Harry Collins
Biographic Data
| ID | 188356 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Harry Collins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Harry |
| FAMILY NAME | Collins |
| SIGNATURE | COLLINS H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2909-9035 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 121 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1273 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 121 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
More problems of large language models in comparison with human knowledge
This paper builds on an earlier paper in this journal (Collins’s, 2024, ‘Why artificial intelligence needs sociology of knowledge ...’). In that paper, an attempt was made to explain why LLMs had no moral compass. Here, we first explain more carefully where humans get their knowledge from and fill out the problems of LLMs by comparing them with humans. We then provide a new classification of different ways in which LLMs fail. There is one main ca…
Why artificial intelligence needs sociology of knowledge: Parts I and II
Recent developments in artificial intelligence based on neural nets—deep learning and large language models which together I refer to as NEWAI—have resulted in startling improvements in language handling and the potential to keep up with changing human knowledge by learning from the internet. Nevertheless, examples such as ChatGPT, which is a ‘large language model’, have proved to have no moral compass: they answer queries with fabrications with …
Virtual diversity revisited
Virtual diversity: Resolving the tension between the wider culture and the institution of science
There are widespread calls for increased demographic diversity in science, often linked to the epistemic claim that including more perspectives will improve the quality of the knowledge produced. By distinguishing between demographic and epistemic diversity, we show that this is only true some of the time. There are cases where increasing demographic diversity will not bring about the necessary epistemic diversity and cases where failing to exclu…
Establishing veritocracy: Society, truth and science
In the west, truth is being eroded by post-modernist ideas such as alternative facts. Once truth is no longer valued it is a short route through nationalistic populism to fascism. To combat this we need to establish the idea of 'veritocracy' as a form of government. A veritocracy is a democracy in which truth is so highly valued that promising to tell the truth will become a central feature of politicians' election manifestos feeding back the ide…
Scientific conferences, socialization, and the Covid-19 pandemic: A conceptual and empirical enquiry
Since the 1970s social analysts have seen communication between scientists not solely as information exchange (the algorithmical model), but as a process of socialization into overlapping and mutually embedded scientific domains (the enculturational model). Under the algorithmical model, the impact of the Covid-19 shutdown on travel would be easily remedied by replacing face-to-face communication with online platforms. Conferences and similar gat…
Science as a counter to the erosion of truth in society
The role of scientific values has taken on new urgency with recent changes in the politics of Western societies. The threat is the erosion of the distinction between true and false in political circles. This could rapidly lead to democracy sliding into populism thence fascism. In the light of this, philosophy and sociology of science should themselves re-examine their role. The main point of the paper is to argue that science could and should pus…
The most important thing about science is values
Science is the search for truth about the observable world. But it rests on values. The only thing that can be discovered by observation is the immediate here and now. Otherwise, knowledge about the observable world is based on hearsay, spoken or recorded, about others’ observations. Apart from small and fleeting observations, science rests on trust. Our scientific lives and scientific knowledge depend on choosing who and what to trust. Since we …
Trevor Pinch (1 January 1952–16 December 2021)
Evaluating the imitation game as a method for comparative research: A replication study using imitation games about religion
The Imitation Game is a new method and, as such, it is important to show that its results are plausible and replicable. We tested this by conducting Imitation Games on religion in a range of European countries, returning approximately 12 months later to repeat the research. The idea was that non-Christian members of strongly Christian countries would find it easy to pass as members of the practicing majority because Christian beliefs and practice…
The science of artificial intelligence and its critics
Not many people seem to understand what it is to mimic human intelligence successfully irrespective – that is, irrespective of internal states such as intentions. Successful mimicking will involve embedding in human societies. AI practitioners have concerned themselves with reproducing something that can mimic an individual human brain, failing to notice that if such a brain is to mimic human intelligence it will also have to mimic the process of…
Interactional Imogen: Language, practice and the body
Here I try to improve on the available answers to certain long-debated questions and set out some consequences for the answers. Are there limits to the extent to which we can understand the conceptual worlds of other human communities and of non-human creatures? How does this question relate to our ability to engage in other cultures’ practices and languages? What is meant by ‘the body’ and what is meant by ‘the brain’ and how do different meanin…
Experts and the Will of the People: Society, Populism and Science
The rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on the legitimacy of scientific expertise in political decision making. This book explores the differences between populism and pluralist democracy and their relationship with science. Pluralist democracy is characterised by respect for minority choices and a system of checks and balances that prevents power being concentrated in one group, while populism treats minorities as traitorous so as to…
The imitation Game and the nature of science
Groups and individuals: Conformity and Diversity in the Performance of Gendered Identities
The nature and role of social groups is a central tension in sociology. On the one hand, the idea of a group enables sociologists to locate and describe individuals in terms of characteristics that are shared with others. On the other, emphasizing the fluidity of categories such as gender or ethnicity undermines their legitimacy as ways of classifying people and, by extension, the legitimacy of categorization as a goal of sociological research. I…
Um, er: How Meaning Varies Between Speech and Its Typed Transcript
We report a small empirical study on the way the transcription used to represent speech affects its meaning. We show that 'disfluencies' in speech indicate far more uncertainty in the speaker when transmitted in text than when transmitted in recorded sound. This has important implications for how transcribed interviews should be edited when they are being used to convey meaning rather than the organization of phonemes. We propose the implications…
Artifictional Intelligence: Against Humanity's Surrender to Computers
Recent startling successes in machine intelligence using a technique called ‘deep learning’ seem to blur the line between human and machine as never before. Are computers on the cusp of becoming so intelligent that they will render humans obsolete? Harry Collins argues we are getting ahead of ourselves, caught up in images of a fantastical future dreamt up in fictional portrayals. The greater present danger is that we lose sight of the very real …
Cracking the Crystal in STS: Marcelo Fetz Talks with Harry Collins
In this interview, Harry Collins and Marcelo Fetz discuss Collins’ early work on the importance of tacit knowledge in laboratory research, the revolutionary spirit of early Science and Technology Studies (STS) research, and his concerns about its current intellectual decline which he sees as a result of the popularity of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approaches and an increasing focus on policy-relevant STS studies. Collins describes how, in the ear…
STS as science or politics
In a recent editorial for this journal, Sergio Sismondo makes two claims. First, he states that STS bears no responsibility for the emergence of post-truth politics. Second, he claims that debates about the nature of expertise that take place within STS are irrelevant in this context. In contrast, we argue that, whether or not STS had a causal influence on the emergence of post-truth politics, there is a clear resonance between the two positions …
Bad Call: Technology's Attack on Referees and Umpires and How to Fix It
The Bearing of Studies of Expertise and Experience on Ethnography
In a recent article published in this journal, Atkinson and Morris explore the kinds of expertise and competence needed by ethnographic researchers. In doing so, they refer to the work of Collins and Evans and, in particular, the idea of interactional expertise, which they dismiss as largely unhelpful to their project. In this response, we show that the Atkinson and Morriss miss-represent this work in important ways and that, if these mistakes ar…
Two Kinds of Case Study and a New Agreement
A thousand words is worth a picture
In this response to Ribeiro and Lima’s paper on interactional expertise, we argue that, by not incorporating the insights of constructivist social science, their analysis goes backwards rather than advancing the debate. We show that much of the evidence they present does not lead to the conclusions they draw. We also critically examine the idea of physical contiguity, which forms a central part of Ribeiro and Lima’s position. We show that its mea…
Social Construction of Reality
Expertise revisited, Part II: Contributory expertise
The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience
Science studies has shown us why science and technology cannot always solve technical problems in the public domain. In particular, the speed of political decision-making is faster than the speed of scientific consensus formation. A predominant motif over recent years has been the need to extend the domain of technical decision-making beyond the technically qualified élite, so as to enhance political legitimacy. We argue, however, that the `Probl…
Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism
Modern philosophy of science has allowed an extra dimensiontime into descriptions of the nature of scientific knowledge. Theories are now seen as linked to each other, and tQ observations, not by fixed bonds of logic and correspondence, but by a network, each link of which takes time to be established as consensus emerges and each link of which is potentially revisable given time.' Many contributors to this new model intend only to make philosoph…
The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics
The replication of scientific experiments is discussed stressing the problem of communication between the originator of an experiment and a scientist intending to replicate it. Models of communication are set up, with reference to established fields. A more marginal field is then investigated in the light of these models and it is concluded that scientists in the latter field should not be seen as engaged in replicating original experiment, but i…
Tacit Knowledge, Trust and the Q of Sapphire
Russian measurements of the quality factor (Q) of sapphire, made 20 years ago, have only just been repeated in the West. Shortfalls in tacit knowledge have been partly responsible for this delay. The idea of `tacit knowledge', first put forward by the physical chemist Michael Polanyi, has been studied and analysed over the last two decades. A new classification of tacit knowledge (broadly construed) is offered here and applied to the case of sapp…
Son of Seven Sexes: The Social Destruction of a Physical Phenomenon
Working from within the relativist perspective, this paper documents the demise of credibility of claims for the existence of high fluxes of gravitational radiation. The study is based on interview fieldwork conducted in 1975 and builds upon earlier work reported in 1975. Criticisms of the positive claims are presented schematically and shown to be permeable to alternative interpretations. The actions of one of the major critics are examined in d…
The Meaning of Data: Open and Closed Evidential Cultures in the Search for Gravitational Waves
The meaning of scientific "data" depends on the "evidential culture" of laboratories. Using transcripts of interviews and conversations with scientists, open and closed evidential cultures are analyzed under three dimensions. For example, an Italian laboratory's evidential collectivism and an American laboratory's evidential individualism are contrasted. In this case–the detection of gravitational radiation–evidential cultures are found to be hom…
Language and practice
What are the relative contributions of language and physical practice to practical understanding? The resolution of a series of puzzles depends upon the answer. I argue that language is, and must be, more central than physical practice in individual acquisition of practical understanding. Only this makes it possible for there to be a sociology of scientific knowledge, for there to be scientific specialities, for there to be a division of labour i…
Certainty and the Public Understanding of Science: Science on Television1
The notion of `the public understanding of science' is ambiguous. It is not the findings of science that are crucial, but the public understanding of science as a knowledge-producing activity. Two television broadcasts on science are described and analyzed. Features typical of science broadcasting, with their implicit epistemological messages, are discussed. The public understanding of science is affected by the way such programmes portray scienc…
King Canute Meets the Beach Boys: Responses to the Third Wave
Experiments with interactional expertise
The Place of the 'Core-Set' in Modern Science: Social Contingency with Methodological Propriety in Science
The Construction of the Paranormal: Nothing Unscientific is Happening
The politics and policy of the Third Wave: New technologies and society
We outline the political implications of the program known as the ‘Third Wave of Science Studies’. Here we develop the politics of the Third Wave showing how it bears on technological decision-making in the public domain. The main concern is to combat ‘technological populism’. The prescriptions that emerge include asking and answering as many technical questions as is reasonable and giving these questions and answers the maximum exposure before m…
Captives and Victims: Comment on Scott, Richards, and Martin
Scott, Richards, and Martin (1990; SRM) are almost entirely right in their description of the dilemma in which analysts of scientific controversies find themselves. In particular, they are right in saying that the analyst will be thought of by participants as being on the side of the underdog. Thus however neutral the analyst intends to be, the work will always be drawn into the debate. Only SRM's conclusion-that attempting to be neutral is point…
In Praise of Futile Gestures: How Scientific is the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
Calls for sociologists of knowledge to be committed to their subjects are examined critically. The idea of `commitment to commitment' is shown to be based either on fallacious reasoning or on a disguised call for commitment to the author's favoured causes. The `universal' and `local inevitability' arguments are analyzed and shown to be wrong. The former suggests that every scientific claim includes a commitment, willy-nilly; the latter says that …
Dissecting Surgery: Forms of Life Depersonalized
When surgeons drape human bodies in green or blue cloths, when they erect a barrier between their eyes and the patient's face, when they narrow their gaze to that small portion of the body into which the scalpel is to penetrate, when they surround their activities with antiseptic walls, what are they doing? Are they `objectifying' and `depersonalizing' the body? How might one tell? What method might one use to find out? What might such a claim me…
II.3 What is TRASP: The Radical Programme as a Methodological Imperative
Private Science and Public Knowledge: The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal and its Use of the Literature
The scientific literature can be used to construct facts or to deconstruct them. The formal journals construct by presenting maximally `demodalized' accounts of experiment. The more popular journals are licensed to present more than this, but usually, where they do provide contingent details of scientists' work, these are details of life away from the laboratory bench. Sometimes, popular journals use their license to present contingent details of…
Knowledge, Norms and Rules in the Sociology of Science
Thomas Gieryn's 'Relativist/Constructivist Programmes in the Sociology of Science: Redundance and Retreat',' I am pleased to say, raises the status of the empirical programme of relativism2 vis-a-vis the Mertonian School to that of 'explicit rejection'.3 I will take him at his word and read his remarks not as an exercise in 'adumbrationism' but as emerging out of disinterested concern with the avoidance of redundancy and the fostering of a cumula…
Quantifying the Tacit: The Imitation Game and Social Fluency
This article describes a new research method called the Imitation Game. The method is based on the idea of 'interactional expertise', which distinguishes discursive performance from practical expertise and can be used to investigate the relationship between groups that diverge culturally or experientially. We explain the theory that underpins the method and report results from a number of empirical trials. These include 'proof of concept' researc…
Tantalus and the Aliens: Publications, Audiences and the Search for Gravitational Waves
Different audiences at different distances from the core-set read scientific papers in different ways. If the institutional circumstances are right, an `inner audience' may try to control an outer audience's reading. In Physics, the literature is sufficiently open to allow some papers that have no credibility with the mainstream to be published. This normally causes no problem within `core-groups' of scientists, because the orthodox interpretatio…
Surviving Closure: Post-Rejection Adaptation and Plurality in Science
Can the procedures and institutions of modern science support more than one version of reality? The early science of gravitational wave detection adapted and survived for a quarter of a century after its findings ceased to be accepted by the majority of the scientific community. Two mutually exclusive approaches to the same physical phenomenon, spawned by the same community, were initially supported by the same institutions and later by only marg…
Expertise revisited, Part I—Interactional expertise
Rejecting knowledge claims inside and outside science
Citizens, policy-makers and scientists all face the problem of assessing maverick scientific claims. Via a case study, I show the different resources available to experts and non-experts when they make these judgements and reflect upon what this means for technological decision-making in the public domain
Special Relativism — The Natural Attitude
The Social Process of Innovation: A Study in the Sociology of Science
The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks
INTRODUCTION: METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL ARGUMENT Thomas Kuhn's concept of 'paradigm has attracted a lot of attention from sociologists and historians of science. In particular, some recent work has involved the search for groups of scientists which are taken to be the social analogue of this idea. I will argue here that the boundaries of those 'social circles' of scientists which have been found are not likely to correspond with the boundari…
The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics
The replication of scientific experiments is discussed stressing the problem of communication between the originator of an experiment and a scientist intending to replicate it. Models of communication are set up, with reference to established fields. A more marginal field is then investigated in the light of these models and it is concluded that scientists in the latter field should not be seen as engaged in replicating original experiment, but i…
Relativity Revisited: Mrs Keech — A Suitable Case for Special Treatment
The Investigation of Frames of Meaning in Science: Complementarity and Compromise
The Construction of the Paranormal: Nothing Unscientific is Happening
Perspectives in the Sociology of Science
The Sociology of Science: Problems, Approaches, and Research. Jerry Gaston
Interests and the Growth of Knowledge. Barry Barnes
Son of Seven Sexes: The Social Destruction of a Physical Phenomenon
Working from within the relativist perspective, this paper documents the demise of credibility of claims for the existence of high fluxes of gravitational radiation. The study is based on interview fieldwork conducted in 1975 and builds upon earlier work reported in 1975. Criticisms of the positive claims are presented schematically and shown to be permeable to alternative interpretations. The actions of one of the major critics are examined in d…
Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism
Modern philosophy of science has allowed an extra dimensiontime into descriptions of the nature of scientific knowledge. Theories are now seen as linked to each other, and tQ observations, not by fixed bonds of logic and correspondence, but by a network, each link of which takes time to be established as consensus emerges and each link of which is potentially revisable given time.' Many contributors to this new model intend only to make philosoph…
II.3 What is TRASP: The Radical Programme as a Methodological Imperative
The Elusive Science: Origins of Experimental Psychical Research . Seymour H. Mauskopf , Michael R. McVaugh
The Place of the 'Core-Set' in Modern Science: Social Contingency with Methodological Propriety in Science
Shorter Notices
Special Relativism — The Natural Attitude
Knowledge, Norms and Rules in the Sociology of Science
Thomas Gieryn's 'Relativist/Constructivist Programmes in the Sociology of Science: Redundance and Retreat',' I am pleased to say, raises the status of the empirical programme of relativism2 vis-a-vis the Mertonian School to that of 'explicit rejection'.3 I will take him at his word and read his remarks not as an exercise in 'adumbrationism' but as emerging out of disinterested concern with the avoidance of redundancy and the fostering of a cumula…
Private Science and Public Knowledge: The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal and its Use of the Literature
The scientific literature can be used to construct facts or to deconstruct them. The formal journals construct by presenting maximally `demodalized' accounts of experiment. The more popular journals are licensed to present more than this, but usually, where they do provide contingent details of scientists' work, these are details of life away from the laboratory bench. Sometimes, popular journals use their license to present contingent details of…
The Possibilities of Science Policy
Irvine and Martin (IM) have been responsible for some serious questioning of British science policy. To date, the outcome of their work seems likely to be beneficial for those who seek some basic nourishment from the research budget, rather than the five-course dinners of Big Science. Nevertheless, their research is not without flaws, nor is it obviously the best way for science policy to make use of recent work in science studies. I will critici…
With Enemies Like This, Who Needs Friends
1. N. Roll-Hansen, 'The Controversy between Biometricians and Mendelians: A Test Case for the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge', Social Science Information, Vol. 19 (1980), 501-17. 2. B. Barnes, 'On the Causal Explanation of Scientific Judgement', Social Science Information, Vol. 19 (1980), 685-95. 3. N. Roll-Hansen, 'The Death of Spontaneous Generation and the Birth of the Gene: Two Case Studies of Relativism', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 1…
Dimensions of Debate
Daryl E. Chubin teaches in the Technology and Science Policy Program, School of Social Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is coeditor of the forthcoming book of readings, Interdisciplinary Research and Analysis (Lomond, 1986), and is author of the recently published paper, 'Misconduct in Research: An Issue of Science Policy and Practise', Minerva, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 1985), 175-202. He is completing a monograph titled Peerless Scien…
Changing Order: Representation and Induction in Scientific Practice
Certainty and the Public Understanding of Science: Science on Television1
The notion of `the public understanding of science' is ambiguous. It is not the findings of science that are crucial, but the public understanding of science as a knowledge-producing activity. Two television broadcasts on science are described and analyzed. Features typical of science broadcasting, with their implicit epistemological messages, are discussed. The public understanding of science is affected by the way such programmes portray scienc…
Pumps, Rock and Reality
Misunderstanding replication
Sociology (84 works) · Epistemology (78 works) · Philosophy (74 works) · Philosophy (53 works) · Computer Science (50 works) · Psychology (48 works) · Political science (35 works) · Education, Healthcare and Sociology Research (34 works) · Law (30 works) · Social science (23 works)