Abstract
In recent decades many sociologists and philosophers of science, especially the so-called ‘new experimentalists’, have stressed the need for detailed studies of real, ongoing experimental practices, and have claimed that a new image of science results from such an approach. Among the new objects of interest that have emerged from laboratory studies, an important one is the tacit dimension of scientific practices. Harry Collins, in particular, has insisted that irreducibly tacit presuppositions and skills are inevitably involved in experimental practices, and that these tacit resources play an essential role in the stabilization of successful scientific achievements. What I will call the ‘opacity of experimental practices’ has been analyzed in different ways, but on the whole, it has been claimed to have harmful epistemological consequences with respect to crucial issues such as the nature of experimental facts, scientific realism, scientific rationality, and the contingency of what acquires the status of an established scientific result in practitioners’ eyes. Such claims remain highly controversial. The aim of this paper is to discuss the epistemological implications of the involvement of tacit resources in experimental practices and to provide helpful conceptual tools with respect to the issue of tacit resources in science. Specifically, the paper provides an analytical clarification of the relation between the opacity of experimental practices and the principle of experimenters substitutability, the latter being a principle commonly viewed as a necessary feature of any good science. Serious doubts are finally raised about the validity of the experimenters substitutability principle, and the impact of these doubts with respect to the contingency of scientific facts and results is considered.
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Notes
When it comes to a formulating these considerationson in terms of rules, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953) is almost always mentioned as another predecessor to Kuhn’s views and to considerations regarding tacit aspects of scientific practice.
(Collins 1974, 1984, 1985, 1990, 2001a, 2001b, 2004; Collins and Kusch 1995, 1998; Collins and Pinch 1993).
Other influential works that deal with the tacit dimension of human knowledge (human knowledge broadly understood: from basic, everyday cognitive activities like linguistic or mnesic tasks, to very specialized theoretical and technical scientific practices) include: (Chomsky 1990; Davies 1989; Dreyfus 2004; Ferguson 1992; MacKenzie and Spinardi 1995; Pinch et al. 1996; Reber 1995, 2002; Searle 1995, 2001; Stich 1978; Turner 1994).
As this selection shows, the interest in the topic has indeed developed in the field of the science studies broadly understood (philosophical, sociological and historical approaches of science) – especially in the context of the practice turn. But it has not been restricted – and is far from being restricted nowadays – to scientific activity. To the contrary, it seems that today the publications devoted to tacit aspects of scientific practices are just a small fraction of the whole literature on the subject matter. In particular, tacit aspects of human cognitive activities have been studied by cognitive psychologists, most of the time through experiments focused on relatively basic tasks (basic when compared with what is involved in scientific activities; for an analysis of these kinds of experiments, see (Reber 1995)). Moreover the vast majority of recent publications connected to tacit knowledge occur in the field of management. Here the main concern is the transfer of tacit skills of all sorts, and the development of techniques designed to avoid losses and sustain a fecund circulation among the different actors. As an example, see “Cross-Generational Knowledge Flows in Edge Organizations: Research in Progress” by three authors from the Department of Information Technology at the Carey Business School of the Johns Hopkins University, (Liebowitz et al. 2007). For a volume dealing with tacit knowledge in a variety of fields such as group organization, education, informatics, arts, and so on, see (Goranzon et al. 2006).
See for example (Galison 1997).
For a philosophical discussion of such biology experiments, see (Trizio 2012).
See (Collins 2004, 124).
The example is borrowed from (Collins 2001a).
The examples of the length of the wires and of the right degree of greasing are good illustrations of a frequently used distinction commonly imputed to Ryle (see (Ryle 1945–6)): the distinction between “knowing-that” and “knowing-how”. When a subject tacitly knows that X, the result of the ‘render explicit’ process corresponds to propositions describing objective features of the world (such as the length of the wires). When a subject tacitly knows how to obtain X, the result of the ‘render explicit’ process corresponds to instructions describing the actions to perform. The opacity of experimental practices with respect to description can refer to both. In fact, descriptive opacity is meant to refer to any kind of item involved in the experimental practice under scrutiny.
I give this last example because it can easily apply to scientists. As one of them said, when interviewed by Collins in relation to the gravitational waves controversy: “As soon as you get competition in there, people tend to denigrate other people just because they’re competing with them (…) you can’t be good unless somebody else is bad” ((Collins 2004, 43); in the quotation, “people” refer to scientists).
Cathy Dufour, who has been a pivotal contributor of the PratiScienS research group, and who was also a very dear friend, prematurely and suddenly passed away in March 2011. This reference to her contribution is also an occasion to pay homage to her.
I write “the common interpretation”, since this interpretation has been recently called into question, especially by Stephen Turner, who contests that in this kind of process, the same ‘tacit something’ first ‘possessed’ by O is indeed transferred and subsequently possessed by R. In his 1994 book, Turner indeed argues, against what he calls the “social theory of practices”, that nothing like a common body of shared tacit knowledge and skills, acquired by the diverse members of a given social group through immersion into the same practices and identifiable with the “social substrate” of these practices exists. According to Turner, under the relative uniformity that we record at the phenomenological, manifest, behaviorist level, there are only variable private habits involved in variable private causal structures – very different patterns from one member of the social group to the others, instead of one and the same collective property. “There are no hidden collective objects; there is, however, a large body of private mental traces – what I have called habits – which persist and which enable people to emulate and operate in relation to one another. These mental traces, however, are effectively opaque to analysis. They are individual, private, and, as best we can tell, irremediably diverse. It is only on the surface – in the forms of expression that others can, more or less successfully, respond to – that there is any kind of uniformity to them. (…) There is no sameness other than the sameness of effects – no hidden sameness to explain overtly similar performances. (…) What we have are private habits, with a variegated causal structure” (Turner 1994, 105).
In an intermediary step, the blame can fall differently: rather than falling to R’s lack of knowhow, it may fall to R’s surrounding context (unidentified parameters in the environment that would surreptitiously introduce differences between R’s initial conditions and those of O’s protocol).
The scare quotation marks are intended to stress that the quantity of time-effort involved cannot be equated with a quantifiable measure that could be considered as ‘objective’ in the sense of ‘inscribed in the object under study’, ‘identically accepted by all scientists’ or even ‘that should be identically accepted by all scientists’. See above, section 5.2.4, point D. I will come back to the consequence of this situation sectionsection 9.2.
On the issue of robustness and disagreements between practitioners at this level, see (Soler et al. 2012).
To refute this claim would amount to denying that some people are legitimately more cautious than others or inversely more prompt to reach conclusions, and to think about social devices that might help to obtain the uniform ‘right behavior’ at this level.
See especially (Collins 2001a). Clearly, the variables ‘degree of trust’ and ‘quantity of time-effort sufficient to conclude’ are not independent of each other.
See especially (Collins 1981). It is true, in contemporary experimental physics, that large teams are often involved in one and the same experiment, but most of the time, a high degree of specialization still holds: experimental competences are distributed between the individual members of the team, so that only small subsets are recognized as potentially competent with respect to this or that part of the experiment. See below, section 11.2.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to specify the sense in which several (at least locally) incompatible stabilized sciences could nevertheless all be robust. Just to give an indication, the robustness involved here is related to the global good fit of a multiplicity of heterogeneous ingredients involved in scientific practices (something like a generalization and extension of the scheme of co-stabilization put forward in this paper in the particular case of the three poles involved in experimental achievements, namely: facts, procedures and experts). Further discussion of this point can be found in (Soler et al. 2012). See also (Trizio 2008).
(Hacking 2000) is a pioneering exception.
For further developments of the inevitabilitist / contingentist issue and relevant references, see (Soler 2008a) (for a presentation of the problem and its situation within the landscape of science studies, notably in relation to scientific realism) and (Soler 2008b) (for a systematic analysis of the formulation of the issue, of the structure of the problem and its internal difficulties). See also (Soler forthcoming), for what I take to be the more general and convincing argument that a contingentist could hope to articulate, and (Soler 2006) for a paper in French. In recent years, I have tried to draw scholars’ attention to the contingency issue through the organization of conferences and the publication of Proceedings (see the Symposium connected to (Soler 2008a), which includes, in addition to my contributions mentioned above, three other papers: “Is Failure an Option? Contingency and Refutation”, by Allan Franklin; “How many Sciences for one World? Contingency and the Success of Science”, by Emiliano Trizio; and “Scientific Realism and the Inevitability of Science”, by Howard Sankey. For a more extended volume on the same subject, see (Soler, Trizio and Pickering, forthcoming), which notably includes papers by Mieke Boon, Hasok Chang, Ian Hacking, Adrew Pickering and Joseph Rouse.
See for example (Pickering 1995) and the polemic it raised.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention on these two points.
I followed several other paths in the references mentioned above, note 24.
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Soler, L. Tacit aspects of experimental practices: analytical tools and epistemological consequences. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 1, 393 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-011-0039-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-011-0039-1