Science?

[Kerim Friedman]

I generally agree with Lev's comments - especially the additional criteria for defining a science.

I am less certain of my response to his critique of my use of the term "instrumental." My initial reaction is to say that yes, I do think that the fact that particle physics involve careful manipulation of small bits of matter make[s] it instrumental".  This may seem silly, but I understand "instrumental" as referring to knowledge which allows for action upon the external world. My inclination is to say that such knowledge production is only legitimately science insofar as it is able to be proven experimentally (or at least through a hypothetical experiment which we may not have the technology at present to conduct). In other words, Lev's "the community-wide acceptance of reasonably stable practices of proposition-falsification" for science is precisely that of instrumental action - experimentation. And I would say that the instrumental nature of science is what allows for it to be readily appropriated by capital. But I would not equate the two.

I like this definition, because it shows what the problem is with social science as science - the object of our study is society itself. I don't approve of calling this the "observer's paradox" or invoking Heisenberg, because I think that the analogy is not correct. It is not that observing society changes it's behavior. Of course it does - but I don't believe that this is more of a methodological problem than an epistemological one. It is that most subjects are aware of being experimented upon. This is precisely the opposite of the observer's paradox - subjects actively observe the observer! James Scott's "Seeing Like a State" shows what happens when the state actually had a mandate to conduct large scale social experiments and why they (necessarily) failed. The reason Scott's large scale agricultural reforms failed was that they failed to take seriously the role of subjects as knowledge producers. Thus, it is a problem of the power relations of knowledge production, not on!
e of simply adjusting for the distortion brought about by the presence of an observer.

Finally, I would like to say that the conditions for "scientific knowledge production" rarely exist. Even in the so called "hard" sciences. One such condition is the "the availability of discursive practice that is specialized for creating rapid and profound intersubjectivity on relevant topics," stated by Lev. I would call this the free flow of information. The sad truth is that information has a cost and is never free. I mean free in terms of unobstructed, not only in the economic sense, but I will use the economic sense to make my point: I think the whole debate over what should be done with the Human Genome Data shows what happens when profit motives impinge upon the free flow of information. Celeron was only willing to make its data public after a certian amount of international pressure. Another example might be the ideological conflict between Microsoft and the open-source software movement. In both of these cases, the forces that aim to profit from knowledge producti!
on are at odds with those who wish to see the free flow of information.

This last point implies that science is more of an ideal towards which institutional knowledge production of all kinds are pushed, than a description of the actual activities that scientists are engaged in. Within the field of linguistics and linguistic anthropology, etc. it seems that there is much less agreement about whether these goals and ideals are suited for our own institutional practices. This seems to routinely devolve into "its science" vs. "its not science" debates that all too often fail to try to understand what science is in the first place.

Sorry this is so long-winded, but life in rural Taiwan can get a little boring at times ;-)

kerim

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P. KERIM FRIEDMAN
			Anthropology, Temple University
			<mailto:kerim.friedman at oxus.net>
			<http://kerim.oxus.net>
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