SOCI 325: Sociology of Science

Agenda

Social construction & the real

  1. Administrative
  2. Social construction
  3. Epistemology in STS
  4. Next three readings

Administrative

Discussion question assignments

  • Everyone should have received an email that looks like this:
  • These list the date of the class period that your question should relate to and the due date for submitting the question.
  • E.g. the question for the class of November 9 (Poudrier 2007) is due on November 6.
  • Turn these in on the “Assignments” tab on Teams

Student discussion questions

Two-part submissions:

1. Prompt

  • One (broad) idea, described in a few sentences
  • Can contain multiple, related “questions”
  • Can contain quotes from text
  • Should use in-text (parenthetical) citations

2. Motivation

  • A few sentences describing where the question is coming from and where I hope it may lead
  • Counts toward score, but will not be published if your question is chosen for inclusion

Example:

Prompt:
Merton wrote The normative structure of science early in his career in 1942 (during World War II) and included it in a collection of his work on the sociology of science in 1973 (during the Cold War). How might the political climate of this time span in America have influenced his work? Do his theories cast science in a particular light? How does this work look through the lens of Wolfe's (2018) depiction of science during the Cold War?


Motivation:
I was thinking about the age of Merton’s piece, (published more than 80 years ago!) in the context of the course theme “history of science is a social history.” Rather than just understanding the reading as an example of the sociology of science, I thought it would be interesting to treat it as the object of our inquiry. In addition to helping us understand Merton’s arguments in context, I hope this will raise the larger issue of whether we can apply the tools of the sociology of science to the sociology of science itself.

Social Construction

Social construction

  • “If something is a ‘socially construct’, that means it can be whatever you want it to be.”
  • “Socially constructed = fake”


  • These interpretations are usually based on a serious mis­under­standing (or deliberate mis­repre­sentation) of social construction.

Screenshot of a Tweet (user redacted), with text 'Gender's a social construct, remember. Just have half the scientists 'identify' as female. #problemsolved'

Screenshot of a Tweet by James Lindsay, with text ''Unvaccinated' is a social conostruct. So is 'fully vaccinated.' All artificial. All hyperreal.'

Screenshot of a Tweet by Jordan Peterson, in reply to another Tweet. Peterson's text reads 'Science is a social construct, remember? That's why planes fly...'

Social construction

Sociology of knowledge

  • The Social Construction of Reality (1966)
    Peter Berger & Thomas Luckman

Basic argument:

  • Humans learn about the world through social interaction.
  • Interactions reinforce the things we agree on, and push us to come to agreement on everything else.
  • This process reinforces norms — how the world ought to be.
  • Over time, shared expectations become so regular that we do not think of them as something we came to agree on. They become something we know.

Symbolic interactionism

  • The meaning of things is not essential to
    those things. It is negotiated through social
    interactions.

Book cover. Peter L Berger and Thomas Luckman; The Social Construction of Reality; A treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

Social construction

A photo of a very old, moss-covered stone cathedral wall. The roof, windows, and most everything else is gone, leaving what appears to be just a free-standing wall of stone. The windows are vaulted, and some keep the remnants of Christain iconography in the stonework.

Screenshot of a Tweet by Katherine Cross. Text reads: 'This is false. Religion is socially constructed, but I can't declare that a table is now a cathedral and have it mean anything. That last bit, meaning, is the key. We can play however we like. But most social constructs are like their physical counterparts: durable.'

Social construction

The social is real

  • We often think of the social as somehow less real than the physical or biological.
  • A social construct is real because it has real consequences. It ‘pushes back’ on our attempts to alter it.
  • Sociologists study how social systems are consequential and durable.

In short: social constructs …

  • … have socially-negotiated definition and meaning
  • … have real consequences in the world to
  • … require widespread, collective action to subvert or change

Social construction

Three terms (loosely)

Social construct

  • A ‘social fact’ that is actively maintained, widely held to be true, and consequential.
  • E.g.: race, gender, customs, scientific method, …

Social constructionism

  • A sociological stance that focuses on social constructs, their maintenance, and their meanings.

Social constructivism

  • An epistemological stance that focuses on the ways that social constructs inform what people know

Epistemology in STS

Epistemology in STS

Epistemology

  • Branch of philosophy concerned with understanding human knowledge
  • What does it mean for knowledge to be correct?
  • What makes knowledge different from belief?
  • How can one justify knowledge?

Knowledge

Truth/reality

Belief

Justification

Epistemology in STS

Two prominent epistemological stances in STS:

Scientific realism

  • The real world is independent of human experience
  • Science describes the real world
  • Scientific knowledge is either:
    True (describes accurately) or
    False (describes inaccurately)

Scientific constructivism

  • The real world is, at best, accessible only through human experience
  • The processes that justify belief as knowledge are social
  • Scientific knowledge is contingent
Two people sitting in a car. One has a flamboyant costume, including a huge pink feather boa and thick yellow-rimmed glasses. The other person is dressed plainly in all black and is glaring at the flamoyantly dressed person. The flamboyantly dressed person is labeled 'constructivism' and the plainly dressed person in labeled 'realism'

Scientific realism

Describing reality

  • Scientists’ job is to objectively describe the real world (nature).
  • Descriptions may be flawed due to measurement error, undetected phenomena, bias, etc.
  • But the object of description—the thing described—is consistent.

Ian Hacking

  • Prominent Canadian scientific realist.
  • “So far as I’m concerned, if you can spray them then they are real.”
    Hacking (1983) on the reality of positrons
line drawing of an elephant. There are six people standing around the elephant, all wearing blindfolds. They are feeling different parts of the elephant.

Scientific constructivism

An old-style drawing demostrating six different hand shadows (e.g. how to configure your hands to create what appears to be the shadow of a goose, rabbit, etc)

Describing phenomena

  • Focus on scientific knowledge as it exist for humans.
  • The truth of a scientific claim is based in its accepted meaning and social consequences.
  • True scientific claims can change.

Umbrella term

  • Constructivism means a lot of different things.
  • Sometimes compatible with realism, sometimes not.

Realism-compatible constructivism

A white rat with red eyes being held by a human hand in a latex glove. A diagram of X and Y human chromosomes

Science constructs the objects it studies

  • The substances and phenomena in a lab are not natural.
  • Scientific practice creates contexts to make sense of phenomena.

Science and tech shape the social

  • Scientific articulations of gender, disability, etc.
  • Technology changes the social environment.

Empiricism

Photo of two people passing on the street. Their shadows are cast on the wall behind them, and the shadows make it look like they are gazing into each others eyes romantically
  • If phenomena are all we have to work with, then everything we know is filtered through our experience of it.
  • There is no objective way to select among competing theories if they do not contradict empirical evidence.
  • Trying to decide whether a theory is true in some fundamental sense is meaningless.
  • Explicitly anti-realist.
  • “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method
    of questioning.”

    Werner Heisenberg
    Physics and Philosophy (1958)

Empiricism

a sytlized diagram showing the sun, earth, moon, and other planets and tracing their orbits. In this diagram all of the planets orbit around the sun except the earth. The sun and moon are both depicted as orbiting around the earth. a sytlized diagram showing the sun, earth, moon, and other planets and tracing their orbits. In this diagram all of the planets including the earth orbit around the sun. The moon is depicted as orbiting around the earth.

Tycho Brahe’s geocentric model

Nicolaus Copernicus’ heliocentric model

Strong   Constructivism

Close-up photo of grey, branching reindeer lichen among som mosses The 'galaxy brain' meme -- a glowing translucent human with rays emitting from their brain.

Construction of categories

  • Nominalism: the distinction between kinds of objects in the world is a human creation
  • Categories are therefore socially constructed
  • Science is formalized categorization

Construction of nature itself

  • Truth is fundamentally defined by human experience
  • Critiques:
    Is there a basis to question established truth?
    Difficult causal link from consensus to reality
  • As a perspective, can be useful

Next classes

The ‘strong programme’ and scientific anti-realism

  • Bloor ([1974] 1991)
    The strong programme in the sociology of knowledge

Feminist epistemologies

  • Haraway (1988)
    Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
  • Martin (1991)
    The Egg and the Sperm

Scientific realism

  • Hacking (1983)
    What is scientific realism?

Image credit

A photo of a very old, moss-covered stone cathedral wall. The roof, windows, and most everything else is gone, leaving what appears to be just a free-standing wall of stone. The windows are vaulted, and some keep the remnants of Christain iconography in the stonework.

Photo of Hore Abbey by Christian Bowen on Unsplash

line drawing of an elephant. There are six people standing around the elephant, all wearing blindfolds. They are feeling different parts of the elephant.

Illustration from Children's Classics in Dramatic Form (1909), via Wikimedia

An old-style drawing demostrating six different hand shadows (e.g. how to configure your hands to create what appears to be the shadow of a goose, rabbit, etc)

Image via Wikimedia

A white rat with red eyes being held by a human hand in a latex glove.

Photo by Janet Stephens via Wikimedia

A diagram of X and Y human chromosomes

Image by Jonathan Bailey on Flickr

Close-up photo of grey, branching reindeer lichen among som mosses

Photo by Peter McMahan

ie if i tell you “we all know that the earth revolves around the sun” or: “vaccines decrease the chances of catching COVID” how can we call that ‘correct’? does the earth really revolve around the sun? How could I justify that belief?

Pretty much all STS scholars subscribe to constructivism, but not all subscribe to realism Going to go over each of these in a bit more detail

standard view: we observe reality and describe it bring up bias as an inherently realist term

Late 16th century early 17th century: Galileo Galilei argues for Copernican model by pitting it against Ptolemy’s geocentric model Today we believe: both are wrong

strong programme and standpoint theory fit nicely into nominalism