Contributions to be Made in Opening the Black Box

The book chapter “Social Studies of Knowledge” by David Hess summarizes some of the major approaches in the sociological study of scientific knowledge.  In describing both contributions and critiques of various sociological analyses of science, he is clearly setting up an argument in favor of what he calls “postconstructivist” ideologies found in critical science studies and cultural studies of science (which he discusses in the next chapter).  There are many areas I want to comment on, but due to word restrictions, I will just share some beginning thoughts.

SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge) is described by Hess as existing somewhere (or many places) in the spectrum of constructivism.   A constructivist approach basically would define knowledge, not as something absolute, rather as something that is formed (via any number of influences). In the context of SSK, constructivism could connote anything from the simple or minute influences on knowledge formation as seen in the rituals of a laboratory setting (for example), all the way to claims of total epistemological relativism, where reality is in entirety contingent on the ideas of scientists and/or the methods they are using to know.

Hess rightly argues that there is a value to a constructivist perspective in understanding how we know in science, and points out that most people who critique “science studies” (SSK, etc.) lump all of these studies into the extreme epistemological relativism camp.  I have read a number of likewise inaccurate critiques.  In fact, I believe that many social scientists (anthropologists, etc.) examining knowledge as a social (cultural, etc.) construction are "realists" to their core.  It is the nature of reality that is troublesome, not falling so easily into static ontological categories, rather dynamic and contingent.

Even attributing knowledge formation in science to purely social or institutional conditions (as Hess describes Collins), is to be caught in the trappings of an ideation of lineal causality.  At best, under any one approach to understanding how knowledge is formed, we offer one conical window into a web of mutually interacting and impacting systems.  Nonetheless, “opening the black box” is still preferable to the alternative (accepting the output of a scientific process as prescriptive by default).  In attaining a greater awareness of the complexity through which we discover (or decide upon) and ascribe authority to knowledge, we have the possibility of improving the whole system (or being incredibly manipulative, but that’s another conversation… :>).