XIII Seminário Internacional de
FILOSOFIA E HISTÓRIA DA CIÊNCIA
novembro
de 2007
Prof. Dr.
Terry Shinn
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, França
Pesquisador Visitante - FAPESP
Regimes of science and technology
Changing historiographical perspectives
Since the 1960s, theories about
scientific and technical knowledge and the organisation of science
and technology proposed by many historians, philosophers and sociologists
have either taken a radical turn or been seriously revised. Theory
of this kind is known as “anti-differentiationist”,
as it minimises or discounts the autonomy of science vis-à-vis
society, and thereby discounts boundaries which are viewed as
simply contingent, Anti-differentiationist analysis includes the
Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1988) and the New Production of
Knowledge” (Gibbons 1994, Nowotony 2001). Several loosely
connected alternative historical and sociological models of science
have been proposed by scholars positioned orthogonally to anti-differentiationist
thinking, and these may collectively be referred to as “regimes
of science and technology”. They share three features: 1.
recognition of some form of science/society demarcation and interaction,
2. co-existence and tension between forms of intellectual capital
and bureaucratic capital, 3. centrality of changing historical
forces both in the transfiguration and conditions of possibility
of scientific knowledge and science’s organisation. These
themes will underpin discussion of a variety of regimes of science
and technology and neighbouring concepts.
Lecture 1 – 14/11/2007
– Rewriting Science and Restructuring Knowledge
The theory of “scientific revolutions”, “paradigms”
and “normal science” proposed in 1968 by T. Kuhn offered
an entirely new historical point of view for the understanding
of scientific change. By the 1980s this stance had itself become
largely supplanted by a further rewriting of science/society relations
in the guise of “Actor Network Theory”. This perspective
reduces nature to acts of “inscription”, represents
science as essentially political behaviour and dismisses the special
place of critical rationality in scientific learning. Soon following
on this radical deconstruction theory, there emerged the model
of the “New Production of Knowledge”, which for its
part insists on the birth of a fundamentally new breed of science
since circa 1970, accompanied by the effacement of historically
earlier expressions of scientific thought and work. According
to New Production of Knowledge thinking, a classical form of learning,
labelled Mode 1 science, putatively ground on a rigid division
and divorce between academia, disciplines, scientist peer-based
problem-definition and truth evaluation on the one hand, and on
the other hand social demand and enterprise, here characterizes
pre-1945 science. This theory claims that contemporary science
– Mode 2 science – is a repudiation of Mode 1 –
that it entails the end of academia, disciplinarity, peer review
for setting and evaluating knowledge, and differentiation between
science and society. According to Mode 2, enterprise, public policy
and citizen movements, and not professional academic researchers,
will henceforth dictate the orientation and content of learning,
based not on truth but instead on “robust” epistemology
– practical solutions to immediate problems.
In this lecture, Actor Network Theory and the New Production of
Knowledge will be critically presented as the backdrops for the
emergence of regimes of science and technology alternative reflection.
Two analytic themata receive paramount attention in our treatment.
First, the problematic deconstruction of epistemological, cognitive,
institutional, community and economic boundaries in Actor Network
Theory and in the New Production of Knowledge: the purposes and
dynamics of frontier development and mutation will here be systematically
explored. Second, an equally grave difficulty occurs through repudiation
of hierarchic relations which habitually prove central to the
work of classification, structuring, and prioritising relations
of every category – from intellectual to organisational.
Anti-differentiationist theory will thus be explored from the
dual perspective of destructurations of cognition and the social
framing of thought.
Local: IEB - Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
- das 9h00 às 11h30.
Lecture 2 – 21/11/2007
– Pierre Bourdieu’s “science field” and
science regimes as historicity
Pierre Bourdieu’s highly innovative reflections on the science
field of 1975 and 2002 identify two essential components of science
dynamics. The production of knowledge and its legitimation as
truth are social activities taking place in a system of cognitive
and organisational competition. Competition underpins truth dynamics.
Competition is in turn regulated and demarcated by the common
adoption of intellectual and methodological conduct specific to
the science field. Science field membership depends on adherence
to these rules and on conduct consistent with acceptance of truth
criteria. Science is also constrained by historical conditions
of possibility. Bourdieu puzzles over the paradoxical issue of
science’s simultaneous palpable heterogeneity and unity.
Alternative science regimes prove equally attentive to historicity,
and this indeed constitutes one of their basic characteristics.
A second key characteristic lies in their balance between structure
and plasticity. A system of science regime proposed by Dominique
Pestre rejects the procrustean Mode 1 purely ivory tower profile
and Mode 2 narrowly entrepreneurial and anti-differentiationist
vision predicated by proponents of the New Production of Knowledge.
The proposed regime consists of an unending changing weave between
academic, economic, mixed societal and political ingredients.
It is the balance and dynamics of heterogeneous factors such as
these that determine the face of science and science’s dealings
with non-science elements. Enterprise, etc are thus stable factors,
signifying that economics and politics comprise underlying issues
across all regimes. It is the altered position of economics, technology
and innovation, and the role of the state that make 21st century
science what it is today and not the total revolutionary recasting
of science/society dynamics.
Local: Prédio de Filosofia e Ciências
Sociais - sala 8 - das 9h30 às 12h30.
Lecture 3 – 23/11/2007
– Regimes of science and technology production and diffusion
This regime is pluralistic, encompassing multiple distinct and
structured historical systems of production and forms of diffusion.
The analytic originality here lies in the observation that science
is to be grasped as a dual process where production and diffusion
together form an indissociable, integrated process. This regime
is further predicated on three postulates: 1. Science is an autonomous
exercise, but autonomy is only relative. 2. Ideas, men and materials
circulate between the different compartments comprising science
and between science and extra-science fields – the economy,
state, civil society, military, etc. 3. Despite science’s
heterogeneities, there operate systems of converging rules and
expectations that confer a measure of unity on science.
In this lecture five specific regimes of science and technology
are examined. Each regime is the product of a particular set of
historical circumstances, and exhibits a specific configuration
of divisions of internal labour. The “Disciplinary regime”
arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, and for institutional reasons
is by far the best known. The “utilitarian regime”
began to flower in the mid 19th century and into the early 20th
century. Its system of knowledge production is epistemologically
distinct from the disciplinary regime, as is the magnitude and
demands of its market. The “transitory regime” falteringly
began in the late 19th century. Lord Kelvin stands as its icon.
Its trajectory is intermittent, and its achievements often take
the form of hybrid specialties. The “official regime”
emerged in the late 19th century, and it may be in decline today.
It is ground on rutinised technologies, metrology, and on state
and public service.
These four regimes of science and technology function on two complementary
levels: first, with reference to their particular intra regime
science/technology logic; and second, with reference to beyond
science audiences. Linkage among regimes often constitutes a subsidiary
concern. In a final science and technology regime, the “transverse
regime”, emerging in the last third of the 19th century
and subsequently prospering, the priority is reversed. The production
and diffusion here circulates ideas, men and materials across
the boundaries of the other four regimes and across the science
boundary toward enterprise, state technical services, the military
etc. This transverse regime is predicated on five features: 1.
Development of “generic instrumentation” which explores
laws of instrumentation as opposed to laws of nature, and which
results in open-ended, multi-function, polysemic devices. 2. Establishment
of an “interstitial arena” where fundamental instrument
research arises, free from local and short-term constraints. 3.
Introduction of abundant boundary crossing as practitioners cross
from the interstitial arena into multiple knowledge and technology
niches as they circulate their devices. 4. Re-embedding of generic
instrumentation principles into local cognitive, technical or
functional niches where principles are adapted to specialized
user demand. 5. Emergence of a generic instrument-driven lingua
franca that traverses local environments, allowing individuals
to communicate across borders, and the emergence of a kind of
“pragmatic universality”, in which instrument users
come to share convergent confidence in particular techniques,
results and concepts. Examples of generic instrumentations include
automatic switching devices, the ultracentrifuge, rumbatron, Fourier
transform spectroscopy, hologram optics, the c++ multi function,
multi paradigm object oriented computer language, and the scanning
tunnelling microscope so central to nanoscience and nanotechnology!
The transverse science and technology regime thereby operates
as a unifying, or at least converging force, that permotes a measure
of communication and consensus on the pluralistic science system.
Based on a certain category of technology and social dynamics,
selected and intermittent boundary crossing lies at its heart,
where knowledge and competence penetrate diverse niches, yet without
imperilling local divisions of labour. In the form of cognition,
habitus or organisation, a balance between differentiation and
integration is thusly reached in science.
Local: Prédio de Filosofia e Ciências
Sociais - sala 8 - das 9h30 às 12h30.
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Organização:
Associação Filosófica Scientiæ Studia
Departamento de Filosofia - USP
Parque de Ciência e Tecnologia da USP
