"Rigorous" sociology

There is sometimes an inclination within the social sciences to unify and "improve" the methodologies of the social sciences to allow them to be "fully scientific" in the way that chemistry or physics were thought to be in the neo-positivist phase of the philosophy of science. With something like these ambitions Klarita Gërxhani, Nan D. de Graaf, and Werner Raub's recent Handbook of Sociological Science: Contributions to Rigorous Sociology (2022) purports to be a "handbook for rigorous sociology" of all stripes.

Thomas Voss puts the perspective of the "scientific sociology" framework in these terms:

The core features of a scientific approach to sociology as described in this Handbook (see the chapter by Raub, De Graaf & Gërxhani) are as follows: sociology and social science in general is an explanatory empirical science – at least it is the goal to establish such a science. The aim of science is the explanation of regularities that have been established by systematic observation. Theories specify causal relationships and in conjunction with boundary conditions imply testable hypotheses. There are obviously some contrasts between the natural and the social sciences. However, scientific sociology is based on the idea of the unity of science, the conviction that there are no fundamental differences with respect to the methodological rules and criteria of evaluating theories between the sciences, such as physics or biology, and the social sciences. (492)

The preferred model of the structure of sociological knowledge expressed here is familiar from the philosophy of science of the 1950s and the writings of Carl Hempel. It is the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific knowledge, explanation, and confirmation. Scientific knowledge (in a given area of research) ideally consists of a set of abstract hypotheses about the way the world works in this area; logical-mathematical deductions from those hypotheses, along with supporting statements of boundary conditions, leading to "testable" predictive consequences for observable social facts. A social outcome or regularity is "explained" when the scientist succeeds in deducing its occurrence from a set of empirically supported theoretical hypotheses. This is familiar within the philosophy of science; it is the view of scientific knowledge that emerged when the verificationist and radical empiricist versions of philosophy of science associated with the Vienna Circle collapsed. Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel, and Richard Rudner were central voices of this approach (link). And invoking "the unity of science" is harmful, since it brings with it a host of assumptions -- including reductionism -- that are positively harmful for our framework of thinking about the intellectual work needed in sociology. The social world is not unified, and neither are the sciences (link, link).

Another component of their view of core tools for "rigorous sociology" is the use of sophisticated statistical techniques to sort out large data sets of sociological data. They are also favorable towards computational social science and the use of tools like agent-based models and simulations.

Excessive empiricism is one shortcoming of the "rigorous sociology" framework. There is a second shortcoming of the conception of sociological knowledge that emerges from the volume. In spite of the statements of openness to theoretical and methodological diversity, the editors and many of the contributors are in fact committed to very specific theoretical and methodological ideas. The introduction of the volume is explicit: the best explanations in the social sciences conform to the assumptions of methodological individualism; and the editors clearly prefer micro- to macro-explanations as "most scientific". Coleman's boat is a central tool for their philosophy of science: explanations proceed down the strut from "social context" to "individuals acting and interaction", and up the strut from "individuals" to "macro-conditions". From these assumptions, the priority of rational-choice sociology, analytical sociology, and other individual-grounded approaches is all but unavoidable. John Goldthorpe, James Coleman, and Peter Hedström are cited repeatedly as examples of "good sociology". 

There is an obvious and important relationship between these ideas about rigorous sociology and the manifestos of analytic sociology. Gianluca Manzo draws out this close connection in his contribution to the volume, "Analytical sociology". The editors emphasize that they don't mean to propose that the social sciences should reflect a unified set of foundational theories or research methods; they are all for "diverse approaches" to the study of the social world. But they emphatically advocate for a core commitment to an agreed-upon core of methods of evaluation for scientific hypotheses in the social sciences. On their view, only such a core set of commitments about confirmation and falsification can provide a basis for "cumulative knowledge formation in the social sciences".

More interesting than general calls for "rigorous" verification of sociological claims is Ivan Ermakoff's contribution to the volume, "Validation strategies in historical sociology". Ermakoff's work falls broadly within the fields of historical sociology, and his views about the use of evidence and validation are specific and helpful. He considers a number of works in historical sociology, including Michael Mann's Dark Side of Democracy, and his perspective is a long way from the apparent positivism of the introductory essay. He considers a range of techniques used by historical sociologists to empirically evaluate their hypotheses and theories about mid-level social processes. He uses the umbrella term of "validation" rather than the loaded ideas of confirmation and verification as the crucial link between hypothesis and evidence. He writes, 

Validation is the linchpin of scientific rigor. Claims relying on arguments by seeing, embedding themselves in self-validating discursive serious, or dodging critical assessments undercut the prospect of sound and cumulative knowledge. A significant stake of therefore attached to clear-cut validation yardsticks. (196)

Ermakoff proposes seven different kinds of validation strategies for evaluating hypotheses in historical sociology. (He doesn't suggest the list is exhaustive.)

1. Descriptive fit
2. Probing observable implications of casual hypotheses
3. Counterfactuals
4. Natural experiments
5. Inductive comparisons
6. Process tracing
7. Simulation 

This is a much more diverse set of ideas about how to consider the relation between hypothesis, evidence, and inference than is often offered by empiricist theorists, and deserves careful study. The implications of the idea of "conjunctural causation" comes in for very useful discussion. And he emphasizes the importance to having a clear and coherent set of working ideas about social causation as well.

Descriptive claims are especially important in historical sociology, just as they are within the discipline of history itself. Consider the strategy of analysis and argument pursued in McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly's Dynamics of Contention. Their goal is to discover some important mid-level generalizations about social contention in a range of settings. However, they do not seek to establish generalizations about the high-level categories of social contention -- civil war, ethnic violence, inter-state war, or riots, which they believe to be unattainable in principle. Instead, they purport to identify an open-ended list of "mechanisms of contention" that occur and recur in a variety of instances and episodes.  ("We search for mechanisms that appear variously combined in al these forms of contention and in others as well. A viable vision of contentious politics, we claim, begins with a search for causal analogies: identification of similar causes ni ostensibly separate times, places, and forms of contention" (74).) In Dynamics they consider a range of episodes of contention from many places and times and seek to describe them in sufficient detail to allow them to identify some of the mechanisms of mobilization, escalation, and repression that occurred in some of these cases. 

The three sequences sketched in Chapters 1 and 2 represent distinctive and well known varieties of contentious politics in the western tradition. Our treatment of them raised standard questions concerning mobilization, actors, and trajectories. In the course of contentious politics: (1) What processes move people into and out of public, collective claim making, and how? (2) Who's who and what do they do? (3) What governs the course and outcomes of contentious interaction? In each case, we found that the standard social movement agenda -- social change, mobilizing structures, opportunity -- provided a disciplined way of asking questions about the events, but pointed to unsatisfactory answers. The answers were unsatisfactory because they were static, because they provided accounts of single actors rather than relations among actors, and because at best they identified likely connections rather than causal sequences. (72)

McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly are equally interested in asserting the causal efficacy of various kinds of social mechanisms, based on their analysis of the episodes. What would be involved in "validating" or empirically supporting the account provided in Dynamics? Ermakoff's seven approaches provide a good beginning to answering this question, and it would appear that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly have done a credible job of providing the right kinds of evidence and arguments that would serve to support their account. We would like to know whether the authors have provided reasonably accurate synopses of the episodes they have considered, and whether their accounts  are based on substantiated historical evidence (primary or secondary). Have they taken appropriate steps to avoid the kinds of biases in historical accounts about which Ermakoff warns us? Second, we would like to know whether the social mechanisms (issue escalation, for example) that they attribute to the episodes under review are reasonably clear and well defined. And third, we would want to explore the degree to which their claims of causal relevance for these mechanisms are justified by the available historical record. Here the techniques associated with process tracing and paired comparisons are most relevant to their arguments; they attempt to show in historical detail how various mechanisms worked in the given historical circumstances. This also makes "natural experiments" a credible basis for their causal reasoning as well. If, for example, the mechanism of issue escalation requires a moderate to high level of density in local social networks, and if it emerges that cases A, B, and C had the causal preconditions of issue escalation but showed substantial variation of network density, then the fact that low-density C did not experience issue escalation while high-density A and B did experience issue escalation, then this looks a lot like a natural experiment evaluating the causal efficacy of issue escalation.

MTT do not use other methods mentioned by Ermakoff. They do not use statistical measures to validate claims they make about the contentious episodes they consider. And they do not show any interest in computational simulations or "generative systems" that would permit them to predict outcomes. "Will current popular unhappiness in China about environmental degradation develop into organized demonstrations and demands against the state for greater environmental regulation?" -- this is not the kind of question that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly would find interesting or fruitful, because they are fundamentally aware of the contingency and path dependency that characterizes the emergence of unrest in most settings.

In short, Ermakoff's analysis of descriptive rigor and justification of causal claims seem to be rich enough to provide a basis for classifying the empirical practices of historical sociologists McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly. And, significantly, these historical sociologists measure up: their work should be classified as "rigorous sociology".

Defining disciplinary research in the social sciences

The "historical turn" in the philosophy of science in the 1960s and 1970s gave most of its attention to the development of the physical sciences -- especially physics itself. (See Tom Nickles' essay "Historicist Theories of Scientific Rationality" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a detailed account of this development in the philosophy of science; link.) Historian-philosophers like Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos studied the development of astronomy, physics, and chemistry as research communities involving complex social arrangements -- networks of practitioners, training institutions, laboratories, journals, and universities and research institutes -- and shifting but shared cognitive frameworks. They argued that scientific research and knowledge always proceeds through organized research communities that regulate the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Kuhn emphasized the specificity and contingency of the cognitive frameworks (disciplinary matrix or paradigm) that guided a research community, insights that in part reflected his own reading of Ludwik Fleck's earlier work on the history of biology and medicine and the idea of a "denkkollektiv" (link, link).  Here is Alexander Bird's description of Kuhn's view in his essay on Kuhn in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

He claims that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments Kuhn at one point calls a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1970a, 182) although elsewhere he often uses the term ‘paradigm’. Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist. (link)

Well and good for astronomy and fundamental physics. But what about the social sciences? How should we think about the sub-disciplines of fields in the social sciences like sociology? The idea is sometimes expressed, including by Kuhn himself, that the social sciences are not yet "mature sciences" precisely because they lack strong and definitive paradigms. Here is Bird again in the SEP:

The claim that the consensus of a disciplinary matrix is primarily agreement on paradigms-as-exemplars is intended to explain the nature of normal science and the process of crisis, revolution, and renewal of normal science. It also explains the birth of a mature science. Kuhn describes an immature science, in what he sometimes calls its ‘pre-paradigm’ period, as lacking consensus. Competing schools of thought possess differing procedures, theories, even metaphysical presuppositions. Consequently there is little opportunity for collective progress. (link)

This view perhaps once had a seductive appeal, but it is no longer convincing. The social sciences are different from the natural sciences because social phenomena are different from the phenomena of the world of chemistry and physics, and the unity of science was a dogma from logical positivism that we are well rid of (link, link). Here is how I've tried to formulate the differences that exist between the social sciences and the physical sciences:

Rather than unity, we should expect eclectic theories, piecemeal explanations, and a patchwork of inquiries at a range of levels of description. Some explanatory theories will turn out to be more portable than others. But none will be comprehensive, and the social sciences will always remain open-ended and extensible. Instead of theoretical unification we might rather look for a more and more satisfactory coverage, through a range of disciplines and methods, of the aspects of the social world we judge most interesting and important. And these judgments can be trusted to shift over time. And this means that we should be skeptical about the appropriateness of the goal of creating a unified social science. (Understanding Society; link)

This view of the social world suggests that sociological research does not require strict paradigms or dogmatic commitment to a "disciplinary matrix" of theory and methodological commitments in order to make progress. Instead, sociology should embrace a pluralistic range of research approaches and cognitive frameworks that can address different aspects of the social world. We gain insight and understanding of the social world through overlapping and pluralistic methods and theoretical frameworks.

That said, it is plain enough that there are distinct (sometimes overlapping) research families within sociology. Any large sociology department at a research university will have members who identify with different approaches and methodologies. Social movement researchers disagree with large-N quantitative researchers in many important ways, and an ethnomethodologist might find the work of both these sets of colleagues to be somewhat foreign. How should we characterize these differences across extended research groups within sociology? 

Several ideas are available. Weakly, a group of researchers might be said to belong to a research tradition if they share a number of common assumptions about the nature of the social world, the methodology that is most suitable to sociological research, and some core examples of sociological explanation. Most commonly this situation would arise from the fact of a common genealogy for a group of researchers -- a founder (Durkheim or Tarde, let's say), and a few generations of researchers who followed in their footsteps. But notice how weak this account is. It does not refer to shared research institutions, social networks of researchers, or definitive processes of research evaluation.

A stronger conception of a research community may begin with the weak conception, but then provide a specification of how research proceeds in this field or that. This stronger analysis aims to describe the institutional framework within which "X sociology" is carried out, evaluated, disseminated, and incorporated into the training of the next generation of sociologists in the X approach. What is added here is an account of the institutional infrastructure of the sub-discipline, the institutions and actor networks through which sociological research is carried out and shared. This more elaborate description is one of the guiding assumptions of the field of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) (link).

But this specification remains incomplete in a crucial way: it says little about the intellectual content of the target sociological sub-field, the cognitive frameworks and theoretical ideas to which practitioners within the field adhere and that guide their research. This is the aspect that is the most novel and interesting feature of Kuhn's theory of the paradigm and Fleck's conception of the thought-collective. Kuhn, Fleck, and others in this line of thought emphasize that scientific research is not "blue-sky" theory, but rather proceeds on the basis of a contestable set of beliefs about the nature of the phenomena under investigation. According to this line of thought, the scientist's imagination is framed and directed by a set of assumptions about the world from which the discipline itself discourages deviation. The sub-discipline is indeed "disciplined" to conform to the existing paradigm. 

In the case of the social sciences, the role of "paradigm beliefs" is complicated and ambiguous. On the one hand, various areas of the social sciences are notorious for their rigid adherence to certain methodological principles -- the primacy of large-N quantitative studies, the value of formal models, lack of respect for case studies and comparative studies. (This was the point of the Perestroika debate in political science some years ago, and subsequent methodological debates in sociology more recently; link, link.) On the other hand, there is a very wide range of different assumptions (ontological beliefs) about social entities and processes in the social world across the social sciences and within each discipline. And it is rare to find a high level of consensus about these issues within a social science discipline. (Economics departments in research universities in the United States are an exception, but an unrewarding one: a high level of commitment to a specific set of methods, but a low level of empirical or policy success.) It seems, then, that the full-blooded idea of a "paradigm" as a unified cognitive framework spanning a broad network of researchers is not to be found in the social sciences. So perhaps our assessment of this topic in the social sciences might be: yes to research communities and networks, no to paradigm-driven research communities.

My interest in this question is fairly specific. I've been thinking about the emerging sub-discipline of analytical sociology over the past twenty years, and it would be useful to provide an analysis of the field in terms of the ideas sketched above. Do the manifestos of important advocates like Hedström and Demeulenaere constitute a "disciplinary matrix" in something like the sense that Kuhn had in mind? Do new areas of computational sociology (agent-based modeling, for example) represent something analogous to the body of laboratory techniques and procedures that Kuhn or Hanson included in the disciplinary matrix of physics? Do the strict assumptions of structural individualism advocated by the primary voices constitute a component of a "paradigm" for sociological research that helps to guide productive investigation and theory formation? In short, is analytical sociology a reasonably well-defined research community unified by a specific disciplinary matrix that is enforced by the regulative institutions of allied journals and institutes?

It is useful to compare the field of analytical sociology with other families of research in sociology today. For example, we might consider 

• "processual sociology" described by Andrew Abbott (link) 
• "field sociology" inspired by Pierre Bourdieu (link)
• "ethnomethodology and microsociology" inspired by Goffman (link) and Garfinkel (link)

Abbott offers a vision of the nature of the social world -- an alternative social ontology -- and his writings provide quite a bit of methodological advice for sociologists interested in exploring these kinds of social phenomena. But it is hard to find the "processual sociology network" of researchers that is carrying out detailed empirical research under this banner. So it is hard to say that processual sociology constitutes a research community at present. The Bourdieu case is different. Many young sociologists make use of Bourdieu's ideas and theories about cultural fields. Bourdieu has a great deal of influence. But it is not obvious that there is a cumulative body of work that "Bourdieu-theory" can claim credit for as a research framework, and it is difficult to articulate the premises of a disciplinary matrix for conducting sociological research for this approach. So here too, perhaps we are forced to conclude that Bourdieu-theory too is less than a research community, in spite of its influence and the frequency of citations of Bourdieu in sociology journals. (According to a table titled "Most referenced authors in 42 sociology journals" reproduced by Gerardo Munck on X (link), Bourdieu is #1 with 9853 citations, and Weber is #2 with 6135 citations!) And though Goffman and Garfinkel are still part of the corpus of "theory" in sociology, it is hard to find instances of research networks proceeding along the lines described by ethnomethodologists fifty years ago. So analytical sociology seems to be a live candidate for an example of a research community organized by an active research matrix, whereas the other examples do not.

(This topic is an appropriate subject for study within the "new sociology of knowledge"; link.) 

Paradigms, conceptual frameworks, and denkkollektive

Image: Ludwik Fleck as prisoner / scientist in Buchenwald

An earlier post opened a discussion of the "historical turn" in the philosophy of science in the early 1960s (link). This innovation involved two large and chiefly independent features: deep attention to the social and institutional context of scientific research, and the intriguing idea that research communities give rise to specific "mentalities" or conceptual schemes that are distinctive to that community. The previous post focused on the social and institutional contexts of science. Here I am interested in unpacking the second point about the specialized conceptual schemes and mental frameworks of scientific research communities.

This dimension of the sociological approach to the history of science has primarily to do with the mental frameworks of the practitioners. Here I am referring to the thinking, concepts, and practices of the practitioners within a give area of scientific research. This is the idea that participants in a research community develop shared mental or cognitive frameworks and conceptual schemes on the basis of which to organize their research and theories about the domains they study. It is sometimes argued that these schemes are to some extent incommensurable across research communities (as Kuhn sometimes maintained), leading to the difficulty or impossibility of genuine communication across research traditions. The guiding intuition is that the scientists' conceptual schemes are embedded in an extended social discourse within the research community, and the meanings (and even references) associated with key scientific terms differ systematically from one research community to the other. Important examples include Thomas Kuhn's conception of a paradigm (link), Imre Lakatos's conception of a research programme, or Ludwik Fleck's conception of a "thought collective" (link).

Let's first consider Kuhn's claims about incommensurability across scientific paradigms. (Oberheim and Hoyningen-Huene's article on incommensurability in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is very helpful; link.) The idea of a paradigm is somewhat unclear in the original version of Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In its narrow meaning a paradigm is simply a clear example or illustration of something -- for example, a well-designed chemistry experiment. ("This is how you separate heavy water from common H20.") But more commonly Kuhn uses the concept of paradigm more broadly, intending to refer to the heterogeneous mix of material and cognitive practices shared by a scientific research tradition -- laboratory procedures, theoretical concepts, methodological principles, dissemination practices, ideas about the use of evidence and experimental data, and so on. In the 1969 postscript to SSR Kuhn refines his language of paradigm to refer to a "disciplinary matrix". A disciplinary matrix is "an entire theoretical, methodological, and evaluative framework within which scientists conduct their research" (174). The implication is that if one has acquired his or her intellectual reflexes within a discipline, each statement within the science will have a meaning that is affected by other elements of the framework.

(It is worth noting that this point about the dependency of the meaning of a theoretical sentence on a myriad of other commitments and concepts is similar to Quine's explanation in Word and Object of the underdetermination of theory and the indeterminacy of translation: the "meanings" of individual sentences can be adjusted according to the status of other assertions in the web of belief. In Quine's example: in the presence of a certain common small animal, I refer to "rabbit", you refer to "gavagai", and we cannot determine whether gavagai refers to the "individual whole animal" that I have in mind, or your own conceptual scheme of "undetached rabbit parts".)

Here is the first place that Kuhn refers to incommensurability in SSR. The concept arises in discussing successive schools of scientific thought such as Ptolemy and Copernicus:

What differentiated these various schools was not one or another failure of method—they were all “scientific”—but what we shall come to call their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practicing science in it. Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time. (3)

A hundred pages later he returns to the topic of paradigm incommensurability:

As a result, the reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science. Some old problems may be relegated to another science or declared entirely “unscientific.” Others that were previously nonexistent or trivial may, with a new paradigm, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. The normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before. (103)

It should be noted that Kuhn's claims of incommensurability generally comes with qualifications. It is not a general claim of radical mutual unintelligibility across scientific research communities, but rather a claim about the impossibility of perfect and exact translation: "After he has done so [stepped from the old paradigm to the new] the world of his research will seem, here and there, incommensurable with the one he had inhabited before. This is another reason why schools guided by different paradigms are always slightly at cross-purposes" (111). The highlighted phrases demonstrate the intended softening of the claim.

The claim of incommensurability certainly seems to be a view about the mental constructs -- ideas, concepts, ways of evaluating claims -- that scientists use in their theories and their empirical and experimental practices. Kuhn, and later Feyerabend, seem to assert that participants in competing paradigms of the "same" subject matter see the world differently, and cannot fully agree or disagree with each other about apparently fundamental statements about the world. The classical physicist "parses" the physical world differently than does the relativistic physicist. And these mental schemes are conveyed to the young physicist through his or her training in the discipline; they are only partially formalized in the apparatus of scientific knowledge. In Michael Polanyi's formulation, they are a form of "tacit knowledge": “the aim of a skillful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them”; Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: 49. Ways of viewing a laboratory across paradigms are sufficiently different that it requires a "gestalt shift" for a scientist to view the world through the alternative theoretical constructs. All of this sounds "mental".

(Here again Quine's views of semantics in Word and Object and "Ontological Relativity" are relevant. Quine seeks to undermine the "museum myth" of sentence meanings. "Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels" (186).)

Now let's turn to a scientist-philosopher whose work influenced Kuhn's, Ludwik Fleck. (A prior discussion of Fleck's work can be found here.) Fleck was a Polish scientist who offered a similar view of scientific conceptual spaces in 1935 in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1979/1935). Fleck was a medical researcher, and he developed his view of scientific concepts and research communities in Genesis around the example of the development of the concept of syphilis over several centuries.

Fleck was an important innovator in both aspects of the "historical turn" in science studies. Fleck's approach to the history and philosophy of science championed both aspects of the founding ideas of historicized science studies -- the importance of the specific social settings of the scientists, and the cognitive features of scientific work within a community of researchers. He emphasized the importance of the specific social arrangements within which scientific knowledge is produced:

When we look at the formal aspect of scientific activities, we cannot fail to recognize their social structure. We see organized effort of the collective involving a division of labor, cooperation, preparatory work, technical assistance, mutual exchange of ideas, and controversy. Many publications bear the names of collaborating authors. Scientific papers almost invariably indicate both the establishment and its director by name. There are groups and a hierarchy within the scientific community: followers and antagonists. societies and congresses, periodicals, and arrangements for exchange. A well-organized collective harbors a quantity of knowledge far exceeding the capacity of any one individual. (42)

Fleck also emphasized the conceptual dependency or incommensurability that became important in Kuhn's thought. In particular, Fleck offered a highly original idea about the social or "collective" nature of scientific concepts with his idea of a "thought collective" (denkkollektiv). (Thaddeus Trenn, the translator of Genesis and Development, notes that this term is a neologism introduced by Fleck, and it has no natural counterpart in English.) Here is how Fleck defines denkkollektiv:

If we define "thought collective" [denkkollektiv] as a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction, we will find by implication that it also provides the special "carrier" for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock o f knowledge and level of culture. This we have designated thought style. The thought collective thus supplies the missing component. (39)

Fleck illustrates the dependence of scientific theory on the specific denkkollektiv with the example of the development of the modern concept of the agent of syphilis:

Siegel also recognized, in his own way, protozoa-like structures as the causative agent of syphilis. If his findings had had the appropriate influence and received a proper measure of publicity throughout the thought collective, the concept of syphilis would be different today. Some syphilis cases according to present-day nomenclature would then perhaps be regarded as related to variola and other diseases caused by inclusion bodies. Some other cases would be considered indicative of a constitutional disease in the strict sense of the term. Following the train of thought characterized by the "carnal scourge" idea, still another, completely different set of concepts concerning infectious disease and disease entities would have arisen. Ultimately we would still have reached a harmonious system of knowledge even along this line, but it would differ radically from the current one. (39)

The point here is important and plausible. Assumptions about biological structures, causation, and disease accreted within one research tradition -- one denkkollektiv -- constituted an extended and growing system of statements, investigative procedures, and research groups as scientific understanding of syphilis developed, and the theories and findings of the science must be interpreted in terms of that system of beliefs and assumptions. But the development of such a system is a highly contingent process, and a different ensemble of assumptions was possible. On that alternative ensemble, the eventual scientific product would have been quite different. This suggests the idea of "brachiation" in evolutionary theory, where the founder finch has one set of properties, and the daughter variants continue to diverge until there is little similarity with the founder or among the daughter sub-species.

The incommensurability to which Fleck refers seems to be of a fairly ordinary kind: if the scientist in the B-denkkollektiv of syphilis science frames his or her thinking in terms of dramatically different ways from scientists in the A-denkkollektiv -- different ways of defining the problem, different views of biological causation, and different assumptions about "causative agents", then their apparently simple statements about the disease will be difficult to inter-translate. This implies that apparently similar statements in A-language and B-language will have significantly different meanings, implications, and avenues of investigation for the two communities. The scientists in the two denkkollektive in the same domain will often talk past each other -- just as Kuhn asserts 25 years later in SSR.

To some extent a close reading of both Kuhn and Fleck serves to de-dramatize the implications of "incommensurability" that each asserts. Neither of these theorists puts forward a radical view of mutual unintelligibility across research communities, or a radical relativism of the findings of science in a particular field of research. Both reject the simple reductionist semantics of positivism (verificationism, instrumentalism) according to which the meaning of a scientific concept can be fully articulated as a set of procedures for verification. But they do not seem to think that conversation with comprehension is impossible between classical physicists and relativity or quantum physicists, or between wave theorists and particle theorists in subatomic physics, or between gradualists and punctuated-equilibrium theorists in evolutionary theory. Substantive disagreements about the domain of investigation and conflicting predictions about outcomes are possible, and that is enough to allow for meaningful scientific discourse to proceed across paradigms or "thought collectives". In this respect both Kuhn and Fleck are less radical than Berger and Luckmann (link), who make a case for an extreme version of conceptual relativism across cultures in The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.

(Polish researcher Paweł Jarnicki has written extensively on Fleck and on the relationship between Fleck's ideas and those of Kuhn. His article "On the shoulders of Ludwik Fleck? On the bilingual philosophical legacy of Ludwik Fleck and its Polish, German and English translations" provides a fascinating philological study of the difficulties of translation raised by Fleck's multilingual writings (link).)

(Here is a discussion of "conceptual frameworks" that is relevant to this discussion of incommensurability of scientific concepts and statements (link).)

Social embeddedness of scientific and intellectual work

How do complex, socially embodied processes of cultural and scientific creation work? (I'm thinking of artistic traditions, scientific research communities, literary criticism schools, high-end culinary experts, and mental health professionals, for example.) This is a complex question, by design. It is a question about how a field of "cumulative" symbolic production moves forward and develops; so it is related to intellectual history, art history, and the philosophy of science. But it is also a question about the social embeddedness of creative work -- the idea that the practitioners of literary theory, political science, high-energy physics, biology, or international relations theory proceed within material and social conditions, institutions, and incentives and constraints that train, guide, and valorize practitioners.

One of the important developments in the philosophy of science since 1970 was the development of large concepts designed to capture the social and institutional context of science, and to discover how the details of these social arrangements influence the content and value of the resulting scientific research. Thomas Kuhn's framing of the history of science around paradigms, normal science, and anomaly was one of the early contributions to this perspective, as was Imre Lakatos's focus on research programmes. There has emerged a strong interest in studying the sociological context of scientific and cultural work, and the institutions that facilitate and regulate publication and validation in various fields. These contextual arrangements define the systems of valuation that distinguish "good" products from "bad" products (good pieces of scientific discovery, good works of literary criticism). And they determine the prestige and career prospects of the researchers.

The "historical turn" in the study of science resulted in two large and independent innovations in how to think about "science in context". The first is the recognition that scientific work (or cultural work) takes place within specific social and material conditions, and it is important to study those environments. The second is that research communities develop forms of "social cognition" that are specialized to their community, and that strongly influence the ways that they conceive of the world and design their research efforts. Both aspects are important insights, but they derive from separate insights into scientific work. I will address the social cognition feature in a later post.

The "new sociology of knowledge" (link) represents a fresh start on the "social embeddedness" orientation towards culture and knowledge, building on interdisciplinary fields like Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) (link). Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michele Lamont offer examples of some very interesting recent work in this field in Social Knowledge in the Making. Here is one of the core observations that the editors draw from the research contributions to the volume:

One of these themes is that social knowledge practices are multiplex, composed of many different aspects, elements, and features, which may or may not work in concert. Surveying the broad terrain mapped across the different chapters, we see, for example, the transitory practices of a short-lived research consortium as well as knowledge practices that endure for generations across many disciplines and institutions... (kl 338)

At site after site, heterogeneous social knowledge practices occur in tandem, layered upon one another, looping around and through each another, interweaving and branching, sometimes pulling in the same directions, sometimes in contrary directions. (kl 353)

The social-embeddedness approach to thinking about science and culture is intended to situate a cultural or scientific activity within a set of social/intellectual relationships, with the background hypothesis that the activity develops as a result of the cognitive, symbolic, and material relationships that exist among its practitioners. These may include graduate curricula, laboratory procedures, journal publication policies, funding agencies, and the other social, political, and intellectual/institutional resources that exist within that community of practitioners.

Detailed studies in the sociology of science shed light on how this conception of scientific research and valuation takes place. Norwood Hanson's Patterns of Discovery (1958) was one of the earliest careful studies of a physics laboratory that demonstrated the impossibility of maintaining a rigid separation between observation and theory -- a key tenet of logical positivism. As such, Hanson's work represented one of the earliest contributions to post-positivist philosophy of science. Since then a large field of study has emerged that focuses on the details of research communities and laboratories. Paul Rabinow's Making PCR is a fascinating account of a biotech laboratory in which he documents the extensive interdependency that exists among research scientists, laboratory technicians, managers, research assistants, and others. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life provides an ethnographic study of a biological research lab.

Pierre Bourdieu's concept of a "field" of cultural and intellectual activity (link) in The Field of Cultural Production falls in the broad category of the social-embeddedness approach to cultural and intellectual activities described here. The heart of Bourdieu's concept of "field" is "relationality" -- the idea that the participants in cultural production and their products are situated and constituted in terms of a number of processes and social realities. Cultural products and producers are located within "a space of positions and position-takings" (30) that constitute a set of objective relations.

The space of literary or artistic position-takings, i.e. the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in' the field -- literary or artistic works, of course, but also political acts or pronouncements, manifestos or polemics, etc. -- is inseparable from the space of literary or artistic positions defined by possession of a determinate quantity of specific capital (recognition) and, at the same time, by occupation of a determinate position in the structure of the distribution of this specific capital. The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces. (30)

This text give us a better idea of what a "field" encompasses for Bourdieu. It is a connected network of social activity in which there are "creators" who are intent on creating a certain kind of cultural product. The product is defined, in part, by the expectations and values of the audience -- not simply the creator. The audience is multiple, from specialist connoisseurs to the mass public. And the product is supported and filtered by a range of overlapping social institutions -- galleries, academies, journals, reviews, newspapers, universities, patrons, sources of funding, and the market for works of "culture."

The social embeddedness of intellectual and scientific research is important and worth careful study. We learn a great deal about the course of development of fields such as "high-energy physics in the United States", "neo-liberal economic development theory", or "post-modern literary studies" by discovering the ways in which researchers in these fields are trained (graduate programs), how they are funded, how their results are evaluated for publication, how the national laboratories work, what the peer networks are, how the researchers are awarded the signs of success within the discipline, and so on. We can perhaps trace the spread of new ideas over a period of time -- for example, computable general equilibrium models in development economics -- based on an understanding of the institutional settings of the relevant discipline. And this "embeddedness" feature is quite general across fields of intellectual, cultural, and scientific work.

An important question arises within this framework: why should we expect these kinds of sociological institutions to lead to "better science", more insightful literary criticism, or better ethnography? We can certainly point to what Lakatos referred to as "degenerating research programmes", and the case of Soviet biology under the iron hand of Trofim Lysenko provides a clear example of "bad science resulting from a disciplined research community". Examples like these confirm that a "disciplinary matrix" is no guarantee of scientific progress or eventual discovery of the truth about a domain.

This is a question that philosophers of science have confronted, and there are substantive efforts to provide answers to the question, revolving around the fact that the empirical world provides its own feedback to bad science (through observation, experiment, and independent critical thinking). There is also a "bootstrapping" mechanism at work in the peer-review process for evaluating scientific work for publication, though it is also clear that a peer-review process may also have perverse results. Dogma is a risk within a scientific research community no less than in a culinary community (never, never, never use dried basil for pesto!). This is the point of the critique involved in the Perestroika debate in political science (link), where the critics maintain that orthodox journal editors and power holders show a dogmatic adherence to rational-choice theory over other possible approaches, and there is an equally deep divide within sociology over the validity of non-quantitative methods for sociological research (link). The fissure in literary studies between post-modern criticism and what Satya Mohanty calls "realist literary theory" represents a disciplinary divide in the humanities. All of that accepted -- it is seems clear that scientific understanding of the world proceeds best when scientists criticize each others' research on the basis of evidence and theoretical coherence. Fallible, yes; but a better bet than any other approach humanity has considered. We might go further and postulate that some institutional arrangements work better than others for promoting the truth-enhancing goals of science -- for example, institutions that encourage independent thinking across ranks within the discipline.

The open texture of the social world

What is involved in arriving at scientific knowledge about the social world? The position I have consistently taken emphasizes contingency and heterogeneity of the social: the social world is a mixture of diverse processes and structures; it is constituted by socially constituted and socially situated actors, leading to ineliminable features of contingency and heterogeneity; and there are no unified "grand theories" that permit us to capture "the way the social world works". Social phenomena are multi-threaded, multi-causal, and multi-semiotic. So the most we can hope for in the social sciences is to identify some of the threads of change and stability, some of the distinct causes at work, and some of the systems of meaning through which actors frame the world in which they live and act.

So the social sciences can only consist of a large number of separate and largely independent lines of investigation into different strands of social life. And these diverse lines of investigation also correspond to a plurality of methodologies for research. These limited forms of knowledge are enormously valuable, both intellectually and practically -- even though they do not add up to a unified and comprehensive representation of the social world as a whole. Social knowledge is inherently incomplete and incompletable. Weber points to this idea in his essay, "'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy" in The Methodology of The Social Sciences (link):

There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture -- or put perhaps more narrowly but certainly not essentially differently for our purposes -- of "social phenomena" independent of special and "one-sided" viewpoints according to which -- expressly or tacitly, consciously or unconsciously -- they are selected, analyzed and organized for expository purposes. (72)

I do not construe this passage as an early version of "post-modernist relativism", but rather Weber's recognition of the inherently open texture of social phenomena. There is no limit to the empirical, theoretical, causal, cultural, and historical research questions that can be formulated with regard to almost any ensemble of social phenomena over time.

Consider a particular sociological topic: the nature and dynamics of the 20th-century urban place -- the city. Acquaintance with a range of cities allows us to note that there are aspects of similarity and difference across "cities". This suggests a range of kinds of investigation of urban life. We can study the particulars of specific cities (Mumbai, Bonn, Mexico City, Chicago) through careful case studies. Second, it is promising to engage in comparative studies of aspects of a range of cities that seem to work out differently. How do the public transit systems of Mexico City, Mumbai, and Chicago compare to each other? How does corruption affect the municipal governments of several cities differently? And finally, it is intriguing to consider whether there are some processes and mechanisms that are recur across cities in the modern world, leading to limited but genuine generalizations that can be discovered through quantitative comparisons. Epidemiological findings about the transmission of infectious diseases might be one such area where generalizations across many or all cities can be discovered.

But consider the enormous range of questions that can be asked about cities:

• Why is Chicago located where it is?
• Why are cities located where they are?
• What are the patterns of residence in cities, and what factors explain these patterns?
• How are features of health status distributed across place and population in cities?
• What kinds of transportation exist in the urban environment, and why?
• How are the necessities of life -- food, water, clothing, ... -- provided in adequate quantities to the population of a city?
• How do people in the city make their livings?
• How are urban services provided, funded, and managed?
• How is the urban population governed?
• How is civil peace maintained in the urban population?
• Why did Detroit, Newark, and Cleveland experience uprisings/race riots in 1967 and 1968?
• What meanings are associated with the design and architecture of a given city by its residents?
• What kinds and frequencies of crimes occur in the city?
• What factors enhance or inhibit crime in cities?
• ...

It is evident that this list can be extended indefinitely. There are always new and interesting questions that can be posed and investigated about an individual city or a group of cities. And any one of these questions can be the basis of an entire research program in the social and human sciences, involving theory, observation, archival research, discovery of institutional arrangements, cultural interpretation, historical research, and so on, for a densely developed set of research ideas and initiatives. So, QED: there can never be a "finished and comprehensive sociology of the city".

This discussion supports the conclusion that the open-endedness of the social world is quite different from the natural world. Once scientific attention turned to the question of the behavior and properties of gases, there were a number of different avenues that could be pursued; but ultimately, we can understand the behavior of gases in terms of a few simple laws and mechanisms: molecules, elastic collisions, intermolecular forces, kinetic energy, entropy, laws of thermodynamics, and perhaps a bit of the mathematics of complex systems to explain local patterns of turbulence. But there is no hidden mystery in the behavior of a gas. The behavior of a population in a city over the stretch of a century is entirely different from this simple story about gases. The mechanisms, meanings, and dynamics of a social population can be investigated along countless different dimensions, and there are no fixed and final "laws of social interaction" that ultimately allow the explanation of the social ensemble -- the city. And this open texture of sociological investigation of the city seems to be true for virtually every aspect of social life.

(Here are some additional posts on cities illustrating the range of social-science studies of urban life that is possible; link, link, link, link, link.)

Ludwik Fleck and "thought styles" in science

Let's think about the intellectual influences that have shaped philosophers of science over the past one hundred years or so: Vienna Circle empiricism, logical positivism, the deductive-nomological method, the Kuhn-Lakatos revolution, incorporation of the sociology of science into philosophy of science, a surge of interest in scientific realism, and an increasing focus on specific areas of science as objects of philosophy of science investigations. And along these waypoints it would be fairly easy to place a few road signs indicating the major philosophers associated with each phase in the story -- Ayer, Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel, Nagel, Hanson, Hesse, Kuhn, Lakatos, Putnam, Boyd, Quine, Sellars, Bhaskar, Sober, Rosenberg, Hausman, Epstein ...

So we might get the idea that we've got a pretty good idea of the "space" in which philosophy of science questions should be posed, along with a sense of the direction of change and progress that has occurred in the field since 1930. The philosophy of science is a "tradition" within philosophy, and we who practice in the field have a sense of understanding its geography.

But now I suggest that readers examine Wojciech Sady's excellent article on Ludwik Fleck in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (link). Fleck (1896-1961) was a Polish-Jewish scientist and medical researcher who wrote extensively in the 1930s about "social cognition" and what we would now call the sociology of science. His biography is fascinating and harrowing; he and his family survived life in Lvov under the Soviet Union (1939-1941) after the simultaneous invasion of Poland by Germany and the USSR; occupation, pogroms, and capture by the Germans in Lvov; resettlement in the Lvov ghetto; transport to Auschwitz and later Buchenwald; and survival throughout, largely because of his scientific expertise on typhus vaccination. Fleck survived to serve as a senior academic scientist in Lublin. In 1957 Fleck and his wife emigrated to Israel, where their son had settled.

Fleck is not entirely unknown to philosophers today, but it's a close call. A search for articles on Fleck in a research university search engine produces about 2,500 academic articles; by comparison, the same search results in 183,000 articles on Thomas Kuhn. And I suspect that virtually no philosopher with a PhD from a US department of philosophy since 1970 and with a concentration in the philosophy of science has ever heard of Fleck. 100% of those philosophers, of course, will have a pretty good idea of Kuhn's central ideas. And yet Fleck has a great deal in common with Kuhn -- some three decades earlier. More importantly, many of Fleck's lines of thought about the history of concepts of disease in medicine are still enormously stimulating, and they represent potential sources of innovation in the field today. Fleck asked very original and challenging questions about the nature of scientific concepts and knowledge. Thomas Kuhn was one of the few historians of science who were aware of Fleck's work, and he wrote a very generous introduction to the English translation of Fleck's major book in the sociology and history of science, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1979/1935).

Here are Fleck's central ideas, as summarized by Sady. Understanding the world around us (cognition) is a collective project. Individuals interacting with each other about some aspect of the world constitute a "thought collective" -- "a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction" (Sady, sect. 3). A thought collective forms a vocabulary and crafts a set of concepts that are mutually understood within the group, but misunderstood by persons outside the group. A "thought collective" forms a "collective bond" -- a set of emotions of loyalty and solidarity which Fleck describes as a "collective mood". There are no "objective facts"; rather, facts are defined by the terms and constructs of the "thought collective". And the perceptions, beliefs, and representations of different "thought collectives" concerned with ostensibly the same subject matter are incommensurable.

So it is not possible to compare a theory with “reality in itself”. It is true that those who use a thought style give arguments for their views, but those arguments are of restricted value. Any attempt to legitimize a particular view is inextricably bound to standards developed within a given style, and those who accept those standards accept also the style. (Sady, sect. 7)

And scientific knowledge is entirely conditional upon the background structure of the "thought collective" or conceptual framework of the research community:

As Fleck states in the last sentence of (1935b), “'To see’ means: to recreate, at a suitable moment, a picture created by the mental collective to which one belongs”. (Sady, sect. 5)

Thus, it is impossible to see something radically new “simply and immediately”: first the constrains of an old thought style must be removed and a new style must emerge, a collective's thought mood must change— and this takes time and work with others. (Sady, sect. 5)

These ideas plainly correspond closely to Imre Lakatos's idea of a research community and Thomas Kuhn's idea of a paradigm. They stand in striking contrast to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle being developed at roughly the same time. (And yet Sady notes that Moritz Schlick offered to recommend publication of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact in 1934.)

Upon first exposure to Fleck's ideas from the Sady article I initially assumed that Fleck was influenced by Communist ideas about science and knowledge (as were Polish sociologists and philosophers in the 1950s). The "collective thoughts" that are central to Fleck's account of the history of science sound a lot like Engels or Lenin. And yet this turns out not to be the case. Nothing in Sady's article suggests that Fleck was influenced by Polish Communist theory in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, his ideas about social cognition seem to develop out of a largely central European tradition of thinking about thinking. According to Sady, Fleck's own "thought collectives" (research traditions) included: (1) medical research; (2) the emerging field in Poland of history of medicine (Władysław Szumowski, Włodzimierz Sieradzki, and Witold Ziembicki); (3) the Polish "philosophical branch" of mathematical-philosophical school (minor); (4) sociology of knowledge (Levy-Bruhl, Wilhelm Jerusalem; but not Max Scheler or Karl Mannheim; also minor). Sady also emphasizes Fleck's interest in the debates that were arising in physics around the puzzles of quantum mechanics and relativity theory.

So there is a major irony here: one of Fleck's central ideas is that individual thinkers can achieve nothing by themselves as individuals. And yet Fleck's ideas as developed in his history of the medical concept of syphilis appear to be largely self-generated -- the results of his own knowledge and reflection. The advocate of the necessity of "thought collectives" was himself not deeply integrated into any coherent thought collective.

This story has an important moral. Most importantly, it confirms to me that there are always important perspectives on a given philosophical topic that have fallen outside the mainstream and may be forever forgotten. This suggests the value, for philosophers and other scholars interested in arriving at valuable insights into difficult problems, of paying attention to the paths not taken in previous generations. There is nothing in the nature of academic research that guarantees that "the best ideas of a generation will become part of the canon for the next generation"; instead, many good and original ideas have been lost to the disciplines through bad luck. This is largely true of Fleck.

But here is another, more singular fact that is of interest. How did Sady's article, and therefore Fleck himself, come to my attention? The answer is that in the past year I've been reading a lot about Polish and Jewish intellectuals from the 1930s with growing fascination because of a growing interest in the Holocaust and the Holodomor. That means a lot of searches on people like Janina Bauman, Leszek Kołakowski, and Vasily Grossman. I've searched for the histories of places like Lvov, Galicia, and Berdichev. And in the serendipity of casting a wide net, I've arrived at the happy experience of reading Sady's fascinating article, along with some of Fleck's important work.

Here is the prologue to Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. It expresses very concisely Fleck's perspective on science, concepts, and facts.

What is a fact?

A fact is supposed to be distinguished from transient theories as something definite, permanent, and independent of any subjective interpretation by the scientist. It is that which the various scientific disciplines aim at. The critique of the methods used to establish it constitutes the subject matter of epistemology.

Epistemology often commits a fundamental error: almost exclusively it regards well-established facts of everyday life, or those of classical physics, as the only ones that are reliable and worthy of investigation. Valuation based upon such an investigation is inherently naive, with the result that only superficial data are obtained.

Moreover, we have even lost any critical insight we may once have had into the organic basis of perception, taking for granted the basic fact that a normal person has two eyes. We have nearly ceased to consider this as even knowledge at all and are no longer conscious of our own participation in perception. Instead, we feel a complete passivity in the face of a power that is independent of us; a power we call “existence” or “reality.” In this respect we behave like someone who daily performs ritual or habitual actions mechanically. These are no longer voluntary activities, but ones which we feel compelled to perform to the exclusion of others. A better analogy perhaps is the behavior of a person taking part in a mass movement. Consider, for instance, a casual visitor to the Stock Exchange, who feels the panic selling in a bear market as only an external force existing in reality. He is completely unaware of his own excitement in the throng and hence does not realize how much he may be contributing to the general state. Long-established facts of everyday life, then, do not lend themselves to epistemological investigation.

As for the facts of classical physics, here too we are handicapped by being accustomed to them in practice and by the facts themselves being well worn theoretically. I therefore believe that a “more recent fact,” discovered not in the remote past and not yet exhausted for epistemological purposes, will conform best to the principles of unbiased investigation. A medical fact, the importance and applicability of which cannot be denied, is particularly suitable, because it also appears to be very rewarding historically and phenomenologically. I have therefore selected one of the best established medical facts: the fact that the so-called Wassermann reaction is related to syphilis.

HOW, THEN, DID THIS EMPIRICAL FACT ORIGINATE AND IN WHAT DOES IT CONSIST?

Lvov, Poland, summer 1934

Decision-making for big physics

Big science is largely dominant in many areas of science -- for example, high-energy physics, medical research, the human genome project, and pandemic research. Other areas of science still function well in a "small science" framework -- mathematics, evolutionary biology, or social psychology, for example, with a high degree of decentralized decision-making by individual researchers, universities, and laboratories. But in areas where scientific research requires vast investments of public funds over decades, we are forced to ask a hugely important question: Can governmental agencies act rationally and intelligently in planning for investments in "big science"?

Consider the outcome we would like to see: adoption of a well-funded and well-coordinated multi-investigator, multi-institutional, multi-year research effort well designed to achieve important scientific results. This is the ideal result. What is required in order to make it a reality? Here are the key activities of information-gathering and decision-making that are needed in order to arrive at a successful national agenda for an area of big-science research.

1. selection of one or more research strategies that have the best likelihood of bringing about important scientific results
2. a budgeting process and series of decisions that make these strategies feasible
3. implementation of a multi-year plan (often over multiple research sites) implementing the chosen strategy
4. oversight and management of the scientific research sites and expenditures to ensure that the strategy is faithfully carried out by talented scientists, researchers, and directors

In A New Social Ontology of Government: Consent, Coordination, and Authority I argue that governments, agencies, and large private organizations have a great deal of difficulty in carrying out large, extended plans. There I highlight principal-agent problems, conflicting priorities across sub-groups, faulty information sharing, and loose coupling within a large organization as some of the primary sources of dysfunction within a large organization (including a national government or large governmental agency). And it is apparent that all of these sources of dysfunction are present in the process of designing, funding, and managing a national science agenda.

Consider item 1 above: selection of a research strategy for scientific research. At any given time in the development of a field of research there is a body of theory and experimental findings that constitute what is currently known; there are experts (scientists) who have considered judgments about what the most important unanswered questions are, and what technologies or experimental investments would be most productive in illuminating those questions; and there are influential figures within government and industry who have preferences and beliefs about the direction that future research ought to take. 

Suppose government has created an agency -- call it the Office of High Energy Physics -- which is charged to arrive at a plan for future directions and funding for research in the field of high energy physics. (There is in fact the Office of High Energy Physics located within the Department of Energy which has approximately this responsibility. But here I am considering a hypothetical agency.) How should the director and senior staff of OHEP proceed? 

They will recognize that they need rigorous and developed analysis from a group of senior physicists. The judgments of the best physicists in the national research and university community are surely the best (though fallible) source of guidance about the direction that future physics research should take. So OHEP constitutes a permanent committee of advisors who are tasked to assess the current state of the field and arrive at a consensus view of the most productive direction for future investments in high-energy physics research.

The Standing Scientific Committee is not a decision-making committee, however; rather, it prepares reports and advice for the senior staff and director of OHEP. And the individuals who make up the senior staff themselves have been selected for having a reasonable level of scientific expertise; further, they have their own "pet" projects and ideas about what topics are likely to be the most important. So the senior staff and the Standing Committee are in a complex relationship with each other. The Standing Scientific Committee collectively has greater intellectual authority in the scientific field; many are Nobel-quality physicists. But the senior staff have greater influence on the decisions that the Office makes about strategies and future plans. The staff are always there, whereas the Standing Committee does its work episodically. Moreover, the senior staff has an ability to influence the deliberations of the Standing Committee in a variety of ways, including setting the agenda of the Standing Committee, giving advice about the likelihood of funding of various possible strategies, and so forth. Finally, it is worth noting that a group of twenty senior physicists from a range of institutions throughout the country are likely to have interests of their own that will find their way into the deliberations, leading to disagreements about priorities. In short, the process of designing a plan for the next ten years of investments in high-energy physics research is not a purely rational and scientific exercise; it is also a process in which interests, influence, and bureaucratic manipulation play crucial roles.

Now turn to item 2 above, the budgeting issue. Decisions about funding of fundamental scientific research result from a political, legislative, and bureaucratic process. Congressional committees will be involved in the decision whether to allocate $5 billion, $10 billion, or $15 billion in high-energy physics research in the coming decade. And Congressional committees have their own sources of bias and dysfunction: legislators' political interests in their districts, relationships with powerful industries and lobbyists, and ideological beliefs that legislators bring to their work. These political and economic interests may influence the legislative funding process to favor one strategy over another -- irrespective of the scientific merits of the alternatives. (If one strategy brings more investment to the home state of a powerful Senator, this may tilt the funding decision accordingly.) Further, the system of Congressional staff work can be further analyzed in terms of the interests and priorities of the senior staffers doing the work -- leading once again to the likelihood that funding decisions will be based on considerations other than the scientific merits of various strategies for research. (Recall the debacle of Congressional influence on the Osprey VTOL aircraft development process.) 

Items 3 and 4 introduce a new set of possible dysfunctions into the process, through the likelihood of principal-agent problems across research sites. Directors of the National Laboratories (like Fermilab or Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for example) have their own interests and priorities, and they have a fairly wide range of discretion in decisions about implementation of national research priorities. So securing coordination of research efforts across laboratories and research sites introduces another source of uncertainty in the implementation and execution of a national strategy for physics research. This is an instance of "loose coupling", a factor that has led organizational theorists to come to expect a fair degree of divergence across the large network of sub-organizations that make up the national research system. Thomas Hughes considers these kinds of problems in Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World; link. 

These observations do not imply that rational science policy is impossible; but they do underline the difficulties that arise within normal governmental and private institutions that interfere with the idealized process of selection and implementation of an optimal strategy of scientific research. The colossal failure of the Superconducting Super Collider -- a multi-billion dollar project in high-energy physics that was abandoned in 1993 after many years of development and expenditure -- illustrates the challenges that national science planning encounters (link). Arguably, one might hold that the focus at Fermilab on neutrino detection is another failure (DUNE) -- not because it was not implemented, but because it fails the test of making possible fundamental new discoveries in physics.

Several interdisciplinary fields take up questions like these, including Science and Technology Studies and Social Construction of Technology studies. Hackett, Amsterdamska, Lynch, and Wajcman's Handbook of Science and Technology Studies provides a good exposure to the field. Here is a prior post that attempts to locate big science within an STS framework. And here is a post on STS insights into science policy during the Cold War (link).

Vienna Circle in Emerson Hall

image: University of Vienna, 2016

I am enjoying reading David Edmonds' The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, which is interesting in equal measures in its treatment of the rise of fascism in Austria and Germany, the development of the Vienna Circle, and -- of course -- the murder of Schlick. Edmonds' presentation of the philosophical issues that drove the Vienna Circle is especially good. (Here is a link to an earlier discussion of Schlick's murder; link.) 

In addition to the narrative, the book contains some very interesting photographs of most of the participants in the Vienna Circle. One of those is this image, captioned "Otto Neurath chatting to Alfred Tarski". The caption does not include information about date or location.

1939

The photo immediately struck me as familiar. It seemed to be the side entrance to Emerson Hall, home of the philosophy department at Harvard. So I did some searching on the web and found that there was a meeting of the International Congress for the Unity of Science (the descendent of the Vienna Circle), which took place at Harvard September 3-9, 1939. This was the fifth and final congress. And both Neurath and Tarski were in attendance. It seems likely enough, then, that this photo is from the 1939 gathering at Harvard. Here is Gerald Holton's list of the attendees and presenters at the Congress (Science and Anti-Science):

I located a photo taken of that entrance to Emerson Hall just a few years ago:

2017

Here is a version of that image, cropped to roughly the proportions of the 1939 photo. 

2017

I'm convinced -- this certainly looks like the same location to me. Harvard has made some improvements on the entrance since 1939 -- the door is modernized, the lamps have been added, the vines have been pruned, and the handrails have been provided. The shape of the brick columns to the sides of the entrance is visible through the vines in the 1939 photo. I seem to remember luxuriant vines from the 1970s on that face of the building. And indeed, that is true. Other photos of the same entrance from 1973 show the vines are more extensive. (Also there are no handrails.)

But one challenge remains: is it possible to identify other people in the 1939 photo? Here is a possibility: I think Quine is one of the people in the photo. Here is Quine as I remember him from 1973:

But his looks changed dramatically from his 30s to his sixties and seventies. Here is Quine as photographed in the Edmonds book from the 1930s:

Finally here is Quine in a book cover photo, evidently taken in the 1940s:

This looks a lot like the man standing directly behind Tarski in the first photo (above Tarski's head). The giveaway is the pattern baldness visible in the 1939 photo and the book jacket photo. It is hard to be sure, of course, but the similarity is striking.

Are there any other familiar faces in the photo? Carnap was present at the Congress and was close to Quine, but none of the faces I see in the photo look much like Carnap. I am especially curious about the man standing behind Neurath and talking with the person I take to be Quine.

This is all very interesting to me, for a number of reasons. I was a graduate assistant to Quine in his undergraduate course on "Methods of Logic," and I took his course on Word and Object in 1973 or so. It is striking today to realize that Quine in 1973 was closer in time to the Vienna Circle in the 1930s (35-40 years) than we are today to Quine and Goodman in the 1970s in Emerson Hall (45-50 years). In a small way this illustrates a meaningful point that Marc Bloch makes about the philosophy of history: we are connected to events in the past through meaningful chains of relationships with other human beings.