Shiju Sam Varughese
STS scholars would agree that science is socially constructed. This is the fundament of the field, developed and established through a century of debates. However, what exactly do we mean that ‘science is socially constructed’? Interestingly, STS scholars disagree on what the field’s ‘central dogma’ implies. Since the Sokal affair in the late 1990s, alongside their public defence of social constructivism, STS scholars revisited their original positions and many leading thinkers came up with specific takes on the matter. Books authored by Bruno Latour (Pandora’s Hope, 1999) and Ian Hacking (The Social Construction of What?1999) are examples.
Since those belligerent years of the science wars, constructivist standpoints have proliferated. It goes without saying that our perspectives on the social construction of science intensely shape our specific research projects. Therefore, it is important to understand the statement in its complexity. Let me attempt to gather the plethora of interpretations under four rubrics to make them handy. These broad rubrics should be understood as heuristic devices to work with, rather than as rigid and fixed frameworks. Even some of the scholars I mark here as representing a particular standpoint may condemn my curt behaviour. Nevertheless, I hope that these four major rubrics will help us shape our own individual vantage points.
Before explaining these positions, I want to invite your attention to some basic concepts, which many of you would know well. Ontology enquires about the nature of reality. What do we consider as ‘real’? In the context of natural sciences, the question is about natural reality, or ‘nature’, which science strives to study. Epistemology is the philosophical enquiry into the theory of knowledge. In our context, it is about how science comprehends natural reality: how do scientists understand a phenomenon or entity as natural? While ontologists contemplate what exists, epistemologists investigate the means of knowing we employ to understand what exists. There are different schools in philosophy that propound a certain relationship between the real and the process of knowing, but for brevity, I will introduce only the realist school here. Realists believe that there is a mind-independent reality (Nature with a capital N) existing out there, irrespective of our attempts to understand it. From this vantage point, scientists try their best to represent it through theories and models. Engaged in this activity, they create a system of knowledge-representations about Nature that may be called the ‘natural order’. Through the process of knowing, the scientific community captures reflections of Nature, according to the realists.
Now we are ready to examine the four STS-positions on the social construction of science. The first standpoint may be called weak social constructivism. As the name indicates, the argument here is that science is socially constructed, but only in a limited manner. Weak social constructionists consider the organisation of science as social, while the intellectual activities are cognitive and hence not social. For them, the betterment of organizational elements such as science policies, institutions (universities, research institutes, etc.), reward systems (for career advancement, academic and social recognition and so on), public communication of science, funding, science education, inclusion and equity in science will facilitate science. J.D. Bernal, a Marxist thinker who discussed the social function of science and Robert K. Merton, the American sociologist who launched sociology of science as a field, hold this view.
Strong social constructivists were at loggerheads with the weak social constructivists. They demonstrated through detailed case studies that even the so-called cognitive processes in science are social in nature. They argued that science is embedded in power relations and scientific knowledge is generated through a complex social process which can be studied with the help of social scientific methods. Proponents of the Strong Programme of Science and Postcolonial Studies of Science along with several feminist STS scholars hold this view. Since scientific theories and discoveries are socially produced, for them, several competing interpretations of Nature exist in parallel at any moment in science. From this multiplicity, eventually a particular theory or model emerges as the truthful representation of the natural phenomena under scientific scrutiny. Success or failure of an interpretation is purely due to social causes, they point out. While believing in the mind-independent existence of natural reality (ontological realism), their epistemology is relativist. As epistemological relativists, they believe in the plausibility of multiple, mutually incompatible interpretations of the same natural reality.
The third group of scholars can seem to be the craziest! They are pure constructivists. They argue that strong social constructivists commit the mistake of taking the modern demarcation between nature and society for granted. The social constructivist approach is asymmetrical, as it relies on social sciences to analyse construction of scientific facts. Hence, they fail to realise, the pure constructivists quip, that the very demarcation of reality as natural and social is the end product of the construction process! Because of this asymmetry in their method, the strong social constructivists end up trying to explain the construction of scientific knowledge from anthropocentric perspectives. Hence, the pure constructivists shift their analytical focus to the process of construction of reality itself: they stay away from the binaries such as natural/social, human/non-human, object/subject, mind/matter and so on in their analysis. As you might have already guessed, actor-network theorists hold this view. Donna Haraway while thinking about natureculture and Karen Barad (agential realism) join the bandwagon. Their basic argument is that the real is a construction made of a complex assemblage of ideas and matters, and humans and non-humans. The process of construction is open and ongoing; also, there are umpteen parallel possibilities of weaving the real. Most of them strongly believe that there is no Nature existing outside the material-semiotic assemblage woven by science, and that there is no distinction possible between Nature and natural order, as the realists thought. The pure constructivists are hence relativists in both ontological and epistemological dimensions: actually, they reject the very separation of these dimensions for the objects and process of knowing are inseparable and ‘entangled’, to borrow a term from Karen Barad.
Co-productionists form the last cohort. They propose the co-production of social and natural orders as an alternative to the aforementioned standpoints. They keep the distinction between Nature and the natural order intact. Their emphasis is on analysing how scientists construct the natural order while being embedded in a social order. The existing social order strongly shapes the construction of the natural order. Conversely, the constructed natural order reconfigures the social order. This is an unending, mutually shaping process of co-production that opens up new analytical opportunities and challenges for STS scholars. The strong political dimension of co-production eludes the analytical radars of other standpoints, the co-productionists contend. It was Sheila Jasanoff who consolidated this standpoint. Variations on the theme were composed by the radical science movement scholars (Robert Young, for instance), Donna Haraway (earlier works), Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Ian Hacking, and Yaron Ezrahi. Co-productionists are ontological realists, but their epistemology is relativist. They believe not only in developing a critique of the process of construction but also intervening and changing it, to democratize the simultaneous construction of natural and social orders.
As an STS scholar, what is your standpoint?
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Dr. Shiju Sam Varughese is an assistant professor at the Department of Studies in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, School of Social Sciences, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. He was a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence (F-NAPE) Fellow at the Department of Science and Technology Studies of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York during 2022–23. He has authored Contested Knowledge: Science, Media, and Democracy in Kerala (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-edited Kerala Modernity: Ideas, Spaces and Practices in Transition (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2015; paperback edition: 2017). He is a bilingual scholar writing in English and Malayalam. His forthcoming book in Malayalam titled Shasthravimarsham: Samoohika Jnanasidhanthasameepanangal introduces Science, Technology and Society Studies (DC Books, Kottayam) to the general reader.
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Image by Bishnu Sarangi from Pixabay
