Week 3

Science, Social Norms, and Social Interests

Functionalism and The Sociology of Science.

Functionalism. Review

  • Things exist because they perform functions necessary for society

  • Functions can be manifest and latent

    • Manifest function of schooling is education

    • Latent function of schooling is socialization

  • There are also dysfunctions

    • Both manifest, like curving makes students compete with each other in toxic ways

    • And latent, like toxic competition causes emotional damage

  • Key Figures: Robert Merton (1910-2003)

Functionalist view on science

  • Function of science is to provide reliable knowledge

  • Therefore, as practice and institution science must be organized around certain norms

  • Sociology of science, then, studies scientific norms and mechanisms of their reinforcement and sanctions applied when scientists fail to follow the norms

Moral Norms of Science

  • Merton identified 4 main norms of science:

    • Universalism: “race, nationality, religion, class, and personal qualities are irrelevant” (Merton 1973: 270)

    • Communism: scientific knowledge is collectively owned; that is one cannot claim property rights over scientific knowledge

    • Disinteretedness: scientists should not have their own interest in the results of their studies

    • Organised skepticism: systematic disbelieve in new ideas until they are proven beyond doubt

Distinction between moral and cognitive norms

  • Beside moral norms there are also cognitive norms governing the way scientists actually do science (e.g. what counts as evidence)

  • Merton was not interested in cognitive norms, because he drew a firm distinction between the practice of science and the content of science

  • In general, he was interested in the practice and did not question the content of science (mark this idea!)

Reward and Sanction System of Science

  • Rewards in science are almost all honorific (that is based on fame)

    • the highest rewards come in the form of eponymy: e.g. Halley’s comet

    • Other forms: citations

  • It is assumed that people do science out of true and unconditional love for science

    • compare it with other occupations to sense the difference; e.g. why do people work in accounting? (money)

Criticism

  • Do really scientists follow the norms identified by Merton?

  • Can these norms be flexible and interpretable?

  • Can we even talk about a goal of something so complex as science?

Cases of Academic Misconduct

  • To understand to what degree scientists follow the norms, it is interesting to look at cases when they actually failed to follow the norms

  • When you start digging deeper into the history of scientific frauds, you realize that lots of prominent scientists of the past were … basically fraudsters

List of Frauds and Fraudsters

  • Claudius Ptolemy, known as “the greatest astronomer of antiquity,” did not do most of his observing, but rather exappropriated the work of another Greek astronomer

  • Galileo Galilei actually didn’t do many of his experiments (though he was insisting that he did). His colleagues also had hard time reproducing his “experiments”

  • Isaac Newton relied on a fudge factor to make his predictions look better

    • things were not adding up without that fudge factor

A Story of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)

Official story goes like

  • Mendel was meticulously experimenting with peas

  • Discovered what we know call genes

  • Identified dominant and recessive traits and the proportions in which they are expected in the offspring

  • Widely recognized as the founder of modern genetics

However…

  • His data was extremely precise, too good to be true actually

  • The famous statistician, Ronald A. Fisher, examined Mendel’s data in 1936 and concluded that

    • “The data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel’s expectations”

  • “Another explanation would be that Mendel performed one or two more experiments and reported only those results that agreed with his expectation” (van der Waerden 1968)

A inofficial story goes like

So, to what extend scientists follow the scientific norms?

  • From a Kuhnian perspective, we could say that science (in its normal stage) is shaped by solidarities built around key ideas, not around general behaviors

    • So norms change with paradigms

  • Michel Mulkay (1969) expands on this idea and gives an example of the Velikofsky affair

  • Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) was a Russian-American psychoanalyst largely known for his pseudo-scientific interpretation of history

    • Pretty much like Anatoly Fomenko

The Velikovsky Affair

Interpretation of Norms

  • We may think of norms as of a part epistemic cultures that characterize scientific disciplines

  • From that point of view, we can also recall Ann Swidler’s understanding of culture: a toolbox of resources

  • So norms do not guide behavior of scientists, but rather provide them with a repertoire of actions whcih scientists can creatively combine depending on their goal

    • which means that the same behavior can be both justified or damned depending on the context

Strong Programme in The Sociology of Knowledge

The basic idea

  • In the 1970s a group of Edinburg based scholars set out to understand the content of scientific knowledge from a sociological perspective

    • note: not the organization of knowledge as functionalist would do, but the content

  • This endeavor was part of the large social constructivism movement that argued (roughly) that studying scientific knowledge we should look at all the factors relevant for the acceptance of a scientific idea, not only those considered legitimate

The scope

  • This, in turn, meant that sociologists should stop distinguishing between science and pseudoscience and treat both equally, as knowledge produced collectively

  • In general, Strong Programme would consider scientific knowledge as the outcome of social relationships between scholars

  • And it was particularly interested in the role of large scale social phenomena (e.g. political ideologies) on the content of scientific knowledge

Manifesto

David Bloor in 1976 formulated four tenets of the Strong Programme

  • It is causal: that shows how social conditions shape scientific knowledge

  • It is impartial: it does not privilege true science over false science

  • It is symmetric: same causes explain both true and false science

  • It is reflexive: it applies the same principles to itself

Important Works

Beliefs Must be Explained

  • Beliefs are products of society so one must study how they come about

  • Typical common sense explanation is assymmetric: true beliefs are explained internally, whereas false beliefs are explained externally

    • internal: heliocentric system has been adopted because it agreed with data

    • external: Lysenkov’s doctrine has been adopted because it was ideologically appealing

Some Other Important Ideas

  • Critique on Foundationalism (true knowledge is accepted because it has foundations in objective nature)

  • Induction requires human judgement on similarity of cases: “No case is or is not the same as cases that came before it in the absence of a human decision about sameness” (Sismondo 2010, 48)

External vs. Internal Explanations

External explanation:

  • identify a scientific controversy.

  • identify a social conflict, the sides of which can be correlated to the sides of the debate.

  • ???

  • explain the scientific conflict as the product of the social conflict

Example: Phrenology in Edinburgh

Friday Discussion: Shapin, S. (1975) 'Phrenological knowledge and the social structure of early nineteenth century Edinburgh'

Discussion Question. Basic

  • Did you like the paper?

  • How would you summarize its content?

    • What is the take away message

  • What is phrenology anyway?

  • Any other interesting insights/trivia from the paper?

Phrenology

A wiki page

More Advanced

  • What was the class composition of The Edinburgh Phrenological Society?

  • How it was different from The Royal Society of Edinburgh

    • and why?

  • What was the general societal agenda of the Edinburgh phrenologists?

  • What do you think of phrenology yourselves?