Social Constructionism and Its Application to the Historiography of Science

Social Constructionism and Historiography of Science

In the historiography of science, the debate between intenalists and externalists has been one of the major fault lines over the past century. While many historians are not specialists in physics, chemistry and biology, by training and experience they also consider the political, economic and cultural influences on any institution and organization in a given period, and science his not been exempt from historicism. Internlaists found that scientific progress was generally driven forward by geniuses like Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Charles Darwin, Antoine Lavoisier and Albert Einstein, and that their discoveries about nature were objectively true regardless of external social and political considerations. For externalists and social constructionists, however, all of these scientists were products of a certain historical and cultural milieu, which influenced their work in many ways. For example, according to Boris Hessen and Robert Merton, Newton and the 17th Century English scientists were influenced by Puritanism and the Whig-capitalist revolution of that period, while Bruno Latour asserted that Pasteur was part of a much broader social and public health movement in the 19th Century that facilitated the acceptance of his discoveries. In the case of Albert Einstein, politics and ideology led to attacks on his theories in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, while Britain and the United States benefitted militarily in the Second World War by their more open attitudes toward the new physics. In addition, the politicization of Darwinism in the form of Social Darwinism and eugenics, particularly in Nazi Germany, led to catastrophic consequences, but the Soviet Union also suffered by rejecting Mendelian genetics completely as a 'fascist' science. Probably the most influential history of science books in the last half century has been Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which combined the Great Man theory with a kind of externalism and social constructionism in which paradigm shifts in science occurred because of a change in generations, with younger scientists more likely to accept new ideas than older, more established ones.

According to Bruno Latour, even though Louis Pasteur received most of the credit for proving that microorganisms caused disease, he was in reality just a small part of a much broader social and political movement in the 19th Century that already accepted the basic idea of contagious diseases and the need for public health and hygiene measures to combat them. Even though very few people today "still believe in the advent of the Enlightenment…nobody has yet recovered from this loss of faith." [footnoteRef:1] Only naive epistemology still holds that science is uniquely set apart from politics, culture and history. Pasteur's 'revolution' took place "at the high point of the scientific religion," although only "extreme cynics" could doubt the true value of his discoveries.[footnoteRef:2] These were applied far more quickly than any others in the history of science, and his belief that invisible microbes caused disease was already widely shared in the 1870s and 1880s. His victory also took place in the aftermath of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War when public discussions about methods for improving national health, wealth and strength were intense. [1: Bruno Latour. The Pasteurization of France. Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 5.] [2: Latour, p. 8.]

Latour studied the relevant scientific literature from the 1870s to the early-20th Century, such as the journal of the Pasteur Institute, the Councours Medical and the Revue Scientifique and determined that germs, microbes and public hygiene were common areas of concern far beyond Pasteur's discoveries. He was interests not only in the content of chemistry and biology of the time but also their social, political and economic context. A wide variety of groups and interests had a stake in Pasteur's discoveries, including biologists, surgeons, veterinarians, military doctors and public health officials. He asks whether Pasteur created a scientific revolution as Thomas Kuhn theorized, or whether he was simply part of a much broader social and scientific movement. He may have been one of the Great Men of history, or even a Napoleon of science, but the transformation did not depend solely on "the great genius of a simple man."[footnoteRef:3] Pasteur had help, even though most of the helpers are long forgotten today, and these other groups were not simply "inert masses" that passively adapted to Pasteur.[footnoteRef:4] Physicians and scientists were already very concerned about public health in the large cities and the population loss from contagious diseases long before Pasteur, and the public hygiene movement had "already prepared the ground for the arrival of the Pasteurians."[footnoteRef:5] National health was necessary to ensure that the cities would no longer be death traps, and an infrastructure was already in place to put Pasteur's ideas into practice. They may not have known exactly what agents caused typhus, plague and tuberculosis, but they realized that overcrowding and lack of public sanitation were factors in the spread of disease. [3: Latour, p. 15.] [4: Latour, p. 16.] [5: Latour, p. 18.]

Pasteurism was already a social movement long before Pasteur appeared on the scene, and hygiene, housing, flush toilets, public water supplies, refrigeration, ventilation and disinfection were all part of public hygiene. Nor was Pasteur's laboratory the only one in the world studying microbes, but he has always "one bacteriologist among others."[footnoteRef:6] His ideas were accepted very rapidly in Britain, France, Germany and the United States since the ground had already been prepared for them years before. Of course there was some skepticism about the existence of the microbes, since they seemed to be "unknown and erratic agents" that did not always cause disease in everyone who came in contact with them.[footnoteRef:7] In 1896, for example, Robert Koch announced a vaccine for tuberculosis and was "besieged by patients from all over Europe possessed of the hope of being cured," but it turned out to be ineffective.[footnoteRef:8] Nevertheless, most resistance was swiftly and surely overcome since Pasteur had "provided the hygienists with a fulcrum" and "made the enemy visible." [footnoteRef:9] Military physicians had a great interest in healthy armies, while capitalists and colonial officials required healthy workforces, so a truly vast social movement associated with powerful political and economic interests existed to drive Pasteurism forward against rather feeble opposition. [6: Latour, p. 26.] [7: Latour, p. 30.] [8: Latour, p. 33.] [9: Latour, p. 34.]

In Laboratory Life (1986), Latour and Steve Woolgar used sociological and anthropological methods to study science as if it were an unknown culture,, and found that the 'facts' of nature were actually the product of intense discussion, debate and argument among various factions. They asserted that "the difference between object and subject or the difference between facts and artifacts should not be the starting point of the study of scientific activity."[footnoteRef:10] Reality only comes about after the settlement of intense discord within the scientific community, and only then do some ideas become objective facts of nature and others dismissed as purely subjective and imaginary. Scientists are not concerned with nature or reality as such, but with politics, language and public relations, "both to make a point and to out-maneuver a competitor."[footnoteRef:11] Their debates about proof and evidence are just as confused and disorderly as those between lawyers and politicians, and those with higher credibility and better credentials and funding usually win. This messy type of scientific debate "blurs arbitrary lines between economic, epistemological, and psychological factors" and the success or failure of scientific theories depends not on objective truth but which faction is stronger and more persuasive. In short, "science is entirely fabricated out of circumstance."[footnoteRef:12] [10: Steve Woolgar and Bruno Latour. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 236.] [11: Woolgar and Latour, p. 237.] [12: Woolgar and L:atour, p. 239.]

Other historians have questioned whether a Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment actually occurred in the 17th and 18th Centuries and regarded these concepts as artificial. Pierre Duhem, the French Catholic scientist and historian, thought that 17th Century science was "a natural extension of theories and methods that had already been developed by medieval scholars" and that the revolution was more a case of evolution.[footnoteRef:13] Emil Wohlwill and others in this school of thought concentrated of medieval and Renaissance predecessors to 17th and 18th Century science. Even Isaac Newton seems more medieval than modern in retrospect, since he spent more time on the "chronology of the Scriptures, alchemy, occult medicine and prophecies of history" than on the physics and mathematics for which he is remembered today.[footnoteRef:14] He used calculus to try to find the date for the end of the world and the number of souls in hell, and all this was perfectly normal and reasonable by 17th Century standards, especially given his Puritan background. At that time, all scientists combined "religious, moral and political considerations" with their work, so no historian can honestly isolate their scientific and non-scientific sides in ways that would have been quite alien to them.[footnoteRef:15] Robert Merton wrote extensively about the Puritan influence on 17th Century science in England and its links with the Whig revolution in society and politics during that period.[footnoteRef:16] Writing from a Soviet Marxist point-of-view, Boris Hessen claimed that Newton's science was a part of the capitalist revolution in the 17th Century and developed to meet the economic and military needs of the new bourgeois elites.[footnoteRef:17] Hessen and Merton could in fact be considered the founders of the externalist school in scientific historiography, with the central thesis that science is socially constructed by outside political, economic and cultural influences rather than the internalist school and its argument that science progresses due mainly to the genius of the great innovators like Newton and Einstein. [13: Helge Kragh. An Introduction to the Historiography of Science. Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 18.] [14: Kragh, p. 27.] [15: Kragh, p. 28.] [16: Robert Merton. The Sociology of Science. University of Chicago Press, 1973.] [17: Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin (Eds). The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossman. Springer Science and Business Media, 2008.]

Even in the 20th Century, science has often been highly ideological and politicized, particularly in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Philippe Lenard argued for "Aryan science" in Germany and asserted that only Aryans had ever made any real contributions to science while "great Jewish scientists had either carried out bad research or had stolen their good ideas from non-Jews."[footnoteRef:18] Ironically, while the Nazis were dismissing quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity as 'Jew physics', and attacked Freudianism as 'Jew psychology', all of these were being denounced in Stalin's Russia as 'bourgeois idealist' sciences that should be banned.[footnoteRef:19] In Stalin's Soviet Union, historians and philosophers of science routinely claimed that Russians were responsible for all the great discoveries and inventions in history and that Communism had made this possible. Soviet genetics was also set back greatly by Stalin's support for Trofim Lysenko, who claimed that Mendelian genetics was a 'fascist' theory and should be banned in Russia.[footnoteRef:20] Stanley Jaki, a scientist and Catholic priest, claimed that science was the result "of the Christian faith of the Middle Ages" and that only Christians could be true scientists.[footnoteRef:21] Moreover, the history of science has always been biased in favor of a few Western countries and almost never focuses on non-European cultures. One notable exception, of course, has been Joseph Needham, who studied Chinese science and technology extensively, and the question of why China did not have a scientific and industrial revolution even before the West has long perplexed historians.[footnoteRef:22] [18: Kragh, p. 104.] [19: Marget Szollosi-Janze. Science in the Third Reich. Oxford International Publishers, 2001, p. 6.] [20: David Joravsky. The Lysenko Affair. University of Chicago Press, 1970.] [21: Kragh, p. 109. See also: Stanley L. Jaki. The Savior of Science. Real View Books, 2006.] [22: Joseph Needham. Science and Civilization in China. Cambridge University Press, 1974.]

H.F. Cohen wrote that the West was unique if developing a culture of pluralism, critical thinking and constructive skepticism that ancient, medieval and non-Western civilizations never had. Moreover, the great danger to the West occurred when science and technology were used by Nazis, Communists and others who did not share its liberal-pluralist values. For Cohen, science was the "key element" that distinguished the West from the Rest and made the Industrial Revolution possible.[footnoteRef:23] Like Herbert Butterfield, he thought that the Scientific Revolution was more important by far than Christianity, the Renaissance or Reformation, even though the periodization that historians use, including terms like Scientific Revolution, has "deteriorated into an empty label."[footnoteRef:24] Many historians have come to doubt whether these labels can even be revived, although they generally favor Kuhn's theory of multiple scientific revolutions. Cohen maintained that modern science was always linked to earlier natural philosophy -- as indeed science was still called into the early-19th Century -- but also to important developments like the Reformation, the printing press and the voyages of discovery and conquest. As I. Bernard Cohen pointed out, only the Glorious Revolution used the term 'revolution' in its modern (political) sense, while the idea of progress and experimentation did not exist before the age of Galileo, Descartes and Bacon.[footnoteRef:25] Even so, the question remains why science failed to "emerge in any of the other great civilizations of the past."[footnoteRef:26] [23: H.F. Cohen. The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry. University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 3.] [24: Cohen, p. 14. See also: Herbert Butterfield. The Scientific Revolution. Freeman, 1960.] [25: Cohen, p. 22. See also: I. Bernard Cohen. Revolution in Science. Harvard University Press, 1985.] [26: Cohen, p. 16.]

Thomas Kuhn's history centers on the great geniuses of scientific history, such as Newton, Lavoisier and Einstein, on the basis that they drove revolutionary change and accumulated a phalanx of younger followers who eventually become the new establishment.[footnoteRef:27] In reality, Lavoisier was very adept at portraying himself as a great political and scientific revolutionary, and "ignored completely the works of earlier chemists" so he could claim to have originated the new science. So did Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology, which later historians came to realize was essentially an exercise in "self-promotion." [footnoteRef:28] According to Kuhn, however, all "attributions of genius are ultimately determined by collective response," though he always claimed to oppose his more radical followers in reducing science to a purely historical or sociological phenomenon.[footnoteRef:29] He considered himself a pluralist rather than a radical skeptic or deconstructionist of the scientific enterprise. Structure of Scientific Revolutions ended its historical inquiry in about 1912, because Kuhn doubted that contemporaries could write an objective account about scientific controversies in which they had a personal stake. His account fits in with the familiar Great Man theory of history, and "the popular historiography of science as the succession of trailblazers at the research frontiers, except that the heroic genius is replaced by the self-perpetuating cult."[footnoteRef:30] He was not particularly comfortable in the era of Bid Science produced by World War II and the Cold War, which is perhaps one reason why he preferred to describe science as it existed before World War I. At no time did he mention the effect of the world wars and the Cold War on science, which was more revolutionary than any of the events he described in Structure. [27: Thomas S. Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Third Edition. University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1996.] [28: Kragh, p. 114.] [29: Steve Fuller. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for our Times. University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. xii.] [30: Fuller, p. 9.]

While at Harvard, Kuhn's closest personal and professional ties were with President James B. Conant, one of the deans of the American scientific establishment since the Second World War, although this connection did not prevent him from being denied tenure for lack or original publications in his field of physics. Conant wrote the preface to his first book, The Copernican Revolution, which quickly achieved canonical status as well. This was ironic in that Conant was one of the founders and leaders of Big Science, and a committed Cold Warrior who headed the Committee on the Present Danger during the 1950s, frequently warning that the Soviets were surpassing the United States in the arms race and space race. In spite of the fact that Bid Science was indeed very much a part of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned about in 1961, "an autonomous science, so Conant and his cohort thought, is science sage both from and for democracy."[footnoteRef:31] He also argued that the U.S. always had to retain its lead in science and technology, both for economic and national security reasons.[footnoteRef:32] During this era, as C.P. pointed out, the gap between sciences and the humanities was growing, while public opinion was increasingly coming to regard modern science as cold, amoral and destructive, and Conant hoped that history of science would help bridge this chasm.[footnoteRef:33] In this sense, Kuhn was also a "normal scientist" in service to the national security state, controlled by a very real corporate and bureaucratic establishment that demanded concrete results for all the billions of dollars being invested every year.[footnoteRef:34] Most unusually for an academic book, Structure sold over a million copies in 1962-2000 and became "one of the most highly cited works in the humanities and social sciences."[footnoteRef:35] It fulfilled a political and sociological function similar to Daniel Bell's End of Ideology in asserting that the great ideological battles were over, replaced by a broad consensus that social, economic and political problems were now more a matter of technocratic adjustments and fine-tuning. [31: Fuller, p. 11.] [32: Kragh, p. 34.] [33: C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures. Cambridge University Press, 1998.] [34: Fuller, p. 5.] [35: Fuller, p. 1.]

Paradigms and paradigm shifts became axiomatic after this time, even cliched, so much so that even Al Gore could claim Structure of Scientific Revolutions as his favorite book. As Kuhn stated, these shifts are uncommon and most scientists have had great difficulty in challenging well-established norms, and therefore "revolutions occur rarely enough to sustain a general faith in scientific progress."[footnoteRef:36] Kuhn always asserted that science has no real progress or goal, only uneven jumps in evolution from time to time, branching out in new directions. His version of history was more Tory than Whig, with the same cycles continually repeating themselves, while the original Whigs once imagined that the emergence of liberalism in England was the true purpose and direction of history. Other historians and philosophers of science like Michael Polyani, Norwood Russell Hanson and Paul Feyerabend had reached similar conclusions even before Kuhn, although they never achieved his level of fame.[footnoteRef:37] Indeed, Kuhn "seems to have had very little contact with European philosophy," although French and German existentialists and postmodernist philosophers had attacked rationalism and logical positivism long before he did.[footnoteRef:38] [36: Fuller, p. 2. ] [37: Fuller, p. 4.] [38: Gary Gutting, "Thomas Kuhn and the French Philosophy of Science," in Thomas Nickles (ed). Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 46.]

Kuhn was not aware that Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger also doubted that science was progressive, but rather regarded it as full of radical breaks and discontinuities. Thanks to Kuhn, though, in the English-speaking world "science has managed to institutionalize historical amnesia" with each cycle of paradigm shifts spawning its own group of historians "rewriting the discipline's history to make the victorious party appear the discipline's natural heirs."[footnoteRef:39] Of course, what Kuhn called "normal science," critics like the classical liberal Karl Popper described as "a danger to science, and indeed to our civilization."[footnoteRef:40] He added that he pitied these scientists who were so deeply committed to traditional thinking and the conventional wisdom, just going along and getting along rather than rocking the boat. Kuhn's work cast doubt on "the objectivity of science and the rationality of scientific progress," with young scientists even having "conversion experiences" as if it were some kind of religion or cult.[footnoteRef:41] [39: Fuller, p. 32. ] [40: John Worrall, "Normal Science and Dogmatism, Paradigms and Progress: Kuhn 'versus' Popper and Lakatos" in Nickles, p. 65.] [41: Worrall, p. 82.]

Popper was the great advocate of the value of falsification in 20th Century science, asserting, for example, the he regarded Freudian theories as worthless because he could find no way to falsify them. For Popper, a more that a theory could prove false, the more valuable it was, which is why he admired Einstein so much for taking the risk to put forward theories that could be falsified. Refutation of all theories stands at the heart of Popper's view of science, although he was well aware of the natural human tendency to cling to false ideas long after they had been disproven. Kuhn maintained that the consensus would only change once the proponents of old theories had all retired or died off, and that science could only be really revolutionary about once a generation.[footnoteRef:42] Mistakes in observation could be corrected by repetition and multiple observers to root out anomalies and outliers, but scientific establishments remained in place until overtaken by death or senility. Imre Lakatos thought this model of paradigm shifts was highly oversimplified, since in the history of science, entire theoretical systems were always being tested, rather than simply the individual theories of a few brilliant scientists. Only the most truly dogmatic scientists would refuse to modify any part of a theoretical system, and often they would even make contributions to "theories in whose tenets they did not believe," as Einstein did with quantum mechanics.[footnoteRef:43] Lakatos also thought that Kuhn's theory was "mob psychology" and "mystical" consensuses rather than real science.[footnoteRef:44] [42: Worrall, p. 67.] [43: Worrall, p. 82.] [44: Worrall, p. 83.]

Even if he was not aware of it, Kuhn had independently arrived at conclusions similar to those of the Continental philosophers and historians of science such as Leon Brunschvicg and Georges Canguilhem. Like Immanuel Kant, Brunschvicg also doubted that science could even know the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) or that knowledge could ever exist independently of the knower. All theories and "mathematical ideas emerge from the mind's creative efforts to make sense of our experience of the world," but none would ever have the "final word" on reality.[footnoteRef:45] According to Canguilhem, all concepts are "functions of theories, deriving their meaning from the roles they play in the theoretic accounts of phenomena," and even terms like "mass" and "heat" did not have the same meaning for Newton as they did for Einstein.[footnoteRef:46] Different concepts gave rise to a variety of competing theories, such as Galileo, Newton and Descartes all having developed theories of motion that differed from Aristotle's and "all employed this new conception in their description of the motion of falling bodies."[footnoteRef:47] Canguilhem thought that conceptual breaks were relatively rare in the history of science, as did his student Foucault. He also noted that science did develop ideologies like Herbert Spencer's philosophy of evolution which had "pretensions that are not scientifically grounded."[footnoteRef:48] Although Kuhn rejected any form of idealism and described himself as a rationalist, his French critics argued that he had abolished "rationality in favor of merely shared opinions," such as the younger scientists of the 17th Century who came to agree with Copernicus and Galileo that the earth really did move around the sun.[footnoteRef:49] [45: Gutting, p. 48.] [46: Gutting, p. 52.] [47: Gutting, p. 53.] [48: Gutting, p. 54.] [49: Gutting, p. 59.]