Abstract
One battle line in the debate between constructivism and realism has been drawn between realistically inclined philosophers of science, on the one hand, and constructivist sociologists of science, on the other. Both camps have seemingly agreed that realism and constructivism are incompatible with one another. This paper investigates the supposed incompatibility of constructivism and realism from the perspective of scientific representation. The argument shows how constructivists, in their critique of scientific representation, stumbled over the constructed nature of their own accounts of science. This problem of reflexivity made the constructivists realize that any extreme constructivist claims tend to be self-defeating. That the problem of reflexivity was felt to be so acute by many constructivists in the field of science and technology studies shows, I argue, that in their wholesale attack on representation these “reflexivists” (and some representation-hostile neo-pragmatists alike) were themselves relying on a rather stringent notion of representation. Yet there are many ways to approach scientific representation, as well as many forms of constructivism, and thus constructivism and realism need not be irreconcilable. The pragmatic accounts of scientific representation, in particular, can fruitfully be combined with a more modest constructivist programme.
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Notes
- 1.
To be sure, the STS scholars were not the only ones struggling with the problem of reflexivity at the time. The term was in wide use also, for instance, in sociology and anthropology. In these discussions reflexivity has taken multiple meanings. The same term has been used when talking about modern societies or “modernity”, “agents” or subjects, the “participant’s” methods of accounting for their reality and finally about epistemological and methodological issues more generally (e.g., Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Knuuttila 2002).
- 2.
To be sure, this reflexive problem that the constructivists faced was but one version of the problem of relativism. See Mary Hesse (1980) for a more philosophically interesting defense of STS constructivism. She claimed that a relativist means different things than an objectivist by such expressions as “truth”, “knowledge” and “grounds”. A “truth” for a relativist, for example, means that which meets the criteria of truth in a local culture. Therefore the non-relativist attempt to show that the relativists’ claims are self-defeating does not succeed, since it makes use of the senses of “true” and “knowledge” excluded by the relativists’ claims. But then a new problem appears: it is not clear that the relativist and her critic are any longer engaged in the same philosophical controversy (see Tollefsen 1987, p. 211).
- 3.
This proposal was clearly a part of a larger current sweeping over humanities and social sciences in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the field of historiography, Hayden White (e.g., 1973) urged historians to pay attention to the historical narratives themselves, to their fictional and artificial nature. Clifford Geerz (e.g., 1973), in turn propagated for the same kind of programme in anthropology. Spencer notes how, as a result of Geerz’s emphasis on writing, his hermeneutic approach “tries above all to close the hermeneutic cycle by limiting his readers’ access to that which he wants to interpret himself” (1989, p. 149).
- 4.
The reflexivist agenda did not disappear from STS, or from sociology in general, instead it was reformulated. Consider for instance how Woodhouse et~al. (2002, p. 307) advocate activism: “[I]n as much as there always are more research questions than time to study them, it seems hard to miss the possibility of extending the individual-level reflexivity of the 1980s to the field more generally: what social processes are setting our collective agendas; is the agenda-setting process a laudable one […]”.
- 5.
The book Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited (Coopmans et~al. 2014) takes its inspiration from its predecessor, taking into account novel forms of image production, especially such as digital image processing and new kinds of tactile and haptic representations.
- 6.
These points derive from Nelson Goodman’s famous critique of similarity (Goodman 1968). For reasons of space I cannot deal with them in detail, and readers are referred to Suárez (2003) and Frigg (2006). Suárez has also directed this line of critique towards the similarity account, but the philosophers of science currently favoring a looser (i.e. not mathematical) notion of similarity all tend to take into account users and use (e.g., Giere 2004, 2010, see above).
- 7.
Looking at the structuralist-pragmatist controversy from this perspective suggests that at least partly the two adversaries are arguing at cross-purposes. The structuralists seem to have been more interested in the question of what would justify a representational relationship whereas the pragmatists have focused on the use of scientific representations. Chakravartty (2010) has attempted to capture this contrast with his distinction between informational versus functional theories of scientific representation.
- 8.
This has recently been argued also by Weisberg (2007), according to whom “[m]odels do not have a single, automatically determinable relationship to the world” (p. 218).
- 9.
This need not be the case, however. One might also pursue an empiricist argument as van Fraassen (1980) does. For him the isomorphism at stake concerns the relationship between the model and the structures of (empirical) “appearances”.
- 10.
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Knuuttila, T. (2014). Scientific Representation, Reflexivity, and the Possibility of Constructive Realism. In: Galavotti, M., Dieks, D., Gonzalez, W., Hartmann, S., Uebel, T., Weber, M. (eds) New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04382-1_20
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