Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
(bachelor's and postgraduate degrees), their colleagues, the (often expen-
sive) equipment at their disposal and other 'local' matters. Scientists are
thus socialised into different (though sometimes overlapping) 'sub-cultures'
rather than into a mythical universal called 'science' (refer back to
Box 2.2)
.
However, the myth has its uses - and here I come to the 'boundary work'
that many scientists necessarily perform (my second point). Back in 1942,
the American sociologist Robert Merton famously sought to capture the
dif-
ferentia specifica
of 'science'. For him there were four, namely: communalism
(the common ownership of scientific discoveries); universalism (claims to
truth are evaluated in terms of transcendental criteria, and not on the basis
of race, class, gender, religion or nationality); disinterestedness (scientists
put personal interests to one side); and organised scepticism (all hypothe-
ses and findings must be evidenced and are subject to rigorous, structured
community scrutiny) (Merton, 1942). Interestingly, Merton's four principles
were not based on any systematic observations of how scientists do their sci-
ence. Instead, he derived them from discussions with scientists and took the
latter at their word. Arguments like Merton's, which claim to reduce science
to its supposed 'essential characteristics', confirm Steve Fuller's astute obser-
vation that '
defining
science quickly metamorphoses into
...
[normatively]
...
demarcating
science from its various pretenders' (Fuller, 2007b: 31). Sixty
years after Merton wrote, the end of the millennium saw a large number of
American scientists trying to delimit their intellectual territory once more.
The impetus for their boundary work was what they perceived as the 'attacks'
on science being launched by scholars like Traweek and Knorr Cetina. These
supposed attacks were met with return fire in the form of publications with
loaded titles such as
The flight from science and reason
(Gross
et al.
, 1997).
It seems to me that two things were going on in the so-called 'science
wars' of the 1990s (see
Box 3.3
for more on these wars). First, sociolo-
gists of science were deliberately having their expertise called into question
by their erstwhile research subjects, namely practising scientists. In other
words, the latter sought to defend their craft by arguing that the former
were, at best, misinformed and, at worst, anti-science and 'politically moti-
vated'. In Thomas Gieryn's (1999: 4) terms, the two sides were engaged in
a 'credibility contest' to see who had the right to represent what science
is 'really' all about. Second, in keeping with the spirit (if not the letter)
of Merton, the defenders of science were also downplaying their differ-
ences in order to present a reassuringly conventional definition - and thus
demarcation - of science for wider public consumption. For instance, the
famous American physicist Steven Weinberg, commenting critically on the
sociology of science in the
New York Review of Books
,saidthis:
If scientists are talking about something real, then what they say is either true
or false. If it is true, then how can it depend on the social environment of the
scientist?
(Weinberg, 1996: np)
