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A NEW IMAGE OF SCIENCE AND NATURE
Joe Rouse, Wesleyan University
Talk at Calvin College, April 20, 2006
DRAFT: Do not cite, quote, or circulate without written permission of author.
Some understanding of the natural sciences is now integral to many aspects
of human self-understanding. In universities, disciplines outside the natural
sciences often define themselves by comparison to science. Some disciplines
aspire to become a science; some emphasize how they differ from the sciences, and
a few smugly proclaim their own scientific status.
Outside the academy, however, such questions arise with comparable
urgency. Practices and ideals of democratic self-governance co-exist uneasily with
the prominent role of scientific expertise in shaping public policy, judicial review,
and political conflict. Response to this tension partly depends upon how one
understands science and scientific expertise. Relations to science also now divide
some Christian religious denominations. Do religious beliefs accommodate a
scientific account of nature and human nature, or do theocentric and scientific
conceptions conflict? Religion may encounter science not only at human and
cosmological origins, but also over ethical issues, from conceptions of the
beginning and the end of life to norms of environmental responsibility.
How do we acquire the conceptions of science that sustain such comparisons
and encounters between the sciences and other domains? Do not imagine
theologians, politicians, or scholars eagerly reading Physical Review or Nature,
observing research laboratories, or vaguely recalling their high school chemistry to
see how their own activities accord with what scientists do. They are instead
informed by a widespread conversation about science, offering familiar images of
the sciences’ aims, methods and achievements. This popular discussion has been
mostly continuous with contemporary philosophy of science, although the popular
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images sometimes run roughshod over philosophers’ careful distinctions and
qualifications.
My aim today is to challenge some central features of the familiar popular
and philosophical images of science. The familiar images are in some respects
misleading, and obscure some important aspects of science. I will begin briefly
with some features of the familiar conceptions that concern me, but afterwards, my
argument will be indirect. My primary aim is to outline an alternative image of
science and of nature. In doing so, I will highlight some important features of the
sciences that familiar conceptions overlook or obscure, and why they are
important. I will also show how this alternative conception can accommodate
what is right about the traditional images, for they are not completely mistaken.
The result should give us better resources to see why the natural sciences are so
important to so much of what we do, and to think about the sciences as integral to
culture and society.
Scientific knowledge is central to the familiar images of science that I will
challenge. Science is supposedly distinctive for the quality and the quantity of its
knowledge. Scientific knowledge is thought to be especially reliable knowledge,
and in any case, the sciences produce so much more knowledge than any other
human enterprise. There are multiple versions of why the sciences succeed in
knowledge production. Some ascribe to science a distinctive, general method,
however vaguely described; others emphasize scientists’ critical or skeptical
attitude, or their respect for evidence; more cynical versions mention the enormous
financial resources devoted to science. I am dubious about any attempt at a
wholesale account of the epistemic authority of science, but that is not my primary
concern about the familiar image of science as a knowledge-producing enterprise.
What troubles me instead is the underlying conception of science as a
relation between knower and known. Our dominant conceptions of knowledge
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suggest a spectator’s stance toward the world. Knowers are here, the world is out
there, and knowledge involves correctly representing in here (the mind, or
scientific language) what the world “out there” is like. Moreover, such
conceptions sometimes suggest that knowledge stands between us and the world.
That suggestion falsely implies that we understand our thoughts and our concepts
better than we understand the world. It also suggests misleading metaphors for
how we relate to the world: from a visual perspective, or through a more or less
transparent lens or “conceptual scheme.” Taken to an extreme, such images
account for the apparent intelligibility of skepticism or relativism about scientific
knowledge. This point needs highlighting. Conceptions of science in terms of
knowledge grip us so strongly that skepticism or relativism may seem the only
alternative. But skepticism and relativism are not alternatives at all. Skeptics or
cultural relativists also make knowledge central to their understanding of science.
Skeptics and relativists doubt the authority or the universality of scientific
knowledge, but the significance of those claims depends upon a shared sense that
what matters about science is the achievement of knowledge.
By contrast to skeptics or relativists, I happily recognize that we know a
great deal about the world through scientific work. That knowledge is also often
reliable, well-justified, and culture-crossing. Placing a general conception of
knowledge at the forefront may nevertheless yield a misleading image of science.
Familiar images of scientific knowledge convey complementary images of
nature as its object. Sigmund Freud once proclaimed that
The naive self-love of [humanity] has had to submit to two major blows at
the hands of science. The first was when they learned that our earth was not
the center of the universe. ... The second blow fell when biological research
destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his
descent from the animal kingdom. (Intro. Lect. in Psychoanal., 1917, 326)
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Max Weber famously extended the non-anthropocentric character of scientific
understanding as the modern “disenchantment” of nature, which strips nature of
meaning, value or significance. Nature becomes a cold, impersonal, inexorable
domain, whose causes or laws grind on indifferent to our concerns or
understanding. Such a disenchanted nature does not leave us bereft of meanings or
norms, but does throw us back upon our own resources. As philosopher Bob
Brandom put it,
The Enlightenment disenchantment of the world and its assignment to us of
responsibility for the norms, values, and significance we nonetheless find in
the world are two sides of one coin. Meaningless objects and meaninggenerating subjects are two aspects of one picture. (MIE, 49)
That is the picture I seek to replace. There is, of course, much more to our
familiar conception of the sciences than just the paired images of us as knowing
subjects and nature as independent, “external” object of knowledge. Other features
of the familiar images will emerge in my talk. They will do so indirectly, however,
by comparison to an alternative conception of the sciences. My alternative
conception focuses upon scientific practices rather than scientific knowledge.
Several initial distinctions between these two conceptions will do work throughout
my talk. Scientific practice is something we do rather than something we achieve
or possess. It involves ongoing interaction with our surroundings rather than
spectatorial observation and representation. You may think of scientific practice
narrowly as only including what scientists do, but I urge a more expansive
conception. Scientific practices are pervasive in our lives, and throughout our
culture. With these initial observations in the background, my talk will address six
aspects of a reconception of science and nature in terms of sciences as practices.
My six themes are the temporal orientation of scientific research toward the future;
the topical selectivity of science; how the sciences intervene and materially
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transform the world; how science articulates the world conceptually; the place of
science in a broader culture; and the resulting reconception of nature and our place
within it. The first two and the last two themes I will discuss relatively briefly.
The heart of my talk is the third and fourth points together.
I begin with the temporal orientation of science. Concern with scientific
knowledge is primarily retrospective. It looks back at what we (already) know,
with what justification or reliability. If you ask where to find a compilation of
established scientific knowledge, however, an answer would be elusive. Scientific
journals carry research reports, but many of these are contested, and most will
never again be cited, used, or critically assessed. The review literature does not so
much survey what is now known, as organize and preview where the field is going.
Textbooks and scientific handbooks are also not comprehensive, but are instead
highly selective documents organized for the likely needs of later users.
Moreover, scientific work in active fields quickly outruns any such compilations.
Scientific practice, by contrast, is oriented toward the future rather than the
past. If you ask a research scientist about her field, she is unlikely to recount what
is now known in this domain. She will instead tell you about its outstanding
problems, interesting issues, and important topics that indicate where the field is
going. A research area is not a sum of accumulated knowledge, but a field of
possibilities, with a sense of direction beyond its current achievements. The
direction of a research field can be fairly definite, yet also vague and not-fullyarticulated, since its core concepts and concerns are in flux. If one could say with
complete clarity what the field is now doing, it would have already been done, and
the field would have moved on. Yet this indefinite sense of possibilities and
directions organizes and guides research. Biologist and philosopher Hans-J rg
Rheinberger coined the term “epistemic thing” for the aim of a research program:
The objects of inquiry [are material entities or processes that] present
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themselves in a characteristic, irreducible vagueness. This vagueness is
inevitable because, paradoxically, [these] epistemic things embody what one
does not yet know. (1997, 28)
The direction of research is of course guided by past results, and depends upon
their reliability. Yet these results are continually reinterpreted in light of the
possibilities they disclose. They are no longer what matters in their own right, but
are reconceived as tools, models, or indicators of how to proceed beyond them.
The familiar conception of science as achieved knowledge can also partially
accommodate the sciences’ openness to a different future. What is now known
helps outline areas of ignorance which science hopes to dispel. Moreover, any
sensible conception of scientific knowledge recognizes its fallibility. Yet even if
this recognition of fallibility is specified by degrees of confidence, neither
fallibility nor ignorance are sufficient to express the future-directedness of
scientific research. Scientific research is organized not by its actual achievements,
but by its field of possibilities and its sense of direction forward. A retrospective
assessment of knowledge provides a static conception of what is not yet known or
might need revision, but not a dynamic orientation toward what lies ahead. In
place of familiar images of an accumulating stock of scientific knowledge, I
suggest biologist Francois Jacob’s counter-image of science as “a machine for
making the future.”
Consider now my second point, the topical selectivity of scientific practice.
Most truths about the natural world have no scientific significance whatsoever.
Many truths are trivial. No doubt there have been some black dogs, but that truth
is no part of science. More revealing examples of scientific insignificance reflect
changes in scientific interest over time. Theodore Richards of Harvard won the
Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1914 for very precise measurements of the atomic
weights of many elements. The Prize signifies its apparent importance to
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chemistry. The discovery of chemical isotopes, however, demolished the scientific
significance of Richards’s measurements. A precise determination of the atomic
weight of chlorine gives no insight into its chemical properties, but only shows,
indirectly, the relative proportions of its two isotopes on earth. Had that been
understood, Richards would not have bothered with his measurements, and would
have received no Prize if he had.
Consider now a different kind of example. Biologists know an extraordinary
amount about a tiny number of the millions of species of organisms past and
present. The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, yeast, the nematode worm C.
elegans, the South African frog Xenopus, and the K12 strain of the intestinal
bacterium E. Coli, and a very few others, have been intensively investigated,
including the sequencing of some entire genomes. By comparison, all other
species are abysses of human ignorance. There is nothing intrinsically important
about these species, however. They are well-known only as useful and familiar
laboratory models. Biologists now know a lot about these organisms, partly from
using them extensively, and partly because they need to know it to understand their
experiments. The significance of model organisms also changes, however. The
ciliate Paramecium was the original model organism for microbial genetics,
extensively studied from the 1930's to the 1950's. Afterwards it virtually
disappeared from research laboratories. Two developments led to Paramecium‘s
scientific demise. First, it was unsuitable for the newly emerging scientific focus
upon biochemical genetics. Second, the topic it was well suited to study, the
supposedly distinctive mechanisms of cytoplasmic inheritance, turned out not to be
distinctive at all.
Why are these shifts in scientific significance important for my topic? They
emphasize that science is not merely a widespread accumulation of knowledge
about the many facets of the natural world. Science is instead a highly focused and
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often idiosyncratic effort to understand those features or aspects of the world that
matter to us. Sometimes they matter for practical reasons. Petroleum geology is
the largest subfield in the earth sciences not because it provides fundamental
insights, but because it feeds the energy gluttony of industrial civilization. In many
cases, however, scientific significance is self-generated. Scientific inquiry is often
highly selective for distinctively scientific reasons. Only by understanding the
trajectory and direction of a scientific practice can one grasp why some esoteric
topics are highly interesting scientifically, whereas most aspects of nature are
matters of mere curiosity but not scientific concern.
These first two themes, the sciences’ future-directedness and their topical
selectivity, are crucially important issues that I could nevertheless introduce fairly
briefly. My next two themes require more extensive treatment. I first take up the
importance of understanding the sciences as practices that intervene in the world.
One side of this theme is very well-known to administrators and bureaucrats;
sciences are more expensive and administratively complex than other scholarly
disciplines, because they need laboratories, instruments, special research materials,
and teams of trained researchers. On traditional conceptions of science as
knowledge, these facilities are merely instrumental to science. Although often
indispensable means to knowledge of nature, they are not integral to that
knowledge. Scientific knowledge claims, and the evidence and reasoning that
justify them, are linguistic or mathematical expressions whose relations to one
another are inferential and rational rather than causal or lawlike.
The practical conception of science that I recommend, by contrast,
recognizes the centrality of scientific intervention in the world. Science does not
take the world as we find it. Scientists must instead re-arrange parts of the world
to allow it to show itself intelligibly. Note the shift in emphasis from traditional
empiricism: the important point is not what we can observe in nature, but what the
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phenomena can show us. Philosopher Ian Hacking once remarked that
Old science on every continent [began] with the stars, because only the skies
afford some phenomena on display, with many more [obtainable] by careful
observation... Only the planets and more distant bodies have the right
combination of complex regularity against a background. (1983, 227)
Science began with astronomy, but it obviously did not stop there. Where
scientists did not find phenomena in nature that manifested a significant pattern
against a background, they worked hard to create them. When Hacking or I say
that scientists create phenomena, we don’t mean that they “make them up,” or that
such work is dubious or unreliable. On the contrary, creating significant and
revealing patterns in the world is hard work, and only succeeds if nature
cooperates.
Nature will nevertheless not cooperate unless scientists bring about the right
circumstances. The effort involved in creating scientifically revealing phenomena
is extraordinary. Start by preparing materials, such as isolating and purifying
standard chemicals; breeding simplified and standardized model organisms in
biology; or inventing batteries, wired circuits, electromagnets, microwave cavities,
lasers, and so many other electromagnetic or electronic systems. Subject these
materials to novel circumstances: vacuum pumps or high-pressure chambers;
extreme low or high temperatures; intense magnetic fields; pulses of high–energy
radiation; or just carefully regulated light, humidity, or nutrients for plants.
Introduce some new ways for hitherto invisible things to produce discernible signs.
These may include stains for transparent biological materials; labeling with
radioactive isotopes or plasmids for antibiotic resistance; diffusion through gels or
filters; displaying diffraction patterns of light; or reflections of high explosive
shock waves. Provide some novel detectors, such as instruments for infrared, radio,
or X-radiation; breeding stocks to cross with mutant organisms; control groups for
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a target population; or coincidence circuits that only fire when two events occur in
rapid succession. Introduce standardized measures, for distances, temperatures,
electrical resistance, and much more, and build instruments calibrated to those
measures. Finally, shield these interactions from unknown or unexpected
confounding influences. With sufficient care and ingenuity, you may then
produce an interesting and revealing outcome, by producing an unprecedented by
reproducible situation. Otherwise, however, the typical outcome is not error but
noise and confusion. Moreover, the hardest part of research is often telling the
difference between signal, noise, and error. In front-line research, there are no
answers at the back of the book.
To sum up this point, science starts off trying to understand what is
happening in the world around us. At its best, however, what it typically produces
is a remarkably clear and precise grasp of what happens in the much more
regulated and sanitized setting of the laboratory. I do not denigrate that
achievement, which is extraordinary. Rather, I emphasize the two primary ways
that the clean and orderly space of the laboratory gives insight into the messy,
complicated world outside. First, it allows us to see new aspects of that world
through a glass, darkly, that is, by comparison to laboratory settings and practices.
Seeing the outcomes of a drug regimen in a carefully controlled clinical trial, for
example, tells us something important about what happens when people take it
more haphazardly, with more varied bodily regimens, lifestyles, and diagnoses.
Knowing how radiation affects cells in tissue culture or animals in older
experiments that no longer meet our ethical scruples, likewise tells us something
important about the biological significance of radiation. It says much less about
what happened when the Chernobyl reactor blew large quantities of diverse
radioactive debris to the winds. The general point is clear: experimental models
inevitably ignore or obscure some effects due to messier circumstances outside the
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lab.
Fortunately, laboratory science enables us to understand the world in a
second way. Laboratory practices guide a massive, continuing effort to reconstruct
the world in the image of the laboratory. Our everyday lives are now surrounded,
for example, by myriad substances that have been synthesized, purified, enclosed,
and/or chemically analyzed; just look around a supermarket, Home Depot,
pharmacy, factory or gas station. Electricity was transformed from a laboratory
curiosity to an indispensable component of everyday life by insulated copper
wires, batteries, and AC transformers, and their correlated motors, bulbs, and coils.
You can hear a pin drop through the telephone a thousand miles away because
precisely correlated laser beams and fiberglass cables counter-balance the diffusion
and compression of light pulses. Hybrid plant varieties yield extraordinary crops,
if their fields are fertilized, irrigated, and sprayed with pesticides and herbicides to
match their sensitivities. These devices and practices only circulate reliably,
however, when preceded by standardized units of measure and measuring devices.
Standard meters, ohms and nanoseconds, along with thermometers, clocks, and
scales, make possible a world of things made to measure. To sum up, what is done
in the laboratory yields extensive and precise understanding wherever aspects of
laboratory order and precision travel alongside and reliably stay put.
My fourth theme, the sciences’ conceptual articulation of the world, is
perhaps the hardest to grasp. Consider the familiar idea that the history of science
has frequently replaced error and superstition with more accurate beliefs. People
mostly no longer identify disease with demonic possession, think combustion gives
off phlogiston, or believe the earth to be flat and 4000 years old. Such judgments
of past error are sometimes appropriate, if we also acknowledge our own fallibility
in turn. Yet current scientific practice mostly licenses a different comparison. In
most domains of science we can now say things about which earlier generations
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had no beliefs at all, rather than false beliefs. Being able to say what others cannot
is not just a matter of learning new words; it presupposes being able to “tell” what
you are talking about with those words. As philosopher John Haugeland noted,
Telling [in the sense of telling what something is, telling things apart, or
telling the differences between them] can often be expressed in words, but is
not in itself essentially verbal. ... People can tell things for which they have
no words, including things that are hard to tell. (1998, 313)
Science allows us to talk about an extraordinary range of things, by enabling us to
“tell” about them. To pick some random examples, people can now tell, and
therefore talk, about mitochondria, the pre-Cambrian Era, subatomic particles,
tectonic plates, retroviruses, spiral galaxies, and amino acid sequences. One need
not go back very far historically to find not error, but silence on these and many
more scientific topics.
How was that silence broken? To express beliefs about something, we need
concepts in which to express them. Again, to have a concept is not just to have a
word, but to be able to “tell” something. That is what I mean by conceptual
articulation. In slightly different terms, the philosopher Martin Heidegger
emphasized the importance of this achievement for science:
Every forging-ahead [in science] requires, in advance, an open region within
which it operates. But precisely the opening up of such a region constitutes
the fundamental occurrence in research. (AWP, 59)
Opening up a scientific domain, in this sense, involves being able to tell what’s
going on there. But I still have not said how this happens.
One philosopher, W.v.O. Quine, expressed a traditional view of this process
metaphorically:
[Science] is a human-made fabric which impinges upon experience only
along the edges, or a field of force whose boundary conditions are
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experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions
readjustments in the interior of the field. (Two Dogmas, 42)
For Quine, concepts are thus components of a systematic theory. They are
developed or changed strictly by internal adjustments in that theory. I call this
traditional because it regards knowledge as a relation between a system of verbal
representation, and something unconceptualized (experience, nature, or “the
world”). The world impinges upon us from outside, compelling us to readjust the
internal relations among our sentences or thoughts.
On the traditional view, it is having a theory that allows us to be “articulate,”
to express thoughts in words. The word “articulate” now primarily describes a
verbal capacity, but it has a more fundamental meaning. Something is
“articulated” when it is jointed, like the human skeleton. Conceptual articulation is
simply our most powerful and fine-grained way of finding, or better, telling
“joints” or boundaries in the world. Traditional views of science regard the
primary work of articulation as verbal. On one version of this claim, the world is
already articulated into kinds of things and properties. Verbal articulation just tries
to match those kinds. On other versions, the world comes more-or-less adaptable
to different verbal articulations. I think we will not adequately understand
scientific practice unless we reject both versions. More fundamentally, we need to
reject the underlying distinction between how the world already is, and how we
represent it in words. Science articulates the world, allowing us to tell about it, by
developing new patterns of interacting and new ways of talking, together.
This claim is fairly abstract, so let’s consider examples. Cell biology has a
rich vocabulary for the internal components of cells and their functions. Modern
cell biology began, many historians would argue, when Albert Claude spun
pulverized chicken sarcoma cells in the ultracentrifuge at 28,000 rpm for a week.
Different materials gradually precipitated; eventually there were multiple layers of
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cellular debris beneath a liquid. Claude could only initially describe the layers as
“small particles” or “large granules,” and note when each precipitated. So far, one
might as well try to understand a car by blowing it up, and sorting the pieces by
size or where they land. That doesn’t allow you to say much about the car. Cell
biology could do better by connecting multiple interactions with these components.
Claude analyzed the different fragments biochemically. Later, he could identify
layers in the ultracentrifuge with some structures discernible through light
microscopes, and then others discerned with electrons. Eventually, the various
experimental, structural, and biochemical interactions with cell components could
be interconnected to localize biological functions such as respiration or protein
synthesis, and cell biology was off to an exciting start. The key work may seem to
come earlier, when some cell structures showed up in the light microscope, but not
so. Microscopes alone cannot indicate whether and how the boundaries they make
visible are biologically meaningful. Without multiply interconnected articulations,
the visually identifiable elements might well be artifacts, either of the stains and
instruments that make them visible, or of the prejudices that equate visibility to us
with importance.
Consider now another, deceptively simple case. What does it mean for one
thing to be hotter than another? We distinguish quantity of heat from intensity of
heat, but what is the latter, what we now call “temperature?” Recognizing that
degrees of heat correlate with expansion and contraction, we might identify
temperature with what a thermometer measures, but that won’t do. Set aside the
many difficulties of defining some fixed points, such as the freezing and boiling
points of water. Having fixed these points, suppose we divide the linear distance
between them into 100 identical units. Here are some different measures of
“temperature” that you would get with mercury, alcohol, and water thermometers:
Mercury
0o
25o 50o 75o 100o
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Alcohol
Water 0o
0o
5o
22o
26o
44o
57o
70o 100o
100o (taken from Chang, 2004, 58)
Is there one concept of temperature, or many, or none? Or is temperature a purely
conventional concept, such that we could just agree upon mercury or alcohol as a
canonical measure? Finally, we want to understand temperature when these
thermometers would melt, or their contents freeze. What is a “degree,” and what it
is a degree of, at 1000o, 1,000,000o or -250o?
I want to make three points about this example. First, scientists were able to
define a unified scale of temperature, and critically assess the performance of
various thermometers, experimentally. This was never merely or even primarily a
matter of internal adjustment within theory. Second, when that concept was
eventually defined more tightly, it was through triangulation with a very different
experimental and practical domain. Steam engines allow us to correlate heat with
a capacity for mechanical work. Finally, the unity and coherence that
thermodynamics then gives to the concept of temperature is highly unusual among
empirical concepts. As just one example, consider the analogous question of what
it is for one solid material to be harder than another. As with temperature, there
are multiple, partly conflicting empirical measures of hardness. Is hardness best
displayed by resistance to denting, to scratching, to cutting, or to frictional wear?
Here there is no prospect of unifying different measures into a single scale.
Materials can be harder or softer in many ways, which only partly overlap. Yet
like temperature, articulating the concept of hardness involved creating phenomena
as much or more than redefining words or formulating theories.
A defender of more traditional conceptions of scientific knowledge might
now raise an objection. Not all, or even most, conceptual developments in the
sciences are as straightforwardly empirical as temperature, hardness, or cell
structure. Internal adjustments within theories might therefore still be the
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predominant mode of conceptual articulation in science. I accept the premise, but
reject the conclusion, because we also need to think differently about scientific
theory. Theoretical understanding is not a relation between a general verbal
representation and a phenomenon in the world. Scientific theorizing is better
understood as a practice of modeling various actual or possible circumstances.
Although we sometimes formulate general theories in the physical sciences, from
Newton’s Laws to thermodynamics, we learn what those theories and their
equations say by developing families of models. We do not know what the
relevant forces, masses and accelerations are in Newton’s F=ma, for example,
except by modeling specific kinds of situation, such as free fall, harmonic
oscillators, or planetary orbits. We then understand more complex circumstances
by comparing them to the models, with appropriate corrections or complicating
factors. Models are even more important in sciences that describe complicated
circumstances. When we think about the workings of a cell on a small scale, or
the dynamics of global climate on a much larger one, models virtually become
stand-ins for the actual systems we seek to understand. We have no way to
comprehend such complex patterns of interaction except via more simplified
models.
The reason theoretical modeling is important for how we think about science
is that models and experimental systems play remarkably similar roles in
articulating concepts. Whether theoretical or experimental, model systems provide
simplified, idealized settings in which concepts and their relations to one another
can be clearly defined as telling differences. On the one hand, differences among
various components or factors in a situation can be identified and highlighted by
their relations within a model. On the other hand, their dominant modes of
interaction stand out more clearly within the simplified or idealized circumstances
of the model. By understanding how the model works, we get some indication in
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“real” circumstances of where to look and how to intervene for scientific or
practical purposes.
My discussion of conceptual articulation has been long and complicated.
Here is why it matters to my larger aim to understand science in terms of practices
rather than knowledge. Traditional images of science focus upon comparing
knowledge claims to the world. The underlying presumption is that the meaning
and the truth of these claims can be independently determined. Understanding
meaning is supposedly a verbal matter; assessing truth requires looking at the
world. There is, however, no clear separation here. We only understand new
scientific concepts by interacting with the world in new ways. Understanding what
these concepts say, and understanding the world in those terms, go hand in hand.
Moreover, by creating and using experimental systems and theoretical models, we
transform the world in ways that allow it to be intelligible to us. Indeed, if you
have understood what I have been saying, my third and fourth themes are really the
same point from different angles. Sciences are material practices of interaction
with the world that articulate it conceptually.
My final two themes also raise large, complicated issues, but I shall be brief.
My aim is to indicate how these themes fit within my larger picture, not to address
them more extensively. Let’s first consider the place of scientific practices in
culture and society. We tend to think of the sciences as relatively self-enclosed
disciplines that only interact with the broader culture in limited, well-defined ways.
That image is reinforced by the university curriculum. Most students and faculty
regard courses in science as having little to do with the humanities or social
sciences. Such isolation accords well with the dominant image of science as
knowledge-accumulation. We say that scientific knowledge influences culture and
society. Influence also runs in the other direction, when social needs call for
“applied” research, or when politics, religion, or culture impinge upon scientific
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fields of inquiry. But the notion of “influence” suggests only limited causal
interactions between relatively distinct and autonomous domains.
There are many reasons to doubt the separability of science from culture, in
either direction. My earlier discussion of extending laboratory practices into the
world should have already generated doubts. If you recognize the extent to which
the materials, practices, and disciplinary order of the laboratory now permeate
everyday life, it is hard to maintain the illusion of science and society as separate
spheres. That becomes harder still keeping in mind the entanglement of the
sciences in politics, education, the economy, or the self-understanding of a
“modern” rationalized industrial society. Yet even on a more fine-grained scale,
science and culture are more intimately interconnected in multi-dimensional ways.
I can illustrate this briefly with two examples of scientific-cultural entanglement
around the concept of a gene and the discipline of genetics.
Understanding the history of the concept of a ‘gene’, in its scientific uses
and its wider cultural significance, requires reference to the familiar JudaeoChristian concept of an immortal, immaterial soul. Genes were first postulated as
abstract “factors” unchanged throughout the life of an organism and their passage
into later generations. Even as genes acquired spatial location and chemical
specificity, they were increasingly conceived in terms of “information” separable
from their material embodiment. Genes and the soul were both conceived as
immaterial forms “informing” bodily matter. Within the culture at large, genes are
widely regarded as an unchanging essence and identity persisting through
developmental changes in body and mind. Moreover, genes have acquired
overtones of the sacred, such that gene therapy, genetic engineering, or gene
cloning are criticized not as imprudent or dangerous, but as “tampering,”
“messing,” or “unnatural,” in short, as sacrilege. This 1994 Time magazine cover
illustrates how the visual iconography of genetics often relies upon religious and
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spiritual associations. The traffic in meaning between genes and souls shows up in
biology as well as popular culture, however. I think biologists’ initial resistance to
recognizing the dynamics of genes, in phenomena such as transposition, posttranscriptional splicing and editing, and DNA repair reflected genes’ conceptual
heritage as secular surrogates to the soul. These connotations also informed
biologists’ frequent talk of “gene action.” Embryology and development almost
disappeared as biological fields at mid-century, as supposedly derivative fields that
only show “how genes produce their effects.” Indeed, the language of gene action,
genetic determination, and genes as unchanging essences still recurs unthinkingly
in the talk and writing of many biologists who now know better.
The fate of the Human Genome Diversity Project offers a second illustration
of the multi-dimensional traffic in meanings between science and culture. When
the Human Genome Project was first underway in the early 90's, some anti-racist
geneticists were concerned about the Project’s apparent indifference to human
genetic variation. They also worried that important traces of human evolutionary
history were disappearing as formerly isolated human groups become part of a
single global population. Their response was a global program of genetic sampling
that would help recognize, celebrate, and better understand human genetic
diversity. These scientists were astonished when their proposal was itself attacked
as arrogant, racist, neo-colonialist, and exploitative. In the ensuing controversy,
the Human Genome Diversity Project collapsed. The point of its failure for my
talk today is the conceptual complexity of understanding human diversity. What
constitutes a human population or “race”? Should it be defined geographically,
ethnically, linguistically, or in terms of its own political or cultural sovereignty?
The biologists hoped to define diversity genetically. They discovered that they
could not do so without taking the partially conflicting alternatives into account.
Moreover, their own activities of genetic sampling and testing could not be
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understood simply as a scientific procedure of evidence gathering. Genetics is a
complex practice, whose meanings and consequences are economic, political,
ethical, and cultural, as well as technical. Different actors with different locations
in that practice raised different issues, with different stakes. With the best of
intentions, biologists thought they could disentangle their scientific goals from the
cultural and political complications of achieving them. They were wrong. As
anthropologist Jenny Reardon concluded from studying the controversy,
Phenomena such as human genetic diversity cannot emerge as objects of
study independent of moral and social decisions about who we are and what
we want to know. ... Debates about natural (or biological) human difference
cannot be disconnected from these historically entrenched debates about
how to characterize human diversity in society ... and [from] the emotionally
and politically charged discourses of population, race, ethnicity and
colonization that structured them. (Reardon 2005, 162, 160)
These two examples of the cultural entanglement of scientific practice lead
directly to my concluding theme, the reconception of nature that complements a
reconception of science as practices. Again, I shall be brief about a large, complex
theme. Familiar views draw a fairly sharp separation between nature and the social
world. The sciences seek to know nature as independent of and indifferent to us,
whereas we make society, and are more or less at home there. Nature is seen as
disenchanted, devoid of human meaning and value; social action, by contrast,
establishes the meanings and norms we live by.
My talk has suggested another way to think about nature and our place
within it. Our scientific culture does not present nature as the disenchanted object
of spectatorial knowledge, but as our environment. We do not observe our natural
environment, but interact with it and live in it, even when we do science. An
organism’s environment is not given, but is partially made by it. Moisture-loving
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insects flourish in deserts, for example, because their environment is not the dry
desert air, but the moist layer of air within a millimeter of a leaf. Earthworms live
in the crumbly soils bequeathed by past generations of earthworms. Human
beings in modern industrial and scientific societies remake our environments much
more dramatically. Just look around you, and also recall the many ways we have
remade the world in the image of a laboratories. But the human environment is
also replete with linguistic and other symbolic practices. We dwell in a
meaningfully articulated world, and words are among the most salient and
pervasive features of our environment. Do not think of language as meanings we
impose from “outside” upon an inherently meaningless nature. Language only
becomes meaningful within articulated patterns of interaction with our
surroundings: word and world become articulate together. Physicist Niels Bohr
once rightly remarked that, “We are suspended in language in such a way that we
cannot say what is up and what is down,” but the word “language” here is short for
a linguistically articulated world. Without practical involvement in the world, the
words would be empty; without the words, the world would be mute and
inarticulate.
This conception of nature emphasizes that we cannot get “outside” of our
language and practices to see the world with the distant eye of a stranger or the allencompassing eye sometimes attributed to God. It nevertheless avoids two
failings that often drive people toward traditional views of nature as a world apart.
First, we cannot think of or remake nature in any way we please. On the contrary,
I am emphasizing our interdependence with nature, and even our inability to think
and act except as part of the natural world. Traditional views wrongly assume that
conceptual articulation comes only from within the mind, and hence requires an
“external” world to constrain our theoretical flights of fancy. The error was in not
recognizing thought and language as worldly from the start. Second, this
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conception does not encourage an anthropocentric complacency. To be sure, we
mostly live our lives in a human-tailored environment, and the world is only
intelligible to us through practices and concepts that habituate us here. Yet our
scientific culture thereby enables us to articulate, in terms intelligible to us, here
and now, how limited and idiosyncratic are the earthly circumstances in which we
dwell. The traditional view of nature and science is after all right to acknowledge,
with wonder and awe, how wildly the earth and the heavens can differ from the
tiny environmental niche to which we cling so precariously. It only to fails to
recognize that we do so, as we must, without ever leaving home.