The sociology of scientific discipline formation

There was a time in the philosophy of science when it may have been believed that scientific knowledge develops in a logical, linear way from observation and experiment to finished theory. This was something like the view presupposed by the founding logical positivists like Carnap and Reichenbach. But we now understand that the creation of a field of science is a social process with a great deal of contingency and path-dependence. The institutions through which science proceeds -- journals, funding agencies, academic departments, Ph.D. programs -- are all influenced by the particular interests and goals of a variety of actors, with the result that a field of science develops (or fails to develop) with a huge amount of contingency. Researchers in the history of science and the sociology of science and technology approach this problem in fairly different ways.

Scott Frickel's 2004 book Chemical Consequences: Environmental Mutagens, Scientist Activism, and the Rise of Genetic Toxicology represents an effort to trace out the circumstances of the emergence of a new scientific sub-discipline, genetic toxicology. "This book is a historical sociological account of the rise of genetic toxicology and the scientists' social movement that created it" (kl 37).

Frickel identifies two large families of approaches to the study of scientific disciplines: "institutionalist accounts of discipline and specialty formation" and "cultural studies of 'disciplinarity' [that] make few epistemological distinctions between the cognitive core of scientific knowledge and the social structures, practices, and processes that advance and suspend it" (kl 63). He identifies himself primarily with the former approach:

I draw from both modes of analysis, but I am less concerned with what postmodernist science studies call the micropolitics of meaning than I am with the institutional politics of knowledge. This perspective views discipline building as a political process that involves alliance building, role definition, and resource allocation. ... My main focus is on the structures and processes of decision making in science that influence who is authorized to make knowledge, what groups are given access to that knowledge, and how and where that knowledge is implemented (or not). (kl 71)

Crucial for Frickel's study of genetic toxicology is this family of questions: "How is knowledge produced, organized, and made credible 'in-between' existing disciplines? What institutional conditions nurture interdisciplinary work? How are porous boundaries controlled? Genetic toxicology's advocates pondered similar questions. Some complained that disciplinary ethnocentrism prevented many biologists' appreciation for the broader ecological implications of their own investigations.... " (kl 99).

The account Frickel provides involves all of the institutional contingency that we might hope for; at the same time, it is an encouraging account for anyone committed to the importance of scientific research in charting a set of solutions to the enormous problems humanity currently faces.

Led by geneticists, these innovations were also intensely interdisciplinary, reflecting the efforts of scientists working in academic, government, and industry settings whose training was rooted in more than thirty disciplines and departments ranging across the biological, agricultural, environmental, and health sciences. Although falling short of some scientists' personal visions of what this new science could become, their campaign had lasting impacts. Chief among these outcomes have been the emergence of a set of institutions, professional roles, and laboratory practices known collectively as "genetic toxicology." (kl 37)

Frickel gives prominence to the politics of environmental activism in the emergence and directions of the new discipline of genetic toxicology. Activists on campus and in the broader society gave impetus to the need for new scientific research on the various toxic effects of pesticides and industrial chemicals; but they also affected the formation of the scientists themselves.

Also of interest is an edited volume on interdisciplinary research in the sciences edited by Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack, Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory and Practice across Disciplines. The book takes special notice of some of the failures of interdisciplinarity, and calls for a careful assessment of the successes and failures of interdisciplinary research projects.

 We think that these celebratory accounts give insufficient analytical attention to the insistent and sustained push from administrators, policy makers, and funding agencies to engineer new research collaborations across disciplines. In our view, the stakes of these efforts to seed interdisciplinary research and teaching "from above" are sufficiently high to warrant a rigorous empirical examination of the academic and social value of interdisciplinarity. (kl 187)

In their excellent introduction Frickel, Albert, and Prainsack write:

A major problem that one confronts in assuming the superiority of interdisciplinary research is a basic lack of studies that use comparative designs to establish that measurable differences in fact exist and to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinarity relative to disciplinary research. (kl 303)

They believe that the appreciation of "interdisciplinary research projects" for its own sake depends on several uncertain presuppositions: that interdisciplinary knowledge is better knowledge, that disciplines constrain interdisciplinary knowledge, and that interdisciplinary interactions are unconstrained by hierarchies. They believe that each of these assumptions is dubious.

Both books are highly interesting to anyone concerned with the development and growth of scientific knowledge. Once we abandoned the premises of logical positivism, we needed a more sophisticated understanding of how the domain of scientific research, empirical and theoretical, is constituted in actual social institutional settings. How is it that Western biology did better than Lysenko? How can environmental science re-establish its credentials for credibility with an increasingly skeptical public?  How are we to cope with the proliferation of pseudo-science in crucial areas -- health and medicine, climate, the feasibility of human habitation on Mars? Why should we be confident that the institutions of university science, peer review, tier-one journals, and National Academy selection committees succeed in guiding us to better, more veridical understandings of the empirical world around us?

Earlier posts have addressed topics concerning social studies of science; link, link, link.)

Gross on the history of analytic philosophy in America

Neil Gross has a remarkably good ear for philosophy. And this extends especially to his occasional treatments of the influences that helped shape the discipline of philosophy in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. His sociological biography of Richard Rorty is a tour de force (Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher; link). There he skillfully maps the “field” of American philosophy (in the Bourdieusian sense) and places the evolution of Rorty’s thought within the landmarks of the field. The book is an excellent exemplar of the new sociology of ideas, bringing together material, symbolic, and intellectual forces that influence the direction and shape of an intellectual tradition.

In his contribution to Craig Calhoun’s Sociology in America: A History Gross offers a very short description of the ideological and social forces that helped to determine the directions taken by the philosophy discipline in the post-war years, and this too is very illuminating. In contrast to historians of philosophy who tell the story of the development of a period in terms of the internal intellectual problems and debates that determined it, Gross seeks to identify some of the external factors that made the terrain hospitable to this movement or that. (Consider, by contrast, the internalist story that Michael Beaney tells in The Analytic Turn: Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology and in many chapters of The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy.) Several paragraphs are worth quoting at length, since philosophers are unlikely to browse this collection on the history of American sociology.

Within academic philosophy, pragmatism’s stature was diminished considerably in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s as a result of the rise of what is called analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy began with the efforts of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell in England to vanquish the idealism that had become popular there after years when empiricism dominated (Delacampagne 1999). Russell, influenced by the efforts of Gottlob Frege to develop a formal system by which logical propositions could be represented, took the view that new light could be shed on long-standing philosophical problems if attention were paid to the language in which they are expressed, and to the logical assumptions underlying that language. Russell made crucial contributions to the philosophy of mathematics, in which he tried, like Frege, to reduce mathematics topologic, but he also sought to develop an alternative metaphysics according to which objects in the world are seen as composed of logical atoms to which more complex entities can be reduced. The young Ludwig Wittgenstein studied under Russell and picked up where he and Frege left off, arguing in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) that facts, not logical atoms or objects per se, compose the world, and that language — which represents facts — does so by “picturing” them in logically valid propositions. On the basis of this assumption, Wittgenstein claimed that many traditional philosophical problems — particularly those concerning ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics, which do not meet these criteria for picturing — are nonsensical. (201-202)

Gross goes on to describe the advent of ordinary language philosophy (Ryle, Austin), and the logical positivists. The positivists are particularly important in his story and in the subsequent development of professional academic philosophy in the United States.

The positivists, along with their counterparts at Oxford and Cambridge, had an enormous impact on U.S. philosophy, giving rise to a new style and tradition of philosophical scholarship. (202)

And Gross offers a sociological and political hypothesis for why analytic philosophy prevailed over pragmatism and idealism.

That analytic philosophy, at least in its early stages, downgraded the status of political philosophy may also have helped protect the field from critical scrutiny during the McCarthy era (McCumber 2001). Within the space of a few years, philosophers who saw themselves as working in the analytic tradition came to dominate nearly all the top-ranked U.S. philosophy graduate programs, analytic work became hegemonic in the major academic journals, and analysts came to assume leadership positions in the American Philosophical Association (Wilshire 2002). Pragmatism was marginalized as a consequence. Russell, for his part, had been sharply critical of Dewey, accusing pragmatism of being a philosophy “in harmony with the age of industrialism and collective enterprise” because it involved a “belief in human power and the unwillingness to admit ‘stubborn facts,’” which manifested itself in the view that the truth of a belief is a matter of its effects rather than its causes. Some American philosophers, like Chicago’s Charles Morris, tried to combine pragmatism and logical positivism, while others, like Quine or his Harvard colleague Morton White, brought pragmatism and linguistic analysis together in other ways. Nevertheless, many who worked in an analytic style came to see pragmatism and analytic philosophy as opposed, and pragmatism’s reputation went into decline. (203)

This is a nuanced and plausible precis of the evolution of academic philosophy during these decades, and the material influences that Gross cites (the influx of Vienna-school philosophers caused by the rise of Nazism, the political threat of McCarthyism) seem to be genuine historical causes of the rise of analytic philosophy dominance. And, consistent with the methods and priorities of the new sociology of ideas (link), Gross is very sensitive to the particulars of the institutions, journals, and associations through which a discipline seeks to define itself.

Contrast this narrative with the brief account offered by Michael Beaney in his introduction to The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy. Beaney too points out the importance of the exodus of positivist philosophers from Europe caused by the Nazi rise to power (kl 636). But the balance of his account works through the substantive ideas and debates that took center stage in academic philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s. To read his account, philosophy moved forward as a consequence of a series of logical debates.

Agreement on the key founders already gives some shape to the analytic tradition -- as a first approximation, we can characterize it as what is inspired by their work. With this in mind, we can then identify two subsequent strands in analytic philosophy that develop the ideas of its four founders [Russell, Moore, Frege, Wittgenstein]. The first is the Cambridge School of Analysis ... and the second is logical empiricism. (kl 826)

The impetus of Gross's interest in the development of analytic philosophy in American universities was the impact this movement had on pragmatism. Essentially Gross argues that pragmatism was pushed into a minor role within academic philosophy by the ascendency of positivism and analytic philosophy, and that the latter occurred because of social factors in the university and society at large. Cheryl Misak is a contemporary expert on pragmatism (The American Pragmatists, New Pragmatists), and she disputes this view from a surprising point of view: she argues that analytical philosophy actually absorbed the greater part of pragmatism, and that one could make the case that pragmatist ideas have great contemporary influence within philosophy. Her argument is summarized in "Rorty, Pragmatism, and Analytic Philosophy" (link).

When the logical empiricists arrived in America, they found a soil in which their position could thrive. They did not arrive in a land that was inhospitable to their view, nor did they need to uproot the view they found already planted there. (373)

She argues that Peirce's pragmatism had much in common with positivism, and she traces a fairly direct lineage from Peirce through Dewey and C.I. Lewis to Quine, Goodman, and Roy Wood Sellars. Here is her conclusion:

The epistemology and the view of truth that dominated analytic philosophy from the 1930s logical empiricism right through to the reign of Quine, Goodman, and Sellars in the 1950s–60s was in fact pragmatism. The stars of modern analytic philosophy were very much in step with pragmatism during the years in which it was supposedly driven out of philosophy departments by analytic philosophers. (380)

It seems to me that it is possible that both Misak and Gross are right, because they are concerned with different aspects of the "field" of academic philosophy. Misak is focusing on the issues of content, logic, and epistemology, and she finds that there is a substantial continuity on these issues across the literature of both analytic philosophy and classical pragmatism. But Gross has taken a broader focus: what are the paradigmatic topics and modes of approach that were characteristic of analytic philosophy and pragmatism? What were the "styles" of thinking that were characteristic of analytic philosophy and pragmatism? And he is right in thinking that, had Peirce, James, and Dewey and their successors prevailed by dominating the chief research departments of philosophy, American academic philosophy would have looked very different.