Function of a Laboratory

Readings from this week (and Eamon’s post on social epistemology) has me reflecting on the function of the laboratory in terms of addressing social agendas. 

In Knorr-Cetina’s book chapter on “What is a Laboratory?” the laboratory is described as a theater in which aspects of the social order are staged, reconfigured and interpreted.  The laboratory, in the scope of this paper, is identified in numerous fields, for example, medicine, high energy physics, social sciences and even Freudian psychoanalysis.  Across the various fields, this environment functions as a means through which we ask the questions deemed most relevant to us socially (or in the science of the times), and also refined on aggregating data in the active inquiry process.  The answers we get are entirely shaped by the questions we ask, which is subject to culture in the most dynamic sense of the word.  Fullwiley’s article on the Racialization of DNA provides an example of this process, describing some of the efforts of trying to identify socially defined concepts of race and ethnicity in DNA chains.  Despite complexity and instances of greater variation than sameness in terms of, for example, Caucasian or African American markers, these conceptual categories are still pursued because our cultural schema deems these categories relevant. (Rather than what Fullwiley calls “appropriate definitions of human difference for genetic research.”p25)

In the same spirit, when discussing the epistemological question about neophytes or the uninitiated setting agendas in science, I agree with Eamon, that much of what we pursue in science is absolutely guided by these sorts of people.  I also think that initiated scientists (still drinking coffee, putting trash to the sidewalk and burning fossil fuels like the politicians) might likewise set very socially determined agendas, just with perhaps a better understanding of the applicability of a scientific process in answering the questions.  Is there such a thing as a true science divorced of its temporal social priority setting?