Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
separated. To reiterate a claim I made in passing before: over time commu-
nities actively create their own niche, and they thereby help to manufacture
their various audiences. Even to insiders, let alone outsiders, this process is
usually too slow for its effects to be visible. Normally, the effects are taken
for granted as 'just the way things are' - as things given rather than contrived.
Let me flesh out these two points by way of brief examples, which relate
to the physical sciences. Even today, if you ask people about 'science' they
think of individuals (usually men) in white coats busy trying to answer
questions phrased crisply as testable hypotheses. In the public's mind, sci-
entists do not pose moral, political or aesthetic questions (because these are
anterior to science). Instead, they ask value-free 'what?', 'how?' and 'why?'
questions about the organic or inorganic world that are addressed by them
adducing the right quality and quantity of evidence ('facts'). In the West, at
least, we hold science in high esteem because it promises a kind of knowl-
edge that's seemingly rather special in its content and character. Science is
regarded as the enemy of distortion, bias, falsity, ambivalence, bad faith,
opinion, metaphysics and the like. Scientists thus together comprise what's
been called 'a culture of no culture'. We typically expect them to say what
'nature would say to us' if only it could speak our language. To be a 'scien-
tist' is thus to be perceived as a truth seeker who lets the facts do the talking,
not their personal biases, hunches or prejudices.
However, the public image of science has always been belied by what
scientists do in practice once their activities are closely scrutinised. Since
the early 1970s, a now large research and teaching field called 'social stud-
ies of science' (or science and technology studies (STS)) has opened up
the 'black box' of science and peered inside. Detailed studies of pure and
applied scientists in a range of disciplines, and in laboratories and the field,
show that 'science' is not at all a unified thing and neither are scientists. For
instance, in her germinal study of two communities of high-energy physi-
cists in Stanford, California and Tusukuba, Japan, Sharon Traweek (1988)
showed that they each had a particular 'culture' - in the same sense a West-
ern anthropologist might characterise the norms, values and practices of
a non-Western 'tribe'. Traweek's key point was that, like
all
communities,
physicists actively create their own ways of describing, looking, questioning,
theorising, recording, measuring, testing and evaluating. These ways are
not
'dictated' to them by the 'laws of nature', Traweek argued. Instead, they are
the socially contingent means by which those laws are (apparently) 'discov-
ered' - if the means had been otherwise, so might the discoveries. More
recent work by Karin Knorr Cetina (1999) endorses this argument, build-
ing on her earlier study (1981). Her book
Epistemic cultures
contrasts the way
that high-energy physicists investigate the world with that of molecular biol-
ogists. Based on ethnographic research, Knorr Cetina shows that in the two
cases, different 'scientists are reconfigured to become specific epistemic sub-
jects' (1999: 32). Their respective sense of the 'right' way to think and act as
a scientist is heavily conditioned by the particularities of their prior training
