The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future

V. Objectivity, Method, and Nature: Value Neutral?

PART FIVE Objectivity, Method, and Nature: Value Neutral? Nature is part of history and culture, not the other way around. Sociologists and historians of science tend to know that. Most scientists do not. Because I was trained as a scientist, it has taken me many years to understand that "in science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature." Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women's Biology [S]cientists who retreat behind the screen of pure science are passively abandoning their social responsibility; those who choose to become actively involved risk being seen as no longer "objective." Here the notion of "objectivity" becomes merely a code word for the political passivity of those scientists who have tacitly agreed to accept a privileged social position and freedom of inquiry within the laboratory in return for their silence in not questioning the social uses of science or the power relations that determine its direction. Elizabeth Fee, "Women's Nature and Scientific Objectivity," in Woman's Nature: Rationalizations of Inequality We now have a much clearer idea of what it is to follow scientists and engineers in action. We know that they do not extend "everywhere" as if there existed a Great Divide between the universal knowledge of the Westerners and the local knowledge of everyone else, but instead that they travel inside narrow and fragile networks, resembling the galleries termites build to link their nests to their feeding sites. Inside these networks, they make traces of all sorts circulate better by increasing their mobility , their speed, their reliability, their ability to combine with one another. We also know that these networks are not built with homogeneous material but, on the contrary, necessitate the weaving together of a multitude of different elements which renders the question of whether they are "scientific" or "technical " or "economic" or "political" or "managerial" meaningless . Finally, we know that the results of building, extending and keeping up these networks is to act at a distance, that is to do things in the centres that sometimes make it possible to dominate spatially as well as chronologically the periphery. Bruno Latour, Science in Action 338 / Objectivity, Method, and Nature: Value Neutral? By now, it is widely held that objectivity, method, and, indeed, nature-as-anobject -of-knowledge cannot possibly be value free. Scientific method was supposed to ensure the elimination of social values from the results of scientific research. In the selection presented here, the National Academy of Sciences adopts the enlarged understanding of scientific method for which so many science observers have argued. It states that scientific method itself inevitably will be shaped by social values, since scientific "methods include the judgments scientists make about the interpretation or reliability of data, . . . the decisions scientists make about which problems to pursue or when to conclude an investigation , ... the ways scientists work with each other and exchange information ." As so many essays in this book have argued, it is no longer reasonable to regard scientific method as value neutral. Moreover, although science training has historically avoided exposing young scientists to anything but the most minimal history, 'philosophy and sociology of science, the academy here recommends such studies, arguing that such accounts provide important resources for scientists in learning to identify their own and their culture's values. The academy's statement reflects its concern to preserve scientific "property" in the face of scientific scandals that threaten to deteriorate its value. It wants to preserve the economic, political, and social value of the information produced by the sciences and their authority to produce these accounts. Obviously, many historians, philosophers , and sociologists of science do not share these goals or values. The other selections in this section, like many others in this collection, provide important examples of the kind of social studies of the sciences called for by the National Academy of Sciences. Robert Proctor points out that Nazi science and "medicine" were perfectly consistent with highly regarded scientific tendencies in the United States and elsewhere at the time, including not only eugenics but also an increasing authoritarianism in scientific and medical practices. Moreover , he argues that while Nazis obviously politicized science in one sense, in another sense the problem was that they depoliticized it "by destroying the possibility of political debate and controversy. Authoritarian science based on the 'Fuhrer principle' replaced what had been, in the Weimar period, a vigorous...