Ramsey and the Vienna Circle 11

H ELEN E. L ONGINO

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AFTER THE SOCIAL TURN *

A word, first, about my title. Here, in Vienna, you might well ask, which social turn? Recently, scholars of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle have been bringing us a different picture of logical empiricism than the one many philosophers educated in the ‘60’s, ‘70’s and ‘80’s in the United States encountered. I think here of Friedrich Stadler and Elisabeth Nemeth at this university and Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Richard Creath, Michael Friedman, Ron Giere, Alan Richardson, Thomas Uebel, elsewhere. Some have been trying to set the record straight while others are looking for a new model for philosophy of science and others some of both. The involvement of many Vienna Circle members in Red Vienna and socialist politics, the view of some, especially Otto Neurath, that the role of philosophy of science was to advance the integration of a scientific worldview and a democratic polity, gives the lie to the picture of a detached philosophy concerned only with logical structure and meaningfulness. And we are reminded that John Dewey in North America was also deeply concerned with the democracy enhancing potential of a properly reconstituted science. So, we might speak of a “social return,” or a revival of the social, that is, a reengaging with both analytical and socially normative questions about relations between science and society that characterized both philosophy in Europe and philosophy in North America before the ascendance of the North American form of logical empiricism. Of course, already in 1962, Thomas Kuhn was pointing to the importance of social factors, but the philosophy of science profession on the whole undertook to defend the integrity, objectivity, autonomy, and rationality of science from what it regarded as the irrationalism and subjectivism of Kuhn’s view. Since the 1990s, an interest in the challenges of feminism, in a critical science movement, in social-cultural studies of science, and in naturalism in philosophy, has encouraged some philosophers of science to shed their defensiveness and to think more constructively about the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. As the work of the scholars I mentioned above makes clear, there are deep resonances, areas of agreement and overlap between the concerns and approaches of the logical empiricists in their European, pre-diasporic, phase, esp. 167 M. C. Galavotti (ed.), Cambridge and Vienna: Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, 167–177. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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those identified with the left wing of the Vienna Circle, and those of today’s philosophers, at least those partaking in this social (re)turn. At the same time there are significant differences. General philosophy of science today is still emerging from the hegemony of a stripped down logical positivism, as contrasted with the metaphysical and normative inclinations of pre-1920s philosophy. Even scientific realists work within parameters largely set by that form of logical positivism. The feminists and scholars in social and cultural studies of science who criticize those parameters are read as anti-science and anti-rational rather than opposed to a particular philosophical theory of science and rationality. So the rhetorical situation in philosophy is different. And the sciences have developed in status and achievement only dreamt of in the early decades of the century. The industrialized societies have created and inhabit a science and science-based technology saturated world. Nuclear physics gave rise to nuclear power generation and weapons capable of incinerating hundreds of thousands at a time. Genetics and molecular biology gave us insights into biological reproduction, inheritance, aspects of growth and development and cancer, as well as eugenics and the FlavrSavr Tomato. Transistors, materials science, and computing science transformed communication and data storage and processing. Scientists are consulted about policies concerning resource management, regulation of toxic exposure, food safety. Economists have gained unprecedented leverage over national policies, especially when they are basically capitalist, and the rubric “scientific” is a universally sought term of approbation. And so on. My point is that the material, as well as rhetorical, situation is different than it was. While it is both salutary and reassuring to see one’s views articulated in essays written 70 years ago, the differences in the rhetorical and material situations mean that we cannot just transfer their conclusions to the contemporary situation. The present situation has prompted a rethinking from the ground up of the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. This is the turn of my title. Philip Kitcher’s Science, Truth, and Democracy and my The Fate of Knowledge both respond to this turn. I would like to contrast the philosophical fundamentals of these two approaches and indicate the different directions each offers for articulating relations between the sciences and their sustaining societies. I will, of course, suggest that the approach I take is both a more adequate epistemology and a more adequate platform for the development of a social philosophy of science. Kitcher’s Science, Truth, and Democracy is a significant achievement and marks a significant shift for philosophy of science. He identifies a number of important questions about the value of science and its place in a democratic society that can be articulated and addressed from a relatively conservative epistemological position. It is a strength of his approach that at least some questions about the constructive role of values in science do not require a radical change of epistemology. Nevertheless, the epistemological conservatism of this work places

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significant limits on the kinds of investigations philosophers concerned with the social impact of science can pursue. Kitcher situates his position as the via media between constructivist debunkers of science on the one hand and the uncritical scientific faithful on the other. He begins by shoring up theses concerning scientific realism and objectivity familiar from his earlier The Advancement of Science against arguments he attributes to debunkers or to their philosophical authorities. Once realism and objectivity are secured, the excesses of the faithful can be moderated. In moderating these excesses, he accepts John Dupré’s view that languages, classification systems, are relative to our interests, so that there is no privileged system of natural kinds. There are multiple correct ways of representing reality. There may be different theories of a phenomenon answering to different practical or epistemic interests. In contrast to the argument of his earlier book, in Science, Truth, and Democracy there is no single overarching criterion of significance that enables the philosopher to evaluate alternative theories. Nevertheless, he claims, the multiple languages and classificatory schemes in which theories can be expressed, each correct relative to some set of interests, are and must be all consistent with each other.1 Where does any form of sociality enter? For Kitcher, scientific inquiry is contingently social, that is, it is pursued within and by communities of inquirers, and a scientific epistemology must take account of that fact. His models in Advancement of the distribution of cognitive labor and of the appropriate level of deference to cognitive authority were intended to bring the communitarian aspects of inquiry within the reach of mainstream individualistic epistemology. In Science, Truth, and Democracy, however, he is also considering the relation between scientific inquiry and a democratic polity. Thus, he asks to what evaluative norms can or must science be subject? Or as he puts it, can “collective research be organized in a way to promote our collective values in the most encompassing sense?” (p. 111) Since no apriori argument for what constitutes the objective common good can be provided, the answer is that research must be subordinated to enlightened democratic decision-making. His discussion of “well-ordered science” is an account of the deliberation that, in his view, would ideally determine choice of research projects to be pursued in a society. As long as the actual pattern of research agendas is the same as the outcome of ideal deliberation concerning such agendas would be, were such deliberation to take place, science is well ordered. But the arguments regarding realism and objectivity have provided the limits on the reach of such decision-making: it is the research agenda not the research process that is subject to democratic oversight. Are these limits justified? Let us take just the arguments concerning objectivity. Kitcher approaches the objectivity of science as a question about the balance of evidential vs. political or value-laden factors in choosing between rival theories. Here he clearly has in mind the use of underdetermination

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arguments by debunkers to support their view that scientific controversy is inevitably decided by non-epistemic values rather than by evidence. There are many ways to understand underdetermination and its implications. Kitcher chooses two. One, easily disposed of, concerns the possibility of empirically equivalent alternative theoretical formulations of the same formalism. These, for example the empirical equivalence of the Schrödinger and Heisenberg formulations of quantum mechanics, he says, may not admit of a systematic treatment. But the permanent underdetermination in such cases rests on particular features of the theories and cannot be generalized to scientific theories in general. The harder question concerns rival theories each claiming some common successes, some different successes, and some failures. Kitcher here calls on an example, the chemical revolution initiated by Lavoisier. While at the outset both the phlogiston theory and Lavoisier’s theory could each claim some successes, as time went on, more and more successes accrued to Lavoisier and more and more unsolved problems to the phlogiston theory. Since the scientific community eventually decided in favor of the theory that had more successes than unsolved problems, we can say that at least sometimes the scientific community over time resolves controversies on the basis of evidence. Thus is objectivity secured as a meaningful ideal for science. But this argument strategy does not take into account metaphysical differences that may underlie different ways of reading, selecting, and evaluating data. It accepts the debunker’s view that underdetermination, if not kept at bay, leaves scientific deliberation always at the mercy of values or politics. There is another way to see underdetermination than Kitcher does: not as a matter of empirically undecidable conflicts between two or more theories but as a matter of relations between theories and the evidence available for them. This way of understanding underdetermination sees it as a matter of the gap between what is presented to us for observation and measurement, whether in the kitchen and garden or in the laboratory, and the processes that we suppose produce the world as we experience it, between our data and the theories, models, and hypotheses developed to explain the data, On this view, underdetermination is a goad to inquiring what reliance on evidence amounts to. As long as the content of theoretical statements is not represented as generalizations of data or the content of observational statements is not identified with theoretical claims then there is a gap between hypotheses and data and the choice of hypothesis is not fully determined by the data. A familiar example from particle physics is provided by relations between claims about collisions and disintegrations of elementary particles and the data available to support such claims. Claims about the behavior of pions and muons and the other members of the “particle zoo” are not based on direct observation of the particles themselves, but on phenomena that can be observed – tracks in compressed gas, the sequence of ciphers on data tapes. For another example, correlation of exposure to or secretion of a particular hormone with a physiological or behavioral phenomenon is evidence that the hormone causes the physiological or behavioral phenomenon

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in light of an assumption that hormone secretions have a causal or regulative status in the processes in which they are found rather than being epiphenomenal to or effects of those processes. And more generally, the correlation of one particular kind of event with another is evidence that one causes the other in light of an assumption that the one kind has or can have a causal influence on the other. Nor do hypotheses taken singly specify the data that will confirm them. Data alone are mute and consistent with different and conflicting hypotheses. They require supplementation in order to be made evidentially relevant. The supplement required to establish a connection between hypotheses and data reports is provided by (background) assumptions. These include substantive and methodological assumptions that, from one point of view, form the framework within which inquiry is pursued and, from another, structure the domain about which inquiry is pursued. These assumptions are most often not articulated, but presumed by the scientists relying on them. They facilitate the reasoning between what is known and what is hypothesized. Some sociologists of science have used versions of the underdetermination problem to argue that epistemological concerns with truth and good reasons are irrelevant to the understanding of scientific inquiry and judgment. The point, however, should not be that observation and logic as classically understood are irrelevant, but that they are insufficient. The sociologists’ empirical investigations show that they are explanatorily insufficient. The philosophers’ underdetermination argument shows that they are epistemically insufficient. My view, spelled out in more detail in The Fate of Knowledge, is that rather than spelling doom for the epistemological concerns of the philosopher, the logical problem of underdetermination, taken together with the sociologists’ studies of laboratory and research practices changes the ground on which philosophical concerns operate. This new ground or problem situation is constituted by 1) treating agents/subjects of knowledge as located in particular and complex interrelationships in multiple and partially intersecting networks and 2) acknowledging that purely logical constraints cannot compel them to accept a particular theory. Those networks of relationships – with other individuals, social systems, natural objects, and natural processes – are not an obstacle to knowledge, but can be understood as a rich pool of resources – constraints and incentives – to help close the gap left by logic. The philosophical concern with justification is not irrelevant, but must be somewhat reconfigured to be made relevant to scientific inquiry. The reconfiguration I advocate involves treating justification not just as a matter of relations between sentences, statements, or the beliefs and perceptions of an individual, but as a matter of relations within and between communities of inquirers. In my 1990 book, Science as Social Knowledge, I supported this move by looking at strategies the sciences themselves employ to guard against the intrusion of personal or social values into the body of accepted results. (The conventions of peer review, reproducibility of experiments, etc.) To see these as part

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of scientific method we must expand the notion of justification. This expansion sees justification as consisting not just in the testing of hypotheses against data, but also in the subjection of hypotheses, data, reasoning, and background assumptions to criticism from a variety of perspectives. Establishing what the data are, what counts as acceptable reasoning, which assumptions are legitimate and which not becomes in this view a matter of social, discursive, interactions as much as a matter of interaction with the material world. Since assumptions are, by their nature, usually not explicit, but taken for granted ways of thinking, the function of critical interaction is to make them visible as well as to examine their metaphysical, empirical, and normative implications. The point is not that sociality provides guarantees of the sort that formal connections were thought to provide in older conceptions of confirmation, but that cognitive and epistemic practices have social dimensions. Acknowledging this cognitive and epistemic sociality has two consequences. In the first place, any normative rules or conditions for scientific inquiry must include conditions applying to social interactions in addition to conditions applying to observation and reasoning. A full account of justification or objectivity must spell out conditions that a community must meet for its discursive interactions to constitute effective criticism. I have proposed that establishing or designating appropriate venues for criticism, uptake of criticism (i.e. response and change), public standards that regulate discursive interaction, and what I now call tempered equality of intellectual authority, are conditions that make effective or transformative criticism possible. The public standards include aims and goals of research, background assumptions, methodological stipulations, ethical guidelines, and so on. Such standards regulate critical interaction in the sense of serving to delimit what will count as legitimate criticism. They are, thus, invoked in different forms of critical discussion, but most importantly, they are themselves subject to critical scrutiny. Their status as regulative principles in some community depends on their continuing to serve the cognitive aims of that community. The particular conditions of effective or transformative criticism that I have proposed (which Miriam Solomon has dubbed the norms of critical contextual empiricism or CCE norms) may not be the conditions ultimately settled on, but what I do contend is that something like them [conditions that establish the effectiveness of critical interaction] must be added to the set of methodological norms. Secondly, even though a community may operate with effective structures that block the spread of idiosyncratic assumptions, those assumptions that are shared by all members of a community will not only be shielded from criticism, but, because they persist in the face of effective structures, may even be reinforced. One obvious solution is to require diversity within the community to reduce the likelihood of reliance on assumptions that would otherwise be so shielded. Another is to require interaction across communities, or at least to require openness to criticism both from within and from outside the community. Here, of course, availability is a strong constraint. Other communities that might be able to demonstrate the non self-evidence of shared assumptions or to provide

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new critical perspectives may be too distant – spatially or temporally – for contact. Background assumptions then are only provisionally legitimated; no matter how thorough their scrutiny given the critical resources available at any given time, it is possible that scrutiny at a later time will prompt reassessment and rejection. Such reassessment may be the consequence not only of interaction with new communities but also of changes in standards within a community. So objectivity would not be a matter of the community settling on the theory that eventually comes to have greater evidential support. That any theory is judged to have greater evidential support than alternatives may be (usually is) a function of shared assumptions in the community that have made certain data salient or worthy of attention and/or that devalue or fail to make perspicuous other data or that frame problems in particular ways. Objectivity, insofar as it makes sense to speak of it, would instead consist in the critical scrutiny of data, reasoning, and assumptions, that is of the elements that go into the construal of evidential relations, by a scientific community that includes multiple perspectives and whose discursive interactions satisfy the norms of critical contextual empiricism. Let me note two further points of contrast between this approach and that of Kitcher. 1. The view of underdetermination and its solution that I advance means that pluralism is permanent possibility. This possibility is a consequence of the possibility that alternative defensible epistemological frameworks may serve as the public standards. These consist of rules of data collection (including standards of relevance and precision, standards of statistical significance, specification of objects and units of measurement), inference principles, and epistemic or cognitive values. They provide frameworks for addressing different kinds of (empirical) questions about the natural and social worlds. Other philosophers have advanced pluralism as a view about the world, i.e. as the consequence of a natural complexity so deep that no single theory or model can fully capture all the causal interactions involved in any given process. While this may be the case, the philosophical point I have taken pains to make is that a theory of knowledge should not presume either pluralism or monism. Thus I think such a theory should be as open to a strong form of pluralism as to monism. These are metaphysical positions, which should not be foreclosed by an epistemological theory. Kitcher agrees that it is a mistake to presume monism and also that such a presumption has vitiated a number of previous attempts to find an alternative to excessive rationalism and excessive skepticism. But he thinks we need only accept a “modest pluralism” according to which “the bits of nature we choose to represent accurately are a function of us, our capacities, and our interests.” These representations will per force be incomplete, and different interests will lead us to classify the objects of nature in different ways. No sense, however, can be made of a robust or less modest pluralism: the suggestion that equally successful representations may be irreconcilable or non-congruent. For Kitcher,

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all true statements, properly understood, are ultimately consistent with one another. I hold, on the contrary, that the multiplicity of defensible epistemological frameworks means that such a requirement is too restrictive. Partial accounts may adequately represent certain aspects of a complex system and contain statements inconsistent with those comprising another partial account of the same system. This is established case by case. 2. As just noted in the contrastive discussion of objectivity, the centrality of critical interaction to justification on this view brings social interaction into the heart of inquiry. In The Fate of Knowledge I offered additional arguments for the sociality not just of justification, but also of observation and of the specification of semantic success (what most call “truth”, but which I prefer to call “conformation”). These arguments are opposed to an individualist thesis something like the following: “empirical knowledge can be fully understood in terms of processes undergone by epistemically self-sufficient individuals.” Kitcher advances a view that I have elsewhere called Socialism Lite, on the other hand, which accepts a contingent version of Epistemological Sociality, i.e. that as a matter of fact scientists are located in communities and accept content as a result of their interactions with each other (or, in an alternative formulation, that some knowledge is produced by scientists working in groups or in institutions). Socialism Lite might acknowledge that the intricate and powerful knowledge produced by scientific inquiry as we know it is made possible by the community of scientists, but hold that such knowledge is the cumulative product of multiple instances of individual knowledge, which, as knowledge, can be understood without reference to social interactions. The process of research is thus, from the point of the community outside the scientific one, black-boxed. I argue, on the contrary, for a normative social element as part of the meaning of “knowledge”, i.e. that epistemic acceptability of content (or epistemically justified acceptance of content) presupposes the satisfactory performance of certain kinds of social interactions. The normative notions central to common understandings of “knowledge”, such as truth and justification or epistemic acceptability and conformation (in my preferred locutions), involve both traditional evidential norms and norms of effective critical interaction. Indeed evidential norms, properly understood, include those social norms. Why does this debate about knowledge matter? Consider an issue we might call upon the sciences to resolve: the health risk posed by exposure to a given substance. The point of such knowledge would be to set policy concerning maximum permissible limits of exposure to the substance. Heather Douglas has examined research and reasoning concerning the health risks of dioxin, a byproduct of paper production that is flushed into watercourses in the vicinity of paper mills. There are research communities who will produce the various results that support setting the exposure limits at some level and there the communities that will experience the exposures as well as the communities whose activities

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release the dioxin into the environment. Both these latter stand to be affected by where the permissible exposure levels are set, and thus, by the findings of the researchers that will be used to determine the maximums. The ideal of well-ordered science would treat the question whether the toxicity should be investigated as an agenda-setting question subject to democratic oversight (whether virtual or real). Once the question is deemed worth investigating, the details of the investigation should be left to the experts. However, in order that the scientific results be worthy of acceptance by those who have not participated in producing them they – the affected outsiders – must be assured that these results have been obtained by a reliable process. (Toxicity is generally determined through animal trials.) Douglas elaborates on the openness to (value) judgment of various stages of the relevant inquiry: setting standards of statistical significance, relative weighting of type 1 versus type 2 errors, protocols for interpreting borderline cases. The point is not that researchers bring an industrial or public health agenda into the research, but that the decisions, however motivated, have value consequences. And the trustworthiness of the risk estimates is a function of assurance that at those places of judgment one group’s interests have not been arbitrarily favored over those of another. On the CCE view, in order that scientific results be worthy of acceptance by those who have not participated in producing them, the users of consumers of knowledge must be assured that the results of inquiry have been secured through a process of critical scrutiny by a community diverse enough to include members who share or represent their interests. Consider also the increased privatization of knowledge production. Since the end of the Cold War, funding of scientific research, especially biomedical research in the United States, has been shifting from the public sector – the federal government – to the private sector. This shift has consequences for the organization of inquiry, the communication of ideas, and disciplinary eminence. Universities once partnered with the government now partner with private corporations, in some instances setting up jointly owned research facilities. Researchers maintain their sense of individual freedom by forming their own corporations. Intellectual property rights have replaced government secrecy as barriers to open communication and biology, especially molecular biology, has displaced physics as the frontier discipline. What should we make of this? Has a human gift of investigation and invention been hijacked? Or are these capacities always for rent? Is there something identifiable as science apart from the ways it is institutionalized and funded? Or are scientific practices so pervaded by their funding structures that there is no continuity from one funding regime to another? And now that science has become so central to so-called advanced society, what are the consequences of leaving the production of knowledge so largely in private hands? If the research process is black-boxed, then philosophy of science becomes powerless to fully explore these and other questions about the reliability and trustworthiness of scientific knowledge in different institutional forms.

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Philosophers in the non-social interregnum largely concentrated on the epistemological, conceptual, and metaphysical aspects of scientific inquiry, seeing there not an institution, but a 500 or 2500-year tradition of seeking knowledge of the natural world. The modern sciences, however, are not merely knowledge producers; they are also commodity producers, weapons producers, instruments of governance, ideology transmitters, engines of social and economic transformation. They are not just elements of a productive system, but also of a persuasive and communicative system. As noted at the outset, in the late 20th century and early 21st, the imprimatur, “scientific,” grants prima facie credibility to any proposal. One detaches the knowledge productive function from these other roles at risk of distorting one’s understanding of them all. Let me not be misunderstood: I’m not arguing that all philosophers of science should shift to thinking about science as a social institution. But philosophers of science should not ignore this, just as philosophers of science that take the social turn should continue to draw on and be in conversation with the philosophy that focuses on science considered in abstraction from its social milieu and forms of institutionalization. This work both illuminates the changes and intellectual achievements of Western science and philosophy and offers tools for the analysis of theories and research programs in contemporary science. A philosophy of science that does take the social turn, however, if it is to be genuinely social, must be accountable not just to the scientific practitioner but to the recipient of knowledge and bearer of knowledge’s benefits and burdens. In light of the various points at which scientific practice is open to judgment and/or must rely on assumptions that are not themselves empirically demonstrated, an insistence that the epistemic practices in the research process conform with the social norms of inquiry I advocate is at least a step towards that accountability. Philosophy of science should open up the black box of research rather than insulating it from social critique.

N OTES *

I am greatly honored by the invitation from the Vienna Circle Institute to give the Twelfth Vienna Circle lecture.

1.

More precisely, he says that all true sentences will be consistent with each other even when expressed in different classificatory schemes.

R EFERENCES Cartwright, Nancy, Jordi Cat, L. Fleck, and Thomas Uebel. 1996. Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Douglas, Heather. 2000. “Inductive Risk and Values in Science” Philosophy of Science. 67, 4: 55979. Friedman, Michael. 1999. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giere, Ronald and Alan Richardson, eds. 1996. Origins of Logical Empiricism. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. XVI. Minneapolis, MN. University of Minnesota Press. Kitcher, Philip. 1993. The Advancement of Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Kitcher, Philip. 2001. Science, Truth and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolusions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Longino, Helen. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longino, Helen. 2002. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longino, Helen. 2003. “Reply to Philip Kitcher” Philosophy of Science 69, 4: 573-77. Nemeth, Elisabeth and Friedrich Stadler. 1996. Encyclopedia and utopia: the life and work of Otto Neurath (1882-1945). Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer. Solomon, Miriam and Alan Richardson. Forthcoming. “Review of Helen Longino’s The Fate of Knowledge.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Stadler, Friedrich. 2000. The Vienna Circle: Studies in the Origins, Development and Influence of Logical Empiricism. Vienna: Springer Verlag.

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