Science and the Quest for Meaning

Notes

187 $ Notes Introduction 1 Epistemic values “promote the truth-like character of science” (McMullin 1983, 18) and are crucial for assessment. These values include predictive accuracy, internal coherence, external consistency, unifying power, fertility, and simplicity. Collectively, epistemic values are the means by which scientists assess the “fitness” of their theories to the natural world. Note that while such values have proven pragmatic worth, they also slide on an aesthetic continuum, where “simple” and “parsimonious,” for instance, may carry different weights at different stages of a theory’s development. An excellent example is offered in modeling complex ecological systems (Mikkelson 2001): when data are limited, simple models carry more verisimilitude, that is, predictive success, but when more data become available, the advantage of simplicity decreases, and more complex models dominate. (In ecology, holistic models are usually simpler than reductionist ones, thus when data are limited, holistic models have an advantage over models based on more reductionist methodologies.) Nonepistemic values are those default values employed when epistemic criteria fail; more formally, they appear to close the empirical “gap between underdetermined theory and the evidence brought in its support” (McMullin 1983, 19). Although such values do not enhance a theory’s epistemic status, they do reflect cultural, political, and religious beliefs, which combine to support or weaken truth claims. Successful theories witness a shift of support from nonepistemic to epistemic values (for an example, see Ruse 1999,143ff.), while other weaker theories may linger because of the power of the supporting cultural values. Appreciating how values evolved and were variously applied seemed obvious when considered in the nonepistemic sphere (cultural meanings, personal proclivities, political ideologies, and so forth). But similar dynamics of change and application were not widely accepted 188 Notes to p. 7 as governing the values operating in the laboratory. Science studies in the past forty years radically altered that basic formulation. Underlying the epistemic/nonepistemic dyad is another controversy concerning the character of epistemic values themselves. In the realism/antirealism debate (see chap. 3. n. 11), epistemic values assume different roles and meanings (e.g., Cushing, Delaney, and Gutting 1984; Leplin 1984; Moser 1990; Boyd, Gasper, and Trout 1991; Boyd 2002), and from those differing meanings the battle lines were drawn over “constructivism,” more specifically, “social constructivism.” 2 Perhaps the key urtext of science studies is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (1985). This seminal work attempts to dispel what the social constructivists maintain is a false division between epistemology and sociology. The authors argue that beyond showing how the social context affected the scientific debate between Boyle and Hobbes in seventeenth century England, what was really at stake was the very invention of a science, its social context, and the demarcation between the two. Bruno Latour lauds the book as “the real beginning of a comparative anthropology that takes science seriously” (1993, 15). For an excellent review of the relation of science, values, and ideology in the contemporary context, see Helen Longino’s “Science and Ideology” (chapter 9 of Science as Social Knowledge, 1990), which is based on the work of Habermas, Michel Foucault, and the feminists Evelyn Fox Keller and Donna Haraway. Opponents argue that such meta-analyses, in general, cannot achieve objective priority. They call into question whether a neutral constructivist project is even possible at all. Other criticism appears to be leveled against particular ideological agendas. Thus controversy concerning the degree to which science may be criticized from a feminist or Marxist perspective revolves around the explicit or implicit charges concerning the prejudice (i.e., male-dominated or capitalist-driven science) that might heavily determine, if not direct, the conceptualization project of objective science itself. In my study, I refer repeatedly to “science studies,” which must be distinguished from “science and technology studies” (STS). Science studies refer to the broad inter-disciplinary examination of science, although some would place it more specifically as a branch of the sociology of knowledge. The character of study depends on the disciplinary commitments of the commentator, so for me the most interesting (and challenging) aspects of the examination of science gives primacy to philosophical insight as it impacts on interpretations of the history and the sociology of science. Note, the prominence of the philosophical orientation does not deny that philosophers are heavily influenced by sociological portrayals of how scientists actually function. Accordingly, each approach (philosophical, historical, and sociological ) contributes to the others. While I regard science studies serving as...