Why to study laboratories?

• In the 1970s socialogists started increasingly looking into the mundane work of scientists

• Laboratories allows you to observe experimental work, a central part of scientific activity

• The general idea: let’s look at the scientists as anthopologists look at distant tribes

  • let’s carefully describe all the rituals and hierarchies within the laboratory and try to understand their meaning (Latour and Woolgar 1986)

How “facts” are made?

• How claims produced/constructed in the laboratory come to count as pieces of knowledge?

  • that is, what is the recipe to cook a scientific fact

• “Facts” are decisions made by scientists; they are negotiated, so it is interesting to look the process of negotiation from a micro-sociological perspective

• Rhetorical maneuvers help shape what other scientists will accept

• Scientific practices in the lab are similar to practices of ordinary life outside the lab, and there is no strict demarcation between science as done in laboratories and non-science outside of laboratories

How to see “facts”

• Scientists learn how to interpret lab results in the certain way that is not clear to the outsider

• This happens because they learn to filter out some “irrelevant” information and focus on the “relevant” one

• However, this distinction between irrelevant and relevant is conditional and historical; it changes with time

Tacit Knowledge

• Laboratires are messy places: things never go the way it is expected

• Lab crew has to develop a wide set of tacit skills and knowledge: tinkering (Knorr Cetina 1981) or bricolage (Latour and Woolgar 1986)

• Tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1858) refers to knowledge that cannot be formally coded and expressed. It is opposed to Explicit Knowledge

  • Explicit: Water freezes at 0 C

  • Tacit: How to ride a bicycle

Tacit Knowledge: Application

• Collins in 1974 applied the idea of tacit knowledge to the construction of a Transversely Excited Atmospheric Laser, or TEA-laser

• he interviewed researchers at six different British laboratories, all of which were trying to build versions of a TEA-laser

• He argued that nobody “succeeded in building a laser by using only information found in published or other written sources”

• The transfer of knowledge about how to build the laser required more than simply a set of instructions; it required the passing on of a skill

Science is full of tacit knowledge

• Collins went on to argue that some scientific knowledge is inevitably tacit

• Since tacit knowledge cannot be codified, it can only be passed on via social action

• Hence, scientific knowledge is produced with the certain amount of social factor that defines the way tacit knowledge passes through generations of scientists

• Expertise can never be entirely formalized

Taming Data

• “Data” comes from the Latin for “givens”

• But creating data requires a lot of pre-work

• The way data is produced is often local: it relies on many assumptions specific to a context

  • there’s no universal way to produce data

• If observation is not a straightforward process, how does data ever become stable enough to form the basis of arguments?

• We might look at how researchers decide on the nature of data, and how they construct evidence for public consumption

Methodological Note

• Lab studies were mostly focused on the language of everyday communication between scientists

• They looked at the research process as narratives and were analyzing structures of those narratives using insights from semiotics and literature studies

• E.g. let’s imagine that the electron is the main character, what does he do, what other characters do, how does they relationship evolve

• What they observed was that scientists tend to interpret observations aligning them with the commonly existing narratives

How scientific papers are written

• In 1963 Peter Medawar wrote a paper Is the scientific paper a fraud?
• Scientific papers typically tell about a sequence of events: we did this, received that, then did that, etc
• Meanwhile, papers presnt argument, a narrative with a defined structure
• Events themselves do not form a nice narrative, one needs to adjust them
  • Compare it with telling a story: story is always a tidied version of true events

Tidying the mess

• Behind-the-scenes laboratory work is not included in papers

• When something is not working as intended, it is externalized: human error, untuned device, bad data

• But all the doubts are purified from the final account: everything looks like it was intended that way

• As Latour and Woolgar put it, the actual work is based on the decision made by scientists; they are the agents

• But after the work is published, they grant all the agency to reality or data

  • Think of the phrase: “out data shows that X affects Y”

  • All the arbitrariness behind has been purified by granting agency to data

• Scientists behave as if they are mere vessels of reality’s will

Constructing the order

• So the messy practical work is never presented in papers

• Papers give an image of an orderly nature, where nature smoothly translates into data

• The work of the laboratory assumes that the nature is orderly, and thus it cancels itself out from the self-image of science as irrelevant

Is Nature Orderly?

Culture and Science at large

• Sharon Traweek’s (1988) Beamtimes and Lifetimes: Ethnographic studies of high-energy physic labs

• How the male tale is constructed: that is how the narrative that physics is a business for men is reproduced

• How wider cultural beliefs about space and time enter into the construction of scientific facts

Epistemic Cultures

• Scientific domains differ in their ways of interpreting knowledge: they have different epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina 1999)

• For example, high energy physics works with very small objects that cannot be directly observed; they can be detected with special equipment and simulated with computers

• Knowledge is produced within large groups that have complex organization

• Molecular biology, however, works with more palpable objects, their laboratories are smaller.

• Manual skills are very important both for working with the material and observing it

Funding Science

• Science needs to be funded, obviously

• How to decide what deserves funding is not clear

• Something that can be applied to real world problems?

• Something that taps into fundamental questions of nature?

• Who is to decide where to channel funds? Scientists? Officials? Tax-payers?

Funding for Science in Kazakhstan

• Ministry of Science and Education holds grant competition every 3-4 years (for example, in 2015 and 2018)

• Data on applications are open; we augmented it with data on principle investigators (projects’ heads).

• The decision on funding was controlled by selection commitee members (mostly men)

Probability of Getting Funded

Big Fish in the Small Pond

Highlights

Background story

• Who are the main characters behind the “spontaneous generation” affair?

• Describe the gist of the argument?

• What kind of experiments Paster and Pouchet were staging?

• How the French academics were deciding on who won the competition

Other questions

• Did Paster win because he was a true scientists?

• What would happen if Pouchet wouldn’t give up and continued to stage experiments with hay infusion?