In every technology the practice, with
its rule of thumb, was far ahead of science. Technology therefore became
the spur to science ....(Drucker 1961:342).
It is all
very well and good to say that beliefs are created, protected and
sustained by a cultural and social mileau; but, in saying that, aren't we
subscribing to the idea that truth is relative? in other words, if what we
believe is solely a function of the society and culture in which we are
imbedded, then how is it possible to claim that one particular view of the
world is somehow truer or better than another, or that one belief system
is a more accurate rendition of the real world than another? But what
about science? How is it possible to deny that it is indeed a better
belief system than those that preceded it? The simplistic form of
relativism that says that all beliefs are equally valid in their own
setting won't do. "Science does," as John Ziman puts it,
"have its triumphs."
It would be absurd to deny the validity
of a theoretical system such as quantum mechanics, to which we owe our
stock of nuclear weapons. Who would doubt the credibility of Mendelian
genetics, now completely confirmed at the molecular level by the
deciphering of the genetic code? At least some of the knowledge that have
been acquired 'scientifically' is as reliable as it could be (Ziman
1978:9).
The relationship between science and
other belief systems has long been a problem for social scientists,
historians and philosophers. In general, they have made two assumptions:
first, that there is a difference between primitive and modern or
scientific modes of thinking; second, that there is no need to explain why
scientific beliefs are held other than to assume they are held because
they are correct. In other words, while it is necessary to explain why the
people of Dobu believe in spirits, or why medieval priests burned witches,
it is not necessary to explain scientific beliefs other than to say they
represent a more correct way of looking at things. There is also the clear
implication that if Dobuans were scientific, they would not believe in
spirits, or that if medieval clerics had been scientific they would not
have precipitated the witchcraze.
I want to question these two
assumptions: I want to show first that we do not need to postulate
different modes of thinking to explain the differences between science and
other belief systems. We have already seen that scientific beliefs are
selected for reasons other than their "correctness," and that
social interests and cultural settings determine to which metaphors people
commit themselves. In this chapter I want to begin by reviewing how
anthropologists have tried to explain the differences between scientific
and traditional belief systems, and why a scientific belief system should
have emerged at all.
MODES OF THINKING
Nineteenth century anthropologists
imagined western civilization to be the acme of man's intellectual
development. The triumph of science marked the casting off of the shackles
of superstition and the emergence of a true vision of the world. French
philosopher Auguste Compte advanced a three-stage theory of intellectual
development in which human ways of knowing passed from a theological
stage, through a metaphysical stage, to a scientific stage where science
is recognized as the only genuine form of knowledge. James Frazer
portrayed the history of intellectual development as a progression from
magical thinking where people made erroneous connections between things
and events, to religious thinking where the magical manipulation of the
world was replaced with supplication of gods and spirits, to scientific
thinking where the scientist replaced the priest as the source of truth.
Lucian Levy-Bruhl distinguished between the pre-logical mentality of the
primitive and the logical mode of thinking of modern man, and Sigmund
Freud distinguished between the 'illusion' of religion and the correctness
of science.
All these writers, as well as others,
assumed that the world visions of other cultures were wrong, and they
assumed that they were wrong because the intellectual processes by which
knowledge was acquired was somehow faulty. Frazer, for example, said the
primitive was making erroneous connections between things by confusing
symbols (a voodoo doll) with the things they represent (a person), while
Freud saw the primitive (us as well) projecting our image of the father to
our image of God. Each of these people tried to explain differences in
belief by assuming there were differences in psychology. Emile Durkheim
was one of the first to break away from this formula and propose the idea
that differences in ways of looking at the world were the result of
different social arrangements rather than ways of thinking, although he
seems to have stopped short of applying this idea to the origin of
scientific ideas (See Horton 1973).
A second assumption these writers had
in common was to cast the difference between primitive and modern thought
in hierarchical terms. Science was clearly a superior way of thinking
about things; it revealed truth instead of falsehood.
We in the Western world are long
captive of these assumptions. We take them for granted, and find them
built into most textbooks in psychology, philosophy, and even
anthropology. But while this extreme view of the relationship between
science and religion or magic remains current in the popular literature,
it is no longer taken seriously by most anthropologists or philosophers.
However, most still subscribe to the idea that there are different modes
of thinking that characterize traditional as opposed to modern cultures,
as if there were one belief machine for generating certain kinds of
beliefs and another for generating others.
Claude Levi-Strauss, for example,
compares the, traditional thinker with a handyman, a "bricoleur",
and the scientific thinker with an engineer. Both do 'science', but with a
difference. Early man, says Levi-Strauss,
was heir of a long scientific
tradition. However, had he, as well as all his predecessors, been
inspired by exactly the same spirit as that of our own time, it would be
impossible to understand how he could have come to a halt and how
several thousand years of stagnation have intervened between the
neolithic revolution and modern science like a level plain between
ascents. There is only one solution to the paradox, namely, that there
are two distinct modes of scientific thought. These are certainly not a
function of different stages of development of the human mind but rather
of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific
inquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination:
the other at a remove from it. It is as if the necessary connections
which are the object of all science, neolithic or modern, could be
arrived at by two different routes, one very close to, and the other
more remote from, sensible intuition (1966:15).
Levi-Strauss is objecting to the
characterization of the primitive as unconcerned for the objective. But he
retains the distinction between magical thought and scientific thought,
making them instead two different kinds of science:
It is therefore better, instead of
contrasting magic and science, to compare the as two parallel modes of
acquiring knowledge. Their theoretical and practical results differ in
value, for it is true that science is more successful than magic from
this point of view, although magic foreshadows science in that it is
sometimes successful. Both science and magic however require the same
sort of mental operations and they differ not do much in kind as in the
different types of phenomena to which they are applied (1966:13).
The "bricoleur" uses things
at his or her disposal, the odds and ends given by his or her culture,
whether they relate to the problem at hand or not. The engineer on the
other hand relates means to ends, he or she questions the universe. It was
as if the "bricoleur" is culture bound while the engineer is
seeking to escape the bounds of his or her culture:
...the engineer is always trying to
make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a
particular state of civilization while the "bricoleur" by
inclination or necessity always remains within them. This is another way
of saying that the engineer works by means of concepts and the "bricoleur"
by means of signs. The sets which each employs are at different
distances from the poles on the axis of opposition between nature and
culture. One way indeed in which signs can be opposed to concepts is
that whereas concepts aim to be wholly transparent with respect to
reality, signs allow and even require the interposing and incorporation
of a certain amount of human culture into reality (1966:19‑20).
In chapter ii we examined how
metaphors (signs in Levi-Strauss's terminology) are drawn from a culture
and used to comprehend different experiences. The Atoni house, for
example, is capable of being used by the Atonl thinker ("bricoleur")
to comprehend virtually his or her entire range of experience. The Atoni
house is a sign that interposes itself into the reality comprehended by an
Atoni. The engineer, according to Levi-Strauss, deals directly with
experience. Consequently, Levi-Strauss sees a qualitative difference
between scientific thinking (the engineer), and mythical or magical
thinking (the "bricoleur"). However, as I have tried to show, no
one can ever deal directly with experience; experience must always be
mediated by metaphors, even so called scientific thinking. In the sense
Levi-Strauss means it, we are all 'bricoleurs' using our culture-given
metaphors to comprehend what we can of our experiences.
Yet the idea of different modes of
thinking is persistent in anthropological writing. Clifford Geertz is
interested in explaining what belief means in a religious context:
"How is it," he asks, "that the religious man moves from a
troubled perception of experienced disorder to a more or less settled
conviction of fundamental order"? (Geertz 1966:24) For Geertz this is
the key question since, he says, "of all the problems surrounding
attempts to conduct anthropological analysis of religion this is the one
that has perhaps been most troublesome and therefore the most often
avoided"(1966:25).
Religious belief, says Geertz, does
not begin with a "Baconian induction" from everyday experience,
"for then we should all be agnostics." Instead the experience of
bafflement, pain, and moral paradox drive men toward an unquestioned
belief in the authority of religion. Commitment is the key, for, as Geertz
puts it, "he who would know must first believe"(1966:26). The
religious perspective is different from, say, the common sense perspective
which is a simple, everyday acceptance of the world as it appears, and the
scientific perspective characterized by "deliberate doubt and
systematic inquiry, the suspension of pragmatic motive in favor of
disinterested observation, the attempt to analyze the world in terms of
formal concepts whose relationship to the informal conceptions of common
sense become increasingly problematic"(1966:26-27). Geertz sums
up as follows:
The religious perspective differs from
the common sensical in that ...it moves beyond the realities of everyday
life to wider ones which correct and complete them, and its defining
concern is not action upon these wider realities but acceptance of them,
faith in them. It differs from the scientific perspective in that it
questions the realities of everyday life not out of an institutionalized
skepticism which dissolves the world's giveness into a swirl of
probabilistic hypotheses, but in terms of what it takes to be wider,
non‑hypothetical truths. Rather than detachment, its watchword is
commitment; rather than analysis, encounter … . It is ...with a
persuasive authority which from an analytic point of view is the essence
of religious action (1966:28).
Geertz, in effect, substitutes
perspectives on the world for modes of thought; but the result is the same
different ways of interpreting experience.
Unfortunately,
in solving one problem, writers such as Levi-Strauss and Geertz have
created another, for if we assume that there are different modes of
thought, we must explain why one mode of thought is used in one culture or
in one situation, while a different mode is used in another. Why do some
people view the world as mythical or magical, while others treat it
scientifically? Geertz assumes the choice of perspective is determined,
not by the level of culture, but by the phenomenon being approached;
death, suffering, the questions of good and evil are approached from a
religious perspective, while the building of a bridge, the study of the
orbits of the planets, or the study of the migratory patterns of game
animals would be approached scientifically. This is similar to Bronislaw
Malinowski's notion that things beyond our control are approached through
religion, while the things we think we can control are dealt with through
science. However the idea that the nature of an experience triggers the
perspective from which it is viewed is highly problematical for there is
little evidence to support the idea there are different ways of thinking
about things. The only area where there is evidence that there are
different ways of thinking is in developmental psychology, a fact that
probably explains the popular pastime of comparing the thought of
primitive man with modern children.
The most comprehensive and recent
attempt to use developmental psychology to explain cross-cultural
differences in belief is C.R. Hallpike's book The Foundations of
Primitive Thought. Hallpike adopts the theories of Jean Plaget.
Children, PIaget argues, go through certain stages in their intellectual
development. The last two stages he calls" pre-operatory" and
"formal operational." One of the classic tests to determine
whether someone is thinking operationally involves a judgment on the
conservation of volume. Children are shown a container with a certain
volume of liquid. The liquid is then poured into a different size
container (perhaps one that is longer and thinner) and the children asked
whether the amount of liquid had changed. If the children respond that
there is either more or less liquid, their thinking is pre-operatory; if
the say the volume of liquid was conserved, their thinking is operational.
Piaget attributes the passage from one stage to another to be a function
of a person's interaction with their environment. As schemata are built
up, new experience is either assimilated into the schemata, or the
schemata is adjusted to accommodate to the new experience.
Hallpike's thesis is that persons move
from pre-operatory to formal operational thought through their involvement
with schooling, literacy and a mechanized environment. Persons in
primitive society -as well as our own -- who fall to experience this
environment never develop to the operational level. Since operational
thought is required for scientific operations, (e.g. the mixing of
chemicals), scientific operations could not develop in primitive
societies: I find, Halipike says,
no evidence for the existence of formal
thought in the collective representations of primitive society, and
there are strong grounds for supposing that it will not develop at all
even among individuals, since a number of years of schooling and
literacy seem essential for it (Hallpike 1979:24).
Hallpike contends that the environment
of the primitive is less challenging than our own, and consequently less
likely to require the development of operational modes of thought. He
summarizes his thesis as follows:
Quite apart from the institutionalized
aspects of their society, individuals construct representations of
reality by their dally interactions with the physical and social
environment in ways that are not themselves institutionalized, but are
responses to the demands of real situations. Some of these are
universal, since all societies and all natural environments have at
least some features in common. This interaction is the basis for
cognitive growth, which is governed by laws general to human beings in
all societies, such that all normal individuals will progress through a
sequence of developmental stages which ends at the stage of formal
operations. However they may not attain this level of thought if
environmental conditions are insufficiently demanding. In other words,
some ways of representing the world are more elementary than others and
consequently will occur before more advanced representations in the
development of every individual. In societies like our own these
elementary forms of representation are inadequate for accommodation to
the sociophysical environment, and so the individual is forced to
reconstruct them at a higher level of mental functioning. But in
primitive societies pre-operatory thinking is perfectly adequate for
coping with the demands of everyday life and does not conflict with
experienced reality so as to require pre-operatory thought to be
reconstructed at the level of concrete or formal operations (1979:60).
The primitive milieu fosters thinking
that is context-bound, concrete, non-specialized, affective, ethnocentric,
and dogmatic rather than generalizable, specialized, abstract, impersonal,
objective, and relativistic (1979:126).
Hallpike's conjectures are
controversial and provocative. To begin with, the data on which he bases
his conclusions are scanty; the major source of his conclusions are what
he calls (after Durkheim) the "collective representations" of
primitive societies. However I'm not sure you could find very much
evidence for formal operational thinking in the collective representations
of our society. Yet his argument has some merit; certainly the effects of
literacy and schooling may have some influence on modes of thought in a
society. An interesting argument is made to this effect by Jack Goody.
Goody begins by questioning the
validity of making distinctions between modes of thought, and taking
exception to what he calls "we-they" thinking." I
certainly do not wish to deny," he says,
that there are differences in the
"thought" or "mind" of "we" and
"'they," nor that the problems which may have concerned many
observers, among them Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl and Levi-Strauss, are of no
significance. But the way they have been tackled seems open to a whole
range of queries. Perhaps I may put the central difficulty i find in
terms of a personal experience. In the course of several years living
among people of 'other cultures', I have never experienced the kinds of
hiatus in communication that would be the case if i and they were
approaching the physical world from opposite ends. That this experience
is not unique is apparent from the contemporary changes occurring in
developing countries where the shift from the neolithic to modern
science is encapsulated into the space of a man's lifetime. The boy
brought up a bricoleur becomes an engineer .... In looking at the
changes that have taken place in human thought, then, we must abandon
the ethnocentric dichotomies that have characterized social thought in
the period of European expansion. Instead we should look for more
specific criteria for the differences (Goody 1977:8‑9).
Goody proposes that the differences
that exist in the thought of different cultures can be explained by the
presence or absence of writing. Writing formalizes thought, gives it a
concrete form in which it can be analyzed and criticized. The problem is
not explaining different modes of thought, says Goody, but in examining
the consequences of different forms of communication;
Culture is, after all, a series of
communicative acts, and the differences in the mode of communication are
often as important as differences in the mode of production, for they
involve developments in the storing, analysis, and creation of human
knowledge, as well as the relationships between the individuals involved
(Goody 1977:37).
Goody sums up his major proposition as
follows:
Certain things that we take for
granted, but that greatly influence our ways of thinking, such as lists
and formulas, are possible, Goody says, only with writing. The list is one
consequence of the written word, and it has had a profound influence on
the way we think about things, says Goody. Lists, for example, force us to
make binary choices, and fix things with an authority not possible in an
oral culture; once something
assumes a place in a written scheme, a classification or a list, it
becomes fixed. It must be either here or there. Listing is
promoted by the demands of complex economies or state organizations, and,
according to Goody, "encourage the activities of historians and the
observational sciences, as well as on the more general level, favoring the
exploration and definition of classificatory schema" (Goody
1977:108).
Listing, moreover, is not a natural
activity, but one promoted by writing. In his experience, Goody finds
little listing activity in oral cultures. Yet we assume it to be natural.
The list, according to Goody,
increases the definiteness of classes,
makes it easier for the individual to engage in chunking, and more
particularly in the hierarchical ordering of information which is
critical to much recall. If this is the case, we stand in danger of
misunderstanding the import and the results of the tests we apply across
the range of human cultures. Not that they are any less relevant for
literate societies, many of whose activities depend upon such
operations. But they may be quite irrelevant for members of oral
cultures, who are less adapted to the form of activity and who
participate neither in its gains nor in its costs (1977:111).
The formula is another consequence of
writing Goody claims has had a significant impact on the way we think
about things.
One of the particular aspects of the
formula that enables us to carry out computations is the ability to
retain the balance or equality between the two sides by performing the
same operations on each, subtracting 2x from each side or dividing by n-1.
There is no non-visual way of doing this; the process depends upon
spatial manipulation. Speech alone cannot do it; writing can. The visuo-spatial
mode permits the development of a special kind of manipulation
(1977:122).
Goody concludes that the emergence of
science need not be attributed to the emergence of a new mode of thought,
but attributed instead to a new mode of communication -- writing.
When people speak of the development
of abstract thought out of the science of the concrete, the shift from
signs to concepts, the abandonment of intuition, imagination,
perception, these are little more than crude ways of assessing in
general terms the kinds of processes involved in the cumulative growth
of systematic knowledge, a growth that involves elaborate learning
procedures (in addition to imaginative leaps) and which is critically
dependent upon the presence of the book.
The shift from the science of the
concrete to that of the abstract, in other words the development of
concepts and formulations of an increasingly abstract kind (side by side
with the concrete), cannot be understood except in terms of the basic
changes in the nature of human communication (Goody 1977:150-151).
Combined with Hallpike's emphasis on
schooling and literacy as the spark for the development of operational
thinking, Goody seems to have a powerful scheme for explaining the
differences in scientific and primitive thought. However, two serious
problems remain with this whole train of thinking that ties differences in
belief to differences in modes of thought.
We can best present these problems by
examining two assumptions present in these lines of argument. The first is
that if there are beliefs different from our own, the thought processes by
which people arrived at them must be different from ours. The problem,
then, is that we need as many ways of thinking as there are different
beliefs; the classification of "them" (primitive) and
"us" (modern) is hardly adequate to describe the range of human
beliefs we know to be present in the world.
The second problem has to do with that
old issue of efficacy, and the assumption that since science seems to be
so much more effective, and since scientists seem to be doing something
right, they must be thinking about the world differently. But this is
terribly simplistic; John Ziman uses the term "reliable
knowledge" to characterize science.
Yet, surely, man did not survive and
evolve for thousands of years prior to the so‑called scientific
revolution by basing his activities on "unreliable knowledge."
Yet if we reject the dual assumptions
that different beliefs require different belief machines -- different ways
of knowing -- and that science is more reliable than other knowledge, we
are more or less back where we started; how do we account for the
emergence of science?
One place we might begin is with the
ideas of Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn does not discuss the emergence of science as
such, but much of his writing is an attempt to explain how new belief
systems arise; what are the nature of revolutions in idea systems? A key
point, according to Kuhn, is the nature of anomaly. A belief system,
according to Kuhn, is able to persist until it begins to break down under
the weight of the anomalies it collects. Then, if a new explanatory system
emerges, it will take the place of the old, as the Copernican system
replaced the Ptolemaic system (see Kuhn 1957, 1962). Yet for anomalies to
serve as a stimulus to changes in belief two things must happen; first,
the anomalies must be recognized and accepted as anomalies. As we saw,
anomalies can be masked in a number of different ways, so it must be to
someone's interest to point them out as problems. Second, circumstances
must arise that are conducive to the generation of anomalies. In other
words there must be conditions whereby people admit and recognize that
anomalies in belief exist. What we must now do is examine the settings in
which these conditions are likely to occur.
SOCIAL FACTORS IN THE RISE OF SCIENCE
One productive line of thinking is
that the emergence of science is a direct consequence of the social,
economic and political changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
This is not, of course, incompatible with the different modes of thought
approach; one can assume that the new social, economic and political
arrangements created by the industrial revolution led to a different
intellectual approach to the world (see Merten 1938). This is the approach
taken by Robin Horton, and it is worthwhile to examine it in detail.
Horton, like other writers before him,
distinguishes between two modes of thought; one he calls "common
sense thinking," the other "scientific thinking". He later
changed these terms to "primary theory" and "secondary
theory" respectively, but I think his original usage better signifies
what he means by the two modes of thought. Horton says that both types of
thinking exist in all societies. He rejects the idea that religious or
traditional thought is directed to different realms than scientific
thought (e.g. mystical or spiritual), and he rejects the idea that
religious and scientific thought represent different thought processes.
These divisions between scientific and religious thought survive, he says,
not because they have any genuine
interpretive value, but because they serve an ideological need: i.e. the
need to place traditional religious thought beyond the range of
invidious comparison with western scientific thought in respect of
efficiency in the realms of explanation, prediction and control (Horton
1982:209).
Instead,
Horton sees a basic similarity between traditional and scientific thought.
In both cases theories represent a people's attempt to explain, predict
and control phenomenon, to reduce diversity to unity, complexity to
simplicity, disorder to order. The major difference between them is that
scientific theory seeks causes for phenomena that lie beyond the everyday,
common‑sense view of the world. For example, a common sense response
to the question "How do I start the car?" might be "Turn
the ignition key." A scientific response, on the other hand, might
involve explaining how an electrical charge is sent from a coil to the
distributor and then to the spark plugs to ignite the gasoline injected
into the motor cylinders by the carburetor. Secondary theory might lead us
to discuss the mechanical principles of the automobile engine and the
chemical interactions resulting from the starting of the engine;
If there is any single characteristic
which enables us to make a clear distinction between primary theory and
its secondary counterpart, it is the latter's vastly enlarged causal
vision. Hence it seems plausible to suggest that it is the desire to
transcend the limited causal vision of primary theory that has sustained
secondary theory down through the ages... (1982:229).
Horton qualifies his emphasis on the
unity between scientific theory in traditional societies and scientific
theory in modern society only in one way; in traditional societies,
scientific theory is dominated by a personal idiom. In other words, the
metaphors of scientific theory in traditional society are drawn largely
from the world of interpersonal relations. The hidden entities (gods,
spirits, ghosts) are modeled after persons and the personal events of
everyday life, whereas in modern society scientific or secondary theory is
dominated by mechanical metaphors; the world is a mechanism rather than a
human community. As society becomes more technologically complex, says
Horton,
order, regularity and predictability
come to be less and less associated with the realm of human action and
interaction, more and more with that of non-living phenomena, both
artificial and natural (1982:238).
But how can this difference alone
account for the gulf in sophistication that we perceive between the
beliefs of our society and those of traditional society? Horton responds
by contrasting what he calls "traditional" and "progressivist"
concepts of knowledge, and "consensual" and
"competitive" modes of theory development.
A traditionalistic concept of
knowledge, says Horton, attributes great power to authority; it is
conservative in outlook. It has a highly developed system of defenses to
block out experiences that threaten established belief. Like progressivist
forms of knowledge, traditionalistic theory attempts to explain, predict
and control; however there is little attempt to monitor theory in terms of
empirical adequacy or consistency. It is also limited in scope, and
directed only towards experience of current practical significance.
Traditional thought is also
consensual; all members of the community share a common framework of
theory, and work only within that framework. Traditionalist-consensual
thought is a product of a society in which the pace of change is slow. An
oral, as opposed to a written tradition, reduces the sense of historical
depth and change; consequently great emphasis is placed on the
"wisdom of the ancients." These societies are culturally
homogeneous and the people share the same cultural backgrounds, further
reducing the possibilities for divergence in belief.
"Cognitive modernism," on
the other hand, is different. Instead of being traditional and consensual,
it is progressive and competitive. It looks to the future for new
knowledge instead of looking to the past as the source of
"truth." Cognitive-modernism is competitive because it is
characterized by rival schools of thinkers each promoting mutually
incompatible views of the world. Whereas a consensual way of thinking
leads to a tendency to suppress puzzling experiences, a competitive
framework seeks out such phenomenon to push a theory into new realms of
reality and make it more encompassing in much the same way as a
manufacturer might push his product into new markets to increase its
profitability. Competition between rival theories results in more
experimentation and observation and increased demands for proof and the
systemization of theory.
In cognitive-modernism there is great
emphasis on freeing theories from contradiction. Rival theorists not only
attempt to point out the inconsistencies of a competitors theory, but also
spend great time and energy scanning for and eliminating inconsistencies
in their own theories in anticipation of the attack from rivals. Cognitive
modernism is, if I read Horton correctly, the scientific counterpart of
the capitalist ethic.
Furthermore, says Horton, cognitive
modernism did not develop because it was a better way of looking at the
world; it arose as a result of social changes. A rapid increase in the
rate of change caused people to question the continuity between past and
present; as long as available evidence led one to believe the past to be
like the present, it made perfectly good sense to use age-old, time-tested
solutions to present day problems. However as the continuity between past
and present is eroded by the perception of change and the spread of
writing, the hold of the traditionalistic concept of knowledge is
weakened, and men come to believe they face a totally new situation. New
solutions to problems are sought as competition develops between old and
new theories. The competition between rival theories is intensified by the
growth of cultural pluralism as peoples with different points of view
begin to confront each other. Thus Horton begins by rejecting the
different modes of thought approach, claiming both traditional and modern
thinkers construct their theories in the same way. People do not change in
their way of thinking, they change the social and cultural arena in which
the thinking takes place. In traditional societies, anomalies are glossed
over more readily as people seek consensus and turn to past experience to
solve problems. In modern society, on the other hand, anomalies are
actively sought out by theorists or their rivals, and the embracing of
anomaly significantly alters the way we treat our beliefs.
In summary, Horton says;
For most people seriously involved in
cross‑cultural studies, the evident success of the
"hard" sciences in the modern West is an embarrassment.
Because on their assumptions such success suggests a superior
rationality in the pioneers of these sciences, if not also in their most
prominent followers, it offends against a strong egalitarian commitment
...most of the more recent programmes for cross-cultural understanding
have been attempts to evade this offensive implication by insisting that
much of what looks like theoretical thought in nonwestern cultures is
in reality thought of an entirely different genre, with goals quite
distinct from those of explanation, prediction and control .... By
accounting for the cognitive success of the "hard" sciences in
terms, not of a superior rationality, but of the universal rationality
operating in a particular setting, it enables the egalitarian scholar to
cast away his fear of invidious comparisons and look at nonwestern
theory with the eye of its user (Horton 1982:258).
But, concludes Horton, when a
universal rationality is set to work in a modern setting, it may in fact
produce superior knowledge, and consequently intellectual modernism may be
more reliable than traditional modes of thought:
First,
the "progressivist" concept of knowledge encourages a
willingness to try radically new theoretical ideas which has no
counterpart in traditional settings. Secondly, inter-theoretic
competition brings with it a continuous
critical monitoring of theory, in respect both of consistency and
empirical adequacy. Such monitoring, which is surely important in
eliminating cognitive defects, also has no real counterpart in
traditional settings. Thirdly, and most significantly, inter-theoretic
competition leads to a more or less continuous expansion in the range of
experience; and this in turn leads to a more or less continuous
expansion in the empirical coverage of theory (Horton 1982:248).
Horton's analysis owes much to the
work of philosopher Karl Popper (see Popper 1969). Modern society is
"open" in respect to belief systems, says Horton. Since there
are always alternative explanations to phenomena, people are not afraid to
prove a theory false; if it is false, another explanation will take its
place. Traditional societies, on the other hand, are closed; there exists
usually only one belief system, one set of explanations for phenomena, and
if it is questioned or destroyed, there is nothing left. As one African
said to a missionary who was encouraging him to give up his belief in
spirits, "it is like asking us to climb to the top of the highest
tree and throw ourselves off." in traditional societies there is a
reluctance to question established belief, for without it there would be
nothing.
It is also possible to put Horton's
ideas into a Kuhnian framework The difference between the traditional and
modern setting has to do with the reaction to anomalies inherent within
belief systems. In the modern setting, anomalies are sought out like
little jewels, because a particularly good one can signal victory for one
theory over another. Thus such writers as Paul Feyerabend, Lawrence Lauden
and Imre Lakatos see the growth of knowledge occurring as a result of
competition between rival theories; as one scientist who modeled his work
after Napoleon's campaigns put it, science is "a battleground strewn
with the corpses of competitors" (Latour and Woolgar 1979:130).
The idea that science thrives in a
competitive setting is also consistent with the grid/group model discussed
in the last chapter. Science thrives in a low grid/low group cultural
setting. Social interest theorists might claim the emergence of a class
society leads to the competing social interests conducive to the
development of intellectual heterogeneity and ideological conflict. In any
case anomalies would be welcomed as weapons to weaken a rival. Thus it is
tempting to conclude that the emergence of modern science is a consequence
of a social order that welcomes discrepancy in theory. This viewpoint
pushes the capitalistic metaphor of competition and struggle into the
arena of intellectual inquiry.
However there are still some
difficulties in attributing the development of science to social
circumstances alone. The setting of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, during which modern science is said to have arisen, was not
totally unique. Cultural heterogeneity was characteristic of civilizations
before then, and competition between rival theories goes back at least as
far as written history. Gerald Holton, for example, portrays the history
of ideas as an ongoing competition between what he calls themata and anti-themata.
Moreover, the ideas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not
unique. We've already seen that Copernicus's ideas were hardly new, and
even most of Newton's theories, while not articulated, were known to the
technicians and engineers of past periods. And finally, while competition
between rival theories may result in added scrutiny of those ideas,
competition itself will not determine the form the ideas and theories
take.
Therefore while a competitive
framework may be a necessary pre-requisite for the emergence of a
scientific world view, as writing may be, it is not sufficient. I suggest
the missing ingredient in theories about the emergence of science is
technology; while social conditions may be necessary to create rival
theories, and competition may be the prime motivation for scientists to
examine and test their theories, it is the realm of technology that gives
our idea system its seemingly unique form. I focus on technology because
other than social complexity and population density, technological
complexity is the major distinguishing feature between modern and
traditional society. Nor, on the basis of what we've seen about belief
systems, can we any longer assume that technology is simply the handmaiden
of scientific thought. We have, I believe, failed to understand the proper
relationship between technology and the development of science because it
has been obscured by the popular view that technology advances as a
consequence of scientific discovery, a view now rejected by most writers
on science and technology. Most now see the relationship as symmetrical,
science and technology developing parallel with each other. As David Edge
and Barry Barnes put it:
it remains true, of course, that
technologists do, at times, make use of the findings and theories of
basic science, and that this has great significance. But it is equally
the case that scientists make occasional use of the ideas and artifacts
of technology, and that this is of considerable importance in
understanding the growth of science (1982:149).
However I wish to go a little bit
further than Edge and Barnes; I want to argue that our scientific world
view, our belief system, is a direct outgrowth of the technological
development that has occurred over the past 300 years. I want to maintain
that it is not science that represents a different way of thinking, but
rather it is technology that effects the way we think about things. I want
to devote the remainder of this chapter to an examination of the
relationship between science and technology. First, however, you may ask
what has this to do with the belief machine and the controversy over the
existence of different modes of thought? Just this: if there is a
variable, be it social, cultural or technological, that can account for
the development of the belief system we call science, then it is not
necessary to assume that people in different societies or cultures acquire
knowledge in significantly different ways. In other words, a universal
belief machine will account for all modes of belief. My point is that
science, or any other belief system for that matter, is given its
particular style by the social, cultural, and technological setting in
which it operates, and that science does not represent a special way of
knowing.
Technology
and Science
The study
of the relationship between science and technology is problematical in two
ways; first there is a problem of definition. Generally science is seen as
an activity whose aim is to help us achieve a greater understanding of the
natural world, while technology is devoted to the production or
transformation of material objects with an aim toward enhancing the
quality of life (see e.g. Hannay and McGinn 1980:27). Some suggest that
the difference between science and technology is a social one suggestive
of class differences. Regardless, it is clear that in American society a
graduate of an undergraduate engineering program is doing something
differently than a graduate of a physics program, although it is still
difficult at times to say when someone is doing "science" and
when they are doing "technology." David Edge and Barry Barnes
sum up the attempt to define the sciencetechnology relationship as
follows:
...any general model of the science-technology
relationship must inevitably be inadequate, and problematic in its
application. Such a model may, nonetheless, retain some utility for
specific purposes. There are, in our society, activities and roles
ordered around the extension of knowledge and competence without any
regard to practical application. There are other roles and activities
concerned solely to increase any improve the stock of existing
practically useful techniques, processes and artifacts. These two
distinct kinds of role currently serve as paradigm cases when science
and technology are referred to: this reflects the widespread implicit
understanding that science and technology are partially separate
cultures .... It has to be recognized that all conceptions or models of
the relationship will have limitations, will indeed be strictly invalid,
and will offer a constant temptation to false inference and over-generalizatlon.
Nonetheless, with cautious use such models have considerable pragmatic
value (Edge and Barnes 1982:147-148).
If, then,
we accept the notion that science and technology are different, there is
still the problem of defining the relationship between them. There are
basically three ways to define this relationship. There is the standard
hierarchical model where technology is viewed as applied science. As
Barnes and Edge describe it,
The
production of new knowledge is the concern of science: scientists
creatively construct new hypotheses and theories, and rigorously
evaluate them against observations and experimental results drawn
from nature. Technology is the routine activity of working out and
realizing the "implications" of scientific theories. It is a
humdrum, uncreative activity crucially dependent upon basic science
(1982:148).
Interestingly, the American
Department, of Defense commissioned the United States National Academy of
Science to study the nature of scientific innovation. After building a
seven stage model of an orderly progression from science to engineering
applications, they found that historical cases did not fit the model
(Layton 1977:206-207). Most scholars therefore reject the hierarchical
model, and subscribe instead to what Barnes and Edge call a symmetrical
model in which science and technology develop independently of each other,
each with its separate culture, resources and theories.
Finally a third view argues that
science has developed largely by advancing on the heels of technology.
Oernot Bohme puts it as follows:
...science has developed by orienting
itself to technical apparatus and instruments. In these terms science
consists largely of theoretical attempts to grasp and systematize the
manner in which instruments function. Cases in point are the emergence
of Gilbert's theory of magnetism (which was based on the existing use of
the compass) and the emergence of thermodynamics on the basis of the
technological development of the steam engine (Bohme 1977:338).
Marxist
writers, as Bohme points out, have long postulated that science is not
autonomous, but is linked to the technological infrastructure of society.
However, as Bohme also points out, the nature of the dependence has always
been unclear. I hope in this chapter to clarify this relationship a little
bit by posing three ways in which science is dependent upon technology.
Very briefly, l want to argue first
that the problems science attempts to solve are dictated by the
technological needs of society. For example, we can point to the
influence on physics of the search for power sources to fuel industrial
development, or the development of chemistry in the early nineteenth
century in response to the needs of the textile industry, or the influence
of the need for new navigational techniques and a more accurate calendar
to the development and acceptance of Copernicus's ideas.
Second I will argue that science draws
largely from technology for the metaphors through which it attempts to
understand the world. Harvey's discoveries regarding the workings of the
circulatory system, for example, were made possible largely by his
equating the heart with a pump.
Third, I
will argue that science is dependent for its work on technological
instrumentation, and that the puzzles, anomalies and problems upon which
science works are revealed by technology and technological applications.
Moreover, that the instruments themselves are developed as a result of
technological needs. I will assume throughout that the social and literate
pre-requisites exist for the development of science, but that the
major impetus is technological.
Science
and Technological Need
The
classic expression of the notion that technological needs determine
scientific ideology is Boris Hesson's study of the role of . technological
need in the development of classical physics, particularly Issac Newton's
"Prlncipia" (Hesson 1931). Hesson's study is considered
something of a doctrinaire tirade, and is given surprisingly little
serious attention by historians of science. However I think it deserves
better than that. Hesson's argument proceeds as follows: (1) The rise of
merchant capitalism in the sixteenth century posed certain technological
problems. As trade and the division of labor increased, and as contact
between societies and groups intensified, problems of communication and
transportation assumed new importance.
Problems of heavy industry, notably mining, increased in
significance as a result of worldwide demand for valuable metals needed
for exchange, and as the result of the need for war armaments as increased
contact between groups spurred competition for land and markets.
(2) Next,
Hesson argues, the technical problems of transportation, industry and war,
given the state of technological development in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century, were problems of mechanics. In the area of water
transport, for example, there was a need to increase the tonnage capacity
and speed of vessels, to improve the floating capacity of vessels, to
develop a reliable means of determining a ship's position at sea, and to
perfect inland waterways. In the area of industry, especially mining,
there was the need to raise ore from considerable depths, to ventilate
mines, to pump water from mines, to develop blast furnace production, and
to work up ores with the aid of rolling and cutting machinery. Finally, in
the area of war and armaments, there was a need to solve problems in
intrinsic ballistics -- that is the study of what happens in a firearm
when it is fired --, and extrinsic ballistics -- the trajectory of a ball
through the air and the forces which cause it to deviate from that
trajectory.
(3) It is precisely these problems of
technology, claims Hesson, that Newton addresses in the Principia,
the dominant document in physics until this century. Thus the scientific
problems to be solved in the area of water transportation include knowing
the fundamental laws governing bodies floating in liquids, and estimating
a vessel's displacement which constitutes the whole area of hydrostatics;
knowing the laws governing the movements of bodies in liquids which
constitutes the area of hydrodynamics; a knowledge of the heavens and the
anomalies of the moon's movement, and a knowledge of tides was
necessary to determine position at sea.
To solve the problems of mining,
knowledge of the proper arrangement of windlasses and blocks is
necessary; solving problems of ventilation is a matter of the
knowledge of aerostatics; understanding the mechanics involved in pumping
water from mines, operating rolling machines and heavy hammers requires a
knowledge of the mathematical arrangements of cogged wheels and
transmission. Finally, the problems of armaments requires a knowledge of
the principles involved in the expansion and compression of gases, or
recoil (the law of action and counteraction); the action of a body under
the influence of gravity; knowledge of the movement of bodies through a
resistant medium; and knowledge of the relationship between the initial
speed of a ball and its trajectory.
Thus Hesson concludes that the
"earthy core," as he puts it, of Newton's work, and classical
physics in general, are directed to solving just these technical and
economic problems and tasks which the rising bourgeoisie raised to the
forefront in their rise to power. The first book of Newton's Principia
is a detailed exposition of the general laws of motion under the
influence of central forces; the second book has to do with the movement
of bodies through resistant mediums while the third book has to do with
the movement of the heavens and the tides. The questions Newton set out to
solve in the Principia were the very problems posed by the
economy of the period.
Hesson's thesis, as I mentioned, has
received a cool reception by most historians of science. It contradicts
the prevalent view of science as value-free, operating in a world free of
social, political and economic interests. Furthermore, Newton was the
prototype of the aloof scientist, ensconced in his English country home,
far removed from the influences of his day.
Hesson has pointed out that Newton showed much interest in the
technological developments taking place in France and Italy, asking
friends and students to report back to him of the developments in those
countries, but this has had little effect in gaining acceptance for Hesson's position and only recently has a
body of literature on Newton emerged showing him to be very much involved
in the political affairs of his day. None of this proves Hesson's thesis,
but it does raise questions of why it has been taken so lightly since the
influence of technological and economic need on the development of science
is so apparent in other areas. The revolution in astronomy in the
sixteenth century, so often used to mark the beginning of the scientific
revolution, resulted, as Thomas Kuhn points out, from a need for new
navigational aids and from agitation for calendrical reform.
Voyages in search of new markets and new riches revealed problems
with Ptolemy's geography and demonstrated the inadequacy of contemporary
navigational techniques, while greater economic, political and
bureaucratic complexity demanded more efficient ways of dating.
Even the church wanted calendrical reform, and Copernicus urged delaying
reform until more accurate measurements of the heavens were available.
Copernicus even justified his new astronomy by claiming it would make
calendrical reform possible (see Kuhn 1957).
The search
for new power sources for industry led to the development of the steam
engine, whose scientific principles were not understood for over one
hundred years after Newcomen first operated his at Dudley Castle; the same
is true of the development in the nineteenth century of the electric motor
and the internal combustion engine. Chemistry emerged in response to the
needs of the English textile industry for better techniques of bleaching
and dyeing, and we can point to the fact that most of the scientific
research today is being done in industrial laboratories in response to
industrial and technological needs. Even most "pure" research is
being funded by the United States Department of Defense. The clear
implication is that our technological needs antedate our scientific
understandings, and it is our technology which, in various ways (i.e. the
need for a particular machine, the need to understand an already
functioning machine, or the need to refine and improve a machine) poses
the questions we are impelled to answer about the natural world. As Peter Drucker put it, "technology became the spur to
science."
A more
recent illustration of the role of technological need in the development
of science comes from the new science of meteorology. Some of the major
advances in meteorology were made in the period just prior to 1920 by
Vllhelm Bjerknes and his associates in Bergen, Norway. To many the work of
the Bergen School of meteorology represents the beginning of a
comprehensive science of the weather (see Friedman 1982:343; Jewel Mss).
It gave us such concepts as the Polar Front and evolutionary cyclones.
BJerknes was trained as a physicist, working under the famous Heinrich
Hertz in Berlin, and his work at first glance seems to confirm the view
that technology is indeed applied science. Bjerknes wanted to develop an
exact science of the atmosphere by applying the laws of physics,
particularly the laws governing the movements of fluids, to the weather.
Generally speaking he succeeded. However, as we shall see, it was far more
complex than an application of science to practical concerns. First there
needed to be some economic needs.
At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, there were at least five areas in which weather prediction became
important: fishing, international shipping, farming, aviation and war.
There were increasing numbers of fishing tragedies in Norway as a result
of faulty weather predicting, and Bjerknes argued that more accurate
weather forecasting, and the establishment of a storm warning system for
fisherman could save lives. In a letter written in 1902 he said:
...for the sailor, fisherman or
aeronaut it can be a question of life and death. Thus the problem of
forecasting the weather is as old as mankind .... (Jewel Mss).
Farming was another area that required
more accurate weather forecasting. This was made more critical during
World War I when Norway's food supplies were threatened.
Bjerknes's initiatives at Bergen are
particularly interesting because they reveal how crucially exposed to
pressures and impulses from outside science they were. The challenges
(e.g. of aiding in food production in 1918 and in the improvement of
security among fisherman in 1919 and 1920) were challenges which did not
come from a narrowly conceived research activity .... (Jewel Mss).
War and the rapid development of air
travel also provided motives for the development of the means to more
accurately forecast the weather. War provided a particularly strong
motivation for the development of meteorology. Whereas broad, general
weather predictions for an area over 12 to 24 hours were sufficient for
general purposes, they were not adequate for the new air war technology
where forecasters had to answer such questions as "Will the sky be
clear before midnight?" or "in which direction will the wind be
blowing at 10 P.M?" Because of a failure to accurately predict wind
direction, the British gassed their own troops during one celebrated
incident in World War 1. In fact the development of meteorology during
this century has been especially rapid during periods of war, as have most
scientific advances. In relation to Bjerknes's research, Friedman says:
New means of warfare, such as long-range
artillery bombardments, gas attacks, and especially aerial combat, had
already led to a mobilization and rapid expansion of meteorological
services. Postwar expectations for rapid development of air transport
similarly prompted meteorologists to promote the growth of their
science, since new predictive methods and greater understanding of
atmospheric phenomena would be required to insure safe operations of
aerial routes (1982: 348).
In all of these examples, astronomy,
physics, chemistry and meteorology, beliefs developed or changed not
solely because the new ideas were better, but because the need for
technological development posed certain questions, and revealed certain
problems, that required a different way of looking at things. In no
instance, however, did an innovation require a different mode of thought.
Science,
Technology and Metaphor
I have argued that the basic component
of the belief machine is the metaphor. The question now is, from
where does science draw its metaphors? The answer, I think, is from
technology. This might not have always been the case. Pre-industrial man
looked to the worlds of nature and society for most of his metaphors.
Winds, tides, the geographic landscape, plants, the heavens, the animal
world and the social world of the family and tribe provided more than
adequate vehicles for understanding as we saw in earlier chapters. For
modern man, and for the scientist, however, the major source of models and
metaphors is technology.
Jonathan Miller does a superb job of
demonstrating the role of technological metaphor in the development of the
science of medicine in his book The
Body in Question. In primitive societies, he writes,
where technological images are few and
far between ...most explanatory metaphors are drawn from nature .... But
the development of technology created a new stock of metaphors -- not
simply extra metaphors, but one's altogether different in their logical
character. Once man succeeded in making equipment which performed -looms,
furnaces, forges, bellows, whistles, and irrigation ditches -- he was
confronted by mechanisms whose success or failure depended on the
efficiency of their working parts: things which could block or break,
slit up or go out, mechanisms which were intelligibly systematic and
systematically intelligible. By mechanising his practical world, man
inadvertently paved the way for the mechanization of his theoretical
world (Miller 1980: 181-182).
Technology
has provided man with a way of thinking about things, and each age has
provided its own dominant metaphor; the clock, the steam engine, the
railroad, the automobile and the telephone. The computer is rapidly
becoming the dominant metaphor of our age (Weizenbaum 1976:157). The
revolution in computer technology has provided new ways of understanding
one of our great anatomical mysteries -- the brain. Carl Pribram points
out how analogies taken from computer science have been used to explain
the workings of the vertical columns of cells perpendicular to the surface
of the cortex. More recently, the development of holography has provided a
metaphor for understanding some aspects of the brain. Among the properties
of holograms, Pribram writes,
important for brain functions are (1)
the widespread distribution of information -- a characteristic that can
account for the failure of brain lesions to eradicate any specific
memory trace... (2) the tremendous storage capacity of the holographic
domain and the ease with which information can be retrieved .... (3) the
capacity for associative recall that is inherent in holograms because of
the coupling of separate inputs; and (4) the provision by this coupling
of a powerful technique for correlating – cross correlations and
auto correlations are accomplished almost immediately (Prlbram 1980:31).
Since a hologram can do what we know
the brain must do, the brain must work something like a hologram, and once
more technique --developed in this case to meet the needs of
communications and war -has furnished a device for thinking about
something else, the brain. Technology has furthered our scientific
understandings.
Throughout the history of science,
technology has provided a rich source of metaphor. One metaphor which has
dominated science as well as popular thought over the past century is
"natural selection." The model is attributed to Darwin, but as
Robert Young points out, the notion of selection was drawn by Darwin from
the literature on animal breeding. The technological principles of animal
breeding made use of the very concepts for which Darwin was trying to win
acceptance. "i have read heaps of agricultural and horticultural
books," Darwin writes,
and have never ceased collecting facts.
At least gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite
contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like
confessing murder) immutable (quoted in Young 1971:453).
In spite of the scientific mythology
about Darwin's insights coming directly from his research in the
Galapagos. Darwin says in a letter to A.R. Wallace that
You are right, that I came to the
conclusion that selection was the principle of change from the study of
domesticated production; and then reading Malthus, I saw at once how to
apply this principle (Young 1971:455).
In another letter to the geologist
Lyell, Darwin says:
... why I like the term selection is
that it is constantly used in all works on breeding (Young 1971:464).
Thus the major mechanism of one of the
most far-reaching scientific theories of our age was taken, as metaphor,
from a technology thousands of years old. Ironically it may also have lent
to Darwin's theory an authority the theory did not deserve. Robert Young
argues that the mechanism of natural selection as taken from animal
husbandry was not a mechanism at all, since it accounted neither for how
variability occurred, nor how selection operated:
...Darwin's reasons for pitching his
argument in abstract and metaphorical terms was that he was frankly and
profoundly ignorant of both the causes of variation and the precise
means by which favorable variants were preserved and accumulated. That
is, he really had no mechanism at all (Young 1971:488).
Meteorology developed because of the
new economic and technological needs of shipping, fishing, farming, air
travel and war. But, in
addition, the conceptual aids by which the science advanced owed much to
the technology of the period. One of the major contributions of the Bergen
School of Meteorology were the concepts of evolutionary cyclone and
"lines of discontinuity." We are now familiar with these
concepts as "warm fronts" and "cold fronts," although
these terms were not used until 1918 or 1919. The cyclone model, in fact,
was originally conceptualized in terms of a battle along two surfaces of
discontinuity where, for example, a mass of cold air might meet a mass of
warm air. Vilhelm Bjerknes quite explicitly began using the war metaphor
of the "front," so common during the first world war, around
1919. Speaking of the meeting of a cold front and warm front, Bjerknes
writes:
We have before us a struggle between a
warm and a cold air current. The warm is victorious to the east of the
center. Here it rises up over the cold, and approaches in this way a
step toward its goal, the pole. The cold air, which is pressed hard,
escapes to the west, in order suddenly to make a sharp turn towards the
south, and attacks the warm air in the flank: it penetrates under it as
a cold West wind (Bjerknes, quoted in Friedman 1982:355).
One of the other major contributions
of the Bergen School was the concept of the Polar Front. One of Bjerknes's
associates remembers deriving the term from the World War I notion of the
front. Someone suggested that the polar air is the "enemy"
attacking towards the equator, while warm equatorial air counterattacks
toward the pole. The area between the two is a battleground extending
around the hemisphere marking the southernmost advance of the polar front.
As battles raged along fronts during World War I, atmospheric skirmishes
raged along the polar front. During a time the researchers in Bergen
alternated using the terms "battleline" with the term
"polar front" (Friedman 1982:355-356).
Technology, therefore, not only
defines the problems science seeks to solve, it also supplies the
conceptual tools with which to solve them.
Science and Technological instrumentation
Thomas
Kuhn, in his study of the Copernican revolution, makes the point that the
Arlstotelean universe more closely corresponds to what we actually see
than does a Copernican or Newtonian universe. We see the sun rise and
fall, we see the stars rotate above us as if they were engraved on a giant
sphere, heavier bodies do fall more quickly than lighter ones in an
air-filled world. Quite clearly then, the universe that we conceive
as real is a universe revealed not by the senses, as such, but by the
instruments we use to aid the senses. However, there seems to be little
recognition of the extent of the dependence of science on instrumentation.
Yet, among other things, technological instrumentation define and reveal
the reality studied by science, reveals the puzzles and anomalies that
motivate scientific research, define research strategy, and constitute the
major means of scientific persuasion.
The fact that scientists are dependent
upon instruments to reveal the reality they seek to understand is so
obvious it is difficult to understand how it is so easily forgotten. Yet
in the same way as we often mistake a metaphor for the thing it
represents, so we mistake the reality revealed by technology to be the
total reality. Aldous Huxley recognized this some forty years ago.
Speaking of how science must first simplify the reality it purports to
study he says:
Confronted by the data of experience,
men of science begin by leaving out of account all those aspects of the
facts which do not lend themselves to measurement and to explanation in
terms of antecedent causes rather khan of purpose, intention and values.
Pragmatically they are justified in acting in this odd and extremely
arbitrary way; for by concentrating exclusively on the measurable
aspects of such elements of experience as can be explained in terms of a
causal system they have been able to achieve a great and ever increasing
control over the energies of nature. But power is not the same thing as
insight and, as a representation of reality, the scientific picture of
the world is adequate for the simple reason that science does not even
profess to deal with experience as a whole, but only with certain
aspects of it (Huxley 1946:35-36).
People, Huxley continues,
tend to accept the world picture
implicit in the theories of science as a complete and exhaustive account
of reality; they tend to regard those aspects of experience, which
scientists leave out of account, because they are incompetent to deal
with them, as being somehow less real than the aspects which science has
arbitrarily chosen to abstract from out of the infinitely rich totality
of given facts (Huxley 1946:38).
Huxley is wrong in one respect; the aspects of
reality science chooses to study are not arbitrarily chosen. They are
revealed by technology through the instruments science has at its
disposal. A perfect example of this is research conducted in high energy
physics.
A major concern of modern physics is
discovering the basic constituents of matter. The most important tool in
this search for irreducible matter is the particle accelerator. The
particle accelerator is a device that enables physicists to break
down matter into smaller and smaller bits. It takes the nucleus apart, and
allows scientists to study its makeup. The accelerator itself is a fairly
complex device, whose origins we will look at below, but for the time
being it is necessary only to recognize that without the particle
accelerator we would not know what we do about the structure of matter.
One of the interesting features of the
history of particle accelerators is as they become more powerful, we
discover new things. The history of the particle accelerator, according to
Andrew Pickering, has been marked by the construction of
particle accelerators of ever higher energy. As new energy ranges have
been opened up to experiment, new and unexpected phenomena have
persistently appeared and have become the topic of energetic theorizing
and experimentation (Pickering Mss).
Technology
is constantly raising unexpected questions. The first users of the
telescope surely must have expected to see a Ptolemaic universe, but
instead saw the heavens--particularly the planets-behave in a way
totally inconsistent with their belief in an earth-centered cosmos. Thus
modern optical astronomy owes its existence to the development of the
telescope. In the same way, the emerging field of radio-astronomy owes its
existence to instruments developed in radio communication. In 1930 Bell
Telephone Company instructed one of their engineers, K.G. Jansky, to
research the source of the static that interfered with radio-telephones.
After eliminating other sources of static, such as thunderstorms, Jansky
concluded the static was caused by radio emissions from the Milky Way.
Jansky's discoveries were largely ignored by scientists until another
engineer, Grote Reber, began to interest scientists in the phenomenon. The
next major advance in the study of radio-emissions from space came from
another application of technology-- radar. During World War II new puzzles
regarding radio transmissions from outer space were revealed by persons
studying the sources of radio interference with radar. Scientists were
puzzled by the detection of radio emissions from the sun, the detection of
radar echoes from meteor trails, and the localization of radio noise in
the direction of Cygnus.
Thus throughout the history of radio-astronomy,
new puzzles, new anomalies, emerged from research on or with new
technology. The main line of research began with chance observations of
unexpected phenomenon with electronic techniques devoted to practical
objectives, and led to new directions in research and theory (see Edge and
Muikay 1976:225f f).
A more comprehensive example of the
importance of instrumentation in scientific research is provided by Bruno
Latour and Steve Woolgar in their anthropological study of a
scientific laboratory. They characterize a laboratory as a setting
designed to generate scientific papers and reports. The key to
understanding this written output is the instrumentation in the
laboratory. Phenomenon studied in the laboratory, they say, is not simply
dependent upon the instruments: rather the phenomena are thoroughly
constituted by the material setting of the laboratory (Latour and Woolgar
1979:64).
Laboratory instruments are, according
to Latour and Woolgar, "inscriptions devices," apparatuses whose
purpose is to transform some material substance --a chemical mixture, a
ground mineral, organ remains-- into a figure or diagram (Woolgar and
Latour 1979:51). Woolgar and Latour have some interesting things to say
about the consequences of this process:
One important feature of the use of
inscription devices in the laboratory is that once an end product, an
inscription -is available, all the intermediary steps which made its
production possible are forgotten .... A first consequence of the
relegation of material processes to the realm of the merely technical is
that inscriptions are seen as direct indicators of the substance under
study .... A second consequence ...is the tendency to think of the
inscription in terms of confirmation or evidence for or against,
particular ideas, concepts, or theories (1979:63).
They continue:
The central importance of this material
arrangement is that none of the phenomena "about which"
participants talk could exist without it .... It is not simply that
phenomena depend on certain material instrumentation; rather the
phenomena are thoroughly constituted by the material setting of the
laboratory. The artificial reality, which participants describe in terms
of an objective reality, has in fact been constructed by
"inscription devices". Such a reality ...takes on the
appearance of a phenomenon by virtue of its construction through
material techniques (1979:64).
The lesson is that it is with the
instruments at its disposal that science constructs the reality it
purports to discover.
But
instrumentation does even more than reveal reality; it also defines
research strategy. The strength of a laboratory depends, say Woolgar and
Latour, as much on the specific configuration of machines available, as on
the machines themselves. Karen Knoor-Cetlna, in her social study of a
laboratory, says there is a certain opportunism to the use of laboratory
technology. Scientists give preference, she says, to the instruments and
apparatus that are "around somewhere"; as some of her informants
put it, "we had a piece of equipment that had been developed in
another project that we could use," or "the machines were here,
so it's very easy to go down and use them." ideas, she says, are
often triggered by the facilities and resources available at a given time
and in a given place (Knoor-Cetina 1981:35).
The role of
available technology in defining research strategy is also illustrated in
the direction of research in astronomy in the United States and Great
Britain immediately after World War II. Radio astronomy developed much
faster in Great Britain largely because the United States had made such
large investments in optical astronomy, notably the Palomar telescope. The
direction of meteorology was determined by the availability of airplanes
and, more importantly, wireless communication that enabled meteorologists
to collect data from many scattered places at once.
Finally,
technology is also the major means at our disposal for persuading people
to accept one idea over another. Science works by societal consensus;
ideas gain hold because they are accepted by the scientific community;
they fail when the community rejects them. Consequently, a major activity
of scientists is trying to gain acceptance for a theory, concept or idea.
Woolgar and Latour give us a nice model for understanding this process.
The object of research, they say, is to get your statement recognized by
others as fact; that is, to remove any qualifiers; in other words to
transform a statement that "A may be related to B," to the
statement "A is related to B." Scientists, they say, are writers
and readers in the business of being convinced and convincing others
(1979:88).
Writing of
their laboratory, they say that to get something accepted as fact, that is
to remove the qualifiers, rats had been bled, and beheaded, frogs had been
flayed, chemicals consumed, time spent, careers had been made or broken,
and inscription devices had been manufactured and accumulated with the
laboratory. This, indeed, was the very "raison d'etre' of the
laboratory (1979:88).
The laboratory is, they say, "the
organization of persuasion through literary inscription" (1979:88).
Instruments help us select one statement from among a group of statements
and designate it as being more likely to be true than the others. And
scientists then use the instruments to try to persuade others the right
choice has been made. Viihelm Bierknes, for example, realized he must
convince others of the correctness of his theories of fronts and cyclones,
and he therefore made a great ceremony of showing visitors through his
laboratory and demonstrating his theory with map after map, thereby using
instruments to convince the public as well as the scientific community of
the correctness of his views.
Obviously, then, without technology
our scientific beliefs would be very different. As I mentioned above, the
dependence of science on technological instrumentation is easily verified,
in spite of the fact that this dependence is rarely acknowledged. Yet
might someone not say that science itself has developed this
instrumentation as a consequence of its ethos and methodology? Probably
not. High energy physics, radio astronomy, meteorology, like most
scientific fields, depended upon technologies developed for either
industrial or military usage.
Particle accelerators, for example,
were an outgrowth of research to generate high voltage for the purpose of
testing electrical equipment. The particle accelerator developed at the
famous Cavandish laboratory, and used for the very first disintegration of
the nucleus of an atom was adapted from a circuit invented by engineer
Wilhelm Greinacher in 1921 to test high voltage electrical equipment. The
Cavandish work won the Nobel prize for Cockroft and Walton. The major
principle of the Cyclotron built by Ernest Lawrence in 1930 was based on'
a paper by Rolfe Wlderoe published in the Archly fur Elektratechnlk,
and Lawrence's paper in Science in 1930 was based on
Wlderoe's work on the resonance principle. Lawrence received the Nobel
prize in 1931.
M. Stanley Livingston, one of the
early developers of the particle accelerator, and a student of Lawrence,
sums up the relationship between particle accelerators and technological
development as follows:
The speed of development of particle
accelerators and the rapid increase in energy has been due in large part
to the rapid development of other engineering technologies. As the
accelerator field has developed it has paralleled the progress in the
electronics industry and in other branches of engineering, and has
quickly utilized new materials and new technologies (Livingston
1980:23).
Radio
astronomy, as we've already seen, first emerged from research on static in
radio transmission. However it was not until the use of radar in World War
II led to the development of technological expertise that research really
became feasible. In the case of radio astronomy both industry and the
military had a hand in developing the technology to make scientific work
possible.
The above
influences of technology on science are not the only ones. There is the
effect of praxis on science, the fact that many of our discoveries come
from trying to use scientific theory for technological use. Oftentimes
this results in theory needing to be reworked as a result of the attempted
application. Bierknes began his work in meteorology with the expectation
of applying the mechanical model of nineteenth century physics to the
atmosphere, and ended up discovering that the scientific theory needed
much reworking if it was to be of any use.
I suspect the extent to which
technology influences the work of scientists will come as no surprise to
scientists themselves. Nor is what I have said intended to reduce the
importance of scientific work. Rather, it is intended to show how
scientific work is built on existing technology. Most importantly, it is
intended to show there is no rationality unique to science. Science
differs from other belief systems not in any manner of rationality or mode
of thought, but in the problems society sets out for it to solve, from the
metaphors it has to draw on, and from the tools, the instruments, which
the industrial or military technology has placed at its disposal.
Go to Conclusion