Futures 34 (2002) 178–181www.elsevier.com/locate/futures

Good questions in search of good answers

William KeithSpeech Communication, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97405, USA

It is sometimes said that all good answers have to begin as good questions, andSteve Fuller, I think, has a knack for asking good questions.The Governance ofScience is in general strongest in setting up good questions, and perhaps lesssatisfying when it comes to answers. I’d like to survey the general strengths of thebook and then examine one set of questions especially interesting to me, and suggestwhere we’d have to go with the answers.

The most important thing about this book is not explicit, and might easily gounnoticed even by those who take the trouble to disagree with most of its contents.Questions about the political character of science as an epistemic enterprise are sur-prisingly difficult to ask, let alone answer. Kuhn was accused of advocating “mobrule” just for suggesting an historical dimension to science in this sense. Beforecritiquing the arguments of this book, it would be well to remember that it has takenmore than a decade of patient and persistent work for Steve Fuller among manyothers, surely to provide a widely enough accepted framework to make asking thesequestions possible. Fuller calls this framework “social epistemology,” and it hasgone from seeming oxymoronic and laughable in HPS to self-evident enough thatestablishment analytic philosophers like Alvin Goldman feel they have to accommo-date it.

In boldly conceiving science this way, Fuller is bound to end up either creatingnew vocabulary (he generally doesn’t do this), or mangle existing concepts intoshapes that will allow him to explore these new questions (following in the ter-ministic footsteps of Kenneth Burke). Arthur Danto once remarked, concerning thedifficulty of Nietzsche’s writing, that those who explore uncharted waters may lackthe means to describe them, and so it is no wonder they return with maps borderedby monsters and mysterious creatures. And so it is here. We are confronted in TheGovernance of Science with an exciting array of terminologies for science as govern-able, some drawn from politics, some from economics, some from sociology. The

E-mail address: keithw@ucs.orst.edu (W. Keith).

0016-3287/02/$ - see front matter 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.PII: S0016 -3287(01 )00056-8

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effect is at once exciting and unsettling. Exciting, for they seem to open up fruitfulways of talking about science. Unsettling, because we don’ t know our way about,cannot be sure if what we’ re seeing is real or not.

The basic question of the book is pretty straightforward: What would science looklike to us if we treated as we would any other social institution, and in particularheld it accountable, as we do other institutions, for its democratic character (or lackthereof)? His door into this topic, as before, is to note the often unspoken normativeexpectation that science and society mirror each other: Science has been pictured(since the Enlightenment) as the potentially perfect democracy, while society andits governance have been understood as better when they are more scientific. Thetrouble, of course, is that the Enlightenment understood science as a disembodieddemocracy, and so society understands science as always other-than itself (and thuswe have never been modern).

Fuller is not out to solve this “problem” ; instead he wants to push past it and geton with the interesting questions about the relation between science and society, withno insides or outsides, aligning the normative dimensions of epistemology and socialtheory. His characteristic move consists in extending the mirroring of science andsociety as far as it will go. Not just for effect, but so that, in fact, that one can nolonger quite see the difference between them. My interest lies in the rhetoricalcharacter of both science and society: I have long thought that if you wish to findthe rhetoric in science, you must first find the polis, the constitutively political com-munity, in science. Fuller thinks political situation of science was always alreadythere, waiting to be rejoined discursively, rhetorically -- not just by funding patternsand protests against genetically-altered tomatoes.

Fuller projects his vision of “ republican” as opposed to “ liberal” science and scien-tists early in the book, but it doesn’ t seem to play much of a role later on, as hebegins to describe the way in which the governance of science will be articulatedthrough universities and so on. Why is that? My own view is that there are someintrinsic rhetorical tensions involved that neither Fuller nor the scientific community(nor, for that matter, those who study rhetoric of science) have fully acknowledgedor accommodated. Most of the literature on this topic (Latour and Fuller are theexceptions, I think) assumes that the characteristic style of argumentation for scien-tists is some version of the public relations version of science devised by the logicalpositivists, the argument that goes on in journals and meetings over what “we” knowor don’ t. This includes the methodologically imbued sort of talk that philosopherslike to reconstruct as “epistemic.” Steven Weinberg is, to put it mildly, anxious thatthis be taken as the characteristic discursive mode of science. This mode raises afamiliar set of discursive problems for the politicisation of science, and theseantinomies have been rehearsed many times. They are all versions of theinside/outside problem, and they include:

The expert/layperson problem: it would be nice to be more democratic, but withoutPhD in genetics, the demos just can’ t really participate in the conversation. Well,maybe not a PhD, but let’s discuss how much “ they” need to know.

The pollution problem: if you let politics past a certain point, it will interfere withthe knowledge-producing capacity of science. Let’s discuss where that point is.

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The scientist/citizen problem: in their role as scientists, these people answer todifferent standards than they do as citizens. Let’s talk about how big and deep thegap is.

This last dualism is the one Fuller is particularly concerned to undermine in hisattempt to explicate a republican theory of science/epistemology. One way to charac-terize these problems is that politics requires a kind of cooperation that science must,methodologically reject. We don’ t count things as facts if they arose from beingvoted on or negotiated. The libertarian insights that inform the Popperian test andrefutation system are characteristic of a marketplace orientation, where science is aspecially cordoned-off area of society where the right kind of conflict can flourish.So, the rhetorical conclusion would be that the typical rhetorical mode of science isjust too conflictual to be workable in politics the right conditions will never prevail.

I think we should be very wary about accepting this conclusion. It is too pat, andfollows too easily from an assumption based on a self-description by scientists. Whatif some kind of epistemically oriented rhetoric was not characteristic of science?What if we just decided, based on the kind of evidence that Fuller and many othershave amassed, that it is not characteristic, that it is maybe a stylistic tic as much asanything else? What else would fill this role? Let’s see what follows from imaginingthat the rhetoric involved in the twin processes of grantsmanship and tech transferlimn the basic structure of contemporary science. What is this rhetoric like, and whatare the challenges in bringing it to the Agora? To the ekklesia?

We can begin by asking questions about audience. The traditional rhetoric ofscience is a weird dodgey thing that mostly consists in denying that one is rhetoricalor even has an audience (even if you do end up trying to convince other scientists,nothing epistemic can be allowed to turn on it). In the rhetoric of grantsmanship, acertain amount of traditional science rhetoric turns up, since the audience is supposedto be other scientists. But they are not any old scientists; they are one’s peers, sincegrants are typically (at the US Federal level, NSF, NIH, etc) approved through apeer review process. This process has rather different implications than peer reviewfor journals. In approving something for publication, a journal reviewer assents toit being argued in a way consistent with advancing knowledge in that discipline.The grant reviewer is determining whether or not the research this person has notdone yet might yield results that could be counted as knowledge producing. Howdoes one argue that future research should be funded? There are two basic ways:track record (past grants have produced results), and coherence with disciplinarymethods and goals (projects “fi ts” ). Supplicants to granting agencies have to demon-strate that they have a record of accomplishment and results, and that their projectcoheres within an established research framework. This is not to deny that there areinnovative research programs; this happens all the time when someone with a trackrecord cuts to a new direction, or a new funding source appears. The rhetorical skillsrequired in any case are cooperative rather than competitive. Showing that you’ repart of the gang is what counts, not shooting others out of the sky. Here we seethe rhetorical truth in Fuller’s provocative comments about mafia characteristics ofresearch communities.

What impact does this have on the democratisation of science? Scientists, far from

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being too rhetorically conflictual for democratic practice, may be too cooperative.A good deal of recent history bears this out. From the cancellation of the Supercol-lider to the science wars, we see people in the science establishment who don’ trespond to challenges in a very articulate way; Steven Weinberg’s “Hey, you’ re notone of us!” mode is all too typical and easily deduced from the Our Gang networkwith whom it is normally (in the Kuhnian sense) talking and persuading. The Kansasdecisions on teaching creationism will no doubt provoke a good deal of responsefrom the scientific community, but many of the early forays have take the tone “youshould listen to us, because we’ re scientists,” which would sound blatantly self-serving and ineffective to anyone accustomed to the hurly-burly of public debate.

The question of science literacy might be turned around: instead of asking (only)that the public know more science, ask that scientists be more rhetorically sophisti-cated. As John Angus Campbell has quipped, when the angry physicists mutteredthat the senators who quashed the Supercollider must have done poorly in their highphysics courses, they overlooked the possibility that perhaps they might have donebetter in their high school debate courses. Because standards of admission to theScience Gang are so strict, it’s little wonder that a certain amount of insularity breedsrhetorical ineptitude. If science is to be more republican, we need to ask how wewill prepare the Ciceros of science for tomorrow.

My complaint, essentially, is that Fuller has been insufficiently attentive to theMadisonian critiques of democracy. Not that I object to the things Madison feared,as in the Federalist #10, not at all. Democracy, especially of the republican variety,is bound to be is supposed to be a weird, cranky sort of thing, always bootstrapped,with no ideological preconditions on who’s rational and who gets to speak. Theexperiments in the 1930s with public forums and participation showed pretty clearlythat while forums and access are a good thing, they require, most of all, tolerance.Does graduate or professional education in science prepare anybody for a world inwhich the Kansas creationist episode is standard fare? What would that educationbe like? Anybody who works in politics for practical goals, and thus takes othersseriously, must allow that what’s “ reasonable to believe” covers a very wide scopeindeed. As Latour points out, the narrowness of what’s reasonable in science is notarrived at by any given scientist, though some kind of conflictual elimination. 99%of science arrives pre-packaged, and scientists, being very smart people, train theirrhetorical skills on the common and cooperative, since that’s which side of the breadis buttered.

These issues are submerged in Fuller’s account, I think, because he proposes theuniversity as the site of governance. Yet this is the very place where people getsocialized into being part of the club. Even public universities, by their nature, cannotfully capture the variety of democracy.