Heh heh heh I’m quite “classical” in view – so my analytical lens would be different from how STS ppl would look at things.
You know the first thing that hits me when you say that sociologists of scientific knowledge study natural scientists and their processes, it almost feels like we’re looking at them through a fishtank – they are the fishes. When you perceive to study another social “species” as it were, you inevitably wrought on the members of the social species some of interpretive power through the viewpoints in your latest bestseller. It’s almost akin to colonial studies of the sub-altern, where you have intellectuals like Ruyard Kipling analysing the other through his own subjective motivations and interpretive lens and then coming at a conclusion (The White Man’s Burden) which then becomes a form of imposed ideology upon the studied. Of course which in our STS case we do not actually wish to impose any form of ideology on them so that we can impose our will over them!
Foucault’s known to reject essentialist typifications of him – he’s been labelled a marxist, anarchist, and other political labels. Was he fickle-minded? Why does he strives so hard to struggle away from one stereotype, only to feel uneasy in another and move away again? Apparently, Foucault felt that if you become involved in a debate on how you should see yourself, you are already becoming subject to its definitive power. Say for example, society debates on how single mothers should be viewed. The individual who subscribes one’s identity to this debate will already become subject to the debate’s typifying power: on the 1st level, one has become essentialised as a single mother (when there are so many things one can be), and on the 2nd level, by normative statements saying what a single mother is. Even if you reject these statements, you are already sucked into the “arena”, and your identity will have to be contoured over what the others are saying about you.
So you’re saying something about scientists. Also saying something about their objectivity. Means we’re already taking the position of the disinterested observer – for us, their obsession with objectivity now becomes just another social artifact to be studied, not something that we acquiesce to be a belief that is inherent in our life-world. And because of the multi-disciplinary range of this academic faculty our journal articles might be deemed more “believable” than other perspectival schools.
This is actually fine, it’s just methodological technique. But I realise (I might be wrong!) that so far, a lot of the analysis is very specifically focussed on the scientists and the process itself, as you’ve succinctly written in your comment. Even efforts to expand the scope from micro to macro (through ANT, for example) still don’t seem macro enough w.r.t how society runs. Science Is Powerful. Every report, every journal article, every press conference becomes a social text that anyone can read, interpret and use (& abuse) for their own purposes.
We are immensely indebted to Samuel Morton, with his scientific use of bb metal pellets to measure skulls of various people, for showing that brain sizes do differ for people in different parts of the world, and for helping us understand why “negroes” are so backward. His work was undoubtedly definitely instrumentally important in crafting colonial social policy in the colonial times he was in.
It’s amazing how back then no one publicly asked, why the heck did he even decide to embark on exploring this form of natural phenomena? What made him so interested in measuring dead people remains? He a fetisher?
Are we thus depoliticizing science? Are we unintentionally hiding the Power Relations driving and defining our science? Why is scientific research on Climate Change so vaunted and powerful today? Why doesn’t the world worry about whether HIV really causes AIDs?
Very harrowing example: Hitler’s scientists were doing scientific, literally cutting-edge research on millions of Jews and marginalized peoples to get at some scientific objective. Now following your schema, an STS application would probably look at how the scientists are doing their work, how they’re interpreting the results gleaned from the screaming test subjects, how they are exploring natural phenomena by recreating conducive environments for their test subjects. Fair enough, we now know how they do their thing. But because of this somewhat single-minded focus, we are unable to consider the inherent socio-political background motivating these scientific studies. Like I said, we would have effectively depoliticized science. And because we are disinterested observers, it almost becomes a positive sanction to the social impact of the science of the Third Reich. It’s true that I’m not making value-judgements, but it’s also true that by not saying anything you can imply that doing the experiment is as moral as not doing the experiment. So, why shouldn’t we do the experiment, if we get paid to do it?
Is the systematic study of the Power Relations, constellations of interests, conflict and structure a mere studying of “what motivates anyone to do anything”? (If so I believe Marx, Gramsci and still many others would so be groovin’ 6 feet under.) Why study the subjective? Because the production of any kind of knowledge is definitely linked to the social millieu of the scientist, which is mediated through his interpretive lens. By studying their interpretive lens and the motivations behind the scientific question, we are able to account for the very salient Power Relations that background the whole process of science. This allows us to ask sneaky things like why did the natural sciences even want to establish their work as “objective” and through what powerful ideological means did they maintain their prime positions. So rather than asking how natural scientists construct scientific knowledge today, there’s equal merit in asking why and how did they arrive at these very methods of constructing scientific knowledge.
What power backgrounds led them to use such methods to construct their knowledge? Why is their knowledge so persistently prime? Why do some natural phenomena become studied and some neglected? We know that no one wants to fund the HIV-AIDs link research. Why is this? Whose interests are at stake here?
So! Whether this is a “Social Science of Science”, if all we do is study motivations. Well then we can say that Pasteur wasn’t exactly doing science because he looked at the natural, ecological background of the anthrax microbes and analysed why these critters wanted to hurt farm animals so badly. He should have just contented himself with analysing how the microbes “do their thang” and cut up steak, mutton and lions.
Ok I’m really sorry here, I couldn’t resist pulling off this joke! C’mon! But really, insofar as the Sociology of Science is studying Science, I argue that it is completely valid and meritable to study the driving forces behind our Science. Because the Sociology of Science is really a Sociology of Knowledge, not only is it cool to study the processes of knowledge production, it is also only logically rational to study how these processes came into paradigmatic being in the first place. Sounds like Kuhn eh? I never read his work, but I believe the lecture didn’t touch on the epic struggles in the underlying constellation of interests in society that perpetuated the shift in paradigm in the first place. The key here is not to negate the current methodological fields of STS, but to integrate with a clear appreciation of the background behind the construction of scientific knowledge.
Because science “produces too much hope or too much fear”, it’s only rational to understand why scientists study what they are studying. Very simply put, it’s a self-reflexive exercise that explores why we in our society are so hung up about studying stem-cell research and genetic influence on terminal diseases. And by allowing a better understanding of our own hopes and fears –> isn’t this something very valuable and very much relevant to our daily lives? We no longer take for granted why we worry about calories in Sunday’s breakfast or about the plastic bottles we drink our Coke from, we understand where our fears are really coming from.
Has all this been said before? I don’t know. I hazard a guess that Prof Volker Schmidt might have expounded on this in the days of yore given what the IVLE shows me. My knowledge is as wide as the 5 lectures I’ve attended, so as usual vote if this is junk.
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