A Response to "The STS Challenge to Philosophy of Science in Taiwan"

Lamenting the absence of fruitful dialogue between philosophers of science and STS scholars in Taiwan, Ruey-Lin Chen argues that each field can and should help the other to improve. In particular, if I have understood Chen's arguments correctly, philosophers of science could learn from STS to pay closer attention to the social aspects of scientific activity, to social understandings of what science is, and to the political or ethical implications of scientific practice in a modern technoscientific society like Taiwan. The field of STS, meanwhile, could benefit both reflexively and methodologically from the philosophy of science by paying more rigorous analytical attention to its own theoretical lineages, internal contradictions, and truth-claims; by attending more closely to the validity of the scientific arguments at the core of most STS case studies; and by developing its capacity as a discipline to proceed from the level of specific case study to generalization.

Chen's arguments for what STS has to gain from a dialogue with the philosophy of science are based on the proposition that STS is, fundamentally, a science, albeit a social science. Greater philosophical rigor, reflexive and interpretive, would thus contribute positively to its "normal development." Certainly any scholarly field benefits from rigorous critical attention to its epistemological practices; it would be hard to disagree with Chen on that point. But do STS practitioners in fact construe the field as a "science," and what might the tradition of Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy that Chen identifies as the forte of Taiwanese philosophy of science contribute to it?

In my opinion one can make a strong case that STS (like "sociology of scientific knowledge" before it) is a project rather than a discipline or a science, and is recognized as such by its practitioners. It is a shared goal, namely, the unpacking and challenging of technocratic authority, that gives coherence to STS, rather than any aspirations to a unified theory, or any agreed bounding or framing of the object of analysis. The field of STS is essentially political, a spectrum of exercises in demystification ranging from the gendering of electric shavers to the transnational governance of nuclear power to claims about the separation of the social and the natural. All these exercises address at different levels how power in contemporary society is accrued and materialized through representations (science) and modifications (technology) of the "natural world." Typically, STS research looks at complex technoscientific issues where many different interests are at stake and where a range of competing scientific or technical justifications are available for mobilization by different stakeholders. Where alternative scientific truth-claims, often equally valid, are mobilized by politically opposed groups (as, for instance, in the arguments for or against approving genetically modified corn), it is as likely to be rhetorical skill, or the number of human and nonhuman allies one has enrolled, or how much it rained in Russia last summer, that decides the outcome as any formal logic. Because STS views scientific research as invariably shaped by interest, it is concerned in part with the logic of its design and the accuracy of its results, but equally, or perhaps even more, with whose agendas (explicitly or implicitly) the research is designed to promote.

Further, most STS research has an activist dimension, aiming not simply to demystify technocratic truth-claims but to develop platforms for more inclusive, democratic decision making or design. In other words, it is both rooted in and focused upon ideology and values. This is one reason I suggested to Ruey-Lin Chen at the conclusion of the 2009 EASTS conference panel Philosophy of Science and STS in East Asia that philosophers of technology might prove better interlocutors of STS scholars than philosophers of science or, more specifically, analytical philosophers of science.

It is notable, if one traces trends in the philosophy of technology over the last twenty or thirty years, that several leading senior figures in the field began as analytical philosophers focusing on the dynamics of technological thought and practice, but then felt compelled to broaden their approach. As Friedrich Rapp noted in 1995:

I myself have...