Dropping the Brand of Edinburgh School: An Interview with Barry Barnes

Dropping the Brand of Edinburgh School: An Interview with Barry Barnes Ruey-Chyi Hwang & Zheng-Feng Li & Chih-Tung Huang & Rong-Xuan Chu & Xiang Fan Received: 1 September 2010 /Accepted: 1 September 2010 /Published online: 3 December 2010 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2010 1 Introduction Professor Barry Barnes is not only a world's leading sociologist, but also a major founder in developing the discipline of Science, Technology and Society (STS). His career started in the 1970s at the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh. Before moving to the University of Exeter in 1992, he had become the East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2010) 4:601–617 DOI 10.1007/s12280-010-9156-8 This interview has been translated into Chinese and will soon be published in Taiwanese Journal for Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine, Number 11 (2010):339–374. Professor Barry Barnes is a major contributor to the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. He is well known for his ground-breaking study on collective action, self-referring knowledge, and systems of power. His enormous influence helps transform the discipline of Science, Technology and Society (STS). This interview started from his naturalistic commitment, insisting that science should be studied in the same way as any other human activities. We then move onto the basic relation between knowledge and society. According to him, problems to do with knowledge and those to do with power are in fact two sides of one coin. His work on agency, collective action, power or even finitism can all be understood as analyzing different forms of the same awareness, rather than as a change of subject. At the end of this interview, we asked Professor Barnes for his suggestions toward the budding East Asian STS research. He encouraged scholars in East Asia to combine the Western resources with their own ones, and advised them not to simply follow a ‘Programme’ as it constrains their vision. R.-C. Hwang Academia Sinica, No. 128, Sec. 2, Academia Rd., Nankang, Taipei, Taiwan Z.-F. Li Tsinghua University, Beijing, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China C.-T. Huang (*) National Chiao Tung University, Room 638, Center for General Education, Assembly Building 1, 1001 Ta-Hsueh Road, Hsinchu, Taiwan e-mail: moenhuang@hotmail.com R.-X. Chu University of Edinburgh, Room 1.14, Simon Laurie House, University of Edinburgh, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AQ, UK X. Fan Sun Yat-Sen University, Room 104, Buildings 638, Yuanxi Area, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou Guangdong, China director of the unit. In the by-now legendary unit, Barnes and his colleagues introduced a distinctive way to explore the relationship between knowledge and society. They suggest that as science itself is clearly a ‘human activity’, it should be analysed in the same way as any other human activities. Under this thinking, researchers from the unit started to analyse the practice of science, rather than what it ought to be. Their pioneering research soon invited severe debates and their research group was labelled as the Edinburgh School or the Strong Programme. Within the Edinburgh School, Barnes is especially known for his ground-breaking study on collective action, self-referring knowledge, and systems of power. His enormous influence helps transform the discipline of STS and won him the J.D. Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science (more details can be found in Mazzotti 2008; Henry 2008). This interview provides an interesting point of departure. It started from Barnes’s naturalistic commitment, insisting that science could not, and should not, be exempted from sociological analysis. For him, relativism is a corollary of naturalism, meaning that if one is properly naturalistic, relativism follows. Thus, he stresses that relativism is defendable. We then moved onto the basic relation between knowledge and society. According to him, problems to do with knowledge and those to do with power are in fact two sides of one coin. In the interview, he used money and power as examples to highlight the importance of understanding self-referring system. For instance, power exists in so far as it is believed to exist and the person who possesses it is treated as ‘powerful...