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Objectivity and Diversity
Another Logic of Scientific Research
By Sandra Harding The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-24153-1
CHAPTER 1
New Citizens, New Societies: New Sciences, New Philosophies?
Locating Philosophy of Science in Global History
Central assumptions of the philosophy of science that most of us learned in graduate schools in the United States were grounded in the modernization theory of the late nineteenth century. This philosophy was reshaped into its late twentieth century form with the revival of this theory at the end of World War II. This was the era of the founding of the United Nations and its development agencies which were to bring modernization to Third World countries, and of the start of the Cold War. Western leaders conceptualized scientific rationality and technical expertise as the "motors" of development policies and their modernizing practices. Without their dissemination, modernization could not occur. And without modernization, the world's poor could not attain a better standard of living. Continuing poverty would again cause just the kinds of social unrest that had created the atrocities of World War II. Only now, the availability of nuclear armaments promised even more unimaginable death and destruction.
The conceptions of the regulative ideals of scientific research embedded in this philosophy were crucial to modernization theory. Value-free objectivity, rationality, and good research method were three such central ideals. They also turned out to be valuable commitments for scientists and philosophers who found themselves working in the contexts of McCarthyism and the Cold War. This was especially so for the scientists and philosophers who happened to be socialists or Jews.
That philosophy of science, referred to as logical empiricism or logical positivism, is still the dominant one today. It is invoked not only in philosophy departments but also in the natural and social sciences. It is used to police academic programs of study and public testimony and debates about, for example, climate change, the eradication of poverty, and the legitimacy of teaching creationism and intelligent design to high school students. Yet the way in which the ideal of objectivity is talked about on campuses and in public debates is at odds with the actual histories and present practices of the sciences and their philosophies. Sciences and their philosophies have never been value-free. They have always been deeply integrated with their particular social and historical contexts. If they weren't, they would be irrelevant. Some critics would say that this is precisely the point: contemporary logical empiricist philosophy of science has become irrelevant not only to how science is sponsored, funded, and practiced, but also to the challenges that publics face in deliberating about its role in public life. What is going on here?
The world we live in today is not that of the middle of the last century. Today, skepticism about modernization theory and the adequacy of its philosophies of science has been appearing in numerous places around the globe, though many philosophy departments as well as development agencies seem unable to envision how to move forward. Moreover, something is happening in national and international politics that seems to promise deep and vast changes in the global social orders in which Western philosophies of science have played a significant role. The outcomes of these changes are not yet clearly visible. Yet, as I write this paragraph, many thousands of Brazilian citizens, especially young people, have been peacefully protesting in the capital of Brazil and in many other cities around the country. The protest started with resistance to a threatened increase in bus fares. For students and the poor, the increase would bring the cost of travel to school and their jobs up to one-quarter of their incomes. But the protest quickly expanded to rage at the decision of the government to spend the Brazilian equivalent of many hundreds of millions of dollars on a new stadium for the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament rather than on the health, education, and other social services badly needed by so many citizens. Now the president of Brazil has announced that funding for the stadiums will not cause cuts in social services. But the protesters are unlikely to be satisfied with this attempt at damage control. It is the government's refusal to prioritize their basic human needs that is the issue. Their basic human rights are being violated, many argue. Their work and taxes support their society's daily life and provide the funding planned for the soccer stadium. Why should they have to continue to live in such immiserated servitude in such a wealthy country?
Meanwhile, in Istanbul, Ankara, and other cities in Turkey, massive popular protests against the autocratic management practices of the country's president have developed in opposition to his harsh crackdown on initial protests against the transformation of a major public park in Istanbul into expensive private housing and a shopping mall. Here, too, an initially sharply focused resistance to removing resources for poor people has expanded into a nationwide protest against government decisions in which participation has been denied both for poor people and for the many better-off citizens who support the concerns of the poor.
And both of these social movements claim inspiration from the "Arab Spring" of 2011. In those uprisings, citizens in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern and North African countries rose up against what they saw as autocratic regimes of elites who were more interested in enriching themselves and the greedy needs of the United States and other Western governments than in improving the lot of the vast majority of their citizens who remain politically and economically vulnerable. How much longer will the oil-rich Gulf state monarchies manage to resist such democratizing tendencies? Nor are such protests rising only "out there" in distant parts of the world. Our own "Occupy Wall Street" movement protested that the United States government was willing to "bail out Wall Street" but not "Main Street" in the financial crisis of 2008. Around the globe, those left out of modernization plans are demanding an end to social progress for elites only. They want modernization agendas that serve their interests and desires.
Are these kinds of events relevant to philosophies of science? It might not initially be obvious how they are. Certainly our logical empiricist philosophies don't give us clues to how to think about such a question. Yet I hope to show that the current agendas of modern Western sciences and technologies and their Enlightenment diagnoses of how to advance social progress are very much at issue in such events. The end of Western colonialism, the fall of the Soviet Union, the onset of globalization and the "information age" (Castells 1996ff), and the rise of people's movements around the globe all suggest the necessity of relocating our thinking about Western philosophy of science out of the cheery Enlightenment world of the "logic of scientific discovery" (Popper 1959), where it took up residence in our classes and public debates decades ago, and onto current geopolitical maps where it continues to have powerful effects. All too often, unfortunately, these effects work against the stirrings of progressive social movements around the globe.
It must be noted that all of these recent uprisings have been dependent on the resources that globalization and its electronic and media marvels—cell phones, the internet—provide for the organization and managment of social change. None are Luddite movements that advocate smashing these technologies of modernity, though most of them have at best an uneasy relation with the continually improving military technologies that scientific rationality and technical expertise deliver. But they do want a say in transforming the conventional philosophy of science and its blind allegiance to elite social projects into philosophies that actually serve their interests and desires for social progress. They want a kind of epistemic modernization, as sociologist David Hess (2007) has put the point, that conventional modernization theory and its philosophy of science have not had the resources to deliver.
The more than six decades of local and global history that have made this a different world are rarely perceived within mainstream philosophy of science as providing reasons to rethink older factual or normative assumptions about nature, scientific inquiry, or the social contexts in which science exists. "The social" tends to be perceived by philosophers and scientists as a source of obstacles and problems rather than as a generator of resources and promising new pathways (cf. Schmaus 2005). Shouldn't philosophies of science ponder how their priorities, ideals, and practices align, or not, with the kinds of global historical tendencies that are indicated above? Do Cold War residues in this philosophy block recognition of how institutional changes in the production of scientific research tend to align with particular kinds of philosophic positions, some of which are more attractive and some less so to advocates of more democratic social relations? Has this once-so-progressive philosophy somehow ended up today as a mostly economically and politically conservative force that has lost its alignment with democratic social movements? Such alignments, from Galileo's day to the Vienna Circle of the 1930s and early 1940s, have rightly been regarded as what has entitled science to such high public regard and to massive support by taxpayers. After all, why should those with commitment to democratic social relations want to support sciences that can produce highly reliable results of research but are funded to do so primarily in response to the concerns of militarism, corporate greed, and the "investing classes" in the Global North and their allies around the globe? Why should reasonable people take this research to be "value-free?" Is the scientific research on which philosophers focus being done on Mars or in some kind of monastic fortress mostly isolated from the last six decades of economic, political, and social change in the West and around the globe? These are the questions that motivate this study.
The field of the social studies of science and technology can provide assistance here. The sociology, social history, ethnography, politics, and economics of the production of "true belief," not just of errors, began to emerge in the 1960s. The work of historian Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) and philosopher Paul Feyerabend (1975) brought forth intense criticisms in the 1970s (e.g., Lakatos and Musgrave 1970). The subsequent development of this work seems to have occasioned scattered rebukes and occasional slight outreaches, but little sustained engagement from mainstream philosophers. By the 1970s, feminist approaches to the social studies of science and technology began to emerge, and then postcolonial studies began to take on science and technology issues in the 1980s, though each of these latter two schools of science studies had older roots.
These three fields have produced histories of modern Western sciences and their philosophies that are counter to the standard ones provided in science and philosophy of science texts. They show the "integrity" of the great achievements of the sciences with particular aspects of their historical eras, as Kuhn (1970, p. 3) put the point. Standards for objectivity, rationality, and good method are often the targets of their critical accounts. In light of these accounts of how sciences and their social contexts shape each other, must our philosophies abandon regulatory ideals of scientific research such as objectivity, rationality, and uniquely good method? Or can there still be an important role for such standards in these new relations between sciences, their philosophies, and their social orders?
The project of this book will be to show that objectivity and certain kinds of diversity can be mutually supportive. While this mutual support claim is counter to the assumptions of the philosophy of science developed in the United States after World War II, it might well be seen as a continuation of the central insights of the Vienna Circle, as chapter 5 will discuss. The strategy here to make the claim compelling is to do "bridge work" between recent feminist, postcolonial, and post-Kuhnian science studies thinking.
The next two sections of this chapter look at the social conditions for scientific research and its philosophy that were created in two eras of significant institutional change: the postwar era of the 1940s and '50s, and then the failure of Third World development policies, the rise of anti-authoritarian social movements, and the emergence of globalization in the 1960s and '70s. The fourth section describes briefly the three science studies research fields that started up in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. The concluding section identifies six arguments for the mutual support claim to be developed in the following chapters.
Post–World War II: Philosophies of Science for Prosperity and Peace
The end of World War II ushered in an optimistic era for the winners of the war as well as for at least some of the populations around the globe who began to emerge from colonial rule. There would be a "peace dividend" for countries that had financially supported the war efforts. Moreover, the Marshall Plan for design and management of the economic recovery of the war's losers, Japan and Germany, would bring increased prosperity to these nations, too. It was generally believed that only widespread prosperity could secure lasting peace. Moreover, the Marshall Plan would subsequently provide the model for development policies in the Third World, as the "unaligned nations" would shortly call themselves. Science and technology played a central role in these economic and political plans, as President Harry Truman emphasized in his 1949 inaugural address.
More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history humanity posseses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people.... I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life.... What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing.... Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge. (Truman 1949 [1964], in Escobar 1995)
The newly organizing development agencies in the United Nations and in many Western countries would transfer Western scientific rationality and technical expertise to the "underdeveloped" societies around the globe. In the language of the day, the "haves" would share their achievements with the "have nots," for the benefit of both. The development of export economies grounded in capitalist assumptions would permit these "handicapped" nations to earn income in global markets and supposedly to distribute prosperity throughout their societies and, especially, to their poorest citizens. In doing so, they would remove the economic reasons that the poor and disenfranchised might have to follow the meglomaniacal leadership of new dictators intent upon leading their armies down yet another warpath. The "transfer" of scientific rationality and technical expertise from the West to "the rest" was to create the prosperity that could secure world peace.
This economic support looked good to many of the intended recipients of these development plans. After all, enslavement, death, and further impoverishment had been the lot of losers in most earlier wars. Yet these new plans would not turn out as the West envisioned. Nor, it would be revealed, was everyone involved in designing them quite so idealistic about the mutual benefits that development could provide. Yet the Marshall Plan, the United Nations development projects for unaligned nations, and the apparent lack of retributive punishment dealt by the "winners" to the losers for the suffering their empire building had inflicted on so many people (except for penalties applied to a few of the highest leaders of Germany and Japan) did mark some kind of world-historic event. It certainly was initially appreciated, if with mixed feelings, by many everyday citizens in the defeated nations. In retrospect, less cheery assessments would be made (Escobar 1995; Sachs 1992).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Objectivity and Diversity by Sandra Harding. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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