Segment 3
Dear List,
I move on now to the next segment of the paper, "Sciences as
Communicational Communities," as I am dividing it. This segment
begins with paragraph 11 and ends with paragraph 17. It is
reproduced in its entirety at the end of the post. There are a
number of subjects addressed in these paragraphs, making this the
most complex segment of the paper, in my view. Several key ideas from
Peirce make their appearance, as JR lays out how he sees scientific
communities organizing themselves in contrast to the negotiational
view of the academic politicians.
In paragraph 11 JR makes a crucial point. He asserts that, what
governs scientific communication (and, so, truth-seeking) are norms
that are well understood in practice but not in critical reflection
(either scientists' or non-scientists'). I wonder if this
practice/reflection distinction is possibly related to the the logica
utens/logica docens distinction somehow. In any case, the reason for
this absence of critical reflection in JR's view is that the norms
are so familiar that their significance is rarely a focus of
attention. As a consequence, the understanding of why they are
recognized as they are and how they "carry the burden" of regulating
truth-seeking/objectivity remains vague.
Here, JR identifies the norms in a manner that, as it happens, fits
exactly with the cultural anthropological definition of "culture."
Cultural phenomena generally speaking are defined by anthropologists
as phenomena that are passed on from generation to generation,
learned by youngers from elders generally without critical
reflection, and are typically governed by intelligence that is so
familiar as to "go without saying." A whole discipline of social
science, in other words, has grown up around the problem of
investigating exactly the kind of thing JR is here intending to
investigate. In this regard, JR is himself taking up the mantle of
the cultural anthropologist (at least from the perspective of members
of that discipline), apparently unintentionally, and engaging in a
kind of inquiry that has defined this particular social science for
over a century.
In paragraph 12, JR elaborates further on the character of the norms
he seeks to better understand, making two further assertions: 1)
these norms govern professional publication and 2) these norms are
justified by the positive ("flourishing") condition of the community
using them. It would seem that with regard to 2) especially, the
spirit of Peirce is again clearly manifest. The norms are not
somehow essentially significant or inherently true or otherwise
meaningful. Their validity is contingent on the general character of
the collective that sets them to work.
In paragraphs 13, 14, and 15, JR turns his attention to defining
publication, drawing attention to certain features of it so as to be
able to reflect critically on the norms themselves. He notes that
the kind of publication he has in mind (a best case token of what he
acknowledges is a more diverse general type) is one in which what is
published provides feedback to the leading edges of a given field of
inquiry. Most important: publication must be understood as
occurring within a "public" that shares a common interest in a given
subject-matter. When publication is understood with these traits in
mind, a range of non-obvious implications can be unpacked that JR
asserts will help reflect critically on the norms at issue.
Paragraph 16 is a key passage in this paper. Here JR underscores
the importance of the subject-matter orientation that drives
professional communication/truth-seeking in his view. He writes,
"academic publication is based on what is minimally essential in
maintaining a common and increasingly adequate reference to the
subject-matter of the field of inquiry." JR finds the hard sciences
exemplary in this regard--the special relation of the hard sciences
to pragmaticism is made explicit here. The hard sciences have
identified what is minimally essential to maintain a common/adequate
reference: "controlled observation." This general conception has
provided a common and adequate basis for all professional
communication. It has enabled the scientific community to reference
its subject-matter with greater clarity, accuracy, and truth, and
this has generated a flourishing community--evidence that the
conception is one to be valued. The hardness of the hard sciences is
a product of their controlled observation of subject-matter, and the
stability that this methodological principle has tended to bring
about in relation to how its subject-matter has been comprehended.
JR actually uses the term "object" in this paragraph, leaving little
doubt that he has the Object/Sign relation in mind in this
description of how scientific inquiry is governed. The paragraph
stresses the Dynamic Object's (DO's) capacity to determine the
Representamen--something that has come up in numerous papers prior to
this one. JR does not appear to be dealing with the Immediate Object
(IO) in this discussion. It would seem that, if he were to do so,
it might complicate the picture of scientific inquiry considerably,
as the IO, as has been repeatedly observed in previous threads, is
determined, not by the DO, but via the Representamen-Object relation.
In the last paragraph of this section, 17, JR turns the model of
scientific publication he has developed against the academic
politician, or as he now labels the figure, "the sociologist of
knowledge" (this, as I've said before, seems most closely to
reference Foucault, although at this point I begin to wonder if the
figure is really a caricature that JR is invoking entirely for the
purposes of making his own position clearer and which has no actual
or specific scholarly referent). He argues that the sociologist of
knowledge is led to making the false claims about scientific practice
that he does because the sociologist cannot relate to the
subject-matter of science. The sociologists' understanding of the
subject-matter's controlled observation is so entirely lacking that
the sociologist cannot even begin to develop a relation to it. And
if the sociologist somehow were to gain this understanding and
develop a scientific perspective on the subject-matter, the very act
of doing so would cause him to loose his sociological focus and
prevent him from pursuing any sociological investigation.
With regard to JR's first argument here, he is generally in line with
the disciplinary perspective of cultural anthropology. That is, a
cultural anthropologist investigating a scientific community (and
there are a large number of anthropologists doing this these days,
particularly with regard to communities that have formed in relation
to the medical sciences) would consider it necessary to develop
expertise on the subject-matter the community is investigating and to
be able to communicate with the members of the community about that
subject-matter fluently. Lacking this familiarity with the
community's forms of controlled observation of the subject-matter,
the anthropologist would have no credibility as a social scientist to
make any claims of understanding that community's professional
practices. So to this point, JR is actually expressing views that
correspond closely to anthropological disciplinary norms of conduct.
However, JR's second claim, that a sociologist cannot do both
sociological research and also engage in the research practices of
the scientific community studied departs from the anthropological
disciplinary perspective and would meet with vigorous opposition.
The discipline of cultural anthropology has developed a distinctive
method, called long-term "participant/observation," designed to deal
with exactly this situation. The method, which is identified
specifically with cultural anthropological (not sociological)
research, is processual in character. It recognizes that over the
course of an extended period of interaction, the anthropologist will
be shifting continuously between two fundamentally different modes of
learning: one in which the anthropologist observes analytically the
activities of the community and one in which the anthropologist
engages actively in the practices of the community. JR's claim that
such multi-modal learning is impossible has virtually the whole of
the ethnographic record weighing in against it, including a large
literature focused on the anthropology of science and technology,
published by anthropologists whose knowledge of the scientific
subject-matter and the methods used to investigate it is extensive,
detailed, and acknowledged as accurate by the scientific communities
at issue. At least if one goes by the empirical evidence, JRs denial
of any possibility of this kind of shifting between disciplinary
practices while engaged in a research process appears invalid.
Having said this, I'm not sure that it matters all that much. JR's
primary interest here is not really to explain why academic
politicians/sociologists of knowledge are destined to come up with
false images of science, but to identify how hard scientists can
dispense with them once they do. However, since JRs comments are so
directly touching upon concepts, methods and procedures of my home
discipline, I supply this additional commentary. The limits of his
cross-disciplinary understanding would seem to come into view in this
segment.
This attack on the sociologist of knowledge brings this segment to a
close. JR will now leave the plight of the sociologist aside and
move on to the heart of the matter--the analysis of the norms
themselves as they can be seen to govern inquiry.
I will post on Segment 4 in 3-4 days.
Best,
Sally
.
Sciences as Communicational Communities, Paragraphs 11-17
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.
[12]
What are these norms and what justifies them as norms? They are
the norms that govern professional publication in academia in
general, and not simply in the sciences, and their
justification--supposing they really are justifiable--consists in the
fact -- supposing it is a fact -- that a research community that
honors them in the spirit as well as the letter will flourish whereas
a research community which conforms to them only in the letter
without a real understanding of what their purpose or rationale
actually is, or which does not conform to them at all, will waste its
intellectual energies in endless acrimonious dispute about
methodology and in the politics of academic empire building and turf
protection.
[13]
I am not, of course, referring to publication schedules or
publication policies established in mindless emulation of what are
often bogus models of research and scholarship having no real
connection with the way professional publication actually works at
the leading edge of research, but rather of publication as the
process of communication of and about results as these results are
being fed back into the process that produced them in such a way as
to modify that process itself by altering its content or form in some
way. Results that do not have that immediate effect may, to be sure,
have such an effect at a later time -- possibly even many years later
-- and it is important to understand how to control the flow of
research results in such a way that what is not assimilated or
assimilable at the leading edge at a given time be retained in
standing availability. Indeed, it would be difficult to exaggerate
the importance of a sophisticated understanding of this for the
health of a tradition of inquiry, notwithstanding the fact that it is
something hardly understood at all at present and typically discussed
only in connection with the economics and politics of publication
rather than in connection with its underlying logic or rationale. But
I cannot devote even the bare minimum of discussion of this that
would be required to make its importance clear in the present paper
and will simply bracket that for the present in order to focus
attention effectively on publication, which will be assumed here to
be fed back into the research process at the leading edge or at least
made maximally available for that purpose. The question is, what do
we have to understand about this to understand what the most
fundamental norms of inquiry are?
[14]
I believe that these things can be understood and the norms can
even be specified in some detail if it is understood that scientific
publication proper, like professional academic publication in
general, is (1) communication that occurs within a special public (2)
which consists of all persons--living, dead, and as yet unborn--with
a common interest in a certain subject-matter, (3) the common
interest being to come to a better understanding of that
subject-matter (more profound, more comprehensive, and better
grounded) than exists at any given moment, and (4) who understand
that what binds them together in a communicational community is not
their personal affinities and likenesses but their common concern
that that subject-matter should be increasingly well understood by
all who are similarly concerned.
[15]
Now, if this sounds initially like a sequence of truisms, don't
dismiss it on that account: for one thing, truisms frequently have
the merit of being true (their deficiency is that they tend to be
jejune and require rejuvenation); for another, anything we discover
from critical reflection on our own practice should be of the nature
of a truism since it is supposed to express what we already take for
granted; for a third, there is abundant testimony from philosophers
from antiquity to the present to the effect that the most difficult
things to perceive are precisely those that are ubiquitous in our
lives or in our experience; and for a fourth, from these truisms or
something very like them we can unpack a range of implications about
the norms not only of scientific activity but of academic
intellectual life in general that are by no means obvious and can be
of help for the problem at hand.
[16]
My intention in the formulation above is to lay as much stress
as possible on the subject-matter of inquiry, and if the occasion
permitted I would try to show, first, that the universal--and
commonly recognized--form of professional academic publication is
based on what is minimally essential in maintaining a common and
increasingly adequate reference to the subject-matter of the field of
inquiry, and I would argue that the reason the "hard" sciences have
been so successful as to warrant that appellation lies in their
adoption of the general conception of controlled observation
(experiment is the special case) as the stabilizing element at the
basis of all professional communication, which functions primarily to
insure that it is finally the subject-matter or object of scientific
study--not the scientists--that controls science by determining in
interaction with the inquiring scientist what is and is not accepted
and taken for granted in the science.
[17]
I can say in the present space at least this much, though, by
way of suggestion, that the sociologist of knowledge who concludes
that it must be negotiation among scientists that lies at the basis
of science does so because the sociologist, as an outsider to the
inquiry being observed, cannot relate to the subject-matter as the
scientist-participants do and indeed cannot locate the subject-matter
in its essential internal relationships within inquiry at all, and
thus must leave out of account that factor in the process the
reference to which constitutes the basis of its objectivity and makes
pertinent the concept of truth. The sociologist can, of course,
become a participant just as anybody else who qualifies themselves to
do so can in principle become a participant, but insofar as the
sociologist participates the sociologist is doing something other
than sociology (except in the special case of inquiry into sociology
as a science), and the sociological account remains radically
incomplete and, apparently, incapable of completion -- unless,
indeed, the sociologist can find the thread that leads out of this
labyrinth (which has been recognized in a variety of forms before) by
inquiring into the one case where the sociologist seems clearly to be
in position to relate to the subject-matter of inquiry in the way
required by inquiry into that inquiry, namely, in the case of
sociological self-reflection. The methodological problem is, of
course, to avoid disappearing into the mysteries of one's own navel
in doing so.
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