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Introduction: Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism Author(s): H. M. Collins Reviewed work(s): Source: Social Studies of Science, Vol.

11, No. 1, Special Issue: 'Knowledge and Controversy: Studies of Modern Natural Science' (Feb., 1981), pp. 3-10 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/284733 . Accessed: 21/02/2012 09:29
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INTRODUCTION

Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism


H. M. Collins

Modern philosophy of science has allowed an extra dimension time - into descriptions of the nature of scientific knowledge. Theories are now seen as linked to each other, and to observations, not by fixed bonds of logic and correspondence, but by a network, each link of which takes time to be established as consensus emerges and each link of which is potentially revisable - given time.' Many contributors to this new model intend only to make philosophy of science compatible with history while maintaining an epistemological demarcation between science and other intellectual enterprises. One school, however, inspired in particular by Wittgenstein and more lately by the phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists, embraces an explicit relativism in which the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge.2 Relativist or not, the new philosophy leaves room for historical and sociological analysis of the processes which lead to the acceptance, or otherwise, of new scientific knowledge. One set of such analyses is gathered in this issue of Social Studies of Science. The studies reported here emerge out of the relativist approach, the approach which has given rise to some of the most vigorous social analyses. Studies of modern science in this genre have been reported since at least 1975 but the reports have been either unSocial Studies of Science (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills), Vol. 11 (1981), 3-10

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published, or, when published, scattered or diluted with programmatic material. This has led one commentator to miss the empirical face of the relativist programme altogether!3 More important, it has tended to make authors feel that every new report must defend the relativist position anew. This collection, it is hoped, in addition to its substantive contribution, will reveal clearly the flourishing empirical programme associated with relativism and thereby obviate the necessity for further defences and re-affirmations.4 The substantive contribution of the papers can be thought of as threefold. First, they develop the empirical programme in its sociological details. Second, they contribute to the understanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge and broader social processes. And finally - a point which needs no expansion - each of the five papers is a study of an area of modern science: memory transfer; the detection of gravitational radiation; the detection of magnetic monopoles; the experimental study of quantum nonlocality; and the detection of solar neutrinos. Four of the papers discuss overt controversies, while one discusses a case (non-locality) in which the latent controversy did not develop. The areas of science looked at are nearer to the mainstream of 'respectable' research than to the 'margins of science'. In each study the investigator has built on a good understanding of the technical details of the science in question, and has used extended informal interviews with relevant scientists as part of the method. In most cases the salience of alternative interpretations of evidence, which typifies controversies, has acted as a lever to elicit the essentially cultural nature of the local boundaries of scientific legitimacy normally elusive or concealed.5 All the papers confirm the potential local interpretative flexibility of science which prevents experimentation, by itself, from being decisive. In particular, the sociallynegotiated character of experimental replication is further documented. This interpretative flexibility was the main message of the 'first stage' of the relativist empirical programme.6 At the same time the papers go on to begin what might be called 'the second stage of the programme' by describing mechanisms which limit interpretative flexibility and thus allow controversies to come to an end. Travis's paper is, in the main, a replication of earlier work on replication! It refers, however, to a new area of science. In the case of 'worm running' experiments, up to seventy factors could be invoked to justify the failure of an intended test of a 'memory

Introduction: Collins

transfer' effect. These factors included the phase of the Moon at the time of the experiment and the orientation of the experimental worm with respect to the Earth's magnetic field. However, few of the 'unlikely' possibilities were taken seriously. Only a sub-set of the possible experimental configurations was exhausted. What is more, the constraints on interpretative flexibility in the case of worm experiments in general seem to have been more severe than in (much better understood) experiments on laboratory rats. For example, in the latter case, care in pre-experimental handling, which was often ignored when worms were the experimental subjects, is considered an important experimental safeguard. Thus, deficiencies in pre-experimental handling can be used to discount the results of rat experiments, but not the results of most worm experiments. Most of Travis's paper is concerned with one aspect of the memory transfer controversy - the ability of worms to learn. That they can learn was initially a heterodox suggestion, and one attempt to discredit the idea appears to have been made through the selective reporting of negative results in a prestigious professional outlet. In the long term, however, this move failed, and the once-heterodox view is now virtually the orthodoxy. Collins's paper is a development of earlier work on replication in gravity wave experiments. It deals with a more recent 'chronological cut' of material. Again the potential openness qf the debate is shown, and one mechanism of closure is discussed - namely, the use of rhetorical and presentational devices by one group of experimenters to make their own interpretation of the experimental series the one credible possibility. Pickering's study of the magnetic monopole again confirms the indecisiveness of experimental data taken by themselves. However, Pickering concentrates his discussion on the way that debate was curtailed, making the monopole interpretation untenable. He suggests that the debate was brought to an end by decisions, on the part of experimenters and critics, to preserve the maximum number of prior agreements on what could count as correct experimentation and what could be seen as credible experimental results. Since it is theories which enable scientists to marshall previous sets of agreements behind their views, by linking one area of science with another, theoretical consensus becomes all-important. Pickering's stress on theory as the major effective constraint on interpretative flexibility leads him to recommend a shift in research emphasis

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toward studies of the establishment of theoretical consensus often established, he claims, without controversy. Harvey looks at experiments on 'non-locality' - experimental tests of quantum theory. In this case conflicting experimental results did not lead to overt controversy since the minority result, which was not in favour of quantum theory, was not supported by the scientist who found it. Nevertheless, Harvey is able to show the important 'non-scientific' assumptions that had to be made for this experiment to be dismissed. Harvey introduces the term 'plausibility' to summarize the pre-existing cultural constraints which allow scientists to make such assumptions with confidence. When pressed, Harvey's scientist respondents themselves referred to the implausibility, or 'screwiness', of the assumptions and arguments that would be needed to allow the minority result to stand. It was shared agreements about what constitutes screwiness which allowed closure of this debate. In the last part of his paper Harvey shows the particular value of the 'blanket' term plausibility when he looks at the changes in plausibility that have attended one assumption associated with the non-locality experiments - the timing hypothesis. He suggests that the plausibility of this hypothesis has increased because one experimenter has planned an experiment to test it. According to Harvey, then, experimental activity need not produce data to change the pre-existing plausibility of an idea; the activity itself is sufficient. This suggestion seems to contrast in an interesting way with Pickering's conclusions about the power of pre-existing theory. Pinch's paper, on the solar neutrino debate, looks at scientists' claims about the certainty of the findings of the various sub-fields within the overall controversy. By showing the differences in opinion he reveals that each of the sub-fields can be seen as either open or closed. In the main, Pinch's scientist respondents claimed closure for their own fields and interpretative licence for those of others. On the other hand, it appeared that when they felt that they were not making a public statement they were prepared to admit to the possibility of interpretative licence in their own fields too. Perhaps Pinch's paper reveals the way in which ideas about certainty, or plausibility, or closure, are maintained outside the inner circle of scientists who are in direct contact with the data. I have said that the papers collected here contribute to two stages of the empirical programme of relativism - showing the inter-

Introduction: Collins

pretative flexibility of experimental data, and showing some of the mechanis.is through which the potentially endless debate about lnterpretation is limited. As more studies are completed, similarities and differences across scientific disciplines will emerge. So far the degree of similarity in the central body of findings is as encouraging as it is unusual in sociology. Another part of the programme is to relate the sort of work presented here to the wider social and political structure. Historians have already produced studies which suggest homologies between political and scientific views.7 The papers here show that the consensual interpretation of day-to-day laboratory work is only possible within constraints coming from outside that work. Thus the homologies found in the historical studies are not incompatible with the apparent methodological autonomy of science.8 The missing link is the detailed relationship of the constraining mechanisms to the wider structure. It would be very satisfying if the establishment of a piece of knowledge belonging to a modern mainstream science, with substantial institutional autonomy, could be described in terms of all three stages. The impact of society on knowledge 'produced' at the laboratory bench would then have been followed through in the hardest possible case.

* NOTES

Steve Shapin originally suggested the idea of an edited volume of papers to be taken from the proceedings of a Conference on 'New Perspectives in the History and Sociology of Scientific Knowledge', jointly sponsored by the British Society for the History of Science and the British Sociological Association Sociology of Science Study Group, at the University of Bath, UK, 27-29 March 1980 - a conference of which we were the joint organizers. Four of the papers in this issue are, in fact, based on work presented at that conference, but Shapin nobly withdrew from joint editorship as it became clear that the final collection would consist of studies of modern science only. Shapin has been an inspiration throughout. David Edge and Roy MacLeod provided the opportunity of bringing these five studies together by inviting me to edit this issue of Social Studies of Science. David Edge also did most of the routine editorial work and made extensive comments on the papers which have proved to be of great value. Ron Westrum refereed the papers and provided notes

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which are so helpful that it would be unfair for him to remain anonymous. Without the help of Edge and Westrum this would be a much inferior issue. Nevertheless, final responsibility for all editorial mistakes, omissions and infelicities rests with myself. Finally, I would like to thank the authors for putting up with me and my, sometimes substantial, suggestions for re-drafting.

1. Among the philosophers who have contributed, not always intentionally, to this new view are Stephen Toulmin (see, for example, Human Understanding [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972]); W. V. O. Quine and Mary Hesse, for the revisability of network links (see, for example, their respective works, From a Logical Point of View [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953], and The Structure of Scientific Inference [London: Macmillan, 1974]); Karl Popper, in his stress on the temporary nature of contemporary knowledge (see, for example, The Logic of Scientific Discovery [New York: Harper & Row, 1959]); and, in particular, Imre Lakatos, for his negative thesis concerning the revisability of judgements about falsification (see, for example, Proofs and Refutations [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976]). It is impossible to separate philosophical contributions from the contributions of historians. T. S. Kuhn in particular has been influential in breaking down the timeless quality of philosophy of science (see, for example, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1970]). Paul Feyerabend has given the new view its most florid treatment in his Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975). We also now know that Ludwik Fleck anticipated many of the new ideas about the analysis of scientific knowledge in The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979). A historian/sociologist who has stressed that findings can only become facts in certain circumstances is J. R. Ravetz, in his Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Finally, John Ziman has written about the consensual aspects of science in his Public Knowledge: The Social Dimension of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 2. In this regard the best known books of Ludwig Wittgenstein are Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956). Peter Winch's book, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958) has shown the importance of Wittgenstein to many non-philosophers and has given rise to the 'rationality debate' (see, for example, B. Wilson [ed.], Rationality [Oxford: Blackwell, 1970]), around which the early arguments about relativism were centred. David Bloor, in his 'Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathematics', Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 4 (1973), 173-91, and Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), and Barry Barnes, in his Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), have carried the relativistic argument to science in particular. In this regard, see also H. M. Collins and G. Cox, 'Recovering Relativity: Did Prophecy Fail?', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 6 (1976), 423-44. A useful entree to the interpretative sociology input to the debate is P. McHugh, 'On the Failure of Positivism', in J. D. Douglas (ed.), Understanding Everyday Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 320-35. The phenomenological aspect in particular may be approached through P. Berger and T. Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1967). The source of the ethnomethod-

Introduction: Collins

ological input is H. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), but for the case of science this should be examined in conjunction with B. Barnes and J. Law, 'Whatever Should be Done with Indexical Expressions?', Theory and Society, Vol. 3 (1976), 223-37. M. J. Mulkay's recent book, Science and the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980) draws together large areas of the debate in a very useful way. David Edge's paper, 'Quantitative Measures of Communication in Science: A Critical Review', History of Science, Vol. 17 (1979), 102-34, draws together criticisms of the major contemporary non-relativist approach to sociology of science. 3. J. Ben-David, 'Emergence of National Traditions in the Sociology of Science', in J. Gaston (ed.), The Sociology of Science: Problems, Approaches and Research (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 1978), 197-218. 4. Empirical studies within the relativist programme include the following: H. M. Collins, 'The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics', Sociology, Vol. 9 (1975), 205-24; Collins, 'Upon the Replication of Scientific Findings: A Discussion Illuminated by the Experiences of Researchers Into Parapsychology', Proceedings of the 4S/ISA Conference on Social Studies of Science, Cornell University, November 1976 (unpublished mimeo); Collins and T. J. Pinch, 'The Construction of the Paranormal: Nothing Unscientific is Happening', in R. Wallis (ed.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge (Keele, Staffs.: Sociological Review Monograph No. 27, 1979), 237-70; Collins and Pinch, Science and the Spoonbenders: Frames of Meaning and Extraordinary Science, final report (1978) on (UK) SSRC-sponsored project on 'Cognitive Dislocation in Science' (Bath: Bath Science Studies Centre Manuscript, 1979), to be published by Routledge and Kegan Paul; J. Dean, 'Controversy Over Classification: A Case Study from the History of Botany', in B. Barnes and S. Shapin (eds), Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979), 211-30; B. Harvey, 'The Effects of Social Context on the Process of Scientific Investigation: Experimental Tests of Quantum Mechanics', in K. D. Knorr, R. Krohn and R. D. Whitley (eds), The Social Process of Scientific Investigation, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, Vol. 4 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), 139-63; D. MacKenzie, 'Statistical Theory and Social Interests: A Case Study', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 8 (1978), 35-83; A. R. Pickering, 'The Hunting of the Quark', Isis, Vol. 72, No. 262 (June 1981), in press; T. J. Pinch, 'Normal Explanations of the Paranormal: The Demarcation Problem in Parapsychology', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 9 (1979), 329-48; S. Shapin, 'The Politics of Observation: Cerebral Anatomy and Social Interests in the Edinburgh Phrenology Disputes', in Wallis (ed.), op. cit., 139-78; G. D. L. Travis, 'On the Construction of Creativity: The Memory Transfer Phenomenon and the Importance of Being Earnest', in Knorr et al. (eds), op. cit., 165-93; B. Wynne, 'C. G. Barkla and the J Phenomenon: A Case Study in the Treatment of Deviance in Physics', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 6 (1976), 307-47. A number of other studies by the same authors are still in draft form. An anthropological/ ethnomethodological approach may be found in B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979), and S. Woolgar, 'Writing an Intellectual History of Scientific Development: The Use of Discovery Accounts', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 6 (1976), 395-422. Ethnomethodological studies by other authors will be forthcoming. M. J. Mulkay and G. N. Gilbert are currently completing a large study of an area of biochemistry - oxydative phosphorylation.

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Their work, which uses the same methods as most of the other studies, promises much valuable new and comparative material. R. Westrum has produced studies of the process by which information about 'anomolous events' - sea-serpents, meteorites, and the like - is receivedand processed by the scientific establishment.His work is exactly compatible with the relativist programme - see R. Westrum, 'Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of UFOs', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 7 (1977), 271-302; 'Science and Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of Meteorites', ibid., Vol. 8 (1978), 461-93; and 'Knowledge about Sea-Serpents', in Wallis (ed.), op. cit., 293-314. 5. M. J. Mulkay's article, 'Norms and Ideology in Science', Social Science Information, Vol. 15 (1976), 637-56, discusses the ideology of science. Mulkay's argument would explain why parochial cultural boundaries might be concealed behind a universalistic face. 6. One might say that this part of the programme showed the Quine-DuhemLakatos position to be more than an abstract, or long-term account of science. It uncovered the equivalent of this philosophical and historical argument in the day-today activity of contemporary laboratory science. 7. Paul Forman's long paper, 'Weimar Culture, Causality and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment', in R. McCormmach (ed.), Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, No. 3 (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 1-115, is the best known article in this genre. Shapin's paper, 'The Politics of Observation...', op. cit. note 4, is the most complete attempt to link fairly highlevel political structures to the technical details of a scientific debate. He shows how Edinburgh politics affected observation of the intricate formations of the human brain. There are, of course, many compatible studies, at a more abstract level, in the Marxist tradition. 8. For an argument reconciling social contingency with scientific method see H. M. Collins, 'The Role of the Core-Set in Modern Science: Social Contingency With Methodological Propriety in Discovery', History of Science, Vol. 19 (March 1981), in press.

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