Another Science is Possible E-Book

Isabelle Stengers

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 227

Beschreibung

Like fast food, fast science is quickly prepared, not particularly good, and it clogs up the system. Efforts to tackle our most pressing issues have been stymied by conflict within the scientific community and mixed messages symptomatic of a rushed approach. What is more, scientific research is being shaped by the bubbles and crashes associated with economic speculation and the market. A focus on conformism, competitiveness, opportunism and flexibility has made it extremely difficult to present cases of failure to the public, for fear that it will lose confidence in science altogether. In this bold new book, distinguished philosopher Isabelle Stengers shows that research is deeply intertwined with broader social interests, which means that science cannot race ahead in isolation but must learn instead to slow down. Stengers offers a path to an alternative science, arguing that researchers should stop seeing themselves as the 'thinking, rational brain of humanity' and refuse to allow their expertise to be used to shut down the concerns of the public, or to spread the belief that scientific progress is inevitable and will resolve all of society's problems. Rather, science must engage openly and honestly with an intelligent public and be clear about the kind of knowledge it is capable of producing. This timely and accessible book will be of great interest to students, scholars and policymakers in a wide range of fields, as well anyone concerned with the role of science and its future.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1 Towards a Public Intelligence of the Sciences

Should ‘the public’ ‘understand’ the sciences?

What should the public understand?

Sciences need connoisseurs

Good will is not enough

Science on trial

Inconvenient truths

Resisting the merchants of doubt

Notes

2 Researchers With the Right Stuff

The gender of science

Real researchers

The construction of a real researcher

Demobilisation?

Notes

3 Sciences and Values: How Can we Slow Down?

In the grip of evaluation

Who are the peers?

‘Science’, an amalgam to be dissolved

Contrasts

Symbioses

Slowing down …

Notes

4 Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn and the Challenge of Slowing Down the Sciences

Notes

5 ‘Another Science is Possible!’ A Plea for Slow Science

Notes

6 Cosmopolitics: Civilising Modern Practices

No guarantee

Political ecology

Civilising politics

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Another Science is Possible

A Manifesto for Slow Science

Isabelle Stengers

Translated by Stephen Muecke

polity

First published in French (excluding Chapter 4) as Une autre science est possible! Manifeste pour un ralentissement des sciences © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, France, 2013

French text of Chapter 4 © Isabelle Stengers

This English edition © Polity Press, 2018

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station Landing, Suite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2184-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stengers, Isabelle, author.Title: Another science is possible : a manifesto for slow science / Isabelle Stengers.Other titles: Autre science est possible! EnglishDescription: English edition. | Cambridge, UK : Polity, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.Identifiers: LCCN 2017026397 (print) | LCCN 2017027589 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509521838 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509521845 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509521807 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509521814 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Research--Social aspects. | Science--Social aspects. | Science--Philosophy.Classification: LCC Q180.A1 (ebook) | LCC Q180.A1 S73513 2017 (print) | DDC 501--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026397

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

For the GECo.For Serge GutwirthFor all those who allowed me to think that this is not simply utopian.

1Towards a Public Intelligence of the Sciences

Should ‘the public’ ‘understand’ the sciences?

Our Anglophone friends speak of the ‘public understanding of science’.1 But what is meant by ‘understand’ here? Many people think each citizen should have the basic ‘scientific equipment’ (or literacy) necessary to understand the world we live in, and especially to accept the legitimacy of the transformations of the world that the sciences bring about. In fact, when the public begins to resist an innovation that scientists have backed, as notably in the case of GMOs, the usual diagnosis points to the lack of such understanding. Thus, the public apparently fails to understand that the genetic modification of plants is not ‘essentially’ different from what farmers have been doing for millennia, but is just faster and more effective. Others say that the methods that make for ‘scientificity’ have to be understood first, and that the public supposedly mixes up ‘facts’ and ‘values’ because it doesn’t understand that scientists are free not to ask certain questions. Of course, it is not a matter of denying citizens the right to accept or reject an innovation, but they should do so only on the basis of solid reasons, and not confuse scientific facts with their own convictions or values. The need for an apprenticeship in the sciences, it is argued, is founded on the fact that close observation, the formulation of hypotheses and their verification or refutation, form the basis not only for the construction of scientific knowledge but for all rational procedures. The sciences are therefore a model that every citizen should follow in their daily lives.

Such arguments are used today to justify a veritable ‘order word’2 coming from public authorities when faced with a somewhat suspicious citizenry. If the latter are sceptical about the benefits the sciences bring to society, the response will be: ‘The public and its science have to understand each other.’ The possessive ‘its’ implies what standard science lessons in school try to get across: scientific reasoning belongs by right to all, in the sense that, confronted with the same ‘facts’ as Galileo or Maxwell, each of us could have drawn the same conclusions.

Of course, anyone with even a minimal exposure to the history of science, or to the sciences themselves ‘as they are made’, can easily conclude that the anonymous rational being drawing these ‘same conclusions’ is just the correlate of the ‘rational reconstruction’ of the situation, from which any reason for hesitation has been purged, and where the facts literally ‘shout out’ the conclusion they lead to with all the authority one could wish for.

In any event, laboratory conditions, reconstructed or not, have very little to do with those situations we are confronted with as citizens. For the latter, I would use Bruno Latour’s felicitous phrase, ‘matters of concern’, which, in opposition to what are presented as ‘matters of fact’, insists that we think, hesitate, imagine and take sides. ‘Concern’ happily incorporates the notions of preoccupation and choice, but also the idea that there are situations that concern us before they become objects of preoccupation or choice, situations which, in order to be appropriately characterised, demand that ‘we feel concerned’. We should not talk about these situations being ‘politicised’, as too many scientists complain. They are a long way from being occasions for the more or less arbitrary or contingent expression of political engagement; rather, what they require is the power to make people think about what concerns them, and to refuse any appeal to ‘matters of fact’ that would bring about a consensus. If there is a question to be asked, then, it is first of all how such situations have so often come to be separated from this very same power, which they require.

To return to GMOs, they constitute a quite different ‘matter of concern’ from laboratory GMOs defined in terms of the preoccupations of biologists working away in well-monitored spaces. GMOs cultivated across thousands of hectares raise questions to do with genetic transfer and pesticide-resistant insects, questions that can’t be raised at the level of the laboratory, not to mention issues such as patent applications for modified plants, the reduction (already critical) of biodiversity, or the runaway use of pesticides and fertilizer.

The essential thing with ‘matters of concern’ is to get rid of the idea that there is a single ‘right answer’ and instead to put what are often difficult choices on the table, necessitating a process of hesitation, concentration and attentive scrutiny – and this despite the complaints of the entrepreneurs, for whom time is money and who demand that everything that is not prohibited be allowed. Then there is the propaganda, often in conjunction with scientific expertise, that all too frequently presents an innovation as ‘the’ correct solution ‘in the name of science’. This is why I would propose, in place of the notion of understanding, a ‘public intelligence’ [intelligence publique] of the sciences, involving the creation of intelligent relationships not just with scientific outcomes, but with scientists themselves.

What should the public understand?

When we speak of public intelligence, we have to emphasise first of all that it is not a matter of activists denouncing, as enemy number one, those biologists who have presented GMOs as ‘the’ rational and objective solution to the problem of world hunger. Rather, if a public intelligence is necessary, it essentially has to do with the very fact that those scientists were able to take this kind of position without a care in the world. If we put to one side hypotheses about dishonesty or conflicts of interest, then the question becomes one of understanding how the training and practice of researchers can lead to such arrogant and naive forms of communication, completely devoid of the critical thinking they so often boast about. How can one explain also the failure of the scientific community to publicly express outrage over this abuse of authority?

Quite the opposite occurred, it seems. Consider this extract from the summary report for the États généraux de la recherche held in 2004, in which researchers told the public what they should be understanding:

Citizens expect solutions from science for all sorts of social problems: unemployment, depleted oil reserves, pollution, cancer … the path that leads to the answers to these questions is not as direct as a programmatic vision of research would have us believe … Science can only function by dealing with its own problems in its own way, shielded from urgency and from the distortions inherent in economic and social contingencies.3

This quotation comes from a collective report, not the wild imagination of some individual. Its authors not only attribute to citizens the belief that science can solve problems like unemployment, they too seem to agree with this belief. Apparently, science can solve problems like this, but only if it is allowed the freedom to formulate its own questions, shielded from the ‘distortions’ said to be ‘inherent’ in ‘contingent’ economic and social preoccupations. In other words, authentic scientific solutions transcend such contingencies, and thus can ignore them (just as those biologists cheerleading for GMOs have ignored the economic and social dimensions of world hunger).

In short, what I have dubbed ‘matters of concern’ are characterised as ‘distortions’ in this account, while the solution that ‘science’ comes up with is identified as an answer to a problem that has at last been well-formulated. It follows that citizens are right to be trusting, but they have to know how to wait, and understand that scientists owe it to themselves to remain deaf to any noisy or anxious demands.

In fact, in 2004, the researchers did not address citizens, but went over their heads to the public authorities in charge of the politics of science, on the occasion of its redefinition in the terms of the ‘knowledge economy’. In their complaint they took up the hackneyed theme of the goose that lays the golden egg – stand back, keep it well fed, and don’t ask difficult questions, otherwise you will kill it and there will be no more eggs. Of course, it is not the business of the goose to wonder for whom her eggs are golden, and the generally beneficial character of scientific progress is taken for granted. The small question as to why this progress may today be associated with ‘unsustainable development’ is not asked.

I don’t think that scientists are ‘naive’, like the goose whose egg we remove from under it in order to give it a new value for the sake of humankind. They know perfectly well how to attract the interest of those capable of turning their results into gold. But they also know that the knowledge economy marks the end of the compromise that guaranteed them a minimum of vital independence. They can’t, however, talk about that openly, because they fear that if the public were to become aware of the ways in which science ‘is made’, they would lose confidence and reduce scientific proposals to simple expressions of particular interests. ‘People’ must continue to believe in the fable of ‘free’ research, driven by curiosity alone towards the discovery of the mysteries of the world (the kind of candy that helps so many well-meaning scientists to set about seducing childish souls).

In short, scientists have good reason to be uneasy, but they can’t say so. They can no more denounce those who feed them than parents can argue in front of their children. Nothing should upset the confident belief in Science, nor should ‘people’ be urged to get involved in questions they are not, in any case, capable of understanding.

Sciences need connoisseurs

If public intelligence on scientific questions has any meaning, it is in relation to this type of systematic distancing. Scientific institutions, the State and industry all find their interests converging here. But we should not be naive about this either. We should not set up, in opposition to an infantile public in need of comfort, the figure of a thoughtful, reliable public capable of participating in the things that concern it. One initial way of not being naive is to remind oneself over and over, as the physicist Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond has constantly done, that the question of being capable or not is equally relevant to scientists themselves. When he wrote ‘If scientism and irrationalism, traditional foes, are still going strong, it is because uncultivated science turns as easily into the cult of science as into occult science’,4 he was not just talking about the public, but also, perhaps above all, about scientists themselves. In other words, a public intelligence of science would involve an intelligent and lucid relationship to scientific claims, an intelligence that would concern the scientists as much as the ‘people’, since they are all vulnerable to the same temptation.

We know that what Lévy-Leblond calls scientific culture is not to be confused with some general scientific literacy – knowing ‘something’ about physical laws, atoms, DNA, etc. A cultivated science should produce not only specialists but also connoisseurs, as is the case in sport, music or software production, i.e., in domains where producers know that they have to take into account the existence of people who are able to evaluate the products, assess the kind of information they are given, discuss its relevance, and differentiate between mere propaganda and calculated risk. For specialists, the existence of such connoisseurs, or amateurs, creates a demanding environment, which obliges them to maintain a ‘cultivated’ relationship with whatever they are proposing – they know the danger of skipping over the weak points, because the people they are addressing will pay just as much attention to whatever is neglected or omitted as to what is asserted.

So let’s take up Lévy-Leblond’s clarion call, ‘There are no amateurs of science’, because it throws new light on the question of the public intelligence of science. It is not a matter of asking the general question, ‘Does the public have the capacity?’, but one of asserting that it doesn’t have the means to be capable. The ‘indifferent confidence’ of the public (that the scientists feel they have to protect against doubt) betrays above all the absence of demanding connoisseurs likely to hold scientists to the task of taking care when making normative judgements about what does or does not matter, or of presenting their results in a lucid manner that actively situates them in relation to the questions they really can answer, rather than as a response to whatever is the object of a more general interest. Had such an environment existed in 2004, the researchers would have thought twice before writing what they did.

It goes without saying that this is not a public where everyone would become a ‘connoisseur’ in every scientific field, a kind of generalised ‘amatorat’, or group of amateurs. But it could be a ‘distributed amatorat’, a multiplicity of connoisseurs dense enough so that those who aren’t connoisseurs in a given field can be confident that should it ever concern them, they will be able to approach it in an intelligent fashion thanks to the milieu of connoisseurs which has already formed around it.

Let me emphasise that the ‘connoisseur’ here has nothing to do with the autodidact, especially the kind that scientists (and even a philosopher like me) are only too familiar with as those unfortunates who go around desperately trying to get recognition, or at least a little attention, for their solution to some major problem. Connoisseurs are not advocates of ‘alternative’ knowledge, looking for professional recognition. But their interest in the knowledges produced by scientists is different from the interest of the producers of these knowledges. It is for this reason that they can appreciate the originality or the relevance of an idea but also pay attention to questions or possibilities that were not taken into account in its production, but that might become important in other circumstances. In other words, they are able to play a role the crucial character of which must be recognised by all those who care about rationality. They are agents of resistance against a scientific knowledge that pretends it has general authority; they partake in the production of what Donna Haraway calls ‘situated knowledges’.

Good will is not enough

These days, where the knowledge economy prevails, scientists could well have a vital need for a public intelligence nurtured by a milieu of connoisseurs. In the same way that uncultivated science can easily turn into occult science or into the cult of science, an indifferent confidence can tip towards mistrust or hostility. This is all the more likely to the extent that more organic links between research and private interests are being forged. Henceforth, those scientists who fight to conserve some basic autonomy will not be able to limit themselves to an appeal to ‘save research’. They will have to have the courage to say what it is that research needs to be saved from; they will have to go public on the ways in which they are urged or compelled to become simple providers of industrial opportunities. And they will need a public intelligence that is inclined to hear them.

But the scientists will also have to know how to earn the support that they need, which will not be the case unless they are capable of hearing and taking seriously those questions and objections which today they too often dismiss as opinions that ‘don’t understand the science’. From this point of view, it seems to me disappointing and unsettling that agronomists, field biologists, specialists in population genetics and others, who were at first excluded from the commissions dealing with GMOs and their associated risks, did not loudly and clearly acknowledge their debt to those whose efforts had secured them some kind of a hearing in the first place – that is, those adversarial groups who were able to persuade the public authorities to adopt a slightly more lucid position on the GMO question, and who brought them more generally out into the political, social and scientific culture.

Here the scientific ethos itself is at stake, and in particular scientists’ mistrust of everything that runs the risk of ‘mixing up’ what they consider to be ‘facts’ and values’. This deeply embedded mistrust is quite different from a simple ignorance that might be remedied by courses on epistemology or the history of science. My teaching experience tells me that most students enrolled in the so-called ‘hard sciences’ make up their minds to forget such courses once they’ve got through the exams. No surprises there, because by signing up for a ‘hard science’ degree they have made a choice that is not initially motivated by ‘curiosity’ – or the ‘desire to uncover the mysteries of the universe’ (most students arriving with this in mind quickly realise their mistake) – but by the image of the sciences promoted by the education system. They have learned that the sciences allow problems to be ‘well-posed’ and therefore amenable to being given the ‘right solutions’. And those solutions will be beyond dispute, verifiable by anyone, thereby silencing those chatterers who mix everything up. However partial and deceitful this image may be, it has the power to attract and select. Those who opt to take scientific studies might be inclined to tolerate courses they consider ‘mere talk’, but they will not see them as a crucial part of their training – and many of their ‘real’ teachers will not fail to reinforce this prejudice with their shrugs, ironic smiles and wise counsel on the importance of not ‘spreading oneself too thinly’. Of course, any scientist worthy of the name will be ready to swear allegiance to epistemological principles concerning the limits of knowledge and its conditions of validity, but only in a formal way, because these principles will be forgotten the moment a situation arises in which their knowledge appears to be offering the ‘correct’, ultimately ‘rational’ solution to some question that has exercised the chatterers. Clearly, this ethos implies that scientists refuse to allow their own type of knowledge to be made part of the general culture: in their view amateurs are just chatterers who descend on these correct solutions and drag them into a world of idle gossip.

While it may be pointless to hope that courses on epistemology or the history of science could transform this situation, an experiment carried out over three years at the university in Brussels gave me a glimpse of another possibility.5 A framework was set up within which science students were confronted with socio-technico-scientific controversies, but they were given sole responsibility for exploring the issues via the resources on the internet, and hence for discovering, in their own way and with no predetermined method, the clashing arguments, the partial and partisan truths, as well as the huge range of facts involved. Unlike other frameworks for the ‘investigation of controversies’ (in particular that of Bruno Latour with his students at Sciences Po in Paris), it was not a case of taking part in the construction of a new kind of expertise. The framework applied to any student, and its ambition went no further than that of complicating their ‘thought habits’.

It became apparent that the students were interested in finding things out ‘in the field’, that is, on the Web: a field constituted by a variety of situations marked by uncertainty and by the entanglement of what they had assumed would be separable into ‘facts’ and ‘values’. They had been in the habit of relegating to ‘ethics’ (no one speaks of politics any more) everything that didn’t seem to bow down before the authority of the ‘facts’. They discovered that there are many conflicting types of ‘facts’, and that each of them was linked, for those presenting them, to what appeared to be important in the situation. But they didn’t draw sceptical or relativist conclusions from this discovery, because they realised that it was the situation itself (as a ‘matter of concern’) which imposed this conflictual entanglement that prohibited one order of importance (for example, that of proof) from dominating all the others. What indeed surprised them was the casual way in which scientists allow themselves to pooh-pooh as ‘non-scientific’ or ‘ideological’ things that others think are important.

I wouldn’t say that these students were inoculated once and for all against the scientific rationality/mere opinion opposition, but I was impressed by the fact that, far from being plunged into chaos, confusion and doubt, at least some of them seemed to experience a feeling of liberation. It was as if they had discovered with relief that they didn’t have to choose between facts and values, between their scientific loyalty and (the remains of) their social conscience, because it was the situation itself that required them to identify the relevance of a knowledge and to understand its selective character – what it makes important, what it neglects. It was as if this curiosity so often associated with science was being called upon and nourished for the first time.

Experiments like the one I have just described are obviously not sufficient, but they are perhaps necessary to weaken the hold of the slogans reproduced in such a remarkable way in the 2004 warning from the French research body. It seems that curiosity, much more than the critical reflexivity close to the hearts of epistemologists, is what needs to be nourished and freed from judgements about what does and doesn’t count. Perhaps this curiosity could bring together students from different fields, allowing them to work together, collectively confronting situations that force them to take a distance from their respective favourite abstractions, and above all to overcome two fears: on the one hand, that of ‘hard’ scientists confronted with questions they ‘can’t deal with’; on the other, that of ‘literary’ or ‘humanities’ specialists faced with the authority of the so-called hard sciences. In short, working together, they could develop a taste for what I am calling ‘intelligence’. And there will never be a public intelligence of science as long as scientists themselves don’t have a taste for intelligence.

Science on trial