Re-Thinking Science E-Book

Helga Nowotny

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 564

Beschreibung

Re-Thinking Science presents an account of the dynamic relationship between society and science. Despite the mounting evidence of a much closer, interactive relationship between society and science, current debate still seems to turn on the need to maintain a 'line' to demarcate them. The view persists that there is a one-way communication flow from science to society - with scant attention given to the ways in which society communicates with science. The authors argue that changes in society now make such communications both more likely and more numerous, and that this is transforming science not only in its research practices and the institutions that support it but also deep in its epistemological core. To explain these changes, Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons have developed an open, dynamic framework for re-thinking science. The authors conclude that the line which formerly demarcated society from science is regularly transgressed and that the resulting closer interaction of science and society signals the emergence of a new kind of science: contextualized or context-sensitive science. The co-evolution between society and science requires a more or less complete re-thinking of the basis on which a new social contract between science and society might be constructed. In their discussion the authors present some of the elements that would comprise this new social contract.

Leseprobe

Re-Thinking Science

Knowledge and the Publicin an Age of Uncertainty

Helga NowotnyPeter ScottMichael Gibbons

Polity

Copyright © Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott and Michael Gibbons 2001

The right of Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott and Michael Gibbons to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2001 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell

Publishers, a Blackwell Publishing Company

Reprinted 2002 (twice), 2004 (twice), 2006, 2007, 2008 (twice)

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Maiden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes 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.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-2607-9

ISBN: 978-0-7456-2608-6 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress.

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

by Kolam Information Services Private Ltd, Pondicherry, India

Printed in the United States by Odyssey Press Inc., Gonic, New Hampshire

This book is printed on acid-free paper

For Didja in memoriam

Contents

Preface

  1 The Transformation of Society

  2 Beyond Modernity – Breaching the Frontiers

  3 The Co-Evolution of Society and Science

  4 The Context Speaks Back

  5 The Transformation of Knowledge Institutions

  6 The Role of Universities in Knowledge Production

  7 How Does Contextualization Happen?

  8 Weakly Contextualized Knowledge

  9 Strongly Contextualized Knowledge

10 Contextualization of the Middle Range

11 From Reliable Knowledge to Socially Robust Knowledge

12 The Epistemological Core

13 Science Moves into the Agora

14 Socially Distributed Expertise

15 Re-Visioning Science

16 Re-Thinking Science is not Science Re-Thought

References

Index

Preface

The aim of this work is to present an account of a dynamic relationship between society and science. It seemed to us that the current array of arguments intended to persuade society to support science did not take sufficient account of the developments that have taken place, whether in society or in research, which are discussed both in the scholarly and policy literatures and in the popular press. Despite the mounting evidence of a much closer, interactive relationship between society and science, current debate still seems to turn on the need, one way or another, to maintain a ‘line’ to demarcate them. Often, too, there is a presumption that communication flows one way – from science to society – with scant attention paid to describing the transformative effects of any reverse communication. The development of arguments which bring current social realities and research practices into line, we believe, requires not so much a clearer articulation of the current arguments, useful as that may be, as a revisiting of the foundations on which they are based. To this end, we have developed an open, dynamic framework for re-thinking science. It is based upon four conceptual pillars: the nature of Mode-2 society; the contextualization of knowledge in a new public space, called the agora; the development of conditions for the production of socially robust knowledge; and the emergence of socially distributed expertise. Our conclusion, briefly stated, is that the closer interaction of science and society signals the emergence of a new kind of science: contextualized, or context-sensitive, science. Of course, this book builds on our previous work, The New Production of Knowledge (Gibbons et al. 1994), particularly in its greater elaboration of the significance of the ‘social’ in the practice and constitution of science, but familiarity with that work is not essential to understanding the argument developed here.

This volume, as was the last, is the outcome of a collaborative effort, albeit, this time, with a reduced team. Its production has occupied our thoughts for nearly three years and over this period we have had meetings in London, Zurich and Stockholm, during which we read, modified and, not infrequently, discarded drafts that had been prepared in the period between one meeting and another. Following our usual practice we have aimed to produce an integrated text rather than a set of individual essays. Working with this intention in mind renders unfruitful all attempts to identify who has contributed what to the final result. In any event, as we have already indicated, this is not our style. We have decided, in this case, to rotate the authorship from the strict alphabetical listing of our previous writing, but we want to make it clear that the new arrangement reflects nothing more than our decision to do so.

Many individuals have helped us along the way. In particular, we would like to thank: Yehuda Elkana, Camille Limoges, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, and John Ziman, with whom we have discussed our ideas at various stages of their formulation; Alessandro Maranta and Myriam Spörri, who checked our references and completed the bibliography; and Sarah Cripps, who compiled the index.

We owe a special debt of gratitude to Dan Brändström, Director of the Tercentenary Fund of the Royal Swedish Bank and to Thorsten Nybøhm, Director of the Swedish Council for Higher Education whose organizations together funded the project. We also want to acknowledge the special contribution of Roger Svensson, Director of the Swedish Foundation for International Co-operation in Research and Higher Education, whose role was, ostensibly, to provide us with administrative back-up. In fact, he made substantive contributions to our discussions, making available to us insights from his vast store of practical experience, and constantly prodding us to provide concrete instances of our more abstract speculations. Roger has been our colleague now on two intellectual journeys and we hope he will not desert us should we begin to contemplate a third!

As we have indicated, this book was written in intervals carved out of over-busy schedules. This has demanded sacrifices and support from our family and friends. In particular, to Carlo Rizzuto, Cherill Scott and Gillian Gibbons, we simply want to say that we won’t do it again, but expect that you know us too well to believe that!

Sadly, in the midst of our writing, Helga Nowotny’s brother, Didja, died after an agonizing illness. Working as we do, intensely, in close proximity, over long periods of time, it is to be expected that our thoughts would be affected by his suffering. We would like to recognize his abiding presence in the composition of these pages by dedicating this book to his memory.

Helga Nowotny

Peter Scott

Michael Gibbons

1The Transformation of Society

Science has spoken, with growing urgency and conviction, to society for more than half a millennium. Not only has it determined technical processes, economic systems and social structures, it has also shaped our everyday experience of the world, our conscious thoughts and even our unconscious feelings. Science and modernity have become inseparable. In the past half-century society has begun to speak back to science, with equal urgency and conviction. Science has become so pervasive, seemingly so central to the generation of wealth and well-being, that the production of knowledge has become, even more than in the past, a social activity, both highly distributed and radically reflexive. Science has had to come to terms with the consequences of its own success, both potentialities and limitations.

In The New Production of Knowledge, changes in the constitution of science and in research practice were attributed to the growing contextualization and socialization of knowledge. One of the characteristics of Mode-2 science, we claimed, was that knowledge was now being generated ‘in the context of application’, and our book contained frequent references, appeals even, to the ‘social’. The implication of our argument was that science could no longer be regarded as an autonomous space clearly demarcated from the ‘others’ of society, culture and (more arguably) economy. Instead all these domains had become so ‘internally’ heterogeneous and ‘externally’ interdependent, even transgressive, that they had ceased to be distinctive and distinguishable (the quotation marks are needed because ‘internal’ and ‘external’ are perhaps no longer valid categories). This was hardly a bold claim. Many other writers have argued that heterogeneity and interdependence have always been characteristic of science, certainly in terms of its social constitution, and that even its epistemological and methodological autonomy had always been precariously, and contingently, maintained and had never gone unchallenged. In a recent essay in Science, Bruno Latour wrote about the transition from the culture of ‘science’ to the culture of ‘research’ in the past 150 years:

Science is certainty; research is uncertainty. Science is supposed to be cold, straight and detached; research is warm, involving, and risky. Science puts an end to the vagaries of human disputes; research creates controversies. Science produces objectivity by escaping as much as possible from the shackles of ideology, passions and emotions; research feeds on all of those to render objects of inquiry familiar. (Latour 1998: 208-9)

Latour goes on to argue that science and society cannot be separated; they depend on the same foundation. What has changed is their relationship. In traditional society science was ‘external’; society was – or could be – hostile to scientific values and methods, and, in turn, scientists saw their task as the benign reconstitution of society according to ‘modern’ principles which they were largely responsible for determining. In contemporary society, in contrast, science is ‘internal’; as a result science and research are no longer terminal or authoritative projects (however distant the terminus of their inquiry or acknowledgement of their authority), but instead, by creating new knowledge, they add fresh elements of uncertainty and instability. A dialectical relationship has been transformed into a collusive one. In the sub-head in another article Latour sums this up as ‘a science freed from the politics of doing away with politics’ (Latour 1997: 232).

So much is common, and uncontroversial, ground. But, even in this more ‘open’ description, much of the attention remains focused on science rather than society. The latter impinges on the argument only when it touches the former – for example, when controversies about nuclear power or environmental pollution draw in a wider range of actors whose presence and significance cannot be ignored. The perspective is still mainly that of the scientific community(ies) – its composition more heterogeneous, its values more contested, its methods more diverse and its boundaries more ragged, of course, but still distinguishable from other domains such as culture, economy and society. In other words the relationship is viewed principally from one, still dominant, perspective. Indeed, it is possible to read into this more ‘open’ description of science (‘research’ in Latour’s term) a restatement of traditional accounts of the scientification of society. Science’s success has made the world more complicated and scientists must wrestle with the consequences of this complication. But science is still in charge.

It is more unusual to view this changed relationship from the perspective of society. The transformation of society is regarded as predominantly shaped by scientific and technical change. In other words the socialization of science has been contingent on the scientification of society. There are now extended scientific communities and more urgent socio-scientific controversies because society as a whole has been permeated by science, although it is accepted that in the process the culture of science – autonomist, reductive and self-referential – has been transformed into something different: in Latour’s phrase, a culture of research which is more populist, pluralistic and open. The ‘social’ has been absorbed into the ‘scientific’. It follows, therefore, that those other aspects of social transformation that appear initially to have owed less to scientific and technical change, even if subsequently they have helped to shape Latour’s culture of research, must be regarded as inherently less significant. As a result, changes in the affective and aesthetic domains, so dominant in our definitions of modernity, have rarely been given prominence in analyses of the changing science-society relationship – except, perhaps, to be dismissed as irritating irruptions of irrationality.