This puzzle—the apparent conflict between the truth-seeking understanding of science (e.g. Popper), and the sociology approach (which as I understand it doesn’t predict that scientists do find even approximations of the truth) - is very interesting.
A philosopher that I spoke with at the Singularity Summit made the observation that everyone there seemed to be familar and comfortable with Popper but there were almost no mentions of Kuhn. My understanding of why the scientists and technologists at the summit didn’t mention Kuhn is that his theory of how science works isn’t (obviously) usable. There will be paradigms, and paradigm shift—but as a practictioner, what do you suggest I actually do?
Pickering’s “Mangle” concept may be applicable. I’ve been trying to digest his “The Mangle of Practice” into a top-level LW post, but other priorities keep getting in the way.
Pickering is a sociologist (and therefore writes in a style that I find annoying and off-putting) but he includes as “actors” non-human entities (like microscopes or bubble chambers). This makes his theory less human-society-centric and more recognizable and sensical to a non-sociologist. Unlike Kuhn, I think Pickering’s mangle might be able to be applied in improved methodology.
As a programmer, the best way I can explain the “Mangle” (Pickering’s theory) is by reference to programming.
In trying to do something with a computer, you start with a goal, a desired “capture of non-human agency”—that is, something that you want the computer to do. You interact with the computer, alternating between human-acts-on-computer (edit) phases, and computer-acts-on-human (run) phases. In this process, the computer may display “resistances” and, as a consequence, you might change your goals. Not all things are possible or feasible, and one way that we discover impossibilities and infeasibilities is via these resistances. Pickering would say that your goals have been “mangled”. Symmetrically, the computer program gets mangled by your agency (mangled into existence, even).
Pickering says that all of science and technology can be described by an actor network including both human and non-human components, mangling each other over time, and in his book he has some carefully-worked out examples (e.g. he applies his theory to Hamilton’s invention of quaternions) which seem pretty convincing to me.
Science is practiced by people, therefore our knowledge about how people act, in particular how they act in situations of interdependence, is directly applicable to scientists.
Thus, I don’t find it surprising at all that when we ask the question, “what did we learn about reality and when”, the answers include both references to the truth (or reality-correspondence) of scientific facts, and references to the social construction of these very same facts.
Some sociologists of science once came up with an astute observation about historians of science: their accounts exhibited an interesting asymmetry. Whenever a scientist was vindicated, his work would be accounted for on the basis of correspondence with reality. Whenever a scientist was proved wrong, his mistakes would be accounted for on the basis of “social forces” at work.
This asymmetry can only be an artefact of reconstruction after the fact: before a scientic fact has become “knowledge”, while it is still in controversy, both reality and social forces are at work on all scientists working on the issue. In fact, “social forces” are merely a name for some aspects of “reality”.
Pickering, Latour and others are saying that if the process of science is itself to become an object of knowledge, we need a symmetric account of it, not one which has The Scientist somehow immune to social forces, immune to bias, immune to reality.
That strikes me as entirely unobjectionable.
EDIT: removed “equally” per Yvain’s feedback—I just meant to stress that you can’t a priori distinguish a good from a bad scientist, they’re subject to roughly comparable sets of forces—the word implies stronger symmetry than that, but I don’t really need it.
Both reality and social forces are equally at work on all scientists working on the issue
You lost me at “equally” and “all”.
Why not just say that both social forces and the part of the natural world under study influence a scientist’s decisions, and a scientist becomes a good scientist who draws correct conclusions about the natural world only when ze keeps the ratio of social influence to natural world influence low?
This leads naturally to the conclusion that yes, a disproportionate amount of correct science will be the result of correspondence with reality, and a disproportionate amount of incorrect science will be the result of social forces.
That doesn’t quite work: how would you keep that ratio low ? In practice, the only way is by countering social influences which might lead a scientist astray with other social influences. The total amount of “social” stays roughly the same.
Consider the LHC, or any particle accelerator. It takes a good deal of “social influence” to get it built, compared to an infinitesimal fraction of its total mass for what scientists hope to observe.
To a very good approximation, any given quark exerts the same influence on a “bad” scientists as it does on a “good” scientist. It takes exceptional and patient work to set up circumstances where the behaviour of a quark, through a long chain of mediating physical influences, results in noticeably different behaviour for a particular scientist.
Generally, there is an enormous amount of “leveraging”, for lack of a better word, that needs to happen between some relevant bit of reality under scrutiny at one end, and the kind of scientific consensus on the other end which affords building something like the LHC.
If you wish to study these leveraging effects accurately, you must adopt a symmetrical stance; you have to bear down and study precisely the nature of these enormously long chains of mediation that bridge the gap between reality and our knowledge of it.
Latour for instance does a great job of this kind of description. Pickering’s study of Morpurgo in the case of quarks is interesting; I got the sense that Morpurgo is a perfectly good scientist, he just failed to discover quarks. This doesn’t jibe with the asymmetric account. I have yet to read “Leviathan and the Air-Pump” which I understand is the original inspiration for the symmetric approach, but apparently Shapin and Schaffer trace these issues all the way back to the debate between Hobbes and Boyle.
This kind of approach gives you a sense of the reality of science as opposed to its mythology—which is largely a product of scientists themselves, for reasons which Latour also outlines convincingly.
It’s a messier, more complicated story than the myth—but then reality always is.
That doesn’t quite work: how would you keep that ratio low ? In practice, the only way is by countering social influences which might lead a scientist astray with other social influences. The total amount of “social” stays roughly the same.
Well, depends if you want to define “desire to find truth” as a social force. A scientist motivated by a desire to find the truth is a better scientist and more likely to get an accurate result than a scientist motivated by a desire to confirm the tenets of zir religion or political system, or to fit in, or to get a promotion, or to get home early, or any of those other social forces.
The stronger the motivation to find the truth, the less we would expect other, more traditionally “social” forces to influence a scientist, and the more likely that the scientist’s results would be accurate.
Because the direction of the motivation to find truth varies along with the evidence, seems fair to say the scientist motivated primarily by truth-seeking is influenced by the evidence and not by the social situation ze’s in.
There may not be any human motivated entirely by truth seeking (except of course Eliezer pbuh), but some people are more than others, and that makes those scientists better.
Well, depends if you want to define “desire to find truth” as a social force.
For the purposes of this conversation, we are using “social” as a shorthand for any influence on the scientist’s behaviour that isn’t linked (through a verifiable publication trail) to the effect under study. That does include “desire to find truth”, if the object of study is (say) the cosmic microwave background.
The stronger the motivation to find the truth, the less we would expect other, more traditionally “social” forces to influence a scientist, and the more likely that the scientist’s results would be accurate.
Do we now ? Some motivation to advance your own career will definitely be required in very competitive fields. (See Latour’s interview with Pierre Kernowicz, “Portrait of a Biologist as Wild Capitalist”.) Given the high degree of specialization in science today, how much do you expect “desire to find truth” to resist to a realization that you don’t, after all, care that much about molecular biology ? Science is a job, and we may expect people motivated by “traditional” social forces such as keeping their boss happy, making promotion, tenure or whatever, and so on will contribute to getting accurate results.
We have demonstrable evidence that working scientists are required to submit to certain non-truth-related conventions in order to be permitted to carry out science. You have to write papers in a form acceptable to journal editors, you have to work on subjects acceptable to your thesis advisor to get your PhD, and so on, and if you refuse to comply with this kind of requirements you may well be able to do science of some kind, in spare time left over from your day job, but certainly not, say, experimental physics.
What gets you accurate results in experimental physics isn’t “desire to find truth”, it is a particle accelerator.
Even though I wanted to get something out quickly, I did do a little reading first. The view you are discussing I saw on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_scientific_knowledge ), where it was referred to as “the French school called Actor-network theory (ANT)”. (I do not recommend this Wikipedia page, it does not fit with what I read about this subject about a decade ago.)
This puzzle—the apparent conflict between the truth-seeking understanding of science (e.g. Popper), and the sociology approach (which as I understand it doesn’t predict that scientists do find even approximations of the truth) - is very interesting.
A philosopher that I spoke with at the Singularity Summit made the observation that everyone there seemed to be familar and comfortable with Popper but there were almost no mentions of Kuhn. My understanding of why the scientists and technologists at the summit didn’t mention Kuhn is that his theory of how science works isn’t (obviously) usable. There will be paradigms, and paradigm shift—but as a practictioner, what do you suggest I actually do?
Pickering’s “Mangle” concept may be applicable. I’ve been trying to digest his “The Mangle of Practice” into a top-level LW post, but other priorities keep getting in the way.
Pickering is a sociologist (and therefore writes in a style that I find annoying and off-putting) but he includes as “actors” non-human entities (like microscopes or bubble chambers). This makes his theory less human-society-centric and more recognizable and sensical to a non-sociologist. Unlike Kuhn, I think Pickering’s mangle might be able to be applied in improved methodology.
As a programmer, the best way I can explain the “Mangle” (Pickering’s theory) is by reference to programming.
In trying to do something with a computer, you start with a goal, a desired “capture of non-human agency”—that is, something that you want the computer to do. You interact with the computer, alternating between human-acts-on-computer (edit) phases, and computer-acts-on-human (run) phases. In this process, the computer may display “resistances” and, as a consequence, you might change your goals. Not all things are possible or feasible, and one way that we discover impossibilities and infeasibilities is via these resistances. Pickering would say that your goals have been “mangled”. Symmetrically, the computer program gets mangled by your agency (mangled into existence, even).
Pickering says that all of science and technology can be described by an actor network including both human and non-human components, mangling each other over time, and in his book he has some carefully-worked out examples (e.g. he applies his theory to Hamilton’s invention of quaternions) which seem pretty convincing to me.
Sounds interesting. FWIW, I encourage you to write up that top-level post.
Science is practiced by people, therefore our knowledge about how people act, in particular how they act in situations of interdependence, is directly applicable to scientists.
Thus, I don’t find it surprising at all that when we ask the question, “what did we learn about reality and when”, the answers include both references to the truth (or reality-correspondence) of scientific facts, and references to the social construction of these very same facts.
Some sociologists of science once came up with an astute observation about historians of science: their accounts exhibited an interesting asymmetry. Whenever a scientist was vindicated, his work would be accounted for on the basis of correspondence with reality. Whenever a scientist was proved wrong, his mistakes would be accounted for on the basis of “social forces” at work.
This asymmetry can only be an artefact of reconstruction after the fact: before a scientic fact has become “knowledge”, while it is still in controversy, both reality and social forces are at work on all scientists working on the issue. In fact, “social forces” are merely a name for some aspects of “reality”.
Pickering, Latour and others are saying that if the process of science is itself to become an object of knowledge, we need a symmetric account of it, not one which has The Scientist somehow immune to social forces, immune to bias, immune to reality.
That strikes me as entirely unobjectionable.
EDIT: removed “equally” per Yvain’s feedback—I just meant to stress that you can’t a priori distinguish a good from a bad scientist, they’re subject to roughly comparable sets of forces—the word implies stronger symmetry than that, but I don’t really need it.
You lost me at “equally” and “all”.
Why not just say that both social forces and the part of the natural world under study influence a scientist’s decisions, and a scientist becomes a good scientist who draws correct conclusions about the natural world only when ze keeps the ratio of social influence to natural world influence low?
This leads naturally to the conclusion that yes, a disproportionate amount of correct science will be the result of correspondence with reality, and a disproportionate amount of incorrect science will be the result of social forces.
That doesn’t quite work: how would you keep that ratio low ? In practice, the only way is by countering social influences which might lead a scientist astray with other social influences. The total amount of “social” stays roughly the same.
Consider the LHC, or any particle accelerator. It takes a good deal of “social influence” to get it built, compared to an infinitesimal fraction of its total mass for what scientists hope to observe.
To a very good approximation, any given quark exerts the same influence on a “bad” scientists as it does on a “good” scientist. It takes exceptional and patient work to set up circumstances where the behaviour of a quark, through a long chain of mediating physical influences, results in noticeably different behaviour for a particular scientist.
Generally, there is an enormous amount of “leveraging”, for lack of a better word, that needs to happen between some relevant bit of reality under scrutiny at one end, and the kind of scientific consensus on the other end which affords building something like the LHC.
If you wish to study these leveraging effects accurately, you must adopt a symmetrical stance; you have to bear down and study precisely the nature of these enormously long chains of mediation that bridge the gap between reality and our knowledge of it.
Latour for instance does a great job of this kind of description. Pickering’s study of Morpurgo in the case of quarks is interesting; I got the sense that Morpurgo is a perfectly good scientist, he just failed to discover quarks. This doesn’t jibe with the asymmetric account. I have yet to read “Leviathan and the Air-Pump” which I understand is the original inspiration for the symmetric approach, but apparently Shapin and Schaffer trace these issues all the way back to the debate between Hobbes and Boyle.
This kind of approach gives you a sense of the reality of science as opposed to its mythology—which is largely a product of scientists themselves, for reasons which Latour also outlines convincingly.
It’s a messier, more complicated story than the myth—but then reality always is.
Well, depends if you want to define “desire to find truth” as a social force. A scientist motivated by a desire to find the truth is a better scientist and more likely to get an accurate result than a scientist motivated by a desire to confirm the tenets of zir religion or political system, or to fit in, or to get a promotion, or to get home early, or any of those other social forces.
The stronger the motivation to find the truth, the less we would expect other, more traditionally “social” forces to influence a scientist, and the more likely that the scientist’s results would be accurate.
Because the direction of the motivation to find truth varies along with the evidence, seems fair to say the scientist motivated primarily by truth-seeking is influenced by the evidence and not by the social situation ze’s in.
There may not be any human motivated entirely by truth seeking (except of course Eliezer pbuh), but some people are more than others, and that makes those scientists better.
For the purposes of this conversation, we are using “social” as a shorthand for any influence on the scientist’s behaviour that isn’t linked (through a verifiable publication trail) to the effect under study. That does include “desire to find truth”, if the object of study is (say) the cosmic microwave background.
Do we now ? Some motivation to advance your own career will definitely be required in very competitive fields. (See Latour’s interview with Pierre Kernowicz, “Portrait of a Biologist as Wild Capitalist”.) Given the high degree of specialization in science today, how much do you expect “desire to find truth” to resist to a realization that you don’t, after all, care that much about molecular biology ? Science is a job, and we may expect people motivated by “traditional” social forces such as keeping their boss happy, making promotion, tenure or whatever, and so on will contribute to getting accurate results.
We have demonstrable evidence that working scientists are required to submit to certain non-truth-related conventions in order to be permitted to carry out science. You have to write papers in a form acceptable to journal editors, you have to work on subjects acceptable to your thesis advisor to get your PhD, and so on, and if you refuse to comply with this kind of requirements you may well be able to do science of some kind, in spare time left over from your day job, but certainly not, say, experimental physics.
What gets you accurate results in experimental physics isn’t “desire to find truth”, it is a particle accelerator.
Thanks for the reference, that’s just the kind of thing I hoped to get from posting this this early. I just ordered a copy of Pickering’s Mangle of Practice from Amazon. You might want to consider leaving a review there (http://www.amazon.com/Mangle-Practice-Time-Agency-Science/dp/0226668037/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260135413&sr=8-3), especially since there aren’t any reviews yet.
Even though I wanted to get something out quickly, I did do a little reading first. The view you are discussing I saw on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_scientific_knowledge ), where it was referred to as “the French school called Actor-network theory (ANT)”. (I do not recommend this Wikipedia page, it does not fit with what I read about this subject about a decade ago.)