Social Studies of Science

This paper documents the connection between the technological and political transformations of late 18th-century France. Its subject is the efforts of state military engineers to produce functionally identical artifacts (interchangeable parts manufacturing). These efforts faced resistance from artisans and merchants attached to the corporate-absolutist ancien régime, for whom artifacts were idiosyncratic, and `thick' with multiple meanings. I argue that to oblige artisans to produce standardized artifacts, the military engineers defined these artifacts with instruments such as technical drawing and the tools of manufacturing tolerance, which the engineers then refined in increasingly rule-bound ways to forestall further subversion by artisans. Hence, I offer a historical account of how the `objectivity' of these artifacts was the outcome of social conflict and negotiation over the terms of an exchange. In particular, I explain why engineers eventually turned to projective drawings (including the descriptive geometry) over alternative ways of representing artifacts (such as free-hand, academic, and perspectival drawings). And I document the origins of manufacturing tolerance, in which the dimensions of an artifact were circumscribed with gauges and machine-tools to preclude possible sources of disagreement. The paper closes with its own `thick' narrative of how standards of production emerged out of social conflict in a particular community on the eve of the French Revolution - a process which reflected the emerging political `toleration' of the French state for its citizen-producers. The SCOT programme can be used to provide a political account of how the operation of seemingly `objective' artifacts can be coordinated across vast physical, temporal and cultural boundaries.

The importance of infrastructural work for the mobility of practices and for the capacity of centres to act on distant sites is stressed in both science studies and the sociology of state formation. Employing Kula's typology of metrological systems, this paper examines four areas of metrological reform in pre-Confederation Canada, stressing the existence of metrological hybrids. Metrological standardization is held to depend upon the exercise of sovereign state power at the same time as it extends the administrative capacity of state agencies.

Historical and sociological studies have shown that precision measurement and metrology play an important social and scientific role. This paper contrasts the dynamics of four metrological configurations. The first concerns an instrument for routine car repair. It displays the network of institutions, conventions and procedures allowing for the conservation of legal metrological precision. Such resources are not yet available during the genesis of an instrument. Very often in scientific laboratories, instruments and their metrology are elaborated simultaneously. The three other case studies analyze this construction by looking at ordinary metrological operations: the collective elaboration of standards; the translation of scientific instruments in metrological laboratories; and the intercomparison of instruments. It appears that the diversity and heterogeneity of resources associated with metrological networks result in different ways of articulating the natural and conventional character of precision measurement.

In Scientific Knowledge, Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry (BBH) explicitly repudiate the notion that the physical environment plays no role in the creation of scientific knowledge, thereby removing a major bone of fruitless and heated contention between scientists and practitioners of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). There remain, however, many aspects of BBH's view of scientific knowledge that clash with my own experience as a practitioner of (theoretical) physics. I offer some examples of ways in which BBH seem to get things wrong, in the hope of starting a more constructive dialogue, leading to a better understanding of sociology by scientists, and perhaps even vice-versa.