Forbid the Forbidding

My essay was written in a conciliatory spirit, to reconcile two only apparently opposed perspectives on the status of the social in science studies, while affirming what I take to be the substantive accomplishments of each. On one hand are the sociologists of scientific knowledge, who have produced some compelling, if incomplete, sociological explanations. No blanket ontological argument about nonhuman agents can undo these achievements. They can only be supplanted by better explanations. On the other hand, meticulous observers of science have carried out a true fieldwork in philosophy, in which they have shown that it is untenable to give priority to the social world and to treat knowledge as socially produced meaning imposed on a meaningless material world. This achievement can only be undone by ignoring it, through compartmentalization or alternation. These are unacceptable solutions since they justify humanist dualism by arbitrarily ruling out everything that contradicts it. Until now, those responsible for these two accomplishments have presumed that they are in conflict, that the preservation of one requires the rejection of the other. Since I find both positions compelling, at least in their positive aspects, I wanted to show that the supposed conflict is illusory. Not only can a thorough sociological contextualization of scientists' practices be reconciled with a nonhumanist ontology, but the two positions are complementary. They complete one another. My criticisms are therefore affirmative, since I think the two sides are wrong only in what they forbid or omit. I challenge sociologists of scientific knowledge to persist in their social contextualizations of scientists' practices, but to repeal the ontological privilege they accord the social, and to internalize the methodological consequences of this move. And I challenge those who reject humanism not to rule out prematurely an analysis that would locate social agents in a set of social relations that motivate and constrain their practice. In his response to my essay, Andy Pickering explains why he is not inclined to take up this challenge. I am not convinced by the reasons he gives, and will limit my comments here to showing why. His first reservation about this challenge has to do with the onesidedness of my methodological recommendation. It calls for a type of analysis that strikes him as hesitant, stuttering, and otherwise aesthetically unsatisfying, since it would try to explain the practices of social agents but not machines. I should point out first that this is already more than Pickering would have us do. If he will grant me, for the sake of argument, that it is possible to generate sociological explanations of scientific practice, then he is faulting me for proposing a method that goes considerably further than what he has been willing to do. Pickering seems to prefer symmetrical nonexplanation to this unseemly discourse

Contextualization · Dualism · Epistemology · Philosophy of science · Sociology · Sociology of scientific knowledge · Undo · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science