A Conversation with Steve Fuller

The interdisciplinary field science studies, which aims at an understanding of science, is a rapidly growing field of research. It has developed increasingly into different specialties, such as sociology of science, psychology of science, theory of science, anthropology of knowledge, and science policy studies--which has resulted in a fragmentation of its knowledge. The emphasis is usually either on social aspects, on philosophical aspects, or on the political dimension. Steve Fuller, with his perspective on science, is an exception to this trend toward specialization. His perspective is panoramic, including essential elements from the philosophy of science and the history of ideas, as well as from sociology, social psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology. Fuller has been an integrative force in science studies, both helping to keep the field together and challenging its assumptions.

Steve Fuller was born in 1959 in New York City and received his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science in 1985 from the University of Pittsburgh. He has written six books and more than fifty scientific papers, and has coedited three other books, including Social Psychology of Science (with William Shadish). ¹ At present he is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, U.K.

Crossing disciplinary boundaries is typical of Fuller's cognitive style. At the same time, there is a political dimension in his writings. An important element in his message is that science needs to be useful for the ordinary person, and that science studies should be useful in the discussion of science policy. Fuller's research program in social epistemology was launched in the 1980s as an attempt to overcome what he regards as the false dichotomy between normative philosophical approaches concerned with what science ought to be, and empirical sociological approaches concerned with what science actually is. Social epistemology is defined as the normative study of knowledge systems and of how science can be improved. Here Fuller's concern is, among other things, that science should be democratized; for example, he feels that taxpayers should not be made to pay for research that is not useful to them. In 1987 he founded the scientific journal Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Policy. His book by the same name, Social Epistemology, was published in 1988. ² One of Fuller's contributions to the philosophy of science is a dimension of critical reflection, together with empirical research on science. Unlike many philosophers of science, he combines a normative and a descriptive approach.

According to Fuller, what most nonscientists need in order to make an informed public judgment of science can be provided by science studies. His outsider stance in his book Science (1997), ³ that of seeing science from a Martian perspective, as well as from an Islamic and a Japanese perspective, sheds light on the Euro-American bias in science studies. His use of such unconventional concepts as "mystery," "soteriology," "saintliness," and "theodicy," so as to provide an outsider's perspective, is indeed thought-provoking. Fuller looks at science as one set of cultural and social practices among many others. His purpose in taking the outsider's perspective is also to show how an enriched understanding of science can help us to construct a public understanding of science with which we can live.

In Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge: The Coming of Science and Technology Studies (1993), ⁴ Fuller distinguishes between what he calls the "High Church" and the "Low Church": The "High Church" consists of philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science, who share a largely intellectual interest in the hold that science and scientific knowledge have over society. The "Low Church" consists of such heterogeneous groups as policymakers, feminists, journalists, and others with a concern for the problems that science has caused, has solved, and possibly can solve in modern society. In his attempts to make science more democratic, Fuller becomes somewhat of a spokesman for the...