Abstract
This chapter identifies two opposing trends—reverse trajectories—over the past 25 years: one in legal contexts with respect to admissibility of scientific expertise and the other in the sub-discipline of sociology known as the sociology of science (or simply “science studies”). As to law, the chapter argues there has been a shift, or trend, away from an idealistic view of science (observed in the now-famous Daubert case) to skepticism of science. This shift in law, with respect to how science is viewed or theorized, is the opposite of what has developed in science studies, insofar as a field of inquiry that was based upon a skeptical view of science (emphasizing its social aspects) is now setting standards for expertise—the third wave of science studies introduces a normative orientation even as it acknowledges the second-wave social contexts of science.
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Notes
- 1.
Sociologist Robert K. Merton was known for articulating four “norms” that ensure good science, namely “communism” (by which he meant collective availability of knowledge), universalism, disinterestedness, and scrutiny through organized skepticism (Cole 2010, 441; Merton 1949). By the 1970s, Merton’s norms were seen as an idealization of science by most science studies scholars, since
Merton’s norms appear to function more as ideals to which to aspire than as determinants of actual behavior. Indeed, one particularly well-known empirical study of a set of actual (normal, respectable, non-deviant) scientists involved in a scientific controversy found that, rather than behaving according to Merton’s norms, they behaved in precisely the opposite fashion…. (Cole 2010, 443; Mitroff 1974, 587–589)
Later in this chapter, I refer to Merton’s influence as “Wave One,” or the first wave of science studies—the second wave is the relativistic approach which I am identifying as dominant in science studies around 1993.
- 2.
The quote is actually a reference to what Alan Sokol “seemed to argue” in an article (Sokol 1996a) which was published before the editors of Social Text realized it was a parody of science studies—it was a hoax that Sokol immediately revealed in another article (Sokol 1996b) arguing that cultural studies scholars could not tell the difference between scholarship and nonsense.
- 3.
Goodstein believes that the Court made a “respectable stab at showing” how to recognize real science, and that the Court “emerged with at least their dignity intact” (Goodstein 2000, 79, 82), but others might disagree.
- 4.
Sheila Jasanoff (1992) had made that same argument just prior toDaubert, but I do not believe very many judges or lawyers paid attention to her “brief” on behalf of science studies.
- 5.
However, I offered an account (Caudill 2009, 27–29) of the Cindy Sommers prosecution, in San Diego, for arsenic poisoning, which case was later dismissed due to faulty toxicological tests.
- 6.
The title Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979) was changed in 1986, in the second edition, to remove the word “social,” which removal suggests a shift toward non-human actors, perhaps a turn to naturalism or at least co-production.
- 7.
“We have [been] and will be said to be putting forward a pro-science view redolent of the 1950s,” as we have “a preference for the norms and culture of evidence-based scientific argument” (Collins and Evans 2007, 10–11).
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Caudill, D.S. (2019). Twenty-Five Years of Opposing Trends: The Demystification of Science in Law, and the Waning Relativism in the Sociology of Science. In: Caudill, D.S., Conley, S.N., Gorman, M.E., Weinel, M. (eds) The Third Wave in Science and Technology Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14335-0_2
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