SOCI 325: Sociology of Science

Agenda

Scientific realism

  1. Administrative
  2. Types of scientific
    realism (Hacking)
  3. Reading discussion

Administrative

Mid-term peer evalutaion

  • Later this week, each student will receive a rubric for evaluating your group-mate's contribution
  • The results will not affect the final grade
  • But the format of the evaluation will match the peer evaluation at the end of the term

Types of scientific realism

Types of scientific realism

Ian Hacking’s realism

  • Hacking is one of the major proponents of scientific realism in STS.

“… if you can spray them then they are real”

  • A “soft” rather than “hard” realism.
  • Focus on entities and causal reality.
Animation. A clerk at a cosmetics counter sprays a bottle of something directly in the face of a customer, who backs away.

Types of scientific realism

Realism about entities

  • The unobservable, abstract entities that science theorizes about can be real.
  • An entity’s reality does not depend on “direct” observation.
  • Atoms, gravity, and genes can be real.
  • Not a statement that all theoretical entities are real.

Can be realist about entities but not theories

Realism about theories

  • Scientific theories about entities are either true or false.
  • The truth or falsehood of a theory reflects an underlying, real world.
  • Geocentrism, quantum theory, and Mendelian inheritance are each either true or false.

Can be realist about theories but not entities

Types of scientific realism

Materialism

  • For an entity to be ‘real’ it must have a material reality.
  • Historically, this was about actual matter/mass.
  • Contemporary materialism is about physical composition.
  • Electrons are real because things can be made of them.

A cube made of tightly packed purple and green spheres. (chemical image of sodium chloride)

Causalism

  • For an entity to be real it must have effects on the
    world.
  • Often focuses on mechanism.
  • Hacking: to say that A causes B, you need to say how A causes B.
  • Implicitly about theory.

A diagram using arrows to indicate clusters of tightly packed spheres coliding and transforming.

Representing and intervening

A complex 'exploded' diagram of a single-lens reflex camera. All of the parts of the camera are spread out from each other and labeled with a part number.

Representing

  • One aim of science is to create ‘correct’ (in some sense) representations of the world around us.
  • Realists and anti-realists argue about what that ‘correct’ means.

Intervening

  • But another aim of science is to create experimental and technological interventions in the world around us.
  • Less epistemological debate around this aspect

Ways of understanding

  • Hacking presents the realism / anti-realism distinction in terms of “movements.”
  • He proposes a practical approach based on how scientists work with scientific knowledge.

Next class

Tacit knowledge and experimental reproduction

  • Collins (1975)
    The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics

Image credit

Animation. A clerk at a cosmetics counter sprays a bottle of something directly in the face of a customer, who backs away.

Animation via Giphy from Mean Girls (2004)

A cube made of tightly packed purple and green spheres. (chemical image of sodium chloride)

Image via Wikimedia

A diagram using arrows to indicate clusters of tightly packed spheres coliding and transforming.

Image via Wikimedia

A complex 'exploded' diagram of a single-lens reflex camera. All of the parts of the camera are spread out from each other and labeled with a part number.

Repair diagram for an Olympus 35DC camera, via ElektroTanya

Toronto Next slide: going to cover a couple of the contrasts that hacking used

Both principally about entities, but especially materialism causalism is very familiar to sociologists, who want to describe social forces as real (Durkheim’s social facts) “The weak interactions of small particle physics are as real as falling in love”

One reason I like ending the 'epistemology' section with this reading is that Hacking presents a more complex view of the epistemological field In the end, I hope students will be able to employ concepts from all of the epistemological stances we’ve seen when trying to understand scientific knowledge production.