2
Choosing Science

Scientific values and the technical phase

Technological decision-making in the public domain involves the inter-mingling of expertise and democracy. What the distinction between technical and political phases allows - in fact, advocates - is that the two are kept separate as far as possible and we do everything we can to preserve the distinctive features of each. The differences between the technical and political phases were summarized in our 2002 paper in table 2.1.

The lower three rows of table 2.1 are relatively straightforward. Starting with row 2, the idea that participation is based on meritocratic principles follows directly from the idea that the technical phase is concerned with expert knowledge; even where concerns are raised by non-expert whistleblowers and other stakeholders, domain experts will need to evaluate the significance and impact of the claims.26 The next two rows are closely related to this meritocratic requirement: first, experts will need to represent themselves in the technical debate. Expertise responds to unpredictable changing circumstances in real-time and is based on understandings which are often tacit, so no non-expert can be delegated to do the job. In contrast, because the political phase is assumed to be democratic, then anyone with a stake or their representative may participate and, as the vast literature on democratic theory attests, many different mechanisms exist for allowing this to take place.

Table 2.1 Technical and Political Phases

The top row is more complicated and most of this chapter is about what we mean by 'intrinsic' politics. To understand the difference between Wave Two (mainly descriptive) and Wave Three (mainly prescriptive), it is important to distinguish between a descriptive 'is' and a prescriptive 'ought'. A well-known example in the STS literature - Shapin's study of the controversy surrounding phrenology in nineteenth-century Edinburgh27 - makes the point. Shapin shows that the outcome, in which phrenology was effectively vanquished and proponents of the status quo retained their positions of influence and authority in the academic world, was closely linked to, and, in part, explained by, their connections and influence in the wider cultural and political life of Edinburgh society. This is the 'is' of the matter. The question is what follows from this description? One could argue that the scientific debate would have been concluded more quickly and efficiently if the influence of the various social and political factors had been brought immediately to centre-stage. But we argue that this would be incompatible with the idea of science. We argue that, despite the inevitable influence of local political factors in the technical debate about phrenology, the guiding principle should be to eliminate these effects so far as is possible. One conclusion that can too easily be drawn from the Second Wave is that, because science is affected by politics, one should forget the distinction - to act politically in a matter of science is to act scientifically. The

Shapin example reveals the flaw in this idea; would we want the fate of phrenology as a potential field of scientific knowledge to have been decided by local Edinburgh politics? The answer seems, a self-evident, 'no'!

The problem of demarcation

But what does it mean to act 'scientifically'? The fact that this question is a classic philosophical topic - 'the problem of demarcation' - makes it evident that science is hard to separate from other enterprises, at least in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient characteristics. If one cannot say what something is, then it is hard to choose it. Indeed, much of the power of Wave Two comes from exactly this point: showing that science is much like other activities means that the boundary between science and other kinds of social activities becomes blurred, and so identifying what it means to act 'scientifically' becomes even more difficult.

Luckily, science only seems hard to define. It seems hard because a mistake has been made about what it is to define something like science. Wittgenstein pointed out that, even though we regularly use the word and the idea of 'game' without being puzzled, we cannot define a 'game':

Consider for example the proceedings that we call 'games'. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? . . . if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.

I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than 'family resemblances'; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.28

'Science' is no more definable in terms of common properties than 'game' and the problem of demarcation arises only because it was thought that it should be. What we argue, following Wittgenstein, is that science can be readily recognized if it is thought of as characterized by a loose collection of family resemblances, mostly present but sometimes not.

Unfortunately, the notion of family resemblance needs to be used with some restraint if it is not to become meaningless. The problem is that anything can be linked to anything via a family resemblance with some intermediate object or property. Soccer uses a projectile - the ball. But rifle-shooting also uses a projectile so soccer and execution by firing squad are part of the same family and, since the stock of a gun is usually made out of wood, they also belong to the same family as carpentry and forestry - and so on. The notion of family resemblance does not work unless the family is restricted in some way in addition to overlap of properties.

Fortunately, the idea of a 'form of life', itself a distinctive feature of Wittgenstein's philosophy, provides the necessary restraint. Thought of sociologically, a 'form of life' is similar to many other sociological/historical concepts that capture the way life is typically lived in a social group.29 The historical notion of 'epoch', Kuhn's notion of 'paradigm', the phenomenological notion of 'taken-for-granted reality' and, indeed, the concept of culture in general, all point to the fact that social groups both create their day-to-day worlds and operate boundaries around them. Science is a social grouping characterized by the typical actions and intentions of its members. In this, it is like other social 'collectivities', and its boundaries, membership and qualities can all be examined using standard sociological research methods.

To these ideas, we add that social groups should be thought as related in a 'fractal-like' manner. At the top end of the fractal are groups characterized only by the fact that they speak a common natural language, such as English.30 At the bottom end are small groups of specialists who have narrow skills in common. Here the members share a more specialist vocabulary and way of talking that allows practitioners to understand and relate to each other and their world of specialized practices; we call this a 'practice language'. In between these two extremes are groups such as sports-players, soldiers, artists and scientists. These groups are of different sizes, they overlap and they are often embedded in one another but, whatever their size and whatever their substance, each group provides the set of 'formative intentions' of its members: it defines the ways in which they can legitimately intend to act as members of that group. Members of the Azande, as members of the Azande, can legitimately intend to divine witches by using the poison-oracle but they cannot legitimately intend to take out a mortgage; those who live in developed societies, as members of developed societies, can intend to take out mortgages but cannot intend to divine witches. Cricket players can intend to score a boundary but cannot intend, as cricket players, to kill members of the opposing side; soldiers can intend to kill members of the opposing side but, as soldiers, cannot intend to score a boundary. And so on. Members of any of these groups may also intend to eat or make love but those intentions do not help constitute the group of which they are members. Eating and making love are universal activities so in themselves they are not formative of social groups. Culturally distinctive ways of eating and making love do, of course, contribute to the constitution of forms of life.

Individuals usually belong to many overlapping forms of life. One can be both a cricket player and a soldier but the formative intentions are still different for each group and it is clear when an individual is acting as a soldier and when as a cricketer. To make the model work, it is important not to try to define the boundaries of groups by reference to which individual members belong to which group but to accept that the group is the unit of analysis.31 It is then possible to say that when an individual is acting as a member of such-and-such a group then their formative intentions can include...