I swear

that i didn’t mean to not find time to read the actual readings in time for discussion. It’s not easy dealing with the giants of our sociological past, one by one on a weekly basis. So I can only ask for forgiveness when I use non-module concepts to arrive at a new interpretation of the lecture. Hence before tomorrow’s lecture on actor-network theory starts and the lecture topic of the science lab gets cold, I thought the box would look good with my 2 cents in it. Oh and yes, this is a student-written rant, and has no link with the lecturer’s intentions.

To my wounded mind, one of the key take-aways was that those guys working in the laboratory could be re-interpreted as social agents – as opposed to being mere droids of the “objective” scientific paradigm. They do their thing in white coats and face gear – collecting data and “inscribing” stuff for their future analysis. What was of immense interest though, was the notion of these white-coaters not actually dealing with the natural world itself – they look at the natural phenomena, take many pictures and reconstruct things into an ideal-typical model in their very comfortable lab.

Notice any familiar term? Yes, I used the term “ideal-typical”. Which means Weber is now in the picture. Why bring him in? Because his idea of ideal-types is very helpful to the messy fray at hand. Where’s the mess? Look – while these “natural” scientists claim that their empirical snapshots are needle-point accurate, and from this claim therefore proceed with reconstructing that particular natural phenomena in their labs (as with our poor C57BL/6 lab mice), the lens and angles through which they take their snapshots are definitely their very own. Who defines what is to be studied? These so-called accurate reconstructions of natural phenomena – are they just ideal-types?

Dr Coopman’s argument (as derived from Lynch) was that the post-data collection, interpretative process – using human logic to link all the inscribed artifacts (did I get it right?) – is what gives the social flavour to the scientific process. By distinguishing what’s natural – from the artificial – can they arrive at a truth, and this very distinguishing is what’s social about the scientific process.

But what’s neglected here, is the pre-scientific process question: through what processes did these “natural” scientists themselves define the scientific problem? As much as you can argue that the formulation of the scientific problem has to go through some upper-echelon ethics committee to check for adherence to empirical rules in the natural sciences, the original decision – why the head scientist prefers one problem area over another – is most definitely a product of his/her subjectivity. Maybe s/he was more interested in researching hair growth due to personal insecurities. Maybe the market for hair products is booming and s/he wants to tap into the industry quick. Or maybe out of all the research proposals the head scientist sent to his superiors, only the hair one got approved – and thus the scientific problem is now birthed from the subjectivities of the bosses. The bottomline is, you see, we don’t know.

Go a step further: your subjective desires and interests is in a strong sense, derived from your social millieu. Because everyone who goes to the corporate networking parties you always attend are now jumping onto the hair-loss solutions bandwagon, you, as a boss feel that yeah, maybe that’s the way to go in your next quest for that new lamborghini gallardo. So, due to the life-world you’re in, you develop business interests which then define what’s most relevant for you – and then you commit yourself to rational action to bring thse interests into plans and into reality.

Yes, I have, in the same sneaky manner, sneaked in another social theorist in my previous paragraph. He’s none other Weber’s all-time fan, Schutz. Ok, maybe Schutz wasn’t totally Weber-lovin’. But what I described is probably how Schutz would describe it. Schutz is this really cool guy who conceptualizes rational human action as the result of socially-influenced individual interests determining what’s most relevant to the individual oneself. Because we are not living alone on an island, each of us forms an intersubjective world with other individuals which is termed the “life-world”. So we are influenced by this “life-world” as we influence it through our individual subjective interests.

Can you already see the rise of the subjective? For Schutz, the scientific-empirical process for social scientists involved replacing your own subjective interests with the formulated scientific problem -> and now with a scientific interest as your background you begin to explore only those things that are relevant to your scientific interest. It’s definitely the same for “natural” scientists as well, cos’ their research area will determine what aspects they look at and what they discard. But as I have expounded upon in the previous 3 painful paragraphs – what processes determine their scientific research problem is inherent from their subjectivity. We’ve got to recognize that the research problem does not come out of the objective world alone. It’s bizarre to think that Lady Gaia slipped into a science lab and wrote the research proposal for the scientists while they were having breakfast coffee.

The last lecture argued that scientific knowledge is a social construction. Yet I wasn’t really satisfied with the term “socio-technical” – it was basically dealing with the scientific process. Like, for me it doesn’t seem to account for how the “objective” truth of the natural sciences is really inseparable from the subjectivities of the scientists doing their work. To be fair, the model reconstruction of the natural phenomena they were studying is indeed objective, because everyone from the marketing department to the cleaning auntie to Barack Obama can look at this model. But the motivations behind the science is not at all objective. At best, it only makes sense to speak of the objective-subjective, or to steal from Schutz, the intersubjective. There is no pure, true objectivity in science, and anyone trying to impose that should have their motives analysed.