杏吧原创

IN the past year, senior members of the scientific community on both sides of the Atlantic have been sufficiently upset by what 鈥渇ashionable鈥� or 鈥減ostmodernist鈥� academic analysts outside of the natural sciences and technologies have been saying about science that they have rallied to defend the cause.

They have taken time off from their experiments, field trips and calculations to write defences of science and to attend meetings at which the nonscientist critics are denounced. Their view is that an alliance of soi-disant radicals 鈥� feminists, sociologists, leftish historians, those with New Age sensibilities and advocates of cultural studies 鈥� have tried to establish a new orthodoxy according to which scientific beliefs are culturally relative and in which the knowledge claims of science are subject to political as well as (or possibly instead of) technical assessment. Andrew Pickering鈥檚 The Mangle of Practice attempts to take the cultural temperature of the practice of science.

In the eyes of some, all this has happened because, while scientists have been attending to the details of scientific work, others have felt free to pontificate about the nature of science in general. 杏吧原创s have been preoccupied doing it, while others have been peddling stories about it. Worse still, a good percentage of these seemingly antiscience writers actually in universities and share the titles and degrees of 鈥渢rue鈥� scientists. In the face of this enemy within, concerned scientists have argued for the truth, realism and objectivity of science, and have opposed feminist or other cultural critics of science who have claimed to see widespread cultural and political influences within science.

Where natural scientists see a united opposition, the academics who make up the bulk of the rebel forces are acutely aware of internal differences. Briefly, there seem to be two main camps. In one camp are those who think of themselves as inheritors of the legacy of philosopher Thomas Kuhn. In the l960s, Kuhn famously argued that scientific knowledge develops through periods of additive growth (鈥渘ormal science鈥�) punctuated by occasional revolutions.

This view, however discomforting to scientists鈥� own favoured image of science as a smooth line of cumulative progress, was at least carried through in a spirit of disinterested and value-neutral inquiry. For Kuhn and his followers, historical evidence suggested that the development of science had not proceeded as many scientists and philosophers fondly supposed. A better analysis, one which made much more room for the impact of social and psychological influences, was needed.

In the other camp are the cultural studies critics. Since this discipline tends to have as its objective the political transformation of culture, science is of particular interest because its theories have frequently been used to legitimate the subordination of women, people of colour, those of minority sexual orientations, nonhuman species or the biosphere itself. Some scientific practices have actually harmed the interests of these subordinate groups. The purpose of such studies is moral and political.

Though the two camps are not completely separate and a number of celebrated analysts attract fans from both sides, the second tends to view the first as excessively respectful of science and as shirking their moral responsibilities, while the first often see the second as lacking in rigour and inclined to put the political cart before the analytical pony.

And this, of course, leaves out the still considerable number of academics who study science鈥檚 role in society from a position which, while critical, is carefully respectful of the special character of science.

This kind of analysis is commonly associated with philosophers of science who share scientists鈥� belief in the objectivity and rationality of science but worry about exactly what these terms might mean, and with science policy analysts who take the standing of scientific knowledge for granted but worry about how best to make research funds pay.

In The Mangle of Practice, Pickering sets out to be all things to all camps, proclaiming that 鈥渟cientific knowledge is objective, relative, and historical, all at once鈥�. He aims to smooth out the differences of opinion by focusing on the practice of science, the doing and tinkering 鈥� what he calls mangling. (He does not seem to use the word 鈥渕angling鈥� in its pejorative sense.) He believes he is offering the foundations for a new analysis of science, one which emphasises practice and so has a 鈥減erformative鈥� focus. He regards the disputes between scientists and post-Kuhnian 鈥渃onstructionists鈥� as exacerbated by an overemphasis on representation. If the debate is allowed to centre on representation, scientists typically choose to see their beliefs as corresponding with how the world actually is; social analysts of science want to stress the cultural lens through which the world is seen. Pickering aims to sidestep this dispute by concentrating on interactions with the world. Whether our knowledge 鈥渞eally鈥� corresponds with the ultimate 鈥渇urniture of the universe鈥� is unknowable, but the world sure as heck interacts with us.

Accordingly, Pickering鈥檚 鈥渂asic image of science is a performative one, in which the performances 鈥� the doings 鈥� of human and material agency come to the fore. 杏吧原创s are human agents in a field of material agency which they struggle to capture in machines.鈥�

The case studies which he reviews in the substantive chapters all focus on, as he puts it, 鈥渕achinic鈥� aspects of science and technology. The principal fault he sees with most sociological approaches is that they overlook, indeed implicitly deny, the agency of the world while the 鈥渨orld 鈥� is continually doing things鈥�. Historians and sociologists of science have focused on human interpretations of the world and have sidelined the world itself.

Now this move appears to take Pickering right into a straightforward realism since it is precisely science and technology which afford us our most authoritative account of how the physical world is. His response to this is to concentrate on science as it happens 鈥� what he calls the 鈥渢emporal emergence鈥� of scientific practice. At the forefront of research, scientists and technologists don鈥檛 yet know how the world will behave. They struggle with the agency of the natural world, trying to capture and domesticate it. Given the ability of the natural world to surprise us, all we can say is that 鈥淐aptures and their properties in this sense just happen鈥�.

Pickering uses some inventive language to get across his sense of science as engagement with the world. He talks of a 鈥渄ialectic of resistance and accommodation鈥�, meaning the way the world confounds the expectations of scientists and engineers and how they take these reversals into account. Aiming to give weight to human activity and the agency of the natural world, he talks of the 鈥渄ance of agency鈥�. He sees inventive 鈥渕angling鈥� as going on at all levels, from getting a detector to work in a lab to establishing a new technology throughout an industry.

But in the end, the extreme even-handedness which Pickering views as the strength of his approach obliges him to conclude only that things just happen. He doesn鈥檛 want to give social and psychological factors undue importance, nor to give exclusive weight to the natural world: all factors are changed and reshaped as they undergo mangling. 鈥淥n my analysis,鈥� he says, 鈥渢here is only the mangle鈥�.

The danger is that while this seems to allow us to comprehend everything it actually advances our understanding rather little. For example, since all science involves mangling, knowledge of the mangle of practice doesn鈥檛 help us understand the outcome of scientific controversies. Pickering鈥檚 approach would encourage us to say that the victor mangled more successfully, but this is to say little more than that the victor followed a victorious strategy. Comparing the contrasting fates of two rival experimentalists, Pickering is only able to say, 鈥淚t just happened that the contingencies of resistance and accommodation worked out differently in the two instances.鈥�

And, just as the approach does not advance our understanding of the history of science, neither does it do much for how the public views science. In 1995, trials involving the science of DNA and environmental protest over sea disposal of oil-storage rigs have exposed scientific expertise to public scrutiny. To some, it must seem that science truly has been mangled. But Pickering does not help us to distinguish legitimate from inappropriate, wise from foolish mangling.

Mangling comes in only one flavour. Pickering鈥檚 mangle helpfully directs us towards analysing the practice of science; it is, however, much less helpful as a model of how to do that analysis.