How Could we ever believe Science is not Political?

Don Ihde, Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook

Two vignettes:

The time is 1910, it is the fourth meeting of the International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research. The issue is one concerning a possible change in the classification of stars as examined through stellar spectroscopy. The Committee on Classification, after debate, decides that it will widely distribute a questionnaire concerning the proposed changed classification scheme to all the top spectroscopists. Returns are eventually received from 28 of these prominent spectroscopists, with 24 of them favorable to a change and the results are published in the Astrophysical Journal. Classification schemes in science are always important since what shall count as what kind of star, a ‘reality’ issue is involved. On the surface it might merely appear that this historical event was an instance of some kind of ‘democratic’ decision making about the classification system—whereby the experts of the field vote on what shall count as reality. But much more lies below the surface: The stimulation for the change arose from the group ‘manning’ [pun deliberate] the Harvard College Observatory under E.C. Pickering, himself a leading physicist and astronomer who, having come from a prominent New England family, attained a full professorship at MIT at the age of 22, before moving on to Harvard in 1877. What’s new? This looks like the standard tale of the WASP heritage in elite schools and of male dominance besides. But now the tale becomes murkier and has a very different underside. Surrounding Pickering, are his associates and colleagues, know as "Pickering’s harem." As it turns out, a number of highly accomplished 19^th century-early 20^th century astronomers, particularly in the mapping fields of spectroscopy and classification, were women: Anna Draper, Annie Cannon, Willamina Fleming and Antonia Maury. It was from their careful work that many previously unnoted aspects of stellar spectra had become important, and it was these which motivated the consideration of classification change. So, Pickering leads the charge and dominates the way the survey is taken—the list of "prominent spectroscopists" was obviously cooked. Rival schemes, mostly European—such as Vogel’s of 1895, were taken care of as follows: J.N. Lockyer, perhaps equally prominent with Pickering, was "one of the most notable omissions from the questionnaire’s distribution. According to DeVorkin the demise of his spectral classification scheme can be partly attributed to his ‘effective exclusion from the process of the committee. Unlike Lockyer, Pickering was at the centre of the proceedings. The way he grasped leadership left little doubt that his system would be strongly favoured. Another ‘elder statesman’ Duner, known for his unswerving support for the Potsdam spectral classification, was also left out of the consulting process." [Hearnshaw, p. 123-4] And while this tale sounds strangely familiar to warring academic philosophers, for example, we are quite familiar with the arcane APA voting proceedure which always yields expectable results through an algorithm rather than a straight numbers vote. Philosophers do not usually think the outcomes yield anything more than political reality. But this is not what we are supposed to believe about internal science politics. There are, of course, two delicious ironies which the tale did not yield directly. The first of these is that "Pickering’s harem" won, a sort of early feminist astronomers’s attainment. The second irony for me is that the astronomer-turned-historian whose events I have been citing, continues unashamedly to refer to the male astronomers as ‘Pickering,’ ‘ Lockyer,’ et. al. but to the female astronomers as ‘Miss Maury,’ ‘Miss Cannon,’ et.al. And this from a book published in 1986! When I emailed him about this gender marking, he unashamedly admitted he remained politically incorrect and would remain so.

The second vignette occurs at Stony Brook in 1997. At a meeting of the Research Advisory Group, faculty and administrators from various disciplines but mostly those which generate large research dollars, looks at the agenda for the day. The most interesting topic is a question: Are we getting enough Pork? Of course this is political ‘pork’, the kind that has increasingly been channeled to universities of some home states or districts of Congressmen and Senators. This is the kind of ‘pork’ which evades the usual peer reviews or competitions of the NIH or NSF. The discussion begins and a physicist asks: "Just how much pork is there?" The Vice President for Research responds with a figure of multiple millions, but not of the billions which flow through the NIH or NSF. The response then reaches a consensus: no, we should not enter this pork race for the following reason, in the large picture there is not really enough to make the risk of appearing politically greedy or even unethical with the resulting news about a win and the possible damage this might inflict upon our reputation. But, the implication seemed clear enough, should the pork pile get big enough for the risk, then we should reconsider.

Most of us, I believe, would not be terribly surprised by these historical tales today. Moreover, the examples I have used are not the most shocking ones about eugenics, race, syphillus, or radioactivity. We live in the post-Double Helix world knowing that scientists are motivated just like anyone else by personal grandeur, reward, and political considerations, in a world where Rosalind Franklin—and totally unknown to you, my colleague Hal Metcalf-- were ‘cheated’ out of Nobels. Only the most reactionary ‘science warriors’ can hold to the old myths of culture-free, value-free, and politics-free science. But the puzzle which I am entertaining here is one about why could we ever have thought otherwise?

The answer I shall propose is, in one sense, both old news and simple: we could have thought science to be a culture-value-politics-free enterprise if and only if we somehow deliberately ignored its concreteness, its history, its anthropology, its sociality. To have thought otherwise we needed to enter into a compact which excercised an enormous abstraction which became a kind of social contract about a transcendent science. That such a compact occurred, mostly in the 19^th century but with vestiges well into the 20^th is now the consensus of most contemporary historians, if not philosophers of science. So, what I am about to engage in is really a phenomenological variation whereby I invert the usual popular beliefs about science by tracing the contentious recovery of common sense regarding science as a political phenomenon.

I shall assume that the compact forged in the 19^th and early 20^th century concerning science holds that (1) science is a universal rationality and is culture-and politics-free, (2) that one dimension of objectivity calls for a clear and totally rational view—distanced and dispassionate--which is value-free, (3) and that science removes so far as possible any ‘subjectivity’ from its practices, and (4) that science is to be understood by its finished products which are ideally the ‘true’ representations of things under ‘universal’ general laws. This should sound familiar since it is what Kuhn called "text-book science." But, how could we have believed this? Or, to use another phenomenological device, how could we have constituted a context such that science could appear or be ‘given’ in this way? a context which allows the nature of science to be so intuited?

And, to slightly complicate the situation, I want to preliminarily take account of what might be required to oppose or take a contrary view of science. If I were to simply take all the contraries of the four points, then I would have to argue that (1 and 2) science is not culture, politics or value-free. It is rather fully culturally, politically and value laden. But if I take this position in relation to the established view, then do I slip into relativism and thus ‘irrationality’? (3) If science removes ‘subjectivity’, then must my inversion affirm subjectivity and thus become some variant upon emotive ‘irrationality’? (4) And, finally, if I take the contrary of ‘true representations’ and ‘general laws’, am I not slipping again into epistemological relativism? I hope you recognize this binary way of formulating the problem since it lies deeply within the arguments of the "science wars" of the recent present. This way of framing the debate, of course, itself remains within the either/or logics and the frame of modern epistemology. It is only in that way that the binaries secretly commonly presuppose abstract reductions: either science is (solely) as described, or it is (reducible) to subjective relativism. This way of framing the arguments only perpetuates modern epistemology itself.

In my answers, I shall invert the order of the traits just listed, beginning with the finished products of science. I am going to utilize both phenomenological and qualified postmodernist tactics which come much closer to a ‘both/and’ logic and a phenomenologically multiperspectival reconstruction of things:

(4) The moves towards the epistemology of "true representations" and "general laws" were themselves complicated and took several centuries of development. They were refined in early modernism particularly by Descartes and Locke through an epistemology which divided subject and object and which took knowledge to be a mental image which, if true, corresponds with its imaged in ‘external reality.’ If I take a textbook science approach and look at culminations rather than processes, the ideal of this version of true representation probably apogees in the objectivity of ‘photo realism’ in the cusp of 19^th-20^th century science.

Peter Galison, probably the leading historian of 20^th century microphysics, has argued that : "’Objectivity’ is historical. As it is used in the physical,medical and biological sciences, objectivity is deeply, ineradicably, a nineteenth century category, one bound up with the process of depicting objects." [Galison327] He contends that science’s visual culture intersects with objectivity in precisely what I have called here, photo realism. He traces, as I cannot do here, the "displacement of the seventeenth- and eighteenth century metaphysical image…and its replacement by the nineteenth-century mechanical image (of ‘objectivity’.) [Galison 329] More concretely, this form of photo realism-objectivity is the use of photography as a replacement for any direct human depiction, such as the scientific drawing.

The specific event Galison uses is the astronomer, Percival Lowell, to confirm the existence of the "canals of Mars." Lowell tries, at first, to effect a ‘mechanical’ style: Each drawing was made as if I had never seen the planet before…about fifteen minutes only was allowed in every instance … [the drawings] were meant to get as nearly as possible impersonal intercomparable representations,---scientific data, not artistic delineations." [Galison 329] But, soon after in collaboration with Carl Otto Lampland, Lowell was able to utilize a photgraphic exploration of the canals. In 1905 Lowell and Lampland, were able to capture, on film, the fine lines of the planetary surface. ‘Thus’, Lowell proclaimed, ‘did the canals at last speak for their own reality themselves." [Galison 329] Once again there is a double irony in this tale: first, given the state of the art, the photographic images of Mars were both very small (about a quarter-inch) and ambiguous. They showed less features than drawings. The second irony is that whereas ‘martian canals’ came into scientific existence with Schiaperelli in 1895 and were defended through Lowell until about 1910, they ceased to exist somewhat later when imaging processes improved. (See their replacement with the results of the Mars Explorer.)

Photography and its mechanical objectivity was an imaging technology which not only became adapted to scientific uses virtually from the beginning (Daguerre’s widely publicized processes from 1839 to the daguerrotype of the gibbous moon in /// ) but both its processes and isomorphic realism suggested a kind of ideal norm for science. Foregrounded, of course, was the fact that the photo ‘reproduced’ or represented isomorphically the thing depicted. That sort of isomorphism was taken as ‘true’ from the beginning. But the way it did so, through a machinic agency of chemistry and apparatus seemed to displace the human with his or her necessary ‘subjectivity.’ And at the very least, it placed the human activity in a different location. Yes, the human had to set up the apparatus, select the object to be photographed, manually undertake the development process, but these actions are much more indirect, more "deistic" in keeping with the god-ideal of the 18^th century. The rest was mechanical with its implied progressivist perfection. In short, this kind of imaging could occlude its human relations and actions and thus embody a science aiming at disembodiment.

(3) In their now famous book on early experimental life, Leviathan and the Air Pump, Shapin and Schaffer show how Boyle had to have a three dimensional set of ‘technologies’ to constitute this new form of life: a social ‘technology’ of modest witnesses or Royal Society approved ‘moral’ men [that literally, since women were not allowed]; a mechanical ‘technology’, the machinery of the air pump which produced a vacuum and a demonstration; and a literary ‘technology’ of a certain style of report. The 17^th century air pump, like 19^th century photography, produced a visible result—flames were extinguished; canaries died; air pressure changed when the pump evacuated the air. But, if we shift to the literary ‘technology’ we see here the rise of the removal of the ‘subjective’ author. ( Maybe the ‘subject’ was effaced in science three centuries before it was in post-structuralism!/?) Here was the birth of an anonymous style.

There were two aspects to the literary technology: the first was the use of carefully crafted drawings and engravings of the experiments themselves, the scientific illustration. Shapin and Shaffer call this "virtual witnessing." This virtual image of the machinery produced for the reader a pre-photgraphic depiction. "Producing these kinds of images was an expensive business in the mid-seventeenth century and natural philosophers used them sparingly [but Boyle made his ]…an attempt at detailed naturalistic representation complete with the conventions of shadowing and cut-away sections of the parts." {S&S 61] In addition there was the (visual) text, another visual source. Boyle called for a particular literary technology, the style of the modest witness who (a) used a reportorial style which included accounts of failures as well as successes (to demonstrate modesty) which also called for a prefiguration of later anonymity (b) Boyle called for a "naked way of writing [eschewing a] florid style, rather in a philosophical than a rhetorical strain." [S&S 66] This was to be functional, rather than personal—and note again the visualist metaphor—it is to be like "the eye-glasses of a telescope." [66].

This prefiguration is well noted today by the spectrum of science interpreters from feminism (Fox Keller and Harding) to sociologists of science (Latour), but is evidenced in any weekly issue of Science or Nature. The literary technology today is both multi-authored and cast in third-person, technical and anonymous style—take this example:Cognitive modularity and genetic disorders, Science, 2355. Thus the desubjectified production of science literature takes its place alongside the desubjectified photographic image.

2. We now ascend to the presumed perspective of science—distant and dispassionate—and value-free. This pairing, distant and dispassionate, is actually an echo of a much more ancient characterization of knowledge than that which arises in early modern science per se. It comes from the ancient atomists who were, however, taken up in early modernity as models for knowledge. Lucretius in De rerum natura extolls the view of humankind from a "high and lofty tower" distant enough so that mortals look like "mere ants moving upon the ground." This gaining of distance, echoed by Boyle’s "eyeglasses of a telescope" displaces the usual position amongst emotively anxious humans. But the purpose of Lucretius’s preferred perspective position is itself existential, it is to distance the philosopher (the atomist) from the woes of humans to give a kind of existential peace—you, too, are of the same stuff as the stars. A second step is needed to make distant dispassion truly early modern, the excision of this existential purpose, step which places scientific perspective ‘outside’ or transcendent to human perspective. As in the two previous cases, and following my own style of seeing the constitution of science through its instruments, I now move upward and backward in time to another visual technology—in this case the camera obscura. This optical device, explicitly used by both Descartes and Locke to outline their epistemological models, was a very familiar one from the 15^th through 18^th centuries. One can very quickly identify in this caracature, many of the most important features of this epistemology: By associated a parallelism between the camera obscura and, first, the eye, and then the mind or subject, one can follow the implicit epistemology. (a) External reality [sun] causally casts an (inverted) image upon the retina-mind, (b) this is all that is directly known to the subject [einstein], and the knowledge is real if and only if the image (representation) is in some way ‘identical’ or correspondent with the imaged (represented). (c) But only God, or the ideal observer [Descartes outside the camera] who can see both what is ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ at the same time can guarantee the truth of the correspondence. I claim that this ‘cheat code’ is employed by both Descartes and Locke as they examine the camera obscura from the distant and dispassionate position of the ideal observer. This inside/outside position avoids the agonies of einstein in the box who is limited to inferring what is outside and who can never be sure whether there is a sun or an ‘evil genius’ who is casting the image. Here the ‘value-free’ is ideal observer transcendent.

(1) We now reach the first and boldest claim of the 19^th century compact, that science is the human activity which is culture and politics free through a universal rationality. Clearly this is both the most abstract and farthest reaching claim of the compact. For this attempt to return science to its human scale, one has to note that there are two dimensions to culture and politics from which, were the compact true, science would have to be exempt. The first dimension could be called internal and the second external, both with qualifications. Does scientific practice contain an internal politics and culture? The contemporary answer surely must be positive. Indeed, the contemporary and even popular image of science today surely reveals much more about the presence of an internal politics than in previous, recent decades. Debates internal to science, or between competing groups of scientists are now highly publicized. Is there a "Greenhouse Effect", and if so, is it of some degree of homogenic origin? Everyone knows that the majority of the science community today answers yes to both these questions; but also that a minority claims that either our measurements are too recent or incomplete to know with enough probability. This is a debate partially internal to the earth sciences, but with plenty of press. A second example which shows the internal politics revolves around the human genome project. Those who read even such popular versions of science reporting as the Tuesday Science Times are well aware of the internal politics of this project. The joint announcement that a draft of the genome had been attained , announced both by the NIH and Celera, was also described in the press as a ‘staged’ affair which only lightly plastered over the subterranean intergroup politics. One only has to go back a little over a year to detect this from Science magazine. May 28, ’99, reports that the "working draft" might occur by spring 2000 through a then new cooperative venture by the U.S. National Genome Researhc Institute and Britain’s Wellcome Trust charity. Both, already having their heels bitten by Celera Genomics, a private biotech group, were rushing to beat the race in a rush similar to that displayed in The Double Helix as Crick and Watson raced Linus Pauling towards the Prize. Interestingly, Science reported that both US and UK agencies, "essentially urged their own grantees to accept lower quality data—at least in the short term—to speed up production." [Science, 28 May 99, p. 1439] One does not need to read feminists and postmodernists to find such information about internal science politics! These recent examples are not radically different from my esoteric first example from stellar spectroscopy. In this respect, Bruno Latour’s Science in Action gives perhaps the clearest account of how science is institutionally internally political. It is a socius quite well designed to perpetuate trials of strength between competing views, which Latour characterizes from a reverse perspective from that of the 19^th century compact which characterizes science as primarily getting at the secrets of Nature. Rather, from what could be called product reports (scientific literature or its publications) in which contests are revealed; back to laboratories where ‘nature’ is prepared to be ‘read;’ and finally to some victorious consensus whereby Nature is declared to be now known, internal science politics is part and parcel of its social form. I have always thought Latour’s characterization of the resolution of such a controversy may be the best yet: "Nature, in scientist’s hands, is a constitutional monarch, much like Queen Elizabeth the Second. From the throne she reads with the same tone, majesty and conviction a speech written by Conservative or Labour prime ministers depending on the election outcome." [Latour, 98] All this is to say indicates that science could not exist as science without an internal politics.

But, in a second sense, it is also clear that science enters external politics—especially with respect to its own interests. Again, that this is the case is much more clear contemporarily than during the heyday of the now eroded compact. You cannot help but be aware of the ‘evolution versus creation science’ debates today which re-echo the famous ‘monkey trial’ of the 1920’s. The last two years of the Kansas events are perhaps the most telling: In the fall of 1999, religious conservatives on the Board of Education in Kansas, were able to write into Kansas educational policy that neither evolution nor ‘big bang’ theories of cosmology could be required subjects. This news, alarming to the science community, stimulated a highly publicized instance of ‘external’ politics, i.e., politics between the science community and the communities of the religious right. Here, for example, is the resolution passed by the Board of Directors of the AAAS which not only condemns the Kansas policy, but urges science societies to join AAAS in its quest to have this policy reversed. Note that the resolution sets the tone which eventually, this fall, succeeded in doing just that. Kansas was casts as a sort of "backward state" whose children would be put at risk in getting into quality higher education colleges and universities were they not to know evolution and cosmology in their science education. The strategy obviously worked since the primaries in Kansas this fall defeated the anti-evolution and cosmology candidates, replacing these with candidates pledged to revoke the previous policy decisions.

What these examples clearly show, minimally, is that internally science has not only its own poliitics, but that these are built into its very social structure. Second, one can glimpse here the fact that science as a social institution also has its own cultural structure, coherent and powerful enough to mount political challenges to cultures or sub-cultures which seek to counter its own. Thus, again minimally, I am demonstrating that science is neither culture- nor politics-free. Nor, since this is all old news, do I think it is perceived to be culture- or politics-free. There remains the claim to universality, regarding both natural laws and rationality. While most of this issue will have to await another paper, note that the science studies which deal with science today most usually show that all knowledge is local. If, for example, the history astronomy and its claims are taken as examples, one can show that the observations and measurements for Ptolemaic astronomy remain as reliable as needed for terrestrial navigation—but these measurements are not sufficient for solar system navigation, whereas Newtonian astronomy is and remains the calculus for current space navigation. But, while we have no technologies to test this, at the extremes of both macro- and micro-phenomena, it seems clear that only Einsteinian mechanics would do in light-bending and macro-gravitational states. What this trajectory shows is that, contrary to claims regarding universality, each version of celestial mechanics is, at best, regional. But here I must leave the reframing of text-book science as I have dealt with it.

Where does this leave us? Does this mean that the inverse of the old compact about science, that it is objective, has universal rationality, is value-politics-and culture-free, now gets replaced by relativism by default? Does science now get reduced to relativism whereby its knowledge claims are no better than those of other, say religious or political claims? My own answer is a strong "no" because the binary, objectivism/relativism, is itself part of the compact which now must also be replaced. If science is a human activity, then it must take its place within the larger and hopefully deeper understanding of what constitutes any special form of human activity. For science to be made both contingent and human scaled, simply calls for a closer examination of whatever its claims may be within the parameters and limits of that scale.

In what I have presented to this point, I have drawn quite explicitly upon the new sources of science interpretation: the new histories, anthropologies, sociologies and at least hermeneutic philosophies of science. Indeed, I believe there is a deep consensus among these contemporary interpretations of science which agrees that science is a very human activity and thus necessarily embedded in political, cultural, valuational dimensions. And it is at precisely this junction that we confront yet another form of contemporary intellectual politics. Who shall, and by what means can science be interpreted? That is the question which often lurks as the political dimension of the "culture" and "science wars." These wars have already produced casualties. A book review editor of thirty-three years with Science, and an editor of the Scientific American each lost their jobs for, in effect, supporting views contrary to text-book science in those respective journals.

But, I am arguing, if the absoluticity of text-book science no longer holds, this does not thereby give the victory to relativism. Rather, a fallibilism such as I believe arises out of both phenomenology and pragmatism, is a better alternative to either of the binaries. To illustrate such an alternative, I must return to some of my examples and add codas and morals to those tales:

• To the tale of stellar spectra one can today take note that what was really Annie Cannon’s revolution, has itself been changed and surpassed. Indeed, there have been two major classification changes since hers. The next supercession was in the 40’s and called the MKK system (again a female astronomer was part of this, Edith Kellman of Morgan, Keenan and Kellman.) And, again in the 50’s still another supercession, the UBV system. To me, what is interesting is that this 20^th century triple supercession of stellar classifications each carries with it an improved set of instruments which allow factors previously unnoted or unnotable to come to prominence. All spectral systems ‘read’ colors and the gaps and lines [Frauenhofer lines] between them, but the latest technological hermeneutics allows for accounting for the reddening of all colors from intervening dust to be detected, thus the ultraviolet, blue and visible of the UBV system. What Pickering’s harem had detected in the first of these reclassifications, were measurements of the intervening lines which were noted to have significance previously unnoted. The moral here is that no single and permanent classification within science is likely and probably is not possible. It therefore must continuously undergo transformations.
• The same instrumental factor relates to Martian canals, but in this case I want to make a slightly different point. When Shiaperelli first claimed ‘canals’, the popular response was one about possible ‘civilizations’ on Mars [the first lgm’s]. And, even if these were now dead civilizations—which some scientists took as possible—one could say that at the end of the 19^th century, Mars had been inhabited. With the post-Lowell demise of canals, Mars became ‘dead’ and barren until the very late 20^th century. The recent claim that Mars originated meteorites contained fossil microorganisms reopened, although in a very different way, a possible re-animated Mars. And while this claim, too, is doubted by the majority science community, it has been sufficient to breathe life into funding multiple Mars missions in the next decades. Similarly, the liquid erosion patterns give hopes for sub-surface discoveries of ‘possible life.’ So, in this sense, Mars has been animated; declared dead; and may possibly be resucitated with life. Two points here: in the history of science what is "objectively out there beyond our subjectivity" keeps changing. Entities come into being and pass from being with astonishing rapidity—phlogiston, aether, preformed homoculi, animated air, etc. once were part of that objective reality, but no longer exist. Or, once circular orbits were replaced by elipitcal ones, which are now replaced by wobbly ones only roughly eliptical. I would claim that with this changing history, judged epistemologically, one cannot have things both ways. Either, phlogiston once had objective existence and passed from it; or, that was a state of evidence and belief which no longer obtains. This either/or must also be applied to current existents: either there are neutral currents, or this is the current state of evidence only. The ‘objective’ world for science keeps changing and that is the way it should be. For this, however, we do not need an epistemology which makes absolutist or ‘objectivist’ claims. All of this changeability does not fit well with the text-book view of science and fits better with a probablistic and fallibilist view. There are very few laws of physics which have lasted for more than a few centuries at a time, and some of these lasted longer than the Newtonian ones which are usually claimed as universal, such as aristotelean stones seeking the center, ‘laws’ which held for more than the three plus centuries since Newton. So, when Sokal advises his postmodernist opponents to defy these by jumping out the window, the aristotelans among them would not be any more inclined than the newtonians to take the bet. Nor would the einsteinians or quantum mechanicians. Even a heideggerian who believes that Dasein belongs to the Earth would not be likely to jump. We need deeper understandings than the red herring of the science wars here.