Segment 2
Dear List:
I progress on, now, to paragraphs 7-11 of the paper "Sciences as
Communicational Communities," Again, the text segment is reproduced
at the bottom of this email in its entirety.
In this segment, JR focuses mainly on the details of the case made
against scientists by academic politicians. He describes two false
images of scientists that academic politicians employ in order to
justify their own intrusion into the internal governance of
scientific inquiry. In my reading, JR is speaking very clearly in
"the spirit of Peirce" in conceptualizing these images and in a way
that relates back to earlier papers discussed in the slow read.
The first false image, which JR notes is held plausible by "large
numbers of students and faculty alike" (p7), is one of scientists as
being "infallible knowers of the truth" (p 7 emphasis mine). Peirce's
concept of fallibilism here becomes plainly visible in JR's argument.
JR establishes fallibilism as a basic character of the scientist--so
important that without it any notion of what it means to be a
scientist is not only false but preposterously so. The strength of
JR's criticism of this false image of science can be read, in this
regard, as a way to emphasize to his audience the importance of
fallibilism in any scientific identity, including theirs.
At this point, fallibilism would seem to have been, in hindsight, the
main concept that JR had in mind when he emphasized earlier that
scientific inquiry should be understood, first and foremost, as a
matter of "discovery processes"--that is to say, as processes that
are not infallible, not mechanistic, not perfect. Once fallibilism
is recognized, in JRs view, the false image of the scientist as a
magical, omniscient figure becomes obviously and entirely
untenable--so a great deal is hanging on the recognition of
fallibilism in JR's argument. This would seem to be very much in the
spirit, as well as in the letter, of Peirce. As a matter of
rhetoric, at least, JR assumes that his audience is already in
agreement with his comments along these lines, already on board
Peirce's fallibilist scientific band wagon so to speak.
One question that comes to mind here is whether or not the previous
posts on fallibilism add anything to JR's remarks here.
At this point in the essay, JR turns his critical attention onto the
scientific community itself for a moment, stating that the widespread
dissemination of this false infallible image "should surely give
scientists pause that they apparently present themselves so poorly"
(p7) He warns against using this false image in order to "sell"
science to the general public (implying that this may well already
have been done and done as a matter of regular practice). JR finds
this strategy unnecessary (given how impressive the current record of
scientific achievement is) as well as dehumanizing (p7). This is
the first indication that JR holds the scientific community partially
responsible for whatever success academic politicians are currently
enjoying.
The second false image of scientists, which is directly and
specifically tied to the academic politicians (who claim it as their
own contribution to knowledge, according to JR), is that scientists
are negotiators who do not really seek truth but who falsely
represent themselves as doing so in order to "buttress their
institutional status as authoritarian dogmatists" (p8). Here, again,
JR turns his critical gaze toward the scientific community, holding
its membership accountable for allowing such a false image to stand
unchallenged and to gain adherents (p9).
The question that comes to mind here is, who is JR (in the spirit of
Peirce) really going after when he goes after the false image falsely
"discovered" by "academic politicians"? JR is careful to name only
Kleinman, but he even relegates Kleinman to an unoriginal role,
repeatedly characterizing him as being only a generic token of this
academic politician type. Who are the leaders of this type? What
philosophical approaches or influential social science research is
the "academic politician" representing? As I mentioned in a previous
post, my first guess would be proponents of Foucault's theories of
power/knowledge. However, perhaps there are other philosophical
figures that JR was more interested in taking on.
In the final paragraph of this section, JR concedes that the second
false image of scientists does contain at least one important grain
of truth: that there is a communicational aspect of scientific
inquiry that does require individual scientists to settle certain
matters of truth and knowledge by "collegial communication" (p10).
This kind of communication is not absolutely different from the
"negotiations" on which the academic politicians fix their attention.
While JR largely rejects the "political model" that the idea of
negotiation entails, he does grant that a detailed examination of
scientific communicational processes is necessary to sort out what is
and isn't involved in it and to determine what is false and what is
of value in the work the academic politicians have done. This brings
JR to the main focus of his paper: the nature of the communicational
process and professional scientific communicational practices.
JR complicates the picture of the relation between professional
scientists and academic politicians in this segment, as he zeroes in
on what--as Jon A. asked in an earlier post--to do about the problems
evident in this relation. What JR wants to do is clear: 1) get a
handle on the difference between political negotiation and
truth/knowledge communication and 2) motivate scientists to be more
pro-active in representing the fallible, discovery-oriented character
of scientific inquiry. He will spend much more time on 1) than on 2)
in the segments that follow.
At this point, JR has done a masterful job of translating Peirce into
non-specialist terms, identifying how the scientists in the audience
are already Peircean in certain critically important respects, and
demonstrating the value of setting some of Peirce's main ideas to
work on serious problems of current interest to these scientists.
Yet, he also seems to have made it clear that Peirce is a hard
scientist's philosopher in the main, that there is a special bond
between Peirce and the physical sciences. Would listers agree? The
mainstreams of the soft sciences certainly have worked very hard to
replicate the hard sciences in every way possible, including (I would
even argue especially) their communicational practices. Are the
communicational practices of hard scientists nonetheless distinctive
in some general respect that JR is here illuminating, in the spirit
of Peirce?
I plan to post on the next segment in 3-4 days time.
Best regards,
Sally
PARAGRAPHS 7-11 OF SCIENCES AS COMMUNICATIONAL COMMUNITIES
The sort of case which academic politicians like Kleinman make
usually uses the same basic rhetorical strategy, which starts by
claiming that -- or speaking as if -- scientists make pretense to
being something they cannot possibly be, namely, infallible knowers
of the truth about something in virtue of being equipped with methods
which guarantee that whatever conclusions they come to with use of
them will be the truth. Stated baldly, this depiction of the
scientists' supposed self-image as inquirers is preposterous, to be
sure, but in fact it is almost always some variation on this that is
first attributed to the scientists and then attacked and it should
surely give scientists pause that they apparently present themselves
so poorly both to students in general and to their nonscientific
faculty colleagues that such a travesty of their self-conception is
actually found plausible by large numbers of students and faculty
alike. Public presentations of science ought never to encourage this
false image, either directly or indirectly, in the mistaken believe
that science can be "sold" to the public on that basis. The general
public supports science as much as it does because of its perceived
results, to be sure, but not because of any misguided belief they
might have that it is an infallible procedure, even if they do in
fact have that belief: the results of theoretical science are now so
obvious and important to the public and its political representatives
that those who speak for the sciences should be doing what they can
to dissuade people from their natural tendency to think that science
must be something with magical potency and even infallibility
precisely because it is so powerful. For this is not only a false
image but also one which runs directly counter to the perception of
science as adventure and exploration, which is what must be conveyed
if it is to continue to attract the kind of people to it who are
wanted. To present science as an infallible machine-like activity or
to present scientists as authority figures pronouncing definitively
on this or that functions only to dehumanize it and generate deep
fears and resentments of it.
[8]
In any case, the next move in the usual attack on the sciences
is to claim that careful and extensive empirical study of the actual
behavior of scientists by sociologists and historians shows that they
have no such method of acquiring truth after all, and that they
actually come to their conclusions simply by communicating with one
another until they are in agreement and they call that agreement the
"truth" of the matter. The communicational process is then labeled by
the sociologist of knowledge as "negotiation", and the conclusion is
drawn that, in practice, scientific truth is just negotiated
agreement among people who call themselves "scientists," and truth
and knowledge claims are really just rhetorical devices used by
scientists when speaking to the general public to buttress their
institutional status as authoritarian dogmatists. This is the image
of science as the High Church of Reason, with scientists cast as
practitioners of priestcraft, which occurs frequently in anti-science
rhetoric in recent years.
[9]
The reason this kind of attack can be effective in spite of its
intellectual crudeness is that, for one thing, scientists have helped
to lay the groundwork for it themselves by allowing such a grotesque
misrepresentation of the nature of scientific inquiry to develop and
to stand unchallenged in their own day-to-day academic activities,
including their teaching and their relationships with their
colleagues in the humanities and soft sciences. Scientists are not,
after all, without voice or effective presence in academia, and there
is surely something to be explained in the fact that this sort of
thing is not simply dismissed as a bad joke but actually taken
seriously by what seem to be increasingly large numbers of
nonscientific students and academicians.
[10]
A further reason for its rhetorical effectiveness is the fact
that there is of course no algorithm--no routine or unfailing
method--for finding out the truth about things or knowing for sure
when you have it; and since truth and knowledge in the hard sciences
is essentially located at the level of the scientific community
rather than the individual inquirer, matters are indeed settled by
collegial communication eventuating in common acceptance. Insofar as
they bring attention to the communicational aspect of scientific
inquiry, then, the sociologists and historians are right and are
performing a valuable intellectual service. They falsify this by
their labeling of the communicational process overall as
negotiational and the introduction of a political model of
discussion, but even here there is some substance in the claim and it
needs to be dealt with explicitly to see what it really does and does
not involve and imply. In general, what scientists--or rather, all of
us in academia--need to focus attention on if we are to understand
what we are doing, using the kind of self-critical awareness we
supposedly represent, is the nature of the communicational process
itself and of our professional communicational practices.
[11]
I omit discussion here of the way in which something like
negotiation does in fact play an important role in the sciences,
which I would argue to be secondary and not truly negotiational
except in a very loose sense. But to move to the heart of the matter
as quickly as possible here, let me simply say that all communication
among scientists that occurs in the process of inquiry as an
essential part of the process is governed by norms that are usually
understood well enough in practice -- in the hard sciences at least
-- to be generally effective, but which are still too poorly
understood in critical reflection, both within and outside of the
sciences, to provide the sort of understanding which is needed if
these attacks on the sciences are to countered as effectively as they
should be. It is the recognition in practice of these norms that
constitutes the commitment to truth and objectivity. But so familiar
are they in everyday practice that their significance goes unnoticed
and critical reflective discussion of them with the aim of
understanding why they are so commonly recognized and how they carry
the burden of the commitment to truth and objectivity rarely occurs.
Sometimes the obvious, precisely because of its ubiquitous presence,
goes unnoticed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To
remove yourself from this list, send a message to [email protected] with the
line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the
list, send it to [email protected]
