I'm posting this on Arpita's behalf:

Monday, January 22, 2007 "Science and the Modern World" - Steven Shapin, UC Berkeley

Shapin started his talk by explicitly trying to discredit Alfred North Whitehead’s claim in Science and the Modern World (a must read, by the way) that the scientific mentality in modernity has spread through the educated world. He did this by citing quite a few Gallup and other opinion polls--statistics on how many people believe in a physical heaven (81%), how many believe that God created the world (an overwhelming 92%), how many think humans are descended from apes (an abysmal 9%), etc etc. He did this for about 30 minutes of the talk. Okay, so the point is that science is not as widespread in the educated world as some scholars would like to believe.

Now Shapin is an empiricist and thinks that a social fact is general if everyone’s doing it (like an essence of something). But he has completely forgotten Durkheim’s first lesson that a "social fact" is general (and external and coercive) not because everyone does it. Crime or suicide is not general (in any social formation) because everyone is committing suicide or homicide but because there is a certain rate of it in every society (which you get by dividing the people who do it by the total population). Durkheim’s example for a "social fact" was the concept of the sacred. It is general not because everyone believes in it, but--and this is important--because even those who don’t adhere to it, will not trespass it. The sacred is forbidden, set apart...

Next Shapin explained that while we may not accede to science on such fundamental questions as creation, or death, but if we have a toothache, we do not expect Gods to descend from the Heavens and fix it – instead we run to the dentist. We are very much consumers of science & technology in modernity, and he recognized that. But this is counter to what he was saying earlier. How does he deal with this obvious contradiction? He proposed that we, as the educated public, should have a better say in how science is done in terms of serving public needs. We should be watchdogs of corporate spending on science & technology endeavors, be cautious about Big techno-science proposals, be equally concerned if Art History projects don’t get funded as much as we are about nuclear power projects.

I don’t know how he thought his paper was even able to attack Whitehead’s proposition. And not just Whitehead. Even people who are not enthusiasts of modern Western science recognize its character, spread and efficacy. Weber says that the first notable, and paradoxical, feature of science is that it is at once unique, in that it started in Protestant, Western Europe and universal, and that it spread to the whole world.

Critiquing is not easy. It takes great analytical strength. To criticize the power and efficacy of modern science/technology is not easy. One can’t do it by reducing it to nothing or by saying it does not exist. Critique is serious business and requires careful attention and analysis.

I am not trivializing the talk. I am not saying it was rubbish but I couldn’t see anything impressive or original about it. Okay I will say that it was stimulating negatively, in that it got me all huff and puff and made me write this blog for our darling ARC !!