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“Once Upon a Time” Philosophy of Science: STS, Science Policy and the Semantic View of Scientific Theories

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Abstract

Is a policy-friendly philosophy of science possible? In order to respond this question, I consider a particular instance of contemporary philosophy of science, the semantic view of scientific theories, by placing it in the broader methodological landscape of the integration of philosophy of science into STS (Science and Technology Studies) as a component of the overall contribution of the latter to science policy. In that context, I defend a multi-disciplinary methodological integration of the special discipline composing STS against a reductionist interdisciplinary unification, arguing that if STS wants to contribute to policy advising by constructing narratives of science practice feasible for science policy both in terms of descriptive completeness and intelligibility, then it must avoid the explanatory reductionism tendencies of special disciplines in interdisciplinary contexts. This would favour, at the same time, a relaxation of esoteric language. On this basis, it seems that the semantic view is one right candidate among other approaches in the philosophy of science for facilitating the integration of the methodologically different contributions to STS toward policy objectives. In fact, besides offering a more realistic and descriptively complete picture of science practice with respect to its predecessor in the philosophy of science, namely the syntactic view, the semantic view is also able to capture some aspects of science practice that elude even sociological approaches to STS, thus inviting different perspective on the same subject matter.

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Notes

  1. Post-Mertonian sociology of science developed in the context of the Edinburgh School founded by the sociologist and historian of science David Edge. Cultural relativism and social constructivism—respectively the idea that the emergence of social and cognitive values in science practice (norms and states of belief) is always relative to specific cultural contexts, so that there are not universal criteria for their evaluation, and the hypothesis that these values are the result of social manipulation—characterizing this approach had a systematic conceptual exposition in the writings of Barnes (1974), Bloor (1976) and Shapin (1982), among others. Interest theory, the methodology according to which behaviors, norms and practices can be explained in terms of being determined in their construction by group interests, is the sociological approach generally employed by these thinkers (see Callon 1995 for an historical and methodological overview of the sociological approaches in STS). These authors focus especially on the individuation of macro-sociological interactions as factors explaining knowledge production and practice, while their most direct descendants, as for example Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Studies (1986), focus mainly on micro-sociological interactions that nonetheless are often reduced to macro-sociological ones (this seems to be the case of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory; see Latour 1987, 1989). The macro and the micro approaches in post-Mertonian sociology, in fact, follow the same heuristics as their Mertonian predecessors, namely interest theory, but differ from Merton’s approach in not distinguishing between the influence of scientific content and social norms, making the determination of the first also dependent from social interests.

  2. This is not to say that traditional philosophy of science denied the causal influence of extra-logical factors for framing science decision problems. Due to historical contingencies, second phase philosophy of science had somehow exasperated the logical and abstract character of the discipline as practiced in the inter-wars years (as explained in Reisch 2005). This has partially caused the contemporary image of philosophy of science as detached from flash and blood science practice. However, recent history of philosophy has shown that inter-wars philosophers of science did not conceive of philosophical practice as “other” from social and political engagement (Uebel 1998, 2004) helping also the recovery of a “sociology of knowledge” more or less explicit in the genetic phase of the discipline (Richardson 2000; Uebel 2000).

  3. The privileged role of sociology of science in the field of STS in terms of its methodological and academic predominance is documented and discussed in Coniglione (2009b) and Viola (2009).

  4. The term “technoscience” was introduced into the STS literature by Latour (1993) to eliminate the linguistic and conceptual confusion arising by the distinction between the terms “science” and “technology”.

  5. Andrew Pickering (1995) develops a similar argument to defend the opposite position that an interdisciplinary perspective in STS is more auspicial and effective than a multidisciplinary one.

  6. There are several versions of the semantic view. My brief description selects some of the common elements to be found in the versions proposed by van Fraassen (1980), Suppe (1989) and Lloyd (1994).

  7. Some writers prefer to name these abstracted/idealized systems “physical systems”. This may engender confusion between abstracted/idealized physical systems and actual physical systems. Hence we prefer to refer to the former through the expression “physical models” and to the latter through the expression “natural (or physical) systems”.

  8. The two concepts of abstraction and idealization are often conflated in the literature, maybe because in actual practice these two modelling devices often work in tandem. However, both the difference between them and their individual diversification are relevant in many loci of philosophical discourse. Novak (1980) is the locus classicus of the differentiation and specification of the two concepts both from a methodological and historical point of view. See Coniglione et al. (2004) for a contemporary taking on these issues.

  9. The semantic view is not the only option, in the philosophy of science, for analyzing the relationship between theory and world as mediated by models. Starting from the 80s of the last century a group of scholars in east Europe have developed an alternative conception to the semantic view. Coniglione (1990) have discussed their contributions both by comparing them to the different approaches to the semantic view developed in the Anglo-American context and by placing their philosophy of science in the more general context of nineteenth-century scientific philosophy (2007).

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Acknowledgments

I thank Francesco Coniglione, Thomas Nickles and Salvatore Vasta for their open-mindedness, patience, and kind support.

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  1. Dipartimento di Processi Formativi, Università di Catania, Via Biblioteca 4 (p.zzo Ingrassia)—I, 95124, Catania, Italy

    Enrico Viola

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Viola, E. “Once Upon a Time” Philosophy of Science: STS, Science Policy and the Semantic View of Scientific Theories. Axiomathes 19, 465–480 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-009-9083-2

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