Reincarnating the Knowing Subject: Scientific Rationality and the Situated Body

The new anthropology, history, and sociology of science tend to describe science in terms of action, cultural practice, social construction, or, better still, as an entanglement of multiple actions, practices, and socio-technical realities. In doing so they have eliminated the presuppositions of an implicitly or explicitly recognized epistemology of rationality (and/or a diffusionist model of science) that takes for granted the dichotomy between knowing subject and known object. In short, by offering a new definition of rationality, these studies make it possible to reflect anew upon the nature of the knowing subject. To understand how such a question becomes relevant again, my aim in this essay is to describe the deconstruction of scientific knowledge and simultaneously to suggest ways that we might fruitfully return to—and reassess—our analysis of the knowing subject. Thus, we shall see the omnipotent and bodiless knowing subject of the rationalist tradition brought into the light of day, at the same time that he or she loses his or her monopoly of action. This is the paradox that I wish to explore. Drawing on an empirical study of the practices of an inventor, I shall try to paint a new picture of the subject: a subjectivity not at the origin of the constitution of an object, but emerging from a collective consisting of heterogeneous elements—that is, a subjectivity that is both distributed and situated in a singular body. Can we talk about incarnation at the heart of science?

The Criteria of Scientificity Called into Question

For the past thirty years or so, one of the pillars of our modernity—the Truth of Science—has come under attack. By investigating laboratory science and following controversies, anthropology, history, and sociology of science have turned away from science as a mirror of nature to study science in action, which is to say, science in the process of being made.¹ We have, moreover, come to see what François Jacob poetically calls "the science of night" characteristic of the context of discovery (a science that "hesitates, stumbles, back tracks, perspires, awakes with a start, doubting everything, . . . which searches for itself, questions itself, constantly corrects itself, . . . a sort of workshop of the possible") spread to the famous context of justification.² Contingency has been reintroduced into the production and stabilization of scientific knowledge. Our criteria of truth—including the reproduction of experiments, the interpretation of results, the evaluation criteria of proof—now seem matters of negotiation.³ Science is politics by other means. In short, contrary to rationalist assertions, there is no natural logic of proof, no single, stable, and timeless criterion by which agreement can be reached on the validity and relevance of a statement. Rather, the social is at the core of the interpretation and construction of facts, and the "rational" is inescapably a function of social and historical context.⁴

The question that sociologists and historians now ask themselves is no longer "How can or could an individual invent a theory that is more rational than others?" but instead "Why is the knowledge constructed at one particular moment more effective than another?"⁵ Owing to Bloor's principle of symmetry—which obliges us to treat victor and vanquished, failure and success, in the same way—accounts of the construction of knowledge appear less linear, less obvious, and less predictable.⁶ We suffer along with the different protagonists and, along with them, try to understand the reasons for their choices. History of science becomes part of history itself.⁷

By tackling the notions of realism and representation, the constructivists and social historians of science attempt to anchor science in the laboratory, the instruments, the local know-how, the institutions, and the ensemble of determinants, which, by the weight of their associations, make it possible to escape the myth of scientific genius: "he won because he was the most rational or because he had immediate access to nature." By refusing to take a stand on truth, these studies make possible a multiplicity of interpretations of the real, yet, in so doing, they deprive Nature...