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Whatever happened to knowledge?

Stephen Turner
Social Studies of Science 2012 42: 474 originally published online 2 April 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0306312712436555
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SSS42310.1177/0306312712436555TurnerSocial Studies of Science

Whatever happened to
knowledge?

Social Studies of Science

42(3) 474480
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0306312712436555
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Stephen Turner

Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

Keywords
Bruno Latour, Michael Polanyi, science wars, social constructionism, Thomas Kuhn

Fifty years on, Kuhns Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996 [1962]) remains a landmark, but understanding its consequences for science studies is not simple. In many
ways it used ideas from Conant and Polanyi, but it reinserted claims about ungroundable
premises from neo-Kantian philosophy, with the predictable result of problems over relativism and scientific progress. These elements remained in social constructionism, leading to problems over reflexivity and reality. Latour, in Science in Action and elsewhere,
determinedly turned away from cognitive explanations in favor of networks. But networks do not explain on their own. So the task of socializing the epistemic and espistemologizing the social returns.
Kuhns Structure of Scientific Revolutions was, at the time, a dramatic break with
something, though in retrospect it is more difficult to see what the break was with than it
seemed at the time it was published. Positivism is the usual candidate for the thing that
it broke with, but the book was published in the most positivist of book series, and was
seen as unproblematic by that most positivist of readers, Rudolph Carnap. The basic
framework of the book, the idea of conceptual revolutions, was taken over from Kuhns
mentor and one of the crucial figures in the pre-history of science studies, James Bryant
Conant. Conant had employed Kuhn in the Harvard course he had designed to teach nonscience undergraduates what science was, from the point of view of the working scientist
struggling with scientific problems, rather than teach them chemical and physical formulas. Much of the descriptive account of the experience of science in Kuhns book was
taken over from Michael Polanyi (1958), whose notion of tacit knowledge, among other
things, made its way into the concept of paradigm.
Corresponding author:
Stephen Turner, Department of Philosophy FAO 226, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA.
Email: [email protected].

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Before Kuhn
What made Kuhn revolutionary, and at the same time retrograde, was something not to
be found explicitly in these writers, except in a very attenuated way in Carnaps internal
external distinction and conventionalism: the kind of radical relativism about the foundations of science that Kuhn built into his notion of paradigm. This too had a source, and it
was a source threaded through the 20th century in various guises, including one that had
a special influence at Harvard itself through Alfred North Whitehead. Also at Harvard,
the physiologist/chemist/philosopher/sociologist Lawrence J. Henderson promoted the
idea of conceptual schemes (1970 [194142]); and Carnap, who spent time at Harvard
in the late 1930s, developed an influential analysis of the internalexternal distinction
that served to translate these issues into linguistic terms, but also to conceal the problem
of relativism by treating external questions as problems insoluble by the kind of formal
analysis that could be done of the internal logic of a scientific theory (Carnap, 1950).
Conant, like Polanyi, was a physical chemist who had lived through the quantum
revolution: for him the transformation of conceptual schemes was an existential fact. But
it was a fact that had implications for the nature of scientific knowledge, and this was
what transfixed them. Both Conant and Polanyi were concerned with the specificity of
scientific knowledge, and with how scientists thought, both in relation to their subject
matter and other scientists. Polanyi in particular was fascinated with the actual psychology of scientific thinking, awareness, and the ways in which discovery happened.
This was very much in tension with both the philosophy and sociology of science of
the time. As Stephen Cole (2004: 837842; esp. 839840) has shrewdly observed, Robert
K. Mertons interest in science was with science as a whole, not with the specifics of this
or that discovery. The philosophy of science had inherited a collection of strongly held
taboos against psychologism, a bogeymen invented by philosophers such as Husserl,
Schlick, and Frege (cf. Kusch, 1995), and so concerned itself with the logical structure
of theories and the rational reconstruction of this structure, and of confirmation, rather
than what was dismissed as the context of discovery. One may think of this as a step in
the de-naturalization of epistemology. But it was to get worse.
Positivism of the Vienna variety was created as a response to a certain kind of antirelativistic neo-Kantianism, which it replaced with the idea that parts of the framework of
physics, namely the mathematical structure, were relative (Howard, 1990: 369373;
Friedman, 1999: 7186, esp. 81). The basic thought that positivism disposed of was the idea
that there was a conceptual structure uniquely valid for and presupposed by any field of science. The innovation of logical positivism was to recognize that one could get the same
scientific results, the same predictions, with different presuppositions, which implied that
these presuppositions were not properly part of science, or even part of the realm of the
factually true. They were at best conventions or something like it: necessary in the sense
that you couldnt do the prediction without some machinery like this, but not uniquely necessary, because one could do the same predictions with different conventions.
This reasoning, however, inadvertently transformed the way one could think about the
history of science. The old neo-Kantian view was that physics had a (unique) conceptual
order that it presupposed and that could be reconstructed by philosophical analysis. The
new view was that the history of science was the history of successive presuppositional

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schemes. The fact that these schemes could be further reconstructed in different ways to
produce the same predictions was a curiosity beside the historical point: that different
thinkers in fact operated with different presuppositions.

The return of Neo-Kantianism

The idea of shared presuppositions as real, operative, historical facts that explained differences in periods of science had a startling but problematic implication. If presuppositions were, as they were by definition, the end of a logical regress, they could not be
founded on anything more basic. They could not be refuted by the facts, for they were
presupposed by the description of the facts themselves. Taken seriously, this meant that
there was no real outside for a world-constituting scheme of shared presuppositions.
If there was no outside, there was no outside standard of progress, either. And if the
history of science was, at least in a significant part, a history of the succession of such
schemes, it could not be a history of progress, much less truth. Indeed, the reality of
which science was supposed to provide knowledge recedes into the mist of the unknowable and indescribable.
The history of philosophical neo-Kantianism ended in the 1920s with the ontological
turn, the moment when it was recognized that this idea of presupposition had pushed
philosophy into a relativistic dead end. The only way out was to somehow rethink the
problem of the nature of the reality being constituted. The history of science studies
repeated this. Conant and Polanyi had avoided abandoning the notion of progress,
because Conant took a more or less instrumental view of conceptual schemes and saw
scientific progress in terms of the increasing ratio of theoretical to empirical content;
Polanyi saw science as a tradition, which grew in the stepwise manner of other traditions,
with a goal that was rethought and respecified within the tradition, not a goal that served
as a permanent yardstick. Kuhns notion of paradigm, to Conants dismay, inserted the
element that reproduced the insoluble problem of relativism that had flummoxed the
neo-Kantianism from whence the notion had derived: the idea that particular scientific
paradigms were based on ungroundable premises which supplied their own standards
of success.
This element, together with the sociological idea that premises were shared by a community of some kind, transformed, and was in an odd sense foundational for, subsequent
science studies. Relativism was said by Barnes and Bloor (1982: 21) to be required for
the scientific understanding of forms of knowledge; it was made into a research program
by Harry Collins and subjected to endless debate, leading to the infamous epistemological
chicken dispute, a lengthy obsession with regress issues in the form of the problem of
reflexivity, and so forth. The positive side of all this was excitement: philosophers are congenitally averse to relativism, so this permitted a lengthy war of words that elevated
social constructionism into a major bogeyman denounced for its relativistic implications;
these flowed from constructionisms incorporation of the aspects of Kuhnianism that carried the relativistic virus specifically in the term social, which was taken to imply not
determined by physical reality, and hence over-the-top irrational.
It would take a much longer essay to reconstruct the ways in which this ballooning
comedy of errors evolved. Its apotheosis was the Social Text affair, and the defense by

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Andrew Ross (1996) of the acceptance of an absurd paper on postmodernist science.

The paper had virtually nothing to do with anything to be found in science studies as it
was actually practiced, but it enabled a number of people to wrap themselves in the
mantle of defender of science and reason. For the philosophers in this discussion, reason rather than science was the issue. For them, at stake was the whole project of naturalizing, and naturalizing epistemology and the discussion of science. They wanted
reason left in, acknowledged as necessary in the description of science, and acknowledged as a form of necessary normativity.
But this issue had some rather recherch elements. The sides had colluded in the introduction of the same problematic anti-naturalistic Kantian language. They had simply introduced opposed variants: the absolutistic language of reason as a presupposition for thought
and the neo-Kantian language of shared and hence social ultimate and ungroundable
presuppositions for particular forms of belief, including particular scientific views. The
problem with these two inheritances were not so much their determined anti-naturalism, but
the fact that there was nothing in the realm of fact that corresponded to the explainers that
they invoked. There were neither presuppositions nor sharings in the natural or social world.
Nor did it even make sense to describe the process in natural terms. Even Harry Collins
whose recent Tacit & Explicit Knowledge (2010) is a perfect example of the recycling, in the
language of collective tacit knowledge, of these same clichs acknowledges that it is a
complete mystery as to how things like the supposedly shared presuppositions that are
needed to make this reasoning work get into peoples heads. But it is not a mystery, so much
as an unwarranted appeal to a mystical non-natural process (Turner, 2011). And it is evidence of our chronic inability to move beyond the toxic inheritance of neo-Kantianism.
So science studies found itself in a situation in which two mysticisms the mysticism
of overarching unnatural Kantian normative reason and the mysticism of unnatural neoKantian shared presuppositions were making a good intellectual living by taking in
each others washing. But this was a phony war. Despite the ritual denunciation of science studies by philosophers and historians of science, the ways in which they explained
particular developments in science came to largely converge with the way science studies people did. This was especially evident with the appearance of Pickerings
Constructing Quarks (1984). For historians and philosophers of science, the way to
make this into the best history of the subject was to razor out the pages in the introductory chapter about social construction.

Actor-network theory
Science in Action (Latour, 1987) was a self-conscious goodbye to all that. Latour explicitly rejected as bogus the conflict between the competing explanations of science. This
was his response to the science wars: to be freed from all these debates about rationality, relativism, culture, and so on (p. 213). Consequently he called for a moratorium on cognitive explanations of science and technology (p. 91) at the same time as he
rejected social constructionism. Actor-network theory (ANT) was the radical substitute.
The actors were not actors, however, but actants. Latour eliminated the knower, even
the intending agent, by flattening agency to the point that everything had it, including
physical objects, all of which were actants and potential network members.

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So instead of naturalizing epistemology, ANT wound up de-epistemologizing the

social, and in the end getting rid of the social as a distinctive category as well. At the
same time, Latour (1988) hinted that once his kind of description had its day, there might
be no need for these explanations. Indeed, he explicitly rejected the demand for explanation in favor of description, though he redescribed description to include what others
might call explanation. Cognitive explanation was, however, excluded. If, by some
extraordinary chance, there is something still unaccounted for, then, and only then, look
for special cognitive abilities (Latour, 1987: 246). This was bravado. The toxic neoKantian element that produced the trouble, and the de-naturalization, of science studies
explanation was groundless presuppositions, or a priori truths. Could these be replaced
by network language? Faced with this challenge of making sense of a priori truth, Latour
tried to reduce the problem to one of the status of formalisms, but was compelled to
concede that there were no accounts of the power of these a priori items in network language. He could merely gesture in the direction of how such an account should be done.
But the basic problem with network explanations is that they arent explanations at
all, cognitive or otherwise. At best they are descriptions. This was a lesson learned by
Durkheim, when he proposed to explain things with concepts like population density, but
was forced to acknowledge that what counted as density was what people took to be
density. Similarly for networks. If a network does anything, it does so through the action
of its elements. If the elements are intentional agents, it is their beliefs about the facts
summarized by the description of the network that do the explaining: not the anthropologists kinship map, for example, but actual beliefs about kin and their relations. A standard example is this: people report that it is easier to find babysitters in the suburbs. But
the number of potential babysitters is lower than in the city. What differs is the information, trust, and so forth that permits typical parents to be comfortable with them. The
epistemic, in short, creeps back in, and the network aspect fades.
The use of terms like actant and the application of action terms, such as mobilization, gave the illusion that something more profound was happening with actor network
explanations. It was not. But the language served as a means of justifying and guiding a
huge number of research projects in which the networks were described and the actual
explanations, the things that made people within the network believe and act, were smuggled in without much scrutiny. Once the parts of the network are animated, the animation
does the explanatory work, and talk about networks drops out.
Philip Kitcher attempted to provide some explanatory go for network thinking by
arguing that one could give some normative and perhaps explanatory force to the
Latourian system. He reasoned that the networks connected not just to actants, but to
values, cognitive and social ends. The apparent fact that widely connected webs were
scientific and technological winners was explained by the fact that they connected to
valued ends (Kitcher, 2003). As for Latour, he has recently published The Science of
Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tardes Economic Anthropology, with
Vincent Antonin Lpinay (2009). This text in a sense is an answer to the problem of what
sort of causal force or reality underlies the networks and what they do, and also an admission that something is needed.
Knowledge, in short, or epistemic considerations, are inescapable. David Bloor had it
right with his exchange with Larry Laudan 30 years ago, in which he asked, as someone

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trained as a psychologist, why science had to stop cold when it came to explaining true
scientific belief (Bloor, 1981; Laudan, 1981). The battle over the limits of naturalism and
the legitimacy of normativism as an element of explanation of whether invoking a
normative notion of reason or truth actually explains a scientific belief was the right
battle, but it was subverted and confused by the presence of unreal normative transcendental notions, such as shared presuppositions.
The hard work, from which these lengthy episodes have been a diversion, is to epistemologize the social, to understand the elements of belief and belief formation, which
inevitably depend on our knowledge of others and of institutional routines, and to do
so in a naturalistic way, avoiding explanatory short-cuts, such as the appeal to transcendental non-facts of the sort that Kuhn added to Conant and infest social constructionism. And this will force us to ask the politically uncomfortable questions we find
so difficult, questions about when to believe experts, about whether and when the
consensus formation processes of science can be relied on, and to face our prejudices
with hard questions.
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Biographical note
Stephen Turner is Graduate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida,
Tampa. His most recent book is Explaining the Normative (Polity Press, 2010). His most recent
writings on relativism include Davidsons Normativity in Dialogues with with Davidson, Jeff
Malpas, ed. (MIT Press, 2011).

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