Abstract
Impartial treatment of technical controversy confronts a dilemma in the clash between objectivists and normativists. Any given dispute, it might be argued, either involves technical questions or it does not. If it does involve technical questions then the objectivist will have the upper hand. If it does not involve technical questions then the normativist will have the upper hand. Either way the prospects for impartial intervention are either dim or non-existent. This paper aims to develop a way out of this dilemma by exploring a conversational dispute that parallels recent examples from agricultural controversy.
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Notes
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. RII-8409919. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
See, e.g, Conviser and Freudenberger in Richard Haynes and Ray Lanier, eds. Agriculture, Change and Human Values: Proceedings of a Multidisciplinary Conference. 2 Vols. Humanities and Agriculture Program, University of Florida, 240 Arts and Sciences Bldg., Gainesville, FL 32611, 1982.
R.C. Rautenstraus, “Public Responsibility of an Agronomist — a University President’s View,” in Agronomy: Solving Problems, Serving People. ASA Special Pub. #37. Madison: Amer. Soc. for Agronomy, pp. 1–6,1980; Robert H. White-Stevens, “Letter to R.P. Upchurch,” in C.A. Black, “Informing the Nonagricultural Public about Agricultural Science,” Special Publication No. 2, (December), 1972, pp. 3–7.
Frank H. Baker, “CAST and the Big T: Truth,” Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, Paper No. 7, (November 19), 1979; Theodore Hutchcroft, “Responding to Media Cheap Shots: Observations on the CAST Experience,” Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, paper No. 16, (February), 1983.
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Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Fact, Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981; Karen D. Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science, New York: Pergamon, 1981.
The conception of interpretive intervention represented here draws on both humanistic psychology (Carl Rogers, On Personal Power: Inner Strength and Its Revolutionary Impact, New York: Delacorte, 1977; Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1968) and interpretive social science (Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, Berkeley: U. of CA Press, 1979).
Haynes and Lanier, op. cit., pp. 30, 60.
Glenn L. Johnson, Research Methodology for Economists: Philosophy and Practice, New York: MacMillan, 1986, pp. 161–169.
The example is drawn from conversation with Glenn L. Johnson.
Luther Tweeten, “The Economics of Small Farms,” Science 219 (March 4), pp. 1037–1041, 1983.
C. Weiss, “Research for Policy’s Sake: The Enlightenment Function of Social Research,” Policy Analysis 3, pp. 531–545, 1977.
On the concept of “performative” utterances, see William P. Alston, Philosophy of Language, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964, pp. 34–36; John L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard Univerisity in 1955, NY: Oxford University Press, 1965; and John R. Searle, Speech Acts, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
See Philip T. Shepard, “Moral Conflict in Agriculture: Conquest or Moral Coevolution?” Agriculture and Human Values 1 (Fall, 1984): 17–25.
Philip T. Shepard and Christopher Hamlin, “How Not to Presume: Toward a Descriptive Theory of Ideology in Science and Technology Controversy,” In Science, Technology and Human Values, Volume 12, Issue 2 (Spring 1987), pp. 19–28.
Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in David E. Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent. New York, Free Press, 1964; Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis, London: Macmillan, 1979.
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Shepard, P.T. (1989). Impartiality and Interpretive Intervention in Technical Controversy. In: Byrne, E.F., Pitt, J.C. (eds) Technological Transformation. Philosophy and Technology, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2597-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2597-7_4
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