In and About the World: Philosophical Studies of Science and Technology (review)

Most of the essays in this book have been published previously. While they are ostensibly thematically connected, the whole lacks the cogency of a single, sustained argument. Nonetheless, one subset of papers does hang together nicely, namely, those concerned with Hans Radder’s novel and persuasive notions about the “non-locality” of scientific knowledge. Other papers, such as that on the normative aspects of appropriate technology, are more ad hoc and altogether less satisfactory.

The best and most integrated essays advance Radder’s claims about nonlocality, which he substitutes for the impossible grail of universality. In these essays, Radder seeks to counter the assertion, which he credits to various relativists, social constructivists, and ethnomethodologists, that all scientific or technological knowledge (indeed, all knowledge of any sort) is exclusively local and context-specific: that it exists only in transitory, local productions. Yet Radder also wants to avoid the sort of spatiotemporally universal claims common in traditional philosophy of science, which he sees as unsustained and unsustainable either by argument or by empirical evidence.

Radder’s core argument has four parts. First, while acknowledging the theory-ladenness of all experiments or observations, Radder claims that the widespread practice in science, at least since the seventeenth century, of using theoretically naive laypersons to conduct actual material “realizations” insulates the material production of the phenomena (or the world) from undue theoretical bias. It’s a clever if perhaps not essential move, but it does give him the purchase to assert that successful experiments are in principle “reproducible,” partially independent of both theoretical and local baggage, even if they cannot be, and never are, “replicated” in exact detail. This in-principle reproducibility in turn entails that scientific experiments do capture (or, his phrase, “materially realize”) some nonlocal, “real and persistent potentiality of nature” (p. 84). This persistent capture then undergirds the “referential realism” of our contingent and corrigible scientific beliefs. Altogether, this argument provides a convincing and salutary antidote to relativist extremism. Radder comes to these issues from a continental tradition—his most notable previous work is on Jürgen Habermas—but it is still curious that he does not engage other philosophical arguments that pursue ends similar to his own, specifically, the evolutionary epistemology advanced by David Hull, Donald T. Campbell, and the latter-day Karl Popper, or Bayesian theory confirmation as portrayed by John Earman, Richard Jeffrey, or Colin Howson and Peter Urbach.

Other essays in this collection wander further afield, with less fruitful results. For example, Radder’s discussion of “knowledge and power,” which really alludes to the material and social control necessary to any experimental or technological system, adds little but tortured language to the discussions offered by Peter Galison, Andy Pickering, or even Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, for science, or by Thomas P. Hughes, James Beniger, or even Alfred Chandler, for technology. Moreover, Radder’s purportedly normative “appropriate realization of technology” is simply superficial, proffering such prescriptions as this: “A necessary condition for the appropriateness of any technology would seem to be to establish the desirability of the intended product in a substantive dialogue between its prospective users and the other actors involved. Engaging in such a process assumes that the needs and wishes of the users will be taken into account from the start” (p. 156). This advice is unlikely to be news to any MBA who has had a marketing course. That the geniuses who gave us the Edsel and New Coke could not quite manage the trick, despite bounteous interests and lavish resources, suggests that the complexity and contingency of sociotechnical systems are not very likely to yield to such happy, New Age incantations.

That said, for those historians of technology for whom relativism, “praxis,” and existential localism have become equally uncritical mantras, Radder’s referential realism demands careful and thoughtful scrutiny.