the uses of sociology of science for scientists and educators

The Uses of Sociology of Science for Scientists

and Educators*

HARRY COLLINSCardiff University, Cardiff, Wales (E-mail: [email protected])

When I was preparing this talk I stumbled across another computer fileentitled ‘Leeds.’ Curious, I opened it (converting it from Wordstar!) andfound an account of the journey I made about 18 years ago, the last time Icame to a conference in Leeds. By the end of the talk I hope to find themoral.

1. How We Got to Leeds for the British Sociological Association Meeting

We missed the turn-off on the M62 and drove around Leeds until wefound a red and white striped barrier marked ‘University of Leeds.’ Nextto it was a plastic box with a uniformed man inside it.1

We drove to the barrier and asked the man where we could find theBritish Sociological Association Annual meeting and we showed him ourmap. In a Scots accent he opined that we did not know Leeds very well.‘Probably even less well than you,’ he quipped. He confessed that he didnot like maps very much, but after turning ours around for a bit he man-aged to orientate himself.‘Do a U-turn round this barrier, get back to the main road and turn

left,’ he told us. ‘Turn left after the second set of traffic lights, go downpast a building that looks like a prison, turn left again, and you’ll find an-other barrier like this. The man there will tell you where to park.’We did a U-turn, turned left on the main road, passed one set of lights,

then a second set. We executed a left turn, passed a building on our leftresembling a prison, turned left again and came upon a red and whitebarrier beside a plastic box occupied by a uniformed person. We showedhim our map and asked for the BSA Annual conference.He told us that we had turned left one street too soon and that we

should be one more block over, just behind the row of houses that cur-rently faced us. He told us to do a U-turn, go back up the road to theroad we had come from, turn left, turn left again, and we would be able topark after the next manned barrier and make our way to registration.

Science & Education (2007) 16:217–230 � Springer 2006DOI 10.1007/s11191-005-2389-6

We executed a U-turn, turned left at the main road and turned leftagain. After another unanticipated left turn we found another red andwhite barrier with a uniformed man sitting in a box beside it.‘British Sociological Association annual conference on studies of science

and technology,’ we inquired, showing him our map. ‘Just down the end ofthe road,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘Where can we leave our car?’ weasked. ‘You can park your car in there,’ he said, indicating a car park justbehind us.Another three-point turn and we managed to drive into the car park and

find a space. We took our belongings, turned left, and strode the two hun-dred yards to the end of the road as indicated. There we came uponanother uniformed man sitting in a plastic box beside a red and whitestriped barrier. He slid open his enquiry window and we showed him ourmap and asked the way to the BSA annual conference.‘Go through there’ he said, pointing across the street to a nondescript

set of double doors. Go up the flight of stairs facing you and you’ll findthem in there.’Lugging our stuff, we crossed the street, went through the doors and up

a flight of steps. Someone walked toward us and we asked for the ‘SouthFoyer.’ He looked a bit puzzled so we showed him our map. He examinedit.‘It’s six miles away,’ he told us. And indeed it was!

2. The Evolution and Current State of Social Studies of Science

The sociological study of science underwent a transformation in the 1970s.Before then the subject was dominated by the Mertonian approach, whichwe can describe as being the study of the social norms and political condi-tions under which the search for objective knowledge can proceed freelyand efficiently. The sociology of science is a branch of the sociology ofknowledge and it itself can be thought about in a sociological way. Ibelieve the Mertonian-style sociology of science was a creature of the mid-dle years of the Twentieth Century: it was a response to fascism and thehorrors it had wrought.2

The 1970s revolution in the sociological study of science was itself acreature of its time. It was part of the collective sigh of relief in theWest that we call ‘The Sixties.’ Fascism in Western Europe had beendefeated, countries were recovering from the economic body blow ofthe Second World War, and a heady rebellion against austerity andauthority provided a context for a new look at science. The iconic bookwas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, though it provided sur-prisingly little of the intellectual meat of the revolution, rather opening

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the academic space for new ways of thinking about scientific knowledge.As is well known, the new ways involved turning attention away fromthe conditions necessary for science to work and toward the wayscientists make knowledge in their day-to-day lives.The first strand of the new approach was the sociology of scientific

knowledge (SSK). I think it was the most important branch when it comesto opening the path to the inner heart of scientific practice and revealingwhat lay beneath the crystal carapace that conventional philosophers ofscience, the earlier generation of sociologists, and scientists themselves, hadbuilt to safeguard science’s path through the economic and political envi-ronment. The new approach became known for a short time as ‘internal-ism;’ it looked at the inner workings of science, an approach to becontrasted with ‘externalism,’ which examined the cracks in the carapacethrough which the environment could leak and cause contamination. Soon,however, the internalist/externalist dichotomy was laughed into obscurityby the revolutionaries: the inside was so squishy and the shell so imaginarythat the distinction between the outside and the inside was an illusion,itself a piece of the binding that held the imaginary armour together.The sociology of scientific knowledge is the branch of the revolution

in social studies of science in which I did and still do my work. Itwas soon to be swept up in the much larger movement known as post-modernism. I said that I thought SSK was the most important ap-proach to opening up the inner heart of science. This is because SSKdeveloped methodologies for examining scientists at the bench and itsapproach was informed by the question previously asked and answeredby philosophers of science. The larger post-modernist approach took itslead from semiotics and literary theory. Its subject matter was the wayscientists represent their work. There is no natural path from there tothe laboratory bench so while the semiotic or literary approach couldhave done its work in the absence of SSK it would always have been‘floating’ as one might say – just another academic fashion or conceitwithout any grounding in a critique of experimental practice.3 I believethat experimentalists would have shrugged it off–‘Criticise all you like,what you fail to understand is that experiment, especially experimentalreplication, is a direct line to the universal, a direct line to which youpeople from the other culture have no access; when you listen to theheavens you hear a Babel of voices, when we listen we hear one voice.’SSK made this claim untenable; it showed that experiment was itself aBabel.4

If I may allow myself an aside, when I turn off the critical appreciationthat comes with being a sociologist of knowledge, it seems strange to methat SSK, the essential foundation of the new 1970s understanding of

THE USES OF SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE FOR SCIENTISTS AND EDUCATORS 219

science is now such a very small branch of the post-modernist approach toscience – very few people still practice SSK while great numbers are associ-ated with the semiotic and literary approach. When I turn my sociologist’sof knowledge understanding back on, however, I find myself less surprised:the semiotic and literary approach demands little more in the way of inves-tigative practice than is learned in undergraduates classrooms in thehumanities and social science. In the case of the humanities, and for nearlyall the time in the social sciences, the quintessential undergraduate skillshave to do with the analysis of the written word; it is hardly surprising,then, that the majority of university careers in these subjects are forgedfrom the same stuff. Part of the genius of, say, Bruno Latour and MichelCallon’s programme, with it’s notions of ‘interessement’ and ‘enrolement,’5

is a good instinct about what is out there among our colleagues to beenrolled.I am going to speak here as a practitioner of SSK. Richard Feynman is

said to have said that scientists need philosophy of science (we can includeSSK), like birds need ornithology. The early SSKers were pleased to agreewith him; we were not doing science policy (like those grubby-handedpeople from SPRU, for example), we were doing philosophy of science ina new way. That what we had to say had no use to scientists was of noconcern to us. Our project was justified by a corrolary of Feynman’sremark (though no one put it this way at the time): if you want to knowabout ornithology, don’t ask birds. We were the ornithologists whose jobwas to understand the nature of birds much better than birds could everunderstand it. Worse, just as birds might fall out of the sky if they startedto worry about how their wings worked, so might scientists lose theirtouch if they took their attention from their true role in life and started toworry about how impossible it was live up to their own job description.6

Speaking personally, however, I have changed my mind. I now believethere is something in SSK that scientists can use. Let me honour the com-mitment in the first part of my title by describing some uses of SSK forscientists. I will start with the easy cases where scientists are acting assomething other than researchers, and finish with the harder case ofscientists at the laboratory bench.7

3. SSK for Scientists

3.1. SCIENTISTS AS CITIZENS

Science itself can be quite usefully taught through mythological histories inwhich the all the work happens in an instant as a result of flash of bril-liance. For example, the standard account of the Michelson–Morley exper-iment is fine for teaching the principles of relativity: In 1887 Michelson

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was puzzled when he failed to detect any effect on the measured speed oflight of the movement of the earth through the aether but this anomalywas dramatically turned into a triumph for science in the first decade ofthe twentieth century with Einstein’s special theory in which the speed oflight is a constant. As many will know, however, it did not simply happenin 1887. It took about 40 years to settle the matter of experimental verifi-cation of the constancy of the velocity of light with the American Associa-tion for the Advancement of Science giving its physics prize to Miller in1925 for his finding the effect that was absent in the 1887 experiment(albeit a smaller effect than would have been expected). The citizen will bedisillusioned if scientists represent science as effortless and decisive, as inthe first account, because science is not like this and the evidence is moreand more obvious in the way scientists disagree or fail in public. There-fore, ‘just so stories,’ fine though they are for the science textbook, shouldnot be made the model of science for the citizen. The point is made withmany case studies, including Michelson–Morley, in The Golem: What youshould know about science – see especially the second edition.

3.2. SCIENTISTS AS EDUCATORS

Here all there is to say is that if scientists introduced their students to theidea that research science was a messy, time-consuming, irritating, businesswith a tendency for data to be recalcitrant and results indecisive, PhD stu-dents might be less disillusioned with their first encounter with the labora-tory bench.

3.3. SCIENTISTS AS SCIENTISTS

The use of SSK for scientists as scientists is much harder to justify. Herelet me offer what might be an example from my case study of the detec-tion of gravitational waves, Gravity’s Shadow (see http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/gravwave). I like to believe that the distinction I make between evidentialcollectivism and evidential individualism (discussed in chapter 22 of thatbook), might help one or two scientists, as Wittgenstein might have put it,‘to get the fly out of the fly bottle.’8 In the field of gravitational wavedetection there has been a bitter difference of opinion about the twoapproaches to the presentation of data. When analysed sociologically,however, the difference looks less stark – less like a matter of good andevil scientific practices and more like a choice about the appropriate locusfor peer review. American scientists have been most vocal in condemningevidential collectivism, believing that no laboratory should promulgateresults until it is completely sure they are right. As big American detectorscome on line for the first time, however, there is likely to be some messydata. The American groups may feel they want to reveal these potential


but uncertain data to a wider audience – to act as evidential collectivistsrather than evidential individualists. If evidential collectivism is seen as asin then the way out of the fly bottle into which the American communityhas deliberately flown may be hard to find; if it is thought of as a choiceabout peer review, it will be easier to find the exit. Perhaps SSK couldhave a role here.

4. SSK for Science Educators

4.1. TEACHING SCIENCE AS VALUES

Once more let us divide the problem up, starting with science as it used tobe thought about before the revolution in our understanding that began inthe 1970s.9 The tension between what is valuable about science as tradi-tionally taught, and what is true about it, strike me as even more forcefulthan they did when I wrote about them in commenting on the ‘Beyond2000: Science Education for the Future’ project. Perhaps the most valuablefeature of science to the school pupil is its mythology. But, as is wellunderstood, and has already been discussed at this meeting, the sociologyof scientific knowledge demythologises. I see no solution but to compart-mentalise. If I ruled the world I would still like to have science taught as Iwas taught it at school; it would be a science of lone heroes with thebrilliance to touch the universal and defeat any earthly leviathan. As aparent there was one crucial thing I wanted to teach my children as theygrew up; how to be your own person and resist peer pressure. The mythol-ogy of science teaches it. As we know, the contradiction is that the mythol-ogy is not what has to be achieved to teach science itself, which is verylargely acceptance of received wisdom and the development of a set ofskills that are best not thought about but simply accomplished, as whenbirds learn to fly. Fortunately, science educators have learned the trick ofdisguising received wisdom as self-directed discovery. This is a brilliantdeception and I don’t think it should be abandoned too quickly.If one wanted to be more philosophical about the compartmentalisation

one would stress the difference between the is and the ought. In a papercalled ‘The Third Wave of Science Studies,’ and published in 2002 inSocial Studies of Science, Robert Evans and I began to develop this themeand make ourselves a number of enemies. Once one sees it, it is strikinghow easily many who would count themselves part of the movementknown as post-modernism have slipped from is to ought. The parade ofepistemological failures in the Twentieth Century, from logical positivismto falsificationism, followed by the detailed descriptions of scientificpractice developed since the 1970s, have been taken as a licence to forgetscientific values.

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One might say that the Mertonian programme itself gave rise to theproblem. The trouble was it was too pusillanimous; the Mertonians wantedto justify the values of democracy and they chose science as their model ofsociety. Now the is of science has been shown not to be able to supportthe burden they placed upon it and the result has been a reaction. Thosewho find the is wanting believe it shows the ought is wanting too. But theconclusion does not follow.This seems to me to be blindingly obvious but since many of my

colleagues do not find it so, it may be worth spelling out once more withan analogy. Suppose we were talking about justice instead of science. TheJustice-Mertonians would try to model society on the workings of thecourts. Assiduous examination of the workings of the courts would show,however, that there was a strong bias in favour of the rich and powerful.The Justice-Mertonian programme would collapse and the Justice-post-modernists would conclude that all there was to justice was wealth andpower and act accordingly. It seems to me clear that this is wrong; what-ever the is of the matter as far as the courts are concerned, the right oughtremains to try to act as though wealth and power are of no account.And that is it! That is what the SSKers were getting at when they said

that nothing about how scientists should act followed from SSK; that iswhy the conclusions I have drawn in the last section have been so thin andweak – the best SSK can do is provide a bit of help in getting the fly outof the fly bottle. When it comes to doing science the only way to act is asa scientist, not because it is the most efficient but because, to grasp thenettle, it is the right way to act. I said the Mertonians were too pusillani-mous: that is because they did not grasp that nettle – the ought is differentto the is.10

4.2. TEACHING SCIENCE FOR THE PROFESSIONAL SCIENTIST

The problem for teaching professional scientists is the same as that facedby scientists as educators. The unmasking of the mythology that encapsu-lates the values that every sensible parent wants to instill in their childrencan cause disillusion, sometimes even moral outrage, when the novice firstencounters the world of professional science as it is. How is this circle tobe squared? Thank heaven it is you who are the educators, not me!

4.3. TEACHING SCIENCE FOR CITIZENS

When it comes to teaching science for the citizen things are still moreconfounded. The modern citizen distrusts science and in many respects isright to distrust it. Science has been oversold. The right model for the


physics laboratory bench simply does not work when science is taken intomore complex domains than were dealt with by Newton and Einstein.Most of the science seen by most of the citizens is beset by too much inde-terminacy.11 The model of science that provides the right moral guidance –the discovery of the laws of the movement of the planets – fails when it isfaced, either with science in the making – where the speed of politics is fas-ter than the speed of scientific consensus formation – or with still morerecalcitrant problems such as long term weather forecasting, forecastingthe economy, understanding global warming, providing the levels of reli-ability that the public has been misled into expecting for human expedi-tions into space, understanding the long term consequences of nuclearpower, and even understanding the path of this sheet of paper as it fallsfrom my hand.12 The problem that faces the citizen is how to deal withstill-forming science and science which resists capture by a limited set ofdeterministic laws.13

Once more, many of my colleagues have taken what I consider to be awrong turning. They have developed what Evans and I call the ‘folk wisdom’view; the view that there is now no boundary between technological judge-ment and political judgement. This strange idea seems to have arisen out ofan over-interpretation of what are otherwise rather good case studies, theiconic example being Brian Wynne’s account of what happened in theCumbrian fells after Chernobyl. Wynne found that the Ministry scientistsfailed to learn what could have been useful lessons about the ecology ofsheep from the Cumbrian farmers; had they taken notice of the farmers theproblems of radioactive fallout on the grasslands and its effect on livestockcould have been dealt with more efficiently. Wynne called the farmers’understanding ‘lay expertise.’ This was a poor choice because before long itwas being taken to mean that all lay persons had stores of technologicalexpertise and understanding often in excess of that of clever but not verywise scientists and technologists. For example, in a report issuing fromWynne’s Lancaster University department it was said that the public at largewere wiser than scientists in the matter of genetically modified foods.14

Setting aside the historical precedents brought to mind by the folkwisdom view – the Cultural Revolution in China or the Nazi era with itslegally instituted ‘‘offence against the natural healthy instincts of the peo-ple,’’ there is simply no evidence for the folk wisdom view.15 On the con-trary, most of the time those who uphold it are at the same time criticisingthe folk for their lust for capital punishment or, in America, their love ofguns and SUVs. The job that faces the citizen is to find a way through thisconundrum: scientists and technologists are fallible yet we must not fallinto the trap of thinking that this should turn technological judgement intopopulism.

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The answer, I believe, is the detailed analysis of the notion of expertiseas something real rather than something attributed. With some hubris,

Evans and I have drawn up a ‘Periodic Table of Expertises’ in an attemptto give an example of how this could be done. Here it is:In due course, so long as the referees do not find the ms. completely

unacceptable, an analysis of this table (and much more along the lines ofthis paper), will be found in a book entitled Expertise: The Sociology, thePhilosophy and the Public Role. In the meantime the two draft chaptersexplaining the table can be found and downloaded at http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/expertise. Other items that bear on the topic can be found at thesame website. We claim in the book that the ordinary citizen facedwith technological choice is generally limited to the exercise of the meta-expertise of ubiquitous discrimination.With the periodic table in hand and with the help of a cartoon, we can

set out the most general point that citizens need to understand abouttechnological choices in the public domain.The top half of the cartoon shows two scientists from a field character-

ised by disagreement; they believe they can prove ‘p’ and ‘not-p’respectively. We know that the disagreeing scientists are, as it were, contin-ually ‘soaked’ by a rainstorm of politics and other mundane influences.The bottom part of the cartoon sets out four possible conclusions that

can be drawn by a citizen who has no expertise in the technical debatewhich is the subject of disagreement but whose life is nevertheless affectedby the choice of p or not-p.16

Citizen ‘A’ concludes that given the radical disagreement betweenscientists 1 and 2, his or her guess about the truth of p is as likely to be

Interactive Ability Reflective Ability

Beer-mat Knowledge

Popular Understanding

Primary SourceKnowledge

Interactional Expertise

Contributory Expertise

Ubiquitous Discrimination

Local Discrimination

Technical Connoisseurship

DownwardDiscrimination

Referred Expertise

Credentials Experience Track-Record

PERIODIC TABLE OF EXPERTISES

UBIQUITOUS EXPERTISES

DISPOSITIONS

SPECIALIST

EXPERTISES

META-

EXPERTISES

META-CRITERIA

UBIQUITOUS TACIT KNOWLEDGE SPECIALIST TACIT KNOWLEDGE

EXTERNAL INTERNAL


right as the scientists’ estimate; give and take some niceties, we think thismight well be a correct view. To take an easily understood example, thiscitizen might think that his or her estimate of the rate of inflation nextyear might be as good as any economists’ estimate of the rate of inflationand it probably would be.17

Citizen ‘B’ concludes, incorrectly in our view, that in consequence ofwhat has just been argued, he or she is entitled to make a full contributionto the debate about, say, next year’s rate of inflation (e.g., it should be

Four citizen cartoon

I CAN PROVE `NOT-P’

I CAN PROVE

`P’

So my politics should determine

P or not-P!

So I’m as likely to e rib ght about P as

them!

So I should contribute to the decision about P!

I don’t know much about P but I know

what I like!

E E

CONTEXT OF POLITICS AND OTHER MUNDANE INFLUENCES

B C DA

FOUR POSSIBLE REACTIONS OF NON-EXPERTS TO AN EXPERT DISAGREEMENT

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predicted by holding a referendum). In other words, because the expertscannot reach agreement about the prediction using their expertise, Citizen‘B’ should have a contribution equal to the experts in the reaching atechnical conclusion. We do not agree with this because it makes no sensefor those with no technical expertise to contribute to a technical judgment.This is a strange argument: to support it we need to argue for the

preservation of the institution of the expert because that institution – thatidea – underpins our whole society. To continue with the same example,though we know the economists are laughably hopeless at making soundpredictions about the inflation rate we also know that they have studied allthe potential mechanisms and theories more assiduously than anyone elseand so if we want to preserve the institution of expert we should still privi-lege experts’ advice and it should play a larger part in the technical deci-sion than that played by the average citizen. The technical advice may notplay a large part in the political decision that flows from the technicalconclusion but that is another matter.18

A justification for this nurturing of impotent experts can be found inNelson Goodman’s book Languages of Art. Goodman asks why it isimportant to maintain the distinction between genuine works of art andfakes when even the most distinguished critics cannot tell which is which(except by forensic means, such as tracing the history or analysing thepaint, canvas, etc). Goodman argues that the appreciation of art is a devel-oping skill and that even if the art critic cannot tell the difference today,the skill of reading paintings might one day develop to the point where itwill become clear to the practiced viewer. This can be guaranteed never tohappen unless the institutional difference between the fake and the real ispreserved along with that of the idea of the art connoisseur. In the sameway, we can argue for the preservation of the institution of expert econo-mists even if current economic prediction is a joke – one day it may bepossible to make more accurate predictions. And even if this will never bethe case for economics, it may be the case for other related expertises;hence, do not give up expert institutions lightly even if they are cur-rently of little use. This means not rushing to hand over technical decision-making rights to the citizen even where experts are failing. Or to put it yetanother way, a better decision is not always a more accurate decision: abetter decision can be better because it acknowledges and bolsters a featureof our way life which we consider valuable. These are the reasons wedisagree with Citizen ‘B’ in the cartoon.19

Citizen ‘C’ believes that, given that the p/not-p decision is invested withpolitics, then it should be political preferences that determine whether thescientific truth is p or not-p. Many post-modernist analysts of science andtechnology are Citizen ‘C’s. This view confounds the politics which are


intrinsic to all science and technology with an endorsement of a politicalinput, analogous to the endorsement of the role of wealth and power inthe justice system. We should always strive to minimise the politicalinfluence in science and technology; Citizen ‘C’ is wrong.The fourth view expresses the idea that irrespective of the truth of p,

politics (‘what I like’), should always play a part in decisions that turn onthe truth of p. This is a correct view; decisions about the consequences ofp or not-p are not the same as decisions about p or not-p.To sum up the cartoon, the nature of ‘p’ should be left to experts (of the

appropriate level), and this means that Citizens ‘B’ and ‘C’ are wrong. Thisshould be the case even when Citizen ‘A’ is right. But even when theexistence or non-existence of ‘p’ is known with near certainty, Citizen ‘D’still has a right to say what follows from the truth of ‘p’ or ‘not-p’ throughthe normal democratic processes.This distinction, between political rights and rights accruing from exper-

tise is what the citizen needs to understand to navigate an uncertaintechnological world. Unfortunately this distinction is becoming ever moreconfounded in modern science studies.

4.4. THE DILEMMA IN A NUTSHELL

In a nutshell, this is the dilemma for science educators. The most valuablething about science in a secular age is not what if finds out, and not howscientists comport themselves, but how they purport to comport them-selves; this is our most important source of values. When it comes to ourtechnological dilemmas, however, the most valuable thing about scientistsis their experience and our respect for experience. And the value of thatexperience overlaps only partially with the old mythology; experience isworthless without care and integrity but it has nothing to do with lonelyheroes touching the universal. It has to do with wisdom born of socialisa-tion. It is not about being right but about the right way to fail to be right.

5. Moral: Two Destinations in Leeds

Finally, let me return to my 1987 journey to Leeds. The moral is that thereis more than one journey and more than one end point. However cumula-tive and coherent a set of directions, it is no good if it does not lead youto where you currently want to go. Describing how science is needs one setof directions – those associated with what Collins and Evans describe asWave Two of science studies. Thinking about what you ought to do next,given technological uncertainty, needs a different set of instructions, themost important element of which has to do with the analysis of expertiseand experience as something real; this is what we call the Third Wave of

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science studies. Neither set of instructions is wrong, neither supercedes theother, they just take you to different destinations.

6. Relevant URLs

http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/gravwavehttp://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/expertise

Notes

* This is the text of the Springer Distinguished Lecture given at the 8th International History,

Philosophy and Science Teaching Conference, Leeds, July 15–18, 2005.1 This is a lightly edited version of an account probably first written in 19872 I am pretty sure that if I had been doing my work in the aftermath of WWII I would have been a

Mertonian. No it’s stronger that this: even knowing what I know now, if I were transported back to

1945, I would become a Mertonian.3 Bear in mind that in Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life it is declared with pride that the princi-

pal investigator did not understand the science in which he was immersed at the Salk Institute: he was

watching the way representations were constructed.4 For a discussion of replication of experiments see Collins 1985/1992.5 e.g., Callon 1986.6 This view is set out forthrightly in, for example, Collins 1982, where it is opined that both scientists

and social scientists should proceed within their own ‘natural attitudes,’ natural science and social

science respectively.7 The following sections of this text are incomplete without the additional reading which was discussed

informally during the lecture and which is referred to here.8 In the talk, as in the book chapter, the point was made in analogy with the different driving habits of

Italian and British car drivers: in Italy one may drive eccentrically and the collective of drivers will take

responsibility for making sure there is no accident; in Britain, any departure from the rules is greeted

with ‘road rage.’9 I am grateful to Jonathan Osborne for comments which have led to improvements in the argument

since it was presented to the meeting.10 to repeat, in 1945, when faith in the power of moral codes had been so shaken, I too would have

reached for any way of trying to rebuild it.11 Not to mention dishonesty and vested interests, but these pose no really difficult problems of

epistemology so I won’t discuss them.12 Drop a sheet of paper to the floor and note its chaotic motion.13 In a book in progress (forthcoming 2006), we make a distinction between ‘Golem sciences’ (which

are sciences in the making which make up the bulk of examples in the Golem series of books,

‘historical sciences,’ which deal with unique trends and are subject to the critiques of Popper, and

‘reflexive historical sciences,’ which turn, additionally, on the solution to the problem of predicting

collective human behaviour (e.g., global warming).14 ‘... many of the public, far from requiring a better understanding of science, are well informed about

scientific advance and new technologies and highly sophisticated in their thinking on the issues. Many

‘ordinary’ people demonstrate a thorough grasp of issues such as uncertainty: if anything, the public

are ahead of many scientists and policy advisors in their instinctive feeling for a need to act in a pre-

cautionary way.’ (‘The Politics of GM Food: Risk, science and public trust.’ Swindon: Economic and


Social Research Council [ESRC Special Briefing No 5, October 1999] quoted at page 4.)15 See Bielenberg, 1968, p. 87, for the quotation from Nazi era law.16 There are other kinds of citizen who, through assiduous study, have acquired one of the higher levels

of understanding found in the periodic table. They may have been helped to gain this kind of under-

standing through conscientious teaching of the perils of statistics, of the uncertain nature of science in

the making, and so forth. The cartoon represents the choices of a citizen who has not made the effort

to gain a higher level of understanding in the specialist domain of this particular p and not-p.17 See Evans 1999 for a discussion of the uncertainties of macroeconic forecasting.18 In general, the more unclear the technical conclusion the larger will be the relative contribution of

politics to the political decision, but even when the technological conclusion is unambiguous there will

still be a political component to what it is decided to do about it.19 It is important to make clear that this resurrection of a notion of expertise is not a return to what

Evans and I (2002) call ‘Wave One of science studies.’ We now know far too much to return to experts

the power and authority they held in the post-war years. We also understand the abuses of expertise.

References

Bielenberg, C.: 1968, The Past is Myself, Chatto and Windus, London.Callon, M.: 1986, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the

Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,’ in J. Law Routledge & K. Paul (eds), Power,

Action and Belief: a New Sociology of Knowledge?, London, pp 196–233.Collins, H.M.: 2004, Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves, University of

Chicago Press, Chicago.Collins, H.M.: 2000, �On ‘‘Beyond 2000’’�, Studies in Science Education 35, 169–173.

Collins, H.M.: 1982, �Special Relativism: The Natural Attitude�, Social Studies of Science 12,139–43.

Collins, H.M.: 1985, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, Sage,

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the uses of sociology of science for scientists and educators

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