Why Not Science Critics? |
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The idea for my title was suggested quite a few years ago by Langdon Winner. Langdon had sent me a copy of a collection of his essays to read and respond to which eventually became THE WHALE AND THE REACTOR. And, although his topic was philosophy of technology and his experience was what many of us felt in technology studies at the time, the point applies equally well to science, or even better, to what is now often called technoscience. Here is Langdon's point:
The contrast between art and literary criticism and what I shall call 'technoscience criticism' is marked. Few would call art or literary critics "anti-art" or "anti-literature" in the working out, however critically, of their products. And while it may indeed be true that given works of art or given texts are excoriated, demeaned, or severely dealt with, one does not usually think of the critic as generically "anti-art" or "anti-literature." Rather, it is precisely because the critic is passionate about his or her subject matter that he or she becomes a 'critic.' That is simply not the case with science or technoscience criticism. In part this is because art and literary criticism is institutionalized. It is so much a part of the artistic and literary tradition that critics meet, publish, and talk in the same contexts as the artists and writers. And, contrarily, there simply is no such forum within science or technology. The critic--as I shall show below--is either regarded as an outsider, or if the criticism arises from the inside, is soon made to be a quasi-outsider. Why is this the case? We are now at the juncture where I may announce the theses which I wish to argue for: First, I am obviously holding that I think something like 'technoscience criticism' ought to be part of the social discourse concerning technoscience and that this role ought to be a recognized and legitimated role. And, in a related fashion, while I am holding that the technoscience community resists precisely this role and bears the self-serving primary responsibility for closing off the critical dialogue, I am also implicitly holding that 'technoscience criticism' while often occuring, has not taken the place it could occupy in the places where we should expect to to occur. This contention comes from my own experience in the founding a growth of North American philosophy of technology--which does frequently offer technology criticism and frequently gets for its efforts an "anti-technology' label--and for my more recent experience and work in the philosophy of science, which until recently has almost strenuously avoided anything which could be called 'science criticism' except in the narrowest of conceptual senses. I shall later examine a few instances of technoscience criticism which have and do occur, but which are, at best, limitedly successful. I. Barriers to Technoscience CriticismThe most obvious barrier to the formation of an institutionalized technoscience criticism lies in the role of late modern technoscience itself. Technoscience, as institution, began in early modernity by casting itself as the 'other' of religion. Its mythologies, drawn from Classical pre-Christian and often materialist (Democritean/Epicurean) sources; its anti-authoritarianism, including the Galilean claim to have exceeded the Scriptures and Church Father's insights by replacing these with the new sighting possible through his telescope; and the much stronger later anti-religiousity of the Enlightenment which cast religion as 'superstition' and science as 'rationality,' all led to the Modernist substitution of what I am calling technoscience for religion. In the process, science--whether advertently or inadvertently--itself took on a quasi-theological characteristic. To be critical of the new 'true faith' was to be, in effect, 'heretical' now called 'irrational.' Functionally speaking, this resistance to criticism serves to keep the critics externally located, as 'others.' And while none of this is news, it maintains itself within the institutional characteristics of technoscience's own belief structure. The success of this science/religion inversion is instanced in the the child's textbook version of Columbus's voyage. We grew up believing that while Columbus knew or at least believed the world to be spherical (hence he was a rational, scientifically informed navigator) his crew believed the world to be flat (hence they were religious and superstitious) and if he went too far they would fall of the end of the earthocean. This myth about the fifteenth century, as Valerie Flint showed in her THE IMAGINATIVE LANDSCAPE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (Princeton, l992), was itself an early twentieth century invention. Indeed, the time of invention, now incorporated into our pre-late twentieth century deconstruction of Columbian history, was when the Scopes trial was underway. What Flint showed, was that even the most moderatly informed individual of the fifteenth century believed the earth to be spherical, with the exception of a very small, obscure group of "flat-earth" sectarians. The early twentieth century inventors of the rational-scientific vs. superstitious-religious binary, simply elevated the texts of the flat-earthers beyond proportion and claimed this was a widespread belief. But it was an apparently successful polemic which did get institutionalized into our science dominated- education insofar as many children still believe in the invented story. And this is but one example of a dominant mythology which still functions. However, the science/religion inversion is too general to account for the resistance to an institutionalized technoscience criticism. Instead, I wish to turn our attention to two features of technoscience which are both more deeply embedded in technoscience praxis and which relate more closely to the art-literature criticism analogy. The first relates to science texts: Bruno Latour's SCIENCE IN ACTION argues that science-as-institution has successfully created a social form which contains its own form of critique into carefully constructed modes of contestation. Science-as-institution incorporates structured trials of strengh through which controversies are settled without damage to the basic institution itself. In a strategy derived both from phenomenology and deconstruction, Latour deliberately inverts what we usually take to be the scientific self-interpretation--the interpretation which usually begins with an inquiry into Nature and ends with a well formulated 'law' or theorum concerning a natural phenomenon finally promulgated in a text--by beginning with results, a 'text' or scientific article and working reconstructively backwards to appeals to Nature. Typically, scientific 'texts' or literature appear as articles in scientific journals. I cannot here trace out the extreme complexity of the construction of such articles, which in Latour's interpretation are carefully crafted results of trials of strength, but everyone is familiar with the fact that virtually all such articles are (a) multi-authored, (b) written in a deliberately anonymous or authorless style, and (c) couched in both quantitative and visualized chart forms. Here, already, is a very 'unliterary' form. Latour asks: who reads such texts? and how are such texts--for my purposes here--'criticized' or challenged? First, most people do not read such 'texts' at all! Rather, the readers are already usually members of a select community. Indeed, the technical opacity of such texts is part of the form of the text itself. The text "puts off" any ordinary reading. The text does not invite one in unless the reader is already 'an expert' in that style of reading. But, then assuming that one knows how to 'read' such a 'text', what are the possible outcomes? Latour cites three: first, one simply "goes along" with the text. One accepts, believes, and if in the field, quickly incorporates the findings which then become part of the larger system of science-as-institution. Or, if you wish to challenge or criticise the 'text', you find that it can't be (often) done through textual criticism per se, but have to go to an entirely different level--you have to go to the laboratory which produces the conditions for the text. Were there to be a counterpart requirement for literature, it would be one whch required us to return to the Agora to refute Plato!
I would like to go on into the context of the laboratory and on into the appeal to Nature which is where the leaving of the text leads in technoscience, but I cannot. I can only say, that to challenge the text at the level of the laboratory ultimately calls for one to construct a counter-laboratory of the challenge is to be carried through. This is a thoroughly technologically embodied process which implies money, gangs of operators, and even an educational process. But it also leaves the potential critic in a very unusual and uncomfortable position. This points to the second inherent problem for the development of technoscience criticism. And that is the dimension of knowledge-power, or better put, knowledge-expertise which functions within late modern technoscience. In this context I shall turn to Raphael Sassower for illumination from his KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT EXPERTISE. In this book, Sassower turns to an interesting early modern example which occured in the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The debate internal to the BAAS was whether to keep or expell Section F from its ranks and thereby effectively 'defrock' economics from the status of being a 'science.' This historical example excellently shows how knowledge relates to power, but in the particular form of 'expertise' whereby only 'experts' are empowered to make decisions. Generalizing on this modern form of technocracy, Sassower notes:
I probably need not remind many here how the myth of expertise operates as two-edged sword in so many academic contexts: in philosophy, for example, shall the dominant philosophical traditions (by number still analytic philosophers) be the sole arbiters of what counts as philosophy? or, does the counter-ploy of counter-expertise, only Continental philosophers should judge Continental results, come into play? But in the realm of technoscience criticism the usual role expertise plays relates to the claim on the part of science-as-institution is that only the scientifically informed may be certified as critics. I want here to enter two examples of criticism in action, to show how the critic is initially 'other', or made 'other', external to institutionalized technoscience. The first instance is autobiographical and as critic (a philosopher) I was already identified as an external critic: The occasion is an interdisciplinary panel of scientists, convened to debate the issue then facing Long Islanders about the Shoreham nuclear plant. The plant had just gone low-level operational, prior to the approval of an evacuation plan [imagine evacuating Long Island!] in the case of a nuclear disaster. One of the panelists was Max Dresden, an acerbic and outspoken physicist who in his past had also been associated with the Manhattan Project. His presentation turned out to be a defense of expertise and a diatribe against even allowing public discussion of expert conclusions. He contended (this was before Chernobyl) that nuclear energy was the cleanest, safest, and ultimately the cheapest source of electric power and that it was 'irrational' to oppose--out of ignorance--the opening of the Shoreham plant. During the discussion, I entered the fray, at first provoking Max to reiterate in even stronger terms his defense of expertise--he now claimed that no one should be allowed to vote on issues of such technical complexity. So, I asked him whether the Shoreham debate was a 'scientific' or a 'political' debate and he eagerly admitted, ruefully, that it was 'political.' I then asked him if he were expert at politics, and he huffed and said no, to which I replied, then, according to your expertise argument you ought to have nothing to say about politics, but merely leave it up to the political process to have its day. [Of course, everyone knows, the Shoreham plant has been decommissioned.] The next day at the Faculty Club, Max came over and as loudly as possible attacked me, saying he wished the entire Philosophy Department could be dismantled given its 'antiscientific' tendencies! I probably need not further explicate how this illustrates the externalization of criticism from within an institutionalized 'myth of expertise.' The second instance is one which begins with the critic as in insider, a "whistle blower" example: I suspect everyone here remembers the news coverage of the l99l "Gulf War." It was a trial run on one of our "Star Wars" developments, the anti-missile missile, the "Patriot." The newsbroadcasts showed over and over again the presumed 'interceptions' and claimed hits up to 95% effectiveness. If, then, you followed the more critical analyses to follow, you will probably recall that there was an admission that effectiveness or 'hits' declined to about 24%. Part of this admission was due to the early-on analysis performed by Theodore Postal, a ballistics expert and MIT scientist who took news videotapes used to make the hit claims and subjected them to magnified, enhanced, and computer image techniques which on closer inspection showed that claimed hits were not hits at all. Eventually, he concluded that there may not have been a single, verifiable hit which had been made by a Patriot! Needless to say, this claim was not appreciated by Raytheon, the manufacturer of the missile, nor by his colleague, Shaoul Ezekiel, who had advised Raython, and eventually not even by MIT itself which got caught in the cross-fire of claims and anti-claims. The battle turned nasty: Raytheon implied that Postal had actually doctored the tapes, but later reduced this to the claim, suggested by Ezekiel, that the grain structure and imaging of video tapes was simply too gross to draw the conclusions drawn. The battle continues to this day, particularly between Postol and Exekiel concerning ethical conduct, with MIT trying to shy away due to the large amounts it gets annual from Raytheon. (see Science, 23 February l996, pp. l050-l052). Nor is this some isolated instance. In a study of the "costs of whistle blowing' Science (5 January l996, p. 35) reports that more than two thirds of whistle blowers (within science as an institution) experience negative effects ranging from 'ostracism' through 'pressure to drop allegations,' to the actual non-renewals or losses of jobs. The long drawn out 'David Baltimore' case is another of these scenarios, in which the whistle blower--not the offender who faked the notebooks--was fired. The insider critic is isolated and, if possible, often separated and thus made into an outsider or 'other.' While the above scenario would not be much different for business corporations, neither would we be surprised about this ostracization from the corporate sector within business, but for the popular image of science as being more like a Church in the claims about critical concern for truth, this may come as a surprise, although not for those of us close enough to realize that science-as-institution is today much more like the corporate world than it is a church! II. Science CriticismThe implicit trajectory clearly shows that there is a role for science criticism. This is not to say there is none, quite to the contrary, the examples cited shows that there is both external and internal criticism which does take place, regardless of costs. But, equally, the role of criticism is not one which parallels the role of the art or literary critic, nor is science criticism validated in the same way. Rarely, unless the criticism is so extreme as to provoke public outrage, is an art or literary critic fired, ostracized, or threatened. Moreover, the sector from which one would expect such an institutionalized criticism to originate, namely the philosophy of science, has also not performed this task adequately. I do not have time here to trace out the reasons for this lacuna, other than to suggest that the heretofore dominant traditions of the philosophy of science (derived from Positivist and analytic traditions, more recently from pragmatic analytic traditions) did indeed take the passionate view of their subject matter which the presumed literary critic takes towards literature, but the result was not criticism so much as an attempt to justify and even to imitate science, in short, to make philosophy more 'like' science. And when philosophy of science did become normative, it did so in the name of an idealized rationalistic conceptualism. Early positivist attempts to isolate the pure logical form of science and then normatively judge science, resulted in the laughable results which proclaimed such sciences as geology "unscientific" or to relegate most of the biological sciences into a kind of 'softness' akin to sociology. Two other areas of philosophy came a little closer to establishing science criticism: I refer to the various types of 'applied ethics' domains which arose most prominently in the medical contexts, and aspects of the philosophy of technology, in which case the degree of tellingness of critique remains marked by the accolade, "anti-technology" as noted by Winner above. But each is at best a partial success. Applied medical ethics has learned and has become partially institutionalized inside medical schools and hospitals, and it does perform evaluative and reflective excercises. Philosophers of technology, on the other hand, have been prone to be far too generic in criticism, both by reifying technologies as Technology with the capital "T", and by making too sweeping claims about 'alienation,' the subsumption of 'Nature' to 'Technology,' etc. And, throughout, both external and internal critics remain to be taken as 'others.' So, do we end with failure? with the impossibility of science criticism in anything like an analogy to art and literary criticism? III. What Would a Science Critic Look Like?Given this state of affairs, it now behooves me to make some projections. If I am calling for science critics, what would they look like? What would they do? And, where would they be? Continuing to pursue the art-literature analogy, I would say the science critic would have to be a well-informed, indeed much better than simply well-informed amateur, in its sense as a 'lover' of the subject matter, and yet not the total insider. Increasingly some philosophers of science have caught this: Ian Hacking, in his work on science instruments, particularly the microscope, has called for philosophers to "go native" in some degree. And, I also agree with him that this is more a matter of learning science practice with its forms of tacit and operational know-how than it is a matter of conceptual analysis. Secondly, again like the art or literary critic, it is probably equally important the the amateur not be a fully practicing artist or literary writer. Just as we are probably worst at our own self-criticism, that move just away from self-identity is needed to position the critical stance. Something broader, something more interdisciplinary, something more 'distant' is needed for criticism. So far, so much like art and literary criticism. But I think technoscience is in many ways a special case which calls for more than occurs in art and literary criticism. For one thing, art and literary criticism still follows the 'authorship paradigms' of its subject matters. Critics remain, like writers and artists, individuals who both do and like to sign their own names, to be personally responsible, and thus bear both the praise and blame for results. Science is not like that: its style is anonymous, impersonal, and above all, corporate or intersubjective. But underneath, even the process of discovery is an intersubjective and increasingly multiple perspectived process. I should like to suggest that the critic, the philosopher, must more thoroughly enter into this process. To do this, one aspect is collaboration. At Stony Brook, we have one example of such a collaboration in the results from our Logic Lab and the co-authored work of Patrick Grim and Gary Mar on computer modelled philosophical problems. Their research--although not an example of science criticism in any direct sense--has reached as high as notice from the Scientific American (April, l993) and is noted for the innovations in fuzzy logics and game theory based on cooperative models. We simply must 'gang up' and produce through the works of cooperative and intersubjective work, our critical results. Another aspect, related both the the 'going native' and the collaborative result, is that the science critic must get in on the origins, rather than the results of the technoscientific process. I have long argued that one flaw in applied ethics fields is that they are like the ambulance corps which attends the battlefield--they fix up the wounded, but do not either prevent the battle or ameliorate its consequences. Only when the critic is, in this metaphor, present at the strategy planning of the generals, can the critic hope to affect the outcomes. Here examples of critical participation at foundational stages are even rarer and harder to broach since the exclusionary forces within science-as-institution mitigate against such presence. But I can cite examples (I cite a lately discovered such example in my PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY (Paragon, l993)), mostly some I have discovered in the last several years in trips to northern European technical universities. In Scandanavian and Dutch technical universities, philosophers have found themselves within research teams and while sometimes assigned the evaluation and consideration of ethical and social outcomes in assessment contexts, sometimes other skills are called for. And, increasingly, I have found myself drawn into these contexts by being asked to review and respond to research design. I will end with one autobiographical example: In Denmark there is a team of researchers who are dealing with a certain problem of medical crises which occur in operating rooms. Picture the patient, unconscious and anethsetized, but hooked up to an array of machines around the room which give readings of vital signs. Dials, audible alarms, oscilloscopes, all are part of the hermeneutic display to be 'read' by the practicioners. In turn, each device is programmed to go off at a pre-set level. During the operation, however, most alarms that go off, experienced physicians have learned, are 'false alarms' and here one reaches a certain critical juncture. If one ignores the alarm and it is 'genuine' clearly there is a danger to the patient; yet, on the other hand, if the alarm is 'false' and one stops to fix the situation, other dangers occur. The dilemma discovered was that the most experienced physicians were more likely to ignore the alarms--sometimes with disasterous results--than less experienced physicians. So, the problem became one of how does one determine a 'real' from a 'false' crisis? Moreover, this was determined to be an explicitly 'hermeneutic' problem, a matter of right reading. But, like science, the result is not the fictive world, but the 'nature' or patient beyond the instrumental texts. What does the critic do, or what can the critic do? It is here that I place him or her to enact 'science criticism.' |