Abstract
Steve Fuller puts the emerging frontiers of science and technology studies (STS) in philosophical shorthand: ‘what is the normative import of contingency, rather than necessity, as the modality for making sense of science and technology?’ (p. 3). The book is divided into three parts, though not exclusively, that divide the field of STS into three fundamental problems, viz. demarcation (conceptual space occupied by science in our culture), democratization (political organization appropriate to science in society), and transformation (material horizons within which we want science to change our world, including ourselves). Disenchantment with demarcation, autonomy, and cognitive authority of science has led several scholars to delve into the examination of science in its historical integrity. Fuller’s apt reflection of three generations of STS research in this context captures: (a) the logical positivists, including Popper (protecting the theoretical base of science from the technological devastation wrought in its name during the First World War); (b) Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Toulmin, and Solla Price (following their predecessors, albeit not exclusively, vis-a-vis the Second World War); and (c) the Edinburgh School of Bloor, Barnes, Collins, and Shapin, and the Paris School of Latour, Callon, and Woolgar (in the context of the Cold War and decolonization of British and French empires).
The demarcation problem lies in the dialectic between science’s search for a revolutionary moment (how science breaks from rival traditions) and a unifying vision (how science becomes incorporated into a tradition in its own right). For example, university as both political and academic sites reflects the dialectic between science as a social movement and as a disciplinary formation. The demarcation problem in political terms lies in the search for the open society (Popper), an incessant self-critical, self-reflexive, and ever-inclusive community of inquiry. For science cannot be reduced to the recording and analysis of the ‘pre-notions’ (in Durkheim’s sense) that social agents engage in the construction of social reality; it must also encompass the social conditions of the production of these preconstructions and of the social agents who produce them (Bourdieu, 2003: 282). Putting it succinctly, STS has gone beyond the absolutist-idealist conception of the immanent development of science on the one hand, and the historical relativism of those who consider science as a purely conventional social construct on the other. In other words, the divide between the external and internal worlds of science is not rigid but porous.
The advent of the customer–funder–policy maker as a prominent element in science and intensifying thereafter seems to have forced scientists to (re)negotiate scientific boundaries and to do some of the delicate boundary work. The challenge for scientists is to bring science ‘close enough’ to politics and policy demonstrating social accountability, legitimacy, and relevance, but to avoid either science or politics overextending into the other’s territory – a prospect that is evidently disorienting and poses serious threats to idealized identities of science and its practitioners.
Scientists often refer back to selected traditional norms of science in order to (re)orient what is described above as the experiences of the customer–funder–policy boundary. Their awareness of the effects of commodification in science is narrated as though first-hand experience of this new terrain is the most reliable information and/or knowledge they have of it. They often use the ‘old maps’ to establish a legitimate way of working in the seemingly unstable terrain of more commodified research. Through the radical changes in science funding and policy orientation ‘scientists seem to be vigorously mapping out the cultural spaces for science’ (Gieryn, 1995: 416) and for their own identities as forming the scientific community (Waterton, 2005: 443). In this context, scientists are not actually in the process of (re)classifying a satisfactory version of ‘science’ and ‘policy’ through their work. Instead, they are engaged in multiple versions of actively negotiated science–policy boundaries, many of which seem to have different qualities and make different demands on them as researchers/scientists.
Negotiating the boundaries between science and politics is one of the challenges that STS scholars are confronted with. Latour’s politics of nature and Fuller’s republic of science are projected as two alternative democratizing strategies. What the author calls the ‘critical deficit of science journalism’ (p. 128) indicates the distinction between ‘good science’ and ‘bad science,’ which has significant implications for questions of democratization of scientific knowledge and research ethics. In this context, not only distributive justice but also cognitive justice assume greater significance.
Finally, the transformation problem deals with ‘science’s and STS’s role as participants in the technoscientific construction of global society’ (p. 5) in its totality. The rise of modernity in thinking in the 17th century drastically altered the hitherto existing conception of the dichotomies between science and non-science, science and technology, and so on. Science began to be posited as an act of knowing and technology, an act of doing. This dichotomous formulation was questioned by many a scholar subsequently, especially after the Second World War. Modernity, as an ideology, has guided much of the scientific enterprise and its theorization. Science, both as theory and practice, is organically linked to the idea of controlling nature and mastering it.
Many perceptive thinkers have linked this idea of control over nature to the central political phenomena of contemporary period namely institutionalized controls of ‘some’ over others. These ‘some’ are usually not men of property in the traditional sense but men of expert knowledge. Scientific knowledge and the associated proprietary technologies have become the source of power over nature. However, in reality, power over nature has been translated into power over people. It is this domination of expert knowledge and its nexus with political power that makes mockery of liberty in any substantial sense. (Mallick, 2009: 53)
One must address the questions: Who will determine the shape of the future? How will it be done? A more inclusive and democratic process is required, one in which experts and citizens, bureaucrats and politicians, business leaders and activists come together in new configurations. It is desirable that interdisciplinary and interinstitutional research initiatives should start by identifying the real world problems and various facets of the problem. The disciplines that can contribute to map different dimensions of the problem should collaborate to identify shared perspectives and suggest deliverable solutions, and therein lies the significance of the incisively written New Frontiers in Science and Technology Studies.