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What Is Science?

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Experts and the Will of the People

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Abstract

Since the early 1970s, in social studies of science and technology (STS), the ‘logic of scientific discovery’ has been displaced by detailed examinations of science in practice; this has eroded the cultural position of scientific expertise. Furthermore, the ‘crown jewels’ of science, Newtonian physics and the like, are no longer accepted as justifying science’s contribution to citizens’ more diffuse technical concerns. Scientific expertise now seems more fallible, less removed from ordinary decision-making and less insulated from political and social forces. Populist leaders, who attack scientific expertise because it limits their power, can draw on these ideas. STS must stop celebrating the erosion of scientific expertise and, without sacrificing the new insights, rethink the justification for the role of science in democratic societies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These writings tend to be philosophical or historical in nature, with the work of the Vienna School being a typical example of the approach along with Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper 2002).

  2. 2.

    Ludwik Fleck’s work on the ‘genesis and development of a scientific fact’, first published in German in 1935, is a notable exception in its naturalist treatment of scientific practice. See Fleck (2008).

  3. 3.

    Merton’s ‘norms of science’ can be found in his Sociology of Science (Merton 1973).

  4. 4.

    Pioneering studies included Bloor (1973, 1991), Collins (1974, 1975, 1985/1992), Latour and Woolgar (1979), Knorr-Cetina (1981).

  5. 5.

    See for example: Fleck (2008), Kuhn (1962), Medawar (1967), and Holton (1978).

  6. 6.

    For an attempt to make this accessible to a wide audience, see The Golem series: Collins and Pinch (1979, 2005, 2010).

  7. 7.

    This is known as the experimenters’ regress Collins (1985/1992).

  8. 8.

    For early cases see for example: MacKenzie (1981) and Shapin (1979, 2007).

  9. 9.

    The most influential, if not the first exponent, of this semiotic style of analysis is Bruno Latour, whose early work laid the foundation for what subsequently became known as Actor-Network Theory. See for example: Latour (1993, 2003), Callon (1986), and Mol (2003).

  10. 10.

    See MacKenzie (1981), Oudshoorn (1994), and Martin (1991).

  11. 11.

    Incidentally, this new kind of work on the analysis of science was done under different disciplinary labels. The, Marxist inspired ‘social responsibility in science’ was a forerunner which took the interrelationship between science, capitalism and socialism as topic. ‘Sociology of scientific knowledge’ (SSK), grew out of theories based in philosophy and sociology and was dominant through the 1970s and early ’80s while more generic terms that were around at the same time were ‘science studies’ and ‘social studies of science’. Today’s most widespread label is ‘science and technology studies’ (STS), though that tends to connote a greater concern with immediate policy issues than with the nature of knowledge.

  12. 12.

    A ‘science war’ differs from a scientific controversy in so far as the arguers are mostly concerned to convince an outside audience rather than to convince their immediate scientific opponents. In a science war there can be more carelessness about accusations than there would be in proper scientific debate because one is trying to characterise the opponents as holding undesirable positions so as to convince outsiders, whereas to have any hope of convincing scientific opponents one must begin with a full understanding and careful description of their actual views. Some of the more well-known interventions by the critics of this new social understanding of science include: Sokal and Bricmont (1999), Koertge (2000), Gross et al. (1997), and Gross and Levitt (1998). Volume 29 (issue 2) of the journal Social Studies of Science contains a number of replies and responses to articles first published in Koertge’s (2000) edited collection A House Built on Sand. For an exception to these poor quality exchanges, see Labinger and Collins (2001). For an example of belated collaboration evolving out of initial confrontations, see Franklin and Collins (2016). For a more recent discussion of the issue of anti-science, see Durant (2017).

  13. 13.

    Collins and Pinch (1979, 142); this sentiment was ignored by zealots on all sides.

  14. 14.

    Collins and Evans (2002).

  15. 15.

    For the most influential version of the philosophical view, see Douglas (2009). Douglas is surely not in favour of populism but she seems not to have considered the implications of her ‘responsiveness to society’ argument for malign societies.

  16. 16.

    See, for example, Sismondo (2017a, b), Collins et al. (2017), and Jasanoff and Simmet (2017). Fuller (2016), in contrast to both sides, applauds STS for being in the vanguard of post-truth!

  17. 17.

    For the first suggestion see Collins and Evans (2002) and Durant (2016); for the second, see Collins and Evans (2017a).

  18. 18.

    The extreme version of this situation, in which the uncertainty and/or the risks of making a mistake are very high has been called post-normal science (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993) to emphasise the ways the mechanisms that normally ensure quality in scientific work break down. Jasanoff (1990) uses the term ‘regulatory science’ which describes a distinct domain of scientific knowledge production that is situated at the intersection of science and politics. Salter’s (1988) ‘mandated science’ generally describes science that is used for the purposes of making policy. Crucially, these terms refer to a kind or type of science that is necessarily and inevitably political given that scientific outcomes—say a scientific judgement about the safety of a chemical compound—are intrinsically dependent on social values and political judgements. Without defining what ‘safe’ means and who has to be kept ‘safe’ (and who is ignored), no ‘scientific’ judgement of safety is possible. Examples of science where social judgements are particularly acute/visible include: Bijker (2007), Epstein (1996), Wynne (1992), Hilgartner (2000), Irwin (1995).

  19. 19.

    An analogy is that mixing science and politics is like mixing oil and water in a bottle: if the bottle is shaken hard, the oil and water are hard to distinguish, nevertheless, the oil stays oil and the water stays water (Collins et al. 2010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Harry Collins, Robert Evans & Martin Weinel

  2. Historical & Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Darrin Durant

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  1. Harry Collins
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  2. Robert Evans
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  4. Martin Weinel
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Correspondence to Harry Collins .

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Collins, H., Evans, R., Durant, D., Weinel, M. (2020). What Is Science?. In: Experts and the Will of the People. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26983-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26983-8_5

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