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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%), cheap acomplia online legally, Farmacia acomplia baratos, how many believe that God created the world (an overwhelming 92%), how many think humans are descended from apes (an abysmal 9%), cheap acomplia, Ordering acomplia online without prescription, etc etc. He did this for about 30 minutes of the talk, αγοράσετε acomplia έκπτωση. Acheter acomplia bon marché, Okay, so the point is that science is not as widespread in the educated world as some scholars would like to believe, pharmacy acomplia. Georgia GA Ga. , 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, buy acomplia no prescription. 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), Nebraska NE Nebr. . Købe acomplia online, Durkheim’s example for a "social fact" was the concept of the sacred. It is general not because everyone believes in it, ordering acomplia without prescription, Order acomplia, but--and this is important--because even those who don’t adhere to it, will not trespass it, Wisconsin WI Wis. . New Mexico NM N.Mex. , The sacred is forbidden, set apart.., Kjøp Discount acomplia. Buy acomplia no prescription, 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. Vermont VT Vt. , We are very much consumers of science & technology in modernity, and he recognized that, acomplia pharmacy. Where to buy acomplia, But this is counter to what he was saying earlier. How does he deal with this obvious contradiction, goedkope acomplia apotheek. Comprar acomplia baratos, He proposed that we, as the educated public, Jotta acomplia verkossa, Acomplia kopen, 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, buy acomplia no prescription.
I don’t know how he thought his paper was even able to attack Whitehead’s proposition, New Jersey NJ N.J. . Kentucky KY Ky. , And not just Whitehead. Even people who are not enthusiasts of modern Western science recognize its character, billig kaufen acomplia, 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. Buy acomplia no prescription, 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 !.
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Thanks for the post, Arpita – you definitely paid better attention than I did! But I wondered what you thought of Shapin’s insistence that we can speak of many different methods used by science but not of ‘the scientific method’? Is this something like saying we must pay attention to sciences but not be too enamored of ‘Science’?
I bring this up because, first, that may account for the statistics he recalled; but second – he mentioned this as well – perhaps there’s been a remarkable shift in our faith in science. Maybe science has lost some of its cache of cultural authority, which would leave us not with belief but with the collapse of yet another metanarrative? Mattias keeps reminding me, for instance, of the first sentence of Luhmann’s Observations on Modernity, which says something like ‘modernity has lost faith in its self-descriptions’.
In the 1990s there was a critical discourse of the small (Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, for instance) that posed itself as a direct challenge to statist, scientific modernism. But what does it mean that scientists position themselves as foresaking the modernist project?
as a follow up to jerome’s question, the single thought i had during the talk was ‘in what way is this blumenberg’ from the perspective of ‘science? i.e. the q of science today cannot be answered through the question of secularism. which might explain why the term modernity did not actually feature in the talk. he even had to be reminded of it (thanks to the last comment of the session).
What is Shapin’s aim : to dismantle the ideology of science or critique its methodology ? Saying that we need to review our “faith†in science is a statement which precisely places science as a meta-narrative. That could very well be the aim of his talk (or even his work). But I thought that science-studies’ contributions are to critically appraising the methods of science.
As to Jerome your question that why do I/we believe in “the†scientific method does need clarification. I don’t believe so but I think Shapin does. Maybe he does not say so explicitly but he always attacks only the “empirical†character of the way science is done. How should technical skills of the lab assistant be rewarded ? Who are the witnesses testifying to Boyle’s vacuum by virtue of which the experiment gets credibility, strength or power ? He bypasses other fundamental and more challenging questions like what constitutes technical skill in the first place? Or other than replication, how does experimental knowledge bring forth innovations ?
Whitehead, in his book, recognizes that there are at least 2 methods to doing science – the Aristotelian classificatory one, later carried forward by Bacon, Locke and Hume, basing scientific thought on experience and “empirical” generalizations (example, what is primary about a particle – its mass or motion) and the Platonic/Pythagorean mathematical one, later taken up, in different ways, by Descartes, Kant or Leibniz, who argue that the core institution of science is the “experimental” method understood most simply as a marriage of mathematical notions to schemes of nature (e.g. : how to calculate the shortest path of a particle traversing under constraints/forces of motion – integral calculus).
And Whitehead unhesitatingly says that one is regressive and the other radical. For example, in physiology/biology as long as the Aristotelian spirit was pervasive, we only had the great chain of being. When Mendel introduced mathematics to biology and genetics was born, it revolutionized biology so much so that its technology (application) went ahead of its science (theory) ! Similarly one can look at Koyre’s classic case-study of Galileo’s break from Aristotelian cosmology to found a physics (of dynamics), predicated on mathematics and experiment.
Now whether we agree with Whitehead’s reading or not is a different matter but he, at least, recognizes 2 distinct modes of thought (and codes of conduct) in science and subjects both to a critique simultaneously whereas Shapin keeps focusing on just one aspect of science while completely ignoring the other.
In this regard I must add that Rabinow+Kelty’s work on synthetic biology/nanotechnology is much superior to Shapin’s aims. They recognize the power of experimentation and innovations in the biological sciences and are submitting that to an anthropological critique.
Although I too worried about the nature of the evidence Shapin spent most of this talk describing–the degree to which people who believe in science also believe in things ostensibly opposed to science such as God, miracles, a physical heaven, etc.–was he not in fact concerned with what Arpita above says that he missed: that is, trying to argue for and protect the sacredness (in her Durkheimian sense) of science? For him, science is open-ended inquiry, and from this it has garnered its integrity and its independent authority–what he called “the currency and life of science.” He seemed to me to want to argue that, because there is now no stable sense of what science is (no specific knowledge that all hold, no shared set of scientific beliefs, no shared scientific method), its authority has diminished. Shapin said that “The integrity of science is in everyone’s interest.” The independence and integrity of science is now threatened because it has less authority as truth; rather it is increasingly enfolded into institutions oriented toward power and wealth (corporations, the state). Scientists are important less for what they know than what they can make happen–science aids the technologist. He said that science as truth is threatened today by science as engineering, and he warned that, given this new balance, we cannot assume science has or will continue to have the independence and integrity that it has had.