cientists are not lone wolves. Rather than picturing
them as individuals who break ground through personal genius and reclusive concentration,
we realize that scientists collaborate in institutional contexts, with their work constrained by
funding conditions and guided by shared norms and rules. From the 1930s onward, Robert Merton has done much 
to dismantle the "lone wolf" myth.
Much of what goes on in my field, science and technology studies-or STS, represents
variations on his tradition.
Although scientists live by shared values, Merton understood science in a broader sense to be
value-free, unique among human endeavors in its oblivion to cultural norms, its objectivity,
rationality, and generalizability. His sociology of science strengthened Snow's "Two
Cultures" distinction, which enfolds controversy over which sphere provides better
knowledge about the world. For objectivists, science does: Scientific method enables knowing
minds to discover reality. Subjectivists reject such a strict division between knowledge and
reality. For them, material reality is not ready-made, independent of the knower, waiting to be
discovered; it consists of interactions (among other things, with scientists' minds).
While STS (also known as the
"new sociology of science") hosts many philosophical propensities, most of its practitioners
subscribe to some form of subjectivism.1 Their
empirical study of scientific practice has shown that attitudes other than objectivity and
rationality operate in science; that generalizability applies to some findings rather than others;
and that interaction among cognitive, material, cultural, and institutional aspects constitutes
the practice of science. Recognizing subjective elements in science and objective ones in the
humanities, and acknowledging that these attitudes often bleed into each other, STS scholars
study scientific knowledge and practice as cultural phenomena. Science influences culture, and
the knowledge it generates bears that culture's marks.
An example of this approach is the laboratory study, in which STS scholars
assume an anthropological role.2 Participating, while
observing, in lab activities, they learn from and collaborate with scientists. They map the
routines and exchanges in the lab. They show how mundane and unseen aspects of its
day-to-day practices, often contingent and happenstance, find their way into its results. They
document the interaction between knowledge and instruments, making the case that
instruments have material impact on the knowledge that their user generates. Or they look at
the resonances
between lab and popular imagery, arguing that the borders between these
spheres are leaky and that influences go both ways.
For STS, then, scientific culture no longer points to an intellectual space where objectivity,
rationality, timelessness, and value freedom reign exclusively. Science is, rather, a
human-while-material knowledge-producing enterprise, located in space and
bound in time. Bound to both the cultural world and the material world that it examines, it
has world-changing effect. The social and cultural configurations in which science operates are
part of the world-out-there that scientific knowledge represents.
This view has not gone over well with objectivists. Whereas few take exception with the
human element in the practices of science -- rules and norms by which scientists
allegedly live -- STS's efforts to analyze scientific knowledge as tied to social and
cultural configurations remain controversial. Opponents have misinterpreted these scholars'
questions as overly critical of science, or "antiscientific," and taken their focus on interaction
between knowledge and reality to attest to an antirealist position. Supposedly, for STS
everything is entirely social, human-made-and thus made up. STS practitioners allegedly do
not allow the external world any influence over the knowledge that science generates about
that world.
This portrayal of STS as antiscientific and antirealist is based on uncareful readings of
its literature and betrays profound misunderstanding of its enterprise. It comes from
critics who confuse criticism with antagonism; who mistake the social for the unreal or the
phantasmagorical; who think that "constructed" means "imagined"; and who misinterpret the
effort to identify social, historical, or political elements in the narratives of science as a quest
for its untruth.
So, what is the position of STS toward scientific truth? The truth value of
scientific knowledge is not necessarily at stake for its STS researcher. Suppose, for example,
one understands the big-bang theory as an origin story and a quest for grounds, analogous to
the Indian creation story that explains the foundations of the world as an infinite stack of
turtles. That doesn't mean that one thinks that the big-bang story is untrue, or isn't our best
explanation of the origin of the universe. The fact that both narratives are exactly
that-narratives-doesn't preclude them from having purchase on reality. Understanding a
theory as an origin
story simply doesn't refer to the question of its truth. While the researcher may be
interested in the narrative structures of both stories, treating them with similar methods
doesn't make them identical, equivalent, or interchangeable.
A related argument applies to STS and reality. STS scholars strive to avoid oppositions like
realism/relativism and subjectivism/objectivism. They argue that the work of science
contributes to the production of specific but material, solid, real, and objective worlds that
cannot be interpreted differently at whim or according to cultural circumstance, but must be
lived in certain ways. This argument is, again, not about the presence or absence of an
"out-there" and the constraints it poses on scientific representation. It is an acknowledgment,
not a denial, of the existence of a real world.
Finally, how does STS stand toward science? Critical of objectivism without being
antagonistic to the scientific enterprise, collaborating with scientists in lab settings, and
communicating with scientists about how to answer their questions, STS scholars attempt to
provide rich and truthful stories of the practices of science, refusing to confine scientists to the
objective half of the spectrum. Seen through an STS lens, scientists have a broader repertoire;
many recognize this and like it. An increasing number express reluctance to identify with the
objectivism favored by critics of STS,3 precisely
because of its simplistic understanding of scientific practices,4 and collaborate with STS researchers precisely because
STS provides rich accounts of their daily work.
The anthropologist listens to her interviewees and takes their explications seriously, but they
do not dictate her interpretations. She may disagree with their philosophy yet understand
them and provide useful information on them. STS is neither ventriloquist nor cheerleader
nor publicist of science; its task is to understand science in all its manifestations and
particularities and to reflect critically on its performance. STS researchers
may arrive at different views on scientific practices than those who live those practices. If they
don't share their objects' conceptual frameworks, that doesn't mean STS is philosophically
bankrupt or that its conclusions are wrong. It means that it provides food for thought and
reasons to talk.
Related links...
Virtual STS, University of
California, San Diego
Society for the Social Study
of Science
European Association for the Study of
Science and Technology
History of Science
Society
Jim Holt, "Beauty's Truth: A
Defense of Scientific Elegance," on Kuhn and scientific "irrationalism,"
Slate
W. W. Cobern, "The Nature of
Science and the Claims of Reason, Faith, and Relativism," presented to the 1996 annual
meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, St. Louis
1 Although STS comprises a variety of conceptualizations of the relations among knowledge,
reality, and the knowable, I know of no one who subscribes to the notion that reality, outside
of the knower, doesn't exist at all.
2 See, for example, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The
Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton University Press, 1979, 1986), and Karin
Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and
Contextualist Nature of Science (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981).
3 Most notably Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in Higher Superstition.
4
See, for instance, the work of Karen Barad, Michael Flower, Emily Martin, and Richard Cone,
along with Jonas Salk's introduction to Latour and Woolgar (1986).
MARIANNE de LAET,
Ph.D., is a visiting scholar in STS at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.
Her specialty is the anthropology of science and technology; she is writing The Travel
of Patents Into the Developing World. Her thesis, Fathers, Stars, and
Hormones: Anthropological controversies over indigenous knowledge was published in
Dutch (Utrecht: ISOR Press, 1994). Her writing has appeared in Kennis &
Methode, Psychologie en Maatschappij, EASST Review,
and Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
