A New Empire of Absurdity

Have you ever wondered what really goes on in laboratories? Isn't science a strange tribal world with the mystique of the white coat, the institutions, the pecking orders, the central dogmas, petty rivalries and human passions? Isn't it, in fact, a subject ripe for study by the anthropologist? There is no end to the creation of academic niches and, yes, this eco-opportunity has been spotted. Here's how it works, in the words of a practitioner, Steve Woolgar:

"Typically, the ethnographic study of' science involves accepting a menial job in exchange for access to the research situation."

Once installed, the ethnographer makes observations such as this: "Here and there around the laboratory we find glass receptacles, open at both ends, by means of which the scientists believe they can capture what they call a 'volume' of the class of substance known as a `liquid"' (a pipette). Alert readers will have noticed the note of humiliation in the notion of "accepting a menial job". Don't forget it: it's the key to what threatens to become a major political fight - for funds, prestige, and the hearts and minds of you and me - between scientists and sociologists. Not just sociologists. The recent book Higher Superstition by two American academics, Paul R Gross and Norman Levitt, uses the umbrella term "the academic left" for a loosely coupled raft of social scientists, literary critics, linguists, semiologists, historians and anthropologists who constitute a broad coalition now ranged against science. The ocean they float on is postmodernism. The essence of postmodernism (as a philosophy, not just the pick-and-mix aesthetics of the style pages) is the notion that the representation of the external world in language, and by visual and mathematical symbols is impossible. All such ' attempts are scuppered by the problem of reflexivity or self-referentiality. In language, such theorists believe that statements such as "Anything you read in this column is not true" are the type of all linguistic utterance. Hilary Lawson has said: "It is the role of language rather than the role of the subject that threatens to demolish the edifice of objective reality".
What this means for science is that since postmodernist reflexivity is supposed to apply to all forms of representation, its advocates know that science's claim to be dealing with external reality is false, even without looking at science in detail. This critique is expressed most virulently in the doctrine of social constructionism, which suggests that science is only a projection of the ruling power structure of the day. In its most extreme form, this can seem to be saying that science isn't true and doesn't work: it's just a capitalist tool, as if capitalists have any use for tools that don't work.

First published in The Guardian, 27 April 1995

"By the end of the l7th century, telescopic astronomy had become a very useful resource for the new maritime and commercial powers of northern Europe. Galileo triumphed not because he was right but because his theories were extremely useful. And because they were useful, his observations came to be believed to be true."

Simon Schaffer