Science proceeds through research communities whose participants share important and often distinctive features of thought and method. This is one of the key insights of the “historical turn” in the philosophy of science initiated in the 1970s (link, link), and it underlies much work within the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies. But what more specifically goes into the “denkkollectiv” (Ludwik Fleck), “research programme” (Imre Lakatos), or “disciplinary matrix” (Thomas Kuhn) of a specific scientific field? One way of gaining knowledge about those features of thinking and experimenting in specific research communities is through immersive study by ethnographers and micro-sociologists. Paul Rabinow offered an especially fruitful example of this kind of investigation in Making PCR (link). Rabinow was specifically interested in discovering the mental and material worlds of biotechnology researchers.
This book focuses on the emergence of biotechnology, circa 1980, as a distinctive configuration of scientific, technical, cultural, social, economic, political, and legal elements, each of which had its own separate trajectory over the preceding decades. It examines the “style of life” or form of “life regulation” fashioned by the young scientists who chose to work in this new industry rather than pursue promising careers in the university world…. In sum, it shows how a contingently assembled practice emerged, composed of distinctive subjects, the site in which they worked, and the object they invented. (Making PCR, 2)
And what about the most esoteric of contemporary scientific research, high-energy particle physics (link)? How does this extended network of researchers think and work as this community seeks out further features of fundamental physics? Peter Galison’s Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics is a brilliant, clear, and extensive exposition of the interface between theory and experiment in physics. Galison thinks of contemporary physics as an overlapping set of three kinds of activity: experimentation, instrumentation, and theorizing. In this book he looks at instrumentation and the machines of physical investigation as a realm that requires its own careful study — from a historical-sociological point of view as well as from an epistemic one.
These machines have a past. To walk through the laboratories of the twentieth century is to peruse an expanse of history in which physics has played many parts. Over here, film for atomic physics, X-ray film out of boxes destined for medicine; over there, a converted television camera rewired as part of a spark chamber. In this corner a piece of preparatory apparatus for a hydrogen bomb, in that a cannibalized bit of computer. Around you in the 1950s the structure of mutable, industrial-style laboratories introduced to physics in the wartime scramble to ready nuclear weapons and radar. Shaped by the exigencies of industry and war, but also shaping the practices of both, the machines of physics are part of a wider technological material culture—neither below it, nor above it. (xviii)
And Galison emphasizes that the realm of “the practice of physics” encompasses many forms of activity: institutions, social networks, extended working groups, peer-reviewed journals, and specialized forms of knowledge developed in industrial, military, and corporate spaces.
Even this penciled sketch is but a partial presentation of the multitude of worlds within physics; there were other worlds beyond. Left out are the different university and national groups participating in large experiments, not to speak of the theorists, phenomenologists, administrators, and industrialists; there are computer programmers simulating runs and figuring out how to acquire, store, and sort the data; there are postdocs running shifts. Somehow, out of it all, comes an argument. This picture of science fits badly into the narrowly construed rationality of the algorithmic, and equally badly into the image of an unreasoned struggle by opposing forces to divvy up the territory of knowledge. Physics as a whole is always in a state of incomplete coordination between extraordinarily diverse pieces of its culture: work, machines, evidence, and argument. That these messy pieces come together as much as they do reveals the presence, not of a constricted calculus of rationality, but of an expanded sense of reason. (xxii)
Moreover, Galison suggests that laboratory machines have “meaning”, in a fairly specific sense: they have been designed and adapted by intentional agents with specific explanatory goals in mind.
I will argue that laboratory machines can command our attention if they are understood as dense with meaning, not only laden with their direct functions, but also embodying strategies of demonstration, work relationships in the laboratory, and material and symbolic connections to the outside cultures in which these machines have roots. (2)
This point amounts to a denial of technological determinism — the idea that technologies (machines) have a specific and inherent logic of development. Against this view, Galison puts forward an “agentic” view of the group processes of instrumentation and experimentation. Individuals and teams make informed guesses about what kinds of probes and instruments will illuminate particular problems, and they design instruments to carry out those investigations. And we can also look at this as a “social embeddedness” conception of the physics laboratory: the physicist (theorist, experimenter, instrument designer) brings with him or her assumptions and mental frameworks drawn from the broader society in which they emerge.
Another important insight Galison offers has to do with the “logic of experimentation” itself. In the empiricist tradition there is the idea that experiments are the means through which observation enforces the constraints of evidence on theory. But Galison emphasizes throughout the book that the nature of “experiment” and “experimenter” has changed dramatically over the past two centuries — perhaps most radically in the past fifty years. “Big science” at CERN or the Fermi Laboratory necessarily involves the extended and collaborative work of thousands of experts and technicians; so who is the experimenter there? Rather, it is necessary to interpret and reinterpret the results of the data collected after high-energy collisions, and these data do not speak univocally for themselves. “It is amid these intimate bits of machines, data, and interpretations that the categories of experiment and experimenter are embodied: defined, dismantled, and reassembled” (7).
Galison offers a novel approach to the problem of “scientific incommensurability”. Introduced by Thomas Kuhn as “incommensurable paradigms” guiding related research communities, the idea has proven elusive. Galison approaches the problem from the point of view of small differences in language and vocabulary across closely related laboratory communities; he uses the anthropologist’s ideas of creoles and pidgins to capture the differences in meaning that he identifies (48). He writes:
Because the picture of physics sketched here is one of distinct but coordinated subcultures, the notion of an interlanguage is a useful decentered metaphor. In different forms the same kind of question arises; How should we think about the relation of theorists to theorists, of theorists to experimenters, of physicists to engineers, of chemists to physicists, of image instrument makers to logic instrument makers, and of the myriad of detector subgroups within a hybrid experiment one to the other? To homogenize these various groups artificially is to miss their distinct ways of going about their craft; to represent them as participating in isolated conceptual schemes “translating” back and forth is to shut our eyes to the productive, awkward, local coordination by which communities, machines, and knowledge get built. Consider three aspects of the interlanguage. (49)
Through these “interlanguages”, Galison suggests, the separate subcultures are able to communicate about the terms and procedures of their collaborations. And this suggests a practical response to W.V.O. Quine’s hypothetical worries about the “indeterminacy of translation” that he believes confronts all inter-linguistic encounters. This is an interesting and clearly formulated framework for seeking to understand the micro-level transactions across research communities in a large research project like the activities conducted at CERN or the Fermi Laboratory. Galison writes:
In many different ways this book is a working out of the following observation: pieces of devices, fragments of theories, and bits of language connect disparate groups of practitioners even when these practitioners disagree about their global significance. Experimenters like to call their extractive moves “cannibalizing” a device. (54)
There is a further point to emphasize in Galison’s approach: his consistent avoidance of the idea that “the experimental method” exists as a general and uniform exercise in empirical science. Against this idea, he emphasizes the contingency and capacity for change that historical studies of scientific episodes display — if we are alert to the fallacy of over-generalization. For this reason he explicitly denies that the episodes he considers in this book point to a common model of “experimentation” that might be incorporated into the philosophy of science or general statements about scientific method:
The chapters of this book, like the Medieval and Renaissance histories I have cited, are grounded in the local. But I resist the designation “case study” because I do not believe that there is a set of defining precepts that can be abstracted from these or other studies to “experiment in general” (or, for that matter, “theory in general” or “instruments in general”). (62)
Rather:
My question is not how different scientific communities pass like ships in the night. It is rather how, given the extraordinary diversity of the participants in physics—cryogenic engineers, radio chemists, algebraic topologists, prototype tinkerers, computer wizards, quantum field theorists—they speak to each other at all. And the picture (to the extent one simplifies and flattens it) is one of different areas changing over time with complex border zones that sometimes vanish, coalesce, and even burgeon into quasi-autonomous regions in their own right. (63)
This is history of science at its best: attuned to the contingency and heterogeneity of various scientific research practices, sensitive to the powerful influence of context (political, ideological, economic, military) on the conduct of science, and respectful as well of the quality and rigor of scientific work when it is done well.
Anthropologist Arpita Roy took up some of these questions through an extended period of field work at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) beginning in 2007, during which she interacted intellectually and practically with dozens of physicists as they performed their scientific work. The primary result of Roy’s ethnography is her recent book, Unfinished Nature: Particle Physics at CERN. The book is most interesting when the author reports and discusses specific conversations and topics that came up with a range of specialists during her field work (theorists, experimentalists, instrumentalists, engineers, computer analysts). These conversations offer the reader a basis for reaching his or her own conclusions about the micro-culture of the CERN technical environment. Also useful is her discussion of the explosion that occurred in the accelerator tunnel in September 2008 and that interrupted work for about fourteen months. And the stated goal of the book is valuable as well:
In that vein, it is not my intention to offer an exhaustive description of a science nor a prescription for a better science but to look closely at some of the presuppositions that serve in an interesting way to connect the technical procedures of a laboratory with wider principles of intellectual classification…. By presuppositions, I mean the class of beliefs that is collectively and unconsciously held by participants and of which they are unaware but that informs every aspect of scientific thinking and activity. (5)
The book is less convincing when the author turns to reflections drawn from Marx, post-modern thinkers, and other areas of philosophy. It is unclear, for example, how Marx’s conception of the division of labor is genuinely illuminating when it comes to understanding the workings of a large laboratory complex. There is a division of labor in this institution, of course; but Marx’s delineation seems to shed little light on this fact (any more than Durkheim’s discussion might have done).
Detailed inquiries into the concrete practices and mentalities found in “big science” laboratories and research institutes are important contributions to both the sociology of science and eventually to our understanding of the epistemic standing of physics. Realist philosophers of science are confident in one of the dualities criticized by Arpita Roy — the distinction between the knower and the properties of the physical world, or the distinction between subject and object — but the cognitive and social practices involved in the scientific enterprise are deeply interesting in their own right, and ethnographic studies of the ways in which scientists and engineers go about their work are deeply interesting. Ludwik Fleck attempted such studies in the 1930s, and this tradition of investigation of “science in the making” has proven to be profoundly insightful (link, link). And emphasis on extra-scientific features of “context”, including gender, race, business interests, and national security pressures is plainly relevant to the conduct of big science — the military-industrial complex described by President Eisenhower almost 75 years ago.
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