Tag Archive ЭТОС НАУКИ

На мосту интерпретаций: Р. Мертон и социальная эпистемология

Порус Владимир Натанович

НИУ Высшая школа экономики, Москва, Россия

КЛЮЧЕВЫЕ СЛОВА: НАУКА, ПОВЕДЕНИЕ УЧЕНЫХ, ЭТОС НАУКИ, СОЦИОЛОГИЯ НАУКИ, СОЦИАЛЬНАЯ ЭПИСТЕМОЛОГИЯ, ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ

АННОТАЦИЯ:
Социологическая концепция “этоса науки” Р. Мертона рассматривается с точки зрения ее социально- эпистемологического содержания. Как “социальная эпистемология”, эта концепция служит одним из источников мифа о “большой науке”, сыгравшего заметную роль в философии науки ХХ века. Критика этой концепции может рассматриваться как спор различных эпистемологических интерпретаций социологических данных о науке и действиях ученых в исследовательских ситуациях.

ОПИСАНИЕ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ:

On the Bridge of Interpretations: R. Merton and Social Epistemology

Porus Vladimir N.

National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow

In the last century, the relationship between sociology of knowledge and philosophy could have become the plot thread for a narrative about mutual concord and discord. This love story persists in the current century, and the child grown up by that love is social epistemology, which gives rise to a relevant question: how is the latter possible? Or rather, how is this philosophical discipline possible? Sometimes the response to this question is “negative”: they say that it is a “sub-discipline in the sociology of knowledge that presumes that traditional epistemological problems should be solved by sociological methods and means”. What can be opposed to this “negation”? A difficult path would be chosen by those who regard social epistemology as a “post-non-classical theory of cognition”. What is social epistemology needed for? Perhaps its mission is to solve in practice the contradictions that defy a theoretical solution: what is required is not to rack one’s brain over universal epistemological problems, but rather to work on particular case studies and to recount the findings in more precise and clear terms. Social epistemology serves as sort of a bridge between philosophy and specific scientific studies of inquiry; its goal is to attach philosophical meaning to the latter, and to land philosophical reasoning from the heaven of abstraction onto the soil of facts and empirical studies. Difficult questions arise. Firstly, is it clear who might need this bridge? Will there be volunteers among scholars to cross it in the direction of philosophy? Secondly, the bridge is swaying, and both its supports are unstable. One of them is insecure because philosophy is fundamentally pluralistic, the other because particular epistemological disciplines cannot off er any “pure facts” and “empirical generalizations” that are exempt from epistemological interpretations. If the bridge is really needed I would call it the Bridge of Interpretations. It looks like no paper written by philosophers since the 1950s, as far as the ethos of science is concerned, has managed to do without references to R. Merton’s works. They involved basic guidelines for scientists to follow in their activities, as well as the idea that these guidelines make up a set of conditions under which science functions and advances in the “right” way. It is believed that the conclusion about the universal character of the ethos of science and values in science that make its existence possible was made by Merton on the basis of historical and sociological analyses of scientific institutions. If this is true, it is a conclusion made by an epistemological sociologist, and its philosophical meaning can be found through the appropriate interpretations. Some philosophers have liked this concept, others have criticized it, but all of them have tried to find in Merton’s observations and conclusions things that corroborate with their own ideas on science and scientists’ ethics. This interpretation is possible in relation to all norms in Merton’s scientific ethos. But do these norms allow another interpretation? Is it possible that Merton’s theory of the ethos of science could emerge in the form of a different socio-epistemological theory? The Bridge of Interpretations sees a complicated interaction between interpreting and interpreted statements. The philosophical perspective on evidence from sociologists is changeable; if not the data then their selection. A question follows: are the disciplinary norms inferred from sociological studies or are they the outcomes of a certain philosophical interpretation of the latter? The normative ethos of science as presented by Merton was a result of a certain concept of “ideal science.” This served as a “sieve” to identify facts with sociological meaning and then to take into consideration other facts that correspond basically to the chosen concept. Then it should be acknowledged that this concept serves as a scheme to interpret sociological facts, and subsequently the theory of an ethos in science must be assigned to social epistemology. So it follows that criticism from the side of alternative interpretations of scientific development (T. Kuhn, S. Toulmin, J. Agassi, P. Feyerabend and so on) is an argument between philosophical theories rather than attempts to find empirical proofs or refutations. All this is a competition between philosophical interpretations of the development of science. When pursuing a comparison, the argument takes place on an oscillating Bridge which is swinging more intensively due to efforts of the contentious participants. Merton himself, in order to support his interpretive scheme, declared the facts to be proofs of a beahavioral “pathology”, revealing that the real conduct of scientists differs greatly from the “normative” ideal. Later on, Merton’s interpretive scheme came under reproofs: its descriptions and explanations of scientific reality were allegedly wrong. This criticism is sometimes presented as “further development in Mertonian sociology of science” and sometimes as a split with it. These criticisms are obviously directed against Merton’s method of sociological studies, and not against their philosophical interpretation. This criticism of Mertonian theory can be considered typical. Nevertheless, behind this criticism one can discern a confrontation of various epistemologies. When the tension of disagreements dropped, the time of ironical criticism of any normative perceptions of science came. What is the worth of this normative approach if it is so easy to substitute anti-norms for norms that show a frustrating symmetry between positive and negative modalities of scientists’ behavior? During the general functional crisis in science the behavioral norms of scientists in this country persist in a more or less stable condition of survival. They even support the hopes that Russian science will overcome its comatose state. It is quite possible that in this crisis scientists’ disinterestedness will become a principle of the scientific ethos that passes us collectively through a decisive test. After that it would not be so easy to make ironic remarks on the state of science. I will say in conclusion the following and would like to not be misunderstood. Considering the Mertonian sociology of knowledge as one approach in social epistemology, I do not detract from the scientific value of these studies, and I do not disparage the kind of science to which they belong. Quite the contrary: it is because these studies assimilate scientific methodology and data along with philosophical interpretation that they have produced a certain cultural awareness which accompanies the entire history of Mertonian sociology of science. It makes R. Merton’s contribution to science and philosophy, and further on to the present-day culture, so distinguished.

Создание Р. Мертоном классических парадигм социологии науки: взгляд из XXI века

Мотрошилова Неля Васильвена

Учреждение Российской академии наук Института философии РАН, Москва, Россия

КЛЮЧЕВЫЕ СЛОВА: РОБЕРТ МЕРТОН, НАУКА, СОЦИОЛОГИЯ НАУКИ, НАУЧНАЯ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТЬ, ЭТОС НАУКИ, НОРМЫ, АНТИНОРМЫ

АННОТАЦИЯ: Статья является предпубликацией из новой книги. Презентируются идеи классической социологии науки, которые неразрывно связаны с творчеством выдающегося социолога XX столетия Роберта Мертона (1910-2003). Оценивается вклад Р. Мертона и его ближайших коллег в теоретическую культуру прошлого столетия, в научное и практическое понимание социального смысла науки.

ОПИСАНИЕ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ:

Robert Mertons Formulation of the Classical Paradigms in the Sociology of Science: Looking Back from the 21st Century

Motroshilova Nelya V.

Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow

This text is an advance publication related to the book “Russian philosophy in the 1950s–1980s and Western thought”. One of its parts concerns the fact that western sociology of science was assimilated in Russia by philosophers, some of whom later on began to work professionally in the sociology of science. The other scholars were those who remained in philosophy, writing papers on the philosophy of science, science studies, theory of knowledge and history of philosophy at the same time. These authors tried also to understand the practical side of sociology of science and knowledge. I belong to the second group of scholars. As early as the 1970s, I was familiar with some of R. Merton’s works that were available in our country. It was a big event for me to meet Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman at the 1972 congress of sociology in Bulgaria1 . Soon, Merton, on learning about my scientific pursuits, sent me his main publications on sociology of science with his good words written on them for me. I keep them as a treasure. I used them in my book “Science and scientists in conditions of modern capitalism” (1976) («Наука и ученые в условиях современного капитализма» (М. : Наука, 1976), which includes references for more than 300 sources. It has a section on Merton’s sociology of science. In the XXI century, again I have returned to summing up my experience in sociology of science and the results of the discipline’s development that has lasted for many years. I was also motivated to do this by the attempts of some scholars at the end of the XX century to get rid of the main concepts of sociology of science. The latter, of course, were associated with R. Merton and his followers. This is why the question stands high on the agenda of where Merton and his disciples were a success and where they failed. In the light of these research tasks I think it necessary to look carefully, given the XXI century perspectives and requirements, at the results of the scientific path paved by Merton and his followers. The present paper is devoted to this general goal.

A concise summary of R. Merton and his school’s contribution to the creation and development of sociology of science

Sociology of science as a distinctive sociological discipline came to model a classically developed, paradigmatic, comprehensive, well founded, self-critical, and constantly growing discipline, rather conceptual at the beginning, and later on involving the entire masses of concrete research. 1. Analyses have suggested the historical causes of Merton’s early works on the sociology of science and knowledge. Of particular importance were the responses given by democratic sociologists in protest against the National Socialism coming to power in Germany, the rise of fascism in other European countries, the racist ideology and suppression of science, and the persecution of scientists. 2. The social and historical conditions were used to explain why and how R. Merton started to explore scientific norms. A detailed analysis of scientific norms was conducted that did not agree with the opinions that Merton had worked out with regard to them being “too ideal,” and subsequently disconnected from real science. Actually, the situation, both historical and theoretical, was largely different. First, as early as the 1930–1940s, sociology of science made its first and quite successful steps. The concept of scientific norms was roughly formulated in the first works of the 1940s. Second, difficulties, contradictions and deficiencies in Merton’s original theory were best seen by the author himself and his close followers. So the most successful corrections to the concept of scientific norms were contributed by Merton and his group. Third, it would be wrong to say that the early Merton suggested only ideal, pure, bright scientific norms, and only later, under the influence of criticism from outside, did he pay attention to real scientific norms. As a matter of fact, his statements include: a) an ideal aspect that is normative and imperative; a1 ) an objective-orientated, argumentative aspect: what should be done and what a scientist does by all means because he or she achieves objective knowledge; b) warning statements that suggest what should not be done in science and why, and also what happens in real scientific environments and how scientists’ behave can be seldom observed in the ideal form. 3. What is important: when Merton identified, in a “pure form”, prescriptions, i.e. aspects of research activity “as they should be”, he presumed that the institution of science interiorizes norms in scientists due to their inherent need to fulfill the main function of science — acquiring verifiable, corroborative, that is, “genuine” knowledge. He was absolutely right in this and did it in a Kantian manner. Like Kant, Merton shaped scientific norms as a sum of requirements for what is necessary, as things should be (both for science and society). He demonstrated that an implementation of norms in real, everyday scientific practice must involve specific, pluralistic and contradictory features. And this was the second move, after the normative one, toward a system of research steps that related to general studies of scientific norms. These steps were also made by Merton and his school in the 1950s–1970s. 4. I consider the high theoretical level that is also a feature of Merton’s concrete and empirical research to be a proof and illustration of the “classical”, paradigmatic nature. 5. The following was demonstrated in the course of analysing terminological and other corrections and additions to the theory of norms that were done within Merton’s school: additions were not useless; though terminological corrections and system additions (CUDOS+) did not actually settle down in the end. 6. I suppose that claims to substitute Mertonian theory of scientific norms with the concept of anti-norms (R. Boguslav, I. Mitroff , S. Fuller) failed. The arguments are the following: a) complete dependence on a negative anti-concept of Mertonian theory (each anti-norm is just an antipode to a Meronian norm); b) the negative side of the real behavior of scientists had never been unknown to Mertonian teaching; Merton and his followers studied it thoroughly; c) should Mertonian norms be substituted with anti-norms it would be hardly possible to understand how, using them, scholars and their communities could produce objective scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, anti-norm theory has its important meaning — as a warning. 7. Assuming that research conducted by R. Merton and his school helped to work out “classical paradigms” in sociology of science, two questions arise. First, is it worth working on non-classical or post-classical paradigms in such a discipline? Has anybody observed such systematic studies as Merton’s recently? The answer to the first question in the Conclusion to the paper is positive, the second answer is negative. The author suggests some ideas about what theoretical approaches would be reasonable to choose in order to search for non-classical paradigms of sociology of science.