EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL
POZNA STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCIENCES AND THE HUMANITIES VOLUME 96
EDITORS Leszek Nowak (founding editor) Jerzy Brzeziski
Marcin Paprzycki Piotr Przybysz (assistant editor)
Andrzej Klawiter Krzysztof astowski Izabella Nowakowa Katarzyna Paprzycka (editor-in-chief)
Michael J. Shaffer Piotr Ziemian (assistant editor)
ADVISORY COMMITTEE Joseph Agassi (Tel-Aviv)
Jerzy Kmita (Pozna)
Étienne Balibar (Paris)
Theo A.F. Kuipers (Groningen)
Wolfgang Balzer (München)
Witold Marciszewski (Warszawa)
Mario Bunge (Montreal)
Ilkka Niiniluoto (Helsinki)
Nancy Cartwright (London)
Günter Patzig (Göttingen)
Robert S. Cohen (Boston)
Jerzy Perzanowski (Kraków)
Francesco Coniglione (Catania)
Marian Przecki (Warszawa)
Andrzej Falkiewicz (Wrocaw)
Jan Such (Pozna)
Dagfinn Føllesdal (Oslo)
Max Urchs (Konstanz)
Bert Hamminga (Tilburg)
Jan Woleski (Kraków)
Jaakko Hintikka (Boston)
Ryszard Wójcicki (Warszawa)
Jacek J. Jadacki (Warszawa)
Address: dr hab. Katarzyna Paprzycka . Department of Philosophy . University of Warsaw Krakowskie Przedmiecie 3 . 00-927 Warszawa . Poland . fax ++48(0)22-826-5734 E-mail:
[email protected]
POZNA STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCIENCES AND THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 96
EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL
Edited by Evandro Agazzi, Javier Echeverría and Amparo Gómez Rodríguez
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence". ISSN 0303-8157 ISBN: 978-90-420-2421-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in The Netherlands
CONTENTS
Evandro Agazzi, Javier Echeverría, Amparo Gómez Rodríguez, Introduction: Epistemology and the Social . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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PART 1. GENERAL PERSPECTIVES
Evandro Agazzi, Epistemology and the Social: A Feedback Loop . . Hervé Barreau, Historical and Transcendental Factors in the Construction of the Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Juan Urrutia Elejalde, Puzzles and Problems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jesús P. Zamora Bonilla, Normativity and Self-Interest in Scientific Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
19 33 49 71
PART 2. VALUES IN THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENCE
Wenceslao J. González, Economic Values in the Configuration of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Ramón Queraltó, The Philosophical Impact of Technoscience or the Development of a Pragmatic Philosophy of Science . . . . . . . . 113 PART 3. SOCIAL IMPACT ON PARTICULAR SCIENCE
Alberto Cordero, Epistemology and “the Social” in Contemporary Natural Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Jesús Mosterín, Social Factors in the Development of Genetics and the Lysenko Affair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Valentín A. Bazhanov, Social Milieu and Evolution of Logic, Epistemology, and the History of Science: The Case of Marxism . . 157 PART 4. EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Juan Fco. Álvarez, Javier Echeverría, Bounded Rationality in Social Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Amparo Gómez Rodríguez, Rational Choice Theory and Economic Laws: The Role of Shared Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brigitte Falkenburg, The Invisible Hand: What Do We Know? . . . . Peter Kemp, The Cosmopolitan Vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
173 191 207 225
Evandro Agazzi Javier Echeverría Amparo Gómez Rodríguez INTRODUCTION: EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL
Epistemology on the one hand, and “the social” on the other hand, have been considered alien to one another for rather a long while. Not only when epistemology was understood as theory of knowledge in general (something that is still normal in the English-speaking world) but also when epistemology was understood in the more restricted sense of philosophy of science (as is more customary today in other linguistic areas). Indeed, epistemology understood as general theory of knowledge seems to be specifically concerned with those cognitive operations that are performed by an individual knowing subject and are supposed to be essentially the same for every knowing subject, operations that, for this reason, are often considered as performances of “the mind” in a rather abstract sense. Society as such is incapable of knowing and, at most, can act as a set of external conditionings that, rather than help, could disturb the mind in the correct performance of its tasks. This situation does not change when epistemology is considered as a synonymous of philosophy of science, because in this case it is understood as the investigation of the conditions under which science constitutes a form of knowledge (and indeed the most advanced form of knowledge). Implicit in this view is the tenet that epistemology does not have a descriptive role, but rather also a normative one, in the sense that scientific knowledge is valid knowledge par excellence, and epistemology is precisely entrusted with the task of clarifying the conditions under which this valid knowledge in science actually obtains. Therefore, any intromission of “the social” is seen again as a disturbing factor of which epistemology should rather teach us how to get rid. A second reason for this distance was represented by the fact that, if one considers epistemology as philosophy of science, it is implicit that it
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 7-16. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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can be concerned only with scientific knowledge understood as a special kind of knowledge. But what kind? As is known, for almost two centuries the domain of the modern sciences was circumscribed, in the Western culture, to mathematics and the natural sciences, and “the social” was excluded from such a domain for a series of reasons that we are not interested in indicating here: the study of the social was considered a part of the “humanities” as distinct and even separated from the “sciences.” Of course, there were important exceptions with regard to this view (for example, Gianbattista Vico had maintained already in the eighteen century that the genuine sciences in which we can uncover the causes of the investigated facts are the social-historical ones, because we humans are the producers of such facts), but the paradigm of the natural sciences became so prevailing that a deep struggle was necessary when, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the social-historical disciplines wanted to vindicate their status of “sciences.” This story is well known and need not be remembered here. What we want to note is that such a vindication was possible thanks to a serious epistemological debate, that is, a debate in which the concept of science was shown to be “analogical” and not “univocal” since it admitted two distinct exemplifications, and in such a way we can say that epistemology and the social started to become more friendly: epistemology had opened to the social the possibility of being a legitimate object of science, by creating in itself a new branch, the “epistemology of the social sciences.” This new discipline has been a mixed enterprise: in certain cases it was a kind of application of “general” epistemologies to the peculiarities of the social sciences, or even the marginal output of grand philosophical theories about man and societies (as in the case of ideologically inspired epistemologies); perhaps less frequently it has been the result of self-conscious reflections by practicing social scientists. Under any of these forms the epistemology or methodology of the social sciences has been a “philosopher-friendly” area more often than not, due perhaps to the fact that sociology, anthropology and political science are (to use an evolutionary metaphor) among the disciplines which have a more recent “common ancestor” with philosophy. Taking the social seriously, however, as it was implicit in the very fact of considering it as a legitimate object of scientific investigation, was likely to produce as a natural consequence the adoption of an inverse point of view, that of including science itself in the domain of the social and to submit it to sociological inquiry. This inquiry was obviously many-faceted, and could very naturally regard several aspects of “doing science” as a social activity (which it actually is especially in
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contemporary societies), but a delicate point presented itself when the programme appeared of a “social analysis of scientific knowledge.” The very formulation of this programme indicates that it entailed a right of entrance of sociology into epistemology, and this fact produced, at least initially, some hostility between the two. In fact, many authors who have cultivated this sociological analysis have conceived their research as an attempt to show that philosophical interpretations of science are radically delusory, are abstract idealizations, and have often pushed their position up to maintain that the content of “scientific knowledge” is itself little more than a fictitious social fabric, not determined at all by “the state of nature” and not even by rigorous criteria of empirical adequacy and rational cogency, but much more by the force of social interests. Therefore, the paradoxical result was that a discipline recently promoted to the rank of science was undermining the respectability and reliability of science itself as a cognitive enterprise, and this was really a novelty in epistemology because traditionally the recognized particular sciences (from mathematics to logic, linguistic, philology, and so on) had offered to epistemology useful tools for developing its work of understanding scientific knowledge. We can certainly consider as unjustified exaggerations the extreme positions mentioned above, but we must recognize that they produced the awareness of the role played by values in the sciences, an awareness that challenged the famous Weberian thesis that science must be value free because only respecting this condition it can attain its ideal, that is, objectivity. There was a moment in which several philosophers of science, who wanted to be open-minded regarding the question of values, admitted that empirical control and logical coherence are not the only criteria that scientists use for choosing between two rival theories but that (when such criteria are satisfied on both sides) they are guided in their choice by “values” such as simplicity, elegance, fertility in predictions, causal representation, links with other scientific branches and so on. Sure, these criteria are different from the basic goal of attaining truth, but remain nevertheless on the cognitive plane, they can be called epistemic values and their intervention in the construction of science seems easily admissible, especially because they are not meant to replace the criteria of empirical adequacy and logical cogency, but simply to be in keeping with them and possibly complement them when they are not sufficient for discriminating between two rival theories. Quite different is the question whether non-cognitive values such as moral, social, political, economic, religious values enter the fabric of science, and not just as a matter of fact (that is, in the form of an
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intromission that is perhaps unavoidable but is regrettable) but as a matter of principle, as something structural that has to do with the nature of science itself. The legitimacy of opening this debate is bound to a “distinction without separation” of the aspect according to which science is a system of knowledge and the aspect according to which it is a complex system of human activities (quite independently of the not negligible fact that contemporary science is so strictly interwoven with technology that we now speak of “technoscience” as a unitary social fact of our time). Once we pay attention to the second aspect, the unavoidable and fully legitimate presence of values in “doing science” becomes obvious, and the only (not simple) problem remains that of making this fact compatible with the due satisfaction of the specific cognitive value of science, and this shows how the consideration of values “in general” and of their mutual relations is one of the central issues of present epistemology of science. The preceding considerations offer the framework within which are inscribed the papers collected in this book, not in the sense that these systematically discuss the points mentioned above, nor that they are arranged in a logical order following the path of the preceding reasoning, but in the sense that they highlight with different stress distinct aspects of this thematic. Therefore, an initial set of papers take into consideration the presence of “the social” in contemporary philosophy of science and its consequences according to a rather general perspective, a second set handles the effect of the presence of values in the construction of science, while a third set exemplifies the social impact on a couple of particular sciences, and finally a few papers treat questions pertaining to the epistemology of the social sciences. It is easy to note a certain accent put on economics in several of these papers that is not accidental. After all, that modern science has produced a huge amount of discoveries and practical achievements is a social factum of which we need both a reasonable explanation (how have modern societies been able to build such an impressive thing?) and instruments for rational evaluation and criticism (how have we to govern such a creature?). In recent times a growing number of authors have conjectured that, among the social sciences, it is economics (not necessarily understood as neo-classical economics) which provides the best tools for carrying out this project, not because of being “more scientific” than its cousins (what may be doubtful) but mainly because it allows to build clearer theoretical models, more suitable to be rationally assessed and criticized. Obviously, this criticism must begin by an analysis of the assumptions, either
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methodological or normative, on which models are constructed, and this is why a philosophical understanding of this theoretical activity is needed in the first place. Part one, devoted to general perspectives, opens with a paper by Evandro Agazzi, “Epistemology and the Social: A Feedback Loop,” that considers first the long tradition in which epistemology was intended as the effort of determining the structures and functions of the mind conceived as given in themselves and independently of the “content” of knowledge. Only late in the nineteenth century it became clear that the contents of thought influence our “way of thinking,” especially when they are unconsciously absorbed: our knowledge is always “framed” within the already acquired knowledge. Sociology of knowledge systematized this awareness and justified it, but it could do so because it is a respected science (a social science) and this seems to produce a circle (we need a recognized science to critically evaluate science itself). This is not, however, a vicious circle, but rather an example of a feedback loop, a process that starts under certain conditions and can be led to modify these conditions as a consequence of the results of the process itself (selfregulation). This happened in the case of science, whose initial conception, inspired by the model of the physical sciences, led to the epistemological legitimation of the social sciences and this result produced a modification of the initial model. Examples of this kind are common in different branches of human enquiry. The only limit is that this circle do not result in contradictions, and this would happen if the application of sociological approaches were to jeopardize the essential characteristics of science, that is, objectivity and rigour, whereas the scientific discourse must be at the same time socially situated and intrinsically valid. The paper by Hervé Barreau, “Historical and Transcendental Factors in the Construction of the Sciences,” points out that, after the relatively recent recognition of the historical nature of science, two aspects have emerged as indispensable approaches for a satisfactory understanding of science itself. One is the historical contextualization of single scientific disciplines, methodologies and theories, the other is the examination of the reasons for which, within each contextualization, the scientific enterprise could correctly claim to satisfy the requirement of providing solid knowledge. An epistemology of science must include and harmonize both attitudes, the first of which we can call “hermeneutic” (having to do with the “interpretation” of the social-historical context) and the second “transcendental” (since it tries to bring to light those
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elements that, though being present in a given context, were supposed to have an intrinsic value not contingently linked with this context). The paper by Juan Urrutia, “Puzzles and Problems,” is written by an economist, but is not a piece of work in the epistemology of economics. The aim of the author is to use the Solow model of economic growth not with the purpose of studying the “economics of scientific knowledge” but as a methodological tool for understanding the production of scientific output or the belief-forming process. In so doing a discussion takes place regarding the pros and cons of this Solow model in comparison with the usual game theory approach. The paper is of a rather technical nature and for this reason cannot be summarized here. Its general interest, however, consists in the fact that it is an excellent example of how certain approaches developed within a specific social science (in this case economics) can profitably become tools for the development of epistemology in general, in a manner not really different from the more familiar use in epistemology of tools taken from mathematics, logic or linguistic analysis. The issue of the harmonization of cognitive and non-cognitive values in scientific activity comes up again in a more general perspective in the paper by Jesús P. Zamora Bonilla, “Normativity and Self-Interest in Scientific Research,” whose declared aim is to propose a “contractarian epistemology.” Two views regarding the notion of rationality in science are considered, the one that concerns the rationality of scientific knowledge (as deriving from the use of sound methodological norms), and the one that concerns scientists as rational agents pursuing the optimization of their own personal interests. The effort is made of making these two approaches mutually compatible by showing that a competition among rational “recognition-seekers” is only possible if they agree in accepting some system of methodological norms (an analysis of the main kinds and properties of these norms is proposed). Part two, devoted to values in the structure of science, begins with a paper of Wenceslao González, “Economic Values in the Configuration of Science,” that considers the axiology of research focused on cognitive values and the enlargement of the characterization of values offered by Rescher’s approach, which makes explicit that economic values can contribute to the configuration of science. It is suggested, however, that the issue of economic values in this configuration requires a new general framework for values in scientific activity, a framework that includes not only the selection of aims or goals of scientific activities, but also their processes and results. Within this broader approach it can be seen how economic values have a role in the internal context of epistemology and
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methodology of science, and a clearer role in science as a social activity and in the uses and applications of science. Moreover the economic dimension of rationality appears as the key element for interrelating aims, processes and results or outcomes of scientific research. The paper by Ramón Queraltó, “The Philosophical Impact of Technoscience and the Relevance of Social Values for a Pragmatic Philosophy of Science,” starts with a clarification of the concept of technoscience as a complex net of activities in which scientific knowledge is applied for the realization of technological products that, in turn, make possible the advancement of scientific research. Therefore it is evident that social values, that permeate technoscience, have also an influence on science itself. The author proposes to conceive these values pragmatically, that is, as guidelines for solving problems arising in the technoscientific activity, be they of epistemological, ethical or political nature. This implies a reconsideration of philosophy of science not only as a broader philosophy of technoscience, but also as a specifically pragmatic philosophy of science. Three papers are included in part three concerning the social impact on particular sciences. In the paper by Alberto Cordero, “Epistemology and “the Social” in Contemporary Natural Science,” the autonomy of epistemology in mature science with regard to social factors is vindicated but at the same time contextualized to the different situations involved. In particular the paper presents two case studies (feminist Biology and Einstein’s development of Special Relativity) regarding the social pressure to diversify the points of view represented in scientific research, involving pluralist enrichment of this research, by imposing an epistemological reform. Examination of these cases shows why general pluralist arguments fail and also why social intervention in epistemological matters is a misguided activity. Jesús Mosterín’s paper, “Social Factors in the Development of Genetics and the Lysenko Affair,” points out that the history of genetics offers abundant material for the study of the influence of social factors in the development of science. Several of these factors are listed and briefly touched upon. Special attention is paid to the interference of political power in the business of science, exemplified and analyzed in the tragic case of the Lisenko affair which led to the death of the best geneticists of Russia and the destruction of a whole and fruitful scientific community. The paper by Valentin Bazhanov, “Social Milieu and Evolution of Logic, Epistemology, and the History of Science: The Case of Marxism,” starts with an interesting remark: it has now become commonly accepted that social factors influence the development of the sciences and also of
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philosophy, but it seems that certain disciplines, such as logic, epistemology and the history of science, are not sensitive to such factors. In their case an “internalist” view seems to largely prevail over the “externalist” view that dominates in other fields. This phenomenon was paradoxically more evident in the case of Marxist ideology, that was strongly externalist regarding any kind of development (including scientific and philosophical development), but made exception precisely regarding logic, epistemology and history of science. After the fall of communism the externalist perspective has become more and more fashionable in Russia in the domains of epistemology and especially of history of science. The concluding part four handles the theme of the epistemology of the social sciences and is opened by the paper by Juan Francisco Álvarez and Javier Echeverría, “Bounded Rationality in Social Sciences,” underscores the limitations of the common view regarding social interactions as produced by human beings considered as rational optimizing decision makers. Instead of this too abstract view of rationality, a more flexible notion of “procedural rationality” is more suitable for understanding social interaction, also because of significant links existing between this form of rationality and axiological cognitivist rationality. Both of them are at work in our social actions. The authors advocate a “bounded axiological rationality” as an alternative to the customary model of rationality. The advantage is that this new view of rationality allows for several models, one of which is the traditional theory of maximizing rational choice, but once values are introduced as a factor in the analysis of actions, their objectives and their results, it is possible to establish differences among these models according to their greater or lesser degree of axiological rationality. In the paper by Amparo Gómez, “Rational Choice Theory and the Economics Laws: The Role of Shared Values,” the epistemological status of the laws of economics is discussed. Such laws are considered explanatory and predictive by some authors in certain specific cases (in contexts where standard rationality operates successfully), while other authors maintain that the descriptive theories of rational choice open up a research path in which fundamental principles of the neoclassical building could be questioned. Both views have produced a revision of the Standard Rational Choice Theory, that has produced the so-called “descriptive viewpoint,” in which due attention is paid to the concrete and far from ideal situations in which choices are made, and that are rather far from the presupposition of the “normative” rational choice theory. This paper, adopting the descriptive point of view, tries to show
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how certain factors coming from the social and cultural environment operate within the rational choice. In the paper by Brigitte Falkenburg, “The Invisible Hand: What Do We Know?”, Adam Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand” is investigated in detail. Smith’s analogue was the mechanics of the solar system but precisely this analogue makes the analogy fail. Indeed the correct analogue belongs to thermodynamics and statistics because in the simplest macro-economic model the business cycle has the same formal structure as the heat flow between two heat reservoirs, and a business cycle of growing efficiency works like a refrigerator: it pumps money from the poor to the rich. More complicated models do not give a more friendly image. Due to technological push, an economic system behaves like a thermodynamic system far from equilibrium, showing chaotic behaviours and developing into unpredictable states. In the paper by Peter Kemp, “The Cosmopolitan Vision,” the opposition is taken into consideration that the sociologist Ulrich Beck has recently maintained between the national and the cosmopolite point of view. The awareness of this opposition is important for a correct understanding of many issues in present international political framework, but the question is posed whether this same opposition should also affect the epistemology of the social sciences, in the sense of asking whether our knowledge of social realities be possible at every level without choosing a political point of view. The contributions published in this volume correspond to revised versions of papers presented at a meeting of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science on the theme Epistemology and the Social that took place in Tenerife on September 22-25, 2005. The meeting was organized in collaboration with the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of La Laguna at Tenerife and with the sponsorship of the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish Superior Board of Scientific Researches, the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation, the Spanish Society of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. It was also supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, and the Regional Government of the Canary Islands. To all these institutions and their officers we present the most sincere expressions of thanks for the realization of the meeting and the publication of this volume.
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Evandro Agazzi President of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science Javier Echeverría Full Professor of Philosophy of Science Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) Amparo Gómez Full Professor of Philosophy of Science University of La Laguna
PART 1 GENERAL PERSPECTIVES
Evandro Agazzi EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL: A FEEDBACK LOOP
ABSTRACT. A sociological study of science is not very recent and has never been seen as particularly problematic since science, and especially modern science, constitutes an impressive and extremely ramified “social system” of activities, institutions, relations and interferences with other social systems. Less favourable, however, has been the consideration of a more recent trend in the philosophy of science known as the “sociological” philosophy of science, whose most debatable point consists in directly challenging the traditional epistemology of science and, in particular, in stripping scientific knowledge of its most appreciated characteristics of objectivity and rigour. A vicious circle seems to lie at the root of this sociological epistemology because, on the one hand, criticism of the traditional concept of scientific knowledge is developed by relying upon sociology, but this, on the other hand is reasonable only if sociology is credited with the status of a reliable instrument, that is, because it has been recognized as a science through an epistemological debate. In this paper it is shown that not all circles are vicious: in particular, feedback loops, positive and negative, are normally considered in cybernetic models of various processes. Negative feedback loops are fundamental in self-regulating processes and have already occurred from time to time in readjusting the concept of science itself. Therefore, a sociological epistemology of science can contribute to a more careful analysis of the real meaning and purport of the cognitive aspect of science, provided that it is not pushed to the self-defeating extreme of challenging the legitimacy of considering objectivity and rigour as the characteristic features of scientific knowledge.
1. The Path to Knowledge According to what we could call the “classical” view, the fact of knowing was considered to consist in an “opening” of reality to the mind as well as an (intentional) “identification” of the mind with reality. In other
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 19-31. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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words, the fact that being must reveal itself as it is, was taken for granted, and at the same time the fact that our thinking activity necessarily thinks being. This attitude, that today we might be ready to qualify as “naïve realism,” was actually rooted in a deeper consideration, that is, in the absolutization of the concept of being, that was simply conceived as the opposite of non-being. Therefore, if our thinking were not thinking of being, it should be thinking of non-being, that is, thinking of nothing, and in such a way no thinking at all. This was, in short, the position of Parmenides, but he could obviously not overlook something that seemed to play at the same time the role of an indispensable tool and of a possible obstacle for knowledge, namely sense perception. Indeed sense perception seems to put us in direct immediate contact with reality, seems to be the situation in which the word “opens” itself to us in the most spontaneous way, without demanding from us any effort, but despite this, we are aware of certain situations in which we are easily deceived by the so-called “sense illusions.” Yet this is not the most important shortcoming of sense perception, the most significant one is that it seems to make manifest something that cannot be real, that is, multiplicity of beings and, especially, change. The sensory experience of change seems to testify that there was a time when something existing did not exist and also will not exist at some future time; in other words, this experience seems to testify that being can become non-being, or that nonbeing can produce being, all things that the simple nature of being necessarily excludes. As is well known, this was the reason why Parmenides and his school disqualified sense knowledge as fallacious opinion (doxa) leaving the attaining of truth (aletheia) as a privilege of the intellect (logos). Things changed a little with Plato, and much more with Aristotle (as a consequence of having clarified that the concept of being does not have a univocal meaning), but even within the doctrine of the Stagirite (in which a proper role is attributed to sense perception), genuine knowledge (episteme) was considered possible only thanks to the work of intellect, and this because of two reasons. The one is that genuine knowledge not only presupposes truth, but in addition requires a justification of this truth through suitable arguments that are elaborated by intellect. The other is that truth itself (according to its most appropriate conception) is a property of judgments and these are again a product of intellect. As a consequence of this historical development we find the famous medieval definition of truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei, that has become the core of the Western conception of truth (though different criteria for truth have been proposed in the history of Western philosophy).
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Let us note that this indispensable involvement of the intellect or understanding was not maintained because sense perceptions were taken to be unreliable, that is, considered as a deformation of reality, possibly due to the peculiarity of our sense organs. The famous statement of medieval epistemology, quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur simply meant that what “accidents” of a substance can be grasped by us depends on our sense organs. Not because our organs produce such accidents, but simply because every sense has its specific potentialities: sight can perceive colours and forms, but not sounds; hearing can perceive sounds but not colours or smells, etc. Already Aristotle had said that every sense is never wrong in its specific domain, but no sense pronounces judgments, and this is why no sense can tell the truth or falsity, that imply the attribution of a particular feature to a substance, and only understanding is capable of doing this. In particular this is possible because the intellect was credited with the capability of fieri quaedammodo omnia (of becoming in a way all things), that is, of conforming itself to reality and realizing in such a way that adequatio in which truth consists.
2. The Uniqueness of the Human Intellect An additional reason for the indispensable role attributed to intellect (understanding) in the classical tradition was the need of overcoming the privateness of sense perceptions, that in modern terminology we would call the overcoming of the subjectivity of knowledge. Indeed already the sophists had stressed that humans are in disagreement about a lot of judgements regarding how things are, and had drown the consequence that truth does not exist and all opinions are equally legitimate. Against this form of scepticism Socrates and Plato had stressed that, in order to disagree about a certain judgment, people must share the same concepts, so that their disagreement can depend upon differences in sense perceptions, but cannot eliminate the sharing of a common universal intellectual content. Therefore the acquisition of knowledge requires an overcoming of sensory experience through the exercise of a deeper scrutiny, in which all the forces of reason are applied (i.e. intellect and contemplation) that brings man to universal and necessary truths. This has become for centuries the standard way of understanding the nature of proper knowledge. Tacitly presupposed in this perspective was the conviction that reason is universal and identical in all humans, independently of times and
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places. From this could consistently derive the proposal of a “critique of pure reason,” of which the Kantian example is only the most paradigmatic expression, since practically the whole history of Western epistemology can be seen as an effort of scrutinizing how our cognitive “faculties” or capabilities, be they sensory or intellectual, “really are” in their intrinsic constitution. This constitution was meant to be simply part of the constitution of the human nature, so that treatises on epistemology could be qualified as “essay concerning human understanding,” “enquiries concerning human understanding,” as well as be included in some “treatise of human nature.” Nevertheless, already the Baconian doctrine of the idola, but also the Cartesian programme of the methodological doubt, had called attention on the fact that also the mind, also the intellect can address reality in a biased way, can induce us to form distorted representations of reality not less than our sense organs. This move was a consequence of a deep but tacit and unconscious presupposition that had occurred in epistemology at the beginning of modern philosophy and which we can call “epistemological dualism.” According to this view what we directly know is not reality but our ideas or representations, so that we must solve the problem of finding a way to distinguish those representations that correspond to reality from those that are fictitious. What Descartes in his Discourse on Method and Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum have proposed to do was a careful examination of those ideas or images that we usually take for granted, but are actually prejudices that we find in our mind as a kind of inheritance derived from what we have learned during our education, or depending on our commerce with our fellow humans, or even on our constitution, both as members of the human species or as particular individuals. This necessity of a critical assessment previous to any application of the sound method of inquiry (that is different for the two mentioned authors) is perhaps more eloquently presented in Bacon’s doctrine of the idola (images), that are dangerous because are ingrained notions that challenge our ability to differ from established notions. It is interesting that among these idola (i. tribus, i. specus, i. fori, i. theatri), the idola fori and theatri were already of a social and cultural kind, since they derive from received doctrines and from the network of our social connexions. The subsequent epistemology, however, until Kant and also after him, continued to investigate an allegedly pure reason or understanding, in the effort of discovering its mechanisms and functioning independently of the particular “contents” of those operations, that is, believing that the “thinking thought” (the thinking mind) is precondition of, and different from, the “thought thought” (what
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the mind thinks). It has become clear in the sequel, on the contrary, that the contents of thought, that is, what has been already accepted in our thought, influences our way of thinking, especially when these contents have been interiorized in an unconscious way. In short, human knowledge never begins from zero, and successive elements of knowledge are “framed” within the already acquired knowledge and tend to consolidate it. We could express this by saying that thought is simply the whole of our thoughts, that our mind is the whole of our knowledge. This statement does not coincide with a return to the Cartesian and Baconian caveats against the risks of becoming prisoners of preconceived prejudices, since it appears that such prejudices are not something we must get rid of, but something that is a precondition of our knowing the world. This awareness has been stimulated also by the studies of psychology already starting in the second half of the nineteenth century and continuing with the most recent trends of cognitive psychology, but has also been enriched by the developments of sociology and, in particular, of sociology of knowledge.
3. From Sociology of Knowledge to the Sociological Conception of Science The thesis of the social dependence of science has become more and more prevalent, at least quantitatively, as a result of the combination of two cultural factors which, though of very different provenance, were (accidentally, one might say) at play in the same time frame. The first of these is represented by the so called “non-orthodox” tradition of Marxist thought, which developed largely in western European countries in the 1960s (particularly, though not exclusively, in the Frankfurt School, and in the writings of authors such as Goldmann and Althusser in France), and was using its arguments – concerning the total dependence of scientific knowledge and practice on the social relations of production in the capitalist societies – as weapons in the polemic over the neutrality of science in the 1970s. In the meanwhile the Anglo-American world began to develop a sociological conception of science, which it has articulated up to the present. This conception was born with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This work engendered a lively debate since it opposed both the epistemological tradition of logical empiricism and Popperian thought. Kuhn always maintained the professional image of
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being more a historian of science than a philosopher of science, and quickly moderated his work’s more radical theses. But his theses enjoyed a great success precisely because they openly applied the sociology of knowledge so widespread and influential in academic circles to the realm of scientific knowledge, and theretofore none had dared make such an application. Indeed the sociology of knowledge has roots as much in the German tradition from Marx to Nietzsche and Scheler, as in the French cultural anthropology of Durkheim and Mauss, but its most prominent pioneer is Karl Mannheim whose most famous work appeared in English in the 1950s (Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, 1956). Originally published in 1929, this work asserts that historical and social environment determines both the content and forms of our knowledge. It is significant, however, that he admits an exception to this epistemological rule: mathematics and the natural sciences are exempt from what he calls “existential determination.” It was precisely this limitation that was overcome by Kuhn’s book. On more technical epistemological terrain, the debate between the Kuhnians and Popperians dominated the scene in the 1970s, entering also into the climate created by the study of the “later Wittgenstein” (whose Philosophical Investigations appeared in 1953), fueling the controversy over the incommensurability of scientific theories, and opening the way to the development of the epistemologies of Lakatos and Feyerabend. The consequences of holding for too great a dependence of science on the social context begin to emerge in this debate over epistemologies: radical relativism, antirealism, disappearance of the notion of truth and even of scientific objectivity, the dissolution of the criteria able to justify the preference not only of one scientific theory over another, but also of scientific forms of knowledge over pseudo-sciences. These theses, which may seem paradoxical in the openly iconoclastic and provocative writings of a Feyerabend, have received systematic treatment since the 1960s, and make up a solid block of “metascientific” literature. The principal works during those years are David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976); B. Barnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowledge (1977); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979); K.D. Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (1981); Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, edited by K.D. Knorr and M. Mulkay (1983). The main periodicals in which these authors publish are Social Studies of Science and Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook. This position has some merits, but also several weak
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points (that have been examined with particular insistence, for example, by Mario Bunge). We are not interested here, however, in a critical examination of this sociological conception of science, but want rather to present a few more general methodological considerations regarding the very fact of using sociology as a tool for elaborating an epistemological doctrine, and in particular a doctrine regarding the epistemology of science. These considerations can be briefly sketched as follows. Sociology of knowledge is a science, intends to be a science and, in particular, one of the specializations of the social sciences; moreover its results and claims are considered reliable simply because they satisfy the conditions of scientificity. And this is what actually happened: during several decades between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century a wide epistemological debate took place in order to vindicate the specific scientific status of the social sciences. This debate eventually led to a very large recognition of the scientific status of sociology such that this discipline, having been admitted among the contributors to our genuine knowledge, can be legitimately used whenever people want to avail themselves of some contents of human knowledge (for instance, in investigating economic phenomena, legal institutions, artistic production, history of ideas and so on). Should we stop this use of sociology when we come to science? Should we become diffident before a sociology of science? Of course not, because, after all, science is also in some respects a “social product” and, despite some legitimate criticisms that have been levelled against the sociological conception of science, none could deny that it is a positive thing in itself to introduce historical and social consciousness into the understanding of science, and that it is also useful to submit the scientific enterprise to sociological study: the information gained thereby is always interesting and illuminating. It is something completely different, however, to claim to reduce scientific knowledge to nothing but a social product. Herein lies the mistake of a good portion of sociological epistemology, a mistake that derives precisely from having promoted sociology to the role of a judge of what is science, beyond the study of how science is concretely practiced in societies. This is tantamount to having endowed sociology with an epistemological role while it has received from epistemology its right to pronounce statements with a cognitive value. In other words, are we confronted with a vicious circle, consisting in the fact that we need a recognized science in order to speak of a socially conditioned status of science in general? Would we not put sociology in the place traditionally occupied by logic and methodology of science, attributing to sociology the privilege of a super-
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science or meta-science that is immune from those conditionings that it brings to light for the other sciences?
4. Not Vicious Circle but Feedback Loop The situation is not precisely this: it is rather like that of a feedback loop. A process which starts under certain conditions can be led to modify these conditions as a consequence of the results of the process itself (selfregulation). In our case, a process of epistemological reflection initiated under the “condition” of accepting a certain modern concept of science (practically derived from an idealization of the “exact” natural sciences, in spite of being considered “general”) continued with a relaxation of certain too rigid requirements included in that idealization, and permitted to include also the social sciences in the domain of science. This step, in turn, made reasonable the acceptance of the results of sociology even when they are applied to knowledge and to scientific knowledge in particular, a fact that produced a reconsideration and readjustment of the “general” concept of science such that social conditionings of science should be taken into serious consideration. This way of reasoning is not circular, but actually common to any form of “reflecting thinking.” So, for example, one cannot start an inquiry on the functioning of mind without crediting mind with the capability of offering us a reliable tool for this inquiry. Even in the case of Kant, he affirmed that his investigation on the a priori conditions of any possible knowledge represented the most solid science, despite the fact that the conclusions of his transcendental investigation were that science is only possible when we apply intellectual categories to sensory intuitions (and this does not occur in the transcendental investigation). Similarly, it was by respecting certain fundamental methodological requirements of classical physics that scientists have been led to results obliging them to repudiate several principles of that physics. To be more precise, circularity is a weakness, a methodological mistake, when it consists in taking A as a justification of B, and then B itself as a justification of A (very clearly when this justification has the form of a logical deduction). But there are many cases in which this does not happen, even when we use deductive tools: for instance, when we use a hypothesis H to deductively predict an event E, we can say, on the one hand, that this prediction was justified by H but, on the other hand, if E does actually occur we say that E justifies H (while the not occurring of E refutes H), and this is correct because the meaning of “justification” is
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obviously different in the two cases (in the first direction it means a link of logical consequence, in the second direction it means a link of empirical confirmation). This shows that not every “circle” is a vicious circle and, paradoxically, a non-vicious circle is that in which, by developing the consequences of A, we end up with the negation of A (which, in a way is a kind of “coming back” to A). The paradoxical impression consists in the fact that we seem to consider a contradiction an example of non-vicious circle, but things are actually a little different: this circle is not vicious not only because it does not take A as justification of non-A, and then non-A as a justification of A, but especially because it is not a contradiction, but a process for discovering a contradiction and, in such a way, for eliminating an error. This procedure is present in the proofs by reductio ad absurdum quite common in mathematics, and is implied in the dynamics of scientific theories according to the standard view, when the developments of a theory can lead to certain results that are logically incompatible with some hypotheses of the same theory and can induce scientists to modify or abandon it. Another significant example that has some similarity with the reductio ad absurdum is what the ancient philosophers called elenchos (and is often translated as “refutation” in modern terminology). This type of argument is different from “demonstration,” strictly understood as a deduction from given premises, since it serves to provide a justification of the first premises or principles themselves, and essentially consists in showing that the person who denies the principle must actually use it in his act of negation. The most famous application of this kind of argument is made by Aristotle in defending the principle of non-contradiction: the denier must use this principle if he simply wants to say something determined, and therefore he implicitly admits it (see the fourth book of Metaphysics).
5. The Normative and Descriptive Aspects of Epistemology Coming now to epistemology (understood as general theory of knowledge), we must note that it has always included two aspects, that we could call the descriptive and the normative ones. The normative is preliminary, since it amounts first to some determination of the concept of knowledge, that is, to making sufficiently precise what is knowledge, and this secondly also determines what requirements something must satisfy in order to deserve being qualified as knowledge. The descriptive aspect consists in scrutinizing how knowledge comes about, through
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which steps, under what conditions and according to what criteria it can be believed to obtain, and this in particular regarding the different objects that we would like to know. These two aspects are, of course, only analytically distinct but are concretely interdependent. After a possible analysis of some different meanings of the notions of knowledge and knowing present in common language, one should focus on the traditionally most relevant one (the one that is taken into consideration by the “theory of knowledge”) which is often qualified as “propositional knowledge,” that is, a knowledge expressed in declarative propositions. This knowledge can be characterized in this way: “knowing is to have present reality as it is” and “knowledge is the mental or linguistic expression of this presence,” that is, “knowledge is the representation of how things really are.” Whatever epistemology must not only presuppose this concept of knowledge (otherwise it would be not theory of knowledge, but theory of something else) but also presuppose that knowledge as such is possible in general. Indeed, if we want to know how our knowledge functions and obtains, we must concede that we can know at least this. Therefore we find here the scheme of the elenchos: the person who maintains that we can not know anything is defeating herself since she presupposes at least that she knows this fact. By the way, this was not the sense of the Socratic declaration that he knew that he did not know, since this was only the admission of his ignorance about many things, but not a general declaration of the impossibility of knowing (indeed he has tried to show in what a possible sound knowledge can consist).
6. Positive and Negative Feedback Loops The history of epistemology can be seen as a continuous deepening and enlargement of its descriptive aspect, in which functions, tools, criteria, modalities for the acquisition of knowledge have been uncovered and evaluated from the point of view of their soundness (the normative aspect). This process can be presented as a repeated application of feedback loops, in the sense that a certain stage of epistemology, characterized so to speak by a given paradigm of knowledge, was led to modify this paradigm (and in such a way to modify itself) by its own intrinsic dynamics. The most notable moment in this evolution is represented by the creation of modern natural science: facing the problem of how we can know the “natural substances” (i.e., the physical bodies), Galileo maintained that the acquisition of such a knowledge is a
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desperate enterprise if we pretend to grasp their “intimate essence,” while it is possible if we remain content with apprehending certain “affections” or “accidents” of them (he then specified that such “real accidents” are the mathematically expressible qualities of things). As a consequence of this delimitation of the scope of possible knowledge (not of the concept of knowledge itself), a display of methods, criteria and tools for the acquisition of scientific knowledge were developed by Galileo, Newton and their followers. During about two centuries this process had the characteristics of a “positive” feedback loop (i.e., the obtained results reinforced and enlarged the original framework), and this led to the promotion of mechanistic mathematical physics to the privilege of being not only the paradigm of science, but also a model of knowledge in general (as is visible in Kant’s epistemology). But towards the end of the nineteenth century the discovery of new physical phenomena (especially in the field of thermodynamics and electrodynamics), to whose treatment the same methodological and conceptual tools of mechanics were applied, had the effect of a “negative” feedback loop, since they obliged scientists to abandon not mechanics as such, but the prejudice that mechanics exhausted the scope of the concept of natural science. Moreover, since in the Western culture the idea had become widespread that only scientific knowledge deserves being really qualified as knowledge (positivism), scholars who were convinced that sound knowledge was acquired in their disciplines began to vindicate for them the right to be qualified as sciences. Here again we can see a negative feedback loop: once we accept that science must be in general defined as sound knowledge, and we also indicate in objectivity and rigor the indispensable features of scientific knowledge, we are led to recognize that the original identification of science with the model of the natural sciences is too narrow, and a change of this exclusive model must take place. This is the kernel of the dispute between the natural and the social sciences that we have already mentioned, and that justifies the fact that sociology, once it has been recognized as a science, carries its specific contribution to the understanding of whatever reality that contains social aspects or characteristics. This fact correctly entails that a certain readjustment of the notion of science occurs as a consequence of the sociological scrutiny, and in particular an enlargement consisting in the awareness that science is a multifaceted reality in which many factors are at work and affect its concrete exercise. This means that limiting the consideration of science to its cognitive aspect was too narrow a perspective, and that the exploration of this pure aspect is insufficient for the understanding of the
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real nature of science, that is, according to a certain sense, a system of knowledge but also, according to another sense, a human activity. The interesting fact is that this awareness has also brought people to investigate how these pragmatic and social dimensions of science can impinge on its cognitive aspect. This is again absolutely normal and positive and, as we have already seen, has its antecedents in Descartes’ methodological doubt and in the Baconian doctrine of idola. In short, this contribution should consist, as far as the cognitive dimension of science is concerned, in bringing to light the social conditionings that accompany the acquisition of scientific knowledge, and the only limit to this procedure is that it does not result in a contradiction. In our case the results of sociology of science can be considered as advancements in the epistemology of science only if they do not lead to the rejection of the fundamental characteristics of science, that is, objectivity and rigour. If these requirements are lost, also sociology looses its rights to be seriously taken into consideration and all its criticisms to the “absoluteness” of science are emptied. The real contribution of sociology of science is that of making people more attentive to the rather delicate conditions that surround scientific research, and can often and easily become obstacles against which scientists must fight if they want to consistently remain scientists or, in less dramatic situations, are limitations of which scientists and the social community must be aware in the evaluation and use of scientific results. We could also express these ideas by saying that we have and must have a concept of science in order to speak about it and tell anything precise about it (including the most radical criticism). This concept, that we have identified with the idea of objective and rigorous knowledge, has a normative role but is an abstract entity that can be exemplified more or less satisfactorily by several concrete entities (i.e., by several human cognitive enterprises that are qualified or pretend to be qualified as sciences). Sociology of science is a good instrument for making us aware that such exemplifications are rather often quite imperfect (and this has a great practical importance in order to make people more prudent), but this never could mean that science as objective knowledge is an empty concept or a forgery. This would be similar to declaring that the geometrical concept of a sphere is void because there is no concrete material body that perfectly exemplifies a sphere; or to declaring that is void the concept of rigid body of mechanics because there are no perfectly rigid bodies that we can concretely see. On the contrary, such abstract concepts are intrinsically legitimate and even practically useful in order us to know what characteristics should be realized in order to obtain a spherical or a rigid
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body, and also to estimate within what limits we could be satisfied with the imperfect realization of such properties according to our actual needs in the different situations. In the case of science, the importance of sociology of science consists mainly in making clear what conditions have to be satisfied in order a scientific discourse to be at the same time socially situated and intrinsically valid.
University of Genoa Department of Philosophy Via Balbi, 4 16126 Genova GE Italy e-mail:
[email protected]
Hervé Barreau HISTORICAL AND TRANSCENDENTAL FACTORS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SCIENCES
ABSTRACT. The hermeneutic context of scientific activity requires that scientific discovery be attributed not only to historical factors but also to transcendental factors (in the sense exemplified by Kant and Husserl, but without their respective idealism). Together these factors can account for a scientific discovery. This is manifest in the invention of Relativity by Einstein. Thomas Kuhn considered the first factors and neglected the seconds. As a consequence the “paradigms” are, for him, incommensurable. But this negligence is the effect of a “positivism of mentalities” which replaced in Kuhn the positivism of facts. This residual positivism is not alleviated by the relativist theses that the last Kuhn borrowed from his colleague, the philosopher Quine. In the line of this positivism and relativism, the successors of Kuhn and Quine are obliged to under-estimate the value of scientific knowledge.
Twenty years ago in the AIPS conference on Mutual Relations between the Philosophy and the History of the Sciences Evandro Agazzi (1987, p. 15) mentioned the “historic dimensions of science” and he stated unequivocally that “science had the same historicity status as other manifestations of the human mind.” This was a significant statement at the time, as it rejected not only the positivist concept of science but also the analytical inspiration and the logico-linguistic epistemologies, as inadequate, being generally unable to distinguish between the “hermeneutic context of a science,” which is relative to its place in history, and the more specific requirements of logical compatibility and the confrontation between theory and experience, which are an essential part of this hermeneutic context, if they are not to be commonplace and without interest. Outside this context these requirements are circular and raise false problems such as the theory-ladeness of all scientific observation. Theory and experience are
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 33-47. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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necessarily circular, but the circularity loses its closed context, rejecting all discussion, when it is studied within the hermeneutic context of its era, where the theoretical choices can be discussed and justified rationally. The hermeneutic context requires epistemology, understood as the philosophy of science, to fulfil two requirements; firstly it must look at scientific discoveries within the context of their era, examining the problems they encountered and tried to resolve; secondly it must see the full epistemological impact of the problems themselves, as they were seen by those who formulated them, particularly if the latter did not confine themselves to a narrow sector of empirical reality to which science is applicable, but aimed much wider, for example at an entire discipline such as physics, chemistry, biology or history. Concentrating on the first type of problem epistemology studies the historical factors which weigh ceaselessly on the evolution of the sciences; addressing the second, it examines the transcendental factors which for a long time determined the frameworks within which the construction of the science in question operated. We intend to show that for some forty years epistemology has been more concerned with the first factors that with the second, to such an extent that there is crisis in the way in which we consider the value of scientific knowledge today.
1. The Exaggerated Attention Paid to Historical Factors Th.S. Kuhn has a special place among the science historians who renewed the attention paid to the historical factors which renewed the face of science in the twentieth century. In advancing the notion of “paradigm,” which in some sort prescribes how science must be conducted if it is to be effective in the new fields it discovers, Kuhn certainly rid the history of science of the cumulative vision on which positivism rested, according to which discoveries accumulate and new discoveries do not appreciably change the sense and scope of those preceding them. Unfortunately Kuhn was not content to demonstrate the extent of the scientific revolutions which mark the history of science from age to age according to the great disciplines. He also wanted to show that these revolutions are so profound that they completely transform the object of scientific activity and leave only a kind of homonym between the old concepts and the new, to such an extent that theories arising from the old
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or the new paradigms are mutually incommensurable. For example, we read the following lines in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by which the author seeks to demonstrate a complete rupture between Newtonian and relativist mechanics: This need to change the meaning of familiar and established concepts was the major factor in the revolutionary shock caused by Einstein’s theory. Although more subtle than the change from geocentricism to heliocentricism, from the theory of phlogistics to oxygen, or from corpuscles to waves, the resulting conceptual transformation was nevertheless fatal to the previously established paradigm. We can even go so far as making the example the prototype of the revolutionary reorientations in scientific life. By the very fact that it does not involve the introduction of objects or of additional concepts, the passage from Newtonian to Einstinian mechanics clearly demonstrates that the scientific revolution is a movement of the conceptual network through which men of science see the world. (Kuhn 1983, pp. 146-147)
Even if we confine ourselves to an overall examination of Newtonian and relativist mechanics, it is not true that the second “does not involve the introduction of additional objects or concepts.” Space-time, invented by Poincaré and described by Minkowski has no corresponding factor in Newtonian mechanics, and its introduction was the revolutionary concept which changed the classic perspectives, as Einstein, who used it, furthermore, to forge general relativity, did not fail to recognize. But from the first step to the special theory of relativity, whilst the concept of space-time was not essentially the base of the description (which explains Poincaré’s refusal to see it as a true physical model) the “movement of the conceptual network” to which Th.S. Kuhn rightly refers, was not the sudden and shocking result of a new and unusual view of the world. What Kuhn has failed to demonstrate is that the movement, like the Newtonian mechanics which it changed, arises from the strict use of the principle of relativity which dominates both mechanics. In fact, Newtonian mechanics, in posing a universal and absolute time, did not have to resolve the problem of simultaneity at a distance. This problem arises, on the other hand, as soon as we see that the validity of the principle of relativity in electromagnetism, confirmed by experiment, requires the allocation of a specific timescale for every Galilean system. Under these conditions the rule of simultaneity at a distance, which is the same both for Poincaré and Einstein, acquired an operative sense which is valid for all Galilean reference frames (to avoid any ambiguity we should use the term ‘Lorentzian reference’), as the speed of light does not depend on the movement of its source and that it is constant for all Galilean reference
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frames, in accordance with the principle of relativity (which only Einstein intends here in the strict sense). It is a universal constant. For Lorentz and Poincaré, the universal constant of the speed of light involves twists in the principle of relativity, because the unit of time dilates and the lengths shorten in any reference which is moving as compared with the static ether; Einstein, however, demonstrated that we need not postulate the chosen reference frame, which is the static ether, but that the changes in spatial and temporal distances for reference frames moving in relation to each other are symmetrical and solely dependent on this relative movement. The contraction in lengths is relative to the instantaneous view taken from a reference frame for which the lengths are in movement (rectilinear and uniform). The dilation of the time periods is relative to the setting of the clocks (immobile in relation to one another) before which the events move in their own (shorter) time. These relativist effects are due solely to the change in the reference frame in relation to which the measurements are made. Nevertheless, these effects are real, so much so that a return trip is longer for an observer who has remained in the same place than for one who has taken the journey (Langevin’s paradox). The rigorous application of the relativity principle has forced us to abandon the Newtonian concept of absolute space and time. It should be noted that these relativist effects are implicitly present in Lorentz’ transformation rule, where they form a group and can be deduced, as Poincaré observed. However whilst Einstein drew all the conclusions from this for theoretical physics, Poincaré remained attached to Lorentz’ conceptions, which gave primary consideration to the static ether. Einstein’s merit lay in renouncing the existence of an ether which no-one could confirm and which he did not need in his theory of light (the discovery of photons), to hold firmly to the principle of relativity. As between Einstein and Poincaré, who was the most faithful to Newton? We could argue the point indefinitely, and there were many such arguments in 2005, when we celebrated the centenary of the major contributions made in 1905 by these two pioneers of contemporary mathematical physics. However, it suffices to place these contributions in their hermeneutic context to realize that Einstein alone respected the principle of relativity in the strictest sense (the identity of phenomena at an inertial immobile reference frame and at a reference frame in uniform and rectilinear movement in relation to the first), and that because of this his theory lends itself to extensions, which Lorentz’ and Poincaré’s theory does not. If we do not examine this hermeneutic context we no longer know which to choose between these two initiators, as Poincaré’s
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first contributions (for example, the definition of simultaneity at a distance), precede the articles of 1905, and we owe the term ‘the principle of relativity’ to Poincaré; we notice that the application of this principle to electromagnetism was very difficult at the time, as it seemed to call for the introduction of different timescales. At first sight the theories of Einstein and Lorentz-Poincaré are therefore “incommensurable,” to use Kuhn’s term, as they are based on different requirements and experimentation could not decide between them when they appeared. However, clearly Einstein alone understood that Maxwell’s equations, valid at every Galilean reference frame, required a recasting of the principle of relativity, a recasting which entailed a change in the physical concepts of space and time. If we suppose a Newton in 1905, well aware of the problems facing physics at the time, there is no doubt that he would have awarded the prize to Einstein. Thomas Kuhn neglected to envisage the hermeneutic context in which the Einstinian theory of relativity was born within the scope of his theory, and he was therefore pleased to oppose relativist to Newtonian mechanics, and use the opposition as an example of the incommensurability of successive scientific theories. Einstein, on the other hand, was pleased to demonstrate that Newtonian mechanics was a very good approximation to relativist mechanics, which was reduced, in a way, to the first for very low speeds in relation to the speed of light. Einstein even insisted that Newton had been, in his time, so to say, constrained to maintain the absolute nature of space and time in order to guarantee the principle of inertia (the basis of the principle of relativity) and the absolute nature of acceleration (as opposed to the relative nature of uniform movement). On these points Newton and Einstein share the same principles. It was after his discovery of special relativity that Einstein was obliged to diverge from Newton. For Newton, universal attraction was simultaneous; which contradicts the relativist principle of the maximum speed of light: no interaction can be faster than light. We know that Einstein had to resolve both the problem of general relativity (postulated by the artificial nature of the inertial reference frames, once physics no longer recognized absolute space and time) and the problem of gravity. Given good luck and his genius, he needed only one theory to resolve both. In this extension of the theory of relativity Einstein obviously diverges from Newton. For special relativity it was necessary rather to stress the common inspiration of Newton and Einstein.
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2. The New Positivism of the Post-Kuhnian History of the Sciences When the historiography of the sciences neglects the hermeneutic task in its double aspect, historic and theoretical, it must examine other aspects of scientific research, which are those which, within a henceforth recognized paradigm, arise from “normal science,” as Kuhn has said, doubtless rightly. He has shown that normal science confines itself to resolving “puzzles.” This is not a tedious task and it gives rise to many important discoveries. Furthermore, we should not confuse the reconstitution of all these discoveries, major or minor, which fill volumes, with their acquisition, which goes through various stages in which neither logic nor experimental method are paramount, though they are always necessary in scientific work. Research is carried out with passionate enthusiasm and nowadays it takes place in a laboratory, supported by governments, public bodies and large industrial companies. It is inevitable, therefore, that studies of the ethnography and sociology of the sciences have appeared alongside the classic history of the sciences which deals generally with the lives and personal motivations of great scientists. When scientific activity becomes an important part of social life; when science can provide technological innovations which could renew production and economic exchanges, we may expect that the field of scientific activity will attract the attention of those in power and the curiosity of social science researchers. This should not surprise us, but we must take care that the picture given by these researchers into scientific activity is not reduced to a description of the rivalries and battles which are an inevitable part of research; this has always been the case and is still the case today when the stakes integrate and outstrip the individual ambitions of scientists. We must therefore recognize that as soon as we settle into a discontinuistic vision of the history of the sciences, where the question of the validity of one paradigm or another is no longer an issue, already settled by the prevailing consensus, then competition in the pursuit of any expected discovery will capture the interest of those who observe research, leading them to neglect the aspects of critical evaluation, themselves subject to the same reductive view of conflicts of interest, when they ought to be mentioned. We are no longer interested in science and the conditions of its progress; we are interested in scientists and their inevitable weaknesses. The sociologist R.E. Merton tried to characterize “the ethos of science” by the four fundamental values of universality, community, disinterestedness and critique, which, of course, are far from being always honored in practice. The new sociologists offer a “strong
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programme” in which these values are systematically ignored. In their place, we are invited to find out what scientists believe, without questioning whether these beliefs are “true” or “false” and considering only the causes which must be the same in the opposing cases (true/false) and recognizing that the same causality can be sought in the sociology of the sciences. This position is defended by Barry Barnes and David Bloor in the USA. In France Bruno Latour is the representative of this sociology, which is unduly silent about epistemology, as it seeks to explain scientists’ beliefs whilst making no mention of inherent scientific values. This attitude leads him to a paradoxical statement which breaks definitively with the search for “objectivity”: “Given that the settlement of a controversy is the cause of the representation of nature and not of its consequence, we should never have recourse to the final issue – nature – to explain why and how a controversy has been settled” (Latour 1995, p. 241). This is the relativist programme, applied to scientific knowledge as to any other product of the culture. It would not be fair to hold Th.S. Kuhn responsible for these positions, though they find their authority in his patronage. He himself expressly disclaimed them, though recognizing that his work had served to nourish them: In the literature of the sociology of the sciences its value system has been particularly argued by R.K. Merton and his disciples. Several times recently this group has been criticized, sometimes stridently, by sociologists who, relying on my work and sometimes representing themselves unofficially as “Kuhnians” have insisted that these values vary from one community to another and over time. These criticisms draw our attention to the fact that, regardless of the values of a community, one or another of these values is constantly violated by its members. They deduce from this that it is absurd to conceive the analysis of values as a valid means of throwing light on scientific behaviour. (Kuhn 1990, p. 27)
We should recognize, therefore, that Kuhn, in the same passage, insists on the fact that his own work shows “to what extent (he) believes that this line of criticism (with regard to Merton’s sociology) is misdirected.” Unfortunately this misdirection is the consequence, almost necessarily drawn by sociologists, of the position according to which a “paradigm” is associated at the time with a “scientific community.” On this point Kuhn never varied. Certainly he recognized that the use he had made of the word ‘paradigm’ in the first edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was excessively extended and it was better to speak of the “disciplinary matrix” if it related to the intellectual and material
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equipment which every scientist must possess in his discipline, and of “paradigm” in the strict and original sense in the case of examples serving as models for dealing with problems in a discipline. This distinction is necessary but is only reinforced the professional nature of the Kuhnian notion of “paradigm.” It was as if Th.S. Kuhn, who liked to retrace his intellectual itinerary, had wanted to remain faithful to the good physics student he had been when he chose to become a physics historian. We cannot accuse Kuhn of having forgotten that he had learned physics from respectable masters but we may regret that they did not include an artisan of the revolution in his discipline (as Einstein was to Karl Popper). Such a master would have taught him that there are times, when studying a problem, when one must adopt new frameworks for thought. Kuhn was evidently conscious of this need because he owes the notion of a “scientific revolution” to it. However, instead of a detailed study of the nature of such a revolution he avoids the issue, confining himself to comments, certainly intelligent but only introductory, instead of undertaking an enquiry. For example we read in a note for an article used as a postface for one of the American editions of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions this judicious comment; we are astonished to find it ends in an interrogation, when it should have banished the first factor to demonstrate that the second should be adopted: I suspect that, altogether generally, scientific revolutions can be distinguished from normal scientific developments in that, unlike these [normal scientific developments], they require a modification of generalisations which have been regarded, up to then, as quasi-analytic. Did Einstein discover that simultaneity was relative or did he destroy an earlier tautological consequence of the term? (Kuhn 1990, p. 405)
If the rapid examination made earlier in this article allows us to form a conclusion, it is that in fact Einstein did not invent the relativity of simultaneity (Poincaré had preceded him) but he destroyed the idea of absolute simultaneity inherent in the idea of an absolute time. What cold have made Th.S. Kuhn so shy about a subject which he had the merit of introducing successfully? It seems to us to be a positivist impregnation of his thinking which he was unable to resist effectively. Kuhn certainly repudiated the positivism of facts and his pertinent reflections on the psychology of the Gestalt which show that the same figure may appear as “carpe” or “rabbit,” are significant in this respect. But he remained attached to a positivism of mentalities, as if the pertinent criticisms he makes of neo-positivist representations of science immunised completely against such a danger. In reality the positivism he reproaches when it is a question of putting aside the “rational
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reconstruction” of science prone by the neo-positivists, he adopts it when it is a question of making his own the paradigms taught by the masters of a discipline. It is this latter positivism which contributes to isolating the scientific disciplines from each other and, for example, in Einstein’s time, mechanics from electrodynamics. But with the advent of a free spirit, which perceives the improbability of changing the general reference frameworks when one moves from one discipline to another in physics, then a new task becomes necessary, which is not described by the neo-positivist philosophers, but carried out by a philosopher scientist, such as Einstein was. At a certain level in the study of the foundations of a discipline, we cannot do without philosophy, even if it is not the one which has been taught to the unhappy scientist who finds himself called upon to undertake such a task. If this “unhappy” scientist succeeds in his task he becomes a hero! Th.S. Kuhn’s attitude to philosophy seems to be the reserved attitude of a scientist who observes that philosophical speculations about science do not reflect the real work of scientists in practice and the continued respect for a discipline which had always attracted him and which he saw could help him to resolve the problem of the appearance of a new paradigm. Was he not aware that, in his famous book, he offered the structure of “normal science” arising from recognized paradigms, rather than that of “scientific revolutions”? Nevertheless we see in Kuhn’s last works certainly not a retraction but a desire to return to the notions of revolution, of change of direction and of incommensurability which he had dealt with as a historian and not as a thinker, seeking to understand the reasons for these changes. It is interesting that in this respect he turned to the opinions of Quine, who had become a close colleague In the last paragraph of the preface to The Essential Tension we find these lines which bear witness to his continuing dissatisfaction with the explanations which were being proposed for the title of his master work: In my book about revolutions I describe them as episodes during which the meaning of some scientific terms changes, and I advance the idea that as a result there is an incommensurability between viewpoints and a partial rupture of communication between the partisans of various theories. Since then I have become aware that the expression ‘changes of direction’ covers a problem which is much more than a phenomenon which can be isolated, and I am now persuaded, mostly by Quine’s work, that the problems of incommensurability and of partial communication must be dealt with in another way. The defenders of various theories (or of different paradigms, in the broad sense of the term) speak different languages – languages which express different adhesions in cognitive terms, which correspond to different worlds. Their capacity to understand each others’ viewpoints is therefore inevitably limited by the imper-
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fections of the processes of translation and the determination of references. These are the questions which interest me most today and I hope to be able to say something about them before long. (Kuhn 1990, pp. 28-29)
No doubt Kuhn was right in pointing out that the differences between theories and paradigms do not arise from the syntactical changes in theoretical terms, but from the semantic viewpoints which assures their existence in the “world” with which they deal. However, to ask Quine’s thinking, which is interested precisely in anchoring words in a particular context, to clarify the sudden changes in anchorage which overturn the meaning of the usual words, is to ask a new positivism of mentalities to explain why mentalities change, when apparently the world they live in remains the same. The real world they try to present remains the same, so they are always “commensurable,” but the descriptions they offer for it differ for the reasons given by the initiators of the new paradigms. We must ask them. To ask the author of three well-known theses (the subdetermination of theories by observation, the inscrutability of the reference and the indetermination of the translation) to account for changes, when the theses explain the resistance to change, is to ask Zenon to explain movement. The new sociologists of knowledge are not wrong there. They see it – how else could they see it – only as an invitation to reinforce what they have drawn from Kuhn’s own work, to seek the reason for changes which have arisen in scientific representations in non-scientific factors for the science in question. Sociological relativism triumphs easily over any philosophy which wishes to preserve science from the critical analyses of this relativism by shutting itself into the cognitive practices duly authorized by the dominant consensus.
3. Transcendental Activity in the Construction of the Sciences So what is the philosophy of knowledge which can overcome the sociological relativism which now undermines confidence in the “objectivity” of science? We know that a return to naïf realism is out of the question, precisely because the new objects of science have none of the sensible evidence which is required for objects of the normal senses. We should remember that in the eighteenth century Hume invented a psychological relativism which resulted in a scepticism at least equal to that of the new relativists and without being more moved, as in his view beliefs could be explained by largely shared experiences. Kant answered
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Hume in inventing transcendental idealism, which at least had the merit of being able to take account of the Newtonian science of its time. We do not need to hold onto Kant’s idealism, which is based on the ideality of space and time, this “transcendental esthetic” which is certainly the least convincing part of his Critique. However, we should take account of the transcendental aspect of the description of valid knowledge; it does not mean that we are escaping, thanks to him, into a transcendent world – on the contrary, we define objects in the reality of the senses using concepts which are a priori and constitutive in relation to objects of experience (valid). Isn’t this what we have seen Einstein do in constituting a new cinematic, valid for electrodynamics as for mechanics? He took the concepts of space and time using graduated rulers and clocks; he demonstrated that we can easily define a simultaneity in an inertial reference frame, but within one reference frame only, as the speed of light is the same at all reference frames (because of the principle of relativity and the independence of the speed of light in relation to the movement of its source); this being so, once again we find Lorentz’ transformation rules, previously discovered by other means (the need to extend the principle of relativity to the laws of electromagnetism). The demonstration has a certain subtlety but it is still simple and accessible to any mind adequately trained in a scientific discipline. The scientific discipline here consists in carefully specifying the objects given and the principles to be used; furthermore, these objects and principles are the result of long scientific practice. The innovation is based on tradition, but a tradition reduced to its essentials and carefully transported into the technology of the era to which we want to apply it. In fact the innovation is the sort of “Copernican revolution” which Kant claimed for his philosophy. In his case the comparison means that Kantian philosophy reverses the traditional relationship between the subject and the object, as Copernicus reversed the roles of the earth and the sun. Generally speaking, the comparison means that innovation, however bold, takes account, as did Copernicus, of the best scientific knowledge of its time, even if this did not resolve all the difficulties. Kuhn was not wrong, therefore, in invoking the Copernican revolution as an example of a new paradigm, but he was much more interested in its results and its consequences and not sufficiently interested in the deep motives which meant that the Copernican theory was better from the outset than those which preceded it, existing defects notwithstanding. We might ask if it is really appropriate to call this method of constructing scientific theories “transcendental.” We have seen that we understand this notion according to Kant’s definition, which is
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appropriate to all theories, whether of knowledge or physical, but we might ask why Kant himself turned to the notion of “transcendental” used in scholastic philosophy. There is little doubt about the answer; the Schoolmen applied the term “transcendental” to whatever fell outside the Aristotelian division of categories, such as the ideas of truth, unity and goodness, in which man generally places whatever, as object of thought, is essentially related to the spirit. For Kant this is a transcendental revolution in the sense that, for every scientific object, truth here is entirely suspended in the mind which gives it its form. For Einstein, it is a transcendental revolution in the sense that it transcends the categoric divisions between mechanics and electromagnetism and that, like Kant, he was concerned to find a rigorous method which applies its principles strictly and is not content with half measures, as was Lorentz’ theory, attached as it was to his belief in the ether. Certainly we may prefer another term; but the connotations of another term might be no better than those, clearly interesting, which govern the Kantian choice. Regarding the “transcendental,” we might also evoke Husserl’s use of the term, which refers to the Kantian usage. Here, more profoundly that was the case with Kant, it means demonstrating the constitutive power of the mind, which is manifest in all objects of intentionality. The idealist connotation is even more evident here, but we can abstract it for two reasons. The first: is “transcendental” for Husserl not only what operates in the construction of science, but also for prescientific knowledge. With regard to the latter Husserl mentioned the Lebenswelt or the world of life which is the infrastructure of all knowledge. Thus the rejection of idealism consists here in not referring to the “transcendental ego” the nature of which we cannot know at this stage, but to the transcendental power of life itself, which forces the living subject to take an interest in the world and to define the objects within it. In addition, and this is the second reason for an interest in the Husserlian reference, with it concerns man, the living subject must be helped in this constitution of the world by a suitable education, so much so that transcendental life is always for him an intersubjective life. This intersubjective side is magnified in the constitution of science which is a community or shared activity which always governs the organisation of “scientific communities,” as Merton saw so clearly, and allows “scientific revolutions” to take place within them. This reference to Husserlian analyses leaves us in no danger of losing what is valid in the work of Th.S. Kuhn, even, if we have broken away from all forms of positivism. From the non-idealist transcendentalism postulated here to take account both of “normal science” and “scientific revolutions,” we can
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bring together the pragmatism of Pierce and even the conventionalism of Poincaré and Duhem. If we inclined to the references of Kant and Husserl, it is because we were asking what philosophy could resist the relativism which is supported, rather than contradicted, by the contributions of Kuhn and Quine. Vis-à-vis Kant and Husserl, philosophers have learned long ago to guard against the idealism which contaminates their thought without rejecting their essential benefits. Because of them, and sometimes in spite of them, we are well able to reach a transcendentalism marked by history. With scientists more involved in the science of their era, it is perhaps more difficult to separate what we can retain of their doctrine of science and what we must abandon to their scientific work, which with all reputable scientists is, sometimes a happy outcome and sometimes much less so.
4. Conclusion The recourse to history, and particularly to historicity, which designates the situation at a given moment in historical time for any given cultural training, and consequently, for science, has the great advantage that it prevents epistemology from falling into the idealism associated, doubtless for historical reasons, with transcendental method and analysis. Idealism is the original sin of transcendentalism, but it can free itself when it works within the historical tradition of science; it should not cast doubt on scientific knowledge even if it reserves the right to reinterpret it. We see that this is the task of hermeneutics in its double function, transcendental and historic. Compared with this hermeneutic concept of epistemology, we see that the work of Th.S. Kuhn suffers from a positivist heritage which came to light in the sociological conception of the “paradigm” and in his contradictory way of dealing with “scientific revolutions.” In fact it is not in resorting to a philosophy which shows all the reasoning by which scientists, besieged in the fortress of their certainties, can defend the paradigms to which they are attached, that we can explain the audacity we need to disturb these certainties and establish new bases. The invention of Einstinian relativity is an example which demonstrates both that Einstein himself had to draw on semi-relativist sources and that Kuhn is greatly embarrassed in his characterization of the originality of Einstein in spite of the accuracy of his intuitions. It must be recognized that such positions are retrospective in nature and do not meet the objections, for example, of relativist sociologists,
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who challenge us to apply this hermeneutic concept, well supported by the past, to the current discussions in physics on the unification of interactions. Clearly we cannot conjure up the great figure of Einstein, who never reached any significant conclusion on this score. It would be honest to say that he failed to take quantum physics seriously at the time. What, therefore, would be the best way to take it seriously – that is the problem facing the epistemologists of physics, and it has not been dealt with here. We can only suggest that, for the quanta as for relativity, we should not neglect either the historical or the transcendental factors in the construction of the sciences; it is by the delicate balance of these two considerations that all the successes of the past have been obtained. We should also consider other objections which the relativist sociologists might make. They might concede that the hermeneutic concept presented here can avail itself of good results in the epistemology of physics, but could the same be said for chemistry, biology, history and the social sciences? Our reply could be the following: where there is a historical tradition, for example in chemistry and history, then the hermeneutic concept can certainly be applied. Where traditions are overturned by new discoveries which cannot be assimilated easily into the former body of knowledge, for example in biology and the social sciences, the hermeneutic task is much more difficult. It is when the hermeneutic task is difficult that it is boldest, in order to clarify epistemic situations which are frightening in their complexity in these areas at present.
Archives Henri Poincaré-Laboratoire de Philosophie et d’Histoire des Sciences (LPHS) UMR 7117 du CNRS Nancy-Université France e-mail:
[email protected]
REFERENCES Agazzi, E. (1987). Dimensions historiques de la Science et de sa philosophie. In : Les relations mutuelles entre la Philosophie des sciences et l’Histoire des sciences, pp. 3-25. Archives of the International Institute of Theoretical Sciences, no. 29. Brussels: Office International de Librairie. Bloor, D. (1991). Knowledge and Social Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Kuhn, Th.S. ([1977] 1990). La tension essentielle, tradition et changement dans les sciences. Paris: Gallimard. Translation of The Essential Tension, Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, Th.S. (1983). La structure des révolutions scientifiques. French translation by Laure Meyer (from the 1970 edition). Paris: Flammarion. Latour, B. ([1987] 1995). La Science en action : Introduction à la sociologie des sciences. Paris: Gallimard. Revised version of Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Juan Urrutia Elejalde PUZZLES AND PROBLEMS
ABSTRACT. This paper tries to contribute to the elucidation of some intellectual conundrums and policy questions regarding scientific knowledge (SK). As for modelling, I have shown that the Solow model is independent of human agency, has rich and precise policy implications and captures some features of S(SK). As for policy I have obtained three results. First, the optimal path of scientific production can be reached through an attainable public intervention. Second, whether this public intervention ought to be implemented depends in part on the relevant period of adjustment, a rather unconventional notion. Third, the analysis of this relevant period of adjustment may help to understand the development of science. Finally and in relation to epistemology I have been able to suggest that visual representation can be very misleading and that the proliferation I have uncovered forces a reconsideration of the desideratum of science.
This is a paper written by an economist on the production of scientific output and on the scientific belief-forming process. The fact that it is written by an economist should not automatically make it a paper on the Economics of Scientific Knowledge (E(SK)). However, if the latter is the application of well-developed economic tools to the understanding of the production of scientific output or the belief-forming process, the paper could certainly be so classified. I will be using the well known 1956 Solow growth model to explore some well-defined issues such as the applicability of this kind of model, which can be understood as almost completely abstracting from individual rationality, or matters of scientific policy, including its public/private nature, among others. There are, however, two features of E(SK) that will not be used quite properly even though they both seem, or ought, to be the staple diet of E(SK). Although I will be making extensive use of the notion of equilibrium, I will be ignoring rationality and expectations almost completely. I find no use for individual rationality except in a cursory way. And as for expectations, a
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 49-70. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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feature that one would expect to loom high in E(SK), I just assume perfect foresight all the time, a simple case of rational expectations and a clever way of not letting in the very rich play of expectation-forming. Without leaving the realm of E(SK) proper, I can ask myself some meta-questions on the pros and cons of this Solow model vs. the usual game theory approach based on the notion of Nash equilibrium 1 or the issue relating to the humanity or non-humanity of scientific research strategy. These latter types of issues are not quite the same as those encompassing E(SK) and they could be classified under the S(E(SK)) meta-heading. For many years I have been interested in what I have called E(SK) or S(E(SK)) and more specifically in the transformation of puzzles (or enigmas) into problems and puzzles as a kind of conundrum that I find both bothering and challenging. A problem only challenges me. The challenge posed by a problem is indeed the challenge of solving that problem. The challenge I feel when facing a puzzle is to convert it into a well-defined problem. Although solving problems is a delicate and decisive task, in this paper I will be considering it as automatic, taking problems and solutions as equivalent. My old interest in puzzles and problems was driven by policy matters such as, for instance, how to organise scientific institutions to produce science. More recently, I have come into contact with the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, S(SK), and with the death of the subject or the bracketing out of both the subject and the world. These are rather esoteric issues for an economist but, in any case, they shifted my attention from the production of scientific output to the process of forming scientific beliefs. In this process, input and output are not clear cut notions. One way of understanding them is to think of pairs like Heidegger’s things and objects, or Latour’s matters of fact and matters of concern. My recent interest in these notions and in processes relating them in a circular flow has a dual origin. In the first place, I want to explore how I can apply economic reasoning to their understanding, and to what avail. Here, for instance, I will try to capture the importance of visual representation in science through the examination of a particular economic example. But, secondly, I also want to use my economic tools 1
Using a macroeconomic model as a tool to understand issues related to the functioning of science is a kind of “tour de force” although not a “boutade.” Not using game theory is almost heretic but it has the novelty of not underwriting rationality of the human agent even when talking about a scientist. However this departure from conventional modelling allows us to cover under the same model both the modern and post-modern conceptions of science as an “ongoing concern.” I return to this point in 3.2.
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to clarify some of the categories, examples and rhetoric used in S(SK), such as, for instance, the broadening of empiricism that Latour is recently demanding. All these issues could be stamped as E(S(SK)) in the sense that they pertain to S(SK) but are going to be approached from an economic point of view. So the paper certainly centres on (SK) but rambles from E(SK) to E(S(SK)) and S(E(SK)), taking S(SK) as an interesting object of observation. The epistemology is somewhat veiled in the background of this pot pourri but I will attempt to bring it to the forefront in unconventional ways.
1. Introduction: The Issues My aim in this introduction is to rearrange thinking on (SK) according to three distinct axes, the first of which is Modelling. Under this heading I want to refer to my second thoughts on E(SK) collected around the S(E(SK)) meta-heading. I will argue in favour of the aggregate dynamic modelling of the production of science and I will discuss the role played by the human agency in research strategy. This is followed by Policy. Here I will focus on the optimal equilibrium path of scientific production and, more specifically, on the public implementation of this optimal path and on the influence that the length of the period of adjustment might have on the decision to implement it. These are topics belonging quite clearly to the field of E(SK). Finally, under the meta-heading of E(S(SK)), I will try to present my second thoughts on S(SK) pertaining to Epistemology and related to the possible broadening of empiricism and to the perils of visual representations in science. Putting together all these different issues is not an easy task but I will attempt to accomplish it according to the following programme. In the next section, I will be presenting the 1956 Solow model. In section 3, I turn my attention to the production of scientific output, something I understand, contrary to most practitioners of E(SK), as a single minded application of the Solow model. I will claim that this understanding is quite appropriate and not so different from the underlying understanding in S(SK). I will also show that it can be used to understand the role of visual representation in science and I will argue in favour of the nonhumanity of research strategy in the field. This unusual way of looking at the production of science is particularly appropriate to face a certain aspect of the issue of the public or private nature of science, an issue the treatment of which requires the analysis of the optimal path and of the period of adjustment. In section 4, the model is translated into the
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language of S(SK) in order to be able to understand and contribute to it. Here, the proliferation of things and objects that can be shown to occur through the scientific belief-forming process, is interpreted as an epistemic issue and as an explanation of the broadening of empiricism at which Latour (2004) aims, barely disguised as a possible mid-life crisis. In the final comments of section 5, I will summarise my answers to the issues raised in this introduction.
2. The Solow Model 2 I begin by introducing the Solow model in its own terms and with a notation which I will not bother to modify when referring to its interpretation and/or applications. I begin with the supply side. Let Q stand for output, the same kind of stuff as capital (K). This stuff is produced by this capital K together with labour L. I will take the production function to be Cobb-Douglas with constant returns to scale from the very beginning. That is:
Q
K 3 L1-3
F ( K , L)
where: 3
FK K and (1 - 3 ) F ( K , L)
FL L F ( K , L)
are the corresponding participation ratios of capital and labour respectively, given that FK wF wK and FL wF wL are the corresponding marginal productivities. This production function can be represented as in Figure 2a.
2 The reader may wonder why I devote several pages to reproduce with some mathematical detail the Solow model when this model is well known and could have been recalled graphically with greater ease. There are two reasons for proceeding the way I do. In the first place I want to introduce in the model a public sector for reasons which will become obvious in the sequel. Secondly, mathematics (even without explicit proof) are necessary because I want to argue that visual representation in science can be deceitful and the thrust of my argument is precisely that some mathematically established results are hidden to the eye.
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Puzzles and Problems
k
L Fig. 2a In this figure, a map of isoquants is depicted together with two rays from the origin. Since I am assuming constant returns to scale, any ray from the origin is the loci of points (one in each isoquant) with identical marginal rates of substitution (MRS) between capital and labour. This MRS is given by:
dK dL
-
wF wL wF wK
FL FK
and it gives the social valuation of capital in terms of labour. Note than along any isoquants the MRS diminishes southwest. Constant returns to scale enable us to rewrite everything in per capita terms:
q
Q L
f (k )
k3; 3k
f ' ! 0,
3 -1
FK
f ' (k )
FL
f (k ) - kf ' (k ) (1 - 3 ) k 3
MRS
f (k ) - kf ' (k ) f ' (k )
(1 - 3 ) k 3 3 k 3 -1
f ' ' 0,
where k
K L
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and all these notions can be represented in figure 2.b, where the production per capita and the MRS for a particular k, denoted by k0, are shown.3
q f (k) q0
(W/r)0
0
k0
k
Fig. 2.b I can now turn to the demand side of the model, specifying the consumption function. Let consumption C be given by:
C
Q - sQ (1 - s ) Q
where s can be a function of other variables and not necessarily a constant. In per capita terms we can define c = C/L and write:
c (1 - s ) f (k ) (1 - s )k 3 in the case of the Cobb-Douglas.
3 This is a good place to explain why I have contended that the Solow model could be thought as abstracting from individual rationality. It is not because the individual in the model, be it the consumer-worker or the producer, is just an aggregate the rationality of which is problematic. Even if this is indeed the case, the model presumes the maximisation both of utility and of profit. But it does explain the evolution of the MRS (i.e., the evolution of relative price (w/r)) which is necessary for the goods and labour markets to be in short run equilibrium at any given time. Under these conditions I can, at any rate, consider the model as representing a blind machine and concentrate my attention on how this machine works in the long run under alternative interpretations. This is what I will be doing in the next two sections.
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Puzzles and Problems
I can now introduce a public sector (which is not in the original) as the agent able to modify the savings rate. Let a be the % of capital owned by the State and let t stand for the tax rate imposed on any income. Look first at capital income. This income is given by YK (1 - a) FK K since private capital owns only (1 – a)% of this capital income. And since it is taxed, disposable capital income is given by
YKd
0 t 1,
(1 - t ) (1 - a ) FK K ,
0 a 1
Similarly, disposable labour income is given by YLd (1-t ) >F ( K , L) - FK K @ where the expression between brackets corresponds to labour income, YL On the other hand, the public sector has revenues corresponding to taxation and income from property and expenses in the amounts required to maintain their share of capital. x
D
R- E
aFK K t (YK YL ) - a K
Given these notions, I can now turn to saving. Private and public saving is given respectively by S pr
s (YKd YLd )
S pu
aK
x
We can now write that private saving as a proportion S of F (K, L) given by S
s>(1 - t ) (1 - a ) FK K (1 - t )>F ( K , L) - FK K @ @
s >(1 - t ) (1 - a ) 3 (1 - t ) (1 - 3 ) s (1 - t ) (1 - a3 )@ x
Since total saving is given by K , we can write x
K
x
SF ( K , L ) a K
and substituting the previous expression here, we find that total saving is given by x
K
SF ( K , L) (1 - a )
s (1 - t )(1 - a3 ) F ( K , L) (1 - a )
It can be immediately verified that
S1 ! 0 and S 2 0
S ( a, t ) F ( K , L )
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Juan Urrutia Elejalde
I can now finally come to dynamics and equilibrium. The dynamics are immediate. Denote by ^ the rate of growth of any variable
(x
x
x
x x , where x
dx dt )
and assume for simplicity that L n . Then,
k
S ( a, t ) F ( K , L ) -n K
Therefore, x
k
S (a, t ) f (k ) - nk
S (a, t ) k 3 - nk
in the case of the Cobb Douglas. Quite intuitively, we say that a given k * is an equilibrium if x
k 0 for this k*. It is obvious that the k* of equilibrium is a function of (a, t) In figure 2.c, the saving function and the equilibrium k have been introduced.
Fig. 2.c The following proposition is easy to prove and intuitively understood just by looking at the above figure.
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Theorem 1: For S 0 = (a 0 , t 0), a long run equilibrium, k 0 , such that x
k
S 0 k 03 - nk 0
(i) always exists, (ii) it is unique and (iii) globally stable. Proof. Standard. See Burmeister and Dobell (1970) All this has been well known for the last 50 years and I only need to make a couple of remarks for later purposes. The first is related to the notion of equilibrium. It is a long-run equilibrium and I have avoided referring to the short-run equilibrium at which at any time the factor ratio (w/r) equals the MRS so that both markets (goods and labour) are in equilibrium. The second remark is that figure 2.c is, together with the D/S scheme or the IS/LM diagram, one of the best known icons of Economics. I will be turning to the general subject of scientific iconography in a moment.4
3. Some Simple Analytics of the Production of Science
A simple application of the Solow model can help to say something related to certain issues in E(SK), E(S(SK)) and S(E(SK)). Take L as the number of scientists, K as the scientific resources they can use in their work and F(K, L) as scientific products. Some of these products are consumed immediately and others increase the resources available to the scientists. A vaccine, for instance, might be consumed immediately. A new molecule that has been isolated may not be consumed right away as it may go back to the production of scientific output as a resource available for scientists to produce others. The first application of this interpretation of the model pertains to what I have called E(S(SK)). S(SK) has closely studied iconography, or the role played by visual representation in science. The production of scientific output according to the Solow model offers an extremely good 4
Before I turn to applications, I want to make clear at this point why I cannot squarely face two topics which are supposed to be central to S(SK). I cannot elucidate constructivism in the model as I have presented it because, to do so, I would have had to introduce expectation-forming and not to make do with perfect foresight: there are no selffulfilling prophecies with this latter notion of expectations. Neither can I properly speak of relativism because according to Theorem 1 there is only one equilibrium. Had I complicated the model making n dependent on k, I would have generated multiplicity and then it would have been possible to understand that different communities (of scientists, for instance) would reach completely different scientific levels of development.
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opportunity to look at this matter in the field and with the aid of Economics. Go back to figure 2.a in which a map of isoquants was depicted together with two rays from the origin each of which represented a particular k and united points of identical MRS. In figure 3.a, I offer two panels.
Fig. 3.a On the left-hand side the Solow trajectory starting at k 0 has been represented as originally in his paper, namely as convex towards the other ray (which has been taken to correspond to k brought about by the golden rule of accumulation). Solow justifies this particular shape by the fact that the convergence from any k towards k is monotone, something that is implicit in Theorem 1. However, it is not difficult to show that the true trajectory is like the one shown on the right-hand panel, which is also consistent with monotone convergence from any k towards k . Theorem 2: The Solow trajectory is concave to the k ray. Proof. See Urrutia (1982). This Theorem 2 elicits some comments related to the visual representation of scientific results. Firstly, note that just by looking at figure 3.a, we already know that, as I said in relation to figure 2.a, the MRS between of resources and scientists increases along the trajectory as k increases, a feature of the model which seems to fit the reality of a world in which scientists are increasingly scarce and valuable. But this feature is common to both the trajectories shown in the two panels of figure 3.a, the false and the true. The perils of visual representation are now obvious in at least two directions.
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Puzzles and Problems
In the first direction, we observe a feature on the right hand side panel which is not present on the left. Look at L, the number of scientists. Along the false trajectory the difference between the number of existing scientists and the number corresponding to the optimal k seems to decline. But the opposite is true as shown on the right hand side panel. The same applies to scientific resources. The number of scientists that each year has to be introduced into the system in order to obtain a “better” equilibrium in the production of science increases. So does the amount of resources applied to science. The second direction in which visual representation is dangerous in this particular case is velocity of adjustment. In this respect, the Solow trajectory is deceitful because it gives the wrong impression that adjustment is quick. However, the period of adjustment, as we will see presently, is not a simple issue and can certainly not be ascertained graphically. In this sense, the impression given by the true trajectory is also deceitful. This example is sufficient for us not to be as iconophilic as Latour, in his 1998 paper, claims we should be. Let us now turn to S(E(SK)). Here, I have three comments to make. The first is related to Zamora’s critique of Latour/Woolgar (1979). Zamora objects to their conception of the production of science as credibility
o
resources
o
credibility
money
Factors of production
Labour Intermediate goods
commodities
in an endless way which disregards any epistemic issue and looks similar to a Marxist model of how an economy functions. According to Zamora, the way to understand scientific production in an economically sensible way is to embed it in a typical neoclassical model of the workings of the economic system as in the following diagram:
consumption goods
money
intermediate goods
Fig. 3.b. This is a representation typical of E(SK). It is easily recognised as the conventional “circular flow” and as such it can be broken down into at
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least two sectors producing consumption and intermediate goods respectively. Furthermore, this representation of the production of science has epistemic content since science is understood as an intermediate good that actually works. However the conventional “circular flow” can be replicated by a simple Solow growth model which, besides not clouding the picture with money and really being a miniature “general equilibrium model,” is completely aggregated and therefore easy to handle; it captures only the production of science as a final good and in such a way that it cannot be said that science really works thus depriving it of any epistemic content and making it epistemically agnostic. This completely orthodox macroeconomic model is not that different from the one used by Latour and Woolgar (1979) but two comments are in order. First, in spite of this, it does not follow from the model I am using that scientific results are “cooked” in order to obtain more resources through a better reputation. The increase in resources comes structurally, so to speak. The second comment is related to the debate between Fuller and Latour (2003) on the role played by human agents in the research strategy of E(SK). The word ‘structure’ above has been chosen to underline that the analysis does not need to introduce human beings. Economics is not a humanism. As I mentioned in the first paragraph of this paper, the rationality of the aggregated consumer and of the aggregated producer does not play a crucial role. It only serves the purpose of defining the short run equilibrium which is supposed to happen at each instant and requires a certain behaviour of the MRS. Apart from this, the dynamics of the model is completely blind. Therefore there is no room for Fuller’s moral enterprise. As a research strategy, morality can only occur in a non-equilibrium, Austrian-like type of economic system but even in this setting the epistemic value of morality is hardly obvious. I turn finally to E(SK) and to question of public policy, for which I must introduce two additional topics.5 The first one is related to the optimal equilibrium path. What we want to discover is the particular savings ratio that will generate a k of long run equilibrium, k , at which per capita consumption is maximised. Per capita consumption, c, is given by (1- S) f (k) = (1- S) k . In the long run equilibrium defined by
5 This section is an example of modern thinking. In fact Economics in general uses modern thinking and this is also the same when talking about (SK). This modern thinking is easily characterised as making a clear distinction between “I” and “the world,” between the “subject” and the “object” of enquiry, between “origin” and “destiny.”
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x
k
0
we have that S f ( k ) = S k = nk , i.e.,
S
nk k
Therefore, in the long-run equilibrium, we can write per capita consumption as a function of S :
C (S )
ª nk º 3 «1 - k 3 » k ¬ ¼
k 3 - nk
In order to maximise c, we have to implement a savings ratio, S, which corresponds to a k such that
f ' (k )
3k 3 -1
n
Given this condition of optimality, we find the optimal savings ratio S
nk k
3k 3 -1 k k3
3k 3 k3
3,
the so-called golden rule of accumulation. We denote it by S0 and note that it corresponds to the capital participation ratio, . The corresponding long-run equilibrium k is denoted by k and shown in figure 3.c. The second topic I have to introduce is much less known and it is related to the period of adjustment which tells us something about dynamics between equilibria. As a simple mathematical implication of the Solow model, one may quite naturally ask about the period of adjustment. This concerns how long it would take to go from an initial equilibrium k0 (related to an initial S 0 ) to a final equilibrium capital/labour ratio corresponding to a higher, say, savings rate. To be precise, let us assume that the economic system moves from its initial position k0 to a final equilibrium position denoted by k due to a change from S0 < to S 0 = implemented formally by a change in a or t (note that both variables are independent or can be understood as such). Given the nature of the differential equation x
(k (k )) it will take an infinite number of periods to obtain exactly k . What we then ask is how long it takes to attain a particular k D arbitrarily close to k . Under the usual interpretation what we have in mind is the following.
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When moving from S 0 to S 0 , S 0 > S 0 , consumption diminishes initially but after a certain number of periods of time during which output has increased, consumption regains its initial value and from then on it becomes larger than it initially was. Whether the move from k 0 to k is worthwhile then depends (putting aside the future discount rate, taken as given) on the time it takes to attain k D , where D is called the relevant adjustment, the one enabling us to attain initial consumption. This particular k is given by S0 f (k) = n or, in the case of the Cobb-Douglas production function, by k as reproduced in figure 2.c. Denote now by t D the relevant period of adjustment, that is this period of time which is needed to recover the initial consumption. We can establish the following result. Theorem 3: Let S(a 0 , t0 ) = S 0 be the initial savings ratio. Let S(a 0 , t0) = S 0 be the final savings ratio. Let t k be the relevant
period of adjustment. Then: 1.a.
1.b
wt D wa0 wt D wa0
!0
and
0
and
wt D wt 0 wt D wt 0
0
for
k0 k
!0
for
d0 ! k
Proof. See Urrutia (1984).
Let us consider the usual case of underdeveloped countries. In these countries, k 0 is very small and below k. We can then say that the relevant period of adjustment is larger for those underdeveloped countries which have initially a greater size of the public sector and/or a lower tax rate. Note that Theorem 3 is just a mathematical implication of the model and therefore cannot be directly related to any conventional knowledge about the influence of the public sector on development, but it could easily be empirically tested. However, we will make use of it to discuss matters related to the production of science and to the scientific belief-forming process which will be raised by different interpretations of the Solow model. Having introduced these two topics, I can now prove that the public sector can implement the golden rule of accumulation. Let us use optimal intervention to designate any pair (a0 , t 0 ) which, given S and , produces S = S 0 = . Given the definition of S, we obtain this locus as given by
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63
S (1 - t 0 ) - 3 S (1 - t 0 )3 - 3
a0
Given and S , the optimal size of the public sector is a0 < 1, satisfying the above condition for 0 < t 0 < 1, which can always be obtained provided S d 3 , as seems to be the general case. Now, the public sector deficit can be written as follows: D
t F (k , L) (1 - t ) a FK K -
a S (1 - t )(1 - a3 ) F ( K , L) 1- a
and it is obvious that for t = 1, there is a superavit. By continuity it can easily be shown that there is always a certain t that generates a superavit together with the corresponding a. As an example,
0 t
aS (1 - a3 ) 1 generates a superavit of (1 - t ) aFk K . aS (1 - a3 ) (1 - a )
I can conclude that an optimal scientific policy can be implemented by the public sector. However, if we ask whether this optimal policy should always be implemented the answer is not obvious. The first difficulty involved is the question of whether the private sector could possibly behave better than the public one. This question has no direct answer in the present framework. What can be said in the particular framework I am using is only whether it pays to change the size of the public sector, changing a and/or t, in terms of the period of adjustment. If we look at Theorem 3 and we interpret its content, we would claim something like the following for backward countries in scientific terms: these countries should diminish the size of the scientific public sector and increase the tax rate t. Just the contrary should be done in advanced countries in scientific terms.
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4. Some Further Remarks Concerning E(S(SK)) on the Process of Forming Scientific Beliefs 6 What I want to do now is to use the Solow model conveniently translated as an instrument to really understand what is the picture of the process of forming scientific beliefs as depicted by S(SK) and especially by Latour (2004). This author tries to refuel what he calls critique through a rhetoric pretension of a false mid-life crisis. In this paper he begins by pretending that the deconstruction of scientific beliefs through the detailed construction of the bargaining process through which these scientific beliefs are constructed, might have gone too far when faced with wars of all kinds, from scientific wars to the Iraq war, or with failures like the Challenger or the Columbus. As expected, this crisis leads to a recommendation to broaden the scope of empiricism to include all these “states of affairs,” covering not only matters of fact but also matters of concern or, using Heideggerian terminology, not only objects but also things. So, in this section I will try to simply translate the Solow model to accommodate the increase in scope of empiricism and to understand economically what S(SK) appears to portray as the process of forming scientific beliefs. I will then present a possible way of uncovering the real “mid-age crisis” which might underline the one used rhetorically. This section is therefore an exercise in E(S(SK)). But before I proceed to an ad hoc translation of the Solow model, let me turn poetic and personal for a moment. In Sartre’s The Nausea, Roquentin felt anguish and nausea when contemplating a simple root completely detached from any natural project. This root is an object in itself which cannot be used except to be bumped into, and the significance or meaning of which we cannot reach from the void. The only experience I have had close to such nausea turns out to be the 6 This section 4 is an example of how Economics, which, as I have said in the previous note, is in general modern, can, however, become a way of thinking which can be labelled post-modern. This post-modern thinking brackets away the “I” and “the world” and concentrates on the mediations between the “subject” and the “object,” between “origin” and “destiny.” It is when abstracting from modern notions that the exploration of (SK) becomes less conventional and more exciting, even if one is subject to the usual critique of post-modernism as an “imposture intellectuelle” (see Sokal and Bricmont 1997). What is unconventional about this post-modern research strategy applied to (SK) is that one is led to shift from a correspondence theory of truth to a coherence theory of truth as is the case with the rhetoric approach. And what makes it exciting is that it can be shown that there are circumstances under which rhetoric is a better strategy for uncovering truths in the correspondence sense. See Urrutia (2003).
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contemplation of the object that falls to the floor when I cut my toenails, completely deformed by psoriasis. I feel this object is absurd, but only until I discover that my psoriatically fattened toenails show how they, like a dolomite rock, can be divided into finer layers of corneous matter. Then what stood as a disgusting object turns into the intelligible implementation of an uncoordinated body process full of meaning and a clear source of understanding about my own being. Immersed in this mesmerising thought, I discovered the distinction made by Heidegger between objects and things. According to Latour (2004), Heidegger understands that an object, a jar for instance, is something against which we unconsciously bump. A thing, however, like a car for instance, is closer to a coordinated decision of several judges closing a cause (chose, cosa) or a cooperative solution to a problem posed to a political assembly (thing). As I have just said, my psoriatic toenails are more things than objects. But this personal and existential experience becomes an interesting research enigma if, following Latour, we associate Heidegger’s objects (like the Roquentin root) to matters of fact (or simply facts: incontrovertible proven facts) and Heidegger’s things, like cars (or my psoriatic toenails), to matters of concern (or ways of caring about certain enigmas or puzzles). Whoever elaborates a theory is someone who cares about ideas and helps to transform them into facts. These facts, as time goes by, detach themselves from their origin and become the unproblematic objects we come up against or which are used as weapons in intellectual wars. To deconstruct this fact or this object might mean to recover its “awe” and remember that it was once subject to the caring effort of many people. In sum, science and thinking in general is a return ticket to travel between objects and things, between facts and theories, between matters of fact and matters of concern. Is this travel everlasting? Can we think about it? Can we say something about it? These are the questions I want to explore next. This digression leads me to the ad hoc translation I want to make of the Solow model. What I have said in my digression can be presented in a better way. Let G stand for a function transforming objects into things. Let M represent the transformation of things into matters of concern and let E transform these matters of concern into matters of fact which are nothing but objects. However, part of these objects can be transformed through E-1 back into matters of concern or enigmas. Consider the following artistic example. The function G transforms sounds into music: g (sounds) defined on all possible sounds. This new music g can be, for instance, dodecaphonism. Then M “transforms” this new music into a new required instrument: m (music) defined on the range of all kinds of
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Juan Urrutia Elejalde
music. And E finally transforms the new instrument m into a new form of concerto: e (instruments) defined over the set of all instruments. Part of this new form of concerto e might be transformed into a new required instrument. Now, these three functions can be composed into a single function F, going from sounds to concertos and another function S going from concertos to instruments and new sounds. Then the translation of this process of science which S(SK) wants to explore (bracketing out the subject and the world) can be represented by the previously presented Solow model. Let L stand for enigmas or puzzles which flow at a constant rate n. Let K stand for the problems (which can be taken to be transformed into solutions on a one by one basis) and let F(K, L) be the problems produced by the enigma and the solutions already obtained. Let S(a, t) stand for the ratio of these solutions which are not consumed at a given time and feed back to the production of more problems and therefore solutions. In this interpretation, t might represent the number of problems or solutions that are necessarily not consumed if we want to maintain a constant stock of problems usable for the functioning of the (scientific) process. In a way, the saving function and (a, t) are the mediators between the (bracketed away) subject and the world. I will assume that there are many attainable (a, t) pairs, something that cannot be proved in the context of this translation. And, given this assumption, I will take S(a 0 , t 0 ) as the golden rule of accumulation of solved problems that can be used to obtain knowledge, or more facts. Let us look at this interpretation carefully. F(K, L) is the number of things or problems (= solutions) that have emerged from L puzzles and K problems which have been reintroduced into the scientific process. Of F(K, L), a certain percentage amounting to C is “consumed.” Consumption here is the number of things produced which become objects. As such objects or facts they are scientific beliefs not useful for further advancing the scientific process. They are like branches of the evolution of the system which cannot be expected to grow new shoots. S, on the other hand, is the number of things produced which continue to have research potential and are refuelled into the process of forming scientific beliefs. How the split between C and S occurs depends on a and t. This latter tax detracts a portion of F(K, L) that goes immediately back to the process, a kind of forced saving of matters of fact which are then spared from becoming just absurd objects. The remaining (1 - t) F(K, L) can be consumed or fed back into the process. We can understand a as the % of things which are public in the Latour sense (see Latour and Weibel). Those public things are brought to the attention of the public and help to determine, in part, the amount of things or problems (= solutions) which,
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as matters of concern, contribute to the production of new scientific problems. The other part determining these new scientific problems may not be public in this sense but still useful in work with new enigmas. This interpretation is compatible with other distinctions, more epistemic this time. C can be understood as the amount of truths in the correspondence sense that are added in each period to the stock of truths in this sense. On the other hand, if one wishes, S can be understood as the amount of truths in the coherence sense produced in each period. I am now in a position to use the Solow model as interpreted to understand the broadening of empiricism intended by Latour (2004) as a leading figure in S(SK) and then to ascertain the epistemic content of this way of looking at the process of forming scientific beliefs. Remember Theorem 2 and read it now according to this interpretation. Look back at figure 3.a but where L stands now for puzzles and K for things or problems (= solutions). Starting from a certain initial point the progress of science moves along the a trajectory in which the ratio of problems to puzzles increases all the time making these puzzles relatively more and more scarce as we said about labour in the previous interpretation. But this cannot necessarily be taken as good epistemic news. If we look at the left hand side of figure 3.a we can see that the distance between K and L along the scientific progress corresponding to the Solow trajectory and their corresponding values in the optimal process are continually decreasing. In other words, both Kt – K0 and L t – L0 are continually decreasing. However, the opposite is the case along the true trajectory. If we look at the other panel of the same figure, the one which happens to be the case according to Theorem 2, we find that the number of puzzles increases and that so does the number of problems and solutions. This can be read as a proliferation of things and objects which seriously broadens the cardinality of the set of different entities floating around in the world and puts the epistemic issue on an unexpected footing. The epistemic desideratum of science cannot be the asymptotic approach to the disclosure of truth, in the correspondence sense, for every puzzle. The epistemic desideratum of science is rather the unbound proliferation of coherent solutions to new puzzles. Turning to literature or mythology, what is happening is simultaneously that the mountain that Sisyphus has to climb increases its height and that Sisyphus carries his rock closer and closer to the summit percentage-wise. The mountain (empiricism) increases and the truth attainable in the correspondence sense is greater and greater but smaller and smaller as a % of the total truth attainable. We have described this strange nature of science as proliferation, a word that conveys certain disquieting overtones, certain disorder and
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Juan Urrutia Elejalde
disgust. Therefore it seems natural to ask whether any society will ever make the effort to jump from an initial “state of affairs” corresponding to k 0 to the optimal state of affairs k . The answer will depend once again on the rate of discount of the future, or impatience, and on the relevant period of adjustment. Go back to the content of Theorem 3 and apply this interpretation. First take a society which is now (with S 0 ) at an equilibrium k0 , which is greater than k, the k that gives the same number of (non-productive) facts or truths if S0 were the case. Then making many things or problems public reduces the relevant period of adjustment as it would decrease the number of things which are found to be fuelled back into the problem. Now take a society where k0 < k. In this case, the reduction of the relevant period of adjustment occurs when the stock of things made public is small and forced saving increases. This gives some content to the Latour and Weibel (2005) idea of “making things public.” According to this interpretation, no policy recommendation is possible. However, we can try to apply the last result to the understanding of Latour’s (2004) rhetoric crisis. At the beginning (k 0 < k) it might be appropriate, in order to reduce the relevant period of adjustment, to have a small stock of matters of concern. But as k increases and if k > k, then increasing the stock of matters of concern available to the process of forming scientific beliefs will be appropriate in order to reduce the relevant period of adjustment. Latour claims that critique has not been understood because it has been taken as an attempt to reduce the number of accepted facts when the case was rather that what critique was trying to do was to increase the number of matters of concern in such a way as to increase the “state of affairs.” What I am surmising is that according to my E(S(SK)), we might not take Latour’s words at their face value. After all, Latour is human and accepting his all too human explanations might not be the right research strategy. As a matter of structure, my result can be more convincing in the sense that what he asserts to be the case is just the result of the passage of time. Or, alternatively, to see everything in problem form is only a good research strategy in societies where k > k, that is in societies which we could describe as scientifically progressive. Or, alternatively still, his repentance might not be just rhetoric. He should have wanted to create problems out of facts (i.e. to increase a) until the society had reached a point beyond k. Along these lines, his faked crisis can be understood as the opportunistic broadening of empiricism to matters of concern when it really helps.
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5. Summary and Concluding Remarks Let us now summarise the answers I have given to the issues posed in the introduction and then add some additional and brief comments. As for Modelling, that is S(E(SK)), my main message is that a chance should be given to Solow-like models when exploring E(SK). I have shown that the Solow model proper is independent of human agency, has rich and precise policy implications and captures some features of S(SK). As for Policy I have been able to contribute to E(SK) the following relatively new three results. First, the optimal path of scientific production can be reached through an attainable public intervention. Second, whether this public intervention ought to be implemented depends in part on the relevant period of adjustment, a rather unconventional notion. Third, the analysis of this relevant period of adjustment and of its changes brought about by a or by t, may help to understand the development of science. Finally and in relation to Epistemology I have been able to produce two results on what I have called E(S(SK)). Concerning visual representation I have shown that it can be very misleading and in relation to epistemology proper I have suggested that the proliferation I have uncovered (which certainly broadens empiricism) forces a reconsideration of the desideratum of science. The final comments that I feel obliged to add are of a different nature. They recognise, as I did in note 4, that this “macroeconomic” way of looking at science in an evolving social system has not been able to say anything of interest concerning the constructivism and relativism of science. Is it then completely devoid of epistemic value? Well, I have already isolated some epistemic issues; but something else can be added. On the one hand, I have shown that iconophilia does not add to the epistemic value whatever its importance as “condensed mediations” between “I” (the mind) and “the world.” On the other hand, it should be clear that not all epistemic misconceptions carry errors. For instance, the false Solow trajectory of adjustment would have never inoculated any error in the calculations of the period of adjustment.
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Juan Urrutia Elejalde
Chairman of the Editorial Board Recoletos Grupo de Comunicación Paseo de la Castellana, 66 28046 Madrid Spain e-mail:
[email protected]
REFERENCES Barron, C., ed. (2003). A Strong Distinction between Humans and Non-Humans Is No Longer Required for Research Purposes: A Debate between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller. History of the Human Sciences 16 (2), 77-99. Burmeister E., and A.R. Dobell (1970). Mathematical Theories of Economic Growth. New York: McMillan. Latour, B. (1998). How to Be Iconophilic in Art, Science and Religion. In: C.A. Jones and P.L. Galison (eds.), Picturing Science, Producing Art, pp. 418-440. New York: Routledge. Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Enquiry 30 (2), 225-248. Latour, B. and P. Weibel (2005). Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Latour, B. and S. Woolgar (1979). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. 2nd edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sokal, A. and J. Bricmont (1997). Impostures Intellectuelles. Paris: Odile Jacob. Solow, R.M. (1956). A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 70 (1), 65-94. Urrutia, J. (1982). Curiosidades y paradojas en un modelo elemental de teoría neoclásica del crecimiento. Boletín de Estudios Económicos 37 (116), 367-384. Urrutia, J. (1984). La influencia del sector público y de la distribución en la velocidad de ajuste a trayectorias óptimas de crecimiento. Boletín de Estudios Económicos 39 (121), 201-209. Urrutia, J. (2003). La potencia semántica de la retórica (un planteamiento de óptimo subsidiario y racionalidad limitada). In: G. Marqués and A. Avila (eds), Objetividad, Realismo y Retórica. Nuevas perspectivas en metodología de la economía, pp. 63-86. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Zamora, J. (2005). Ciencia pública – ciencia privada. Reflexiones sobre la producción del saber científico. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Jesús P. Zamora Bonilla NORMATIVITY AND SELF-INTEREST IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
ABSTRACT. In this paper I want to present the guiding lines of a research programme into the economics of scientific knowledge, a programme whose ultimate goal is to develop what I would like to call a contractarian epistemology. The structure of the paper is as follows: in the first section I will comment on two conflicting approaches to the topic of rationality in science: the view of the rationality of scientific knowledge as deriving from the employment of sound methodological norms, and the view of scientists as rational agents pursuing the optimisation of their own personal and professional interests. In section 2 I will try to make both approaches mutually consistent by showing that a competition among rational “recognition-seekers” is only possible if they agree in accepting some system of methodological norms. Section 3 will be devoted to analyse the main kinds and properties of these norms. Finally, in section 4 I will discuss a question which is far from being easy and innocent: why are scientific norms obeyed by researchers, once they have been established in a scientific discipline?
1. The Rationality of Science versus the Rationality of Scientists According to a traditional view, a view not only common among philosophers, but also among the general public, the objectivity and validity of scientific knowledge would be the necessary outcome of scientists’ following an appropriate set of methodological rules. What makes these rules “appropriate” would be their efficiency in promoting the cognitive and practical ends of scientific research, but philosophical discussion begun when different authors proposed different conceptions about these goals as well as different ways to assess the efficiency of given rules. Over and over again it has been discussed whether the aim of science is the attainment of truth simpliciter, or that of indubitable truth,
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 71-81. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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or that of probable truth, or that of empirical adequacy, and so forth. Less frequently, and only much more recently, it has also been discussed whether the justification of methodological norms should be given by a priori reasoning or by means of empirical research. Usually, epistemologists took for granted that, being methodology a kind of propedeutic for the attainment of knowledge (particularly of empirical knowledge), it would be circular to try to justify the efficiency of norms on the basis of the kind of knowledge these norms are devoted to justify. So, the only remaining possibility was to approach the study of scientific method as a kind of a priori reflection. This “rationalist” conception about scientific method is shared by authors having few more ideas in common, such as Aristotle, Descartes, and Bacon (among classical philosophers), or as Rudolf Carnap and Karl Popper (among XXth century methodologists). Popper, at least, defended the view that the rules of science are conventional, in the sense that, being a matter of decision, they can not be derived from logic alone; but I do not think he approved the idea that the “right” methodological conventions could be empirically discovered. The merit of having proposed this view corresponds basically to the philosophical approach known as scientific naturalism, and in particular to the work of Larry Laudan, who has defended the idea in several of his books. I think that the attitude of real scientists to “methodological norms” is much closer to Laudan’s theory than to the traditional philosophical conception. In fact, when scientists talk or write about “methodology,” they usually refer to the practical procedures they follow when performing an experiment, for example, and the efficiency of those procedures (a process for analysing chemical substances, a way of dissecting animals for observation, the use of certain ways of calibrating measuring instruments, etcetera) is obviously the outcome of “dirtyhands” empirical research, not of anything similar to philosophical reflection (the case of mathematical methods is usually different, of course, but they are also not an outcome of “philosophical” research). Hence, if most scientific methods are empirically established, or, in other words, if the appropriateness of these methods is always recognised within a scientific community by means of scientific research, then the idea that methodology should not be seen as a kind of a priori reflection ceases to be surprising. Nevertheless, this naturalist idea still corresponds to the more general traditional view I mentioned at the beginning: the view according to which the rationality of science is grounded on the soundness of methodological norms. To this view many sociologists of science (and
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some philosophers as well) have opposed in recent times a striking vision of the process of scientific research. These sociologists, the so called “constructivists,” assert that scientists are usually not motivated by “a disinterested pursuit of truth,” but, instead, by the pursuit of personal and professional goals, especially the attainment of public recognition from their peers. They also assert that the production of scientific knowledge is usually not governed by methodological rules, but by the strategic choices of competing individual scientists, who only “obey” a rule, or employ it to defend a particular choice, when doing so is in their own interest. Constructivism, hence, opposes, to the epistemic rationality of scientific knowledge and scientific method, the instrumental rationality of scientists considered as agents whose only goal is optimising their own personal situation, either within the restricted game of science or within society at large. This view of scientists is by no means an arbitrary fiction of some sociologists: it is certainly well supported by an impressive amount of empirical case studies, and I will take it here as an undisputed assumption. What I will ask in the first place is whether it is necessary to conclude that both conceptions about the rationality of science are really contradictory, or if they can be made mutually consistent.
2. Personal Interests and Methodological Norms What I am going to defend in this section is that the view of scientists as “recognition-seekers” is not only consistent with the existence of methodological norms. My thesis is still stronger: I affirm that, given the high degree of consensus we observe in many areas of natural science, this assumption about the motivations of researchers entails that research processes must be governed by some methodological norms. In order to prove this thesis, we have to take seriously the idea that scientists are rational agents, that is, we have to look at them through the lens of economic theory, particularly through the lens of game theory. The fundamental game theoretical concept is that of equilibrium: when what an agent obtains depends not only on what decision (or “strategy”) is taken by him, but also of what decisions are taken by the other participants in the “game,” then the only combinations of decisions that can take place are those in which the decision of every agent is the best possible response to the strategies of the others. I.e., we will hardly observe a social situation corresponding to a combination of decisions which is not an equilibrium.
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So, imagine the following situation: 1) you are a scientists and you have to decide whether entering a “race” for the solution of an unsolved scientific problem or not; 2) you are a “recognition-seeking,” that is, your fundamental goal is having your own solution to the problem explicitly accepted by your colleagues; and 3) the other participants in the “race” have exactly the same kind of motivation as you. Besides this, imagine you have red or heard something about contemporary philosophy of science, and so you know that no scientific hypothesis can be conclusively confirmed (I actually think that most researchers are aware of this possibility without knowing anything about philosophical epistemology). So, to the purported solutions presented by your competitors, you could always respond that they are not still “supported enough” by the facts; this entails that you will never be forced to accept a solution advanced by a colleague. Your problem is that all your rivals have also the same option regarding the solutions presented by everybody else! Obviously, the conclusion is that the game of research is absolutely pointless for you, because you know a priori that you will never have a chance of “winning” the game, that there is nothing you can do in order to force your competitors to recognise that your solution is the right one. Expressed in game theoretical terms, the equilibrium (or at least one of the possible equilibria) of the “persuasion game” is that each researcher would adopt the strategy of never accepting publicly a solution proposed by another researcher. The history and sociology of science show us that this situation happens very frequently: no agreement is reached in many research processes. But my argument is that, if scientists are “recognitionseekers,” and if they have always open the possibility of rejecting a rival’s solution for not being “confirmed enough,” then we could never observe a general agreement about a scientific fact, theory or law. Actually we could never observe anything like scientific research, because it would be a game that nobody would like to play. Hence, if science does exist, and if agreements about facts, laws or theories do exist, then it is necessary to conclude that the game of scientific research is organised in such a way that scientists do not have permanently open the possibility of rejecting the solutions presented by their rivals. There must be some circumstances where the acceptance of a proposed solution becomes compulsory. Or, stated differently, we can conclude that: 1) every game of scientific research must be subjected to some rules, and 2) researchers must know that their colleagues usually comply with these norms. If these conditions are not met, recognition-seeking researchers will simply have no interest at all in playing the “persuasion game.”
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So, we can see methodological norms as mutual constraints collectively adopted by the competitors in a research process. These constraints are simply the rules of the game, the rules that make the game both exciting and profitable. Given certain rules, every researcher will have to decide whether it is interesting for him to enter the game or not. And analogously, given a set of people having entered the game, they obviously can “negotiate” whether keeping the prevailing rules or modifying them, a possibility that I will discuss with more detail in the next section.
3. Negotiating the Rules of the Persuasion Game Seeing methodological norms as rules defining how the research game is to be played and how researchers can decide who of them is the winner, allows to understand where and why the naturalist approach mentioned in section 1 is, in general, more acceptable than its rationalist and constructivist counterparts, though our own approach preserves also some appealing aspects of these other views. Regarding the merits of naturalism, the notion of scientific methods as conventional rules of a game makes it evident, in the first place, that these norms need not be universal: different research processes, or even similar processes played by different scientists, may have different rules, since these will usually depend on the interests of the competitors, and even on accidental historical facts. Methodological rules may change, as well, even within the same research process. In the second place, any particular rule or procedure will only be adopted after a public process of negotiation, during which the flaws and virtues of the rule must become as clear as possible for everyone, and this will generally demand the development of new research processes, usually empirical ones. In connection with this, constructivism has still a point (and certainly a strong one) because, in the process of attaching normative force to a given procedure, what is relevant in principle is not that it is “empirically supported” in the rationalist sense of ‘supporting’, but that the empirical information each researcher has about the working of the new rule makes it interesting for him to adopt it. But we can also save some of the insights of the rationalist approach, for, although particular norms are determined by the interests of scientists and grounded on empirical information, the possible kinds of norms and the essential aspects of their operation can be analysed in a more or less “transcendental” sense, i.e., we can study the “necessary conditions of possibility” of a game as the
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one described in the past section, and it can be shown that, under some reasonable assumptions, the adopted methodological norms will usually be sensibly sound from the epistemic point of view. Let us consider these “rationalist” aspects. Firstly, what kinds of norms can be expected to arise in a negotiation among “recognition-seeking” researchers. It seems that three types of them are needed, at least: (1)
(2)
(3)
Inferential norms: these tell that, if a researcher has accepted certain propositions, and if another proposition stands in certain specified relation with the former ones, then that researcher will be forced to accept also the later proposition. For example, norms of this type will establish when is a hypothesis “well supported enough” to make its acceptance compulsory. These rules are useful for a “recognition-seeking” researcher because they indicate what statements you have to persuade your colleagues about, before attaining the public acceptance of your hypothesis. Observational norms: in order to prevent the strategic denial to accept any statement that can “trigger” the undesired acceptance of a rival’s theory through the rules of the first type, it is necessary that the commitment about some kinds of propositions is compulsory for reasons different from the previous acceptance of other statements. Typically, observations and experiments (or specific parts of them) are the natural locus of this type of norms, though probably nor the only one. Distributional norms: these norms govern the allocation of the power to control the resources needed for making research and communicating their results. Obviously, this power is interesting for scientists not only for the ability they confer to increase the probability of getting their theories accepted, but also because many other “private benefits” accrue to them together with that power (I admit that these rules are less appropriately called “methodological”).
Secondly, it is perhaps more important to notice some properties that any “reasonable” system of rules must have. These properties are grounded on the very nature of the negotiation process through which the rules are established: (1)
Norms are usually chosen “under the veil of ignorance” (to use a Rawlsian expression). It is certainly possible that accepting a norm may be interesting for you on a particular occasion because that norm “supports” the theory you are proposing; but committing to a
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norm today forces you to be committed to it also in the future, and perhaps the same rule makes it that the facts discovered tomorrow support some of your rivals’ theories more than yours. In general, it is very difficult for you to predict exactly what theories or hypotheses will you be proposing in the future, and what will its connection be with the accepted facts. So, as long as methodological rules operate as real (and more or less durable) commitments, it is not necessarily a wise strategy to “vote” for the rules that happen to favour your “current” theory. As long as the decision of belonging to a scientific community or exiting and constituting a different one is open for researchers, it makes no sense to talk about “imposing” a rule. A norm is a norm within a scientific discipline because it is interesting for all its members to adopt it. So, a rule will only be established if it promotes reasonably well the prospects for recognition of every researcher. This does not entail that everyone will have exactly the same probability of success, for scientists less talented and poorly equipped will be content with a lesser probability than their more fortunate colleagues. The two previous properties entail that scientific norms will tend to be impartial, because they must offer a fair opportunity to rival approaches and theories. If a particular approach is seen as “promising” by the members of a scientific discipline, and some existing norms tend to diminish the chances of success of those following that approach, researchers will be interested in negotiating a change in the norms and will begin to explore the new ideas according to the new rules. On the other hand, it also is true that norms may have some “inertia,” and this can slow down the negotiation process.
In many cases, the real effects of a norm on the prospects of getting public recognition will be so uncertain, that scientists will tend to be indifferent between several alternative rules as long as only recognition is considered. Think, for example, in a norm indicating that “ceteris paribus, the theories with a higher predictive success have to be preferred,” and contrast it with alternative norms, as “ceteris paribus, the theories with a lower predictive success have to be preferred,” or “ceteris paribus, the theories which have been formulated in Latin verses have to be preferred.” Imagine now that you could negotiate with your colleagues which of these three rules to adopt. It is by no means clear which one of the three maximises the probability of your winning a game of research; perhaps
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you are much better at Latin than the rest, but in this case it is just this differential ability what will make your competitors abstain from accepting a norm so clearly benefiting you. In any case, it is difficult, if not impossible, to ground your decision about which norm to accept on an estimation of your probability of success. What other criteria will you employ, then? It seems to be a benevolent assumption that, ceteris paribus, researchers will prefer methodological norms which are consistent with the maximisation of the epistemic value of the theories which happen to win in the game of persuasion. After all, why would they have chosen a scientific career as a means of getting public recognition, instead of other kinds of activities, as pop music, sports, or politics, if they did not worry at all about the attainment of “knowledge”? A last important point in connection with this is that, although the contractarian approach to scientific norms leaves some space to the influence of epistemic factors in the choice of the rules (and hence in the justification of scientific knowledge), we can not interpret this result as a return of the classical view of epistemologists as deciding a priori how the pursuit of knowledge has to be. Because it is essential to recall that, even if epistemic values enter into the negotiation of scientific norms, this values are those of the researchers who are taking part in it, not those of the philosopher or the “science student” who are observing the process from outside. This is again something that our approach shares with that of many scientific naturalists, though I want to point towards an aspect more specific of the contractarian view: the assumption that an explicit or implicit agreement between the members of a scientific discipline is the only legitimate way of “aggregating” the epistemic preferences of all these individual scientists. Nevertheless, it is true that other agents outside the research field or even outside science may have an interest in negotiating the norms according to which the game of research is played, and the study of this interaction can also be an interesting point of contact between the approach defended here and other approaches in the field of social epistemology.
4. Do Researchers Obey the Norms? And Why? The past two sections have been devoted to show why recognitionseeking researchers are interested in establishing a set of methodological norms and what are the fundamental types and properties of these norms. But it is legitimate to ask still a further question, which is whether a
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scientist basically motivated by the attainment of public recognition will have an interest in obeying the rules he has approved. We must take into account that, both in the case of science and in other norm-regulated activities, individuals benefit from the fact that other people comply with the rules, but it can be very costly for oneself to behave accordingly. For example, my paying taxes is not advantageous for me (rather on the contrary!), but my life is much better because people pay taxes regularly, at least if the collected money is wisely administered. This is obviously the reason why such an impressive amount of resources are spent just in making people comply with the norms. Curiously enough, we do not observe that it exists something like an institutionalised “science police” or “science tribunals”: scientific research seems to be “self-policing,” at least in a higher degree that other kinds of practices. It is true that a large amount of case studies in history and sociology of science have been devoted to showing that scientists are far from being mechanical and systematic in their application of methodological norms, and that they tend to use the existing rules “strategically” or “rhetorically.” But I do not think that this may serve to prove that scientific research is not regulated by those norms. In the first place, the vision of scientific method suggested in the preceding sections is not that of a logico-mathematical algorithm: actual methodological rules are usually ambiguous in their application to concrete cases, and they are frequently contradictory in their practical suggestions. So, it is natural that each scientist tries to interpret each norm in the way which is most favourable for his own theory. In the second place, usually not all methodological rules are violated simultaneously by a researcher; rather on the contrary, he must employ some rules in order to justify why he has broken others; otherwise, his colleagues will simply not take into account what the former scientist is asserting. In the third place, and more importantly, a “rhetorical” use of a norm only makes sense if one expects that others are going to be persuaded by such a move: if everybody employed “just rhetorically” the norms every time, no one would have a reason to do it. Appealing successfully to rhetorical strategies shows that your audience act according to some predictable patterns (at least within certain limits), and these regular patterns of decision making are just the real methodological norms I am referring to. I want to suggest that the main reason why these patterns are chosen and followed is because of the nature of the reward pursued by scientists, i.e., recognition. Since what you want is that others express a public approbation of your own work, you do not obtain anything directly from your own decision about what facts or theories to accept; it only matters
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to you what facts or theories are accepted by your colleagues. So, the only question relevant for you is whether your colleagues obey the rules or not: if they do it, you will be rewarded for doing “good research” (“good” according to the accepted norms), and you will get nothing otherwise; if they do not obey the rules, you will get nothing no matter what you do, because they are not going to accept your own theory however much effort you might put in defending it. So, the game of persuasion has two possible equilibria in general: either no one obeys the rules of the game (and this means that no research is done, save perhaps by isolated people), or everybody does (though, in this case, further problems arise when deciding which norms to institute). Under the contractarian vision of scientific method I am defending here, the first of these two equilibria would represent something like the “state of nature,” or, to express it in popular Kuhnian terms, perhaps the state of scientific disciplines in their “pre-paradigmatic period.” The emergence of a “paradigm,” as well as its subsequent changes, can then be seen as the outcomes of collective negotiations on a “methodological contract.” Unfortunately, the argument of the preceding paragraph does not entirely solve the problem stated in this section, for it only works properly with inferential and observational norms, i.e., the rules governing what propositions have to be accepted. Distributional norms, instead, open the possibility of enjoying other types of benefits (income, travels, power, relief from boring activities, and so on), and people who have control over this kind of resources will surely be tempted to use them to their own advantage. It seems that, “under the veil of ignorance,” scientists will prefer that an institutional mechanism is established that guarantees that a closer relation exists between the level of recognition one has reached and the resources and advantages that one can enjoy. Anyway, the design of such a self-enforcing, self-policing mechanism (if actual institutions are not satisfactory) is a difficult problem which offers a promising avenue of research for students of the economics of science. If we desired something like a “moral” from this section, we could affirm that the norms for accepting facts, theories and laws prevailing in a scientific discipline are very probably “right,” in the sense that everybody trying to enter into the discipline to make a “critical examination” of the knowledge produced by its members would conclude that those norms are acceptable, given all the available the information. On the contrary, the actual norms of distribution of resources within science will probably be more subject to criticism, in the sense that the interests of many people outside science may be strongly affected by the establishing (and enforcing) of some system of norms instead of another.
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5. Conclusion I want finally to say that the contractarian approach to scientific norms, whose fundamental lines I have tried to sketch in this short paper, is able to offer a coherent explanation of many features of science that had usually been remarked by conflicting philosophical and sociological schools. The assumption that researchers are rational agents (in a sense which is more usual in economic theory than in sociology) allows to understand why the pursuit of private interests demands the constitution of a methodological order, whereas ideas such as that of “choosing norms under the veil of ignorance” allow to reserve still an important place for epistemic values in the construction of scientific knowledge by selfish people. I think that the contractarian approach can be particularly fruitful because it suggests many ways of modelling the interactions between researchers (as well as between them and other agents) using the powerful instruments of game theory. The need of using the techniques and skills of philosophers, economists, sociologists, historians, and probably experimental psychologists, in order to develop an approach which is both theoretically and empirically well grounded, may also enhance the cooperation between several species of students of science.
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia Facultad de Filosofía Ciudad Universitaria E-28040 Madrid Spain e-mail:
[email protected]
PART 2 VALUES IN THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENCE
Wenceslao J. González ECONOMIC VALUES IN THE CONFIGURATION OF SCIENCE
ABSTRACT. The axiological question of the role of economic values in the configuration of science is analyzed here following several steps: 1) the acceptance of the presence of values in science (among them, economic values in connection with scientific progress); 2) the clarification of the realms of values in science, which gives room for an “economics of science”; 3) the analysis of economic values in the internal perspective (cognitive and methodological), which is called “economy of research”; 4) the examination of external economic values of science as social activity and in the uses and applications of science; and 5) the assessment of the possibility of an “economic axiology of science” (i.e., the articulation of economic values as a system where economic dimension of rationality should have an important task). The paper seeks an alternative vision to those already available, insofar as it is looking for new aspects of economic values, such as those involved in scientific results or outcomes, in addition to those considered in scientific aims and processes.
What is the role of economic values in configuration of science? This question requires, firstly, to accept the presence of values in science and, among them, the possibility of economic values in connection with scientific progress. Secondly, a clarification is needed of the realms of values in science, which gives space for an “economics of science.” Thirdly, if economic values can be assumed, then they can have a role in the internal perspective, which is called “economy of research.” Fourthly, as a complement of the internal values (cognitive and methodological), there may be external values (as social activity and in the applications of science). Finally, the possibility of an “economic axiology of science” arises, i.e., the articulation of economic values as a system where economic dimension of rationality should have an important task. Concerning this range of topics, which conforms to the organization of the present paper, it seems obvious that the acceptance of values in science is the condition sine qua non for the existence of specific values
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 85-112. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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based on economic considerations (e.g., of cost-benefit analysis). Axiology of research is the branch of philosophy of science that deals with values in science. It received an impulse from Larry Laudan, who focused the values in the realm of aims of science and stressed the relevance of cognitive values, but he did not pay attention to economic values. Nicholas Rescher has improved the framework of values in science, because his approach includes several advancements in comparison with the previous viewpoint: a) he recognizes that economic values are important in scientific research; b) he offers a characterization of economic values according to several spheres (cognitive, methodological, social, and operative); and c) he tries to connect those values of science with other human values, insofar as all of them have their roots in human needs. This paper considers the axiology of research focused on cognitive values and the enlargement of the characterization of values offered by Rescher’s approach, which makes explicit that economic values can contribute to the configuration of science. In addition, these pages look for a more articulated framework of economic values than the previous ones. Thus, the structure follows the successive steps mentioned in the initial paragraph in order to facilitate a more complete conception of the role of economic values in the configuration of science. In other words, the present attempt seeks several things: i) to recognize the presence of economic values (mainly of cost-benefit analysis) in science; ii) to emphasize their role in different levels of scientific activity, both internal and external; and iii) to offer a new framework articulated in terms of aims, processes, and results. This alternative vision goes beyond Laudan’s emphasis on aims and Rescher’s enriched vision of economic values in aims and processes, looking for new aspects of economic values such as those involved in scientific results or outcomes.
1. Presence of Values in Science: The Axiology of Research In recent decades there has been a philosophical shift from the idea of science as wertfrei or value-free 1 to the acceptance of the scientific undertakings as “value laden.” This feature is generally assumed nowadays: any science (formal or empirical) carries out values. This trait
1
“An empirical science cannot tell anyone what he should do – but rather what he can do – and under certain circumstances – what he wishes to do” (Weber [1904] 1951, p. 151; 1949, p. 54).
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is connected to the emphasis on science as human activity, a characteristic that usually impinges the present vision of science, 2 instead of the previous tendency oriented towards science as a logical structure or impersonal knowledge (either timeless or evolutive). In addition, this conception of science as “value laden” could be understood in a nonrelativistic way, because it may be compatible with the idea of scientific objectivity,3 which was considered as a central feature of the former perspective of science as wertfrei.4 Besides the existence of values in science, it is commonly accepted that there is a plurality of them. Moreover, they can be founded in the different types of sciences (mainly, in the contexts of natural, social or artificial science).5 This plurality of values has been categorized within different kinds: “internal” and “external,” cognitive and social, epistemic and practical, . . . Among this variety of values a relevant role is played by the economic ones, which could be seen within different spheres (epistemological, methodological, social, and operative or political). Certainly economic values are not the only variety of values assumed in contemporary science, but their position has been emphasized during this contemporary shift.6 1.1. Axiology of Research and Economic Values On the one hand, it seems clear to me that values are a component of scientific activity, and that they accompany the other constitutive elements of science: language, structure, knowledge, method, social actions, and ethical considerations. Thus, axiology of research should be considered in the philosophical analysis of science, in addition to other analyses more traditional (semantical, logical, epistemological, methodological, etc.). On the one hand, scientific activity is under the influence of different kinds of values (cognitive, social, economic, etc.). These values have a role for the selection of aims or goals of scientific undertakings, which may be crucial (e.g., in the case of cognitive values).
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Formal sciences, such as mathematics, can be seen from this viewpoint, cf. Gonzalez (1991). 3 This is the case not only among different versions of scientific realism but also in the approach of pragmatic idealism, cf. Rescher (1997, pp. 172-196) and (1999a, pp. 73-96). 4 On objectivity in Weber’s wertfrei, cf. Agazzi (1999, especially pp. 181-183). 5 The latter is understood in the sense and reference present in Simon (1996). Economics is also a science of the artificial, cf. Gonzalez (forthcoming). 6 De facto, there is an increasing interest in “Economics of science” in recent times, cf. Wible (1998).
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But the values can go beyond that point: they also have repercussion on the processes as well as on results of scientific activities. Axiology of research should deal with the different kinds of values (cognitive, social, economic, etc.) that have influence on the scientific activity. Thus, the whole set of values in science (“internal” and “external,” cognitive and social, epistemic and practical, . . . ) are studied by axiology of research. This is a domain of philosophy of science, and it has been intensively developed in the last two decades. Moreover, axiology of research is a philosophical domain that accompanies the main areas of this field: semantics of science, logic of science, epistemology, methodology of science, ontology of science, and ethics of science. Among the relevant values for doing science are economic values. They influence a variety of aspects – aims, processes, and results – of scientific activity. Generally, economic values in science are in one way or another related to a cost-benefit evaluation: effectiveness, efficiency, profitability, utility, productivity, prosperity, etc. They are related to science as a human activity, because scientific activity seeks aims or goals which are singled out or picked out according to values (among them, economic ones). But economic values also affect scientific means and outcomes of scientific undertakings. Since 1984, when the book Science and Values was published, the new value-laden attitude was seen as a standard among philosophers of science, and the old value-free tendency was no longer assumed among specialists. However, the subtitle of the book was very clear: “The aims of science and their role in scientific debate” (Laudan 1984), because the focus was on aims rather than on processes or results. Thus, even though the concern of Larry Laudan was with cognitive values as well as methodological norms and rules, his particular interest was “the role of cognitive values in the shaping of scientific rationality” (Laudan 1984, p. xii). At the same time, he recognized that “the question of precisely how one distinguishes cognitive values or aims from noncognitive ones is quite complex” (Laudan 1984, p. xi). Moreover, his view places “cognitive values” in the realm of “aims,” insofar as he states that “an attribute will count as a cognitive value or aim if that attribute represents a property of theories which deem to be constitutive of “good science”” (Laudan 1984, p. xii). Laudan’s explicit interest has been in cognitive values. In his book Science and Values he also recognized the existence of ethical values in science,7 but it is difficult to find in his text statements directly related to 7
“Ethical values are always present in scientific decision making and, very occassionally,
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economic values in the scientific activity.8 His attention was directed towards how cognitive values have influence on the configuration of aims which should be rationally searched by the scientist. Thus, his view emphasizes the internal perspective of science, thinking of the decisionmaking on the process of research. For him, “progress makes sense only if it is progress toward the satisfaction of a goal or aim” (Laudan 1984, p. 64). Further, according to his reticulated model of scientific rationality, “axiology, methodology, and factual claims are inevitably intertwined in relations of mutual dependency” (Laudan 1984, p. 63). Cognitive values can be shifted and methods change, because he considers that, on the scientific scene, nothing can be taken as a permanent fixture. Recently, Laudan has emphasized that he establishes a clear difference between “epistemic values” (understood as those related to truth and falsity) and cognitive values, e.g., “the role that issues of scope, generality, coherence, consilience, and explanatory power play in the evaluation of scientific theories” (Laudan 2004, p. 20). In addition to the insistence on the need for cognitive values instead of epistemic values, he acknowledges the importance of social values, insofar as any human endeavour “is grounded in social processes of communication, negotiation, and consensus formation” (Laudan 2004, p. 22). Nicholas Rescher has offered a wider framework for the role of values in science than the previous approach. On the one hand, he defends a “holism of values in science,” where the scientific values could be a matter of distinction (“internal” and “external,” cognitive and social, . . . ) but this aspect does not authorize separations. On the other hand, he pays more attention to the existence of economic values in science than Laudan does. Moreover, this topic constitutes the leit motiv of two of Rescher’s books: Cognitive Economy (1989) and Priceless Knowledge? (1996). Furthermore, this issue also appears in his reflection on rationality – in general, and scientific, in particular – from the point of view of economic dimension. 9 Even though Rescher is in tune with Laudan on some epistemological bases, such as a pragmatic vision of scientific knowledge, there are also differences between their viewpoints: first, because of a diverse emphasis on the question of limits that they put; and, second, due to the issue of their influence is of great importance” (Laudan 1984, p. xii). 8 The comments are usually in the context of criticisms, cf. Laudan (1984, pp. 48 and 98). 9 Cf. Rescher, “The Economic Dimension of Philosophical Inquiry,” in Rescher (2001, ch. 8, pp. 103-115). “Economic rationality is not the only sort of rationality there is, but it is an important aspect of overall rationality” (Rescher 1997, p. 184).
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the interconnection between cognitive goals of science and the rest of our goals as human beings. These aspects are highlighted by Rescher (cf. Gonzalez 1999a, pp. 21-22). For him, one of the key values of science as a human cognitive project is “its selflimitation based in a need to recognize that there are limits to the extent to which this project can be realized.” 10 Assuming that science is limited, their values are also bounded. Some of the limits are in the epistemological and ontological areas. This recognition is based on the acknowledgement that the composition itself of reality (natural or social) can be a limit for our cognitive control through science. In addition, Rescher conceives scientific goals (mainly, cognitive ones) as related to the rest of our goals (social, cultural, economic, etc.). Thus, besides the teleological character of science, this viewpoint insists on science as a human undertaking in a contextual setting rather than in a purely cognitive project or an isolated doing. In other words, science belongs to a human network. Holism of values follows from the interconnection between scientific goals and other human goals: they can be seen as a “system.” Moreover, Rescher thinks that the distinction between internal and external values of science is a “distinction” but not a separation (Gonzalez 1999a, p. 22). i) The structure of human needs and goals is larger than mere human cognition alone. The aim of controlling reality is only one valid human aim among others. There are many other valid human needs and desiderata. ii) Even though knowledge is not an all sufficient be-all and end-all, it is itself a human need-a situational requisite of ourselves as the sort of creatures that we are. iii) The internal values of science (consistency, generality, comfortability, etc.) are what they are because this is necessary to achieve effectively the applicative aims of science (effective prediction and control), and these aims of science are what they are because they inhere in the large situational requirements of us humans as homo sapiens. Hence, Rescher proposes a holism that binds the sphere of values together, and he sees them as a matter of the effective servicing of human needs. De facto, he offers a practical framework for the role of values in science. Within it there is a clear space for economic values, which he conceives have a role in science as human project and, consequently, they are values that are related to human needs. Thus, the analysis here of economic values and scientific progress will consider his approach more
10
Rescher, personal communication, 27 August 1998.
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closely than the conception of Laudan, where the cognitive values are shaping scientific rationality (Laudan 1994, p. xii). 1.2. Economic Values and Scientific Progress Frequently, the analysis of economic values in science is related to reflection on those aims that can bring about scientific progress, either in itself – internal perspective – or in its social consequences (external viewpoint). Moreover, the main reason why economic values have received special attention is sometimes based on their connection with “scientific progress.” This link involves the existence of a close relation between axiology of research and methodology of science, because values in science have a clear role in the selection of those aims that the process – the method – can follow in order to increase scientific knowledge. There are some factors, commonly associated with scientific progress, that are relevant for the relation between values and progress in science. i) The concept of “scientific progress” has a teleological character, because the sense and reference of “progress” is not a mere “development”: it is an advancement oriented towards an aim or goal. Thus, scientific progress cannot be restricted to the present situation of science: it requires some prescriptions or indications that can be used by the scientific communities to evaluate the aims or goals of scientific research. ii) In science there is not a single aim or goal: we do not have a concept that can be overarching for all the aspects of progress in science. Scientific activity is multidirectional in its aims rather than one directional. Nevertheless, there is still an area where scientific progress has put more emphasis: the epistemic and methodological components of the advancement of reliable knowledge. Thus, a theory of scientific progress should give an explanation of the criteria of “cognitive progress” (Gonzalez 1990 and 1997a). Cost-benefit analysis can help in this regard (effectiveness, efficiency, etc.). Following these aspects of scientific progress (advancement towards aims and existence of a variety of goals), there are two elements for this analysis. On the one hand, insofar as scientific progress can be oriented towards different aims or goals, there is a plurality of values (cognitive, social, economic, cultural, etc.) involved in the scientific process, where the role of every kind of values, such as economic ones, should be specified. On the other hand, in those authors that accept the existence of “progress” in science, there is a particular relevance of the cognitive factor within a multidirectional sphere of aims or goals of scientific
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progress. Economic values can be considered in this regard, but they are not commonly placed in a key role. It seems noticeable to me that Laudan and Rescher, two philosophers who focus particularly on scientific progress and the role of values in it, coincide in emphasizing the diversity of aims or goals of science and, at the same time, they insist on the preference for the cognitive factor above of other scientific components (social, cultural, political, etc.). However, there are also philosophic-methodological differences between these two thinkers, because they differ on boundaries of the values in science, as well as in the problem of how to articulate the whole set of scientific values. In addition, the explicit connection between economic values and scientific progress appears in the latter rather than in the former. Rescher’s approach on scientific progress is frequently based on the language of cost and benefit, because – for him – cost-effectiveness is a salient aspect of rationality, where the benefits of knowledge can be theoretical (or purely cognitive) or practical (or applied). On the one hand, among the internal benefits of sciences is the increasing capacity that a science has to provide explanation and prediction, which also contribute explicitly to the human worldview as well as the solution of many practical problems of everyday life. On the other hand, there are growing external costs, mainly in the natural sciences and in the sciences of the artificial, which are due to the enlarging complexity of the phenomena studied as well as the greater difficulty in learning and mastery.11 These internal and external aspects of economic values related to scientific progress require a closer analysis, which is developed in the following sections.
2. A New General Framework for Values in Science and the Role of Economic Values The issue of economic values in the configuration of science requires a new general framework for values in scientific activity. This can be made according to three different realms: aims, processes, and results. Thus, in this approach that I am suggesting, there are at least two initial aspects which are relevant for the contextualization of economic values. On the one hand, the proposal contains a broader viewpoint on values in science
11
“The historical situation has been one of a constant progress of science as a cognitive discipline notwithstanding its exponential growth as a productive enterprise (as measured in terms of resources, money, manpower, publications, etc.)” (Rescher 1998, p. 85).
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than the dominant perspective, where axiology of research is mainly focused on aims of science; and, on the other hand, this new view involves a distinction between “axiology of research” and “economics of science.” They are dissimilar types of analysis: the former is mostly philosophical in its standpoint, whereas the latter is commonly seen as a scientific study of science. We need a philosophical study to clarify the role of economic values in science and, at the same time, we should see if there is a sense and reference of ‘economics of science’ that shares that purpose. 2.1. Three Different Realms of Values: Aims, Processes, and Results Basically, in my judgment, values in science can be present in three different realms: aims, processes, and results. a) In the case of aims, values are used to choose the goals of research, either in basic science or in applied science. They could be either descriptive (values related to explanation and prediction) or prescriptive (values related to solutions of concrete problems). b) In the realm of processes, values play a key role in order to select the adequate means to get scientific progress and to choose the adequate undertakings to develop science as a human activity within a social setting. c) In the domain of results, values are used to assess the outcomes of science as intellectual achievement as well as a product of the society. These three different realms (aims, processes, and results) should be considered in the analysis of economic values as well. This position involves an axiology of research in three consecutive levels, which is larger than previous axiological analyses. Commonly, axiology of research is the philosophical study of science that deals with aims or goals (e.g., in the case of Laudan), whereas the other two kinds of values (those related with processes and results) are usually analyzed through methodology of science and the diverse studies on science, technology and society. Meanwhile, Rescher suggests a different conception on values in science: he proposes a broad axiology of research, according to his conviction that sciences are related to values from diverse angles (cognitive, methodological, etc.). These values are related to other human values and rooted in human needs. In addition, he sees scientific progress – a central issue of methodology of science – from the viewpoint of “economics of research” (Gonzalez 1999a, pp. 11-44, especially pp. 13-27). This conception can be used as a basis for the new framework of values in science: on the one hand, he offers an overview of scientific
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values taking into account different aspects of human endeavors; and, on the other hand, he distinguishes diverse kinds of values (internal and external) of science as a human practice. Predominantly, for Rescher, there are four aspects in the relation between science and values. First, science is a human project devoted to the search of valuable aims, such as information and truth. Second, science demands an economy of means from the methodological point of view, which involves a set of economic values related to the pattern of cost-benefit. (In other words, scientific progress is commonly modulated by an “economics of research.”) Third, science has the characteristics of a social activity of science, because it is based on a process of human cooperation. Science includes attention to human ideals, even though it is a competitive business, because the method and modus operandi of any science asks for honesty, veracity, integrity, collaboration, etc. These values are relevant for scientific communities as human groups. Fourth, science has uses and applications that call for a set of values to evaluate the consequences of every scientific activity (above all, in its technological projection). This task of assessment requires an evaluative rationality, which should be able to discern the appropriate and legitimate ends of this human activity (Gonzalez 1999a, p. 16). Consequently, in his broad axiology of research, Rescher (1999a) accepts a variety of values around science. They can be distributed in four large areas of values: cognitive, economic, social, and operative; implicitly, his approach includes a fifth area: ethical values. If we see these plurality of values from the duality internal-external, two of them – cognitive values and economic values – are inserted into a framework basically internal, insofar as it is a methodological economy; meanwhile the other two – social values and operative values – are mostly in the external dimension. And the ethical values have an endogenous side in addition to an exogenous sphere. Nonetheless, this differentiation between “internal” and “external” cannot be rigid, because there is a permeability between both perspectives: it is the case that social values can have influence on the method of research chosen (e.g., in stem cell research) and some operative values are accepted only after the legitimizing of a cognitive value (e.g., in the research on transplantation of organs from animals, including hearts, to humans). Furthermore, in this view, it can be considered that all the values belong to a whole that allows distinction, but not a genuine separation, insofar as they conform a “system.” Thus, an effective interdependence of the values in science can be accepted.
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However, the distinction between internal and external shows that the economic values are of Rescher’s interest insofar as they are related with science itself (i.e., the internal perspective), rather than science as connected to the rest of the human experience (i.e., the domain of external perspective): his analysis of economic values is made in connection to methodology of science, a dominion that – using some insights of Charles S. Peirce – he calls “economy of research.”12 Moreover, his book Scientific Progress – a central book of his methodological contribution – is conceived as a philosophical essay on the economics of research in natural science (Rescher 1978). In other words, Rescher’s main purpose is to clarify values – in general, and economic values, in particular – mostly in the context of scientific processes, whereas Laudan clearly focuses the attention on the area of aims (mainly, in cognitive values). But a general framework of values should make explicit – in my judgment – the values of the realm of outcomes or results, in addition to those values of aims and processes. Moreover, there is a relevant place for the role of economic values within this triple realm (aims, processes, and results). 1) Economic values can evaluate the outcomes or results of scientific activities (as intellectual achievements and as products of society), mainly in the case of applied science (pharmacology, economics, library science, etc.), where the connection with economic markets (including the stock market) is clearer than in the case of basic science. In effect, this economic repercussion of the scientific outcomes is more relevant in design sciences (i.e., sciences of the artificial), due to their relation to technology. 2) Economic values of results or outcomes, which obviously have been obtained after the aims and processes, can be used to compare the validity of what has been achieved and what was expected. This comparative factor may be a starting point for changes in science, according to the self-corrective nature of science. Thus, the cost-benefit analysis can appear in the evaluation of the three scientific realms as human activity: aims, processes, and results or outcomes. Additionally, besides the triple realm of values in science, I consider that economic values can be seen in the internal perspective of science, and then they affect scientific knowledge and method; and they can also be considered from the external point of view, where two directions appear: on the one hand, values which have influence on science as social activity connected to other human activities of social character; and, on
12
Cf. Rescher (1989, p. ix) and (1996, p. 3). The idea comes from some reflections made around 1896 and published in Peirce (1931, vol. 1, sect. 1.122).
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the other hand, values which influence scientific activity insofar as science is an undertaking under the plane of scientific policy and connected to technological policy (i.e., science in the context of “research and development”). Undoubtedly, the internal facet and the external aspect of science receive de facto a more intense influence of economic values where the links with technology are more intense (especially when the scientific results contribute to technological patents). Thus, when there is a clear interconnection of scientific progress and technological innovation, the presence of economic criteria is more noticeable. The conceptual convergence of scientific progress and technological innovation is reached through the notion of “planning” (and its articulation through calculation and distribution in the short, middle or long run) (Gonzalez 1998b). And it seems clear that any planning involves economic values besides other kinds of values (cognitive, social, etc.). 2.2. Economics of Science: Three Options An analysis of the general framework of the values in science and the study of economic values within it requires taking into account the relationship between “axiology of research” and “economics of science.” This involves distinguishing both approaches, in order to consider the role of economic values in the configuration of science. In this regard, after the new framework for values as diversified in three realms (aims, processes, and results), it is clear that economics of science should also be seen in these different levels. Previously, this requires making the sense and reference of ‘economics of science’ explicit in order to have a clear point of comparison with the philosophical studies on values. 13 Initially, ‘economics of science’ can be understood in two different ways: i) as a specific knowledge within the scientific studies of science (i.e., a discipline different from, and complementary to, history of science, psychology of science or sociology of science); and ii) as a set of values of economic kind that are involved in the scientific undertaking as such or that they have influence from the environment (then it is assumed that there are economic values inserted in the cognitive and methodological spheres of scientific research or can affect them from external instances to the process itself considered). When these possibilities are accepted, then an additional view appears: iii) as economic criteria present in the methodology of economics of science itself. Thus, the economic values (cost-benefit, profitability, incentives, 13
The analysis follows here Gonzalez (2001, pp. 17-20).
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etc.) can be applied to the undertaking of research of this concrete scientific discipline. Through the first sense and reference, the clearest possibility appears: economics of science is a new discipline on scientific activity, located within the orbit of science of science and focused on it using the scientific parameters of economics. In this use, economics of science is an explanatory and predictive study of scientific activity by means of economic categories (cost, benefit, supply, demand, etc.). Its presence in the whole set of disciplines on science is warranted insofar as it studies a territory – scientific activity – that possesses characteristic features: its subject matter is different from those objects of study considered in other spheres (either historical, psychological or sociological). At the same time, its contributions can be complementary of those reached from the other scientific perspectives on science. Less evident is the second sense and reference of ‘economics of science’, when the approach is focused on the scientific values themselves of economic character (profitability, optimization, efficiency, etc.). Then, it is a metascientific study, insofar as it searches the set of values of economic nature that are inserted in the practice of scientific research or that conditioned it from the environment (values that, in turn, have repercussion in the configuration of technology). 14 Understood in this way, economics of science is a branch of an enlarged axiology of research (i.e., a discipline which deals with the economic values of aims, processes, and results of science). Its objects of analysis are economic values – internal and external –of scientific activity, like – to some extent – ethics of science works on ethical values (endogenous and exogenous) that have influence on the decision-making of scientists. Within this context, economics of science accompanies other reflections of philosophy and methodology of science: strictly speaking, it would be “economic axiology of science.” This analysis can be articulated to study goals, procedures, and outcomes of science, both basic and applied. Conceptually, the views on “economics of science” pointed out already, belong to two different levels, even though they can become clearly interconnected studies. The first level – economics of science as scientific discipline – explains and predicts the phenomenon of scientific activity, paying attention to testable factors (either by means of observation or via experimentation). Meanwhile, the second level – economics of science as axiology of science from an economic key –
14
On the relations between economic values and technology, cf. Gonzalez (1999b).
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reflects on values that are inserted in these activities of scientists, or configured them, without the search of possible laws or reliable probabilistic estimates. In other words, the first direction is neatly scientific, whereas the second way is metascientific (and, hence, it belongs to a philosophic orbit) (Radnitzky 1987). Besides these two levels (scientific study of science from an economic key and search of values that are in the sphere of “economy of research”) (Rescher 1976), there is a third possibility: interaction of the scientific and philosophic-methodological levels within economics of science itself. This context includes that, economics of science, like any other scientific branch, possesses philosophical and methodological elements that affect its standpoint, development, and outcomes. It is this line where the objective that James R. Wible points out when he wrote The Economics of Science is located. He explicitly indicates that his book is looking for two things: “(1) creating a systematic economics of science and (2) the methodological and philosophical issues which result from an economics of science” (Wible 1998, p. xiv). Wible’s last goal involves the third sense and reference of ‘economics of science’, insofar as he assumes the legitimacy of a philosophicmethodological reflection about the discipline that studies science from an economic perspective. This possibility involves a second aspect to be considered by the new framework for values in science (i.e., besides the metascientific analysis of economic values in scientific activity), because there are economic values in the methodology of economics of science. Previously, it should be assumed that the second characterization of “economics of science” is pertinent, insofar as it is a philosophical approach that deals with economic values present in scientific processes or can have influence on them. These are the kind of values (internal and external) that Rescher has commonly in mind (“economy of research”). After the reflections on the relations between axiology of research and economics of science, some conclusions can be drawn: a) axiology of research involves more values than economic ones (cognitive, social, etc.); b) there is a convergence between both studies when it is the second option (“economic axiology of science”), because the first alternative is “science of science” (like in the cases of psychology of science or sociology of science); c) axiology of research and economics of science partially converge in the third possibility (i.e., philosophicmethodological analysis of economics of science), where the focus is on the discipline itself of “economics of science” and values are one component among others of this subject.
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3. Economic Values in the Internal Perspective: “Economy of Research” Now the analysis can consider central aspects of “economic axiology of science,” the territory where axiology of research and economic of science converge. This can be done taking into account Rescher’s reflections on “economy of research,” which is focused on the processes related to scientific progress and can be connected with aims and results. His considerations have particular interest because his attention goes into details of economic values, both internal and external, present in scientific processes. Regarding the economic values involved in the internal dimension of science, it is possible to investigate the economic criteria of epistemology (“cognitive economics”).15 In addition, the economic values that accompany methodology of science can also be analyzed, mainly through the cost-benefit approach. Thereafter, in the following section, the attention will shift to the external perspective on economic values related to scientific progress. 3.1. Internal Values in the Cognitive Domain From an epistemological point of view, Rescher insists on the economic factors as modulating and conditioning our cognitive process in a fundamental way. For him, human cognitive practices arise from economic pressure in order to achieve effectiveness in the costs when we are dealing with epistemic matters. Thus, instead of accepting relativism, which involves conforming to dominant tendencies in a concrete place and moment, he proposes a problem-solving search understood in pragmatic terms: each epistemic initiative is dependent on the effective cost of obtaining adequate responses to our questions (Rescher 1989, pp. 150-151). Definitely, Rescher sees scientific knowledge as an active process of economic character. Thus, there are costs and benefits in the acquisition and management of information, which involves that knowledge, is a commodity among others: to get it has a price, which is not merely monetary, because it also includes other resources, such as time and effort (Rescher 1989, pp. 4-5). To know is, in this approach, a human activity. It is a process that has a twofold benefit: theoretical (or purely cognitive) and practical (or applied).
15
This conception can be seen in his books Cognitive Economy: The Economic Dimension of the Theory of Knowledge and Priceless Knowledge?
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On the one hand, this process gives the informative content of knowledge, and it can be used for the important task of understanding: and, on the other hand, the process guides the procedure to satisfy (non cognitive) human necessities and wants, and it facilitates the achievement of some goals guiding our endeavors to productive and rewarding lines (i.e., a practical payoff). This search for potential benefits, both theoretical and practical, increases scientific research – to enlarge and validate knowledge – and leads to an approach to scientific progress of pragmatic character. With this analysis of human knowledge in terms of cost-benefit, and the consideration of rationality as epistemic optimization – the optimal use of resources – (Rescher 1996, p. 8), there is an emphasis on some aspects that usually are not taken into account. a) The cognitive dynamics is not costless, b) human rationality, in general, and scientific rationality, in particular, are not restricted to the processes themselves, to the means which look at ends already given. Then economic criteria are introduced in an internal realm of science (knowledge and rationality) and, at the same time, the practical dimension of both is highlighted. Simultaneously, there is an acceptance of the social character of science from an economic viewpoint, in terms of trust and cooperation, which forces the scientists to work together as scientific community under the pressure of the economic advantage involved in the search for knowledge. Thus, in cognitive contexts, as well as in economic environments, the relevant community uses incentives and sanctions to establish a system where agents perform according to criteria of trust (which includes reciprocity) (Rescher 1989, pp. 43-44). 3.2. Internal Values in the Methodological Context Via the methodological orientation based on the pragmatic view of the advancement of science, which is presented by Rescher in different books, such as The Limits of Science (1999b), science appears as a potentially unlimited from the cognitive point of view. However, at the same time, the approach emphasizes that science is only a type of knowledge among others. In his characterization of scientific progress, he assumes that human rationality, in general, and scientific rationality, in particular, are within an economic dimension: “rationality and economy are inextricably interconnected. Rational inquiry is a matter of epistemic optimization, of achieving the best overall balance of cognitive benefits relative to cognitive costs” (Rescher 1989, p. 13). But in his approach, where rational inquiry is economically minded, Rescher does not restrict rationality to the mere instrumental conception,
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as is usual in mainstream economics, as well as in one of its main critics: Herbert Simon, who also sees rationality only in terms of means to ends: “we see that reason is wholly instrumental. It cannot tell us where to go; at best it can tell us how to get there. It is a gun for hire that can be employed in the service of whatever goals we have, good or bad” (Simon 1983, pp. 7-8). 16 Instrumental rationality (i.e., from means to ends) is not enough to characterize scientific rationality. In addition, it is insufficient to analyze economic rationality itself. On the one hand, Rescher recognizes the presence of an evaluative rationality focused on ends. On the other hand, he criticizes the idea of economic rationality understood in terms of maximization of utility: “true rationality calls for the pursuit of appropriate ends based on valid human interests, rather than following the siren call of unexamined wants or preferences” (Rescher 1988, p. 107). As criteria for the research strategy of the methodology of science based on cognitive economics, Rescher insists on simplicity, uniformity and systematicity. For him, scientific inquiry is teleologically effective, in the case of costs and benefits regarding a concrete goal, when certain parameters are fulfilled, such as simplicity, uniformity, regularity, normality, coherence, . . . (Rescher 1989, p. 96). These features can be seen as features of scientific progress as well, insofar as they are signs of methodological efficiency. Nevertheless, Rescher points out that an economy of means is not an economy of products: simple methods can bring out complex results. Thus, a simple method, such as trial and error, can give us complex responses to difficult questions, and vice versa: simple outcomes are obtained sometimes through complicated ways (Rescher 1989, p. 102). He calls the attention on the economic character of the rationality of the evolutive process, because it supposes that the survival through adaptation involves efficient ways of using limited resources (Rescher 1989, p. 103). Therefore, he has connected the cognitive domain and the methodological process with economic values, mainly when the analysis deals with scientific progress.
16
This instrumental character of human reason is also present in the field where Simon has worked more on goals: political science. In this area, he describes and analyzes some problems (conflicting goals, salient goals, focus of attention, group identifications, . . . ) and several goals (search of power, pursuit of private interest, . . . ), but he does not offer an examination of the validity or not of those goals. Moreover, he seems to exclude any chance for an evaluative rationality of ends: “rationality can only go to work after final goals are specified; it does not determine them” (Simon 1995, p. 60).
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4. Economic Values in the External Perspective: The Dependence on Economy Through the analysis of economic values in science, the presence of economic factors in science as a social action (a human activity among others) and as an operative instrument for different applications, which is used for technology as well as for other practical utilities becomes clear. Thus, besides the internal values, which are those related to scientific knowledge – cognitive economics – and progress – methodological economics, there are also external values of economic kind. Frequently, these values can receive a quantitative measurement, and they may appear in the decision-making of the policy on research and development.17 4.1. External Values of Science as Social Activity Nowadays there is a particular insistence on science as social activity. Those approaches that see the entity itself of science as social activity give habitually special relevance to economic values. Then, economic values are those present in the social dimension of scientific activity: 1) insofar as it shows a psycho-sociological facet (trust, credibility, feasibility, etc.); 2) as a phenomenon of a socio-cultural character (satisfying needs, covering expectations, increasing social welfare, etc.); 3) as factor with a public projection (diminishing inequalities, decreasing poverty, increasing freedom, etc.); and 4) insofar as has repercussion on the environmental dimension that has social incidence (protection of nature, to avoid side effects of applied scientific research, etc.). Understood as social activity, science is the work of a scientific community (in its different steps: search of goals, utilization of methods and attainment of results) that is developed within the social sphere in general. In this way, science shows a set of economic values of economic character, because science – in itself – is articulated in organizations that are related to the “market of ideas.” At the same time, as Wible has pointed out, “scientific ideas are public goods and they are not divisible, saleable, and mass reproductive like private goods” (Wible 1998, p. 188). From this point of view, when science is developing these goods, it is a human activity interrelated to other human activities. Thus, without affecting its epistemological and methodological autonomy,18 there are 17
These reflections are based on Gonzalez (2001, pp. 30-33). The insistence on the relevance of economic values of social character is wholly compatible with dismissing a “finalization thesis,” that can lead to determine from an
18
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economic values of social character that can have incidence in giving a priority to some type of research above other types. Indeed, it could be the case within economic science itself, when it is doing research on legal or institutional frameworks, which can increase the economic development or the diminishing of poverty. These values are not of a single class (i.e., merely “economicists”) but rather of a variety of them (i.e., pluralistic). Contemporary science has not an individualistic nature insofar as it is a collective undertaking that requires organizational structures and processes of institutional kind. There can be found the economic factors of the social sphere (psycho-social, socio-cultural, of political projection or environmentalist of social incidence) that may give an impulse to the development of science or, eventually, can stop it. The first phenomenon appears when the social character of science is seen in economic terms (of psycho-social nature) such as trust and cooperation, which leads the community of researchers to work together under the pressure of the economic advantage that the search of knowledge involves. In this regard, it happens that in cognitive domains and in economic contexts the community uses incentives and sanctions to establish a procedure where people commonly act in a trusting and trustworthy way (Rescher 1989, pp. 43-44). The second phenomenon emerges when the social organization of science has an institutional failure (or there is a malfunction due to a scientific policy) that may diminish the critical attitude of some scientists, which can lead to forgetting the search of best outcomes possible because of the lack of new economic incentives (e.g., in terms of remuneration) (Wible 1998, p. 189). Presumably, if the emphasis moves from the “market of ideas” to highlight the role of organizations (science articulated through networks), then the theoretical framework generally used – to study properly the economic exogenous factors that have influence on scientific activity – should be redefined. The mainstream tendency in economics – neoclassical approach – does not commonly contemplate elements of historical and social character (that include the institutional sphere), aspects that have influence on economic activities and, consequently, in science as economic activity interconnected with other social activities. There bounded rationality would have a relevant role. Usually, human rationality (and, above all, economic rationality) of agents in the task of decision-making is bounded. Moreover, commonly their rationality is
extrinsic base the scientific process itself. Cf. Niiniluoto (1984), pp. 226-243; and Gonzalez (1990), pp. 100-104.
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procedural rather than substantive (Simon 1976). In addition, it could be that variables closely link to historical factors in economics. These variables can take into account “(1) continuing changes in knowledge and information (both knowledge about economics and other knowledge about the world), (2) changes in human ability to estimate consequences of actions, (3) changes in the institutional setting within which economic behavior takes place, (4) changes in the focus of attention and related changes in beliefs and expectations [. . .], (5) changes in human altruism and (6) in group identification” (Simon 1998, p. 251). 19 4.2. External Values and Uses and Applications of Science: The Repercussion on Technology Parallel to the social dimension of economic values in science, there is another type of external values: applications and uses of science.20 This sphere connects, in principle, more easily with technology. In that directions go many proposals of research plans, national and international, that combine Research plus Development plus Innovation (R&D&I), where economic values are highlighted insofar as the products are artifacts and patents. Undoubtedly, there are economic values in science policy, which are reflected in priorities on R&D and it is also related to technology policy on innovation. Regarding this issue, Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter have considered the case of the United States. They have emphasized many years ago the importance of public funding for scientific research: “Government R&D support programs have, since World War II, provided approximately half of the total funding for research and development. More generally, a significant portion of economic activity is conducted by public rather than private organization” (Nelson and Winter 1982, p. 371). Moreover, these figure could be ever larger in the case of countries of the European Union, where the public funding is crucial for the research carried out at the universities and national centers (like in France, Germany or Spain). Following a pragmatic conception of “scientific progress,” where the important point is the superiority of applications rather than the pure 19
On the role of economic rationality in connection to science and technology, cf. Gonzalez (1998a), pp. 95-115, especially pp. 97-107. 20 “It is important to distinguish applied science from the applications of science. The former is a part of knowledge production, the latter is concerned with the use of scientific knowledge and methods for the solving of practical problems of action (e.g., in engineering or business), where a scientist may play the role of a consult” (Niiniluoto 1993, p. 9).
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sophistication of theories, there is an economic factor, there is a new emphasis on an economic aspect in the relations with reality that reinforces the interdependence between science and technology. This practical confluence of scientific activity and technological doing is linked to two central ideas of Rescher’s book Scientific Progress (1978): 1) science and technology are interdependent and they advance in an interconnected manner, like two legs of a person while walking; and 2) the rate of progress is guided by economic factors, where the ratio is that a linear progress – to maintain the same speed – requires an exponential increase of costs.21 Putting it differently: the internal dimension of scientific progress – economy of research: to seek an economy of means in scientific inquiry – converges with the external component of financial costs, mainly through the technological projection. The scientific progress – especially in natural sciences – is built upon technological escalation, which makes each new advance more expensive (e.g., Genome project). This involves that new steps in science require a superior technology. In other words, technology has a clear repercussion in the advancement of science (above all, in natural sciences). This phenomenon is complementary of the incidence of science (mainly as knowledge) on technology, a feature that has been stressed traditionally. Certainly, the nexus science-technology connects with some views on “technoscience,”22 insofar as the relations between science and technology are bi-directional, because “the technological [. . .] ramifications of science as a human project also have major implications for science as a cognitive discipline” (Rescher 1996, p. 115). But Rescher’s approach is clearly oriented towards natural sciences (especially, physics).23 His references to formal sciences are really infrequent and even less frequent his mentions to human and social sciences, which has the tendency to call “hermeneutical sciences” (Rescher 1989, p. 146). 21
“The impressive scope of recent advances in science has tended to obscure the fact that this progress has been achieved at an increasingly high cost in manpower, talent, and resources devoted to scientific work. The sheer volume of progress has masked the circumstance that the actual rate of return in terms of high-quality results per unit investment has been decreasing over time” (Rescher 1978, p. 120). 22 Cf. González (2005), pp. 8-13. The relations between science, technology and society – including the topic of “technoscience” – have been analyzed in a large amount of publications, among them are those listed in Gonzalez (2005, pp. 37-49). 23 This feature also appears explicitly in the subtitles of two books: “A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science,” in the case of Scientific Progress, and “Natural Science in Economic Perspective,” in the volume Priceless Knowledge?
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If in Gary Becker we can find a “methodological imperialism” of economics within the context of social sciences,24 because economic methods are proposed for the study of problems commonly located outside of the boundaries of economics (and, therefore, economic criteria domain – in his approach – methodologies of social sciences); in Rescher we can see a different framework: scientific progress (which is, in principle, a general methodological notion) is considered in the concrete sphere of natural sciences, and these appear as causally interdependent with technology. Again, his emphasis is on processes even though he also pays attention to aims. Science appears as a social activity with economic values and an operative undertaking with links to technology, which reinforces the economic dimension of science.
5. The Articulation of “Economic Axiology of Science” Internal and external values show a diversity of aspects in axiology of scientific research. The analysis according to the type of contents (cognitive, methodological, social, and operative) reveals additional details. But there is still a twofold consideration in order to arrive at an articulation of “economic axiology of science” (i.e., an axiological study of scientific research based on economic values): i) the possibility that those values can form a system, where the building of scientific values of economic kind can be interwoven with other values; and ii) the economic dimension of rationality as the key element to interrelate aims, processes, and results or outcomes of scientific research. These factors – to be a system and to be modulated through economic rationality – can contribute to complete the role of economic values in the configuration of science. 5.1. Holism of Economic Values and Scientific Activity Ultimately, what Rescher proposes is a holism of economic values regarding science as a whole. His proposal includes four lines: i) a cognitive economics – the achievement of scientific knowledge with the minimum risk possible of error; ii) a methodological economy (a process of research which can increase the cognitive enlargement with minimum cost regarding the means); iii) an economy on the social undertaking of 24
Cf. Blaug (1980), p. 248. As it is well-known, the Nobel Prize winner in 1992, Gary S. Becker, studies social realities, such as family or prisons from a purely economic angle, cf. Becker (1976 and 1981).
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science, which involves a procedure of rational selection of the cognitive resources in order to keep, make explicit and transmit those which have been tested as efficient (what affects social communication of science); and iv) an economy as pattern for the uses and applications of science, which is directly linked to the technological projection of science. 25 Implicitly, there is a transition from a particular setting – natural sciences – to the general set of sciences. This is not incoherent within Rescher’s philosophical schemes. On the one hand, he accepts the legitimacy of induction as “cognitive systematization,”26 which involves making inferences from a part to the overall; and, on the other hand, he assumes that economic values are only a type of scientific values and they conform a sector of the human values in general. Therefore, he assumes a system of values in science that it is related to the whole framework of human values. To justify this holism of economic values, Rescher starts from the following idea: human values – and, among them, economic ones – are directly rooted in human needs; they are all interwoven like also human needs are. Thus, scientific values – which are a kind of human values – can be seen as different but interconnected. The manner to avoid an “imperialism of economic values,” which would be the consequence of emphasizing the four economies already pointed out (cognitive, of means, of social undertaking, and of uses and applications), might be in to ponder their importance. In other words, it can be an appraisal of the relevance of each one of the realms of values mentioned in the general framework (social, cultural, economic, ethical, . . . ). Using this kind of consideration within the overall sphere of science, it is possible to accept that economic values affect both the internal perspective and the external domain of science. But this viewpoint does not include a hegemony of economic values regarding the whole set of scientific values. There are other important values, such as cognitive values, which have a singular place within science, in general, and scientific progress, in particular. These values are commonly highlighted both to basic science and applied science. This emphasis on cognitive values can be seen in Laudan, even though he considers them as different
25
The internal and external economic values of technology are analyzed in Gonzalez (1999b, pp. 69-96, especially pp. 72-95). 26 “Inferences from sample to population, from part to whole (from the jaws to the entire alligator), from style to authorship, from clue to culprit, from symptom to disease, and the like, are all also modes of inductive reasoning. The characteristic and crucial thing about inductive reasoning is its overreaching the evidence in hand to move to conclusions lying beyond the informative reach of relatively insufficient data” (Rescher 1989, p. 83).
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from “epistemic values,”27 and in Rescher, who has a broader vision connected to human needs: “the fact that knowledge represents a subordinate (albeit functionally appropriate) need for a creature such as ourselves integrates the values at issue in science (internal and external like) into one cohesive fabric.” 28 Again, cognitive values are not alone: they are related to social, operative, values, etc. This aspect should be present in an articulation of values in science. In this regard, between Laudan and Rescher there are some key differences on the philosophical approach to science and values. Laudan insists on cognitive values in science without emphasizing the role of economic values, and he places values in the sphere of goals and aims.29 Thus, he proposes an axiology of research with a clear status that it is different from other spheres (such as methodology of science or empirical studies of science), but interconnected with them. Rescher offers an image of values that we can call “transversal,” because he explicitly accepts values in the case of aims, in the realm of theory, in the methodological process of constructing science and also in its applications.30 Therefore, on the basis of the relevance of economic values for science as a human activity, these two epistemological pragmatists have clear differences when dealing with the methodological characterization of scientific progress in itself and its repercussions (social, technological, etc.). In order to articulate a system of economic values in science, Rescher’s approach on the holism of values show us a diversity of aspects (internal and external). His views can be integrated within a more exhaustive analysis based on the three realms of aims, processes, and results.
27
For Laudan, “epistemic values” (truth, falsity, . . . ) can be distinguishd from “cognitive values” (cope, generality, coherence, consilience, explanatory, . . . ), cf. Laudan (2004, p. 20). 28 Rescher, personal communication, 27 August 1998. 29 Cf. Laudan (1984), pp. xi-xii, n. 2. When he proposes a reticular model of scientific rationality, he points out: “Doubtless a wide range of cognitive goals or values can satisfy the demands laid down here” (Laudan 1984, p. 63). 30 Cf. Rescher (1999a), section 3.6, pp. 93-96. On the use of economic rationality as intermediation between scientific rationality and technological rationality, cf. Gonzalez (1998a), pp. 95-115.
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5.2. The Three Realms and the Economic Dimension of Rationality in Science So far, I have insisted on a central idea on the axiology of scientific research: the need for a new framework for scientific values, insofar as they can be seen – in my judgment – in three different realms (aims, processes, and results or outcomes), which can be consecutive. Thus, the analysis cannot be restricted to the first level or to include only the second area as well. This involves to take into account more seriously applied science (and, therefore, design sciences), where the relevance of results is crucial due to its possible connection with technology.31 In this regard, the kind of values (cognitive, social, economic, etc.) that can have influence in each case (aims, processes, and results) varies, but they affect the internal part as well as the external dimension of science. According to this proposal of articulation, economic values can have a role in the internal contexts of epistemology and methodology of science, and they have a clearer role in science as a social activity and in the uses and applications of science. The weight of the economic values in science should be analyzed according to the relevance of the main components of science (language, structure, knowledge, method, activity, . . .). Undoubtedly they have an influence, but still other values (cognitive, methodological, etc.) are more decisive for scientific progress (even in the case of applied sciences, such as design sciences) (Gonzalez forthcoming, sections 1 and 2). Insofar as scientific progress is involved, the role of rationality should be considered as well. To be sure, there is a key point in the link between economic of means and scientific rationality. Thus, it seems clear to me that “the optimal use of resources is, after all, a crucial aspect of rationality. It is against reason to expend more resources on the realization of a given end than one needs to” (Rescher 2001, p. 108). This can lead to simplicity as a methodological way to see efficiency, insofar as avoiding needless complications helps to acquire efficiency. But the general picture should be broader than that view on economic dimension of rationality in science. Taking into account the different aspects of the analysis made here, the economic dimension of rationality can be seen in the following features: an economy of aims (not all of them are achievable), an economy of means (i.e., the combination of parsimonious factors and the use of simple and plausible means), and an economy of results (i.e., to 31
On the relations between applied science and technology, cf. Gonzalez (2005), pp. 11-12 and 24-26.
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avoid a plethora of them and to focus on those more profitable according to relevant scientific standards). Thus, scientific outcomes do not need exuberance, but rather to enlarge reliable knowledge (explanatory or predictive) or to solve new concrete problems (mainly, problems which are increasing more complex).
University of A Coruña Faculty of Humanities Dr. Vazquez Cabrera street, w/n 15402-Ferrol Spain e-mail:
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REFERENCES Agazzi, E. (1999). Valores éticos en la empresa científico-tecnológica: De la Ciencia como value-free al compromiso ético de la Ciencia y la Tecnología. Arbor 162 (638), 173-193. Becker, G.S. (1976). The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, G.S. (1981). A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blaug, M. (1980). The Methodology of Economics: Or How Economists Explain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gonzalez, W.J. (1990). Progreso científico, autonomía de la Ciencia y realismo. Arbor 135 (532), 91-109. Gonzalez, W.J. (1991). Mathematics as Activity. Daimon 3, 113-130. Gonzalez, W.J. (1997a). Progreso científico e innovación tecnológica: La “Tecnociencia” y el problema de las relaciones entre Filosofía de la Ciencia y Filosofía de la Tecnología. Arbor 157 (620), 261-283. Gonzalez, W.J. (1997b). Rationality in Economics and Scientific Predictions: A Critical Reconstruction of Bounded Rationality and Its Role in Economic Predictions. Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 61, 205-232. Gonzalez, W.J. (1998a). Racionalidad científica y racionalidad tecnológica: La mediación de la racionalidad económica. Agora 17 (2), 95-115. Gonzalez, W.J. (1998b). Prediction and Prescription in Economics: A Philosophical and Methodological Approach. Theoria 13 (2), 321-345. Gonzalez, W.J. (1999a). Racionalidad científica y actividad humana. Ciencia y valores en la Filosofía de N. Rescher. In: N. Rescher, Razón y valores en la Era científicotecnológica, pp. 11-44. Barcelona: Paidós. Gonzalez, W.J. (1999b). Valores económicos en la configuración de la Tecnología. Argumentos de Razón Técnica 2, 69-96. Gonzalez, W.J. (2001). De la Ciencia de la Economía a la Economía de la Ciencia: Marco conceptual de la reflexión metodológica y axiológica. In: A. Avila, W.J. Gonzalez, and
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G. Marques (eds.), Ciencia económica y Economía de la Ciencia: reflexiones filosófico-metodológicas, pp. 11-37. Madrid: FCE. Gonzalez, W.J. (2003). Racionalidad y Economía: De la racionalidad de la Economía como Ciencia a la racionalidad de los agentes económicos. In: W.J. Gonzalez (ed.), Racionalidad, historicidad y predicción en Herbert A. Simon, pp. 65-96. A Coruña: Netbiblo. Gonzalez, W.J. (2005). The Philosophical Approach to Science, Technology, and Society. In: W.J. Gonzalez (ed.), Science, Technology, and Society: A Philosophical Perspective, pp. 3-49. A Coruña: Netbiblo. Gonzalez, W.J. (forthcoming). Rationality and Prediction in the Sciences of the Artificial: Economics as a Design Science. In: P. Suppes, M.C. Galavotti, and R. Scazzieri (eds.), Reasoning, Rationality, and Probability. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Koertge, N. (1998). Science, Values, and the Value of Science. Philosophy of Science 67 (3), S45-S57. Laudan, L. (1984). Science and Values. The Aims of Science and Their Role in Scientific Debate. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Laudan, L. (1990). Science and Relativism: Some Key Controversies in the Philosophy of Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Laudan, L. (2004). The Epistemic, the Cognitive, and the Social. In: P. Machamer and G. Wolters (eds.), Science, Values, and Objectivity, pp. 14-23. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag. Nelson, R.R. and S.G. Winter (1982). An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Niiniluoto, I. (1984). Is Science Progressive? Dordrecht: Reidel. Niiniluoto, I. (1987). Progress, Realism, and Verisimilitude. In: P. Weingartner and G. Schurz (eds.), Logic, Philosophy of Science and Epistemolog, pp. 151-161.Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky. Niiniluoto, I. (1993). The Aim and Structure of Applied Research. Erkenntnis 38, 1-21. Niiniluoto, I. (1995). Is There Progress in Science? In: H. Stachwociak (ed.), Pragmatik. Handbuch Pragmatischen Denkens, pp. 30-58. Hamburg: F. Meiner. Peirce, C.S. (1931). Collected Papers, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Radnitzky, G. (1987). The Cost-Benefit Thinking in the Methodology of Research: The “Economic Approach” Applied to Key Problems of the Philosophy of Science. In: G. Radnitzky and P. Bernholz (eds.), Economic Imperialism: The Economic Method Applied Outside the Field of Economics, pp. 283-331. New York: Parangon House. Rescher, N. (1976). Peirce and the Economy of Research. Philosophy of Science 43, 71-98. Rescher, N. (1978). Scientific Progress: A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press (published in Great Britain by Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). Rescher, N. (1988). Rationality: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature and the Rationale of Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rescher, N. (1989). Cognitive Economy: The Economic Dimension of the Theory of Knowledge. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Rescher, N. (1993). A System of Pragmatic Idealism. Vol. II: The Validity of Values: Human Values in Pragmatic Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rescher, N. (1996). Priceless Knowledge? Natural Science in Economic Perspective. Savage, MD: University Press of America. Rescher, N. (1997). Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.
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Rescher, N. (1998). Complexity. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Rescher, N. (1999a). Razón y valores en la Era científico-tecnológica. Barcelona: Paidós. Rescher, N. (1999b). The Limits of Science, revised edition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Rescher, N. (2001). Philosophical Reasoning. A Study in the Methodology of Philosophizing. Oxford: Blackwell. Simon, H.A. (1976). From Substantive to Procedural Rationality. In: S. Latsis (ed.), Method and Appraisal in Economics, pp. 129-148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simon, H.A. (1983). Reason in Human Affairs. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Simon, H.A. (1995). Rationality in Political Behavior. Political Psychology 16, 45-61. Simon, H.A. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Simon, H.A. (1998). Economics as a Historical Science. Theoria 13 (32), 241-260. Weber, M. ([1904] 1968). Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis. In: Weber (1968), pp. 146-214. English translation: “Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy. In: Weber, pp. 50-112. Weber, M. ([1917] 1968). Der Sinn der “Wertfreiheit” der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften. In: Weber (1968), pp. 489-540. English translation: The Meaning of “Ethical Neutrality” in Sociology and Economics. In: Weber (1949), pp. 1-47. Weber, M. (1949). The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. New York: The Free Press. Weber, M. (1968). Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 3rd ed. Foreword by Johannes Winckelmann. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr-Paul Siebeck. Wible, J.R. (1998). The Economics of Science. London: Routledge.
Ramón Queraltó THE PHILOSOPHICAL IMPACT OF TECHNOSCIENCE OR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PRAGMATIC PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes some issues derived from the social turn in the philosophy of science. The point of departure is the transformation of science into technoscience. If technoscience is conceived of as a system of human actions, then it requires the consideration of both epistemological and methodological parameters and the analysis of ethical, political, economic, and social aspects. This involves the necessity of assessing these parameters as a whole, by using a broad notion of value, namely, a pragmatic notion of value. Accordingly, value will henceforth be a “pattern-guideline of solving problems.” It leads to considering the philosophy of science as an axiology of technoscience. The following issues are developed: i) science as a value-laden enterprise; ii) value assessment as a task in the philosophy of science, which means justifying some special methodologies of assessment; iii) the proposal of specific criteria for establishing social policies of science and technology.
1. The Meaning of Technoscience Recently, one of the most relevant issues to be considered in relation to the understanding of scientific knowledge has been the conception of science as technoscience. Undoubtedly, one of the main reasons for this is the current importance of technology in scientific endeavour, which has greatly increased the traditional connection between science and technology. This current interdependence between science and technology is expressed precisely by the term technoscience. Nowadays it is a fact that this connection makes it very difficult to establish precise boundaries between both. Accordingly, many scholars have accepted the term technoscience in order to describe this situation: “But if we look at technology, we can at most admit a conceptual or an analytic distinction,
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 113-125. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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without any real separation from science, since they are concretely intertwined and, so to speak, consubstantial [. . .]. This in particular justifies the use of the term technoscience for designating this new reality” (Agazzi 2001, p. 127). In turn, the conception of technoscience necessarily involves the consideration of social factors in order to correctly understand the structure and the nature of contemporary sciences. A preliminary conclusion to be drawn from this is that it is possible to assert that the impact of technoscience may imply an enlargement of the traditional boundaries of the philosophy of science. Within the philosophy of science, the received view considered essential the methodological, logical, and epistemological traits of scientific knowledge, but other factors such as ethical, political or economic concerns were not particularly focused upon. At present, however, these social factors possess a specific relevance. Because of this they have been added to those traditional parameters in order to obtain a correct view of scientific activity. In this respect, two main reasons have to be pointed out. On the one hand, the massive impact of technoscientific outputs on human life and on nature; on the other hand, the proper quality of technoscience itself. We devote our analysis to this last issue. The relevance of social factors derives especially from the specific meaning of technoscience. As a primary trait, technoscience is conceived of as a system of human actions based on the results of scientific knowledge and directed toward the transformation of reality with the goal of achieving benefits for humankind. This is a standard conception of technoscience (Mitcham 1994; Echeverría 2003). So the aim of technoscience is to transform reality in order to obtain practical profits. Consequently, technoscience emphasizes the relevance of the pragmatic aspect of scientific knowledge. From this initial description originate both types of factors above mentioned: first, the necessity of scientific knowledge as such, which involves especially methodological and epistemological issues; and, at the same time, it also implies social factors, given that technoscience is considered a system of human actions that are envisaged as attaining a set of presumable profits to man. Thus, technoscience is both a knowing enterprise (its scientific aspect) and also a pragmatic enterprise including concrete engagements directed to modify nature, reality, and man. This last element implies necessarily that technoscience becomes a value-laden enterprise too, as far as it is characterised as a system of human actions.
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At this point, it is necessary to remark upon the systemic quality of technoscience. If we conceive of technoscience as a system of actions, then it means that every element included in technoscientific activities will play a specific and unavoidable role; therefore we must look at the entire set in order to grasp the structure of technoscience correctly. Consequently, we have cognitive factors (epistemological, etc.) and social factors, and both shape a whole that requires an internal coordination for the efficient functioning of technoscience as a system. This is a very relevant impact of technoscience: the parallel analysis of both epistemological and social-pragmatic factors from a systems point of view. In sum, technoscience means a system of human actions which involves two levels, cognitive and social, closely connected. So technoscience (Ts) is a value-laden enterprise because it is a system (S) of human actions and it necessarily implies both cognitive and social issues. By denoting cognitive values as ‘Vc’ and social values as ‘Vs’, we have in formal terms: Ts: S(Vc, Vs). According to this description, the philosophy of science conceived of as a philosophy of technoscience must obviously include these traits jointly. This implies a possible turn in the received view, because this view referred especially to cognitive values, broadly speaking. So technoscience could bring about a sort of change in the traditional contents of the philosophy of science itself. Of course it is not the only ground for that. It seems clear that the work of some contemporary philosophers such as Popper (1983), Kuhn (1970), Laudan (1977), Hacking (1983), and others, has induced this pragmatic turn in the concept of the philosophy of science, because they emphasized, up to a point, the relevance of ethical, political and social factors, as well as cognitive factors, in scientific production. Nevertheless, it is convenient to admit that, in practice, the transformation of science into technoscience is progressive. Consequently, not every scientific sector has reached the same level in this process. There are branches of scientific knowledge in which it has been accomplished to a great extent, for example in physics or in cosmology. But in other scientific fields the situation can be different. However, the technoscientific transformation is undoubtedly a very prevalent phenomenon nowadays and so it must be taken into account. It is not hard to assume that, in fact, scientific progress frequently depends on technological means: “It seems clear that progress in science is a direct function of increasing sophistication not merely in instrumentation, but in the technological infrastructure which underlies and makes mature
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science possible” (Pitt 1995, p. 1). So this technological infrastructure is a very decisive factor for scientific discoveries. Therefore the philosophy of science should be connected with the philosophy and history of technology. Of course the term technoscience is based as well on the fact that technology is no longer “applied science” but rather it operates as a condition of the possibility of scientific research. We have analyzed and justified this assertion in other contribution (Queraltó 1993). Needless to say, the aim of technological reason is mainly pragmatic, namely, the manipulation and the transformation of the natural object for the practical profit of man. According to our conceptual model of technological rationality (Queraltó 2003, pp. 73-110; 2005, pp. 182-187), in technoscience the search for scientific objectivity is no longer a purely theoretical investigation directed to discovering scientific truth in a traditional sense, but it is especially conditioned by the aims concerning the sway of reality. It is not the case that the theoretical scope constitutes the first rank and the pragmatic one is subordinated to it. Now the pragmatic goal has acquired a rank at least as important as the theoretical goal, insofar as technology is a condition of the possibility of scientific research. On that account, the border line between science and technology becomes imprecise, because it is not possible to establish where each one begins or ends. Moreover, it would be a useless task to attempt to describe the scientific production of today. For that reason many authors assert that “contemporary science is technological (in the sense of being dependent on the use of hardware artifacts) in a way that classical science never was” (Hickman 1995, p. 212). But there is another important issue to remark upon regarding the role of technology. It deals with the fact that the use of technological means transforms the research object in such a way that it becomes a technological object and not just a scientific object as such. This means that technology is not only an “instrument” for scientific research but it is much more, namely, a necessary mediation for the development of science (Queraltó 2001). The distinction between instrument and mediation is extremely important here. An instrument is something that is there, outside, and is used in a determined moment and when the action finishes it is returned to its previous place. It seems clear that this is not the role of technology with regard to science nowadays. Perhaps it was some decades ago. On the contrary, a mediation is something that is always there, whose presence is therefore continuous, and whose action sinks its roots into the intrinsic structure of the relevant situations. By this line of reasoning, it is not hard to understand that technology
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determines science as a real condition of the possibility of scientific making. In this sense, the use of the term technoscience can be largely justified.
2. Main Effects of Technoscience The first philosophical problem to be analyzed in order to coherently develop a philosophy of technoscience is that of the notion of value to be used. Note that this notion of value – as applied to technoscientific actions – must encompass both cognitive and social-pragmatic dimensions. As is well known, from the received view in philosophy as a whole, the notion of value is confined to social and ethical realms. Value is here conceived of as something that should be applied because of its intrinsic ontological quality, which justifies itself as being held up by a more or less definitive transcendental level. In other words, values such as justice, honesty, etc., are justified by their ontological essence. This classical notion of value raises some difficulties for encompassing the set of values involved in technoscience. It is sufficient to think about the methodological values, inference rules, etc. that are responsible for the formal framework of scientific theories. An essentialist justification of them will be problematic. On that account, it is germane to search for another notion of value, one compatible with the full set of parameters involved in technoscience. That is, a pragmatic notion of value applicable to both epistemological and social features of technoscience. So what is required here is a broad notion of value considered from a pragmatic view-point. In a general sense, value is depicted now as a pattern or a guideline for solving problems, that is to say, value obtains its axiological meaning as long as it is an efficient means for overcoming and for solving some concrete problems. Basically it is a formalist notion because, as a pragmatic value, this “pattern” depends on the nature of the problem to be solved, either epistemological or social. So in the philosophical analysis of technoscience, we have for example cognitive values as patterns for solving epistemological and methodological problems; and we also have social values as patterns for solving ethical and political problems. Observe that both patterns are pragmatic values because they help to solve specific questions to be overcome through technoscientific action. In this manner, value, pragmatically considered, is a guideline for overcoming a problem of technoscientific activity, be it epistemological,
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ethical or political. We have treated this notion in other writings (Queraltó 2002; 2005). Accordingly, a pragmatic philosophy of technoscience implies two specific traits: i) the concept of science as a system of actions; and ii) the concept of scientific making as a value-laden enterprise. In this line, philosophy of science as philosophy of technoscience is also a pragmatic axiology of science. But, in a general sense, it is necessary to understand here the term axiology as an inquiry into patterns-guidelines for solving problems related to technoscientific practice. From this pragmatic perspective, value is not justified by essentialist reasons, but rather it is defended because of its power for overcoming problems. In my view this is the key turn derived from the philosophy of technoscience, which can imply an important variation in contemporary philosophical thought. Without a doubt, one of its causes is the crucial impact of technology on science and the subsequent progressive transformation of science into technoscience. Of course, this pragmatic and value-laden conception of science does not exclude traditional ethical values. On the contrary, it also integrates them, because their pragmatic efficacy is obviously required for technoscientific development, as far as they are internal factors in technoscience. So technoscientific action must satisfy the requirements of many classical ethical values in order to be pragmatic. By following this line, a pragmatic philosophy of technoscience would be able to open a possible way of overcoming the traditional schism between the realm of scientific knowledge and the realm of values. As a very relevant consequence, a second task is raised by this pragmatic philosophy. It is that of value assessment in technoscientific practice. If technoscience is a system of value-laden actions, the crucial point will then be that of establishing a critical methodology for assessing the values implied in every technoscientific action. The main scope of this value assessment will be to justify some criteria for deciding among different actions. In other words, the aim of value assessment is to provide the grounds for justifying a reasonable choice, that is, a rationally well founded choice among diverse technoscientific actions. In this respect, we can now mention the following four rules. (1) It is necessary to proceed to an inclusive assessment of values, including as much epistemological values as social-ethical values. This derives directly from the above mentioned systemic character of technoscience. Values should be selected as a function of a concrete problem, with the objective of centering the evaluative analysis. This rule can be denominated a “bounding rule of values,” which helps to establish
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a reasonable intersubjectivity for the process of value assessment and tries to avoid an endless discussion in the process of assessment. (2) Pragmatic judgements have to distinguish clearly between epistemological and social values. That is to say, epistemological criteria cannot be confounded with ethical criteria. An epistemological value must be measured by epistemological rules and ethical values will be assessed by ethical criteria. (3) It is pertinent to use the more-less criterion MLC (“more than,” “less than”) in order to weigh the different systems of values involved in the alternative technoscientific actions (Queraltó 2005, pp. 195f ). The justification of this criterion is not difficult. In general, it can be asserted that a certain value (or set thereof) in a specific scientific action appears with more or less intensity than in another action, both being directed toward the same objectives. That is to say, we can speak in terms of “more than” or “less than” when referring to the values concerned. Given that values cannot be evaluated mathematically, the way of assessing them will be to establish a scale from “larger” to “lesser” between them, by taking into account especially the set of purposes pursued by technoscientific action. In other words, we can prefer a specific action A instead of another action A because the first one will have an environmental effect “lesser” than the second one. Note in this example that the decision about technoscientific action is determined by a social value (environmental value) and not by an epistemological value. This easy case shows the impact of the social on scientific production from the perspective of technoscience. Nevertheless, to correctly use this rule it is indispensable to identify clearly which is the problem to solve by technoscientific action, that is to say, which is the specific aim (a) of this action, because the “more than” or “less than” criterion has to be established about these aims. In this sense we could write in formal terms: Sv(a) > S v (a) or Sv(a) < S v (a). And in general, Sv(ai) > S v (ai) or Sv(ai) < S v (ai). It is obvious that we cannot pretend with this “calculation” to reach an exact mathematical solution, as in the case of determining physical magnitudes such as the kinetic energy of a motion for example. But, one could establish a certain measurement (inequations as above) that will suggest the global viability of one technoscientific endeavour or another. This is the ultimate purpose of the value assessment. Evidently, these inequations would not have the mathematical exactitude required in other dimensions of technoscientific action because their own purpose, namely, the elucidation of the capacity to solve those technoscientific problems in which values of diverse nature are implied, would impede this. Such a
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pretension would be suspicious because it would go outside of the framework of the problem itself. Furthermore, it would be neither adequate nor necessary. What the value assessment tries to do is to find reasonable guidelines for decision making. These guidelines have to assess the final costs (of all kinds, not only in economic terms) of technoscientific action in the case of using one or another system of values, that is to say, Sv or S v . In addition, the use of the MLC criterion should avoid the current discussions about “optimization” or “maximization” of values in Sv. By following MLC neither optimization nor maximization will be convenient. The reasons for this are easy to point out. On the one hand, optimization of values obviously refers to an optimum, that is to say, a theoretical content previously determined without taking into account the conditions of the pragmatic situation. So optimization would be an ideal situation. But this is not an available end, from a pragmatic point of view. In general, it is useless in value assessment. On the other hand, maximization of values is not possible because, within an axiological system, values are intrinsically connected and their pragmatic power for solving problems depends on the relations among them. In fact, the axiological power of values is bounded by these relations. It means that if we pretend to maximizing a value, then we could cancel the axiological power of another value necessary for the assessment (in accordance with the first rule above mentioned), or at least to put it down to its critical limit in Sv. Logically, it will be a mistake. In a certain sense, maximization of values signifies, in practice, a “weak” optimization. The internal relationship of values is a central characteristic of Sv and its consequences must be respected. With regard to this issue, we can now add that the scope of the MLC criterion will be that of obtaining the greatest axiological increase of the influence of values in relation to their systemic situation. Put another way, what the use of MLC seeks is to increase the pragmatic power of values in accordance with the conditions of the technoscientific action under consideration. In the current practice of value assessment, notions such as optimization or maximization should impose axiological requirements impossible to fulfil. (4) The fourth rule is the so called prudence rule (PR). This rule tries to solve the possible shortcomings of the more-less criterion. Frequently it happens that the final result of value assessment cannot establish a clear range – from larger to lesser – between two global systems of values. Here the case is that both systems would solve the stipulated problems, and so their pragmatic value would be similar; but at the same time, they would indicate two very different ways of technoscientific
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action. What can we do now? It is fully necessary to point out some rational means for overcoming such an impasse. This instrument would be a prudence rule, which consists of checking other finished technoscientific actions – former actions – and to take into account the degree to which they fulfilled the same values under consideration or, at least, some similar values. The advantage of this procedure is that the degree of fulfilling of these values is well known in those former actions and therefore a prudent comparison will be feasible. In other words, the middle term of the comparison will be bound, and by taking into account the previous results with respect to the values involved, it will be possible to establish a rational approach applying again the scale “more than/less than” analogically. This procedure fulfils the general conditions of the value assessment. Briefly speaking, PR is a method for comparing former technoscientific actions with new technoscientific actions, when the first step of value assessment does not obtain a clear result in regard to these new actions; that is to say, when the internal assessment of them is not enough. This procedure is compatible with the system-conception of technoscience. In short, there is an internal use of the MLC criterion and an external use of it. This last is then employed if the results of the internal use do not indicate a rational direction of the technoscientific action. The term ‘prudence’ can be justified here because to take into consideration the results of prior assessments constitutes a case of “practical experience” from a pragmatic point of view.
3. The Social and Political Enlargement of the Philosophy of Science Now it is convenient to point out that the horizon of a pragmatic philosophy of science is highly enlarged in applying its key lines within the social-political area in general. Up to here we have considered the analysis of single technoscientific actions, that is to say, of isolated actions. But it does not exhaust the rational possibilities of a philosophy of technoscience, because a standard political situation is to establish a broad set of general measures for the development of technoscience, and it falls upon technoscientific practice especially. This is a consequence derived from two factors: on the one hand, the interdisciplinarity of scientific research nowadays; on the other, the increase of social aims pursued by technoscience.
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If technoscience is a value-laden enterprise (epistemological and social values), then a philosophy of technoscience may be enlarged to pay attention to science and technology policy. It deals with considering the technoscientific system as a whole and suggesting general criteria for its development. It is an important issue in this field (Frodeman and Mitcham 2004). Of course, in this task it is necessary to take into account social goals. Every modern state is looking for these policies. Later they will be applied politically. As is well known, many states are working up policies for science and technology based on technological criteria only, and consequently the specific social aims of the technological development are not envisaged to a reasonable extent. Undoubtedly, if a pragmatic philosophy of science includes the task of value assessment, then it has to include proposals on political guidelines for directing the correct technoscientific development. In other words, this task tries to apply the value assessment to the set of possible political actions for technoscientific development. This set would be considered a global system to be evaluated. In this field one of the main scopes of a pragmatic philosophy of technoscience will be to provide ethical criteria for technoscientific policy. These criteria would operate as regulative ideas for science and technology policies. The following example will clarify this issue. Nowadays a recurrent idea of many governments is to increase and to extend the use of the information technology highways, especially in education policy, beginning from the lowest level. Often the standard political criterion is the quantitative increase of technological means in educative centres. It seems as if this quantitative action were justified in itself. However, this sort of justification is not sufficient. What is also required is an efficient social policy for science and technology, and not only a quantitative justification. Of course, the material technological increase is a first and necessary step. But very soon many questions arise: What is this material increase for? Is the economic cost justified to any extent? What kind of results have to be promoted by using technological facilities during the educative process? How to assess these results? At present, these questions still have not received sufficient responses from public powers, and the debate is open. At this point, a pragmatic philosophy of technoscience ought to propose some important contributions derived from the investigation of the epistemological and ethical values to be pursued by public education today. It is possible to suggest and to justify a global set of values in accordance with the hopes of people and with the possibilities of technoscience. Later it will be
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workable to adopt them in the development of science and technology policies. Finally, another important issue is that of technological risk. One of the main consequences of the unavoidable use of modern technoscientific means is their impact on the conditions of human life. As is well known, often this impact has been very negative (air pollution, etc.). Scientifictechnological development must be compatible with human welfare, but it means as well that it is necessary to assume some (or many) risks involved in this development. The technological society is also a risk society (Beck 1992). Logically, it will be indispensable to assess the risks and to balance them with the social benefits to be obtained. In this line, philosophical contributions are focused on critical methodologies of risk assessment. Without a doubt, the risk assessment has to be considered a relevant issue within the general framework of value assessment, to which we have devoted the central part of this paper. It seems obvious that these tasks are feasible for a pragmatic philosophy of science, as long as it conceives of technoscience as a value-laden activity. Thus, it is not hard to assert that the impact of the social on the epistemology of sciences enlarges the range of the philosophy of science in general. That is the actual turn implied by a pragmatic philosophy of technoscience.
University of Sevilla Research Unit on Science, Technology, and Society Facultad de Filosofía Camilo José Cela S/N, 41018 Sevilla Spain e-mail:
[email protected]
REFERENCES Agazzi, E. (2001). From Technique to Technology: The Role of Modern Science. In: Lenk et al. (2001), pp. 121-128. Agazzi, E. (2004). Right, Wrong, and Science. The Ethical Dimensions of The Technological Scientific Enterprise. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Aicholzer, G. and G. Schienstock, eds. (1994). Technology Policy: Towards an Integration of Social and Ecological Concerns. New York: W. De Gruyter. Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Bertalanffy, L. von (1967). General Systems Theory. New York: Braziller.
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Bijker, W.E., T.P. Huges, and T. Pinch, eds. (1987). The Social Contruction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dosi, G. (1982). Technological Paradigms and Technological Trajectories: A Suggested Interpretation of the Determinants and Directions of Technological Change. Research Policy 11, 147-162. Echeverría, J. (2000). Los Señores del Aire. Telépolis y el tercer entorno. Barcelona: Destino. Echeverría, J. (2002a). Ciencia y Valores. Barcelona: Destino. Echeverría, J. (2002b). Axiología y Ontología: Los valores de la ciencia como funciones no saturadas. Argumentos de Razón Técnica. A Spanish Journal on Science, Technology and Society, and Philosophy of Technology 5 , 21-38. Echeverría, J. (2003). La revolución tecnocientífica. Madrid: FCE. Frodeman, R. and C. Mitcham, eds. (2004). Toward a Philosophy of Science Policy: Approaches and Issues. Philosophy Today 48 (5), Supplement, Special Issue. Giere, R. (1991). Knowledge, Values, and Technological Decisions: A Decision Theoretic Approach. In: D.G. Mayo and R.D. Hollande (eds.), Acceptable Evidence: Science and Values in Risk Management, pp. 183-203. Oxford: Oxford University Press Goldman, S.L., ed. (1989). Research in Technological Studies. Bethelem, PA: Lehigh University Press. Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and Intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heilbroner. R.L. (1967). Do Machines Make History? Technology and Culture 8, 333-345. Hickman, L. (1995). Techniques of Discovery: Broad and Narrow Characterizations of Technology. In: Pitt (1995), pp. 207-218. Hottois, G., ed.(1988). Evaluer la technique: aspects éthiques de la philosophie de la technique. Paris: Vrin. Kuhn, T.S. ([1962] 1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press. Laudan, L. (1977). Progress and Its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Laudan, L., ed. (1984). The Nature of Technological Knowledge: Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant? Dordrecht: Reidel. Lenk, H. and G. Ropohl, eds. (1987). Technik und Ethik. Stuttgart: Reclam. Lenk, H. and M. Maring, eds. (2001). Advances and Problems in the Philosophy of Technology. Münster-London: LIT Verlag. Longino, H. (1990). Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mitcham, C. (1993). Philosophy of Technology in Spanish Speaking Countries. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Mitcham, C. (1994). Thinking Through Technology. The Path between Engineering and Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchan, C. and S.H. Cutcliffe, eds. (2001). Visions of STS. Counterpoints in Science, Technology and Society Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pickering, A., ed. (1992). Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pitt, J.C. (1995). Discovery, Telescopes and Progress. In: Pitt (1995), pp. 1-16.
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Pitt, J.C., ed. (1995). New Directions in the Philosophy of Technology. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Popper, K.R. (1983). Realism and the Aim of Science. London: Hutchinson. Porter, A.L., ed. (1980). Guidebook for Technology Assessment and Impact Analysis. New York/Oxford: North Holland. Queraltó, R. (1993). Does Technology Construct Scientific Reality? In: Mitcham (1993), pp. 167-172. Queraltó, R. (1996). Hypothèse, objectivité et rationalité technique. Philosophia Scientiae 1, 187-196. Cahier Spécial Entretiens de la session 1994 de l’Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences. Queraltó, R. (2001). Technology as a new Condition of the Possibility of Scientific Knowledge. In: Lenk and Maring (2001), pp. 194-205. Queraltó, R. (2002). Ética y Sociedad tecnológica: pirámide y retícula. Argumentos de Razón Técnica 5, 39-83. Queraltó, R. (2003). Ética, tecnología y valores en la sociedad global. El Caballo de Troya al revés . Madrid: Tecnos. Queraltó, R. (2005). Philosophical Patterns of Rationality and Technological Change. In: W.J. González (ed.), Science, Technology and Society: A Philosophical Perspective, pp. 179-205. A Coruña: Netbiblo. Queraltó, R. (forthcoming). Science as Technoscience: Values and Their Measurement. In: E. Agazzi (ed.), Science et Éthique: contexte axiologique de la science. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Rescher, N. (1983). Risk: A Philosophical Introduction to the Theory of Risk Evaluation and Management. Lanham:University Press of America. Rip, A., T.H. Misa, and J. Schot, eds. (1995). Managing Technology in Society. The Approach of Constructive Technology Assessment. London: Pinter. Shrader-Frechette, K. (1984). Science Policy, Ethics, and Economic Methodology. Boston: Reidel. Shrader-Frechette, K. (1985). Risk Analysis and Scientific Method. Dordrecht: Reidel. Smith, M.R. and L. Marx, eds. (1994). Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Winner, L. (1977). Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus 109, 121-136. Winner, L. (1986). The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
PART 3 SOCIAL IMPACT ON PARTICULAR SCIENCE
Alberto Cordero EPISTEMOLOGY AND “THE SOCIAL” IN CONTEMPORARY NATURAL SCIENCE
ABSTRACT. Philosophers of science disagree on the extent to which epistemology transcends the social sphere in mature branches of science. In this paper I suggest a way of vindicating a key aspect of the transcendence thesis without questioning the social nature of science. Such vindication requires epistemological autonomy to prevail along channels having to do with (1) selection of research goals, (2) use of human subjects and public resources in research, (3) social interventions aimed at helping science fulfill its epistemic goals, and (4) social interventions aimed at helping people and the community protect themselves from harmful scientific activity. This paper focuses on type (3), specifically on social pressure to diversify the points of view represented in scientific research. My exploration proceeds by contrasting two case studies involving pluralist enrichment of scientific research. Both encompass epistemological reform. In one (Feminist Biology) reform is pushed largely from outside the scientific sphere; in the other (Einstein’s development of Special Relativity) reform originates largely from within. Examination of these cases shows why general pluralist arguments fail and also why social intervention in epistemological matters is a misguided activity – or so I argue.
1. Science, Epistemology, and “the Social” Modern science embodies a distinctly social way of pursuing knowledge, and so epistemology and the social are tied together in modern science, As the latter purports to speak rationally to the mind, it seeks public knowledge. Following Ziman (1968) I am using ‘public knowledge’ to mean information and reasoning backed up by persuasive argument and evidence, open to detailed checking by others. Public scientific rationality both constrains admission of proposals into the body of “established science” and takes institutional precedence over individual
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 129-142. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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preferences. One can appeal here to a rough distinction between “publicly established science” and “science in the trenches,” the two types carrying quite different credibility grades. Established science comprises representations and procedures that have stood the test of time and conceptual change, and are hence credibly relied upon. On the other hand, science in the trenches can be hasty, and as wild as the individuals who forge it. Much of this kind of science turns out to be either wrong or irrelevant to future research. Individual scientists often turn quite “mystical” about their novel ideas; this certainly helps them to keep digging into the depths of nature. But more is needed for their ideas to gain proper scientific acceptability; in particular, as one popular slogan goes, “replication is the ultimate test of truth in science.” So in at least one fundamental sense “the social” cannot be separated from the “scientific.” It is a rather limited sense, however, because its intended reach does not extend beyond the scientific community. But wider couplings with the social sphere are also easily discernible1 particularly in regard to (1) selection of research goals, (2) use of human subjects and public resources in research, (3) social interventions aimed at helping science fulfill its epistemic goals, and (4) social interventions aimed at helping people and the community protect themselves from harmful scientific activity. Types (1) and (2) are of obvious ethical and political interest, but arguably not of much epistemological interest (McMullin 1983; Cordero 1992; 2001; 2004a). By contrast, types (3) and (4) can be “epistemologically invasive,” particularly in the case of pressures to either expand or constrain the scientific imagination. I have commented on interventions of type (4) in recent papers (Cordero 2004b; 2005). Here I want to concentrate on type (3), namely social interventions aimed at helping science to fulfill its epistemic goals. I will focus in particular on pluralist programs designed to promote expansion of the scientific imagination in ongoing research programs.
2. A Popular Pluralist Argument One influential general argument for opening scientific deliberation to the greatest possible diversity of points of view builds on the feeling that the natural world is much richer than any particular perspective can do justice to, that the “scientific way” of seeing through the complications
1 See, for example, McMullin (1983), Brown (1989), and Cordero (1992, 2004a, 2004b, and 2005).
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of concrete situations inevitably misses relevant material. The argument runs essentially as follows: 2 (P1) (P2) (P3)
In science rational selection of theories is always a comparative affair involving a finite number of options. In all selection events the options on the table reflect the intellectual and social limitations of the participating scientists. Even in the best intentioned deliberations, the scientists involved will in all probability leave out options that would have turned out to be scientifically better than those then on their table.
Therefore, (C)
Epistemically, it pays to incorporate into a scientific investigation the greatest possible diversity of intellectual perspectives, however eccentric many may initially appear to be.
Notice that stated this way, the recommended pluralism’s primary goal is to advance the received epistemic aims of science. Appealing expressions of this way of thinking are apparent in much of the current interest in interdisciplinary research. Equally apparent, however, are some provocative interpretations of the argument. The loudest come from some social reductionists and also from some academics who present themselves as “postmodernist.” Both groups are critical of what they regard as the “tyranny” of scientific empiricism, which they depict as narrow and dogmatic. Scientists seem sure of their ideas, but – they stress – no one can ever be completely sure of anything, and so superstition becomes a matter of reasonable doubt. Indeed, from many of these critics’ perspective there is actually no truth to be had. Fascinated with subjective belief, they conflate the sincerity of a believer in something with the plausibility of his beliefs. From fundamentalist pulpits, deconstructed academia and opportunistic cultural institutions these objectors keep themselves busy encouraging people to respect “alternative ways of life,” however crazy they may initially seem to the scientifically minded. Their rebellious reaction to science has been repeatedly debunked, notably by Sokal and Bricmont (1998), but it remains influential. More relevantly for present purposes, all this popular emphasis on the intellectual limitations of scientists and science has given rise to much interest in the issue of social representation and participation in the conduction of scientific research. The resulting debates include talk of
2
My presentation here follows Okruhlik (1994).
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epistemological and social-therapeutic agendas. My focus in this paper is primarily on the epistemological ideas involved. Attractive as the notion of the larger society helping science through pluralist policies may be, it is one peculiarly fraught with peril. Attributing prospective epistemic gifts to any particular intellectual perspective, culture or human group is not easy. Also it is the kind of project that attracts corrupting influences from many quarters. So, how credible is general pluralism as a way of helping science? In debates about matters as complex as the advance of science the devil is usually in the details. I thus propose to explore the idea of pluralist revisionism with the help of two emblematic case studies, both involving epistemological revision. In the first, alteration is pushed mostly from outside the inner scientific sphere, in the second from within. The first case concerns a popular genre of social interventions, centered on the notion that groups presently underrepresented at the top in many scientific areas (particularly women and certain ethnic minorities) “might” have points of view helpful to the current epistemic aims in those areas, and that therefore more members from the said groups should be included in research teams, as a matter of “good epistemology.” A more specific form of this view identifies particular groups as actually having some distinct cognitive gifts for certain scientific fields. I think the most articulate defenses for interventionism of type (3) are of this more specific form. Justifications variously resort to ideology, naturalist narrative, or both. The pluralist contention at hand is said to be convincingly supported by case studies. The most developed project is probably found in the program known as “feminist science.” A case much referred to in this direction concerns the scientific work of biologist Barbara McClintock, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for her work on segments of chromosomes that move from one site in the genome to another (transposons), to which I now turn.
3. On Women and Holistic Biology The feminist thesis of interest goes basically as follows: (Thesis F) Women tend to look at nature more “holistically” than men, as women are more spontaneously interested than men in aspects like development, individuality, diversity, and functional organization in complex systems. Men, by contrast, tend to concentrate more spontaneously on mechanical compositional structures.
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A social policy of affirmative action in favor of incorporating more women researchers in certain scientific areas follows from this. The most articulate defenses of thesis F employ case studies to document the presence of masculine partiality and distortion in investigations conducted in paradigmatic scientific fields. One such study, believed by many to have splendidly corroborated thesis F, is a biography now turned into a classic, written by the historian Evelyn Keller. It is a work that draws extensively from McClintock’s own recollections of her early struggles as a biologist against the closemindedness and unfairness of her colleagues in the 1950s, the hostile puzzlement with which they reacted to her work on transposons for which some years later she would receive a Nobel Prize. McClintock regarded herself as a survivor of much systematic discrimination. Keller takes McClintock’s victimization stories at face value, and gives them a sexist twist in the form of an explanation of why the discovery of chromosomal transposition would have been more easily accomplished by someone like McClintock. Unlike her male colleagues, McClintock was able to take from nature the kind of understanding and fulfillment that others acquire from personal intimacy, according to Keller. McClintock, Keller thinks, gained a deeper discernment of genetics through an emotional connection with her subject, thus explaining why the work on transposons was in the end brought to fruition by a woman rather than a man, and also why McClintock’s work took so long in being appreciated. But, is such an explanation credible? The information used by Keller appears to be both tendentious and inaccurate. For example, how true is it that McClintock’s scientific worth was not recognized when it was presented? A recent study by Nathaniel Comfort carefully traces McClintock’s investigations and their impact during the period in question. His findings strongly suggest that her discovery of transposition was primarily fueled not by any holistic stance but by an ambition to explain development through “controlling elements” (a term she initially used for transposons). Comfort also shows in detail how well established as a researcher McClintock already was in the 1930s, thanks to her work on the genetics of maize, which led in 1944 to her election to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1945 to the presidency of the Genetics Society of America. In addition Comfort documents that McClintock’s original presentation on transposons was received with much interest by other researchers. All of which discredits the story that McClintock’s work on transposons had been systematically dismissed by her colleagues. The latter did not agree with all of her proposals all of the
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time (some investigations by McClintock linking development and evolution were considered controversial from the start, and have remained so), but this is completely normal behavior in science. McClintock, it seems, helped create a myth about her work, particularly the notion that back in 1951 her work on transposons had been flatly rejected or ignored by close-minded colleagues whose response to her ideas was limited to hostile puzzlement. There is no adequate substantiation for that notion. Keller’s biography, it appears, gets many of the pertinent facts wrong. But, if so, it cannot be said to advance thesis F. 3 More generally, no reasonable case seems to exist for linking McClinock’s best scientific work with any distinctly feminine cognitive gifts. That said, however, something needs to be added here. In principle, some naturalist-scientific version of thesis F might one day become respectable. The notions involved are difficult to establish, particularly such claims as that there is a more holistic understanding of the world to be had for which women are better disposed than men, and that the understanding in question is not just of “feminine” interest but also of standard scientific value – because it can make our knowledge of the world more precise and reliable in the best pre-feminist sense. Both claims seem as yet unwarranted. Nevertheless, the notion that some form of thinking both distinctly “feminine” and beneficial to biological science actually exists could begin to get off the ground by, for example, someone documenting clear correlations in the right direction.4 Were that to happen, and were thesis F continuing to make progress, then certain parts of epistemology would cease to be gender neutral. Vindicating the various steps necessary for this would not be easy, but that is a different story. Meanwhile, however, until proper evidence comes our way, encouraging action to implement thesis F would amount to arbitrary policy. None of which, again, denies the dreadful and totally condemnable persistence – even in advanced societies – of many real forms of discrimination against women and other human groups. What, then, of the general argument for pluralism with which I began this section? That argument, I will suggest shortly, lacks the force needed to license its intended conclusion. Furthermore, it calls attention away from what I think is truly valuable about bringing multiple perspectives to bear on certain investigations. However, I will bracket these issues for 3 In point of fairness, a major – and more credible – worry in Keller (1983) concerns the illusiveness of pretending that science has absolutely no cultural background. 4 Cases in point are allegedly available in speculative fields, particularly in certain areas of psychology and the social sciences (Gilligan 1982).
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the moment and look first into the related matter of interdisciplinary success. Although I have addressed only a specific case study regarding socially driven calls for epistemological reforms of type (3), the approach I have followed seems to have similar implications for other interventions originating from the broader social sphere (on behalf of such presently disregarded ways of “looking at things” as ethnic cosmologies, minority science, epistemological anarchism, and so on). There is no denying that bringing multiple points of view into research projects can be epistemologically beneficial sometimes. Clear favorable instances suggest some significant epistemological traits at work, or so I will argue. Here my choice of success story is the development of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (SR). The studies and research for this theory, conducted mostly during Einstein’s years as doctoral student at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, brought together insights and ways of thinking from a variegated array of disciplinary perspectives. The scientific success of this case, I will suggest, attests not to the benefits of any general “pluralism,” but to Einstein’s having been able to critically discern relevant epistemic local connections between the perspectives he brought to bear on his studies.
4. Einstein’s Many Perspectives The notion of a stationary electromagnetic wave seems more than a little odd from the point of view of Maxwell’s theory. Suppose a person was running at the speed of light while holding a mirror in front of his face. Would this person see himself reflected in the mirror? Could the light from his face ever reach the mirror? Einstein’s reflections on this puzzle have become legendary. At end of the 19th century those in the know had reason to worry. The edifice built on the pillars of Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism was in trouble. One problematic topic was how to deal with charged bodies in relative motion. Close to this, only more widely noticed, was the matter of the ether, a burdensome posit since the early days of the wave theory of light. Subsequent developments had turned the ether into something increasingly baffling. Was it really part of the physical world? By 1900 all attempts to measure the Earth’s speed relative to the ether had failed. Even worse, the speed of light seemed to have the same value with respect to every reference frame. Dropping the ether from the narrative was tempting, but such a move would leave the formulas of
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electromagnetism without visually imaginable counterparts – a thought which remained anathema to most physicists until well into the century. And, anyway, how could a wave not have a medium? Einstein’s now famous response to the above difficulties was the Special Theory of Relativity (SR), in which he both generalizes the old principle of Galilean relativity (according to which mechanical laws are the same for all inertial systems) to include all physical laws and presents the invariant character of the speed of light as a law of nature. SR crowns a decade of thinking about electric bodies in motion from the point of view of fundamental physics. It also epitomizes Einstein’s “miraculous year” of 1905, in the course of which he produced a major paper on the diffusion of large molecules (a piece that was immediately very well received by the cheese industry), completed his doctoral dissertation at the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, published “the” definitive scientific argument for the existence of atoms and molecules, articulated a new conception of space and time that fixed the problems of electromagnetism, and advanced a quantized conception of matter and energy – all this while working full-time for the Swiss Patent Office at Bern. Routinely regarded as the purest of scientific developments, SR established Einstein’s reputation as a seer, a pure and abstract man. But, where did the young Einstein get his very original ideas from? In “How I Created the Theory of Relativity” Einstein states that the key to the problem occurred to him in a flash of inspiration (Einstein 1982). One day he suddenly realized that time could not be defined in absolute terms: an inseparable relation existed between time and the speed of light. Importantly for present purposes, however, there was a social and technological environment to this breakthrough. Focused on that environment Peter Galison has recently contributed a perceptive reading of the development of SR, in which he looks at Einstein as someone who was multiply involved in a very rich moment in history: Instead of a wholly abstracted “Einstein philosopher-scientist” [. . .] we can recognize him also as “Einstein patent officer-scientist,” refracting the underlying metaphysics of his relativity theory through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity. (Galison 2003, p. 255)
Galison’s specific emphasis on the emblematic character of devices for synchronizing distant clocks is appropriate. Einstein’s scientific work prior to 1902 did not include any investigation on the nature of time. However, he was surrounded by a growing fascination with the electronic synchronization of clocks (between 1901 and 1904 the number of patents in that direction grew from 8 to 14 per year).
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No less relevant to Einstein’s education was the sobering attitude toward discovery prevailing at the Patent Office, where submitted proposals were expected to be supported by clear results. This was a stance rooted not exclusively in techno-utilitarian imperatives but also in down-to-earth awareness of the value of successful prediction for correct charting of scientific domains. Adding to this, but coming from the wider civic sphere, were political and diplomatic debates about how to establish national and international time zones. Unifying places within any large territory required giving up local times in favor of a common measure, constrained – if only coarsely – by the range of meridians involved. SR generalizes this issue of coordination to the case where there are no objective meridians. Reasonably, but also illuminatingly, Einstein’s synchronization rule corresponds precisely to the one the Paris Bureau of Longitudes and Measures used for the synchronization of clocks. So, in the development of SR, pulling different perspectives into the research does seem to have helped scientific advance. However, let us guard against hasty generalizations. The many perspectives Einstein incorporated into SR were each mediated by considerations specifically germane to the questions of physics he was addressing. This brings us back to the general pluralist argument. According to premise (P3), in any given scientific deliberation the finite number of options considered will in all probability leave out better options (i.e., approaches that would have turned out to be better than those then at hand). Even if this were granted, however, the strong pluralist conclusion would still not follow, unless it were further assumed that the better options in question might come with comparable probability from just any of the perspectives currently left out. But, in the case of the more advanced scientific disciplines, this is a completely unreasonable expectation. As the critique of Kuhnian history amply revealed in the 1960s and 1970s, in the more advanced branches of science “revolutionary” theory selection is far from a wildly revolutionary affair. In our own time, disciplines generally recognized as successful all display thick arrays of accumulation through theory change in terms of both theory-structure and intermediate ontology – even change involving radical reinterpretation at deep levels of theorizing. In this sense, mature branches of science display cumulative learning about their subject matter, and this renders overwhelmingly implausible that current theory may lose to just any newcomer. So, while no particular research piece can be expected to actually bring to the fore “the best possible theory” for any empirical domain (assuming such a thing makes
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sense), this is not enough to let the general argument for pluralism get through. We are thus left with a question: Why something like the pluralist strategy worked so well in Einstein’s and other major scientific cases? Arguably, in Einstein’s work one prominent reason has to do with something already hinted at: the perspectives that converged were brought in because of explicitly recognized relevance to Einstein’s scientific goals at the time. The multiple concerns and disciplines he pulled together were fairly autonomous from each other, yet their respective domains overlapped in ways that invited specific questions on and/or answers to the issues he was addressing. Consider the following sample of connections readily discernible regarding the technological and cultural influences at play in the episode. Let us begin with the “pragmatic” approach at Einstein’s school, the Zurich Polytechnic, where the teaching of theoretical science emphasized application to situations of practical interest through detailed modelling. This was not pragmatism of an instrumentalist or anti-realist sort the way these terms are understood in philosophy. Its focus was on distinguishing within specific theoretical narratives what did and did not have clear experimental consequences, and directing trust accordingly. This emphasis is apparent in much of the of work done at the Polytechnic in theoretical physics and chemistry during Einstein’s time there, including his thesis research on molecular diffusion, in which predictive power is explicitly valued as an epistemically desirable feature. But, of course, attributing predictive power to a narrative does not make it true. In principle a successful account can be false. How to interpret this possibility has been a matter of philosophical debate since the early days of modern science. It is still with us. At the Polytechnic, faculty tended to sneer at the mere logical possibility that massively successful theories might turn out to be completely wrong. For example, the ultimate, “true” nature of heat may forever escape us, but nevertheless at the Polytechnic the kinetic theory of matter was recognized as leading very convincingly to a mechanical conception in which heat is but mechanical motion. Importantly, this “Polytechnic mentality” was not without precedent in modern natural philosophy. It had clear precursors in earlier science, most famously Newton’s work. Forceful intimations are apparent in, for example, his fourth rule of reasoning: In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such
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time as other phenomena occur by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions. (Newton 1934, p. 400; my emphasis)
The above rule gestures toward what would become a non-trivial defense of ampliative inference against global (philosophical) skeptical readings of theoretical accounts. Nevertheless, as questions first about Newton’s Absolute Space and later on about the ether had revealed, the ampliative force licensed by Newton could be overgenerous. Newton’s Rule needed a purgative supplement. One move, available to Einstein at the time of his exertions, was Hertz’s reaction to theoretical sub-plots found to be dubiously connected with specific predictions – conspicuously the ether story. Such plots Hertz regarded as optional interpretation. Hertz, who had experimentally demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic waves and expressed strong doubts about the physical significance of the received distinction between electricity and magnetism, thought Maxwell’s theory should be completely freed of assumptions about the ether. The young Einstein developed a great admiration for the way Hertz had centered Maxwell’s theory in a few basic equations. A similarly sobering, yet still non-skeptical approach to physical theories was further encouraged in Einstein by the Patent Office at Bern, where everybody was “officially” aware of the excessive fertility of the imagination. And so, I suggest, Einstein’s revamped “scientific way” of understanding the scope and limits of credible theoretical representation was eminently contemporary yet also continuous with earlier responses to skepticism within fundamental physics. It was a way centered on an appreciation of the epistemic value of predictive power in the search for the underlying constituents of nature. At least equally important was Einstein’s interest in epistemology and philosophy in general. The young Einstein studied the modern period well, from Descartes to Kant, and his epistemic interest in physics was ostensibly helped throughout the first decade of the century by his detailed exposure to the major current philosophical debates about science. Einstein’s insight into the ease with which people end up believing too much was especially helped by the works of J.S. Mill, Karl Pearson, Richard Avenarius, and Ernest Mach, thinkers whose philosophical reflections impinged directly on the received notions of absolute time and the ether. Einstein’s attitude towards the ether in electromagnetism proceeded largely in step with his intellectual immersion in the variegated perspectives just mentioned, from his initial unease about the ether concept to his realization that, once the intuitive notion of the ether had
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been demoted, that posit had become an onerous fiction, a medium whose movement was kept in the narrative even though it seemed impossible to empirically ascribe any measurable effect to it. His thought on how to conceive of time and space in physics developed in a similar way. Lorentz and Poincaré would remain forever committed to distinguishing between “real” and “apparent” times, even after it became clear that the distinction could not be grounded it in any empirically discernible matter of fact. Unlike Poincaré, Einstein started by defining the position of a point with respect to a system of rigid rods, supplemented by his new definition of simultaneity. Einstein’s emphasis on the epistemic value of predictive power, already strong in 1905, grew stronger still in the following decade. With SR reasonably well articulated as a theory, we find Einstein repeatedly insisting that the only theoretical narratives of interest are those that lead to results accessible in principle to experience. The important task for the 1910s, he urged, was to make the most accurate experiments possible in order to test the foundations of the theory. Further speculation and conjecture alone would not take anyone far, he remarked time and again.
5. Concluding Remarks I think the above considerations seriously undermine the claims of naive pluralism in science. The strong argument for pluralism effectively assumes that theoretical narratives either get right everything or nothing at all. Disciplines with widely acknowledged records in terms of predictive success are not like that at all. As a matter of fact, such disciplines ostensibly accumulate narrative structure and intermediate ontology at various theoretical levels, including some fairly deep ones. Contemporary realists take this as central to the their claim that, at least in some scientific areas (although by no means all), there is knowledge to be had after all – i.e, theoretical information that can be reasonably argued to be as well-established as our best ordinary knowledge of the world around. My argument’s main point is that in the more mature scientific disciplines pluralism is best propelled from within. In Einstein’s case, the asset that clearly mattered was his very comprehensive and disciplined education. Although Einstein’s work both sprang from a plurality of disciplinary perspectives and reached into the epistemology of his day, his revisionary contributions originated primarily from his having been able to discern relevant epistemic local connections between the
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perspectives he brought to bear on his scientific research. In turn, those perspectives propelled both Einstein’s carefully learned appreciation of the epistemic import of predictive power and his strong advocacy of a tougher, more restrictive epistemology (less “explanationist” friendly, in later terminology) than the one then prevailing in much of fundamental physics. Einstein’s work thus benefited greatly from the multiplicity of perspectives it came to encompass. But, to repeat, the latter were not just any perspectives: each had synchronically discernible epistemic relevance to the issue of charged bodies in motion. It would be “nice” to close with some plea for relaxing current epistemological barriers against more “tolerant” forms pluralism in science. But I think that would require us to indulge in fantasy. The more advanced branches of science no longer can be easily “helped” from without – not epistemologically at any rate. The most important reason for this is, I suggest, an old one. Scientific learning turns out to involve gradual discovery, specification, and organization of epistemic and causal relevance relations within empirical domains of interest, leading to a correspondingly gradual unveiling of underlying entities and processes in nature, and also specification of areas requiring further investigation. From this point of view, the epistemic enterprise of science is really about discovering what is and is not relevant to the domains in question. Not all areas of human interest lend themselves with equal ease to this type of learning. Which ones do and which ones do not is a matter of empirical discovery. I thus end with a slightly paradoxical conclusion: While the advanced branches of science are now more strongly coupled with “the social” than ever before, their epistemological maturation has made them remarkably autonomous from the latter at increasingly many levels.
City University of New York CUNY Graduate Center & Queens College United States e-mail:
[email protected]
REFERENCES Brown, J.R. (1989). The Rational and the Social. New York: Routledge. Comfort, N.C. (2001). The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Cordero, A. (1992). Science, Objectivity, and Moral Values. Science & Education 1, 49-70. Cordero, A. (2001). Scientific Culture and Public Education. Science & Education 10, 71-83. Cordero, A. (forthcoming). Contemporary Nativism, Scientific Texture, and the Moral Limits of Free Inquiry. Philosophy of Science. Cordero, A. (forthcoming). Nature, Science, and the Opening of Mind. In: V. Gómez-Pin (ed.), Ontology Studies. Cordero, A. (forthcoming). Pluralism, Scientific Values, and the Value of Science. In: F. Minazzi (ed.), Axiology and the Sciences. Einstein, A. (1982): How I Created the Theory of Relativity. Physics Today 35, 45-47. Galison, P. (2003). Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Gilligan, C. (1982): In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keller, E.F. (1983): A Feeling for the Organism. New York: W.H. Freeman. McMullin, E. (1983). Values in Science. In: P. Asquith and T. Nickles (eds.), Philosophy of Science Association, vol. 2, pp. 3-28. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association. Newton, I. ([1687] 1934). Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Okruhlik, K. (1994). Gender and the Biological Sciences.Canadian Journal of Philosophy 20, 21-42. Sokal, A. and J. Bricmont (1998). Fashionable Nonsense. New York: Picador USA. Ziman, J. (1968). Public Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jesús Mosterín SOCIAL FACTORS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF GENETICS AND THE LYSENKO AFFAIR
ABSTRACT. The history of genetics offers abundant material for the study of the influence of social factors in the development of science. Several of these factors are listed and briefly touched upon. Especial attention is paid to the interference of political power in the business of science, exemplified and analyzed in the tragic case of the Lysenko affair, which lead to the death of the best geneticists of Russia and the destruction of a whole and fruitful scientific community.
1. Genetics The epistemic development of genetics in the last hundred years has been frequently hampered or boosted by the interference of social factors and polemics. Therefore, the history of genetics offers a wealth of casestudies and a touchstone on which to test hypothesis about the relations between epistemology and society. Let’s recall some of the milestones of this history and some of the issues involved. One of the main social factors affecting the dynamics of scientific development is the role of diffusion and communication in science. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) discovered his famous laws of genetics and the “hereditary factors” (now called the genes) in the course of a heroic series of experiments with peas. His seminal paper, “Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden” (1865), included the results of the experiments and the formulation of his laws. It was published in an obscure Czech journal, Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereines von Brünn. For 35 years, no one read his paper, not even Charles Darwin, who had received a reprint of the paper that remained unopened in his library. So, Mendel’s work which had no influence at all in the development of genetics until it was rediscovered in 1900, long after his death.
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 143-155. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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The compatibility of theories is a logical question, but the social perception of that compatibility is of course a social question. Once Mendel’s laws were rediscovered in 1900, an initial relation of hostility between Darwinism and Mendelian genetics was soon established, to be later replaced (in the 1930s) by the tight integration of both approaches in the “new synthesis,” brought about by the Russian expatriate Theodosius Dobzhansky and Julian Huxley. During the fist decades of the development of genetics, the genes were just abstractions, symbols, theoretical entities. No one knew what they were, where they were, what they were composed of, how they replicated or how they passed from one generation to the next. Genetics itself was mainly a formal theory or even a mathematical theory, as was the case with population genetics. In 1908 the Hardy-Weinberg principle was first formulated, the equation at the basis of population genetics, in which it plays a role similar to the second law of Newton in mechanics. The brilliant statisticians Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, and John Haldane were the main contributors to population genetics, which made it possible to understand the genetic bases of the theory of evolution, and so completed the work of uniting and reconciling Mendel’s genetics with Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the 1920s and 1930s, great work was done on the mathematical theory of population genetics, but nothing was known about their material reality. The next task would be to go from mathematics to molecules, from population genetics to molecular genetics, and to bring the genes back from the sky of mathematics down to the earth of chemistry. Where are the genes? At the beginning of the 20th century, shortly after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work, Theodor Boveri and Walter Sutton put forward the chromosomic theory of inheritance, which postulated that the chromosomes (already known) are the carriers of the hereditary factors. In the 1910s, Thomas H. Morgan (1866-1945) and his students performed a huge amount of experiments with fruit flies (Drosophila), through which they showed beyond dispute that genes are indeed in the chromosomes and they discovered the linkage between genes located at the same chromosome. One interesting social question is why Thomas Morgan and the whole Drosophila group conducted their research and developed the chromosome theory of inheritance in America, not in Europe. What is the carrier of the genes? Biochemists already knew the existence of “nuclein” (the nuclear material discovered by Friedrich Miescher in 1869, which today is known as DNA), but no one suspected its informational function. It was only in 1944 that Oswald Avery, Colin
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MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty identified DNA as the hereditary molecule and discovered that genes were made of DNA, not of proteins, as then widely assumed. Their sensational discovery was announced with a certain modesty in the middle of the Second World War, and no one paid much attention to it. The scientific community took only notice of the discovery in 1952, when Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase proved it again with a different method. This eight year delay is again an interesting study-case for the role of diffusion and communication in science.
2. Mutations The laws of Mendel, the germinal line of Weismann and the whole formal and mathematical character of classical genetics emphasized the permanent, immutable aspect of hereditary transmission. As already pointed at, this led some people to think that there was an incompatibility between genetics and the Darwinian theory of evolution, which rather stresses change in the characteristics of organisms. Only through change can variability be produced, so that there are different alternatives for natural selection to choose from. The solution to the conundrum was found in the discovery of mutations. Genes are generally transmitted in an immutable manner as perfect copies, but sometimes there are exceptions, accidental changes, errors of copy or mutations. Hugo de Vries (1848-1935), who had rediscovered Mendel’s laws, based on his own botanical observations, completed Mendel’s theory with the introduction of mutations. De Vries inferred their existence, but had no idea of how they were implemented in the material world. It would be up to Hermann Muller to prove that mutations are real by producing them in the laboratory. So in the middle of the 20th century it was already known that genes reside in the chromosomes, that they are made of DNA and that sometimes they change by mutation. Hermann J. Muller (1890-1967) studied genetics with Thomas H. Morgan and taught at the University of Texas and at Columbia University. In 1926 he presented the first genetic theory of the origin of life: The first living organism had been a randomly formed gene with the properties of being autocatalytic (replication), heterocatalytic (metabolism), mutable (subject to evolution) and autotrophic. From 1925 on, he taught genetics and evolution, and did research mainly on mutations. Between 1918 and 1926, he formulated the chief principles of spontaneous gene mutation as now recognized: most mutations are
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detrimental and recessive, and are point effects of ultramicroscopic physicochemical accidents arising in the course of random molecular motions (thermal agitation). At the same time he put forward the conception of the gene as constituting the basis of life, as well as of evolution, by virtue of its possessing the property of reproducing its own changes. In late 1926 he obtained critical evidence of the abundant production of gene mutations and chromosome changes by X-ray radiation, published in 1927. It was for this discovery, for his artificial induction of mutations by means of X-rays, that he was later awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Like many socialists, Hermann Muller favored eugenics. Like so many others (from Diego Rivera to Isadora Duncan) at the time, Muller felt attracted by the ideal of a new world being built at the Soviet Union. At the request of N.I. Vavilov, the main Russian geneticist, Muller spent three and a half years at the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., first in Leningrad, later in Moscow (1934-1937), with a considerable staff of co-workers. With the rise of the Lysenko affair, he was deeply disappointed and had to leave the Soviet Union in 1937, moving first to the University of Edinburgh and then to Indiana University.
3. The Lysenko Affair The standard methodology of science presupposes a free exchange of arguments and an open communication of data, subject only to the control exercised by peer review and by the repetition of experiments and observations by colleagues. Nevertheless, the powers from outside the realm of science have sometimes interfered in the scientific process, bringing it to a halt, at least for a while, and even inducing tragic personal consequences. In the Renaissance it was the Church that used to interfere in science in the name of religious orthodoxy, as shown in the well known cases of Miguel Servet, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo Galilei. In the 20th century the interference has often come from the world of politics, political ideology and political power. It suffices to point at the interferences of the Nazi regime in German science, which provoked the flight of the best German scientists to the USA and the abrupt end of the golden epoch of German science. Here we want to concentrate our attention in an extreme case of political interference, with especially tragic consequences for a whole scientific community, the so-called Lysenko affair in the years 1935-1964, which brought disgrace, prison
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and death to the best geneticists of the Soviet Union and caused the complete collapse of the science of biology in that country, in marked contrast with the continuous flourishing of physics and mathematics under the communist regime. The Lysenko affair is the best known and most dramatic case of extreme interference of politics in science. As the geneticist Michael Lerner pointed out, the story of Soviet genetics in the period 1937-1964 is, perhaps, the most bizarre chapter in the history of modern science. In a society devoted to the betterment of the lot of peasants and workers, an illiterate and fanatical charlatan was allowed absolute dictatorship and control over both research in biology and practical agriculture. This event not only stifled the development of science, but also had a far-reaching and destructive influence on the national economy of the Soviet Union. To the outside world, it was completely incomprehensible that a country capable of developing a nuclear potential rivalling that of the United States, and of establishing itself in the forefront of space exploration, could have entrusted its fundamental resources to exploitation by an obvious quack. (Medvedev 1969, p. V)
The 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent 1918-1920 civil war completely disrupted agriculture. By 1921, food shortages were acute. The forced collectivization of agriculture by Stalin in the early 1930s dealt food production in Russia a further and severe blow. Collectivization attempts had been very violent, involving the deportation and eventual deaths in camps of hundreds of thousands of peasants, and were followed by a famine which killed millions. Many peasants opposed the collective farms and some even went to the length of destroying their grain in order to keep it away from the Soviet government. This dismal state of Soviet agriculture was the consequence of the agricultural policies of Stalin, but they were taboo and could not be openly criticized. Only technical points could be discussed, but few agricultural technicians were willing to work towards the success of the troubled collective farms. The factors stimulating germination and early flowering in a wide variety of crop species had attracted considerable research interest in Russia and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The main technical problem for Soviet agriculture was to increase yield, both by learning how to manipulate environmental conditions and by developing genetic strains that could flower early and thus produce two crops in a season. One of the key debates in this connection was between proponents of day length (photoperiodism) and exposure to cold temperature (vernalization) as the major factors stimulating early
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germination and flowering. It was in this context that Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) raised to prominence. He came from a peasant background and was largely self-educated. Nevertheless Lysenko graduated from the Kiev Agricultural Institute in 1925, a fact hailed as a triumph of Soviet education policies. Lysenko’s early papers on plant physiology, particularly vernalization, were mediocre. He eventually linked vernalization and selection to create genetically stable lines of early flowering varieties. In 1928, Lysenko allegedly “invented” the new agricultural technique of vernalization (using humidity and low temperatures to make wheat grow in spring), which in reality was neither new nor useful. Lysenko promised to triple or quadruple agricultural yields. The Soviet press presented him as a proletarian genius who had developed a revolutionary technique. Soviet propaganda had a tendency to focus upon idealized stories of peasants and workers who, through their own initiative and intelligence, came up with solutions to practical problems. Lysenko used the attention received to denounce mainstream biologists and to promote his own ideas of how agriculture works. He was, in turn, supported by the Soviet propaganda machine, which overstated his successes and omitted mention of his failures. Lysenko’s political success was in part due to his striking differences from most biologists at the time, being both from a peasant family as well as an enthusiastic communist and advocate of the Soviet Union. He was also extremely fast in responding to problems, although with fake solutions. The Party-controlled newspapers inevitably applauded Lysenko’s “practical” efforts and questioned the motives of his critics. What most caught the Soviet government’s eye about Lysenko was his success at motivating peasants. Lysenko energized the enthusiasm of the peasants, making them feel participants in and protagonists of the great Soviet revolutionary experiment. Academic geneticists could not hope to provide such simple and immediately tangible results with their work, and so were seen as being politically less useful than the charlatanism of Lysenko. It was when Lysenko sought to convert one strain into another and one species in another by “education” – that is, by repeated exposure to low temperatures so that the plant’s acquired adaptation to cold became inherited – that his theories collided with established biological opinion. Unable to counter the justified criticisms of the geneticists, Lysenko declared war on them. In this endeavor, he was helped by Prezent, a lawyer and pedagogue totally ignorant of genetics but prone to attack,
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defame and denounce all competent biologists as enemies of the Party and of the people. Before 1935 Russian biologists, as well as those in the rest of the world, held to Mendelian genetics, the chromosome theory of heredity and the theory of mutation, all of them supported by an overwhelming amount of empirical evidence. In that year Lysenko and Prezent announced a new concept of heredity in opposition to the widely accepted chromosome theory which they denounced as reactionary, idealistic, metaphysical, and barren. Lysenko and Prezent pretended that heredity is a general property of living matter and does not need a genetic system localized in the chromosomes and transmitted from generation to generation. They rejected the existence of genes and every piece of knowledge gathered by previous geneticists up to then. Lysenko’s actual “science” was nonexistent. He was a proponent of the ideas of Ivan Michurin, and practiced a form of Lamarckism, insisting on the change in species among plants through hybridization and grafting, as well as a variety of other non-genetic techniques. Ivan Michurin (1855-1935) was a collector of plants who tried to hybridize them to create new sorts of fruit plants. He had already attracted the attention of Lenin. He assumed the possibility of changing the genotype under external influence, but his theory of influence of the environment on the heredity was just a variant of Lamarckism. NeoLamarckism retained a strong following in France and Germany, but the ardently nationalistic Lysenko needed a national champion, which he found in Michurin. Lysenko and his disciples declared themselves “michurinists” and promoted Michurin as a national figurehead in the theory of evolution, in opposition to genetics, pejoratively called Weismanism-Morganism-Mendelism by Soviet propaganda. They also rejected the chromosomic theory of inheritance, developed by August Weismann and Thomas Morgan. The new science of genetics was emerging out of studies of the fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), which allowed for easy studying of Mendelian ratios and heritability. Lysenko criticized these theoretical biologists as “fly-lovers and people haters” for spending their time bent over trays of fruit flies while famine raged on around them. In contrast to those researchers, Lysenko portrayed himself as a practitioner, a man of the people who sought to use the experience of the masses to improve both his theories and his practical breeding programs. In December 1929, Joseph Stalin gave a famous speech elevating “practice” above “theory,” and putting the judgment of the political bosses above that of the scientists and
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technical specialists. Lysenko himself spent much time decrying academic scientists and geneticists, claiming that their isolated laboratory work was not helping the Soviet people. In 1935, at the Second All-Union Congress of collective Farmers, Lysenko delivered a speech in the presence of Stalin and all the members of the government. Lysenko described the vernalization debate in demagogic terms of class struggle and class enemies. The speech pleased Stalin who, at its end, exclaimed: “Bravo, comrade Lysenko, bravo!” After 1935 the balance of power abruptly swung towards Lysenko and his followers. Lysenko was admitted into Soviet hierarchy and put in charge of agricultural affairs. He became President of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union and was made responsible for ending the propagation of “harmful” ideas among Soviet scientists. Lysenko fulfilled this task by inducing the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and the demise of genetics (a previously flourishing field) throughout the Soviet Union. He bears particular responsibility for the death of the greatest Soviet biologist, Nikolai Vavilov, at the hands of the NKVD. The Soviet Government ordered all flies in the genetics laboratories to be incinerated and all genetics books to be burned. The science of genetics was forbidden. The whole of Russian biological science was destroyed and has since been unable to recuperate. The fact that many supporters of classical genetics, like Hermann Muller, invited to Russia by Vavilov in those years, had also supported eugenics did not place Mendelian theory in a particularly favorable light in the eyes of the communists: it was held up as an example of reductionist, atomistic, bourgeois science. Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943) was the most prominent Russian biologist, a botanist and geneticist best known for having identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants. He was born into a merchant family in Moscow, in contrast to Lysenko’s humble and “politically correct” peasant origins. He travelled to Europe and made research on plant biology in collaboration with Professor William Bateson, who founded genetics as an academic discipline, again in contrast to Lysenko, who lacked any formal training in genetics and had never been abroad. Vavilov organized a series of botanical-agronomic expeditions all over the world in the development of his theory about centers of origin of cultivated plants and created the largest collection of plant seeds in the world. In 1930-40 he was the head of the genetics laboratory in Moscow, later reorganized into the Institute of Genetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
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Once Lysenko was made head of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, he was the administrative superior of Vavilov and the overseer of his Institute of Plant Breeding. He tried to make Vavilov’s life impossible, surrounding him with ignorant and disrupting deputies loyal only to Lysenko, and submitting him to continuous and slanderous accusations. The growing world prestige of Vavilov as a scientist only ignited more and more Lysenko’s rage and envy. Vavilov was elected president of the International Congress of Genetics which met in Edinburgh in 1939, but he was denied permission to go to Scotland. In August 1940, Vavilov was arrested by the secret police (NKVD) on a botanical expedition in Ukraine. His closest collaborators and disciples were also arrested and later died in prison, among them Karpechenko, a geneticist of world fame, Levitsky and Govorov. Vavilov was formally accused of ludicrous charges: spying for England, rightist conspiracy, sabotage in agriculture. He was condemned to death, but not immediately executed. He was sent to the Saratov prison, where he was incarcerated under horrific conditions. He was placed in a dump, windowless underground death cell and was undernourished and denied any outdoor exercise. In 1942 Vavilov was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society of London. He died in 1943 of malnutrition and dystrophy (faulty nutrition of muscles, leading to paralysis). After the end of World War Two, Soviet Genetics had been utterly destroyed. Its leading exponents were either dead or imprisoned in terrible conditions for no other crime than defending the standards of science. The research institutes had been either closed or transformed into sterile caricatures of what they had previously been, in the hay days of Vavilov. Lysenko’s address in 1948 as president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences reflects the situation: We, the Michurinists, must squarely admit that we have hitherto proved unable to make the most of the splendid possibilities created in our country by the Party and the Government for the complete exposure of the Morganist metaphysics, which is in its entirety an importation from foreign reactionary biology hostile to us. It is now up to the Academy, to which a large number of Michurinists have just been elected, to tackle this major task. [. . .] The Morganist views are utterly alien to the world outlook of Soviet people. [. . .] But the condition in the Academy has now sharply changed thanks to the interest taken in it by the Party, the Government, and Comrade Stalin personally. (Lysenko 1948, section 6)
In the years immediately after the war, various groups in the scientific community severely criticized Lysenko’s work. It was only the heightened tensions of the Cold War and Stalin’s personal intervention
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that turned the tide. Lysenko’s theories and policies were finally given official sanction at a 1948 meeting of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science. By this time many of his opponents had been silenced through arrests or imprisonment. Even the foreign communist parties, like the French communist Party, were mobilized in a vicious attack on the “bourgeois” science of genetics and in defense of Lysenko’s hoax. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Lysenko retained his position, enjoying a relative degree of trust from Nikita Khrushchev. However, mainstream scientists were now given the ability to criticize Lysenko for the first time since the late 1920s. In 1962 three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Zel’dovich, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Pyotr Kapitsa, set out the case against Lysenko, his false science and his policy of political extermination of scientific opponents. In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences: He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists. (Sakharov 1990, p. 324)
The Soviet press was soon filled with anti-Lysenkoite articles and appeals for the restoration of scientific methods to all fields of biology and agricultural science. Lysenko was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences. After the dismissal of Khrushchev in 1964, the president of the Academy of Sciences declared that Lysenko’s immunity to criticism had officially ended, and an expert commission was sent to Lysenko’s experimental farm. A few months later, the devastating critique of the commission was made public. That was the end of the Lysenko affair.
4. From the Double Helix to the Human Genome Project How do you explain the replication of the genes? In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the mechanism and described the doublehelix structure of DNA. How do genes get expressed, how do you get from genes in the chromosomes to proteins in the rest of the body? In 1961, François Jacob, Jacques Monod and Sidney Brenner introduced the notion of messenger RNA for explaining the regulation of gene expression. How do you explain the translation of the DNA or RNA message into actual proteins? You need a code, the genetic code. In 1966,
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Marshall Nirenberg and Gobind Khorana cracked the genetic code. With that, the revolution of molecular genetics, started in 1953, was basically completed. Resistance to the acceptance of new ideas by the scientific community was previously exemplified in the cases of Mendel and of the identification of DNA as the genetic material by Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty. Even the much celebrated idea of the double helix, put forward in 1953 by Crick and Watson, had to wait several years for its general acceptance. After a few years the recognition came and a whole stream of Nobel Prizes were awarded to the discovers: in 1959 to Severo Ochoa and Arthur Kornberg for producing nucleic acids by artificial means, in 1962 to Watson and Crick, in 1965 to Jacob and Monod. By 2003, the double-helix structure of DNA, discovered by Crick and Watson, had become an icon of science and its 50th anniversary was celebrated in the whole world with unprecedented fanfare. A social factor that often hampers the progress of science is the negative reaction of the uninformed public towards new possibilities and the exaggerated social perception of risks involved in research. The 1974 moratorium on recombinant DNA experiments was a response to this social fear. The fear was later seen to be unfounded and the recombinant experiments were resumed. The more recent polemics about genetic engineering and transgenic crops are other cases in point. In 1985, a technological breakthrough took place: the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was discovered (or invented) by Kary Mullis. The next year the first automatic instrument for sequencing DNA was presented. This made possible to conceive the ambitious plan of sequencing the whole human genome. In this case, as in many others, a technological advance in instrumentation opened the door to important research in new fields. Living beings are the only things in the Universe that carry inside themselves a description of what they are, as often emphasized by Sidney Brenner. That description is written in the genetic code of DNA and constitutes the genome. Each species has its own genome. And we are understandably interested in our human genome. In 1990, the Human Genome Project was launched, under the leadership of John Watson. The role of competition in science was highlighted by the ferocious competition between the Public Consortium and Craig Venter (and the company Celera) in the sequencing of the human genome. Thanks to this competition, the whole project was completed in a shorter time and at a lower cost than originally foreseen, a rather rare event in the economics of science.
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In 1999, for the first time the sequence of a human chromosome (chromosome 21) was completed. In 2000, the final sequencing of the human genome sequence was prematurely announced in order to damp the competition between Celera and the Consortium. In 2001, a draft version of human genome sequence was published in Nature by the International Consortium and in Science by Celera. The finished version of the human genome sequence was published in Nature on 21 October 2004. This was the first highly accurate and fairly complete sequence. It covers 99% of the euchromatic sequence (containing the genes) of DNA. The error rate is one error for every 100,000 bases. The number of gaps reduced from around 150,000 in 1990 to just 341 in 2004. Since then, detailed analysis of the DNA sequence of each of the particular chromosomes have been completed and published. Among the results obtained, it was most surprising that the number of our genes is less than 25.000, much less than previously expected. This result was smattering for the residual anthropocentrism, as it implied that no more genes are needed to make humans than to make mice, for example. Besides, this result ruined the previous idea of molecular biology that a single gene codes for a single protein. As a matter of fact, there are many more human proteins than human genes. One and the same gene has to be able to code for different proteins by means of alternative splicings, induced by the presence of specific small RNA molecules that act as triggers of that particular splicing. Another social question involved was the discussion on open access and secrecy in science. The infighting about the patentability of genes in the human genome project led to Craig Venter leaving the International Consortium and to the resignation of John Watson as its director, although for opposite reasons. Several public institutions and private corporations came to the idea of patenting the genes themselves. Already in 2000, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair had to intervene in support of free access to the information about the human genome. The whole affair ended with the final triumph of full and free accessibility. The whole human genome (and the genome of other sequenced species, like the mouse, the chimpanzee or the dog), together with all the annotations, are freely accessible online in Internet. Everyone can access the information from anywhere and free of charge. The final conclusion was that only technological or medical applications are patentable, but not pure scientific knowledge, like the sequence of our own genes.
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Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) Instituto de Filosofía c/ Pinar, 25 28006 Madrid, Spain e-mail:
[email protected]
REFERENCES Davies, K. (2001). Cracking the Genome. New York: The Free Press. Fisher, R. (1948). What Sort of Man Is Lysenko? Listener 40, 874-875. Gee, H. (2004). Jacob’s Ladder: A History of the Genome. New York: W.W. Norton. Graham, L. (1993). Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. New York: Cambridge University Press. Graham, L. (1998). What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Joravsky, D. (1970). The Lysenko Affair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lecourt, D. (1977). Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Lysenko, T.D. (1948). Soviet Biology: Report to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences. http://www.marxists.org/archive/Lysenko/works/1940s/report.htm. Medvedev, Z. (1969). The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko. New York: Columbia University Press. Roll-Hansen, N. (2005). The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science. Buffalo: Humanity Books. Sakharov A.D. (1990). Memoirs. London: Hutchinson. Soyfer, V. (1994). Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sturtevant, A. (1965). A History of Genetics. New York: Harper & Row. Reprinted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in 2001. Sulston, J. and G. Ferry (2002). The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics, and the Human Genome. New York: Bantan Press. Vavilov, N. (1992). Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants. Translated by Doris Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Valentín A. Bazhanov SOCIAL MILIEU AND EVOLUTION OF LOGIC, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE: THE CASE OF MARXISM
ABSTRACT. The impact of social factors upon the philosophical investigations in a broad sense is quite evident. Nevertheless their impact upon epistemology as a branch of philosophy, logic, and history of science as fields of research with noticeable philosophical content is not evident enough. We are keen to claim that this impact exists within some limits, although it is not so overtly evident. Moreover in the case of Marxism it is of a paradoxical nature. Marxism always puts the accent on the role of social and economic factors in the development, development of science included. To a large extent due to Marxism, externalism emerged; the key idea of externalism may be expressed through the statement that social and economic reasons are the main sources of development of science. B.M. Hessen declared and did his best in 1931 to justify this statement through the example of the emergence of classical mechanics. Meanwhile the social milieu of Marxist countries placed a taboo on the externalist approach towards epistemology, the interpretation of logic, and history of science. All these fields of knowledge were evolved in the Marxist era in the USSR and Eastern Europe – despite the spirit of Marxism – within strict internalist boarders. We offer the explanation of this contradiction .
1. Introduction Marxism in the XXth century was an influential ideology and mode of thought. Many prominent Eastern and Western thinkers experienced its influence and charms. Later they often turned their faces and minds against it, and severely criticized its principles and implications. Nevertheless, Marxism proceeded to display its attractiveness. How can we impeach the degree of its influence if in the USSR, and after World War II in Central and Eastern Europe, Marxism was adopted as the State
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 157-169. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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ideology until the late 1980s and in virtue of its having been implanted by the force of totalitarian power? According to the old tradition, Marxism was thought to consist of three parts: philosophy, political economy, and so-called scientific communism (the sort of political science based upon the number of Marxist dogmas). The interpretation of Marxism and its components during its hundred and fifty years of history and various geographic sites was different. Sometimes the adepts of Marxism debated over the problem (and even smashed each other heads) of what to consider as authentic Marxism. Authentic comprehension of Marxism was declared by dozens of its followers: for example by George V. Plekhanov and Vladimir I. Lenin in Russia, G. Lukacs, A. Gramsci, A. Camus, M. Foucalt, J.P. Sartre, H. Marcuse, M. Merleau-Ponty, et al., in Central and West Europe. In the early 1920s in Soviet literature the dominant position was that any ideology is a “transformed” ideology, a false self-consciousness and its highest form, philosophy, in its rational content was already totally dissolved in science. Moreover, some Marxists claimed that the term ‘philosophy of Marxism’ is non-logical and even “harmful,” and we need only pure science itself (Minin 1922b, pp. 194-195), that science was opposed to philosophy as well as to religion (Minin 1922a, p. 122). This standpoint was quite popular until the late 1920s because “Marxism revealed the laws of social development and cast philosophy out from the sphere of social knowledge. At the present moment philosophy has finally lost its value” (Nastol’nyi entsyclopedicheskii slovar 1929, p. 607). Some well-known Soviet Marxists (V.N. Sarab’yanov, I.I. SkvortsovStepanov, A.K. Timiryazev, L.I. Akselrod, A. Varjas) assumed that philosophy is nothing but a mere summary of conclusions drawn from science. The laws of the transformation and conservation of energy were considered to be universal and all conceivable material processes could be reduced to these laws. Dialectical understanding of nature coincides with the mechanical understanding, and all processes converge to “energy transformations which are in the scope of physics and chemistry” (Stepanov 1924, p. 85). Some Marxists treated the notions of “dialectical” and “historical” materialism as identical (as did, e.g., Friedrich Engels), while the other the concept of “historical” materialism was used to denote Marxist sociology (by Nikolai I. Bukharin, for example). Despite the lack of unity and the various readings of Marxism, its followers were confident that Marxist methodology opens radically novel
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and previously wondrous horizons in construction of new just and economically much more effective than capitalist society. New society might and ought to create new science while the old-style science will inevitably decline and decay. Such prescriptions shortened the distance between science and society, promoted the birth of so-called ideologized science, and set a seal on the research in philosophy and history of science. Formal logic experienced from the early socialist State a special attitude because it was considered to be a citadel of metaphysical (i.e. non-dialectical) thinking and, hence, automatically seized the status of an educational and/or scientific specialty. To what extent did these prescriptions have an impact upon the character of the theory of knowledge, analysis of science and its history?
2. Basic Principles of Marxist Philosophy By the early-mid 1930s Marxists arrived at the conclusion that within Marxism (which is “made from an undivided piece of steel”) there exists a Marxist-Leninist philosophy as a comparatively independent part. The lack of unity among Marxists on a number of key problems (like the relationship of philosophy toward science, ontology, and epistemology, formal and so-called dialectical logic, etc.) did not hamper a uniform comprehension of the cornerstone principles of this philosophy. The core principle of Marxist philosophy from its beginning was considered to be the principle of practice (praxis). This means that practical activity (i.e., material, sense-object, teleonomic activity) has a deeper and more profound nature than existence of certain objects-stuffs. The principles of materialism, dialectics, historicity, etc., all of these principles, were borrowed through the materialistic conceptualization of Hegel’s philosophy. Moreover terms and ideas, introduced by K. Marx primarily for analysis of society and its structure – social being and social consciousness, socio-economic formation, base and superstructure – inherited the spirit of Hegelian philosophy where the genus has evident priority toward the isolated element. The history of social thought yields two rival approaches. The first approach is based on the primacy of the “whole (totality)” over the “sum of its parts.” The second approach, on the contrary, emphasizes the “parts”: the success of the development of the “whole” is predicated on the development of the “sum of its parts.” The first approach may be termed social realism; the second, social nominalism.
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Social realism was represented by Hegel and Karl Marx. It judged that the development of a society and its parts (man, social groups, etc.) was determined by the whole – the Absolute Idea (Hegel) or class struggle (Marx). The practical result of the dialectal evolution of class-in-itself (or class-as-such) to class-for-itself was disdain for human life and dignity, in violence toward the person. The tragedy of the individual was seen to be justified by the bright future of the whole of mankind. Social utopianism may be seen to have been fed by the conceptual undertakings of social realism. Social nominalism, represented, for example, by liberalism and its forerunners (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls) judges that every person has rights. The freedom of the individual takes priority over the state. The state itself emerges as a result of a social contract (e.g., Rousseau’s Du contract sociale): it provides for citizens’ existence more comfortably and safely than would otherwise be possible. Applicability of the principle of practice to society presupposes the standpoint of social realism. It meant the absolute priority of economic factors upon the spiritual components of society; moreover, it meant the later determination of these components by economic processes, the direct dependence of superstructure on the base (a sort of “economism”). After K. Marx died in the early 1890s his closest friend, F. Engels, did his best to soften this position. He noted that the base only ultimately economically determines intellectual ingredients, and that superstructure and social consciousness develop autonomously. Nevertheless, the conviction that dominated among the Soviet neophytes of Marxist doctrine was the style of primitive economism. Certainly it led to the manner in which the angle of examination of science and its history was selected.
3. Ideologized Science Phenomenon By ideologized science we understand the process of the transformation of science typical of every totalitarian regime which has the goal of establishing of a novel science, adjusted to the ruling ideology, and the attempts to reformulate existing scientific achievements in order to make them congenial to this ideology. The dominant ideology suppresses the objective content of science and the unprejudiced quest for truth succumbs to the selection of some statements arising from that ruling
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ideology, and first of all those which provide it with a continuous triumph. Recognition of the social nature of science presupposes that society and its functioning has some impact upon academic activity, the style of scientific reasoning, the form of scientific results representation, or the goals of the scientific quest. Nevertheless, this recognition does not contradict the claim that science develops to large extent autonomously, placing its wellsprings “inside” the body of science. The totalitarian regime prevents independent changes within science of the totalitarian values that play a central role in State existence (in Marxism-Leninism: class; in Islamic fundamentalism: religion; in Nazism: race), and suppresses natural academic stances. Disbelief in the old values by adherents of a new ideology, pushing society toward revolutionary renewal, was shared in Russia not only by Marxists but also, for example, by anarchists like Mikhail A. Bakunin or Peter A. Kropotkin, who sought to devise a new official “State” science to replace the bourgeois science, stripped the old science of its objective content. Their hostility to the political pluralism generated the program of creating a novel, namely proletarian, science, capable of a modernization of economics under the new business principles. New revolutionary society was enchanted with the new ideology, often doing its best to rebuild science according to new basic principles. Such attempts seldom happened to be successful. We can mention only the psychological theory of Lev S. Vygotsky and Alexander R. Luria, and the concept of relevant logic of I. Orlov (see Bazhanov 2003) based upon certain Marxist aspirations which happened to be weighty contributions to science. Usually ideological pressure leads instead to the radical politicization of the scientific community removing those scholars who try to oppose the appetence of neophytes and continue a so-called “repressive” science. At the surface remain those scholars who conduct research as the direct embodiment of the new ideology and promise immediate practical results or breakthrough in science (e.g., the Lysenko phenomenonon; see Joravsky 1970, Medvedev 1969). Establishing by force the supreme authority of one person (“leader”) in all spheres of politics and science, faith in the collective reason of the “Party,” the dogmatization of Marxist ideology, which was held to be the only “scientific worldview,” and the strengthening of political purges in the USSR, all led to the phenomenon of ideologized science, which disrupted and created havoc in almost all fields of knowledge: mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, not to speak of the humanities. Academic style of reasoning and argumentation gave up its place to the political accusations, often with direct political implications, arrests, and
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even purges. Nazi Germany pursued and eliminated Jews; after the World War II anti-Semitism was transmitted to the USSR, and only the death of Joseph Stalin saved Soviet Jews from the large-scale purges. A notable by-product of the phenomenon of ideologized science phenomenon was the goal of identifying blight-ridden authorities in all fields of research and, hence, the struggle with cosmopolitism (see Daniels 1985, pp. 303-306). Proponents of Soviet Marxism adopted the principle of “ideological correspondence”: when the bourgeoisie in the early stages of capitalist development played a progressive role it produced progressive science (e.g., the classical mechanics of Newton, the associationist psychology of Hume); but once capitalism begun to disintegrate, the bourgeoisie were to be treated as a reactionary class, and the science of this latter period becomes corroded by reactionary ideas and conceptions. Thus, theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, or of Freudian psychoanalysis, are reflections of imperialist crisis and in reality pseudosciences.
4. Logic Since the autumn of 1917 and the October coup d’état, and to the late 1940s, the philosophical traditions in the USSR were destroyed. The monolithic State ideology did not admit any standpoints which differed from the official one. Elementary logic was taught in Russia’s schools before 1917, but the first steps toward the reconstruction of Secondary (school) education debarred logic from the school and University curricula. For the Marxist ideology was based upon dialectical, mainly Hegelian, ideas, so that formal logic was treated as a metaphysical heritage, alien to the revolutionary proletariat. A campaign against formal logic was launched in the leading Communist Party ideological journal. The laws of formal logic were considered to be contradictory to dialectics, and the study of formal logic was ossified and stagnant, showing through materialistic dialectics the invalidity of the position of formal logic. The Law of Contradiction ignores the fact that all sorts of evolution presupposes contradiction; the Law of Excluded Middle is just inane. (For the dialectician, A = A is just a momentary static fragment of the law of dialectical logic A A, the latter indicating a dialectical development in which one state passes into another, just as formal logic is considered to be nothing more than a static fragment of the dynamic and progressive dialectical logic.) The accusation of ignoring Marxist dialectics become the most pervasive in the ideological discussions in
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1930s (see Cavaliere 1990; Mathias 1991). The Soviet government insisted on purely practical goals of higher education; thus even at Moscow State University all departments of humanities were abolished. Logic was not taught for many decades. “The logic of terror did not leave any place for logic,” as Alexander S. Karpenko described the situation in pre-War World II USSR (Karpenko 2004, p. 63). Logical investigations were conceivable only as purely mathematical; logic might survive under the mantle of mathematics in the milieu of orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideology.
5. Epistemology In the USSR the term ‘gnoseology’ (‘theory of knowledge’) was used as a synonym for epistemology. For decades its status as an independent branch of philosophy was rejected. Usually Marxists claimed that materialistic dialectics is simultaneously the theory of knowledge and logic. Materialistic dialectics covers nature, society and thought. Thus there is no need of a special theory of knowledge (nor logic, either). As Lenin put it: “We need not three words: logic, dialectics, and theory of knowledge are all about the same.” Only in the 1960s did some Moscovite philosophers (like P.V. Kopnin) begin to treat theory of knowledge as distinct and selfworthy branch of philosophical discourse, though their Leningrad colleagues firmly insisted, even into the late 1970s, that only ontology has its rights to independent status as philosophical specialty. Soviet style theory of knowledge was based upon orthodox Marxist principles and envisaged itself (after Lenin’s works) as a theory of reflection.
6. History of Science Formal logic was for a long period of time, from about 1920 until late the 1940s, almost banned in the USSR. Gnoseology at last became independent within Marxist philosophy and took the shape as a theory of reflection (Lenin 1908). As really paradoxical may be described the situation around the history of science in the USSR and former Soviet bloc countries. Social realism, typical for Marxist philosophy, presupposed a very definite conception of scientific development. After K. Marx who, as we
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well know, strictly adhering to the spirit of social realism, declared that “man is the summation of all social relationships,” and that the economic base determines intellectual superstructure, social existence, i.e., social consciousness. Science in fact was dissolved in social and economic realities. The sources of the growth of science were placed beyond science itself; they were placed in economics or (at lesser degree) in culture. Not accidentally, F. Engels even in regard to such theoretical fields as philosophy, judged that philosophers are pushed foreword not only by the force of pure thinking, as they imagined, but mainly by the powerful evolution of economy and natural sciences. Faith in the determinacy of science as a whole, and especially discoveries by economic conditions, was precisely the salient thesis of Soviet historians of science in the 1920s. Precisely this conviction was embodied in the concrete conception of history of science in the USSR, called externalism. According to externalism, science has grown due to socio-economic reasons, the demands from the society (often Western tradition of externalism points to a certain conception of consciousness; in our work this notion has nothing to do with consciousness). The concrete date of the new conception of science is firmly fixed in the annals of history. On June 30-July 4 of 1931 the Second International Congress of the History of Science took place in London. The Soviet delegation included rather well-known scholars and public figures. It was headed by the highranking communist official Nikolai I. Bukharin, who by a single vote was just elected to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (from the list approved by the Central Committee of Communist Party). N. Bukharin was appointed as Director of the Institute of History of Science and Technique. At various stages of his life he held the most prestige positions in Communist Party and State hierarchy. The delegation also included actual members of the Academy of Sciences, biologist Nikolai I. Vavilov, physicists Alexander F. Ioffe and Vladimir F. Mitkevich, Professor Boris M. Hessen (physicist and philosopher), Boris M. Zavadovsky (physiologist), Ernest Kol’man (mathematician and philosopher), Mikhail M. Rubinstein (economist). B.M. Hessen presented at the Congress the paper “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” in which he put forward the idea that the birth of classical mechanics was entirely determined by the evolution of capitalist, by the demands of new social class, the bourgeoisie, who needed much more productive results of labor than that which had been available in the feudal era. B. Hessen began his paper with a quotation from A.N. Whitehead, who had noticed that I. Newton
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was born in the same year that G. Galileo had died, and wondered what path mankind might have taken had not these two great thinkers been God’s gifts to the human race (Whitehead 1969, p. 46). Hessen pursued the idea that concrete persons (Galileo, Newton, et al.) are not so important, since social and economic conditions pushed mankind toward new inventions or discoveries. “Newton,” Hessen claimed, “was the typical representative of the rising bourgeoisie, and in his philosophy he embodies the characteristic features of his class [. . .]”(Hessen 1933, p. 38). Until Hessen’s paper Newton was treated as a genius, and his creativity as indebted to his outstanding talent, which was given him by God. Hessen persistently stressed that the bourgeoisie needed science for the development of industry, and this science should “investigate material bodies and forms of forces we can find in Nature”; “being for a particular time the most progressive class, the bourgeoisie demanded the most progressive science” (Hessen 1933, pp. 23-24). Moreover Hessen indicated “the complete coincidence of the physical content of this era, arising from the economic requirements with the content of Principia” (Hessen 1933, p. 31). The development of industrial capitalism put in front of technology the problem of designing effective machines. The steam engine was created, and in its turn thermodynamics flourished. All these events had a powerful impact upon the productive forces and, hence, upon science. Hessen’s ideas attracted the attention of the Congress participants. As a matter of fact the novel direction of research, even novel paradigm in the field of history and philosophy of science was proposed. The paper was published in English (and Russian) and reprinted several times. Analogous thoughts, typical for Marxists (practice is base for the theory) were announced by N. Bukharin in his paper “Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism.” N. Bukharin’s attitude toward science was really shivery. He was confident that due to Soviet scientists the USSR would become “the greatest hotbed of world science,” that “in the USSR science plays a noble role: it promotes the liberation of mankind from the shame of our epoch” (he meant capitalism – V.B.), and that “science is transformed into the friend and close ally of working class” (Bukharin 1928, pp. 6, 15, 16). Hessen’s ideas formed the basis of externalism which displayed a brilliant performance in the West. Let us just to mention the works of J.D. Bernal, J.G. Crowther, R. Merton, J. Needham, E. Zilsel, et al. An irony of history resulted from the fact that, in the USSR, where Marxism played the role of the State ideology and naturally presupposed
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externalism, and the forerunner of externalism lived, externalism happened to be impossible. All studies in the history of science in the USSR until the early- mid-1980’s – the moment when communist ideology began intensively to decay, were carried out in a purely internalist manner. History of science in the USSR was the history of science, so to speak, in the social vacuum. If socio-economic conditions were mentioned, then only as factors rooted in the capitalist order and as a disincentive to its progress. We can judge that the history and philosophy of science in the hotbed of communism and elsewhere in the East evolved strictly within the framework of positivism, a rabid enemy of communist ideology. What is the reason for such an anomalous state of affairs? Why have neither communist historians of science, nor the communist State closely followed the purity of ideology of its citizens and done its best to plant Marxist dogmas everywhere it might? Why has this State not noticed that history of science does not obey and share another mode of thought and standards of reasoning?
7. History of Science under Ideological Pressure Marxism naturally presupposed externalism but Marxism put impassable obstacle to the development of this trend in the history and philosophy of science in communist bloc States. The main reason is socio-political milieu within these State and accompanying ideologized science phenomenon. B. Hessen was born in 1893 and was the classmate of Igor E. Tamm, who later became a talented Soviet physicist. In 1913-14 Hessen studied in the physico-mathematical department of Edinburgh University, then in the same department of Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) University. He joined communist party in 1919. In 1928 he graduated from so-called Institute of Red Professors and in 1930 was appointed the director of Physics research institute at Moscow State University. He was the first Dean of the Physics department at MSU. In 1934 Hessen was appointed the Deputy Director of the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In August, 1936 he was arrested and in December shot as an “enemy of the people.” B. Hessen made some attempts to protect the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics from the assaults of the “mechanists.” Taking Newton as his example, he tried to show that any person may share incompatible features (being a genius in physics, Newton nevertheless
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shared backward religious views). We should separate the achievements of some scientists in physics from their non-scientific views. The latter view do not depreciate the value of their scientific achievements. Nevertheless, B. Hessen himself shared outdated views. Thus, for example, he published in first edition of the Soviet encyclopedia the article “Ether,” in which he insisted upon the existence of the world’s ether. Leading young Soviet physicists (Landau, Gamow, Bronstein, etc.) telegram in which they mocked his article in form and content, in which they asked for articles on phlogiston and thermorode (Sonin 1994, pp. 38-39). In October of 1930 B. Hessen was castigated at the All-Soviet conference over the state of affairs in Soviet philosophy. He was denounced as a “metaphysician” (i.e., enemy of dialectics) and an “idealist.” These accusations were, from the point of view of ruling Marxist ideology, the most serious. There is some evidence that B. Hessen did his best to compose his paper for the London congress in the spirit of crude, vulgar, orthodox Marxism, and he was keen to present his paper as response to his critics and as a proof of his fealty to communist ideology and Marxist loyalty. Moreover, perhaps, E. Kol’man’s role as a participant of the Londons congress was to ignore B. Hessen in order to prove (or disprove) his ideological purity. N. Bukharin was denounced for his “anti-Marxist” views in the late 1920s; but despite his frequent trips to the West he did not became its defender. He was arrested in March 1938, tried for conspiracy in an “anti-Soviet Trotsky bloc” and after his conviction was immediately shot (Daniels 1985, pp. 266-272). The General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in May of the next year ousted him, despite his being dead for almost half an year, from the Presidium of the Academy and stripped him of the academician merit. After Bukharin’s arrest, the chief prosecutor of the USSR mentioned the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology where Bukharin occupied the position of Director as the “hotbed of anti-Soviet conspiracy.” Incidently, the position of Director may be assessed as a grim political exile. Institute was extinct. Only two of the eight members of the Soviet delegation to the London congress, led by Bukharin, remained alive after Stalin’s purges. The Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology was restored after World War II. The struggle with cosmopolitism required both domestic scientific heroes and branded enemies. Nevertheless, the enduring memory of the recent political repressions and the dominance of
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the ideologized science with a necessary native hero in every branch of science forced the composition of historical studies as internalist in their essence, as history of ideas without and beyond any socio-economic and political factors. Soviet historians of science for decades concentrated on narrow histories often filled with numerous technical details. Certainly, in many of these works some sentry dispatches to practice as real background of every theory may be found. Nevertheless, mentioned dispatches were trite and inane though they helped authors to feel safe for they went through all necessary ideological requirements. Actual socio-economic and political factors were untouched and unrevealed. Moreover many Soviet scholars, especially from the universities, purposely abstained from writing papers and were extremely careful in their classes to avoid any potential reason for being accused of some ideological “sin.” After World War II an ideological campaign in physics similar to the one in biology (genetics) was planned. As we know, Soviet genetics was virtually destroyed by “people’s academician” T. Lysenko. The form of this campaign demanded public debates and public accusations of persons who took the path of “revisionism” in science (namely in physics). This campaign might have take place even despite the atomic (nuclear) project which was vital for the USSR. The only obstacle to the start of this campaign was expressed by L. Beria, closest of Stalin’s comrade-in-arms, which was the fear that physicists would babble out secrets of the nuclear project. It may be the only positive side of spy hypermania typical for the USSR. Ten years passed between Stalin’s death and the moment when the phenomenon of ideological science in the USSR and the former Soviet bloc decayed, and thirty years passed before the first work done in the externalist style emerged. Meanwhile these studies were not written in a Marxist mindset. The socio-political milieu changed; and the interests of philosophers and historians of science changed as well.
Acknowledgements The author is grateful to Dr. Irving Anellis for his valuable comments on first draft of this paper and suggestions. This work was partially supported by RFH grant (N 07-03-00054a).
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Ulyanovsk State University Department of Philosophy P.O. Box 1602 432063 Ulyanovsk, Russia e-mail:
[email protected]
REFERENCES Bazhanov, V.A. (2003). The Scholar and the “Wolfhound Era”: The Fate of Ivan E. Orlov’s Ideas in Logic, Philosophy, and Science. Science in Context 16, No. 4, 535-550. Bukharin, N.I. (1928). Nauka i SSSR (Science and the USSR). Moscow: Rabotnik prosveschenia. Cavaliere, F. (1990). La logica formale in Unione Sovietica. Gli anni del dibattio, 1946-1965. Firenze: La nuova Italia. Daniels, R.V., ed. (1985). The Moscow Trials. A Documentary History of Communism. Communism in Russia, vol. 1. London: I.B. Taurus. Hessen, B.M. (1933). Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie korni mekhaniki N’yutona (Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia). Reports of Soviet Participants at II International Congress of History and Technics in London, June-July 1931. MoscowLeningrad: Gosudarstvennoe tekhniko-teoreticheskoe izdatel’stvo. Joravsky, D. (1970). The Lysenko Affair. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Karpenko, A.S. (2004). Predmet logiki v svete osnovnykh tendentsii ee razvitia (The Subject of Logic in the Light of the Main Trends in Its Development). Logical Investigations (Moscow) 11, 149-171. Lenin, V.I. (1927) Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. New York: International Publishers. Mathias, A.R.D. (1991). Logic and Terror. Physis 28, 557-578. Medvedev, Zh. (1969). The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko. New York: Columbia University Press. Minin, S.K. (1922a). Philosophiyu za bort! (Philosophy Should be Thrown Overboard!). Pod Znamenen Marxizma 5-6, 122-127. Minin, S.K. (1922b). Kommunism i Philosophia (Communism and Philosophy). Pod Znamenen Marxizma 11-12, 192-199. Nastol’nyi entsyclopedicheskii slovar (Desktop Encyclopedic Dictionary) (1929). Moscow. Sonin, A.S. (1994). Phizicheskii idealism. Istoria odnoi ideologicheskoi kampanii (Physical Idealism. The History of One Ideological Campaign). Moscow: Fiz-mat. Literature. Stepanov, I.I. (1925). Moi oshibki, vskrytye i ispravlennye Ya. Stenom (My Mistakes, Revealed and Corrected by Ya. Sten). Bolshevik 14, 83-89.
PART 4 EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Juan Fco. Álvarez Javier Echeverría BOUNDED RATIONALITY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES
ABSTRACT. Empirical research on Rational Choice Theory has brought up two focus of the economics laws problem. On one hand, we find the authors who state that the neoclassical economics laws are explanatory and predictive on specific cases: in transparent contexts in which the standard rationality operates successfully. On the other hand, we find the authors who state that the descriptive theories of the rational choice opens up a research path in which fundamental principles of the neoclassical building could be questioned. Both view points have generated an important standard Rational Choice Theory revision what has produced the so called descriptive view point. It implies understanding that most of the choices take place under risky or uncertainty conditions and, that, these choices are far more complex than the normative Rational Choice Theory supposes. This article’s main goal is to expand the descriptive point of view in rational choice, theorizing how some factors, coming from the social and cultural environment, operate within the rational choice. Into space of this research essay we find the debatable question of whether these sort of proposals expands the explanation of the deviation of the rational choice normative theory, and that, of the disturbing causes of the microeconomics laws, or they call into question fundamental principles of these laws and therefore they are opening the possibility to focus some economics issues in a new different manner.
1. Introduction There are very important links between procedural rationality (Simon’s view) and axiological cognitivist rationality (Boudon’s approach). Many procedures could be understood as frugal and simple mechanisms to put our values – values that are giving us reasons to act – into action. We are instrumentally rational agents, but we also exhibit axiological rationality. These are two different notions of rationality but we act with both of
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 173-189. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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them in a single communicative situation. The real agents cannot be blurred; they must always remain at least as a parameter of the interaction. From the point of view of bounded rationality, there are several models of practical rationality, one of which is synthesized in the theory of maximizing rational choice. However, by introducing values as a factor in the analysis of actions, their objectives, and their results, it is possible to establish differences among these models according to their greater or lesser degree of axiological rationality. A large array of approaches to different kinds of social interaction have been built on a very special model of human being, i. e., the rational optimizing decision maker. This is a very special agent that has at least three unbounded capabilities: it has, at any time, all possible information and computational abilities, it has no limitations and it is able to achieve an optimal degree of communication with the constraints on and means for its feasible set of actions. We try to enlarge some ideas that we published before (Álvarez 2005; 2001; Echeverría 2002; 2001) and to expand those to a broader scope. Although there are some scholars who use an approach that goes beyond the standard vision of rationality, they are usually closely related to some kind of substantive rationality rather than to procedural rationality (using concepts coined by Herbert Simon): The former is concerned only with finding what action maximizes utility in the given situation, hence is concerned with analyzing the situation but not the decision maker [. . .]. Procedural rationality is concerned with how the decision maker generates alternatives of action and compares them. It necessarily rests on a theory of human cognition. (Simon 1997b, p. 18)
For several reasons, these reductionist tendencies are unable to deal even with the epistemic issues adequately. We will try to show one of the reasons: a better understanding of social interaction could be obtained from other notions of rationality, from a less abstract notion than the usual idea of optimizing means and ends that appears in these models. We need to move closer to bounded rationality, a “procedural rationality.” In Simon’s terms: People do have reasons for what they do, but these reasons depend very much on how people frame or represent the situation in which they find themselves, and upon the information they have or obtain. Their rationality is a procedural rationality; there is no claim that they grasp the environment accurately or comprehensively. To predict their behaviour in specific instances, we must know what they are attending to, and what information they have. (Simon 1997b, pp. 8-9)
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Some sociologists have remarked that an axiological and cognitivist rationality is necessary “to avoid the Charybdis of the irrational models and the Scylla of the narrow versions of rationality the Rational Choice Model endorses” (Boudon 2001, p. 120). This notion of rationality leads to the delineation of a rather different set of agents” models than the set that arises from instrumental or consequentialist rationality. In our opinion, there are very important links between procedural rationality (Simon’s view) and axiological cognitivist rationality (Boudon’s approach). Many procedures could be understood as frugal and simple mechanisms to put our values – values that are giving us reasons to act – into action. We are instrumentally rational agents, but we also exhibit axiological rationality. These are two different notions of rationality but we act with both of them in a single communicative situation. We prefer to talk about the fabric of rationality, with expressive or axiological rationality as the warp and instrumental rationality as the weft. The space of values frames the context and points to a pragmatic notion of rationality (a synthetic notion) that arises as a minimal condition within which interactions may be possible. Some of the problems that arise when we try to understand polemics or controversies (M. Dascal) may be solved by attending both to participants’ spaces of values and to the overlapping zone of these spaces. The approach based on the notion of controversy, as M. Dascal presents it, could be improved if some of these notions of procedural and bounded rationality were used to describe practical and historical cases in the study of science. A first step, an empirical one, could be to delineate the boundaries of the space of values that participants try to occupy. Their goal is not, or not only, to optimize some singular variables (such as truth, rhetoric force or consistency), but to satisfy a set of values that they regard as important; their own authorship or agency could even be one of these values. Perhaps, with these tools, we can analyse the continuum between refutation and reputation (Dascal 2001) and some other non-traditional epistemological questions. The main idea is that some features of the context could generate rules. Usually we are prone to ascribe these rules to the participants’ cognitive capabilities, but these rules are the output of the relationships themselves. We do not need to suppose Olympic participants in the interactions, with absolute and common knowledge (each one knows what the others know); all we need is some flesh and blood human beings in contextual interactions. These real agents cannot be blurred; they must always remain at least as a parameter of the interaction. In the standard view of rationality, the Olympic agents could be eliminated, because each agent is similar to
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every other one; as they are all epistemic gods, none of them are necessary. They upgrade to some kind of Popperian third world where they can achieve objective knowledge. However, we always need a concrete agent: objectivity is not a view from nowhere, it is a view from somewhere – Amartya Sen (1993). We cannot eliminate the particular agent; we always need it at least as a parametric reference. Other approaches try to put a grammar, an inner language, several absolute capabilities or innate abilities into human beings, and that is why we cannot understand the bargaining process itself. We are rational but less than gods. As we have mentioned, theories about social interaction usually assume a very debatable notion of rationality. This notion comes from economic studies, but nowadays many discussions show that it is a very weak notion. An important part of social studies accepts this standard notion as a datum. However, a simple review of the benefits and drawbacks of economic theory could show the way out of this enclosure. It is necessary to open our minds in order to build a pragmatic orientation that will not be reduced to some kind of sophisticated semantics. Perhaps it would be a good idea to look at the conceptions of rationality from other sides. There are some similarities between these problems and those that have appeared in economic welfare theory with the economic notion of utility. Trying to reduce any economic variable to a single utility generates some very important difficulties for understanding economic processes. Once we have superseded the code view of language, we would reject notions such as truthfulness or relevance as the main purpose of language. The communicative process is usually shown as a mechanism with a single and one-dimensional output (related to some kind of utility or cooperative disposition such as some kind of happiness in economic studies). Even the relevance principle (or the two relevance principles) is heir to these one-dimensional economic notions. In order to rebuild the dialogic interaction process, we must not only make its communicative component explicit but also include spaces where interlocutors can express their individuality: spaces that could be considered to be other dimensions with their own values that the participants try to satisfy to various degrees. So it is very important to include dimensions related to power, emotions, and affections; to sum it up, an n-dimensional set of values. This set becomes a group of criteria that we try to satisfy in our social interactions, and if we draw this kind
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of set, we must implement an empirical program that is sensitive to these differences right from the beginning. Our models are always idealizations, and we can have no other kind of models, but this is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. The mistake appears when we opt for reductionism. Trying to reduce all the variables to a single one, with a single unit of measure, is the main difficulty for understanding the complexity of interaction. There are several parameters that we must maintain ab initio. When economists have proposed other ideas opposed to both single utility and optimization, they have mainly unfolded two different views. As Selten says: “One way to model limited search without giving up the ideal of optimization is known as optimization with decision cost taken in account, also referred to as optimization under constraints” (Gigerenzer and Selten 2001, p. 5). The other option has been the idea that “models of bounded rationality use fast and frugal stopping rules for search that do not involve optimization.” The first models become even less psychologically plausible because “the knowledge and the computations involved can be so massive that one is forced to assume that ordinary people have the computational capabilities and statistical software of econometricians” (Ibid.). Some movements in the linguistic analysis of dialogic interaction show a similar drift (for instance, Optimality Theory and Relevance Theory). Herbert Simon’s idea of bounded rationality offers another, more radical, option. Simon used the metaphor of a pair of scissors, where one of the blades is the “cognitive limitations” of human beings and the other one is the “structure of the environment,” cognitive rationality and ecological rationality, as Gigerenzer calls them. The most important thing is that “minds with limited time, knowledge, and other resources can be nevertheless successful by exploiting structures in their environments” (Gigerenzer and Selten 2001, p. 7). Increasing the complexity of a task does not necessarily imply a corresponding complexity of individuals. Sometimes a better comprehension of the environment could help carry out the task. A system of relationships could sometimes allow some fast and frugal mechanism to produce better results than those that an optimal rationality with a high computational complexity is assumed to produce. To work with a complex system such as the communicative process does not necessarily convey more formal complexity, but it represents a complete departure from the one-dimensional criteria of rationality. Having more information is not always an advantage for participants in a communicative action game.
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In our opinion, the participants in interactions now and then use some kind of ignorance-based decision mechanism. As Peter M. Todd says: “When choosing between two objects (according to some criterion), if one is recognized and the other is not, then select the former” (Todd 2001, p 56). This kind of mechanism is embodied in the recognition heuristic (Gigerenzer). The point is that usually our basic intuitions tell us that having more information is an advantage for the decision maker (Rubinstein 1998, p. 52), but this is only so if our belief system has some special structure. In fact, as Goldstein and Gigerenzer (1999) have investigated, adding more knowledge to the recognition heuristic in use – by increasing the proportion of recognized objects in an environmentcan even decrease decision accuracy. This mechanism is named the lessis-more effect by Todd. To be precise: “Knowing more is not usually thought to decrease decision-making performance, but when using simple heuristic that rely on little knowledge, this is exactly [. . .] what can be found experimentally” (Todd 2001, p. 57). “Simple strategies that use few cues can work well in real decision environments, and fast and frugal heuristic that exploit this feature can satisfy the true bounds – temporal, rather than cognitive – of our ecological rationality” (Todd 2001, p. 68).
2. Towards a Bounded Axiological Rationality We here propose bounded axiological rationality (BAR) as an alternative to the habitual model of rationality. Combining certain ideas of H. Simon and R. Boudon with Amartya Sen’s proposal concerning informational filters, we claim that values, in addition to guiding or orienting actions, intervene as filters that restrict the perception of the environment and the choice among possible courses of action. As we have stated in previous publications, we understand values to be functions that a subject applies to an object in a specific circumstance, with a valuation, that is, an evaluative expression, resulting from this application.1 We call the subject (individual, institutional, corporative . . . ) who applies a set of axiological functions the valuator (or evaluator); we call the object, person, result or system upon which this axiological function acts the valuate (or evaluate). The axiological functions can be simple (a value) 1
Valuative expressions may or may not be declarations – value judgments. An expression of approbation or rejection can express a valuation. In the social sciences, many valuations are expressed with evaluation matrices, that is, using numerical tables in which various evaluational criteria are weighed and added. This kind of axiological expression is the most interesting for BAR.
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or compound (several valuation criteria). Compoundedness, satisfiability (as used by Simon) and graduality are three basic properties of values. In general, something that is valued satisfies a criterion of valuation to a certain degree, in the judgment of the evaluating subject. Taking these conceptual premises as our starting point, our proposal for a bounded axiological rationality is based on the following three hypotheses: (1) Values are informative filters for human beings2 because they orient their perception towards those objects that can be valuated positively or negatively, paying no attention to those objects that do not fall within the domain of the axiological functions that a subject S is applying. Human beings never operate with complete information when making decisions and acting, not only for the reasons Simon gives, which are quite true, but also because of an additional reason of an axiological nature: the subject selects what he desires and rejects in the environment, the subject valuates the information. The axiological functions of a subject S filter the world, selecting what is desirable (what is valuated), doing without what is irrelevant and avoiding what is harmful or prejudicial. One example will be sufficient: previous knowledge guides the perceptive actions of a scientist (observations), discriminating between what is scientifically interesting and what is not. An observation becomes scientific data after an epistemic valuation (precision, coherence, fit, relevance . . . ) and a technological valuation that depends on the trustworthiness of the observational instruments used, on the interferences that may occur, on the margins of error in measurements, etc. There are no observations or scientific data without previous valuations. These evaluations are carried out according to the prevailing criteria of valuation in a scientific community at a given moment. (2) Secondly, when it is time to act and make decisions, human beings do not process or analyze all possible options and courses of action. In the first place, because their capacities for analysis and computation are limited, as Simon pointed out; in second place, because they act and make decisions in a limited time margin; and thirdly, because they limit themselves to considering the possible courses of actions that they value positively or negatively in each set of circumstances. The cognitive states of subject S strongly influence this second filtering process, which concerns not only the inputs received, but the subject’s attitudes, 2
And, in general, for all living beings that have valuative capabilities. We defend a naturalized axiology, which works not only for human beings, but also to analyze valuation processes occurring in the animal world. In this contribution, we will focus solely on the area of the social sciences.
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intentions, and goals. The values operate not only as informative filters, but also as deliberative and proactive filters.3 Note that these two valuations are previous to the selection of the means that will be used to try to achieve the proposed goals. Let us give an example. A scientist first designs a research project, in which he includes the human resources, instruments, and financial means required to carry it out. All these components of the projects will be valuated by anonymous peers or committees. However, the scientist has previously selected the objectives to be achieved and has demonstrated that they would be epistemically or technologically valuable. The choice of the possible courses of action occurs before the choice of means. (3)Thirdly, given a positive value V for a subject S in circumstances c, we can always assume that an upper boundary MS,c of the degree of satisfaction possible for this value will exist. These boundaries are generated by the subject herself and by external constraints of different sorts. They are not magnitudes that can be precisely determined, but rather upper boundaries of possible satisfaction of the values, which vary according to the circumstances and the cognitive or emotional state of subject S.4 We have already set forth the first two objections to the inherited conception of rational choice (incomplete information, limited calculational capability) elsewhere (Alvarez 1992, pp. 73-93; 1999, pp. 345-357). In this contribution, we will place greater emphasis on the third objection, which characterizes bounded axiological rationality (BAR) and develops Simon’s ideas, synthesizing them with those of Boudon and other authors.5 We will give some examples to illustrate this. (i) The economic growth of a country is a positive value, but if it turns out to be excessive, as a result of complex systemic interactions, the risk of inflation appears. Experts in political economy tend to set boundaries for growth, although they give acceptable margins of variation according to the national and international situations. Many 3
This is particularly important in institutional evaluations in which several subjects holding different evaluational criteria participate. In these cases, the evaluations of others intervene as constrictions and limitations on the subject’s evaluations. This is the most frequent case in social science. Álvarez (1995, pp. 137-148). 4 Obviously, a subject with diminished or altered cognitive or valuative abilities, whether due to dullness, distraction, a state of euphoria, or any other reason, does not evaluate opportunities or risks the same way as he would in a state of watchfulness, maximum attention, and cognitive normalcy. 5 Evandro Agazzi has always insisted that human actions are guided by values. See E. Agazzi (1996). As we have already said, Amartya Kumar Sen’s work (above all in the methodological aspects) is a fundamental reference.
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economic indicators, for example, the macroeconomic objectives to be achieved, are nothing more than the upper and lower boundaries of satisfaction of certain values and disvalues (growth, stability, competitiveness, distribution of wealth, unemployment, etc.). “The fact that everyone adopts a certain value does not deprive it of this character (as a value)” (Amartya Sen 1970, p.79, Spanish edition). (ii) A long life is good, but certain conditions can turn it into an evil, the end of which is desirable: “at least she is no longer suffering and she’s at peace,” as people say. The criteria and mechanisms for estimating quality of life have been one of the main subjects of A. Sen’s reflections about values. In particular, see Sen and Hawthorn (1987). (iii) A person who is guided by models of bounded rationality places limits on his enjoyment of pleasures, although these limits may be flexible. Similarly, he endures discomfort and unpleasantness, although only to certain limits, after which they become unbearable. (iv) Watching over small children is a positive value, but overprotection can be harmful to them because it reduces their degree of autonomy, responsibility, and capacity for action. The same can be said, in the opposite direction, about excessive tolerance. The problem of bounded practical rationality consists of finding a balance between opposing values and degrees of satisfaction. After a certain point, a positive value becomes negative. The conception of BAR affirms the existence of these upper and lower boundaries for different values. (v) Maximizing safety in a city tends to generate limitations of individual rights, such as, for example, the assumption of innocence or the right to legal aid and to a fair trial for presumed delinquents. To paraphrase Goya, we could say that “the dream of maximizing rationality generates monsters.” (vi) The exploitation of non-renewable natural resources has limits because otherwise greater evils are generated. The value “sustainability” and making it operative constitute one possible good example of bounded axiological rationality. (vii) Telling the truth is a virtue, but no sensible person always says what she thinks, to avoid offending other people. Even veracity has its limits, as some constitutions acknowledge: the right to remain silent or to not testify against oneself. Telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in situations in which powerful legal constraints exist is not a behavior that is compatible with bounded axiological rationality. We could give many more examples. One good series of examples is the different processes of non-violent action, which even characterize the difference between a hunger strike and allowing oneself to starve to
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death. Anyone who suggests that, in a situation of political negotiation, all negotiations must be done under bright lights and with verbatim records is, by trying to maximize “transparency,” hindering the negotiation. At any rate, the previous examples suffice to illustrate our third hypothesis. We state that an action or decision is a BAR one when it fits these upper boundaries (and, when pertinent, the lower boundaries) of value satisfaction. If this does not occur and the subject insists on maximizing a specific value (economic growth, longevity, pleasure, protection, safety, resource exploitation, frankness, transparency, etc.), her behavior is not very rational from the BAR perspective.6 As there are several kinds of values, the BAR proposal distinguishes among different kinds of rationalities, even though a formal model that is common to all of them may exist. Purely epistemic rationality (for example, scientific rationality) is not the same as technological, economic, political, ecological, or moral rationality. Because the values that guide these different kinds of actions are different, there are also significant differences when it comes to elucidating their rationality from the BAR perspective. As can be observed, our proposal not only advocates axiological plurality. Insofar as we opt for the BAR model in rationality theory, it is necessary to distinguish among a plurality of reasons and interests. The composition of this plurality of reasons, values, and interests is a key problem in social science, and it is usually resolved through processes of consensus and deliberative procedures. When there is a plurality of axiological agents that act and make decisions, the degrees of satisfaction of the respective values are mutually limited. The existence of values shared by several agents, as well as opposite values, brings up a central problem: the determination of lower and upper boundaries to the satisfaction of these values for the different agents involved. To end this contribution, we will briefly consider this problem, which we believe is central in the area of the social sciences.
6
Stating that behaviors that systematically tend to maximize a single value or the utility function, independent of the circumstances and the consequences derived from these behaviors, are irrational is excessive, although sometimes we may harbor serious doubts as to whether or not they are intelligent behaviors. The BAR proposal distinguishes degrees of rationality according to the plurality of values and the limitation functions taken in to account. This will become clearer when we distinguish among different models of rationality, some of which are more rational than others from the BAR point of view.
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3. Four Models of Axiological Rationality Based on the hypothesis that actions are guided by a plurality of values of different kinds, we will use the term functional FS(O, C, T ) for the system of values that a subject S applies to the objects O in circumstances C and in the period of time T. FS forms a structure that prioritizes some values as opposed to others, although these respective specific weights may change according to the different phases of a course of action.7 Broadly speaking, we will distinguish among four basic structures and, therefore, four models of axiological rationality. There are, of course, intermediate and mixed models. One agent (individual or collective) can follow one model in certain circumstances and another in a different situation. Model M1: Some agents prioritize a specific type of value (military, religious, economic, etc.) and, within this type, they prioritize a specific main good. This is the case with animals that fight for survival, with the businessperson who only pays attention to profits, with the military person who tries to win regardless of the cost, with the scientist who thinks only about the search for truth, or with the believer who only worries about eternal salvation. Radical ecologists, ardent technophiles, rigid moralists, pure aesthetes, or people who seek pleasure above all else, ignoring costs, risks, and consequences, are other examples. We will call model M1 pyramidal axiological monism because it affirms a supreme value as the source of all good or all evil. This value takes precedence over all others, which are subordinated to the search for the main good, and, when it applies, for the Supreme Good. Its axiological functional FS tends to be a pyramid with an apex, from which the maximum good stems. Inversely, this model can be applied to the area of disvalues, postulating the existence of Evil or of some kind of Supreme Evil, the fight against which is more important than anything else. The existence of this value or disvalue, good or bad, gives an ultimate meaning to all actions. The defenders of the thesis of the uselessness of social action (a rhetorical thesis belonging to conservative thought, sometimes presented as radical, as A. Hirschman has pointed out so well) are a good example of social theory that follows this kind of pyramidal thinking. 7 Going back to the example of scientific actions, at a given moment the purely epistemic aspects may have greater weight (in the laboratory, for example), while at others technical values (instrument design and construction, use of apparatuses), economic values (obtaining funding), or social values (presenting results, dissemination and circulation of knowledge) may have more weight. The same thing happens in many other human actions.
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Model M2: This is a weaker variation of the previous model and is characterized by maintaining the priority of one kind of value, selecting various values within this class and subordinating all the rest to these values. The functional FS has no apex because there is no supreme value, but it is hierarchical. One type of value occupies the upper level and all the rest are less relevant. This is the case of the military person who no longer seeks victory at any price, but takes other military values (minimizing losses, respecting the adversary’s dignity and honor, maintaining discipline among the troops even when victorious, causing a minimum of damage to the civil population, etc.) into account. Another example would be the businessperson who attempts to be successful in business and obtain a profit, but who values the factor work and negotiates labor pacts with the workers, even though this involves additional costs, reinvests part of the profits to modernize the production systems, provides customer services, accepts losses with the objective of increasing the market quota, etc. There are multiple examples, as this is a very common model, typical of people who are entirely dedicated to their professions. Generally speaking, model M2 agents are characterized by acting to maximize the utility function, which includes several values (and disvalues) of the same type. This model does not attempt to maximize one of the values or disvalues, but rather a utility function made up of several values. The kind of rationality that arises from the M2 model is monistic, because it prioritizes above all a type of value. However, in the pattern of valuation, a plurality of values is accepted. We will call it the maximizing monistic model. Rational maximizing decision theory corresponds to this model of rationality. The type of model of the capitalist that Marx presents in The Capital, particularly in the third volume when he analyzes the law of the tendency towards falling profit rates, is a good example of M2. Model M3: This type of agent takes into account not only one type of value, but several types. Its functional FS is mixed but hierarchical. The upper axiological level is made up of different kinds of values, but other values are secondary. To use Max Weber’s terms, there are end-values and middle-values. We can distinguish a set of fundamental values to which several kinds of values, which receive hardly any attention, are subordinated; these subordinate values, in any case, orient neither decisions nor actions. For example, a businessperson may act according to model M2 but, in addition, be rooted in a concrete society even though the production costs are higher, or he may have political influence, or develop an I + D department that may generate innovations, or promote the development of the arts and culture, taking on the additional role of
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Maecenas, or develop environment-friendly production systems. A politician may accept the control and mediation of other powers (legislative, judicial, public opinion, military, media groups, lobbies, etc.). A religious leader may accept scientific advances and try to harmonize revelation with scientific theories. The M3 model involves a partial mixture of different kinds of values, even though the functional FS used to valuate good and evil has a hierarchical structure. Frequently, agents of the M3 model are composed of several subjects, each of which has the mission of promoting and defending one type of value. For example, a democratic state has a government, a parliament and a judiciary. In addition, it pays a lot of attention to public opinion, which tends to articulate itself by means of the media or different citizens’ associations. What has priority is a functional FS that includes political, legal, economic, and social values (or, in other variations, military, religious, or other values). This model is more complex, with several principal agents, not just one. Of course, tensions and conflicts arise among these agents, as each of them safeguards certain kinds of good and combats the corresponding kinds of evil. As a result, the different values find high boundaries of satisfaction, due to the systemic interrelationship among these agents. M3 is the first model that fits bounded axiological rationality. This is a model of relative (or partial) axiological reality. The Schumpeterian type of businessperson is clearly a case of M3; even the positive bias towards risk and the impulse to innovate could be by-products of putting this kind of model into practice. Model M4: If an agent has equivalent preferences for the different types of values that can be distinguished, she will try to satisfy a considerable plurality and diversity of values to a sufficient degree. This means a pattern of action that is practically impossible to find in individual practice, being a model of high axiological plurality that takes into account the different types of good and evil possible and their respective minimum boundaries of satisfaction. When making decisions and acting, this kind of agency takes into account different basic, epistemic, technical, economic, military, political, legal, social, ecological, aesthetic, religious, and moral values, even though it attributes greater or lesser importance to some values (and disvalues) as compared to others. This kind of agent can only be human, because several of the types of values are specifically human ones. In principle, these agents never subordinate one type of value to another, although they may give priority to some values over others according to the concrete circumstances. Their axiological rationality is complex, because their functional FS is complex. In general, this kind of agent is not
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individual, but collective. The M4 model requires plural agents with the capacity to integrate different individual agents, each of which takes on and promotes the different types of values that we have described. These four models can be represented by the different formal structures of the value systems that they apply. One would be totally monistic, another partially monistic, the third partially pluralistic, and the fourth totally pluralistic. (However, there is never a closed totality of values, if only because new values may possibly emerge. This aspect is fundamental when we make decisions today for future generations, whose values are clearly uncertain at present.) Between one structure and another, there are several intermediate models, with greater or lesser subordinations and hierarchies. Strict monists believe in the existence of a supreme (prioritary, preponderant) good or evil and even personalize it (God, Fatherland, King, Company, Party, Nature . . . ). This is the object of their identification, love, devotion, reverence, esteem, etc., or, reciprocally, of their rejection, hatred, repudiation, or disdain. Pluralists, on the other hand, try to modulate and combine the different kinds of good and evil. By modulate we mean that they weigh them adequately and in a balanced fashion, according to each situation and moment. They may subordinate some kinds of good to others depending on the context of action, but never a priori. The four models represent as many forms of rationality and generate very different patterns of action. From an axiological perspective, the first model is the least rational and the fourth the most rational. Obviously, we have given a very schematic description of the models, to the end of making it clear that different degrees of rationality exist.
4. In Conclusion From the point of view of bounded rationality, there are several models of practical rationality, one of which is synthesized in the theory of maximizing rational choice. However, by introducing values as a factor in the analysis of actions, their objectives, and their results, it is possible to establish differences among these models according to their greater or lesser degree of axiological rationality. In particular, the models that assume the existence of maximum and minimum boundaries of satisfaction of positive (and negative) values entail a greater complexity and development of axiological rationality. One particularly interesting case is the case in which a minimum upper boundary and a maximum lower boundary are adopted, as happens with warrant models in stock
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investment. A model of this type has been used to negotiate the “weather” on the crude oil market, a subject which is, unfortunately, in the news these days due to the terrible disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. We have pointed out that a subject does not tend to behave according to a single model, but rather follows the patterns of two or three depending on the circumstances. In fact, the most complex models, M3 and M4, in particular the latter, require plural subjects. The way we see it, this last model is the most fertile heuristically for representing practical rationality the way it does in fact occur empirically among human beings. We do not deny the interest of model M2 as a possible regulative ideal, applicable in some cases. However, the processes of choice among several alternatives tend to be more complex than model M2. Both model M3 and model M4 involve alternative theories of practical rationality. It is worthwhile to explore them, based on the ideas of Simon, Boudon, and other critics of the inherited conception of rationality. Multiagent systems such as the ones in model M4 (and, in part, M3) involve a processual and deliberative rationality. Some of the simulation processes of “intelligent” multi-agent systems can serve as patterns for the complexity of these mechanisms, a complexity that does not require individuals to have a greater computational capability but rather a better understanding of their systemic relations. Our proposal does not attempt to predict the choices and actions that different human subjects will, in fact, carry out. Its purpose is only to explain these behaviors based on a plurality of values that the subjects are trying to satisfy to a greater or lesser degree; although it is a formalist or formalizing conception of rationality, applicable to very diverse value contents and systems, it is neither algorithmic nor predictive. Prudently weighing the different values without attempting to maximize them or infer a necessary rule of action implies affirming subjects’ freedom when it comes to valuating and acting, even though this freedom may be limited.
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Dpto. Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia Senda del Rey, 7 28034 Madrid Spain e-mail:
[email protected]
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Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) Instituto de Filosofía Pinar, 25 28006 Madrid Spain e-mail:
[email protected]
REFERENCES Agazzi, E. (1996). El bien, el mal y la ciencia. Las dimensiones éticas en la empresa científico-tecnológica. Madrid: Tecnos. Álvarez, J.F. (1992). ¿Es inteligente ser racional? Sistema 109, 73-93 Álvarez, J.F. (1995). Dinámica deliberativa y valores epistémicos. Isegoría 12, 137-148. Álvarez, J.F. (1999). Economía de la ciencia y racionalidad imperfecta (2). Laguna. Revista de Filosofía 6, 345-357. Álvarez, J.F. (2000). Racionalidad, modelos humanos y economía normativa. In: W. González (ed.), Argumentos de razón técnica, pp. 93-114. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla. Álvarez, J.F. (2001). Capacidades potenciales y valores en la tecnología. Elementos para una axionomía de la tecnología. In: J.A. López Cerezo and J.M. Sánchez Ron, (eds.), Ciencia, tecnología, sociedad y cultura en el cambio de siglo, pp. 231-242. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Álvarez, J.F. (2005). Bounded Rationality in Dialogic Interactions. Studies in Communication Sciences: Argumentation in Dialogic Interaction (special issue), 119-130. Boudon, R. (2001). The Origin of Values. Sociology and Philosophy of Beliefs. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Dascal, M. (2001). Reputation and Refutation: Negotiating Merit. In: Weigand et al. (2001), pp. 3-17. Echeverría, J. (2001). Ciencia, tecnología y valores. Hacia un análisis axiológico de la actividad tecnocientífica. In: A. Ibarra and J.A. López Cerezo (eds.), Desafíos y tensiones actuales en ciencia, tecnología y sociedad, pp. 137-148. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva/O.E.I. Echeverría, J. (2002). Ciencia y Valores. Barcelona: Destino. Gigerenzer, G. (2000). Adaptive Thinking. Rationality in the Real World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gigerenzer, G. and D.G. Goldstein (1999). Betting on One Good Reason: The Take the Best Heuristic. In: Gigerenzer et al. (1999), pp. 37-58. Gigerenzer, G. and R. Selten (2001). Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gigerenzer, G.P.M. Todd, and ABC Research Group (1999). Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. New York: Oxford University Press. Gooding, D. (2002). Varying the Cognitive Span: Experimentation, Visualisation, and Computation. http://www.bath.ac.uk/~hssdcg/Research/Cognitive_Span1.html Grice, H.P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Hirschman, A.O. (1991). Retóricas de la intransigencia. Spanish version by T. Segovia. México: FCE. Nussbaum, M.C., A.K. Sen, and World Institute For Development Economics Research (1993). The Quality of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rubinstein, A. (1998). Modeling Bounded Rationality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Saari, D. (2001). Decisions and Elections: Explaining the Unexpected. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, A. (1970). Collective Choice and Social Welfare. San Francisco: Holden Day. Sen, A. (1993). Positional Objectivity. Philosophy and Public Affairs 22, 126-145. Sen, A. and G. Hawthorn (1987). The Standard of Living. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, A. and J. Foster (1997). On Economic Inequality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Simon, H.A. ([1945] 1997a). Administrative Behavior. A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations. New York: Free Press. Simon, H.A. (1982). Models of Bounded Rationality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Simon, H.A. (1997b). An Empirically Based Microeconomics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simon, H.A. (1999). The Sciences of Artificial. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Simon, H.A. (2001). On Simulating Simon: His Monomania, and Its Sources in Bounded Rationality. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32, 501-505. Todd, P.M. (2001). Fast and Frugal Heuristics for Environmental Bounded Minds. In: Gigerenzer et al. (2001), pp. 51-69. Weigand, E. and M. Dascal, eds. (2001). Negotiation and Power in Dialogical Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Amparo Gómez Rodríguez RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY AND ECONOMIC LAWS: THE ROLE OF SHARED VALUES 1
ABSTRACT. The descriptive viewpoint in rational choice has generated an important Standard Rational Choice Theory revision. This viewpoint has meant the introduction of relevant psychological considerations that Rational Choice Theory tied to the neoclassical economics is unable to heed In this paper I suggest a way to expand the descriptive viewpoint by theorizing how some factors, coming from the social and cultural environment, operate within rational choice. That troublesome issue concerning the overall validity of economic laws is also a question here; specifically, if these descriptive proposals expand the explanation of the disturbing causes of economic laws, or if they actually call into question their fundamental principles, encouraging consideration of some economic issues in a quite new, different manner.
1. Introduction Long-recognized as problematic in the philosophy of economics is the “inexactitude of economic laws,” to use Daniel Hausman’s expression, or, in other terms, the problem of ceteris paribus laws. In order to have laws of finer precision and accuracy enabling greater explanatory and predictive competence, ceteris paribus clauses should be specified. This implies the development of empirical research around what John Stuart Mill called disturbing causes. When dealing with economic laws, inquiry focuses on Rational Choice Theory since its axioms constitute the fundamental principles of the laws of neoclassical economic theories. Empirical research follows two main paths: a) to demonstrate the violation of the axioms of 1 This work has been facilitated by the Research Project HUM2006-10521. Translated from Spanish by Marie MacMahon.
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 191-205. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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normative rational choice theory in specific contexts, offering reasons for such breach and b) to develop descriptive theories of rational choice located outside the boundaries of Utility Theory and Expected Utility Theory in neoclassical economics. The empirical research on Rational Choice Theory has brought into focus a troublesome issue, namely, the question of the overall soundness of economic laws. There is, of course, variation on the issue. On one hand, some authors consider neoclassical economic laws sufficiently explanatory and predictive in specific cases, that is, in transparent contexts where standard rationality operates successfully and consider descriptive theories of rational choice adequate in non-transparent contexts in which choices are made under conditions of risk. Economic laws, then, are not questionable in their application context. On the other hand, some authors believe the descriptive theories of rational choice lead to a questioning of the fundamental principles of neoclassical economic laws. Neoclassical economic laws, unlike physic laws, fail to provide empirical hypotheses explaining the deviation of normative laws. The empirical hypotheses about rational choice bring to the fore alternatives that could deeply affect neoclassical economic laws, (Herbert Simon’s proposal, for example, can be interpreted in this way). These two viewpoints have generated important revision in standard rational choice theory, since the fifties, with the work of Herbert Simon and, thereafter, with contributions from Kahneman and Tversky (1979, 1984, 2000, 2002), Slovic (1982), Gigerenzer (1983), Arthur (1991), Plous (1993), as well as others. The works of these authors have produced the so-called descriptive viewpoint, which calls for recognizing that most choices take place under conditions of risk and uncertainty, and that these choices are far more complex than normative rational choice theory presupposes. Following Simon standard rationality is replaced with procedural and bounded rationality, and Simon’s satisfying principle displaces the maximization of utility and expected utility theories.2 The descriptive viewpoint has meant the introduction of relevant psychological considerations that Rational Choice Theory tied to the neoclassical economics is unable to heed (Simon, Tversky, Kahneman, Gingerenzer, etc.). Furthermore, several authors have noted the major role social and cultural factors play in rational choice (Chong 2000; Denzeu and North 2000; Halpern 1998; Smelser and Swedberg 1994; Langlois 2000; Henrich et al 2001; among others). 2
Procedural rationality takes into account the individual’s frame of mind, his conceptualization of his predicament, and his aptitude for evaluating the information and options available to him. Simon (1976, pp.129-148).
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This essay’s main goal is to point out the existence of a important convergence between both lines of research, namely, complementary links between the psychological and the contextual. I shall offer evidence of this claim through an examination of the Prospect Theory of Kahneman and Tversky and the proposal J.K. Halpern makes about the importance of contextual factors. Halpern’s proposal permits me to offer some considerations concerning the degree of complementarity that both psychological and socio-cultural points of view allow, given the convergence of psychological and contextual aspects in the empiric choices individuals make. This paper’s ultimate goal is to expand the descriptive viewpoint by theorizing how some factors coming from the social and cultural environment operate within rational choice. Of course, that troublesome issue concerning the overall validity of economic laws is also a question here; specifically, if these descriptive proposals expand the explanation of the disturbing causes of economic laws, or if they actually call into question their fundamental principles, encouraging consideration of some economic issues in a quite new, different manner.
2. The Prospect Theory Since the middle of the last century, various authors (Allais 1953; Ellsberg 1961; Kahneman and Tversky 1979; Machina 1982; Slovic, Fischhoff, and Linchensten 1982; among others) have shown that empiric choices breach the axioms of Utility Theory and Expected Utility Theory. The axioms around which deviation has emerged are the following: cancellation, dominance, invariance and transitivity. Starting in the early seventies, Tversky and Kahneman examined the invariance and dominance axioms. Several of their empirical experiments demonstrate the vulnerability of these axioms when choices are made under conditions of risk. This means the principle of maximization of expected utility is breached, and involves, thus, a refutation of Expected Utility Theory. In the light of the experiments, Kahemann and Tversky propose a purely descriptive theory, their Prospect Theory. This Theory explains the results of their experiments and permits a new Rational Choice Theory under conditions of risk. The notions of framing effects and heuristics are crucial in their theory.3
3
For the proposal of these authors to see: Kahnemann and Tversky (1979, 1984, 2000, 2002) and Tversky and Kahneman (1973, 1974, 1981, 1988, 1990).
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The Prospect Theory basically shows that choices under conditions of risk are far more complex than Expected Utility Theory assumes. According to Kahneman and Tversky, choices imply a first-phase of analysis of the problem and a second-phase of evaluation and choice. Individuals analyze the choice problem in the first-phase. This analysis depends as much on the way the presentation of the problem is carried out as on individuals’ perspectives in which expectations, habits, and other contextual factors exercise an important influence. In this first stage individuals organize and reformulate the options thus simplifying subsequent evaluation and choice. They perform different tasks that transform the associated results and probabilities. This leaves the individuals with several options from which to choose. In the second-phase, individuals evaluate the options derived from the preliminary analysis and choose the one they consider greater in value. This process involves the following: a) subjective values are defined in terms of gains and losses rather than on ultimate states of wealth or welfare, (the effective carriers of values are changes of wealth or welfare); b) the gains and losses are established in reference to some neutral point in relation to which they appear as positive or negative deviations (according to Kahneman and Tversky the status quo is probably the most common reference point); c) the differences among values are subjective, that is, they are established by the individuals; and d) the probabilities are replaced by decision weights. The function value is seen as a function of the individual’s position, his status quo or reference point, and of the magnitude of the change (positive or negative) from that point of reference. The theory predicts preferences will be affected by the changes in the reference point. The value function for losses is different from the value function for gains; this is a meaningful property that expresses a characteristic of individuals choosing under risky conditions: they are averse to loss.4 Loss aversion expresses the fact that the response to loss is more extreme than the response to gain: the displeasure of loosing, for instance, an amount of money exceeds the pleasure of earning the same amount. The Prospect Theory affirms essentially that under risk choices: a) the way of presenting information, that is, just how the choice problem is formulated, is a key factor; b) that there are biases involved when individuals process information, that is, psychological tendencies such as aversion to risk, and the particular perspectives of individuals; c) that the 4
The value function is: a) defined on gains and losses, b) concave in domain of gains and convex in the domain of losses, and c) much steeper for losses that for gains (loss aversion). Kahneman and Tversky (2000, p. 3).
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individuals do not perceive nor process the statistical information satisfying the probability theory requirements but use heuristic rules to make judgments instead of probabilistic algorithms. Therefore risk choices depend on framing affects and on the fact that the mind does not function according to a mental algorithm but with heuristic rules. Tversky and Kahneman point out that the experimental results are discouraging for those who to look at people as a statistical object. The advantage of heuristic rules is that they allow individuals to reduce the time and effort required to make reasonably good judgments and decisions. As Simon indicated, people usually satisfy rather than optimize.
3. The Prospect Theory and the Social Aspects of Rational Choice The Prospect Theory of Kahneman and Tversky has had a great impact on psychological studies of rational choice; it has also influenced the work of authors interested in the social aspects of rational choice, for instance, Kuklinski and Quirk (2000), Bazerman, Gibbons, Thompson, and Valley (1998) and, especially so, in the previously mentioned proposal of Halpern (1998). Halpern (1998) presents important insights concerning the dependence of rational choice on the social and cultural context. First of all, Halpern actually tries to sever Rational Choice Theory from an exclusive grounding in neoclassical economics in an effort to dig up Rational Choice Theory from the prevailing economic roots of choosing. And she offers, instead, a proposal that allows rational choice to be fully inclusive, applicable, that is, in all choosing, economic or otherwise. She recognizes, together with Simon, Kahneman, Tversky, and other authors, that our choices are limited by cognitive biases, and admits the notion of bounded rationality. But she does not consider these the only biases that must be faced. For Halpern social and cultural biases must be weighed in as well. These latter biases would explain many of the deviation cases in empirical choices. In other words, rational choices have an important social and cultural dimension that needs to be considered by Rational Choice Theory. Halpern’s viewpoint relies on two facts: a) we all share ways of evaluating options (that may not be objectively optimal) and b) we use
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social heuristics in our reasoning processes.5 Moreover, people have the capacity to reason rationally about their personal evaluations and choices, even when these do not fit with some rational objective criteria. Halpern agrees with Kahneman and Tversky that individuals are the ones who analyze and evaluate the alternatives that they face. As Kahneman and Tversky have shown, in the search for solutions, individuals analyze choice problems using heuristics, reformulate and evaluate the options from which they subsequently choose. This process is personalized, idiosyncratic, and rational, but it also has an important social and cultural dimension. The social and cultural dimension emerges when Halpern opens the notions of evaluation and heuristics towards the social and cultural environment that individuals share. People evaluate alternatives in a highly individualistic manner, giving a personalized value to each one of the options before them. But this takes place within a shared social and cultural context that influences the evaluation of alternatives as much as the personalized value people give to the options from which they subsequently choose. Each one personalizes his/her options and evaluations, but society pressures individuals to personalize them in a specific and shared manner. This occurs because people who belong to the same cultural and social group have a shared understanding of the alternatives involved in the different choosing situations. As Halpern (1998, p. 224) affirms: “people do personalize alternatives” but that “they do so in similar ways,” reflecting the influence of their social and cultural context. Shared understanding is a pre-requirement for living in society, necessary for the action and interaction of social groups, including economic relations. 6 If, as Simon, Kahneman, Tversky, and others have shown, the choices people formulate can reflect bias, a lack of shared understanding would thwart interaction among people: our subjective slants and the absence of any shared understanding make comprehension among us impossible. But, given that people are, generally speaking, involved in successful transactions, we can infer that they must have a 5
Kuklinski and Quirk (2000, pp. 153-182) use the Kahneman and Tversky’s notion of heuristics in the field of political elections. Other authors, such as Bazerman, Gibbons, Thompson, and Valley (1998, pp. 78-98) have developed proposals in the field of the social heuristics that offer an account of the social aspects implied in the personalization of alternatives by members of society. Halpern (1998) and Coleman (1990, 1994) underline the notion of shared understanding. People give sense to their behavior in light of their common understanding and shared knowledge of culture. 6 As Ross and Anderson (1982, p. 131) have pointed out, the individuals have a shareed understanding of social actions.
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similar understanding of the alternatives, in spite of the presence of cognitive bias. When making evaluations or reasoning, the errors we commit are common ones since we are cognitively similar and we have incorporated common ways of evaluating the world. We can even say that people have similar ways of misunderstanding the world due to a limited capacity in processing probabilistic information, to the cognitive illusions, or the shared social context and common cultural background. If everyone evaluated the world objectively, we would not need tools to understand how others have evaluated their alternatives. Obviously, we know that is not the way things work, and to deal with the actions of people, we human beings assume everybody uses the same heuristics rules. These heuristics derive from our own psychological and reasoning patterns but there are also heuristics learned within social contexts. Some of our biases are concerned with such social heuristics, as they “are the result of social and cultural influences” (Halpern 1998, p. 227). The heuristics learned socially are crucial in any attempt to understand deviation from the normative theories of the rational choice and to explain empirical choices.
4. Shared Values In our judgment the key notion in Halpern’s proposal is shared evaluation. But, this notion warrants more commentary given the necessity to explain just why a shared evaluation is produced. It is not enough to refer to the existence of shared understanding as a prerequirement of living in society. It is necessary to explain just what is being shared within the shared evaluation. A productive way to address this has to do with the role of the norms in rational choice. This leads us to the works of the neoinstitutionalists and, would include the works of authors of social rationality. Neoinstitutionalist literature basically points to the role of norms as constrictions on choice. However, some neoinstitutionalist authors have gone further since their works explore other forms in which the norms bear upon the rational choice.7
7
Chong (2000, p. 48) affirms “every society prescribes certain goals and certain approved cultural issues to attain them.” According to Coleman (1990, p. 242) the rationality also has to do with the functioning of norms and states “some theoreticians of rational choice armed with maximisation of the function of the utility as a principle of action consider the concept of the norm totally unnecessary,” but this ignoring an important process in the functioning of social systems included the one linked to economics.
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One key factor serving to explain shared evaluation is the claim that norms sustain the common values individuals share. The shared values become a part of the perception, interpretation judgment and evaluation of the actors and therefore of their choices.8 Shared values, together with the social heuristics, are implicated in choice deviations from normative rational choice theory. However, it is not enough to affirm that shared values do exist. It is also necessary to explain how common values become shared values. In order to address this question, we pay special attention to the notion of mental model. The cognitive sciences state that individuals construct models of the environment in which they live, choose and act, and of the problems they face. These mental models are internal representations that individuals create in order to analyse and evaluate the situations and problems they face, as occurs in the problem choice case. In fact, the mental models are internal representations created by individuals and “the institutions are external (to the mind) mechanisms individuals create to structure and order the environment” (Denzau and North 2000, p. 24). The mental models that construct different individuals of the same culture and society (with common institutions, organizations and therefore, norms and rules) are convergent and, in relevant aspects, are shared models. Denzau and North (Ibid.) coincide on this idea, when they affirm: “Individuals with common cultural backgrounds and experiences will share reasonably convergent models, ideologies, and institutions [. . .].” But at the same time institutions and ideologies “are the shared framework of mental models that groups of individuals possess that provide both an interpretation the environment and a prescription as how that environment should be structured” (Ibid.). Thus we can state, that social and cultural factors, like ideologies and institutions, make possible shared mental models. Mental models “provide a prescription as how environment should be structured” because norms and values form part of our internal representations. And if a shared mental model is available, the concepts and values embodied in the structure of mental models that several people have are more similar and therefore shared. There is a very close relationship among society, culture, institutions, norms and shared values. Common society, culture and institutions imply shared values (amongst other things) which are part of mental representations or models that individuals have.
8
According to Agazzi (1996) actions are guided by values.
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The shared mental models are possible thanks to the social and cultural experience, interaction and learning of individuals. Society and culture presuppose a common background that is transmitted through learning, experience, and the same interaction and communication that social life implies. Part of this background includes norms and consequently, values. Individuals construct their mental models incorporating materials already social and culturally existent. For that reason such models can converge and be shared. Learning from others makes an significant number of similarities feasible among members of each society and culture.9 In fact, a common cultural heritage reduces divergence in the mental models that people have in a given society, because it supposes the transference of common values, ideas, concepts, etc. from one generation to the other. Not everyone needs to start at level zero.10 Cultural heritage, social interaction and communication, more shared learning and experience, explain the existence of shared values (and beliefs, conceptions, etc. ) that make up part of the mental models of individuals with the same cultural and social background.11 It is quite important to point out that the common values that are transmitted in such a way will become shared values as they are accepted by the individuals. The acceptance is based on the uniformity of cognitive beliefs (for those who accept them) about the adequacy, correctness, convenience, and opportuneness of values that are culturally and socially transmitted. The values shared by individuals are expressed in the analysis, the evaluations, the preferences and furthermore, in the rational choices that take place. Therefore, individuals do not choose in a vacuum, that emptiness presumed in the market notion of neoclassical economics transferred to Rational Choice Theory. Instead, individuals make their choices in a social and cultural environment. One of the forms in which this occurs is 9
As Jones (2001, p. 114) explains, the Solomon’s experiment and much addional research show human susceptibility to social influence and learn from others. The rational choice always imply a interactive and social context. According to Zey (1998, p. 82) motivations are learned in the course of social action. 10 Henrich et al. (2001, p. 244) affirm: “Cultural trasmission mechanisms are cognitive information processor that allow individuals to acquire information in some fashion from others individuals, often via observation, imitation and interaction.” 11 In the existence of shared values we find another relevant factor: the linkage of the individual to social groups such as amongst others: the familiar or the professional ones. Groups, play an important role in the convergence of values, beliefs, opinions, and preferences. According to Chong (2004, p. 67) “Group members develop common evaluations, identifications, and norms [. . .].”
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through shared social and cultural values, in the sense we have just described. This fact has important consequences over the rational choices, including the economic and scientific choices. As Zey (1998, pp. 69-70) points out, markets are made up of relationships, networks of organizations linked together through economic transactions, family relationships, friendships, and social and management circles. Consequently, standard Rational Choice Theory cannot explain adequately the operation of markets nor can it deal satisfactorily with a large portion of economic rational choices. Even scientists do not choose in a social vacuum as presumed by economic rationality. Within the scientific field the neoinstitutionalistic vision highlights the social aspects implicated in scientific practice and consequently in the choices of the scientists. The neoinstitutionalists consider not just the scientists (their actions and choices) as basic units in their analysis of science, but also include the institutions, the communities, the norms, the rules, and the values. Scientists choose under stronger social links than the individualistic and traditional models of rationality allow. They choose rationally in an institutionalized, organized, regulated, and normative environment, besides interactively and strategically. Their rational choices are understood in terms of bounded and strategic rationality, in which the values that come from social norms and cognitive rules play an important role. Individual scientists have interests, beliefs, preferences, and values, all of which is mediated by the institutional and normative matrix of science. All values, including cognitive values, are social. According to Shi (2002) cognitive values (such as simplicity, precision, etc.) are a type of social value linked to institutional norms and rules of science. The norms and rules are essential elements of the scientific institutions. They not only determine the scientists’ frame of opportunities in their strategical interactions, but they also provide a substratum of values and prescriptions shared by scientists belonging to a scientific community. Shared values explain the presence of common interpretations and evaluations of the choice problems that scientists face. The shared values make it possible for individual scientists to evaluate problems in a similar manner, to have common objectives, and linked strategies in order to achieve those objectives. This implies coordination and cooperation, and one of the functions of norms is, precisely, to make both feasible. Finally, values are not the non-rational bedrock of explanation. Values are part of the reasons from which choice is made. Individuals are
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able to give reasons about values and can deliberate rationally about them.
5. The Rational Choice Following Kahnemann and Tversky’s proposal, we can affirm that shared values operate in two key moments of the rational choice process: in the analysis of the choice problem and in the evaluation of the alternatives. As previously indicated, the analysis of the choice problem constitutes a fundamental stage in rational choice. In this stage individuals interpret, organize, and reformulate the options that they then evaluate and from which they choose. Kahnenmann and Tversky underline just what is entailed here, namely, that the analysis of the choice problem depends not only on the way information is presented but also on the individuals’ perspectives. Such perspectives involve habits, expectations and, also, shared values of individuals with convergent mental models about the choice problem. Sharing and convergence explain how it is that different individuals bring forth similar analyses of the choice problem. Shared values and analogous mental models are also present in the second stage of rational choice, namely, in the evaluation of alternatives from which individuals choose. Shared evaluation is possible to the degree that individuals share values (besides others such as beliefs and expectations) about the options before them and from which they choose the option they consider most adequate. Thus, shared values play a crucial role in the analysis of the choice problem, in the evaluation of alternatives, and in the choice. While the analysis and the evaluation are individualized and personalized processes, they do not take place in a social void. The individuals are members of institutions, groups, societies, and cultures in which they share, among other things, values that play a role in the analysis and evaluation of the choice problem and in their rational choices. Just the same, they confront the analysis, evaluation, and choice individually. Finally, individuals choose the option they consider most adequate. However, we understand this not as a function of the value that individuals give to wealth and welfare changes in respect to the status quo, as Kahnemann and Tversky maintain, but in a broader sense, as a function of the several values used by the individuals in the evaluation of the alternatives among which they choose. These values can include
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changes in the status quo, reciprocity, welfare of others, compensations, or other values. It depends on the choice problem and the values of individuals within their social and cultural contexts. The descriptive view makes it clear that individuals do not choose rationally according to a single value as the maximization of utility that normative rational choice theory claims. We can even find different types of values in the field of economics, in contrast to what the neoclassical theories have maintained and, furthermore, all are shared values. As Denzau and North (2000, p. 40) remark: “a market economy is based on the existence of a set of shared values such that trust can exist.” Values as different as adhering to the latest fashion trends or refusing to accept child labor can influence choices in the market. For instance, what fashion dictates is a social-cultural value that the consumers make their own, even when it goes against their pecuniary interest. Camerer (2004) has demonstrated that values such as those of justice can explain diverse behavior and choice in the market economy. Thaler (1991) and Camerer (2004) believe Rational Choice Theory must be changed in order to include the fact that people take acting correctly and being treated justly very much into account. At the same time, we must keep in mind that individuals when making their choices tend to follow a satisfying strategy (as Kahneman and Tvesky concede to Simon). In the satisfying strategy values can operate as criteria that determine when an individual considers an alternative satisfactory and stops looking for any other.
6. Concluding Remarks What I am highlighting here is the importance of shared values when facing the social dimension of rational choice. However, this does not mean, in any way, that the shared values are socially monolithic or everlasting values as the sociological Theory of the Status affirms. Neither values nor choices are a simplistic function of the social and cultural environment. Shared values may be dominant ones in a society, culture or any type of group. But just the opposite may also occur: values held by those who refuse reigning ones and uphold, instead, others. As previously indicated, shared values are those that individuals accept and make their own. The values involved in rational choices are the ones that sustain the individuals who choose. The point is that these are not exclusive values of an isolated and pre-social individual (a real Robinson Crusoe, or, according to Hobbes, men who just come out of earth by
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spontaneous generation and suddenly, like mushrooms, reach their maturity). Instead, values imply others and diverse forms of life in common within society. To conclude, the contribution here has been an effort not only to expand the explanation of deviations of normative rational choice theory but to contribute to the questioning of normative rational choice theory on which economic laws are based and to reinforce the call for an effort to give major empirical content to the rational choice. And this is carried out by acknowledging how some factors, coming from the social and cultural environment, operate on the rational choices of cognitively limited individuals who follow heuristic rules and who are subjected to framing effects in their choices. In other words, how psychological and social factors come together in rational choice. Hence, we believe that the proposal put forth here provides a fundamental research guideline for the descriptive program of rational choice. Further in-depth study promises potentially crucial insights given the horizon of the descriptive program in which some economics issues are seen in a quite new and different manner.
University of La Laguna Faculty of Philosophy Campus de Guajara, s/n 38206 La Laguna Spain e-mail:
[email protected]
REFERENCES Agazzi, E. (1987). Il problema della formalizzazione nelle scienze umane. Il Quadrante Scolastico 34, 10-23. Allais, P.M. (1953). The Behavior of Rational Man in Risk Situations. A Critique of the Axioms and Postulates of American School. Econometrica 21, 503-546. Arthur, W.B. (1991). Designing Economic Agents That Acts Like Human Agents: A Bahavioral Approach to Bounded Rationality. American Economic Review 12 (81), 353-359. Backhouse, R. (1997). Truth and Progress in Economic Knowledge. Lyme, NH: Edward Elgar Pub. Bazerman, M.H., R. Gibbons, L. Thompson, and K.L. Valley (1998). Can Negotiators Outperform Game Theory? In: Halpern and Stern (1998), pp. 78-98. Camerer, C. F., G. Loewenstein, and M. Rabbin, eds. (2004). Behavioral Economics. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Coleman, J.S. (1990). The Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coleman, J.S. (1994). A Rational Choice Perspective on Economic Sociology. In: Smelser and Swedberg (1994), pp. 166-180. Chong, D. (2000). Rational Lives. Norms and Values in Political and Society. Chicago: The Univerity of Chicago Press. Denzau, A.T. and D. North (2000). Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions. In: Lupias et al. (2000), pp. 23-46. Ellsberg, D. (1961). Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms. Quaterly Journal of Economics 75, 643-669. Gigerenzer, G. (1983). The Bounded Rationality of Probabilistic Mental Models. In: Manktelow and Over (1983), pp. 284-313. Gigerenzer, G. and R. Selten, eds. (2001). Bounded Rationality. The Adaptative Toolbox. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gilovich, Th., D. Griffin, and D. Kahneman, eds. (2002). Heuristics and Biases. The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gómez, A. (2003). Las leyes ceteris paribus y la inexactitud de la economía. Teorema. Revista internacional de filosofía 3 (XX), 69-80. Gómez, A. (2006). Estructura y componente empírico de la teoría del intercambio en economía. Endoxa. Series filosóficas 21, 115-136. Halpern, J.K. and R.M. Stern, eds. (1998). Debating Rationality. New York: Cornell University Press. Halpern, J.K. (1998). Bonded Rationality: The Rationality of Everyday Decision Making in a Social Context. In: Halpern and Stern (1998), pp. 219-238. Henrich, J., J.H.W. Albers, R. Boyd, G. Gingerenzer, K.A. McCabe, A. Ockenfels, and H.P. Young (2001). What Is the Role of Culture in Bounded Rationality. In: Gigerenzer and Selten (2001), pp.343-357. Holland, J.H., K.J. Holyoak, R.E. Nisbett, and P.R. Thagard (1986). Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning, and Discovery. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kahneman, D. (2002). Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment. In: Gilovich et al. (2002), pp. 19-49. Kahneman, D. and A. Tversky (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica 47, 263-291. Kahneman, D. and A. Tversky (1984). Choices, Values, and Frames. American Psychologist 39, pp. 341-350. Kahneman, D. and A. Tversky, eds. (2000). Choices, Values, and Frames. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, eds. (1982). Judgmen under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuklinski, J.H. and P.J. Quirk (2000). Reconsidering the Rational Public Choice: Cognition, Heuristics, and Mass Opinion. In: Lupias et al. (2000), pp.153-182. Langlois, R. (1990). Bounded Rationality and Behavioralism: A Clarification and Critique. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 146 (4), 691-695. Lupias, A., M.D. McCubbins, and S.L. Popkin (2000). Elements of Reason. Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Machina, M.J. (1982). “Expected Utility” Analysis without the Independence Axiom. Econometrica 50, 277-323. Manktelow, K.I. and D.E. Over, eds. (1983). Elements of Reason. Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality. London: Routledge.
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Plous, S. (1993). The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. New Yok: McgrawHill. Ross, L. and C.A. Anderson (1982). Shortcomings in the Attrinution Process: On the Origins and Maintenance of Erroneus Social Assessments. In: Kahneman et al. (1982), pp. 129-152. Shi, Y. (2002). The Economics of Scientific Knowledge. A Rational Choice NeoInstitutionalist Theory of Science. Cheltenham, NH: Edward Elgar. Simon, H.A. (1955). A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice. Quaterly Journal of Economics 69, 99-118. Simon, H.A. (1956). Rational Choice and Structure of the Environment. Psychlogical Review 63,129-138. Simon, H.A. (1957). Models of Man: Social and Rational; Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting. New York: Wiley. Simon, H.A. (1976). From Substantive to Procedural Rationality. In: S.J. Latsis, Method and Appraisal in Economics, pp. 129-148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simon, H.A. (1997). Models of Bounded Rationality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Slovic, P.B. Fischhoff and S. Linchenstein (1982). Response Mode, Framing, and Information Processing in Risk Assessment. In: Kahneman et al. (1982), pp. 463-492. Smelser, N.J. and R. Swedberg, eds. (1994). The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thaler, R.H. (1991). Quasi Rational Economics. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman (1973). Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability. Cognitive Psychology 5, 207-232. Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman (1974). Judgment under Incertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science 185, 1124-1130. Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman (1981). The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice. Science 211, 453-458. Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman (1988). Contingent Weighting in Judgment and Choice. Psychological Review 95, 371-384. Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman (1990). The Causes of Preference Reversal. American Economic Review 1 (80), 204-217. Zey, M. (1998). Rational Choice Theory and the Organizational Theory: A Critique. California/London/New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
Brigitte Falkenburg THE INVISIBLE HAND: WHAT DO WE KNOW? 1
ABSTRACT. Adam Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand” and its analogue in classical physics are investigated in detail. Smith’s analogue was the mechanics of the solar system. What makes the analogy fail are not the idealisations in the caricature-like model of the rational economic man. The main problem rather is that the metaphor does not employ the correct analogue, which belongs to thermodynamics and statistics. In the simplest macro-economic model, the business cycle has the same formal structure as the heat flow between two heat reservoirs and a business cycle of growing efficiency works like a refrigerator: it pumps money from the poor to the rich. More complicated models do not give a friendlier image. Due to technological push, an economic system behaves like a thermodynamic system far from the equilibrium, showing chaotic behaviour and developing into unpredictable states .
Up to the present day, defenders of absolutely deregulated markets employ Adam Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand.” Here, the metaphor and its analogue in classical physics are investigated in detail. The original analogue of Smith’s was the dynamical link between the bodies of celestial mechanics and their order in the solar system. However, what makes the analogy fail are not the idealisations in the caricature-like model of the rational economic man. Today it is known that the metaphor just does not employ the correct analogue, which belongs to thermodynamics and statistics rather than to the mechanics of a many-body system of a small number of bodies. In the simplest macroeconomic model which spells out the analogy, the economic cycle has the same formal structure as the heat flow between two heat reservoirs. In this model, a business cycle of optimal efficiency works like a refrigerator: it pumps money from the poor to the rich. More complicated models do not give a friendlier image. In particular, due to technological 1
Translated from German by Vanessa Cirkel.
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 207-224. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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push an economic system behaves like a thermodynamic system far from the equilibrium, showing chaotic behaviour and developing into unpredictable states.
1. Rationality from an Invisible Hand? Following Adam Smith’s often evoked metaphor of the invisible hand markets evolve as if God was guiding them to the better, i.e., to a desirable equilibrium of supply and demand, if only all producers and consumers were eager to serve their own purposes. The metaphor of the invisible hand is up to these days linked to the idea that selfish economic action, which is solely orientated on personal advantages, finally will, as if following a law of nature, add to the well-being of all individuals of a society. This idea is actually based upon a deep-rooting analogy between classical economics and classical physics. Already Adam Smith had this analogy in mind, but like many defenders of the free market today, he did neither have insight into its formal import nor into the conditions under which it does hold. In Smith’s work there is no systematic discussion of the analogy. The metaphor of the invisible hand just shows up in a few scattered passages and stands in a number of quite different contexts. Those passages that are often referred to even today are to be found in the moral philosophy as well as in the economic theory. There, Smith gives incisive examples of how individual economic action of human beings leads to a form of welfare which affects all society, without the individual actors intending to do so. So, according to Smith, the rich enhance the produce of the soil to such a degree, that finally the poor profit from the enhancement as well: The produce of the soil maintains at all times nearly by that number of inhabitants which it is capable of maintaining. The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose form the labours of all thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplications of the species. (Smith 1761, pp. 184-185)
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The context of this passage from the Theory of Moral Sentiments is not the relation between morality and economy, but a chapter on the human love of beauty and system. The chapter deals with the usefulness of the strive for beauty, of the need of harmony and of organising principles for the general well-being. Close to some illustrative material from the field of architecture and the aforementioned example of economy Smith points out, that aestheticism and orderliness advance, among other things, the foundation of social institutions: The same principle, the same love of system, the same regard to the beauty of order, of art and contrivance, frequently serves to recommend those institutions which tend to promote the public welfare. (Smith 1761, p. 185)
Behind the metaphor of the invisible hand there seems to be the following basic idea: The selfish struggle for luxuries is not so much due to the account of vicious inclinations like avarice as rather on behalf of the human strive for beauty. This is the reason why egoistic economic actions should finally have a positive effect on all society. The human aestheticism ensures that selfishness serves social welfare. To put it differently: between self-centred economic ambition and social welfare there is some kind of pre-established harmony; because the selfish striving of the individual is subject to the same principles of harmony and order as society in general. Something like a doctrine of virtue, asking people to restrict their selfish needs according to a moral principle of frugality, becomes unnecessary from this point of view. The needs of human beings are rather structured in such a way that their economic actions serve an aim not intentionally pursued, the increase of public welfare. But the selfinterest of men is not unlimited. Because, for Adam Smith public welfare also contains the legal order, which functions as a framework condition for the fulfilment of people’s needs. Quite contrary to what is often purported, his metaphor of the invisible hand does not imply the development of totally deregulated markets towards an equilibrium but rather market development under legal conditions.2 The pre-established harmony of individual needs and public welfare does therefore not only include the development of the market towards an equilibrium, but also 2 Mestmäcker (1978, p. 160) shows this under the nice title “Die sichtbare Hand des Rechts” (“The Visible Hand of Law”); Mestmäcker (1978, p. 164): “Die Vereinbarkeit des egoistischen Handelns mit dem öffentlichen Interesse wird nicht dadurch gesichert, daß der einzelne vorgibt, im öffentlichen Interesse zu handeln, sondern dadurch, daß er sein Eigeninteresse in den Grenzen des Rechts verfolgt.”
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the system of laws which constrains the dynamics of the market. Concerning the topic of investment in the domestic economy, Smith put this teleological thought in The Wealth of Nations the following way: As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestick industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. [. . .] and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. [. . .] By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really want to promote it. (Smith 1776, p. 456) 3
Is the invisible hand, which is supposed to be at work here, supposed to be the hand of God? Or is Smith just using a metaphor, indicating that from his point of view there are law-like relations between the motives of the individual’s actions and their collective effect? Both readings are arguable. Due to the theological overtone that accompanies the modern concept of law in physics, one might even understand them as belonging together. Galileo, Kepler, and Newton wanted to decipher the mathematical laws which are written in the book of nature. To them, this book was the work of God and the laws of nature the mathematical expression of the divine order. Smith on the other hand was interested in the law-like connections of natural things as much as he was interested in the socio-economic organising principles and the laws of human society. In the essay about the history of astronomy he shows the historical development which led to the formulation to the laws of celestial mechanics by Kepler and Newton. And there he makes use of the metaphor of the invisible hand once more. This time it appears in the following context. Smith emphasises the deep contrast between modern astronomy and physics on the one hand and ancient natural philosophy on the other. He stresses this contrast especially regarding the understanding of the laws of nature. Ancient natural philosophy invoked the moods of quite a number of different gods to explain irregular natural phenomena and wonders. However, it did not employ the invisible hand of Jupiter, but rather the essence of the things themselves in order to explain the law-like occurrence of natural
3
Here, Smith attributes to the protagonists particular selfish motives which in the age of globalisation do no longer work like this. Today, the flight of capital in the form of foreign accounts and shares is possible due to missing international laws.
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phenomena, for example the well-known facts about fire, water, and bodies: Fire burns, and water refreshes; heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; nor was the invisible hand of Jupiter ever apprehended to be employed in those matters. (Smith 1795, p. 49)
From a modern point of view all natural phenomena are in contrast dynamically related by immaterial links respectively forces, what Smith calls an invisible chain. Modern physics (that Newton had still called natural philosophy) is concerned with recognising the principles of order and coherence in nature, which link all individual, seemingly chaotic natural things: Philosophy is the science of the connecting principles of nature. Nature, after the largest experience that common observation can acquire, seems to abound with events which appear solitary and incoherent with all that go before them [ . . . ] Philosophy, by representing the invisible chain which binds together all these disjointed objects, endeavours to introduce order into this chaos of jarring and discordant appearances [. . .]. (Smith 1795, pp. 45-46)
Smith is full of admiration for Newton’s system of general gravitation which makes this invisible chain between the natural phenomena visible with so far unknown perfection (Smith 1795, pp. 104-105). The expression invisible chain is something like a secularised (or rather naturalised) version of the metaphor of the invisible hand. The emphasis is now only on the physical effect, but no more on divine action. Yet the religious background is still present, when Smith marks off modern understanding of nature from ancient natural philosophy. There, in the polytheistic framework the action of one unique invisible hand is not assumed in order to explain regular, consistent natural phenomena. Against that background the metaphor of the invisible chain (which links all natural phenomena) does not express anything fundamentally different from the metaphor of the invisible hand (which presides over economy). Both metaphors are typical of the rationalist thinking of the 17th and 18th century. Rationalism established close connections between the laws of nature and the actions of God within the world. Smith regards the organising principles of socio-economic systems and the laws of physics as analogous. And this means that he sees powers and laws at work in nature as well as in human society. From his point of view, in both cases these organising powers are responsible for the organisation of the individuals’ behaviour to a stable system, or rather:
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they make that the individual behaviour of the system’s elements generate a well-controlled system as a whole. Like the celestial bodies form Newton’s general system of gravitation and thus create the solar system, so do the single actors in a socio-economic system by creating collective order through individual strive for beauty and harmony. Because the individuals are provided with aestheticism and orderliness and act under the constraints of a system of laws, they increase the public welfare with their selfish actions. Here, Smith anticipates a formal analogy between the behaviour of physical and socio-economic systems, which nowadays can be spelled out in mathematical terms; even though not in the way he may have expected! From his point of view, the physical universe and the human society are comparable the following way: Like the single celestial bodies due to their masses form the overall system of gravitation, so the human needs fit in a system of economic action. Thereby the order of the planetary motions in the solar system equals a well-regulated socioeconomic system which develops in favour of the social welfare. In order to make this analogy plausible, Smith attributes men in his Theory of Moral Sentiments with a need for beauty, harmony and order. In contrast thereto the image of man in the neo-classical economics does no longer include any moral properties or principles. However, the conditions under which the analogy between physical and economic systems holds are neither made explicit in the work of Adam Smith nor in neo-classical economics. With them, the validity of the metaphor of an invisible hand which brings order into the system remains unquestioned.
2. Physics and Economics: The Correct Analogue Neo-classical economic theory links the levels of the individual actors and economic system with the help of two central concepts. The instrumental or purpose-oriented rationality of economic action is expressed by an abstract model of men – the model of the rational economic man, who is conceived as egoistically maximising his own benefit. The expedience of the whole is in the micro-economics covered by the concept of Pareto efficiency. An economic unit works Pareto efficient if no individual in this unit can enhance his or her position without worsening somebody else’s position. It is striking that both concepts understand rationality with respect of human purposes merely in the sense of profit maximisation. In the model of the rational economic man the concept of a person is reduced to the abstraction of the
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purposeful actor, whose actions only aim at maximising his benefit.4 For the sake of generality this is abstracted from all other motives, including the aestheticism and orderliness according to Smith. Of course this is an ideal-typical model in Max Weber’s sense, resting upon idealisation. It still has to be examined how far it can be applied to human behaviour. In the ideal case, if the conditions of being adequate and applicable are fulfilled, the model of the rational economic man will correspond to the actual economic action of men, at least statistically or in the average. Only under such general, ideal conditions the behaviour of the rational economic man becomes thus calculable. What is calculated, i.e., given the form of a mathematical model, is his producer and consumer behaviour: the number of products he may produce and sell or is willing to buy; the money that he may invest; the prices he fixes his goods at or he is ready to accept; and finally, the monetary benefits or economic profits he thus is trying to maximise. With this method one may model markets with the help of operational research. The solving of mathematical extremum problems is particularly of interest. The producer and consumer behaviour is defined under the assumption that everyone may maximise his or her benefits; as a solution results in an equilibrium state. In this model supply and demand regulate each other like according to a law of nature. The consumers’ demand determines the supply on the part of the producers and vice versa: an equilibrium of the market is reached. Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand is up to the day willingly used for pointing out the law-like development of a market towards an equilibrium state. Nevertheless, it is all too often forgotten that Smith himself thought only of market mechanisms set under legal conditions. Actually, here applies a socio-economic law that has an exact formal analogue in physics. So one is absolutely entitled to speak of market mechanisms, as far as the model of the rational economic man is justified by social reality. In this ideal case markets behave exactly like manyparticle states which obey classical statistical mechanics or the kinetic theory of gases. A free market can be compared to a many-particle state, with unbound particles; or: to an ideal gas with freely moving molecules. The individual decisions of producers and consumer corresponds to the inertial motions of the molecules. A good that is produced and consumed on the market, has a (relative) value for producers; for consumers it has an average utility; and this matches the price they are ready to pay. In contrast to modern economics Adam Smith still had a theory of the “absolute” value or labour value that 4
The model traces back to Bentham and Mill; cf. Hottinger (1999).
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makes the “natural” price of a good (Smith 1776, p. 48). Smith’s “natural” price, to which in modern economics corresponds the average utility or relative value of a good, is analogous to the average kinetic energy of the gas molecules or to the temperature of the gas. The market price then fluctuates around the relative value which is averaged over all consumers and producers or the “natural” price. This is comparable to the fluctuation of the molecules’ energy around the mean value. Each of both variables, the average market price or the average energy of the molecules, then formally acts as a parameter of an optimisation problem. In economics the utility function is maximised, in kinetic gas theory it is the probability of the molecule velocity (respectively the entropy). If there is an equilibrium between supply and demand, the economic utility function becomes optimal. Analogously, in the thermal equilibrium the molecules of an ideal gas are distributed according to the MaxwellBoltzmann-equation.5 Thus markets tend to the same kind of equilibrium of supply and demand like an ideal gas tends to the thermal equilibrium of the molecules. Both dynamics follow the same formal law. This dynamics actually fits the understanding of the metaphor of the invisible hand outlined above: If all producers and consumers indeed are only particularly concerned about their own profits, all markets develop for the better, namely to an equilibrium state where the benefits for all consumers and producers are maximised. The equilibrium state is Pareto efficient, i.e. no one can achieve a better position without manoeuvring someone else into a worse position. To what extent this equilibrium state realises social justice, however, is a different question. From this kind of economic modelling thus results a concept of economics which is exactly modelled after the ideas of classical physics. The analogies between economic and physical modelling have indeed farreaching consequences. Beginning with the abstract description of an ideal individual whose actual individual properties, however, are 5
The optimisation problem consists in maximising the Lagrange function of a system under a side condition whose components are independent of each other except for the side condition. In the kinetic gas theory the temperature functions as a Lagrange parameter, in the theory of the market the (natural) price. In the case of the ideal gas, the side condition is that the total energy of all molecules is conserved. The analogous conserved quantity at the market may be considered to be the altogether available money supply, as far as one abstracts from flight of capital, stock exchange stock, inflation etc. So the analogy has to be taken with caution. It is spelled out in Mimkes (1999) in many details; to what extent it holds, however, is not discussed there. For several competing markets, the economic correlate of the temperature is the mean income of a society, i.e., the standard of living. See also Mimkes (2000).
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neglected by the model itself: here it is the mass point of classical mechanics; there it is the rational economic man. In both cases the behaviour of the ideal individual is basically seen as calculable and statistical laws predict what kind of collective state will most likely occur, due to the actions of the individuals. Physics: The single mass point moves along a trajectory according to the law of force, thus corresponding to the principle of least action. In an ideal gas the trajectories describe the inertial motions of the molecules. The molecules interact through collisions. In a collision they exchange kinetic energy. If the motions of the particles initially are non-correlated, in course of time they assimilate to the statistical average and the whole system develops towards thermodynamic equilibrium. This corresponds to the state of maximum entropy. Economics: Rational economic man acts according to the principle of profit maximisation. Producers and consumers produce and consume independently. Only during the process of purchase they get into contact. There, money is exchanged and the market tends to an equilibrium of supply and demand. Interactions just take place via the market mechanism, where supply and demand mutually balance. As a result a Pareto efficient equilibrium state is reached, with optimum utility for all market participants. Additionally, the analytic-synthetic view upon natural processes can also be found in the modelling of economics. This view is characteristic for modern physics. It assumes, e.g., the decomposability of forces in single components. It is assumed that such components can be measured separately and that summed up they explain the motion of a mechanical body. Similarly, the dynamic properties of a composite many-body system as a whole are assumed to sum up from the dynamic properties of its parts. In case of economics, the whole is the market. It is modelled as a composite system, its structure, here: its equilibrium state, being explained by the sum of the economic decisions made by all the individuals. Moreover, economics make use of ideal-typical explanations for certain economic situations; after analysing the structure of a concrete economic system they have to be combined in order to finally apply them to the whole system (Eucken 1950, p. 162). Up to this point, the analogy between statistical physics and neoclassical economics seems exactly to be teaching what economic liberalism has been claiming for a long time, referring to the metaphor of the invisible hand: Compared to all economic systems, the untamed freemarket economy works best. On the long run non-regulated markets enhance the welfare of all participants.
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Unfortunately this is not the whole truth. The question of whether and how the market mechanism works in each particular case has to be solved out considering the particular market conditions prevailing at that moment. Here the conditions of adequacy concerning economic theory formation come into play. Which idealised assumptions have been made and to what extent are they justified in the specific case? Or: under which non-negligible boundary conditions do supply and demand balance? According to Adam Smith, the legal order under which the market mechanism works has to be taken into account. Absolutely deregulated markets with uncontrolled growth strictly speaking do not exist according to the author of the metaphor of the invisible hand.6 Besides: what kind of equilibrium state is expected to be reached by such uncontrolled growth?
3. Society Atomised Neo-classical economics is based on an atomistic model of society. Everyone acts selfishly and thinks only of maximising his or her profits. The basic idea about the rational economic man is: He does not consider others when acting; no social bonds are taken into account. All peculiarities in the behaviour of single individuals are as well neglected as altruistic acting in favour of others which establishes relations between the individuals. As one does with molecules in the kinetic gas theory, one abstracts from the actual properties of the individuals as well as from their dynamic interactions or binding forces. The correct analogy between economics and statistical physics holds for an atomic society without any social bonds. In this society the market mechanisms function as an analogue to the laws which hold for an ideal gas in thermodynamics and statistical physics. To what extent is this ideal socio-economic model justified? How is it related to socio-economic reality? On first sight it appears as if it was way afar from social reality; therefore it was already criticised in the philosophy of science for being a caricature due to its invalid abstractions; Morgan (1997). Concerning the validity of the model, however, one has to divide the individual from the collective level. Certainly, the rational economic man is in many respects just a blurred image of the single actor in an economic system. But when taking into account the statistical aspects of modelling it becomes evident that the 6
Cf. my above remarks and Mestmäcker (1978, p. 164).
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neo-classical model describes the socio-economic reality of free market economy under capitalistic conditions just all too realistic. The atomic society is, from an economic point of view, the reality we do live in. Its market mechanisms function merciless, whether we do approve them or not. That is why for a good reason moderate economic liberals stand in for a social market economy, in which the market develops in the framework of a social and legal order. From a formal point of view, in a social market economy the laws of the market function under the boundary conditions put by of a system of laws. At the level of individuals the economic modelling is clearly inadequate. For example, it neglects all irrational ways of behaviour of the actors. Though there are impressive examples of purpose-oriented rational actions in every day life in the sense of the economic image of man,7 strictly spoken no one in reality acts like the rational economic man. The simple model deviates in many aspects from economic reality. The actual economic behaviour of producers and consumers might be very complicated depending on the very case. Human beings quite often act irrationally in such a way that they violate the economists’ axioms. They are not consistent in their preferences, i.e., their tendencies to prefer certain goods at a given price do not necessarily form a coherent whole. Men often act even inevitably irrationally. They have to make their decisions while their knowledge is limited and they are fully aware of that fact. 8 An excellent example for this is the investment behaviour when being faced with the stock price which can rather never be based on sufficient knowledge of the market. Moreover the basic concept of rationality is one-sided. Human beings do not only tend to selfish but also to altruistic behaviour and they have good reasons to do so. All this is based on emotions like empathy and our moral ideas. Those who follow altruistic principles in their actions do not maximise their own, but somebody else’s benefit. From a statistical point of view, such deviations of the real producer and consumer behaviour from the rational utility maximisation of economic modelling do not play a decisive role. The individual ways of behaviour are neglected, in the legitimate expectation that they have no or just a small effect at the collective level. It is assumed that the individual peculiarities of the actors only have a negligible effect on the economic conditions under which the equilibrium of the market is
7
This conception can be seen in Friedman (1996). In economics one tried to take this into account by theories of bounded rationality; cf. Simon (1992). 8
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reached. Modelling is based on the idea that individual deviations from the intentional rational behaviour mutually annihilate in the statistic average. But this assumption does clearly not hold for two rather common cases: (1) if individuals follow trends, i.e., if their individual deviations from the rational consumer behaviour all tend into the same direction; and (2) if reflexivity is involved, i.e., if the development of a market is influenced by the theoretical prognoses of this very development, like it happens especially in the case of financial markets (Soros 1998). In both cases the simple model drawn here obviously fails. Trends shift the equilibrium state, reflexivity causes fluctuations. Adequate modelling becomes more complicated in these cases. That it is still not impossible though, is shown by the new physics of socio-economic systems, having some impressive successful explanations in store, e.g., concerning the variations of the stock price. However, there are no useful quantitative predictions.9 This becomes fatally clear at the statistical level: the correct physical analogue to the market mechanism is not, like Adam Smith assumed, the mechanics of a manageable and stable system of a few celestial bodies, but rather described in terms of classical thermodynamics and statistics. Today we know that according to the mechanics of a many particle state even the stable orbits of the celestial bodies of the solar system rather are the exception from the rule. The behaviour of complex systems is generally chaotic. Just under very special boundary conditions they develop stable states. The correct analogue to the functioning of the market mechanism is the dynamics of a thermodynamic system beyond the equilibrium. Whether the market mechanism leads to socio-economic conditions which, on the long run, add to the well-being of all participants, is, according to the analogy between physics and economics, not at all self-evident. The dynamic development of the market towards a stable, Pareto-efficient equilibrium cannot be guaranteed at all, as soon as a number of markets are considered that compete under different socio-economic conditions. The same holds for the development of the markets in the case of a gain in productivity, due to technological push. And it is rather not the case that those idealisations are responsible which go into the model of the rational economic man. More treacherous are the transitions from the so far modelled micro-economics to the 9
In principle, known deviations from the behaviour of the rational economic man, just like the legal frame of the markets, can be taken into account by maximising the utility function under side conditions.
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macro-economics. They have to take into account several additional factors, especially concerning trade, unemployment and inflation. In the best case a system of markets develops in analogy to a reversible thermodynamic process close to the thermodynamic equilibrium. But if technological innovations come into play, the correct physical analogue to the circular flow of the economy is the behaviour of a complex system far-off from equilibrium. According to all we know from non-equilibrium thermodynamics, it is mere luck whether such a system behaves totally chaotic or whether it tends towards a stable state; and if so to which one. Already when leaving technological innovations aside, the analogy between physics and economics leads to quite embarrassing insights. The analogy between an ideal gas and a society of the selfish, who maximise their own profits, makes it possible to bridge the gap between the models of micro- and macro-economics. Due to the laws of combinatorics it follows that social justice in the atomised society is as improbable as a uniform distribution of the kinetic energy of the molecules. Even if the households’ incomes scatter around a mean value (Poisson distribution), the most probable distribution of wealth will form a capitalist model, with few owning much and many owning few (Boltzmann distribution).10 Additionally the business cycle may be considered regarding the interaction of two markets which belong to social systems with a different standard of living. The thermodynamic analogue of this case is the heat exchange between two heat reservoirs of different temperature. The business cycle is in this case the exact formal analogue of the Carnot cycle of thermodynamics. This simple model teaches us that the efficiency of the business cycle increases right then when the profit is gained in a one-sided way, i.e., if more profit is gained on the rich market.11 This leads naturally to an ever increasing inequality instead of 10
Mimkes (2000, section 4), Mimkes (1999, pp. 43). Both distributions do well agree with the German data (from the years before the reunification) which shows Mimkes. In the statistical model, a uniform distribution only results from the capital when nobody has anything. 11 Mimkes (1999, pp. 78); Mimkes (2000, section 4). The quasi-thermodynamic model forecasts four possible mode of actions of the market mechanism: A. Colonialism: The profit is distributed in the richer society whose standard of living grows at the expense of the poorer society; the efficiency of the economic cycle increases. B. Booming economy: If the economy profit flows back to the poorer society, the living standards tend towards being equal; the efficiency of the economic cycle decreases. C. Fair deal: The trading partners share the profit, doing justice to each other; the economic cycle proceeds with constant efficiency and the standard of living grows in both societies. D. Two class world: The colonialist market mechanism works in the domestic market; an originally homogeneous society splits up into the poor and the rich.
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an oscillation around a socio-economic equilibrium. This happens especially in the trade of two markets evaluating human labour differently; like in the case of production by international companies in a low wages country, when the products are sold on the expensive market of another country, without the profits flowing back to the low wages market. Here the economic cyclic functions as a heat pump, pumping the heat from a colder into a warmer reservoir, i.e., like a refrigerator: it produces capital by pumping the profits from a poorer into a wealthier area. This means, however, that it works like a refrigerator. The production in countries with low wages, like it is typical for the current process of globalisation, does not follow the simple model of the free market at all. It is far from establishing a desirable socio-economic equilibrium like established from God’s invisible hand. In contradistinction to what Smith had supposed, the poor do not profit sufficiently from the striving for luxuries of the rich. The markets of the globalised world do not make up a system of needs which are in preestablished harmony. Instead the simplest socio-economic model predicts, if spelled out correctly in analogy to thermodynamics: A business cycle with a growing efficiency, thus gaining ever higher profits, always makes the poor even poorer and the rich even richer, exactly like the opponents of globalisation argue. Smith may have objected in favour of his metaphor that these conditions of globalisation depend on the lack of legal framework conditions. There is no international system of laws which might prevent the consequences predicted in the simple refrigerator model. In the atomic society, however, due to the missing social bonds those who make the profits do not care about all this. But if the business cycle is regulated by political and legal constraints, its efficiency will be constrained as well; exactly like the advocates of an unrestricted market economy argue. Evidently, there is not much cause in the thermodynamic analogy to trust in the blessings of the market mechanisms. If technological innovations are added, the resulting image is not much friendlier. Technological push enhances the productivity. This makes labour cheaper and destroys jobs on the respective sector of production without creating new ones to the same degree. Neo-classical economics reacted thereto with the theory of Kondratieff cycles, predicting long-term variations of the economic situation due to technological innovation, lasting for decades. 12 The economic theory
12
Schumpeter (1939). For recent considerations of the economic theory of technological push cf., e.g., Hall (1994).
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predicts long-term variations around the economic equilibrium states; and that these variations appear again and again, combined with periodic growth (here an analogy to the biological concept of dynamic equilibrium seems likely). Also the relapse into recession that might appear now and again can be taken into account in the quasi-thermodynamic model; Mimkes (1999, p. 80). The thermodynamic analogue then teaches us that rationalisation through innovation increases the efficiency of the business cycle, while political measures to increase the employment rate decrease it in turn. The theory of the Kondratieff cycles matches the empirical fact that thus society re-organises itself totally every few decades. But how may that be any help for the unemployed of today, already being to old or ill educated for nowadays’ innovations, if in about 30 to 40 a great number of fundamentally new jobs will develop, while then their children will be unemployed?
4. What Do We Know? One may reproach the refrigerator model of the global, deregulated business cycle for simplifying in an undue way. That is in fact the case. Two objections can be immediately made. Both are linked to the idealisations of the model. On the one hand the interactions between more than two markets soon become unmanageable. Generally they make sure that that the profits that have been gained flow back into markets, at least partially, at whose costs they have been made. If the low wages employees do not profit sufficiently from that, this is often caused by lacking social equality inland the very country; and this is a political problem. On the other hand the analogy to thermodynamics close to equilibrium (like thermodynamics itself) holds only for closed systems. But most certainly global economy is no closed system. On the international financial market assets emerge from nothing and elapse into nothing. Additionally there are territorial, social, and political side conditions, making globalisation and mechanisation have very different effects in different regions. And we do know much more about the dynamics of complex physical systems than we know about the economic cycle in the globalised world – thus making the analogy very misleading. But does this not hold especially true for the analogy that is behind the metaphor of the invisible hand? And is it not admissible to replace one concise image of the internal dynamics of economic development, based on a misunderstood physical analogue, by another concise image that at least brings this analogy to bear correctly.
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However: The analogy between physics and economics does not argue for a doctrine of bare economic liberalism – rather on the contrary. The analogy holds for the ideal model of an atomised society without any social bonds or legal restrictions. In this model individuals act absolutely free, in the sense of freedom being not much more than mere arbitrariness. Their individual decisions are determined through arbitrary needs and are not justified by social norm nor ruled by legal order. The fulfilment of their needs is only limited by economic necessities. Their individual behaviour is uncorrelated. Individual decisions are subject to statistical laws and show only coincidental deviations from the mean value. But at the same time one has to be aware of the following fact. Unfortunately, human needs are not of that kind that socio-economic equilibrium is reached automatically, if all individuals pursue their own benefits. Rather our consumer behaviour takes on a life of its own due to the plasticity of human nature. In atomised society our needs tend towards unlimited growth. Those who are on top of the income- and property-scale may follow these tendencies undisturbed; those who are at the bottom of the scale have to restrict themselves. Yet, not only the simple thermodynamic analogy, but also the experience of the last decades, teaches us that in a globalised world the gap between the rich and the poor diverges increasingly in many places.13 Economists dislike being confronted with such embarrassing truths. Though macro-economics is also based on cyclic models which are modelled according to examples from physics. However, the original idea of an economic cycle is not based on the aforementioned analogies to 19th and 20th century physics.14 It still derives from the ideas of Renaissance to understand nature as an organic whole.15 The cyclic models of modern macro-economics therefore link an early modern, organic idea with the mechanical analogies from classical physics. The 13
For an opposite opinion cf. Norberg (2003). The book primarily cites India and Asia. Norberg’s main thesis is that the globalisation is not due to poverty and mismanagement but to the hindrance to the global free market economy by over-regulation and bureaucratisation. His remarkable plea for liberalism demonstrates the limitations of the thermodynamic analogy discussed here. 14 The first economic work which takes the analogy to thermodynamics into account is Georgescu-Roegen (1971); it treats the embedding of the circular flow of the economy into the ecosystem. Daly (1996) discusses this revolutionary work and its to this day far too low reception in standard economics. Mirowski (1988; 1989) presents a related philosophical account. 15 Cf. the discussion of baroque mercantilism, as represented in the work of Johann Joachim Becher, in Falkenburg (2004).
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basic idea is in both cases similar to Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand: the state of equilibrium in economy is natural; any deviations tend to go back to equilibrium. Above it has been pointed out that already Adam Smith did not believe that this was all happening outside some legal framework; and moreover, that this idea is not justified for the ideal of nature in general. Like the modern theory of selforganisation teaches us, is the tending of a complex system towards equilibrium rather the exception from the rule. This holds especially true for the equilibrium between economy and nature, if the effects of the former on the later cannot be neglected any longer. The idea of an organic circular flow between man and nature, or: the economy and the environment, is only taken up again in modern ecology and in ecological economics. Here, the requirement of looking at economics in a different way is discussed, namely to consider the economic system no longer to be isolated but to be a partial system of the ecosystem. At this point of my considerations, not only the confidence in the market mechanisms which allegedly tend to an equilibrium state on deregulated markets led by an invisible hand should be shaken. In addition it finally should have become clear what stands behind this confidence. It is the early modern age idea of a natural circular flow which will always make the results of our collective economic and technical behaviour turn out in the positive.16 For centuries, the faith in the beneficial effects of technological progress has come hand in hand with the confidence that the economic development always serves the public welfare. Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand is grounded in this faith. However, in view of the relations between technology and economy today such a blind faith means to hide one’s head in the sand.
University of Dortmund Institut für Philosophie (FB 14) Emil-Figge-Straße 50 44227 Dortmund, Germany e-mail:
[email protected]
16
Becher (1689) carried this idea from natural philosophy into economics, even though he already emphasised the ambiguities of technology between progress and failure in Becher (1686). Cf. Falkenburg (2004).
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REFERENCES Becher, J.J. (1686). Närrische Weißheit Und Weise Narrheit. Frankfurt: Zubrodt. Becher, J.J. (1688). Politischer Discurs. Frankfurt: Zunner. Daly, H.E. (1996). Beyond Growth. The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Eucken, W. (1950). Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie. Berlin: Springer. Falkenburg, B. (2004). Wem dient die Technik? In: J.J. Becher-Stiftung Speyer (ed.), Johann Joachim Becher Preis 2002: Die Technik – Dienerin der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung?, pp. 5-172. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Friedman, D. (1996). Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life. New York: HarperBusiness U.S. Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971). The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, P. (1994). Innovation, Economics, and Evolution. Theoretical Perspectives on Changing Technology in Economic Systems. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Hottinger, O. (1999). Die Grundlagen der ökonomischen Nutzentheorie und deshomo oeconomicus: die Beiträge von J. Bentham und J.St. Mill. In: M. Faber (ed.), Horizonte ökonomischen Denkens. DIALEKTIK 1999/3, pp. 63-82. Hamburg: Meiner. Mestmäcker, E.-J. (1978). Die sichtbare Hand des Rechts. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Mimkes, J. (1999). Script zu Politik und Thermodynamik. http://fb6www.unpaderborn.de/ag/ag-mim/publikationen.htm Mimkes, J. (2000). Society as a Many Particle System. Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry 60 (3), 1055-1069. Mirowski, P. (1988). Against Mechanism. Totawa: Rowman and Littlefield. Mirowski, P. (1989). More Heat Than Light. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, M. (1997). The Character of “Rational Economic Man.” In: B. Falkenburg and S. Hauser (eds.), Modelldenken in den Wissenschaften. DIALEKTIK 1997/1, pp. 77-94. Hamburg: Meiner. Norberg, J. (2003). Das kapitalistische Manifest. Warum allein die globalisierte Marktwirtschaft den Wohlstand der Menschheit sichert. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn. Schumpeter, J.A. (1939). Business Cycles. A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, 2 vols. New York and London: Porcupine Press. Simon, H.A. (1992). Economics, Bounded Rationality, and the Cognitive Revolution. Aldershot: Elgar. Smith, A. ([1761] 1976). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, A. ([1776] 1980). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. II. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, A. ([1795] 1980). Essays on Philosophical Subjects. The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. III. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Soros, G. (1998). The Crisis of Global Capitalism. Open Society Endangered. New York: Public Affairs.
Peter Kemp THE COSMOPOLITAN VISION
ABSTRACT. Sociology was born as an attempt to delimit an object of investigation offered by society as a social reality. The ambition was that of “treating the social facts as things” (Durkheim) or of understanding and explaining the social relations by respecting an “axiological neutrality” (Max Weber). Today, however, we are in the presence of a new kind of sociologists, and they are by no means the less popular ones, who are not trying to avoid assessments in their analysis of the present social world. I have in mind especially two sociologists, Ulrich Beck (Munich) and David Held (London). I will discuss in particular the view of sociology presented in a recent book of Ulrich Beck (Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter, 2002, translated into French under the title Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir à l’ère de la mondialisation, 2003), and I will show some analogies between Beck and Held. Finally, I will try to identify the points that make the present sociological epistemology different from that of the great founders of this science.
1. The Question Today two sociologists, Ulrich Beck (Munich) and David Held (London), are becoming fervent advocates of a cosmopolitanism opposed to nationalism, liberalism, Marxism, etc. They support their conviction by analyzing the social life conditions in the 21st century. We are led to ask the question: have they dismissed the scientific ideal of “axiological neutrality” (Max Weber), or the ambition of “treating social facts as things” (Emile Durkheim)? Moreover, if this is true, can we still be sure that their works are scientific? Through these questions, I try to single out the issue of sociological epistemology as it presents itself nowadays: what is a sociological knowledge in our days? Can we achieve and communicate a social and political knowledge today in spite of taking up
In: E. Agazzi, J. Echeverría, and A. Gómez (eds.), Epistemology and the Social (Pozna Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 96), pp. 225-231. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008.
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a definite position in the ethical, legal and especially political discussions?
2. Émile Durkheim Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) insisted on the fact that sociology has its own object of research, that is, the collective consciousness that, even though it does not exist without the individual consciousnesses, constitutes a sui generis reality with specific characteristics that cannot be reduced to psychological features. The behaviour of a group cannot be explained by assembling the individual acts of the single persons, but it follows its own rules. Society, Durkheim says in the book Moral Education (1902-1903), “is a psychic being that has its own way of thinking, of feeling nd of acting, different from that which is proper of the individuals that compose it” (Durkheim 1963, p. 56). This is the reality he tries to treat like things, in the search of testable information that assure it scientific objectivity. Nevertheless Durkheim also pays attention to a specialization and a division of the social tasks that entail a growing individualism that is a threat for the collective consciousness, and consequently people forget the main condition of their social life. Therefore, the individual believes that he can act alone or almost alone, and sets himself against the society of which he is a member, by declaring that he is unique. According to Durkheim, from this phenomenon derive society’s anomies, immorality, and the psychic illnesses that can lead people to suicide, a topic to which he has devoted a whole book. The task of a sociologist, according to Durkheim’s ideal, is not only to make a diagnosis of the social body, but also to prescribe the cure, that is nothing but its moral education. It is necessary to remind the young generation the importance of discipline, that is, the adaptation to the collective consciousness upon which are founded the citizen’s duties. What has survived him, is not the preacher and moralist Durkheim, but his idea that a society consists of sociological facts that can be subjected to a rigorously scientific and objective analysis. They are as objective as the natural facts of the natural sciences.
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3. Max Weber In Max Weber’s work (1864-1920), we do not find the same contradiction as in Durkheim. On the contrary, the author of The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and of his magnum opus, Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1922), the founding work of twentieth century’s sociology, insists on the clear-cut distinction between the social reality composed by relations among values, on the one hand, and the sociological analysis without any valuejudgement of this relations, on the other hand. According to Weber, the sociologist can be strictly objective in his analysis and comprehension of the subjective values that determine the relations among people, be it at the time of Christian Protestantism or in the post-Christian secularized era, relations that produce many conflicts within modern society. Indeed Weber is convinced that the sociologist has at his disposal the necessary verification rules for establishing facts that do not depend on his subjective opinions. Therefore, axiological neutrality (Wertfreiheit) would be possible. This does not prevent Weber from speaking of “science as a vocation,” because he does not deny that science has a theoretical value, but this is a value having a status different from the status of the practical values that the sociologist analyses and describes. In this way, he maintains that the idea of axiological neutrality, that is, of a knowledge without value-judgements, concerns “the practical evaluation of social facts, under ethical or cultural-historical or other points of view that are practically desirable or not desirable” (Weber 1988, p. 499). Nevertheless, in a lecture of 1909, Weber has stressed that his strict distinction between “what it is (das Seiende)” and “what it ought to be (das Seinsollen)” does not mean that he plays down the questions of the ought to be. Quite the contrary, and the reason is that he does not tolerate, as he says, that “problems of world significance and of the highest level that can commit man’s heart be transformed in questions of techno-economic productivity and reduced to an object of discussion among professional disciplines” (quotation in Brun 1972, p. 36). However, if the currently most read sociologists do not respect the axiological neutrality in the sense of Weber anymore, how can we understand this new sociology? This question leads us to Ulrich Beck.
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4. Ulrich Beck Ulrich Beck published in 2002 the work Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter (the title of the French translations to which refer the page numbers of our quotations sounds Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir à l’ère de la mondialisation, 2003). This book is at the same time an analysis regarding the end of the era of the political life of the Nation-States, of their international relations, and a speech for the engagement in transnational politics at the cosmopolitan era. Beck calls the last chapter of his book “A brief funeral oration at the cradle of the cosmopolitan era,” where the deceased who is being buried is the Nation-States system, while the baby in the cradle is cosmopolitism. The author dos not maintain that Nation-States do not exist anymore, or that they do not play a role on the political world scene, but he points out that their borders are more and more deleted because of new facts or challenges, which exceed them and with respect to which the national vision can not give any indication about actions to undertake because they entail a reconsideration of the foundations of that living together of which everyone can have direct experience. According to Beck, these facts are especially “the climatic change, the destruction of the environment, the risks connected with food, the planetary financial risks, the migrations of populations, and the anticipated consequences of nanotechnological and genetic innovations, be they applied to nature or to humans” (Beck 2003, p. 12). Beck also point out that the terrorist attacks of the 11th September 2001 have shown that “power is not synonymous with security” and he explains that “in a radically divided world it twill be possible to live in security only when everyone will be able and ready to see the world of wild modernity through the eyes of the other, of the alien, when cultural evolution will push everyone to put in practice this openness every day” (Beck 2003, p. 12). Beck estimates that, after the 11th September, it is not a dream, but really a question of survival to insist on the necessity of “a spirit of recognition of the other’s difference, capable to apprehend the ethnic, national and religious traditions and to take advantage of their mutual exchanges” (Beck 2003, p. 13). Therefore, he presents his book “as the answer to the question of knowing how to react, on the intellectual, moral, and political plane, to the spreading of the Right populism.” This answer consists of an analysis of the world’s power space, which has exceeded the categories of the “national” and “inter-national” (what is
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done among nations) pointing toward “perspectives for a cosmopolitan renewal of politics and State” (ibid.). It follows that the cosmopolitan approach associates the respect for the dignity of people, whose culture is alien, with the survival worries of everyone. And Beck goes up to making a real profession of faith when he says “cosmopolitism is the next great idea that will succeed those too much abused by History of nationalism, communism, socialism, newliberalism, and it might happen that this idea make possible what is improbable, that is, that it enables humankind to survive the 21st century without sinking again into barbarity” (Beck 2003, p. 19). Beck distinguishes two stages of Modernity, the First Modernity and the Second Modernity (Beck 2003, pp. 20, 207-208). According to the first, one is convinced that a scientific or technical solution will be found for every question on which depends the future life of society, so that “the more science and technology were put at work, the less would discussions arise since the only best solutions would be at hand as a realizable goal” (Beck 2003, p. 207). In the second Modernity, however, the game has changed radically, since “whatever we could do, we had to expect unforeseeable consequences” (ibid.). We know, for example, that in food production something like the epidemic of the mad cow can occur. As to atmospheric pollution, people are afraid that the polar ices could one day melt, so that the sea levels would grow catastrophically for low territories, such as the Basque country, Denmark, Yucatan in Mexico, etc. We do not know either if, or rather when, our city or our family will be affected by transnational terrorism. Finally, economy is more unpredictable than ever and is out of control of governments and parliaments, because it is to a large extent in the hands of big companies and speculators. This means that political tasks have acquired today global dimensions and threats and risks spread beyond all borders. As a consequence, we are called to understand ourselves as citizens of the world and to recognize a “community of destiny” (ibid., p. 219), but we also take part in conflicts between countries that have to do everything in order to avoid the worst. It is obvious that Beck’s work does not respect the axiological neutrality that Weber wanted. Nevertheless, he holds that the aim of his work “is principally of an empirical and analytical kind” (ibid, p. 220). He calls it a cosmopolitan realism and opposes any idealism and romanticism. He is a scientist because he thinks he can show through facts that “life will sanction those who remain prisoners of the national vision” (ibid. p. 221). But he does not deny that he is proposing a
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normative political theory with the view of preventing not only political science, but also political action from becoming blind. However, at variance with the national vision that is unable to see that the Nation-State idea and its imaginary notion of sovereignty do not match anymore the political and social reality, the cosmopolitan vision is realist and hopes to guide action in a sceptical and self-critical spirit. Nowadays, the cosmopolite is neither optimist nor pessimist, but he nurtures the ambition to be an incentive for understanding the present world and make possible a politics in the service of humankind. So he wants to show in what measure the State has become as relative as the cosmopolitan State considered as dependent on the transnational political structures and by recognizing that “world politics has become world internal politics” (Beck 2003, p. 453).
5. Final Comments In the book Democracy and the Global Order, published by David Held in 1995 a remarkable analysis is made of the transformation of the State from the role of a sovereign actor to that of an actor among many others such as the NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), the cultural and scientific associations, and the international courts. This book also shows that the definition of the State by its power over a territory does not hold in an absolute way any more, since a State cannot exist today without establishing relationships with other States, and also with other agencies, with what happens in other territories, and with whatever has impact on politics without reference to any territory. Furthermore, throughout his work he advocates a democracy which goes beyond the borders of all the States. Held is one of the authors that have inspired Ulrich Beck and, as in Beck’s case; his ambition is to lead a political movement in keeping with a cosmopolitan view. Considering this sociologic work, the question for me is to know whether the non-neutrality, not only theoretical but also practical, is precisely what allows these scholars to understand things, more and better than a sociologist, who insists in doing an analysis without assessment and without a political aim. Is it not the partisan episteme that wants to be at the same time empirical (looking for all the social facts that constitute the current society life) and normative (by imagining the best politics)? Is it not this vision that really understands the object of its investigation?
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In other words, can we understand what is at stake in the present world without being cosmopolitan in our body and soul? If this is not possible, we must conclude that Weber’s axiological neutrality was an illusion in which it was possible to believe in sociology only in the quite stable world of Nation-States.
Danis University of Education Professor of Philosophy and President of FISP Department of Philosophy of Education Tuborgvej 164 - DK 2400 Copenhagen NV Denmark e-mail:
[email protected]
REFERENCES Beck, U. (2003). Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir à l’ère de la mondialisation. Paris: Aubier. Brun H.H. (1972). Science, Values, and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. Durkheim, E. (1963). L’éducation morale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Held, D. (1995). Democracy and the Global Order. London: Polity Press. Weber, M. (1988). Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr.
