Notes

It is common to speak of scholarship in terms of “two cultures” (Snow [1959] 2012). Humanistic study is a search for meaning in our experiences. Science is a search for evidence about the true nature of the material world. The two cultures are very different and that difference runs deep. Each side asks fundamentally different questions. If you are on one side, it’s easy to think that you don’t have anything to do with the work being done on the other side. You might even regard the other side with some suspicion. At the same time, human experience and people’s ideas and values obvious influence scientific pursuits, and science and its applications obviously have a great deal of influence on the conditions in which people live. Humanists can’t ignore science’s knowledge and scientists can’t assume that they are exempt from culture, social forces, historical contexts, or the human condition.

This class is concerned with building a bridge. In that respect it joins with a large group of people from many fields who are interested in intellectual history, the history of science, the philosophy of science, and the social study of science. It’s a big topic. And as you may already sense, the people in this group don’t always have the same aims. Philosophers of science want to establish the basis on which science can claim to discover truth. Others are interested in seeing science as a product of a time, place, culture, and social setting. Scientists do often recognize that they benefit from reflexive critique so that they can overcome biases and impediments to greater objectivity, so they are open to seeing themselves in relation to history and society. Others who want to examine science in those contexts don’t necessarily assume that anyone can really be objective, or that any claim to knowledge can ever be free of the conditions in which it is formulated.

This class isn’t really going to examine much of this big, crazy, unruly bag of people examining the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Our main goal is to learn about one relatively recent development in that field. Anthropology played a major role in developing a new line of inquiry into the science–society nexus and a new school of thought has emerged from it which has had a huge influence on anthropology beyond the study of scientific knowledge and technology. That’s our focus—the development of a theory of society as a network that connects people, things, ideas, and information.

To begin this study of the network perspective in anthropology, we need to go back and consider how scholars have thought about people’s relationship to scientific knowledge and its applications in technology. Sociology (including anthropology) has always been a quest for universal knowledge about society. Sociology and anthropology say that they study anything that people do. Nothing is off limits, because everything people do they do in the context of social life. So for as long as there has been sociology, sociologists have wanted to examine science as part of society. The sociology of science has however always contained an uneasy mixture of both optimism and cynicism. On the one hand, sociologists of science see science as the expression of rationality, and thus capable of contributing to the rationalization and progressive development of society. Science is its own social force that drives progress toward modernity. On the other hand, other sociologists of science argue that scientific knowledge is no different than other social activities and thus is determined by and reduced to social forces of different kinds. These stances necessarily also entail claims about whether it is possible for scientific knowledge to be universal or can only ever be relative to a specific context. The question of of what kind of truth science can produce will motivate later developments.

Since the social sciences have at least historically wanted to be like natural sciences, and still arguably claim to be grounded in empirical inquiry, the debates over the influence between society and science necessarily also have implications for what kind of knowledge social scientists can produce, and what it means for people to know themselves and each other. For that reason, although it may seem like a narrow focus, inquiry into the society–science nexus has always promised a major paradigm shift in the social sciences.

Keywords

paradigm, sociology of scientific knowledge, technology, enframing, modernity, progress

Learning outcomes

• Understand the scope of the class, the nature of seminar participation, and the roles for teachers and students in an advanced class.
• Be familiar with some of the background and preceding debates that inform contemporary social studies of science and technology.
• Be familiar with the main thesis of this class, which is that the concept of a network is a perspective which can be applied to any domain of empirical inquiry, and which change the questions one asks about facts in these domains.