Daniel Boorstein - The Americans: The Democratic Experience

The meta-narrative: that the century following the Civil War was an Age of Revolution in which the meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future was being continually revised.  It was a century in which a new democratic world was being invented and discovered by Americans.

This is the story of how we got to where we are.  The creation of the everywhere community.  Mass production, chain stores, suburbia, everywhere you go, there you are.  The same commodities, the same merchandisers.  The same television shows, the same radio shows.  The homogenization, the democratization of American society.  For Boorstein it is a good thing.  Remember those Popular Science reels that showed us what the future was going to be like?  The glorification of the gadget, gee whiz science.

But by the end even Boorstein seems a little out of breath.  The pace of scientific and technical progress has become so fast, is it out of our control?  Has it become its own power?

Edelstein, Michael - Contaminated Communities - 1988

The aim of this book is to identify the major social and psychological impacts that stem from residential toxic exposure and to examine their significance.  Edelstein bases his analysis on four postulates: 1) that the social and psychological impacts of toxic exposure involve complex interactions among the different levels of society as well as differing across time and with environmental context; 2) that these impacts affect how the victim behaves and how they understand their lives both in the short and long term; 3) that toxic exposure incidents are traumatic and invoke coping responses in their victims; and 4) that contamination is inherently stigmatizing and the very possibility of such contamination arouses fear in the public.

Toxic exposure undermines the very fabric of society.  It leads to a loss of trust, the inversion of the home (formerly seen as a safe haven, now hopelessly poisoned), a sense of a loss of control in one’s personal life and over the present and the future, a different relationship to and assessment of the environment (now seen as dangerous, and insidious in it’s dangers) and a pessimistic attitude towards one’s expectations about health.  It places the adults in contaminated families under a great deal of stress as they become isolated and stigmatized by their contamination and it teaches children to fear.

Toxic victims also become absorbed by government agencies and bureaucracies that threaten the victim’s social identity.  This is compounded by the fact that the government’s aims and values may not be the same as the values of the victim’s, especially with regard to acceptable risk, which has more to do with economic and political forces.  The regulator’s, on the other hand, have their own restrictions that they operate under.  They are bound by regulations, political realities and limited resources.

Toxic contamination in other communities leads to anticipatory fear in communities as yet untouched, resulting in the “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) response, which serves to articulate citizens’ frustration over the manner by which projects are sited.  It arises, in part, from the failure of the regulators to take the psychosocial impact of these facilities seriously.  The citizens, seeing no room for compromise in the response of the regulators, regard the situation as an all-or-nothing, win-or-lose, battle.

One of the lessons that Edelstein draws from his study is the engineering fallacy, which involves the assumption that problems can be solved in isolation, away from the complicating factors and uncertainties of the real world.  If we narrow a problem enough, it will be controllable, and solvable.  He points out Bateson’s 1972 book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind as a source for an alternative method to that of traditional science and engineering.  In this approach, any learning is done within a context.  Called metalearning, it seeks to recognize the context of a problem, rather than deduce and isolate it.

Wynne, Brian “Misunderstood misunderstandings” (pp. 19-46)

Misunderstanding Science?  The Public Reconstruction of Science & Technology (1996)

A case study of hill sheep-farmers of the Lake District of northern England that were affected not only by Chernobyl, but also the nuclear reactors at Sellafield (formerly Windscale).  Wynne examines the interplay between social and cultural identities, especially those of the sheep-farmers, as they see themselves threatened by the scientists interventions.  What is revealed is arrogance on the part of the scientists who discount the local knowledge of the sheep-farmers, even when that knowledge is essential to understanding the scientific issue at hand, namely radioactive contamination.

The relationship between the scientists and the sheep-farmers is further undermined by the lack of full disclosure on the part of the scientists, and also by the changing assertions of the scientists.  At first they said there would be no effects from Chernobyl, but six weeks later (20 June 1986) the Minister for Agriculture announced a ban on sheep sales and movement in several of the affected areas.  Once the scientists had admitted the contamination, they insisted that the initially high cesium levels would fall soon, but their predictions were based upon a false scientific model.  Their model was based upon empirical data of alkaline clay soils, not the acid peaty soil found in these upland areas.

The degree of certainty that the scientists expressed in their statements denied the ability of the farmers to cope with ignorance and lack of control, and the degree of standardization of knowledge denied the variation of the conditions in the region from their models and even from farm to farm.  We thus see scientists inappropriately applying their specialized knowledge and not acknowledging the specialized knowledge of the sheep-farmers, but where the farmers were willing to work with the scientists, the scientists did not seem to be willing to work with the farmers.

The distrust that the farmers soon came to have for the scientists, and then for the government that was employing them, also caused the farmers to question the government’s assertions about Sellafield.  The scientists asserted that contamination from Chernobyl could be distinguished from contamination due to Sellafield, thus making Chernobyl a convenient cover or scape goat for previous misdeeds.  As the distrust grows you transition from considering the scientists merely as arrogant, to thinking that maybe there has been some kind of coverup or conspiracy, all of which only serves to further undermine the public’s trust and understanding of science.

Wynne sees the conflict as one between social identities, both groups, the scientists and the sheep-farmers, have their identity threatened by the other.  These sorts of conflicts bring to light the whole issue of knowledge systems and the problems that arise when formal knowledge systems interact with informal ones.  The formal knowledge systems often don’t know how to acknowledge or understand the informal knowledge systems because the former have a hard time quantifying the latter.  The problem may simply be one of communication, these two types of knowledge systems simply may not speak the same language, or, even worse, they may speak the same language but mean subtly different things.

B. Campbell - “Uncertainty as Symbolic Action in Disputes among Experts” - Social Studies of Science 15 (1985): 429-53

Campbell claims that uncertainty does not cause controversy because the content of scientific knowledge is a social construction.  Therefore uncertainty is something that is negotiated, discussed and argued about.  He further argues that the adequacy of empirical evidence thus becomes a prop in the social negotiations that occur over the credibility of expert statements made in public arenas, where the authority of a scientist as an expert is connected to the image of the relationship between scientific understanding and empirical evidence.
    He is attempting to establish five points.
    1) uncertainty is a strategic element of argument as opposed to something that causes argument;
    2) adequacy of evidence and knowledge is relative and varies with the social situation of experts;
    3) the social structuring of expert arguments does not mean that the scientists’ arguments have been ‘distorted’ by the social circumstances of their expertise;
    4) uncertainty arguments don’t necessarily undermine the credibility of scientific expert knowledge;
    5) the approach that he takes emphasizes the political dynamics of expertise and the complex relationships between scientific and policy issues.

E. Chargaff - Heraclitian Fire (1978)

An idealist, a romantic, a classical man in a modern world.  He never found his place, never found himself. [Oscar Levant: It’s not what we are that hurts, it’s what we aren’t.]  In the 20th C, especially in the latter half, the pace of scientific advances became inhuman, and science became inhuman, accumulating facts, but not understanding.  Increasingly fragmented, increasingly specialized, a Red Queen’s Race.  There is no time to understand the ramifications or the importance of a discovery, because a new one is just around the corner.  Even the sciences are forgetting their history.  The citations and references of research papers rarely go further back than a decade.  Everything is compressed, eternally in the present.  Without a past how can there be a future.  Scientists need to ask why they are doing what they are doing, to what ends are they working, how will their knowledge be used.

Echoing Mitroff, Chargaff is a humanist scientist making a plea for the development of Dionysian science.

Ian S. Mitroff - The Subjective Side of Science (1974)

The author, a practitioner of applied social science, believes that disagreement (rather than consensus) is the essence of scientific inquiry.  He further claims that the causes of the disagreements between scientists are social in kind and that they are also psychological, and that truth is as much psychological as it is logical.  This view is in contrast to the Descartes-Locke view that all humans are endowed with the common capabilities of reasoning and observing, and that if we strip away (purify) the personal and social contamination, then scientific inquiry will necessarily yield results that are acceptable by all who have also achieved this “pure state.”

The aim of the book is to lay a foundation for modeling scientific practice on a critical analysis of the actual behavior of scientists, and to also ask what a science looks like that better understands itself.  The book (and the author) is critical of what he calls “The Storybook Image of Science.”  This myth depicts scientists as emotionally neutral, willing to change their opinions when confronted with reliable evidence, humble about their knowledge and understanding, loyal to the truth above all else, and possessed of an objective attitude and the ability to suspend judgement until the issue under consideration has been investigated.

What Mitroff fails to realize, though, is that myths and archetypes have an important psychological place in our existence.  Would science be better off if the storybook image of science was dispelled?  Or would science, and the world, lose their ideal of what a scientist is supposed to be?  And if that happened, would science suffer as a result?

As a sociologist of science, he is concerned with examining the norms of science, which he defines as: faith in rationality, emotional neutrality, universalism (rational knowledge is the realm of all), individualism (anti-authoritarian), community (knowledge is not private property), disinterestedness (no personal glory), impartiality (concern is with knowledge, not with its consequences), suspension of judgement, absence of bias, group loyalty and freedom of investigation.

And yet he’s willing to accept the norms as ideals.

Mitroff bases the study in this book on the Churchmanian program in the philosophy of science in which the logic of research and the social psychology of research are not viewed as being antagonistic to each other, but rather vital, although partial, components of scientific research as a whole.  He is a supporter of Kuhn, rather than Popper.

After interviewing scientists studying moon rocks he comes to the following conclusions:  1) there are two sets of opposing norms of science; 2) there are distinct styles of inquiry in science and distinct psychological types of scientists; and 3) the method that scientists use to test their ideas involve adversarial proceedings that combine formal and informal elements.

Styles of Inquiry:

Leibnizian:  formal-deductive;
Lockean: experiential, inductive, consensual;
Kantian: synthetic multimodal;
Hegelian or Dialectical: conflictual, synthetic;
Singerian-Churchmanian: synthetic, interdisciplinary, holistic.

Psychological types of scientists (based upon Jung):

Hard experimentalist (sensation);
Abstract theorizer (thinking);
Intuitive synthesizer (intuition);
Humanist scientist (feeling).

Science as a Game possesses the following features: 1) individual players; 2) coalitions, teams; 3) designation of teams as home side and opposing side; 4) special field of play; 5) entrance fees or skills; 6) schedule of games; 7) recruitment and development of talent; 8) rules; 9) umpires; 10) objectives; 11) awards; 12) historians or preservers of the tradition; 13) fans; 14) public sponsors; 15) societal sanction or support.  It is intensely human and personal, and also mostly masculine (conquering nature), and has at least four general aims or ideals: the knowledge ideal (perfect knowledge); the politico-economical ideal (efficient pursuit of knowledge); the ethical-moral ideal (conflict removal between scientists and science and society); the esthetic ideal (enlarge the range and scope of scientific inquiry).  And even though it does have subjective elements, it is not completely subjective, irrational or relativistic.  We have reached Apollonian science that knows how to reach “the starry heavens above,” but we still don’t know how to develop Dionysian science that knows how to reach “the moral law within.”  We may be intellectual giants, but we are still moral dwarfs, and tackling that problem is the task of the future.

S. Hillgartner - “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems” Social Studies of Science, V. 20, #3, 519-41

Hillgartner asserts that scientists develop scientific knowledge and after that it is popularized, and that this popularized knowledge is seen (by the scientific community) as either an appropriate simplification or a pollution, something that is distorted or misunderstood.  This view serves scientists by providing a vocabulary of non-science for rhetorical use and by demarcating ‘genuine’ science from ‘popularized’ knowledge.  It asserts that there is a ‘gold standard’ of knowledge, and that only scientists know the ‘truth’ and gives scientists the authority to decide which popularizations are appropriate simplifications and which are distortions.

But there are problems with this view.  Popularized knowledge feeds back into the research process, especially by scientists outside the field, who use it, and whose beliefs about the content and conduct of science are shaped by it.  Simplified explanations of science are used in communicating with students, funding agencies and specialists in adjacent fields.  And scientific knowledge is seen as constructed through the collective statements of the scientific community and popularization is a part of this (social studies of science perspective).

In drawing the line between genuine knowledge and popularization, the scientific community prefers a binary mode.  When scientists communicate with other scientists they are exchanging genuine knowledge, when scientists communicate with the public, it is popularization.  The difference between these two modes is one of content, the nature of the claims, and the precision with which they are stated, and also the difference between ‘original’ knowledge and the subsequent spread.  But drawing the line between appropriate simplification and distortion is not that easy, since virtually every ‘downstream’ retelling involves some simplification.  How do we know when simplification becomes over simplification becomes distortion (the telephone game).

The dominant view of popularization reinforces the epistemic authority of scientists because ‘genuine’ knowledge is only available to them.  It also provides scientists with a rhetorical tool for representing science and communicating it to non-scientists.  Because scientists often control the simplification, they can shape public opinion by how and what they simplify.  They can even use the notion of distortion via popularization to debunk popular claims and reassert their authority.  But...there is no ‘central’ bank to enforce the ‘gold standard’ of knowledge, and there is no ‘police force’ to detect counterfeit claims.