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Summary literature Managing Science and Technology in Society (AM_470586)
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Summary of all the literature provided for the course MSTS, which can also be used for the mini-essays and take-home essay.
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Literature Laboratory LifeAn introduction to science and technology - Sismondo (2010) - Chapter 1
Common picture of science: science = formal activity that creates and accumulates knowledge by
directly confronting the natural world → science makes progress and scientists can agree on
different truths about the natural world.
Prominent views:
- Logical positivism (Vienna Circle) = a scientific theory is a condensed summary of
possible observations → scientific progress consists in increasing correctness, number
and range of potential observations that its theories indicate → inductive.
→ issues: (a) if meanings are reduced to observations, there are many synonyms, (b) theories are
often abstract and therefore are meaningless according to LR.
- Falsificationism (Karl Popper) = one can by purely logical means make predictions of
observations from scientific theories → the best theories make all the right predictions
→ need to provide a demarcation, so a rule to draw a line between science and
non-science.
→ issues: (a) in this view, most would be unscientific (because many theories are abstract), (b)
theories are not always rejected in case of incorrect predictions.
Positivism and falsificationism: features of science that make it scientific are formal relations
between theories and data, either through rational construction or dismissal of theories based on
empirical data.
Realm = science progresses towards truth and accumulates truth as it goes (many scientific
theories are approximately true) → realists: good methods are the basis of scientific progress.
- Functionalism (Robert Merton) = science serves a social function, providing certified
knowledge → structured by norms of scientific behaviour → science’s social structure
rewards behaviour that promotes the growth of knowledge and penalises behaviour that
retards this growth.
→ standards or norms are the source of science’s success and authority.
Technology is the application of science, so limited by the limits of scientific knowledge → 2
varieties (Lewis Mumford): (1) polytechniics (life-oriented, integrated with human needs and
potentials). (2) monotechnics (mega machines, can increase power).
Technique = totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency for a given
stage of development.
Science and tech often result in unevenly distributed benefits, costs and risks.
Science and Technology Studies (STS) = science and tech are social activities → scientists and
engineers are always part of a community → claims, theories, facts and objects may have
different meanings to different audiences, so science and tech are active processes and
constructed by using the material world.
An introduction to science and technology - Sismondo (2010) - Chapter 2
The structure of scientific revolutions (Thomas Kuhn) = there have been periods of normal
science punctuated by revolutions (rejects normative stance).
- Normal science = science done when members of a field share beliefs about which
theories are right, an understanding of important problems and methods for solving
them → scientists doing normal science share a paradigm = scientific achievement that
serves as an example for others to follow (worldview or form of life) → normal science is
puzzle-solving, because problems are to be solved within the terms of the paradigm.
, - Crisis = discomfort and unease with the terms of the paradigm, leads to considering
changes and alternatives → if there is an alternative that solves the problems, it will be
adopted, which may become a paradigm itself, structuring a new period of normal
science = revolution.
- Theories belonging to different paradigms are incommensurable = lacking a common
measure, because people in different paradigms view the world differently.
- Science does not track the truth, but creates different partial views that contain truth
only by people who hold those views → roots from positivism.
- Theory-dependence of observation = observation is guided by concepts and ideas →
during revolutions people stop seeing one way and start seeing another way.
- Scientific communities are organised around ideas and practices, not around ideals of
behaviour to serve an overarching goal.
→ critique: there cannot be complete, radical incommensurability, because we all live in the same
world → often, there is no immediate change in experiments or instruments (key components of
science rarely change).
Disciplines are epistemic cultures that may have completely different orientations to their
objects, social units of knowledge production, and patterns of interaction.
Communication across barriers: (a) via a trading zone = area in which scientific and/or technical
practices can interact via simplified languages (pidgins) → in trading zones, collaborations can be
successful → (b) via boundary objects = serve as a focus of attention in different social worlds
and are robust enough to maintain their identities in those worlds.
An introduction to science and technology - Sismondo (2010) - Chapter 6
Social constructivism = provides 3 assumptions: (1) science and tech are importantly social, (2)
they are active, and (3) do not provide a direct route from nature to ideas about nature (products
of science and technology are not themselves natural).
→ social construction of social reality: institutions and structures that come to exist because of
people’s actions and attitudes → knowledge, methods, epistemologies, disciplinary boundaries,
and styles of work are all key features of scientists’ and engineers’ social landscapes.
→ construction of things and phenomena: phenomenotechnique = most of the phenomena of
modern physics are manufactured → technology involves material forms of construction.
→ scientific and technological construction of material and social environments: science and tech
contribute to the construction of many environments → effects of tech can be enormous, and
can be both intended and unintended → science also shapes the world and politics.
→ construction of theories: constructing accounts, models, and theories, on a basis of data, and
methods for transforming data into representations → scientific and technical controversies
display alternative representations, alternative attempts to construct theories.
→ heterogeneous construction: successful technological work draws on multiple types of
resources, and simultaneously addresses multiple domains → heterogeneous engineering = the
simultaneous shaping of the material and social world, to make them fit each other
(co-construction) → Actor-Network Theory (ANT) = scientists and engineers are separated by
disciplinary boundaries (technoscience) → scientists construct networks, the larger, the better.
→ construction of kinds: nominalists; kinds are human impositions → realists; kinds are real
features of the world.
→ construction of nature: representations directly shape their objects → when scientists agree
on a claim, they literally make the claim true = neo-Kantian constructivism → individuals
impose structure on the world as they apprehend it.
, Literature Social Shaping
Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts - Pinch & Bijker (1984)
Scientific facts and technological artefacts are social constructs → 3 bodies of literature in
science and technology studies:
1. Sociology of science = there is scientific truth (X-Rays) and a scientific falsehood
(N-Rays) → scientific knowledge has shown to be thoroughly socially constituted →
there is nothing epistemologically special about the nature of scientific knowledge, it is
merely one in a whole series of knowledge cultures.
→ Empirical Programme of Relativism (EPOR) = focus on the empirical study of contemporary
scientific developments and scientific controversies → 3 stages:
(1) interpretative flexibility: scientific findings are open to more than one interpretation →
disappears when a scientific consensus emerges to what the truth is.
(2) social mechanisms limit interpretative flexibility and terminate scientific controversies.
(3) closure mechanisms: to the wider social-cultural milieu → consensus emerges about the =
core-set = constructs scientific knowledge.
2. Science-technology relationship = heterogeneous and includes contributions from a
variety of disciplinary perspectives → innovation researchers have attempted to
investigate the degree to which technological innovation incorporates basic science →
science and tech are socially produced in a variety of social circumstances → boundary
between science and tech is a matter for social negotiation.
3. Technology studies = scientific knowledge was treated like a black box → a linear
structure of technological development → sociology of technology = considers the
development of both a successful and failed technology.
→ Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) = the developmental process of a technological
artefact is an alternation of variation and selection → multi-directional model → explains why
some techs die and others survive.
- A problem is only defined as such, when there is a social group for which it constitutes a
problem → social group is homogeneous in the meanings given to the artefact →
conflicting technical requirements by different social groups.
- Growing and diminishing degrees of stabilization of the different artefacts → degree of
stabilization is different in different social groups.
- Interpretative flexibility: technological artefacts are culturally constructed and
interpreted → flexibility in how people think of or interpret artefacts, but also that there
is flexibility in how artefacts are designed → FEX. for some, the “air tyre” (bicycle) was a
solution to the vibration problem of small-wheeled vehicles -> for others, it was a way of
going faster.
- Closure and stabalisation: depends on multiple groups (trans-scientific fields).
Rhetorical closure (science) = crucial experimental result, definitive proof or a knockdown
argument which has the effect of closing the debate on some controversial issue.
Rhetorical closure (technology) = stabilization of an artefact and the disappearance of the
problem → relevant social groups see the problem as being solved.
→ closure by redefnition of the problem: redefining the key problem with respect to which the
artefact should have the meaning of a solution.
Literature Social Construction of Risk
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