"Missing the Target? A Comment on Edward Constant's "Reliable Knowledge and Unreliable Stuff
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5096077 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Philip Scranton (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2000 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 752-764 |
| Publication date | 2000-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Technology and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0040-165X • E-ISSN: 1097-3729 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/tech.2000.0179 |
| OpenAlex | W2078177266 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 11 |
In Technology and Culture's April 1999 issue, Edward Constant offers an essay broadly critical of the social constructionist approach in the history of technology. He suggests that work by Trevor Pinch, Wiebe Bijker, and their colleagues, in "focus[ing] on local practices leads, sometimes very explicitly, sometimes implicitly, to the claim that all knowledge and all practice is only local, and that no such thing as translocal or spatiotemporally universal knowledge can exist outside purely local reification. This empirical claim, in turn, entails the more discomfiting and controversial theoretical claim that all knowledge and beliefs are therefore in principle socially situated and culturally relative, that is, are spatiotemporally particular." 1 Constant then warns readers that "these crosscurrents of doubt about the objectivity, realism, value, or veracity of scientific and technological knowledge hold profound dangers," which unfortunately are not specified. The balance of the article undertakes to show that such "spatiotemporally universal knowledge" 2 does exist, based on: (1) commonsense recognition that most of our technological "stuff," including complex systems, works most of the time; (2) a more formal Bayesian argument indicating the operational reliability of knowledge informing and deriving from utilization of technologies; (3) two exemplary case studies drawn from Louis Bucciarelli's Designing Engineers and from Constant's own [End Page 752] research on petroleum engineers' successive techniques for gauging underground oil pools; and (4) brief discussions of reliable knowledge's role in generating "revolutionary technology" (the turbojet) and engaging "novel natural phenomena" (water-drive as an element in the "behavior" of very large oil fields under extraction). Though recognizing some "difficulties" with the Bayesian formulation, Constant concludes that: "Contra social constructivist claims about the irreducible situatedness and contingency of all technological (and scientific) practice, and therefore all technological (and scientific) knowledge, highly reliable, spatiotemporally universal knowledge not only exists but also is both the essence of engineering science and the translocal foundation for engineering practice" (p. 350). Still, Constant allows that this rejoinder "does not contradict the essentials of social constructivist accounts of technological change. . . . But recognition of the existence and practical importance of reliable knowledge and Bayesian rational belief in it does mandate a return to history--the 'social turn' supplemented, if not replaced, by a 'historical turn'" (p. 354)
Argument (complex analysis) · Body of knowledge · Epistemology · Objectivity (philosophy) · Political science · Politics · Popularity · Reductionism · Reification (Marxism) · Situated · Sociology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Science and Climate Studies
Shaping technology/building society
Science as a Process
What Engineers Know and How They Know It
Studies in ethnomethodology
The Second Wave
The constitution of society
Working knowledge
An invitation to reflexive sociology
Reliable Knowledge and Unreliable Stuff
Objectivity and Its Other
Technological Change
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2002 - 2006 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |