The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (review)

Nearly one hundred years ago William James asserted that “to believe in the one or in the many, that is the classification with the maximum number of consequences.” Certainly a tension over whether science can be best understood as a unified or a disunified enterprise has animated a contentious set of debates from the mid-nineteenth century onward, as Peter Galison notes in his introduction. The recent emergence of a body of work advocating “the view that there is something local about scientific knowledge” (p. 2) has provided a counterweight to the legacy of a vision of unified science that arose earlier in the century under the aegis of the Vienna Circle. The result is that much that had been taken for granted about the nature of scientific inquiry has come open to question within many disciplines. This edited collection, the product of a 1991 Stanford University conference on the topic of contextualism and disunity in science studies, is a thoughtful attempt to shape this debate and to move it forward.

The editors solicited “scholars representing various flavors of science studies” (p. vii), and indeed, the nineteen essays tackle a diverse array of topics, touching on such fields as archaeology, computer simulation, molecular biology, natural history, particle physics, and psychiatry. Although the book takes in a welcome breadth of territory, it does not quite allow a thousand flowers to bloom. The emphasis is heavily weighted toward science studies as viewed from the philosophy of science, with the sociology of science playing a secondary role, and the history of science a recurrent but somewhat diffuse presence. The sophistication of the presentations, however, makes the text well worth the attention of those interested in these issues, whatever their own particular intellectual frameworks.

Much in these debates hangs on definitions of unity, and the various changes rung on this theme from one essay to the next can be somewhat dizzying. Likewise, the participants’ ventures into some recent intramural battles in science studies may mean heavy going for the uninitiated reader. But readers will be handsomely repaid for their perseverance, given the number of interesting insights within the book’s pages.

Theoretical explorations make up the first two parts of the text, categorized under the headings “Boundaries” and “Contexts.” Among the many intriguing discussions is Galison’s theoretical explication of the activity that can flourish in the boundary areas between disunified scientific domains (which he characterizes as local “trading zones”), in which participants improvise a “pidgin” language that mediates the coordination of different groups’ practices. John Dupre advances a philosophical view, “promiscuous realism,” which emphasizes that “individual things are objectively members of many individual kinds” (p. 105), all of which are real, but none of which can be reduced to one determinative essence. Karin Knorr Cetina conducts a comparative ethnographic exploration of laboratory biology and experimental physics, which reveals divergent epistemic cultures existing under a shared rubric of empiricism.

A third section, entitled “Power,” takes on such issues as the relationship between Otto Neurath’s politics and his scientific outlook (Jordi Cat, Nancy Cartwright, and Hasok Chang). Timothy Lenoir and Cheryl Lynn Ross address the naturalizing work accomplished in museum making.

The larger ambition of this volume is to speak to the nature of the deep connections between the ideal of unity and the questions of science and politics. Galison observes at the outset that “the disunity (or unity) of science is fiercely contested ground because these attributes of homogeneity and diversity are so deeply tied to the images of authority of the sciences in relation to one another—and to the broader place of science in the world” (p. 3). James’s generation grappled with this knowledge at the last fin de siècle, even as we continue these debates today. Building on the effort at cross-disciplinary communication represented by this volume will help us engage these issues more fruitfully in the coming...