Science of Science and Reflexivity (review)

This book is based on Bourdieu's final lecture course at the Collége de France. It attempts to show how science produces transhistorical truths despite the fact that scientific production occurs in specific cultural and socio-historical conditions. The aim is inspired by a fear that science is losing its autonomy to political and economic interests, a development he believes makes science "dangerous." Bourdieu claims that "relativism" is largely responsible for current political and corporate designs on science, and while he claims to seek a third way between "logicism" and relativism, the latter is his critical target. The book concludes with a discussion of reflexivity, where he claims to apply the same critique to himself that he earlier applies to the "new sociology of science." In fact, he does not; he presents an introspective on his biography, a reflection on his professional achievements in historical context.

Before addressing the substantive aim of the book, it is necessary to say a word about his terminology. When he speaks of "logicism" he is referring to the epistemological tradition associated with the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, particularly that espoused by its exiles to America, such as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, and currently known as "analytic philosophy." Clarification is also necessary with respect to his use of the language of "the new sociology of science." The notion of a new sociology of science is broad in the sense that it includes a wide range of work published since Kuhn's Structure. Bourdieu's target is just one sub-section of this work, that known as the "sociology of scientific knowledge" (SSK), with a few non-SSK "postmodernists" (such as Foucault) thrown in for good measure.

Applying his theory of "the habitus and the field" to science, Bourdieu claims to "have been able to resolve the problemof the relationship between reason and history or of the historicity of reason, a problem as old as philosophy and one which, especially in the 19th century, had haunted philosophers." (54) He suggests that the contextual perspectives brought to the field by individual scientists (by virtue of their habitus), are disciplined and corrected by the structuring force of the field. But how can the field as a whole achieve transhistorical truth? His answer lies in the concept of the "autonomy of the scientific field," an autonomy that permits science to escape the corrupting force of outside interests. Autonomy is achieved when science erects a barrier between itself and the outside world. The process is explained by mathematization. With Newton (and Leibniz), mathematical mastery became the "price of entry" into the scientific field, drawing a sharp distinction between professionals and amateurs. Second, the idea of explanation is removed from the empirical/temporal world and grounded in the mathematical/universal abstractions of "logicism." This leads to what he calls "desubstantialization," an effect of mathematization whereby science breaks free of Aristotelian substances, substituting the "logic of the manipulation of symbols" for the empirical observation of appearances. (49) The cumulative effect of mathematization is simultaneous closure and autonomization of science. It is this "closure upon itself of the autonomous field [that] constitutes the historical principle of the genesis of reason and the exercise of its normativity." (54)

So how does this teleological vignette of the scientific revolution in physics relate to the science of science when applied to sociology? The answer is difficult to fathom, except to the extent that the authority of the field, its "censorship," becomes a "liberating censorship, which leads one to dream of the censorship of an ideally constituted field that would free each of the participants from the biases linked to his or her position and dispositions." (114) He parenthetically notes that mathematization occurred first and primarily in physics, had different "effects" in different contexts, and that its impact on the social sciences has "not [been] certain." (48) Thus from the outset he reinscribes the old (and now debunked) hierarchy of the sciences, placing math-physics at the pinnacle...