Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
Kuhn and the Breakdown of the Received View
Theory-ladenness/underdetermination, the social nature of the scientific knowledge, and the breakdown of the positivist hierarchies (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought")
Two consensus among SSK
Reject the traditional philosophy of science; social belief should be explained as another social belief (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought")
Marxist and Mertonian Views
The structure of Scientific Revolution
Marxism: Science consolidate capitalism (P. 701)
but the science in socialist country serves all mankind (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 701)
Merton: Functionalist
Capitalism affect the direction of science but not the objectiveness of science (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 702)
They believe in economic determinism (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 702)
Four Characteristics of Science that maintain the institution of Science: Universalism, Communism, Disinterestedness, Skepticism (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 703)
As norms in scientific community, they safeguard science from politics and culture (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 704)
Same as Marxism, Mertonian school does not question the objectivity of science (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought")
"self-fulfilling prophecy"
"Matthew Effect"
The prediction of science become valid because the prediction itself change the society (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 706)
A well-known scientist can publish his paper easier that the lesser-known one (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 706)
SSK
Strong Programme
Scientist research due to their social interest
Social Constructionism
No general theory; most of the concept is socially constructed; nature plays little role in scientific knowledge; debunking the traditional view of scientific knowledge (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 711-714)
Two problems of SSK
Reflexibility: SSK itself is social determined. Then why should we believe in SSK.
Relativism: Science is relative
The response from Strong Program
It is ok to say SSK itself is social determined? (I don't understand) (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 718)
The response from Strong Program
It is ok to embrace relativism when relativism means science only rational in our own believe system. (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 718)
Barnes & Bloor (1982) Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge
The response from hyper-relativity school
It is ok to say so because it open an opportunities to further discuss about the academic discourse. Academic discourse is just like a game now. (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 719)
The response from hyper-relativity school
Ashmore, Malcolm. 1989. The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting the Sociology of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Woolgar, Steve (1992) Some Remarks about Positionism: A Reply to Collins and Yearley
Woolgar, Steve (1988) Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: SAGE.
The rebuttal within SSK
Social Realist
Actor Network theory (ANT)
Collins, Harry M., and Steven Yearley (1992a) Epistemological Chicken. and (1992b) Journey into Space
Pickering's "Mangle of Practice" (1990, 1994, 1995): Science is determined by nature and science. Scientist interpret the nature world and nature world resist.
Since no general pattern can be discrened. There is no relativism.
Application to History of Economic Thought
SSK and ESK: ESK is Economic of Scientific Knowledge. That perceive scientific research as a economic activity.
Social Interest within Scientific Community:
Latour and Woolgar's credibility accumulation (Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts)
Applying Economic tools to SSK: (Paula Stephan 1996)
SSK and HOPE
Discuss the application of SSK in a general level:
Coats (1993a) The Sociology of Knowledge and the History of Economics
Coats (1993a) The Sociology of Science: Its Application to Economics
Hands (1994a) The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Some Thoughts on the Possibilities
Works on one particular one sociologist or economist:
0111 Davis (1997) New Economics and Its History: a Pickering View
0110 Hands (1994b) Restabilizing Dynamics: Construction and Constraint in the History of Walrasian Stability Theory
Historian work on History of Economic Thought:
Hands and Mirowski (1996) Harold Hotelling and the Neoclassical Dream
Mirowski (1989) More Heat Than Light
0112 Weintraub (1991) Stabilizing Dynamics: Constructing Economic Knowledge (the most-consciously social constructivist book in the history of economic thought is Roy Weintraub's Stabilizing Dynamics)
Roy and Mirowski (1994) The Pure and the Applied: Bourbakism Comes to Mathematical Ecocomics
Marxist approach:
Bukharin (1927) Economics Theory of the Leisure Class
Context-sensitive histories of economic thought:
Mitchell’s Types of Economic Theory (1967)
Schumpeter’s History of Economics Analysis (1954)
Knowledge and Social Imagery (Bloor, 1976)
Naturalistic: We analysis scientific knowledge just as we analysis others belief
(1) seeks the cause of those beliefs, (2) is impartial and symmetric about the truth ot falsity of those beliefs, (3) is willing to apply the same causal argument to one's own work (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought")
Define social interest: "a variety of different forms - personal, group, professional, class, national" (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 710)
"not everything that is social can be couched in interest terms, and even that there are some factors affecting scientists' beliefs that are not social" (Hands, 1998, "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Ecnomic Thought", P. 711)
No tight priors: no general theory (then how can it be my theoretical framework)
Other Theories in Social Constructivism:
Collins (1985) Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice
Knorr Cetina (1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science
Latour (1897) Science in Action
Latour and Woolgar (1979) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts
Lynch (1985) Art and Aritifacgt in Laboratory Science
Knorr Cetina (1995) Laboratory Studies: The Cultural Approach to the Study of Science: Summarisation of Social Constructivism
Knorr Cetina in Callebaut (1993) Taking the Naturalistic Turn: Summarisation of Social Constructivism
Collins (1985) Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice: Example
Collins 1991: Collins on Economics
Pickering's "Mangle of Practice" (1990) Knowledge, Practice and Mere Construction
Pickering's "Mangle of Practice" (1994) Objectivity and the Mangle of Practice
Pickering's "Mangle of Practice" (1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science
ANT: Latour (1990) Postmodern? No, Simply AModern! Steps Towerd an Anthropology of Science
Latour (1992) One More Turn After Social Turn
Latour (1993) We Have Never Been Modern
Pickering's "Mangle of Practice"
Definition: "A dance of agency" in the form of "a dialectic of resistance and accommodation" (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. ;)
We should see science as a "continuation and extension of this business of coping with material agency. And, further, we should see machines as central to how scientists do this. (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 6-7)"
Scientists construct machine to capture material agency (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 7)
"Scientists are human agents in a field of material agency which they struggle to capture in machines." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 21)
"Tuning in goal-oriented practice takes the form, I think, of a dance of agency. As active, intentional beings, scientists tentatively construct some new machine. They then adopt a passive role, monitoring the performance of the machine to see whatever capture of material agency it might effect. Symmetrically, this period of human passivity is the period in which material agency actively manifests itself." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 21-22)
"The dance of agency, seen asymmetrically from the human end, thus takes the form of a dialectic o f resistance and accommodation, where resistance denotes the failure to achieve an intended capture of agency in practice, and accommodation an active human strategy of re- sponse to resistance, which can include revisions to goals and intentions as well as to the material form of the machine in question and to the human frame of gestures and social relations that surround it." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 22)
Human Agency
Material Agency
Disciplinary Agency
bridgeheads (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 116)
fillings (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 116)
"the entanglement of disciplinary agency in practice makes the achievement of such associations nontrivial in the extreme" (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 140)
"Resistance thus emerges in conceptual practice in relation to intended associations, and precipitates the dialectics of accommodation and further resistance that I call the mangle." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 140)
transcriptions (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 116)
free move
forced move
free move
"in scientific culture, particular configurations of material and human agency appear as interactively stabilized against one another." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 145)
social organisation inside scientific community (Davis, 113 New Economics and Its History A Pickeringian View.pdf, 1998, P. 293)
Scientist forms plan and take action (Davis, 113 New Economics and Its History A Pickeringian View.pdf, 1998, P. 294)
social organisation outside the scientific community, e.g. politics and WWII (Davis, 113 New Economics and Its History A Pickeringian View.pdf, 1998, P. 295)
Davis suggests the application of human agency into the research on history of economic thought (Davis, 113 New Economics and Its History A Pickeringian View.pdf, 1998, P. 301)
Davis suggests to apply this concept in the research on history of economic thought (Davis, 113 New Economics and Its History A Pickeringian View.pdf, 1998, P. 303)
"we find sociocyborgs: arrays of lathes and milling machines in a corporate machine shop, operated by wage labor within a classic Taylorite disciplinary apparatus of specified social roles and relations a hierarchical command structure, precise job descriptions, production targets, rewards and penalties, and so forth." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 159)
"Taylorite sociocyborg as the basic unit for the machinic capture of agency in the metalworking industries" (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 159)
"Resistance, to use my term, relative to the goals of capital, was apparent. And one tentative accommodation to this resistance was developed for industry by engineers at MIT, in the shape of numerically controlled machine tools N/C for short." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 159)
GE Management try different tactics to accommodate the resistance, including "under-the-table payments of higher rates as incentives to selected workers" (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 161)
and also "increasing the pressure" (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 161)
"Taylorite discipline being used as a tuning device, and the open-endedness of this process bears emphasis" (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 161)
Pilot Program
"they would be free to start to take over responsibilities usually held by others, including management." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 163)
"In short, in a drastic shift of policy, GE management now expected the pilots effectively to act like traditional management consultants and, moreover, to implement their own recommendations, blurring their roles into the traditional roles of foremen, planners, programmers, quality controllers, and so on." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 163)
"the extent of the open- ended evolution of work styles, roles, and relations, in the early phase of the Pilot Program." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 164)
"Conflicts with the support people in quality control, planning, and production also intensified, owing to the expanded responsibilities of the hourly workers in the Pilot Program, responsibilities which now seriously encroached upon jealously guarded territory" (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 165)
Pilot Program was ended in 1975.
"in terms of a series of resistances and accommodations: as instances, that is, of mangling" (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 165)
"the results of which GE management eventually recoded into the renewed Taylorite regime that superseded the Pilot Program." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 167)
"The defining property of the Pilot Program was, after all, that the role of labor blurred, to a certain extent at least, into that of manage- ment. There is a case, therefore, for saying that the very identities of the social actors involved were mangled-the precision of definitional boundaries that obtained before and after the Pilot Program was lost during it." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 173)
"We should see the blocks to cultural extension as what they appear to be resistances emerging in time-rather than the surfacing of otherwise hidden limits; and we need to recognize the existence of an impure, posthuman dynamics, reciprocally linking and transforming on the one hand the scale and boundaries of social actors, their social relations, disciplines, and goals, and on the other machines and their material performances. The alternative is the unreflective projection of commonsense categories and the consequent obliteration of fascinating social phenomena." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 176)
Machine used in the laboratory have its own agency which cannot be reduced into Human Agency (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 52)
Resistance emerge by chance (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 53)
the transformation of goals in practice has to be understood in terms of contingently formulated accommodations to temporally emergent resistance. (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 58)
My argument is, in effect, that the social dimensions of scientific culture should be seen as themselves in the plane of practice and as always, in principle, subject to mangling there, just like and together with the material and conceptual dimensions. (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 61)
"My argument is, in effect, that the social dimensions of scientific culture should be seen as themselves in the plane of practice and as always, in principle, subject to mangling there, just like and together with the material and conceptual dimensions." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 61)
The interest of scientific community: "the goals of science are understood as subject to impure mangling, as already described ... the social identities and relations of scientific actors-their inner and outer constitution-are themselves liable to mangling and redefinition in practice" (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 65)
The constraint of scientific community: "My usage of resistance has neither of these qualities. As I
have emphasized, in the real-time analysis of practice, one has to see resistance as genuinely emergent in time, as a block arising in practice to this or that passage of goal-oriented practice." (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 65-66)
"though resistance and constraint have an evident conceptual affinity, they are perpendicular to one another in time: constraint is synchronic, preexisting practice and enduring through it, while resistance is diachronic, constitutively indexed by time" (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 66)
Resistance is for the relationship between human agency and material agency; constraint is for the human agency (Pickering, 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, P. 67)
Sociology of Knowledge
The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge(Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, 1991 [1966])
"reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyse the process in which this occurs" (P. 13)
"the processes by which any body of 'knowledge' comes to be socially established as 'reality'" (P. 14)
What is the reality of everydaylife?
"The world of everyday life is structured both spatially and temporally." (P. 40)
"Temporality is an intrinsic property of consciousness." (P. 41)
What is the Social Interaction in Everyday Life?
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