it trusts our overall good sense as well.
In particular, NOA encourages us to take seriously the idea that what
the scientific enterprise has to offer is actually sufficient to satisfy our
philosophical needs. (Ibid., 177)
This trust in the sciences is coupled with a
thoroughgoing suspicion of interpretations of the scientific enterprise as a
whole, or of essential features of science which supposedly underwrite its
trustworthiness:
612
[NOAJ urges us to… approach science... without
rigid attachments to philosophical schools and ideas, and without intentions
for attaching science to some ready-made philosophical engine. (Ibid.)
III – The Autonomy &
Authority of Science
The political issues raised by postmodern
philosophy of science are highlighted by this combination of respect for the
local context of scientific inquiry and resistance to any global
interpretation of science which would constrain local inquiry.
These issues concern the autonomy and
cultural authority of the sciences. Can
we distinguish a field of practices “internal” to the scientific enterprise
whose credibility is enhanced by their relative freedom from “external”
influence, and which ought to be protected from criticism or intervention on
“external” grounds?
These questions are very much in the background
of the various realist and antirealist interpretations of science which Fine
criticized. These views all
incorporate a version of the internal/external distinction, and in the case of
all but some social constructivists, are intended to uphold the political
autonomy and cultural authority of successful scientific practice.
This concern is part of the modernist
legacy of logical positivism, which had aimed to demonstrate the epistemic and
cultural primacy of mathematical physics by showing that mathematics
exemplified the very structure of rational thought, and sense experience the
only basis for knowledge of the world. Contemporary
realists and philosophical antirealists take up somewhat different lines of
defense than the positivists did: Realists justify the autonomy and authority
of science by showing that it gets us in touch with the real structure of the
world, while antirealists typically show that it respects the boundaries of
epistemic rationality. In both cases,
however, there is a tacit presupposition that it would be culturally or
politically undesirable to leave the autonomy of science, and the
authoritativeness of its results outside of the context of scientific practice
itself, to be the outcome of local judgement, unbuttressed by arguments which
demonstrate the rationality of science in a general way (either directly or
via its success in describing the real).
Judgement alone, they fear, would open the way to irresolvable
differences of judgement, with no way to defend scientific practice against
those with fundamentally different beliefs or standards.
This concern perhaps accounts for the
vehemence with which many philosophers attack the views of Kuhn and Feyerabend,
or more recently, of constructivist sociologists of science.
Its mirror image (equally modernist)
is often found in the rebellious glee with which some sociologists and
philosophers claim to unmask the rationalist or realist pretensions of those
who defend the authoritativeness of the sciences.
Against this background, how should we interpret
the combination of
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Fine’s trust toward the sciences and suspicion
towards philosophical programs for interpreting them?
I want to distinguish four ways to
construe this combination. These four
readings exhibit a conflict between Fine’s trusting attitude and his
anti-interpretative stance, focused upon how one understands what is “local”
in local scientific practice, and how its locality is established.
The implications of this conflict
should incline us to endorse the fourth, and most unrestrictive, reading of
these two aspects of postmodem philosophy of science.
The first reading takes Fine’s trusting attitude
toward the sciences to be fundamental, and his antiessentialism and his
opposition to global interpretation to follow from that trust.
The resulting view would be that
both criticism and defense of the general autonomy and authority of the
sciences are idle because the political program of philosophical defenders of
the sciences requires no defense at all, but can be taken on trust.
Fine’s rhetoric sometimes strongly
suggests this reading. He concludes
his criticism of van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism with:
The general lesson is that, in the context of
science, adopting an attitude of belief has as warrant precisely that which
science itself grants, nothing more but certainly nothing less. (1986a, 147)
He makes this point more colorfully in his
response to realism:
[If] the scientists tell me that there really
are molecules, and atoms, and ψ/J particles, and, who knows, maybe even
quarks, then so be it. I trust them
and, thus, must accept [this]. (Ibid., 127)
But interpreting NOA in this way as an
uncritical endorsement of the autonomy and authority of the sciences seems to
me a mistake. It mistakes the
trust which Fine recommends for authority, and this confusion leads to serious
misunderstanding. NOA does not require
us to accept whatever scientists tell us, even on the rare occasions when a
scientific community speaks with one clear voice.
A careful reading of the texts
suggests that all Fine asks is that we trust the context of concerns
and practices within which particular scientific judgements are situated as
appropriate and sufficient for their assessment.
Such trust does not require us to take
any such judgements as authoritative. The
only constraint which this attitude places upon criticism is that it be
continuous with the tradition of practices and concerns constituting the field
within which that judgement is situated.
Thus, at most what NOA asks us to trust are
scientific traditions where these are understood not as a consensus of
authority, but rather as a field of concerns within which both consensus and
dissent acquire a local intelligibility. The
relevant notion of tradition was effectively described by Alasdair Maclntyre:
614
[W}hat constitutes a tradition is a conflict of interpretations of that tradition, a conflict which itself has a history susceptible of rival interpretations.
Although, therefore, any feature of any
tradition, any theory, any practice, any belief can always under certain
conditions be put in question, the practice of putting in question… itself
always requires the context of a tradition. (1980, 62-63)
So long as philosophical interpretation actually
engages the pragmatically intelligible disputes that can occur within a local
field of scientific practice, NOA leaves the adequacy of that interpretation
up to the exercise of reasonable judgement. This
does mean that at any time one must accept most scientific practices as
unquestioned in order to have resources and standards for the exercise of
judgement. But which practices
and results must be taken as exemplary in this way is entirely up for grabs.
IV – Shapere’s
Historically Contingent Enterprise
So the first reading of Fine’s postmodemism is
untenable. But suppose we take seriously the resulting suggestion that the
alternative to global interpretations of science is a reliance upon particular
historical traditions of scientific practice which establish a contingently
coherent domain within which local, “internal” concerns can be distinguished
from external and irrelevant matters. This
suggests a second reading of Fine’s postmodernism in which Fine resembles
Dudley Shapere. Shapere tries to
uphold the autonomy and authority of the sciences, while avoiding anything
like a global legitimation of scientific reasoning or realist success, by
characterizing the contingent historical development of local forms of
scientific rationality within particular scientific domains (1986, 1984).
Shapere argues that there is no
essential distinction between concerns which are internal to science and those
which are not, but there is a contingent distinction between those
considerations which we have learned to regard as relevant in the
course of scientific inquiry, and those which have turned out to be beside the
point. Thus, a strong distinction
exists between internal and external issues in well-developed sciences.
Shapere thinks we should respect this
distinction because of its epistemic efficacy, but its formulation requires
only local arguments within a particular historically constituted scientific
domain.
In some ways, Shapere’s position may seem
consonant with Fine’s postmodernism.
Shapere presents his view as imposing no philosophical program onto the
interpretation of science; he takes the sciences to be historically contingent
enterprises, and he insists upon the primacy of local arguments internal to
the particular history of the domain as the only arbiter of epistemic
disputes. I nevertheless believe that
Shapere’ s defense
615
of the internal autonomy of the developed
sciences violates Fine’s objections to grand narrative.
The reason is that Shapere is still
offering a global interpretation of science as the activity of epistemic
domain formation. His interpretation
offers a standard narrative pattern in which to write the history of various
scientific fields, which provides both a criterion of scientific success and a
global legitimation of the authority and autonomy of those scientific fields
which meet that criterion. Shapere
claims that
the very adoption of the piecemeal approach to
inquiry - the laying-out of boundaries of specific areas of investigation -
automatically produced a standard against which theories could be assessed.
Whatever else might be required of an explanation of a particular body
of presumed information (domain), that explanation or theory could be
successful only to the extent that it took account of the characteristics of
the items of that domain. (1986, 3)
The history of scientific disciplines on
Shapere’s view is fundamentally a story of progress.
When disciplines begin, “the
motivating considerations in selecting explanatory approaches might come from
just about anywhere” (ibid., 4), but they develop through a
process… of a gradual discovery, sharpening, and
organization of relevance-relations, and hence of a gradual separation of the
objects of its investigations and what is directly relevant from what is
irrelevant thereto: a gradual demarcation, that is, of the scientific from the
non-scientific. (Ibid., 6)
His view is complicated by the ways in which
consistency between domains, or even their unification, is scientifically
valuable. Basically, however, those
disciplines which contingently fail to consolidate a domain in the way he
describes fall short of being scientific, and have no claim to the autonomy
and authority which Shapere regards as appropriate to the sciences.
The objection to Shapere’s program from the
standpoint of NOA is not that such histories of scientific disciplines are
false; this would need to be examined case by case.
Rather the problem is Shapere’s
programmatic insistence upon the pattern of domain consolidation and
its philosophical significance. Shapere’s
program is still a case of what Fine would call “attaching science to some
ready-made philosophical engine” (1986b, 177).
Indeed, Shapere’s program promotes a characteristic feature of
modernity, namely, the rationalization of autonomous domains of social
practice and expertise. Even if
Shapere were generally right about the actual history of scientific
disciplines, we would still need a case-by-case assessment of whether this
justifies the exclusion of concerns from outside
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those domains. Considerations
relevant to this assessment might well come from outside the domain itself.
How were the boundaries of the domain
constituted? What was excluded from
consideration within the domain, and what were the effects of that exclusion?
It will not do to insist in advance that these questions must be
answered from a standpoint internal to the domain constituted by those
exclusions.
Fine’s relation to Shapere is in some ways
comparable to his treatment of social constructivism.
Fine rejects such striking
constructivist doctrines as consensus theories of truth (along with
relativism, reductionist treatments of scientific practice as “really” just
discourse or social negotiation or such, or the insistence that scientific
decision making must be explainable solely in terms of interests or
other social factors). What is left is
a constructivist research program, which brackets concepts of truth and
rationality, and asks to what extent the activities and decisions of
scientists can be explained by appeal to social factors (Fine, forthcoming).
Similarly, Fine can happily endorse Shapere’s piecemeal account as an
internalist research program in the history of science, the mirror image of
the constructivist approach, while rejecting Shapere’s aspirations toward a
philosophical account of scientific rationality.
But even the success of Shapere’s program for any particular discipline
would still leave open the question of what cultural authority thereby accrues
to scientific results in its domain, and even whether the internal autonomy
which the discipline has exhibited so far ought to be sustained in the future.
V - MacIntyre ‘s
“goods internal to practices”
What political consequences do these arguments
have for science and its cultural context? The
arguments against Shapere and metaphysical constructivism suggest that Fine
will reject any political criticism or defense of scientific practice
or belief which depends upon an essentialist interpretation of scientific
practice imposing a unified narrative structure on the history of science.
Such interpretations supposedly aim to
close off some possibilities for historical variability in what science is and
how it is done, even when their essentialism is as limited as Shapere’s
piecemeal account of scientific domain formation.
Thus, Fine insisted at one point that
the description of science as an historical
entity was intended precisely to undercut at least one version of that idea
[of a science of science], the idea that science has an essence… If science is
an historical entity, however, then no such grand enterprise should tempt us,
for its essence or nature is just its contingent, historical existence.
(l986b, 174)
On the resulting third reading, Fine’s “trusting
attitude” toward the sci-
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ences would be regarded only as his assessment
of what will happen when we do take seriously particularist criticisms of
scientific practices. We thus seem to
have come full circle from the first reading of Fine’s post-modernism.
There, Fine’s anti-interpretative
stance was derivative from and dependent upon a more basic trusting stance
toward local scientific practice. Now
we find that Fine’s trust is a highly contingent consequence of a more
fundamental antiessentialism. We get
the same constellation of trust and suspicion, but its significance - and
where it might be open to revision on the basis of sympathetic
criticism - has fundamentally changed.
This emphasis upon antiessentialism enables Fine
to tolerate some specific political criticisms of scientific practices or
beliefs without abandoning his basic attitude of trust toward the sciences.
He clearly believes that any inventory
of what scientific practices have contributed to human flourishing which is
sufficiently fairminded to appeal to our best judgement will surely call upon
us to preserve the substantial portion of our scientific beliefs and
practices. The implicit idea that only
philosophical justifications of science can preserve us from irrational
rejection of science is implausible. On
Fine’s view, I believe, the sciences provide what MacIntyre has called “goods
internal to practices” (1981, 175), which cannot even be appreciated without
some understanding and acceptance of these practices, rather than goods
defensible by appeal to general rational principles independent of historical
and social context.
But this suggestion raises an interesting
difficulty about how Fine should treat those interpretations of the sciences
which discount or criticize the goods internal to scientific practice.
His original arguments against realist
and antirealist accounts of science premised that science already provided the
context for its own interpretation in terms of concepts like truth, reality,
explanation and justification. Fine
cannot claim in the same way that scientific practice provides the resources
for its own interpretation politically and culturally.
While scientific work does require
considerable attention to questions of evidence, reality and explanation,
scientists are usually professionally unconcerned with the political or
cultural standing of their practices. Questions
about ideology, power, social interests, gender relations, happiness or
liberation do not usually arise within scientific practice (at least in the
natural sciences) in the way that concerns about truth, explanation or reality
do. When scientists are on occasion
exercised to address such issues (e.g., when the effectiveness of political
criticisms threatens to undermine their autonomy as scientists), they address
these issues not by doing more research and publishing journal articles, but
by stepping momentarily outside of their ordinary activities and engaging in
what seems to be a different sort of debate. Political
issues of this sort may require something more than can be provided by the
local practices
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and standards which could plausibly be regarded
as “internal” to science. How might
Fine respond to those critics who do not share his trust in the various
scientific traditions, and who regard modern scientific theories, practices,
and their technological extensions, as ideological, androcentric,
antiecological, or otherwise oppressive or destructive?
Do global political interpretations of
the place of science in a larger social context also count as objectionable
philosophical “additives”? This
question is not one which Fine has directly addressed, but my third reading,
emphasizing his antiessentialism, suggests a definite response.
If there is no essence of science,
then there are also no essential political or cultural consequences of
the authority and prominence it has within our society.
It is instructive that many critics of
science who do seem to adopt an essentialist line towards science or
scientific rationality (e.g., the
But there may still be a conflict between Fine’s
trusting attitude toward science and his thoroughgoing antiessentialism.
For if it is our scientific
traditions which are to be taken as trustworthy, we may seem to need some
account of what makes a tradition essentially scientific, or some other
distinction between what is internal and what is external to the sciences.
Indeed, Fine himself uses the
internal/external distinction ironically to criticize philosophical
interpretations of what is internal to science as themselves external
impositions upon local scientific practice:
[In] science, as elsewhere, hermeneutical
understanding has to be gained from the inside.
It should not be prefabricated to
meet external, philosophical specifications. (1986a, 148, f.n. 9)
Since Fine denies that we can systematically
demarcate the boundary between the inside and the outside of science, we
should not take his trusting attitude to depend upon such a demarcation.
We must instead see Fine’s attitude as
part of a generally trusting attitude toward local contexts of practice.
No authority can accrue even to the
historical tradition of scientific practice simply in virtue of its
being scientific. If some of our
scientific practices were to conflict with other practices or beliefs which we
take seriously, NOA could only counsel the same appeal to reasoned judgement
which it recommends in the case of intrascientific disputes.
Once we have done our best to
619
come, there is nothing more to say; but prior
to such careful exercise of local judgement, for example, on grounds of
philosophical principle, we have nothing to say at all.
Even with respect to the place of
scientific practices within culture, then,
NOA, as such, has no specific ontological
commitments. It has only an attitude
to recommend: namely, to look and see as openly as one can what it is
reasonable to believe in, and then to go with the belief and commitment that
emerges. (Fine l986b, 176)
The plausibility of Fine’s view on my third
reading depends upon the appropriateness of a twofold classification of
interpretations of the sciences: They must be either essentialist, with a
unified philosophical story which the interpreter brings ready-made to the
sciences, or else local, particularist and without any insistence on the
relevance to all sciences of any particular category (whether that category is
observation or social interest, abductive argument or gender).
Some recent strands of feminist
criticism of the authority and legitimacy of contemporary science seem to
escape this dichotomy, so they may offer a sharp challenge to Fine’s
amalgamation of trust in the sciences with an antiessentialist suspicion of
global interpretations which underwrite or undercut that trust.
Let me first clear the ground by separating out
those strands of feminist criticism which give Fine no difficulty.
He can readily endorse the relevance
and appropriateness (although not necessarily the accuracy) of feminist
criticisms of gender bias, which appeal to and try to enlarge traditionally
scientific norms of objectivity. Thus,
feminist critics have frequently noted ways in which sexism has distorted
inquiry, especially in the social and biological sciences, by the selective
choice of experimental subjects, by the assumptions underlying the framing and
answering of research questions, by the gender-blindered interpretation of
results, and so forth (representative examples can be found in Tuana 1988;
Harding 1986, chap. 4; or Hrdy 1981). The
feminist origin of these criticisms is marked by the focus upon gender, but
once identified, these criticisms could be appropriated by scientific
communities which do not embody feminist commitments (which is not at all to
say that they have been or will be widely accepted by nonfeminists).
Such criticisms could be acknowledged
by nonfeminists as the exposure of “bad science” rather than a critique of
“science as usual” (Harding 1986), even when the practices in question remain
all too usual.
A postmodernist like Fine can just as easily
reject the idea that science is essentially androcentric (e.g., perhaps,
620
fying, the neoromantic claim that science is
essentially reductivist, and so forth. But
such a strong essentialism is more often attributed to feminists by their
critics than actually asserted by feminists themselves (hence the “perhaps” in
the above citation). The most
interesting cases of feminist philosophy of science, and the ones which
challenge Fine’s residual use of internal/external and local/global
distinctions, fall in between the liberal critique of bias and the
essentialist rejection of science as androcentric.
Such feminist philosophers argue that gender bias is endemic to much of
contemporary scientific practice, that this is not accidental but is rather
deeply rooted in the development of scientific practice and its recognition as
authoritative, and that reform would involve substantial changes in the ways
science is practiced and/or the range of inquiries which we would recognize as
scientific.
Consider two examples which illustrate the scope
of such criticisms and their challenge to the critical resources of Fine’s
postmodernism on this strongly antiessentialist reading.
Evelyn Fox Keller (1985, part 3)
argues that gendered conceptions of objectivity and power have shaped
scientific practice in a variety of fields. She
focuses upon unarticulated norms of explanation and their influence upon
theory construction, in the contemporary interpretation and use of quantum
theory, in mathematical biology and developmental biology more generally, and
in genetics. Keller’s arguments are
not just objections to forms of unscientific bias, which could be assimilated
to substantially unchanged scientific ideals, for she identifies gender at
work in the most fundamental methodological concerns of particular
disciplines. Her criticisms have to do
with where the burden of proof lies (e.g., her discussion of the pacemaker
concept in slime mold aggregation), what an adequate (causal) explanation
consists in and consequently what questions must be asked in scientific work
(e.g., her reflections upon “master molecule accounts” in molecular genetics,
which easily extend throughout much of the biological sciences; the entire
field of neuroendocrinology, for example, seems wedded to master molecule
explanations), or how to assimilate significant conceptual shifts into
scientific practice (e.g., her account of “cognitive repression” in the
interpretation of quantum mechanics). If
Keller’s concerns are to be satisfied, substantive methodological reflection
and revision would be called for in the fields she discusses.
Ruth Ginzberg’s (1987) argument intersects
Keller’s work in an interesting way. She
suggests that a variety of activities which have been systematically excluded
from social recognition as “science”, or even as knowledge, offer an already
existing model for a “gynocentric science”.
Where Keller looks at the gendered construction of inquiries which are
widely recognized as scientific, Ginzberg looks at the role of gender in
621
constructing the boundary between inquiries
understood to be scientific and those dismissed as unsystematic and
unreliable. She notes:
In searching through women’s activities outside
of those that have been formally bestowed the label of ‘Science’, I have come
to suspect that gynocentric science often has been called ‘art,’ as in the
art of midwifery, or the art of cooking, or the art of
homemaking. Had these ‘arts’ been
androcentric activities, I have no doubt that they would have been called,
respectively obstetrical science, food science, and family
social science. Indeed, as men
have taken an interest in these subjects they have been renamed sciences -
and, more importantly they have been reconceived in the androcentric model of
science. (1987, 91-92)
Ginzberg’s and Keller’s insistence upon the
far-reaching influence of the construction of gender may seem to offer a
political parallel to the philosophical programs which insist upon the
importance to science of sense experience, abductive argument, social
interests, or such. Even if the actual
effects of gender construction upon inquiry and its recognition as scientific
must be examined case by case, the insistence that questions about gender are
always relevant, and that they must be asked even in fields of inquiry which
do not seem to make gender an important category in their own terms, might
seem to make such criticisms a target of NOA’s antipathy to “ready-made
philosophical engines”.
Yet neither Keller’s nor Ginzberg’s arguments
can be easily dismissed as essentialist impositions upon local scientific
practice. Ginzberg’s argument
obviously hinges upon an antiessentialist account of science since she focuses
upon the cultural and political significance of how the boundaries of science
and knowledge have actually been demarcated. Keller’s
(1985, part 2) appeal to Nancy Chodorow’s psychodynamic interpretation of the
construction of objectivity might initially suggest an essentialist claim that
the very idea of scientific objectivity is objectionably gendered.
But when one looks at the specific
cases where she employs this analysis to look at the sciences, this impression
is not fulfilled. Keller is arguing
that the working out of scientific conceptions of knowledge, explanation, and
objectivity cannot be isolated from more general cultural and cognitive
patterns. This has nothing to do with
intrinsic features of science, or of objective inquiry, and everything to do
with the larger cultural context within which particular scientific
disciplines have actually developed. Gender
can function constitutively within those scientific concepts and practices,
without having been identified as such explicitly, because of the pervasive
gendering of cognitive activity in the dominant culture.
Yet this does not guarantee that any
or all scientific practices will be debilitatingly gendered; the presence and
actual impact of gender in science must
622
be demonstrated case by case.
Furthermore, and perhaps most
importantly, the concept of “gender” itself is not unproblematic in her work,
as her treatment of Barbara McClintock’ s research shows.
Keller’s reflections upon science and
gender leave neither science nor gender unchanged.
Furthermore, if Fine were to make this argument,
thereby reaffirming a stronger version of his trusting attitude toward the
sciences specifically, he would undercut his antiessentialism by
privileging a particular account of what is internal to the tradition of the
sciences. The objection to Ginzberg or
Keller would be that their focus on gender was a large-scale program imposed
upon science from the “outside”; but their argument is that gender functions
very much “inside” the sciences, precisely by helping to shape what counts as
inside or outside. Shapere, who
provided the model for our second reading of NOA’s postmodernism, bases a
philosophical program upon taking at face value scientists’ own interpretation
of how their domains of inquiry are bounded. Fine,
however, must reject both that critical hermeneuticism which insists that this
face value must mask a deeper truth, and Shapere’s, which denies that the
constitution of scientific domains is open to suspicion.
To do otherwise is to beg the question
between an internalist like Shapere, and the feminist critics.
This recognition offers a fourth reading of
Fine’s postmodernism, one which I think Fine’s arguments ultimately should
lead us to endorse. On this reading,
what is at issue in reflecting about science is how a particular domain of
concerns comes to count as a coherent field of inquiry.
Because this is what is at issue, Fine rightly requires that
[NOA} does not prejudge the constitution of the
scientific world; that is, whether the scientific facts and objects are
essentially social or essentially objective, or whatever.
Its attitude is to let the chips fall where they may. (Fine,
forthcoming)
From the standpoint of the philosophical
tradition of reflection on science, this may seem to place the philosophy of
science more within the realm of social and political inquiry rather than its
traditional home within epistemology and metaphysics.
But that would be to miss the
antireductivist force of this reading of Fine.
It is as much a mistake to reduce science to politics or social
construction as it is to restrict it to epistemology.
Political, epistemological,
sociological, or psychological accounts are on a par at the outset when we ask
how (and whether) a distinct domain of inquiry has been successfully or
appropriately constituted. There is no
line of argument which can reassure us that we have (and will continue to
have) the right language and the right locus of concerns to understand
science.
This fourth reading of Fine’s postmodernism
reduces the conflict we
623
have found between trust in local practice and
suspicion of global readings by glossing both views in very unrestrictive
ways. In contrast to its treatment by
the third reading, NOA’ s antiessentialism would still leave considerable room
for large-scale social criticism of the modern sciences (and for responses and
countercriticisms of comparable scale), so long as they situate themselves
within particular historical contexts and the critical resources specific to
those contexts. [1]
NOA’s trusting attitude would
remain, but only in the sense that Fine trusts that the contingencies of
history give us all the resources necessary to tell us what we need to know
about science. This says nothing yet
about which contingencies these are.
Thus, on this fourth reading of NOA, Fine’s
frequent reference to trust in science is either misleading or mistaken
insofar as “science” is identified with any determinate interpretation of what
does or does not count as scientific. Asking
that we take science “on its own terms” should not invoke an authoritative
account of what are those terms. “Its
own terms” denotes a field of interpretative dispute rather than a definitive
vocabulary. Thus, if Ginzberg is
right, understanding science on its own terms requires us to understand the
ways in which the authentication of knowledge is gendered, and this leads us
to explore gossip, midwifery and cooking, and the history of sexism, along
with physics and geology. But there
are no philosophical shortcuts. The
only way to find out whether she is right is to look where she is pointing and
see whether we can come to see what she finds there.
Likewise with realists,
constructivists, empiricists, and neoromantic visionaries.
This account of the critical resources available
to someone who adopts Fine’s recommended attitude may seem anemic in its lack
of general criteria upon which to ground one’s judgement, and its openness to
unfamiliar interpretations of science. Fine
himself recognizes that his appeal to good judgement is empty without the
detailed work necessary to provide a local and particularist grounding for
judgement in any particular case. This
recognition is evident in his recommendation that
an open, social particularism… [is] the right
corrective to philosophical (especially realist) distortions of science, and
the place where lots of good work can be done too.
Among the work to be done is to
achieve some understanding of what is actually involved in rational acceptance
and proof in science, of what, in Boyle’s words, deserves “a wise man’s
acquiescence.” This job involves
exploring the diverse range of contexts, historical and contemporary, in which
inquiry is carried out. (Fine, forthcoming)
1. A similar position has been defended by Nancy
Fraser and Linda Nicholson (1988) against what they take to be the apolitical
postmodernism of Lyotard (1984) and Rorty (1982); my argument in this paper is
deeply indebted to Fraser and Nicholson.
624
Such a recommendation would still be vacuous if
taken out of context. What
contemporary philosopher of science would deny having paid attention to “the
diverse range of contexts in which inquiry is carried out”?
But Fine has provided detailed
arguments, and strategies for extending them, which show how many treatments
of science which initially seemed historically sensitive and particularist
could instead be cases of “attaching science to a ready-made philosophical
engine”. The criteria for “wise
acquiescence” can never be fixed once and for all, for they are inescapably
open-ended and context-sensitive.
In the case of recent feminist philosophy of
science, we can perhaps see more clearly how Fine’s program is less anemic
than it initially looks. Keller’s and
Ginzberg’s arguments gain credibility from several decades of extensive
feminist research in a variety of fields which has repeatedly exposed and
challenged the gendering of scholarly inquiry and authenticated knowledge.
Such research would not have succeeded
without frequently and substantially satisfying previously established
scholarly standards, but it also partially transformed those standards in
doing so. Without that range and depth
of detailed research as background, Keller’s and Ginzberg’s claims would
undoubtedly be unconvincing. But in
that context, the burden of proof has to some extent now been shifted (Fuller
1988, chap. 4). It is now more
credible that the substantive ideals of explanation in physics or biology are
not gender-neutral; it is also now reasonable to demand a strong and detailed
argument before expecting that the natural sciences will be different from
other fields in being relatively uninflected by gender.
These considerations alone do not
suffice to make Keller’s or Ginzberg’s case, for we must still evaluate their
specific arguments and evidence in this context.
These considerations do, however,
illustrate how the appeal to reasonable judgement in specific historical
contexts is not entirely unconstrained, and how such standards of judgement
might still be flexible and open to change. Just
as it has always been reasonable to accept, reject, or suspend judgement upon
various knowledge claims despite the absence of any plausible general theory
of confirmation, it is also reasonable to accept, pursue, or reject various
approaches to a political understanding of various scientific practices and
disciplines in the absence of a general philosophical interpretation of
science and its aims.
Such an historically sensitive and open-ended
particularism is what I take to be fundamental to the natural ontological
attitude on this fourth and final reading. When
we adopt such an attitude toward science and its epistemic and political
interpretation, we relieve the specific and fundamental conflicts disclosed
within the other readings of Fine’s postmodern philosophy of science.
More importantly, we take up an
approach to the sciences which avoids both science-bashing and the foreclosure
of
625
the intellectual resources needed to raise and
begin to answer critical questions about the cultural and political
significance of the sciences. Much
more remains to be said about the positive implications of such an approach to
the philosophy of science, and how it would relate to other discussions of
“modernity” and “postmodernity” (the beginnings of such a constructive program
are worked out in Rouse 1987 and explicitly connected to narratives of
modernity in Rouse 1991). But the
difficulties with alternative readings of Fine’s NOA suggest that such a
thoroughgoing postmodernism offers the best hope for what Fine once called “a
decent philosophy for postrealist times” (1986a, 113).
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