Inevitability,contingency,and the epistemic significance of time

Abstract

A considerable attention has been given recently to the analysis of the temporal dimension(s) of science and the impact of the changes therein on scientific work. One of the questions that has emerged from the rapidly growing discussion is whether and (if so) how these changes affect not only the general structural aspects of scientific practice but also the very content of scientific knowledge. In this study, I critically examine these epistemological considerations in the available body of work on scientific temporality and argue that while there has been significant progress in our understanding of the manifold temporal layers of scientific practice, the analysis of their epistemic impact has remained rather limited in certain aspects. In particular, whereas the recent studies of academic time successfully overcome the binary perspective of “fast versus slow” academia, their considerations of the epistemic role of scientific temporality in particular seem nevertheless still couched in similarly binary terms. Against this background, the study explores—in a deliberately speculative fashion—how the available investigations into the temporal structure of science can be progressively utilized and further developed so as to enable an even more complex, nonbinary understanding of the manifold ways in which scientific practice is affected by its temporal conditions. Drawing on the contingentism/inevitabilism debate in the contemporary philosophy of science, as well as on Andrew Pickering’s “mangle” theory of practice, I develop a tentative argument that the temporal structure of scientific work should be perceived as affecting not merely the speed of scientific development—whether negatively or positively—but more importantly also its direction.

Keywords

Scientific temporality scientific knowledge scientific practice contingency inevitability time

Introduction

Despite the apparent progress that has been achieved over the last two decades with regard to our understanding of the temporal dimension(s) of science, the epistemic considerations in particular drawn therefrom have remained rather unchanged—and, more surprisingly, even unchallenged—so far. The amount of articles discussing the topic of scientific temporality and the impact of its recent transformations on scientific practice have been steadily growing over the last years within science and technology studies (STS).1 Yet, even though the topic has been extensively researched in several aspects, the epistemological questions regarding the recent changes within the structure of academic time—that is, mainly the question of how these impinge on the very content of scientific knowledge2—have been touched upon mostly implicitly, without the appropriate level of attention. Indeed, the critical focus of the accumulating articles seems to lie mainly in the attempt to comprehensively describe the structure of scientific temporality (e.g., its multiple dimensions and the interconnections between them) and the changes therein as a result of the transformation of academia at large, while the particular question of the epistemic relation between the temporal conditions under which scientists operate and the knowledge they produce, although it has been discussed to a limited extent, seems to have not received that much critical consideration. In fact, I am going to argue that after inspecting the available relevant literature, only a little (if anything) has apparently changed in this regard since time became a topic of its own for science studies more than a decade ago. Rather than becoming a topic for critical investigation, the epistemic function of time—that is, the particular way of how temporal conditions of academic work affect the very content of scientific knowledge produced therein—seems to have been taken for granted. Apparently, there has not been a single controversy or even disagreement regarding the epistemic impact of the recent changes within academic temporality, even though there also has not been a single attempt to critically analyze this topic with proper attention and focus as a topic of its own. In other words, the analyses of scientific temporality seem to focus on the temporal features of various scientific practices—either by categorizing their several temporal dimensions and “timescapes” (e.g. Felt, 2016; Vostal et al., 2018) or by dissecting the temporal conflicts therein, such as the conflict between “process time” and “project time” (Ylijoki, 2015, 2016)—without delving deeper into the actual epistemic level of the matter.

Against the background of the recent investigations into the temporal structure of science, I want to explore—in a deliberately speculative fashion—how these can be progressively utilized and further developed so as to enable an even more complex understanding of the manifold ways in which scientific practice is affected by its temporal conditions. From the perspective I am going to propose, the current approaches offer a somewhat limited perspective on the epistemic significance of scientific temporality, and while they certainly shed a valuable light on how the recent changes within the temporal structure of academia affect the process of scientific knowledge production, they appear rather conservative in their considerations of what I find the most puzzling—but also the most relevant—question: the question of whether and (if so) how do the temporal conditions of scientific practice impact not only the process of scientific knowledge production but also its very outcome. In this study, I try to outline the limitations of the current inquiries into the epistemic role of scientific temporality and indicate the direction in which these can be productively elaborated to enable a more in-depth investigation, as well as more nuanced conceptualization, of the matter.

The structure of the article will be as follows. I will begin by providing a comprehensive review of the most recent body of work on the temporal conditions of scientific practice and their epistemic impact. Taking a look at several representative contributions to the contemporary analysis of scientific temporality, I am going to characterize their relevant common features in order to schematically outline the different available perspectives on the epistemic role of time that are enabled by them. In this regard, I will focus on their binary treatment thereof, which will be critically discussed in the following part of the article. As I am going to claim, while recent studies of academic time successfully overcome the binary perspective of “fast versus slow” academia, their considerations of the epistemic role of scientific temporality in particular seem nevertheless still couched in similarly binary terms. Drawing on the contingentism/inevitabilism debate in the contemporary philosophy of science, as well as on Andrew Pickering’s “mangle” theory of practice, I will then provide arguments in favor of a nonbinary treatment of the epistemic function of time that would, hopefully, allow for a comparatively more profound and complex investigation of the matter on both descriptive and normative level. In particular, I am going to claim that the temporal structure of academic work should not be seen merely as affecting—whether negatively or positively—the speed of scientific development but rather its direction.

Accelerating academia and decelerating scientific progress

The transformation of academia under the influence of the neoliberal economy has been extensively documented and critically studied for quite some time now. Over the last few decades, countless books and articles about neoliberalism’s impact on the university and higher education have been published, many of them written from more or less different theoretical perspectives, all of them nevertheless indicating that something severely upsetting is indeed going on.3 The political–economic processes that are re-forming academia and pushing it in a somewhat new and unprecedented direction have been analyzed and described using a vast array of concepts and labels. It has been claimed that academia had undergone a “silent revolution” and entered a new entrepreneurial era of “academic capitalism” (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004); that it had been invaded by “audit culture” (Strathern, 2000) embodying new rationality, new morality, and new norms of conduct and professional behavior that had been transferred to the public sector from the financial domain (Shore and Wright, 2000); that it had been progressively colonized by the ideology of “new managerialism” and “new public management” emphasizing effectiveness and performance as the core goals to be aimed for (Kremakova, 2016; Müller, 2014); that it had been “McDonaldized” under the dictum of the principles of efficiency, quantity, predictability, and control (Besley and Peters, 2005; Hayes and Wynyard, 2002; Parker and Jary, 1995); or that it had been swept in the wider process of the “projectification” of society (Ylijoki, 2015, 2016).

While these different conceptualizations of the neoliberal changes within academia focus on diverse aspects and features of the ongoing process, it has been rather uniformly argued that all of these changes contributed particularly to a significant shift within the temporal order of academia, with further consequences for academic work following therefrom. In accord with the general argument that modern society is “accelerating” (Rosa, 2013; Rosa and Scheuerman, 2009) as a result of the neoliberal, capitalist economy as well as technological progress and the development of new ICTs, it has been argued that academia has not been exempt from these accelerating effects and its temporal dynamics have been likewise becoming progressively “faster”, more “hasty” and more “rushed” than ever before. Pels (2003a, 2003b) was among the first to provide a systematic argument that the external economic and political pressures exerted upon academia threaten its traditional “unhasty” temporal regime, as the realms of politics and economy are characterized by relatively “faster” temporalities and these are consequently colonizing the “slow” temporality of academia as part of the process, with potentially disastrous effects on academia’s fundamental function of producing useful and reliable knowledge and thus contributing to the creation of a better and more just society. As he writes:

The pressures of globalization, the morality of publish or perish, the imperatives of academic entrepreneurship and self-generated funding, the competition for promotional image and education market share, the growing salience of the intellectual celebrity system, the relentless machinery of research and teaching assessments, the endless administrative restructuring, and the resultant hypertrophy of academic leadership and management (lots of talk in endless meetings and no time for writing) together produce a threatening acceleration which undermines the weak boundaries of science and turns the tempo and habitus of the fast decision makers into an infrastructural routine. However, as both Plato and Nietzsche were aware, we need time in order to develop “untimely” considerations. (Pels, 2003b: 225)

Following Pels, further studies and texts lamenting the alleged “acceleration” of academia and urgently calling for its “unhastening” or “slowing down” proliferated (e.g., Garwood, 2012; Levy, 2007; Lutz, 2012). During recent years, the growing number of empirically based, ethnographic studies of academia’s temporal dimension gradually contributed to a substantial reconsideration of the initial one-dimensional conceptualization of science’s temporality in terms of the “fast versus slow” dichotomy.4 Instead of that, a much more nuanced multifaceted or multidimensional picture of academic time has been offered, grounded not only in empirical data, but also in concepts developed within the sociology of time, such as Barbara Adam’s (2004) notion of “timescapes” which has been creatively utilized by Ylijoki (2015, 2016) and Felt (2016).

However, even though the conceptualizations of academic time have gone well beyond the simplistic “fast versus slow” dichotomy toward much more elaborate and complex categorizations (e.g., Bruyninckx, 2017; Vostal et al., 2018), one thing has remained the same ever since Pels’ call for “unhastening” science, and that is the ever-present perception of a genuine conflict between the externally forced changes within the structure of academic time on the one hand and academia’s fundamental goal of producing reliable knowledge and contributing to scientific (and thus social) progress on the other. The recent collection of articles on academic temporality from the leading scholars in the field, Universities in the Flux of Time (Gibbs et al., 2015), is indicative of this attitude, as basically all the articles that somehow inquire into the epistemic impact of these changes express a certain discomfort in this regard and warn against the possibly disruptive effects of the temporal changes within academia on the process of scientific knowledge production. Thus, Hassan (2015), for example, argues that the contemporary “accelerated” conditions of academic work, forced by the political and economic pressures, create an environment in which the traditional purpose of the university—the advancement of knowledge—is getting into a substantial conflict with the individual academics’ concern with meeting the criteria required for securing their career track (cf. Burrows, 2012). In such circumstances, he continues, academicians are increasingly discouraged from the activity of “truth-seeking” in favor of a more “pragmatic” approach to research, focusing more on the quantity of the published articles rather than their quality in order to achieve “excellence” which is the primary aim to be strived for. Similarly, Barnett (2015) develops an argument that the temporal reordering of academia effectively diminishes the possibilities for independent and authentic thinking, as the “time of reason” is being under attack from the external forces of politics and economy, resulting in proliferating cases of bad analyses of data, premature judgments, and fraud (cf. Fanelli, 2009).

Murphy (2015) is even more explicit in this regard when he contrasts between what he calls “temporality of discovery” and “temporality of delivery”. He claims that the old order of the university, which was characterized by slow tempo, deliberate contemplation, and focus on discovery, has been redefined under progressive bureaucratization into a new order, which is contrariwise characterized by fast tempo, “means-ends” rationality, and a primary focus on delivery. This new, delivery-oriented mode of the university allegedly “smothers discovery in unintended ways” (Murphy, 2015: 147), as “the productive delivery system and the productive discovery system are quite different in temporality, rhythm, and resulting ethos” (Murphy, 2015: 148). While the time of discovery is according to him one of long duration, as it requires a sustained “indwelling” (cf. Polanyi, 1958) in the topic and prolonged exploration of a variety of remote associations, the now prevalent time of delivery is fast, businesslike, sequential, governed by “means-ends” rationality, and accompanied by constant sense of “now,” “soon,” or “tomorrow”. As a result of this incompatibility between discovery and delivery, he claims, the university’s capacity for discovery has been diluted, discovery has accordingly diminished, and scientific progress has ultimately decelerated. As he writes in a very Pelsian fashion:

In now-world there is no time for thinking, no time to pause for thought. There is no gap, no hiatus and no suspension of action. This is a strange condition for a university. Suspension is a mark of thought. It is the interruption that signals the coming eruption of ideas. The contemporary university has issued an invisible decree: all suspension of action has been hereby suspended (Murphy, 2015: 152).

Likewise, Ylijoki (2015) draws analogous epistemic consequences from her formal distinction between what she calls “process time”—that is, the temporality embedded in the internal logic of research activity—and “project time”—that is, the scheduled time of a research project as it is “on paper.” She argues that these two temporalities (similar to her earlier distinction between “timeless time” and “scheduled time” [Ylijoki and Mäntylä, 2003]) are in mutual conflict, as process time is slow, emergent, temporally blurred, multidirectional, and context-dependent, whereas project time is by contrast fast, highly scheduled, predictable, linear, and decontextualized. Yet, as a consequence of the political–economic changes within academia, process time has been progressively colonized by project time, resulting in the emergence of several new conflicts and dilemmas in research work. According to Ylijoki, some of these tensions—especially the general preference of “short-term” against “long-term” research—negatively impact the overall quality of produced knowledge, as they favor a particularly conservative selection of research topics and methods that are feasible in a given project schedule and encourage conformist mainstream thinking that is likely to get financed instead of risky new openings, all at the cost of scientific progress and scholarly development (Ylijoki, 2015: 101; cf. Ylijoki and Mäntylä, 2003: 71).5

This critical perspective on the temporal conflicts within academic work is further reinforced even outside of the collection of essays mentioned above. For example, Noonan (2016)—in different terms, but in a manner very similar to Ylijoki’s and Murphy’s—argues that during recent decades, “thought-time,” which forms a precondition for a successful pursuit of the university’s fundamental goal of producing valuable knowledge and providing better quality of life, has become increasingly colonized by “money-time,” which represents capitalist market forces and economic interests regardless of the actual effects on planetary or human life, thus making scientific research less progressive and less beneficial for society. On the other hand, Vostal (2014, 2015) partially diverts from the mainstream standpoint when he argues that the changes in the structure of academic time can have both inhibitive as well as stimulant effects on scientific knowledge production and therefore needs to be thought in a more ambivalent fashion. His argument is nonetheless still rooted in the overall implicit presupposition that the changes within the temporal conditions of academic work affect, on the epistemic level, merely the “speed” of scientific knowledge production, that is, they can either represent an obstacle for the development of scientific knowledge or they can positively stimulate it.

The list is far from exhaustive but I believe it is illustrative enough at this point to provide a plausible general picture of how the epistemic function of time is conceptualized within the contemporary scholarship on scientific temporality. As outlined above, it should be apparent that the various accounts of time’s epistemic function allow only for two possible effects of changes within the temporal structure of academic work: they can either have an accelerating effect on scientific progress, or they can decelerate it. In fact, with the exception of Vostal’s ambivalent account, all of the authors uniformly express the sentiment that the colonization of academia by “faster” temporalities has a detrimental effect on the quality of knowledge produced, and thus on the speed of scientific progress, while it is the “slow” temporalities and rhythms that are the necessary prerequisites of a high-quality scientific work and efficient contribution to the growth of knowledge. I believe however that such binary treatment of the epistemic significance of time is unnecessarily restrictive on both descriptive and normative levels and that the available body of work on the temporal conditions of science and their epistemic impact in fact opens up a substantially broader and deeper perspective on the relationship between scientific temporality and scientific knowledge that invites further exploration. On the descriptive level, the current perspective makes it very hard (if not impossible) to conceive of the epistemic impact of temporal changes within academia in more complex ways and supports instead rather simplified descriptions thereof. If the changes within the structure of academic time are conceptualized as affecting merely the “speed” of scientific progress, then there will likely be no space for more detailed questions such as, for example, whether the temporal conditions of scientific research influence the very content of our scientific theories, and thus whether there would be different theories under different temporal conditions. This kind of question could possibly enable a substantial shift in our understanding of the temporal conditions of scientific practice, as these would be ascribed a much more fundamental role in the production of scientific knowledge; yet, as it is, these kinds of questions are beyond the scope of the available body of work. More importantly, on the normative level, the current perspective severely constrains the imagination of what can be extrapolated from the accumulating empirical analyses of academic time. What I mean by that is that there are now basically three standpoints toward the epistemic impact of the changes within academic time: first, there are those who are critical of the changes for the reason that they have pernicious effect on the production of scientific knowledge, such as the advocates of “unhastening” or “slowing down” science (cf. Gibbs et al., 2015); second, there are those who are ambivalent about these changes, as they can arguably have both stimulant as well as detrimental effect on scientific knowledge production (cf. Vostal, 2014, 2015); and third, there will be naturally those who are not worried about the changes whatsoever. But that seems to be a rather shallow and narrow scope for a normative theory of academic time. Instead of treating the epistemic effect of the temporal changes within academia as either good, or bad, or somewhere in between, would it not actually be more fruitful and revealing to discard the binary categories of “good” and “bad” in favor of a more open analysis of how the temporal conditions of academic research (and changes therein) actually imprint on the very content of the scientific knowledge produced? Such an approach would likely open new vistas for the normative theorizing about the temporality of scientific knowledge production going “beyond good and evil” toward a more nuanced, sophisticated, and thus even more responsible treatment.

In the next section, I want to reinforce this line of argument by drawing attention to the contemporary philosophical debate on inevitability and contingency in the history of science (Soler et al., 2015). What we learn from this debate is that on the epistemic level, the temporal conditions of scientific work are likely to have a more qualitative impact on its outcomes, affecting not simply the “speed” of scientific knowledge production, but rather its very content or the particular direction in which it develops.

Inevitability versus contingency

To paraphrase the title of Ian Hacking’s article “How inevitable are the results of successful science?” (2000), one of the earliest formulations of the “contingentism versus inevitabilism” issue, inevitabilism can be understood as a position according to which the results of a successful science—our current scientific theories, concepts, and explanations—are inevitable in the sense that if anyone, anywhere in the world began their “own” scientific research, they would sooner or later necessarily end up with roughly the same theories and the same scientific results that we have. As described by Pickering, “any community that embarks on a project akin to science will end up believing what we do” (2015: 117). In other words, an inevitabilitist holds that scientific progress necessarily follows a single, predetermined path: sometimes science will encounter an obstacle that would prevent it from moving forward; sometimes it will be led astray completely; but eventually it will get back on track, overcome the obstacles, and continue its journey toward the “Truth.” As such, inevitabilism stands in direct opposition to the other possible view of the development of science, contingentism. According to contingentism, there is nothing inevitable in the present state of scientific knowledge: scientific development is by contrast considered as “contingent” in the sense that science could have likely evolved in a radically different, incommensurable, yet equally (or even more) successful way. In other words, a contingentist claims that under different historical conditions, the very content of our scientific knowledge could have ended up being entirely incommensurable with the present content of our scientific theories: there exists a multitude of possible scientific ontologies, a multitude of different possible trajectories that scientific progress could legitimately follow, without being at the same time any less progressive, less successful, or simply “worse” than the others. Contrary to the inevitabilist position, then, it makes no sense for a contingentist to conceive of scientific changes in terms of either supporting or hindering scientific progress, as there is no single right path of scientific development, but a myriad of equally legitimate ways whose comparative scientific promise cannot be reliably estimated in advance.

My argument here is that while from the inevitabilist perspective, the binary treatment of the epistemic role of time as affecting merely the “speed” of scientific knowledge production is perfectly fine, as there is only one direction of scientific progress that we can at most temporarily divert from, the contingentist perspective offers a radically different and much more complex picture of the possible epistemic impact of the temporal (as well as other) conditions of scientific work. In particular, it seems too simplistic from the contingentist standpoint to discuss the epistemic impact of the temporal conflicts within scientific practice in terms of them having either positive (i.e., stimulative) or negative (i.e., inhibitive) effect on scientific research. Rather, just like the recent empirical inquiries demonstrate that scientific temporality is too complex to be grasped in the simple terms of “fast versus slow” science and thus requires a more nuanced conceptualization, the contingentist perspective complexifies the epistemic significance of scientific temporality in a similar manner. Now, it should be acknowledged that the inevitabilitist position cannot, by any means, be “proven wrong”: inevitabilism is perfectly consistent on its own terms, and Léna Soler directly acknowledges that the dispute between inevitabilism and contingentism very likely cannot be brought to a definite closure (Soler, 2015a: 11–13). Nevertheless, I want to take the contingentist position into serious consideration and tentatively explore its possible consequences for thinking about the relationship between the very content of scientific knowledge and the temporal conditions that enable its production. In this regard, some arguments in favor of contingentism as opposed to its inevitabilist alternative should be provided.

Even though the dispute between inevitabilism and contingentism appears ultimately undecidable, Léna Soler argues that there is a “strong empirical evidence” in favor of contingentism nonetheless (2015b: 98). She is referring here to the large body of work accumulated under the sociology of scientific knowledge approach that enabled the social scientists to accumulate data in support of what Trizio (2008) later labelled as the “multiplicity thesis,” that is, the view that “there is one world, and any number of different descriptions of it” (Barnes, 1994: 33). For example, Andrew Pickering in his sociological analysis of particle physics Constructing Quarks (1984) argued that despite the fact that the “old” paradigm of particle physics of the 1960s has been eventually superseded by the “new” quarky paradigm in the 1980s, there was nothing “inevitable” or “necessary” about this development as the nonquarky paradigm could have successfully continued to develop so that there would have been a very different, but no less sound physics today (cf. Pickering, 1984, 1995a). Similarly, Collins’ studies of scientific controversies (e.g., 1981, 1985) where he introduced the notion of the “experimenters’ regress”—that is, the situation where the questions of what is the “correct” result of an experiment and what is the “correctly” performed experiment cannot be decided independently of each other—have demonstrated that there are always more equally legitimate trajectories in which science can develop and it is only with hindsight that the direction actually taken appears as “more rational” than the others or simply as the correct path. Taken seriously then the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) studies are simply irreconcilable with the inevitabilitist view that there is only one necessary path of scientific progress.

Moreover, I believe there are several normative benefits of taking the contingentist perspective seriously with regard to the analysis of the epistemic role of scientific temporality. As it is, the inevitabilist approach allows only for a very limited normative perspective on the debate about the temporal conditions of academic work: they can be perceived as “good,” meaning that they provide suitable environment for achieving scientific progress, or they can be considered “bad” in the sense that they thwart it by depriving the scientists of the quality time that they need for their work to be efficient enough. The inevitabilitist position, together with its inherent binarity, simply does not allow for a more complex conceptual grasp of the matter. The contingentist standpoint, on the other hand, provides a qualitatively richer picture, opening up new questions to be asked (e.g., “What direction of scientific development do these temporal conditions of scientific work support?”), new problems to care about (e.g., “Is this line of scientific development desirable?”), and new essential topics to discuss (e.g., the relevance of the contingency of scientific development and its relationship to the temporal conditions of scientific practice for science policy). Even though it is ultimately impossible to disprove inevitabilism in favor of its contingentist counterpart, it is certainly worth exploring the latter approach in this regard to actually discover its possible contribution to the debate—more so, as it is the inevitabilitist view that is likely to govern the contemporary discussion, presumptively because “[m]any philosophers and scientists share an inevitabilitist instinct” (Chang, 2015: 362; emphasis mine). In this context, I cannot but agree with Soler that it is precisely the “instinctive” nature of the inevitabilitist position that “encourages an examination of what lies behind it” (Soler, 2015a: 21).

Exploring contingency

In this section, I am now going to tentatively sketch out the direction in which such a nonbinary treatment of the epistemic function of time could be developed. Drawing on Andrew Pickering’s “mangle” theory of scientific practice, which not only professes an openly pluralist and contingentist attitude toward scientific knowledge development, but also represents one of the rare “time-sensitive” approaches within the SSK, I will outline what it means to conceptualize the epistemic role of the temporal conditions of academic work in both pluralist and contingentist fashion.

Pickering’s “time-sensitive” approach

Pickering’s perspective, comprehensively developed mainly in his The Mangle of Practice (1995b), provides a valuable insight into the limitations of the current treatment of the epistemic function of time, as it very nicely indicates that time’s impact on the production of scientific knowledge appears much more complex than just supporting or inhibiting scientific progress when approached from a pluralist and contingentist standpoint. By stressing “the temporally emergent structure of scientific research” (Pickering, 1993: 561; emphasis in original), his approach is particularly illustrative in this regard as it not only supports the contingentist view of scientific progress, but is also “time-sensitive” in that it explicitly takes time into account when explaining the production and development of scientific knowledge.

The core concept of Pickering’s approach is what he calls the “real-time dialectic of resistance and accommodation” (Pickering, 1995b: 37). In his account, it is this peculiar dialectical process that characterizes the dynamic and temporally emergent nature of scientific practice and all its components. As he puts it, “all sorts of heterogenous cultural strata—material, conceptual, social […], and whatever” are continuously “mangled” in the real-time dialectic of practice (Pickering, 1995b: 109). To articulate what he means by this “dialectical” and “mangle-ish” nature of scientific practice, Pickering provides several case studies from the areas of particle physics, mathematics as well as industry including the development of the bubble chamber by Donald Glaser and his adversary Luis Alvarez, Giacomo Morpurgo’s experimental attempts to detect isolated quarks, William Hamilton’s discovery of quaternions, and the development of numerically controlled machine tools and their introduction into the industrial workplace. Since each of these case studies serves its own distinctive purpose with regard to Pickering’s articulation of his account of scientific practice—each focuses on a different aspect of the “mangle”—however, using either of them on its own as an illustrative example would inevitably provide only a partial picture of Pickering’s approach. For that reason, I will rather directly focus on the relevant conceptual features of the “mangle” theory and refer to the particular case studies wherever necessary or appropriate.

The first fundamental conceptual feature of Pickering’s “dialectical” account of scientific practice is the notion of “interactive stabilization.” As he demonstrates in his case studies, scientific practice is far from a straightforward enterprise: it is a process of a mutual interaction and interplay between various components—conceptual, material, social and other—and it is indeterministic and multidirectional in the sense that none of these components necessarily determines its further development and ultimate outcome.6 Rather, they are all to be treated symmetrically as each of these components is continuously and open-endedly “mangled” in real-time scientific practice in order that all are made to fit together to create a coherent, robust whole—that is, in order that the “interactive stabilization” between the components is achieved. Thus, in the case of the attempts to locate an isolated quark, Morpurgo constantly struggled with the incoherence between the conceptual component of his research and its material component: he was ready to accept measurements of either third-integral fractional charges (e/3 or 2e/3)—which equaled the theoretical predictions for quarks—or standard whole charges, but the actual measurements he initially performed did not fall into either of these categories. In his attempt to interactively stabilize these two components, then, Morpurgo decided to “mangle” the material component—his experimental apparatus—so that the measurements would be compatible with the conceptual component. Now, the important thing to note here, however, is that even though Morpurgo’s decision appears completely natural, Pickering remarks that there was nothing necessary about the particular step he decided to take: he was equally free to mangle the conceptual component, that is, to challenge the theoretically predicted third-integral charge value of quarks. In this regard, the process of interactive stabilization—the “mangle” of scientific practice—is ultimately contingent. In Pickering’s own words:

As far as a real-time analysis is concerned, therefore, no preexisting principle explains or lies behind the trajectory of evolution of Morpurgo’s material apparatus or its performativity, or his interpretive account of his apparatus, or the facts that he or it produced; there is only the mangle (Pickering, 1995b: 92).

This bring us to the notions of “resistance” and “accommodation.” The obstacles on the path to making the various components of a particular scientific enterprise “interactively stable”—obstacles which are indeed ubiquitous in day-to-day scientific practice—are what Pickering calls resistances. In his own words, they are “the occurrence[s] of a block on the path to some goal” (Pickering, 1995b: 39). Particular examples of such resistances include Morpurgo’s measurement of charges incompatible with either of the two models he deemed plausible, or the various failures encountered by Glaser on his path to developing a functional prototype of the bubble chamber. Now, the two important features of these resistances is that (1) they demand a response on the scientist’s part, and (2) at the same time they disclose and narrow down the possible pathways toward reaching the scientist’s goal. Thus, both Morpurgo and Glaser encountered several resistances in their attempts to achieve the goals they set for themselves (i.e., locating the theoretically predicted isolated quarks or developing a functional bubble chamber, respectively), and each of these resistances demanded a response on their part in the form of “mangling” the various components of their research in a way that would overcome the resistances and eventually lead to a interactively stable closure. These responses to the encountered resistances, then, are what Pickering calls accommodations, and similarly to resistances which are simply failures in achieving the desired goal and can appear in many different forms, the accommodations can be of a various kind as well. In his case study of Glaser’s development of the bubble chamber, Pickering introduces three particular kinds of accommodations—“material transformations” (i.e., changing the working substance used for the apparatus), “conceptual transformations” (i.e., changing the background theory), and a revision of the desired goal—but this list is by no means exhaustive and Pickering makes clear that such accommodations can include “mangling” of virtually any resource at scientist’s disposal—“material, conceptual, social, and whatever” (cf. Pickering, 1995b: 109)—as long as it is relevant within the process of interactive stabilization. In this dialectic of resistances and accommodations, every component of scientific research is “open-endedly mangled in practice” (Pickering, 1995b: 60), and in this sense the particular features and trajectories of a given scientific research “emerge” in the course of time and practice.

The final fundamental conceptual feature of Pickering’s “dialectical” account of scientific practice then is the notion of temporal emergence. What he means by that is that, in simple terms, there is no way of predicting any of the resistances to be encountered in advance, as these “emerge” in the real-time dialectic of resistance and accommodation, and likewise there is nothing that determines the particular choice of the accommodations to be made. In Pickering’s own words regarding the temporally emergent nature of Glaser’s development of the bubble chamber:

Glaser had no way of knowing in advance that most of his attempts to go beyond the cloud chamber would fail but that his prototype bubble chamber would succeed […] In fact, nothing identifiably present when he embarked on these passages of practice determined the future evolution of the material configuration of the chamber and its powers. Glaser had to find out, in the real time of practice, what the contours of the material agency might be. […] There is no real-time explanation for the particular pattern of resistances that Glaser encountered in his attempts to go beyond the cloud chamber. In his practice, these resistances appeared as if by chance—they just happened. It just happened that, when Glaser configured his instrument this way (or this, or this), it did not produce tracks, but when he configured it that way, it did. This is the strong sense of temporal emergence implicit in the mangle (Pickering, 1995b: 52–53, emph. original).

Indeed, Pickering acknowledges that Glaser had several options of how to go on with his research anytime he encountered a new resistance: had he decided otherwise in some cases, his project may have developed in a fundamentally different way. If he had a limited time for his project, for example, he would presumably choose different accommodations than he did, probably changing his original goal in favor of another one, possibly never being able to reach his original goal altogether, but maybe achieving an entirely different result instead. Similarly, Morpurgo was free to “mangle” the conceptual component of his research instead of the material one: had he decided to challenge the theoretical prediction of third-integral charge value for quarks, the quark research would have likely developed in an entirely different way. Where would these alternative trajectories of research have eventually led, we do not know. But from Pickering’s perspective there is no reason to think of them as being any less “progressive” or “correct” than the actual ones.

Time as a component of the “mangle”

Now, having outlined Pickering’s pluralist and contingentist approach to the analysis of scientific practice, it is time to discuss its comparative import to the understanding of the epistemic function of time, as opposed to the binary treatment thereof. Let us start with a general remark that by putting emphasis on the “temporally emergent” character of scientific knowledge, Pickering’s account provides a novel perspective on time as an epistemic factor in scientific research: what he tells us is not only that time is something that has to be taken into account when investigating scientific practice, but more importantly that time represents a factor that has a fundamental impact on the very content of scientific knowledge and therefore also on the trajectory according to which scientific knowledge develops. Approached through the optics of his “mangle” theory of scientific practice, the impact of scientists’ temporal setting on the results of their work emerges as far more complex than just affecting the “speed” of their progress forward. In fact, it does not even make a good sense to conceive of them in this manner, as Pickering’s approach together with his contingentist standpoint abstains from too easily qualifying a particular scientific change as “good” or “bad.” For him, there is simply a multiplicity of possible scientific trajectories of scientific progress, and the fact that one of them always eventually emerges victorious does not make it “more progressive” than the others. Rather than affecting the “speed” of scientific progress, the temporal conditions of scientific practice appear to have a more constitutive role in the production of scientific knowledge. Indeed, to return once more to one of his case studies, whereas Glaser’s 30-cm xenon-filled bubble chamber was constructed and ready for experiments already in 1958, but was useless for “big science” research, Alvarez’s 72-inch liquid-hydrogen bubble chamber set “a basis for the big-science approach to particle physics experiment” (Pickering, 1995b: 41), yet it was ready no sooner than in 1964: in this case, different temporal conditions have led to different scientific results, but without either of them being “better” or “more progressive” than the other.

But there is more to be learned from Pickering’s approach with regard to our understanding of the epistemic function of time. Pickering’s “mangle” theory provides a particularly novel way of conceptualizing the role of time in the production of scientific knowledge, as it makes it possible to conceive of the temporal conditions of scientific practice as being a component of the mangle. Even though Pickering himself does not explicitly recognize time’s epistemic role in this manner—in his case studies, he instead focuses on the material, conceptual, and social components of the “mangle” in particular—his account implies that the temporal conditions of scientific work can be conceptualized in the very same way as the other components of the mangle that he draws attention to in his analysis. Indeed, he makes this clear when he writes that while he “analyzed Morpurgo’s work in terms of the interactive stabilization of just three cultural elements—his material instrument, his interpretive account of the instrument, and his phenomenal account(s) of how the world might be—there is nothing magical about the number three. Rather, we have here an exemplification of the multiplicity of scientific culture” (Pickering, 1995b: 94; emphasis in original). In other words, there is a plethora of heterogenous cultural strata that enter the mangle: as Pickering puts it, they are “material, conceptual, social […], and whatever” (1995b: 109; emphasis mine). And it is precisely this “whatever” where time—that is, the temporal conditions of scientific practice—can enter the “mangle” as its active, temporally emergent, constitutive component. Approached from this perspective, time would no longer represent merely the “background” against which the “real-time dialectic of resistance and accommodation” operates. On the contrary, time in the sense of the temporal conditions of scientific work would itself enter this dialectic as its constitutive—and also “mangleable”—component.

How do the temporal conditions of scientific work enter the “mangle,” and how can they affect scientific research not merely on the level of practice (i.e., as inhibiting or stimulating it) but on the genuinely epistemic level (i.e., as affecting what kind of knowledge is being produced)? Vostal et al. (2018) provide an illustrative example by their pluralist reconceptualization of scientific temporality in terms of three distinctive temporal clusters—experimental, cognitive, and institutional—and even more importantly by their concept of “agentic synchronization.” According to their claim, the relationship between scientists and the temporal conditions of their work is not by any means asymmetrical in the sense that scientists are simply passive victims to the forces of acceleration, as often portrayed. On the contrary, scientists should be regarded as “temporal agents” who can actively and, for the most part, intentionally manage the temporal aspects, demands, and pressures of their work. Drawing on Pickering’s view of scientific practice as a dialectic of resistance and accommodation, Vostal et al. describe the temporal conditions of scientific work as not simply given but constantly (re)emerging from the scientists’ active struggle to achieve balance between the demands of the manifold timescapes of scientific practice. In other words, conflicts between the experimental, cognitive, and institutional temporality are resolved by adequately “mangling” either of these temporal clusters in the process of “interactive stabilization” so that they are maintained in a relatively stable state. Far from being deterministic, however, this process involves what the authors describe as “temporal intentionality,” that is, a certain maneuvering space allowing for multiple possible ways of achieving stabilization and therefore also multiple different trajectories of scientific development. In their own words, “maneuvering, (un)bending, (dis)connecting, responding and reacting to (re)routing and (re)orienting both expected and unexpected tempos of experimental, cognitive, and institutional nature constitute a fundamental feature in the process of scientific knowledge production” (Vostal et al., 2018: 799). Another example of how such “temporal juggling” can affect the very content and direction of scientific research is suggested by Bruyninckx (2017) whose ethnographic study of three research facilities develops an image of scientific research as an activity which is structured across multiple temporal registers that do not necessarily unfold synchronously and that are therefore in need of constant “synchronization” (which involves multiple strategies of “timework”) in order to maintain organizational stability as well as maximum efficiency. According to Bruyninckx, technicians at these facilities are faced with the daily task of navigating between the different demands of “organizational time” and “instrumental time,” but their synchronization work—while ensuring organizational stability—has also epistemic ramifications, as it directly affects the daily work of researchers themselves for instance via control over the availability of research instruments. From the contingentist perspective, again, the particular way of resolving the conflict between the organizational and instrumental temporality in scientific work is not to be perceived as merely a matter of “efficiency” of research facilities but rather as a matter of the very content of scientific research, as different strategies of timework—most likely those that would not adhere to the imperative of efficiency—are likely to create more space for the exploration of multiple alternative open-ended possibilities of scientific inquiry.

Utilizing Pickering’s pluralist account therefore allows us to approach time not as a constraint—in the sense that the less quality time scientists have at their disposal, the less scientific progress they achieve—but instead as a central and, most importantly, “mangleable” resource in scientific practice. Treated symmetrically with all the other components of the “mangle” and against the background of the contingentist view of scientific development, the temporal conditions of scientific practice can be ascribed a fundamentally new role in the production of scientific knowledge, as they also become a part of the process of interactive stabilization with all the other—material, conceptual, social etc.—relevant components of scientific practice. From this perspective, the temporal conditions of scientific practice do not affect (merely) the “speed” of scientific knowledge development: instead, they directly affect the very trajectories and outcomes of scientific research. Similarly to the way that the material, conceptual, and social components of the mangle interact with each other and “temporally emerge” in the process of interactive stabilization, as documented by Pickering’s case studies, so do also the temporal conditions of scientific practice—temporally emergent by themselves—enter this dialectical process and affect not just the development of the other components, but also its overall outcome.

Having approached the epistemic function of time in scientific practice from the perspective of Pickering’s theory, we are thus left with a picture substantially dissimilar to—and noticeably richer than—that offered by the currently available analyses of scientific temporality. Rather than affecting the speed of scientific progress (whether positively or negatively), the temporal conditions of scientific work (and changes therein) appear to affect the direction of scientific progress in the sense that different temporal settings of scientific work likely lead to different pathways of scientific development to be pursued, and thus to different content of scientific knowledge to be created. From this perspective, it is too simplistic to conceptualize the temporal changes within academia in terms of increasing/decreasing the quality of scientific research, or stimulating/inhibiting the scientific progress, as the matter seems to be much more complex, and it appears too hasty and spurious to qualify the impact of these changes in such a binary manner. What we learn from Pickering’s account instead is that the temporal conditions of scientific practice, being a part of the “mangle,” affect the very content of scientific knowledge in a manner that is very difficult to qualify. In general, we learn that under different temporal conditions, different—neither better, nor worse, simply different—scientific decisions would be probably taken, and science would thus develop in a different direction that cannot be classified as necessarily “more” or “less” progressive.

That being said, the question of the particular impact of the temporal changes within academia—the question of the actual epistemic role of time—still remains unanswered. Would that direction of scientific development be better than the actual one? Or, more particularly, if the recent temporal changes within academia, associated with the phenomena of academic capitalism, new managerialism, etc. did not take place, would scientific knowledge actually develop in a more “desirable” way? That is something that we do not know and that demands further investigation.7 What I have tried to show is that contrary to the binary view of the relationship between the temporal conditions of scientific practice and its outcomes, Pickering’s contingentist approach makes such a critical investigation at least conceptually possible.

Moreover, the conceptual alternative outlined above would not only enable a comparatively more open-minded and more complex understanding of the epistemic function of time, but it would also open up a whole new perspective of the issue on the normative level. Whereas when considered as having either inhibitive or stimulative effect on scientific development, the temporal conditions of scientific work are epistemologically relevant solely in terms of the “efficiency” of scientific knowledge production—which itself in fact appears to be a surprisingly “neoliberalized” conceptualization of the issue—under the alternative “mangle-ish” approach suggested here, the temporal dimension of science would acquire a truly critical importance, as it would become a factor not in the effectiveness of scientific knowledge production, but in the very direction of scientific development—and therefore also of the development of society at large. In other words, the temporal conditions of academic work would cease to become a matter of how “fast” or “efficiently” we progress to the future, and become instead a matter of what kind of future we are going to have (cf. Adam, 1995; Urry, 2016).

Concluding remarks

I have attempted to provide an analysis of the way that the epistemic function of time has been conceptualized within the contemporary analyses of scientific temporality and to develop an argument that the prevalent conceptualization of the matter is unnecessarily restrictive in several aspects. In spite of being present within the majority of recent scholarship on academic time and the impact of its changes on scientific practice, I have characterized the current outlook as still embedded in a binary perspective which makes the critical inquiry into the epistemic function of time significantly limited on both descriptive and normative level. Drawing on Pickering’s “mangle-ish” account of scientific practice, I have then outlined a contingentist conceptual alternative that, according to my opinion, provides a comparatively deeper, more complex, and less prejudiced understanding of the matter. Instead of approaching the epistemic significance of time only in terms of “speed,” where the temporal conditions of scientific practice are being evaluated as either favorable or harmful for the development of scientific knowledge, the contingentist perspective regards time not as a factor of “speed” but rather as a factor of “direction”: it opens up ways of thinking about the temporal conditions of scientific work as affecting—together with the other components of the “mangle”—the particular trajectories along which science develops.8

Still, one may remain wondering whether the issue is really that important and whether the current critical treatment of time’s epistemic function is not fine as it is. Indeed, as I have already partially argued above, there is something inherently attractive and reasonable about the various critiques of acceleration of academia as a result of its progressive neoliberalization—they just feel “right.” And yet, even though they resonate with me on the emotional level, I cannot help but find these critiques wanting—or questionable at least—on the level of epistemology. In the light of the arguments presented above, the criticisms of the recent temporal changes within academia as decreasing the quality of knowledge and slowing down scientific progress appear at the very least spurious and unwarranted, as their authors come up with qualifications of the epistemic impact of these changes rather too prematurely instead of subjecting the nature of this impact to further investigation. Recognizing the limitations of the current conceptualization of the epistemic impact of time and embracing the contingentist view of scientific development I have argued is then the first step to make such an investigation possible. But a question may arise: Would not such a contingentist approach deprive the current analyses of scientific temporality of their ability to “criticise,” that is, to maintain a critical stance toward certain developments within the structure of scientific time while favoring and supporting others? Compared with the current body of work which enables us to perceive the recent developments as mostly pernicious for science and offers a ready antidote—that is, preventing the progressive neoliberalization of academia—does not the adoption of the contingentist standpoint actually restrict the scope of possible criticism, since it demands that one abstains from the all too hasty qualifications of these developments’ impact?

I consider such worries misplaced, as the perspective outlined above is capable of providing an even deeper criticism of the temporal conditions of academic work. While the currently prevalent binary treatment of time’s epistemic function indeed offers a critical perspective of the issue, I have tried to make clear that it is ultimately one-dimensional and thus very limiting in its critical sensibilities. On the contrary, approaching the issue from the “mangle-ish” perspective suggested here is far from “conformist” or “uncritical,” as it actually enables—albeit in an admittedly speculative fashion—a more cautious as well as more complex analysis beyond the binary opposition of “good” and “bad,” thus possibly leading to a better understanding of the matter and, consequently, a more responsible criticism. Along the lines with the argument developed by Felt (2016), the contingentist approach would likely enable a comparably much more “care-full” treatment of the temporal conditions of academic work: in her own words, it would likely help “to develop a deeper sensibility toward and understanding of temporal orders and more ‘care-full’ temporal policies” in order to “support the creation of sufficiently diverse knowledge resources and secure attractive ‘epistemic living spaces’ […] for researchers that will enable us to develop solutions to currently unknown problems in the future” (Felt, 2016: 145). It remains to be seen, of course, what is conveyed by this “deeper sensibility” toward the temporal conditions of scientific work. Recognizing the limitations of the available analyses of the epistemic significance of time is the first necessary step to find that out.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and insightful suggestions that significantly improved the text. I also thank Filip Vostal for commenting on several earlier versions of the article, and Xing Su for proofreading.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article has been written as part of the Czech Science Foundation grant no. 16-18371Y.

ORCID iD

Libor Benda

Notes

References

Adam

(1995) Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time. Cambridge: Polity.

Adam

(2004) Time. Cambridge: Polity.

Barnes

(1994) How not to do the sociology of knowledge. In: Megill

(ed) Rethinking Objectivity. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 21–35.

Barnett

(2015) The time of reason and the ecological university. In: Gibbs

Ylijoki

O-H

Guzmán-Valenzuela

, et al. (eds) Universities in the Flux of Time: An Exploration of Time and Temporality in University Life. London: Routledge, 121–134.

Berg

Seeber

(2016) The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Besley

Peters

(2005) The theatre of fast knowledge: performative epistemologies in higher education. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 27(2): 111–126.

Bloor

(2011) The Enigma of the Aerofoil: Rival Theories in Aerodynamics, 1909–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bruyninckx

(2017) Synchronicity: time, technicians, instruments, and invisible repair. Science, Technology, & Human Values 42(5): 822–847.

Burrows

(2012) Living with the H-Index? Metric assemblages in the contemporary academy. The Sociological Review 60(2): 355–372.

10.

Busch

(2017) Knowledge for Sale: The Neoliberal Takeover of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

11.

Chang

(2015) Cultivating contingency: a case for scientific pluralism. In: Soler

Trizio

Pickering

(eds) Science as it Could Have Been: Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 359–382.

12.

Collini

(2017) Speaking of Universities. London: Verso.

13.

Collins

(1981) Son of seven sexes: the social destruction of a physical phenomenon. Social Studies of Science 11(1): 33–62.

14.

Collins

(1985) Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice. London: Sage Publications.

15.

Collins

(2013) Gravity’s Ghost and Big Dog: Scientific Discovery and Social Analysis in the Twenty-First Century. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.

16.

Collins

(2017) Gravity’s Kiss: The Detection of Gravitational Waves. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

17.

Ergül

Coşar

(eds) (2017) Universities in the Neoliberal Era: Academic Cultures and Critical Perspectives. London: Palgrave.

18.

Fanelli

(2009) How many scientists fabricate and falsify research? A systematic review and meta-analysis of survey data. PLoS One 4(5): e5738.

19.

Felt

(2016) Of timescapes and knowledgescapes: retiming research and higher education. In: Scott

Gallacher

Parry

(eds) New Languages and Landscapes of Higher Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 129–148.

20.

Garwood

(2012) Good science needs time to mature and ripen! Lab Times 2: 20–27.

21.

Gibbs

Ylijoki

O-H

Guzmán-Valenzuela

, et al. (eds) (2015) Universities in the Flux of Time: An Exploration of Time and Temporality in University Life. London: Routledge.

22.

Hacking

(2000) How inevitable are the results of successful science? Philosophy of Science 67: 58–71.

23.

Hassan

(2015) When innovation becomes conformist: academic research in network time. In: Gibbs

Ylijoki

O-H

Guzmán-Valenzuela

, et al. (eds) Universities in the Flux of Time: An Exploration of Time and Temporality in University Life. London: Routledge, 79–93.

24.

Hayes

Wynyard

(2002) The McDonaldization of Higher Education. London: Bergin & Garvey.

25.

Kremakova

(2016) The “new spirit of academic capitalism”: can scientists create generative critique from within? Theory of Science 38(1): 27–51.

26.

Levy

(2007) No time to think: reflections on information technology and contemplative scholarship. Ethics and Information Technology 9: 237–249.

27.

Lutz

J-F

(2012) Slow science. Nature Chemistry 4(8): 588–589.

28.

Mountz

Bonds

Mansfield

, et al. (2015) For slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 14(4): 1235–1259.

29.

Murphy

(2015) Discovery and delivery: time schemas and the bureaucratic university. In: Gibbs

Ylijoki

O-H

Guzmán-Valenzuela

, et al. (eds) Universities in the Flux of Time: An Exploration of Time and Temporality in University Life. London: Routledge, 137–153.

30.

Müller

(2014) Racing for what? Anticipation and acceleration in the work and career practices of academic life science postdocs. Forum: Qualitative Social Research 15(3). DOI: 10.17169/fqs-15.3.2245.

31.

Noonan

(2016) Thought-time, money-time, and the conditions of academic freedom. Time & Society 25(2): 213–233.

32.

Parker

Jary

(1995) The McUniversity: organization, management and academic subjectivity. Organization 2(2): 319–338.

33.

Pels

(2003a) Unhastening Science: Autonomy and Reflexivity in the Social Theory of Knowledge. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

34.

Pels