philosophy, rhetoric, end of knowledge philosophy, rhetoric, end of knowledge

401 Pages·2008·1.78 MB·English

Second Edition
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A New Beginning for Science
and Technology Studies
S F • J H. C
TEVE ULLER AMES OLLIER
PHILOSOPHY, RHETORIC,
AND THE END OF KNOWLEDGE
A New Beginning for Science
and Technology Studies
Second Edition

PHILOSOPHY, RHETORIC,
AND THE END OF KNOWLEDGE
A New Beginning for Science
and Technology Studies
Second Edition
Steve Fuller
University of Warwick, UK
James H. Collier
Virginia Tech
LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS
2004 Mahwah, New Jersey London
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Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
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Cover design by KathrynHoughtalingLacey
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fuller, Steve, 1959-
Philosophy,rhetoricandtheendofknowledge:anewbe-
ginning for science and technology studies.— 2nd
ed./Steve Fuller, James H. Collier.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-4767-7 (alk. Paper)
ISBN 0-8058-4768-5 (pbk. :alk. Paper)
1. Science—Philosophy. 2. Science—Social aspects. 3.
Knowledge,Theoryof.4.Rhetoric—Philosophy.5.Social
sciences—Philosophy. I. Collier, James H. II. Title.
Q175.F926 2003
501—dc21
BookspublishedbyLawrenceErlbaumAssociatesareprinted
onacid-freepaper,andtheirbindingsarechosenforstrength
anddurability.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 2003:
The More Things Remain the Same, the More They Change xi
PART I: THE PLAYERS AND THE POSITION
1 The Players: STS, Rhetoric, and Social Epistemology 3
HPS as the Prehistory of STS 3
The Turn to Sociology and STS 7
Rhetoric: The Theory Behind the Practice 14
Enter the Social Epistemologist 19
Thought Questions 26
2 The Position: Interdisciplinarity as Interpenetration 29
The Terms of the Argument 29
The Perils of Pluralism 32
Interpenetration's Interlopers 37
The Pressure Points for Interpenetration 40
The Task Ahead (and the Enemy Within) 46
HereIStand 54
Thought Questions 54
PART II: INTERPENETRATION AT WORK
3 Incorporation, or Epistemology Emergent 59
Tycho on the Run 59
Hegel to the Rescue 70
Building the Better Naturalist 78
Naturalism's Trial by Fire 83
Thought Questions 83
4 Reflexion, or the Missing Mirror of the Social Sciences 86
How Science Both Requires and Imposes Discipline 86
v
vi CONTENTS
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Why the Scientific Study of Science Might Just Show That
There Is No Science to Study 90
The Elusive Search for the Science in the Social Sciences:
Deconstructing the Five Canonical Histories 96
How Economists Defeated Political Scientists at
Their Own Game 104
The Rhetoric That Is Science 110
Thought Questions 114
5 Sublimation, or Some Hints on How to Be Cognitively
Revolting 117
Of Rhetorical Impasses and Forced Choices 117
Some Impasses in the AI Debates 119
Drawing the Battle Lines 120
AIasPC-Positivism 122
How My Enemy's Enemy Became My Friend 125
But Now That the Coast is Clear 129
Three Attempts to Clarify the Cognitive 138
AI's Strange Bedfellows: Actants 145
Thought Questions 149
6 Excavation, or the Withering Away of History and Philosophy
of Science and the Brave New World of Science and
Technology Studies 152
Positioning Social Epistemology in the Transition From
HPS to STS 152
The Price of Humanism in Historical Scholarship 157
A Symmetry Principle for Historicism 163
Historicism's Version of the Cold War:
The Problem of Access 165
Under- and Overdetermining History 171
When in Doubt, Experiment 174
STS as the Posthistory of HPS 179
Thought Questions 183
PART III: OF POLICY AND POLITICS
7 Knowledge Policy: Where's the Playing Field? 187
Science Policy: The Very Idea 188
An Aside on Science Journalism 192
Managing the Unmanageable 194
The Social Construction of Society 203
CONTENTS vii
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Constructive Rhetoric of Knowledge Policy 206
Armed for Policy: Fact-Laden Values and
Hypothetical Imperatives 211
Machiavelli Redux? 217
A Recap on Values as a Prelude to Politics 221
Thought Questions 222
8 Knowledge Politics: What Position Shall I Play? 225
Philosophy as Protopolitics 225
Have Science and Democracy Outgrown Each Other? 228
Back From Postmodernism and Into the Public Sphere 234
Beyond Academic Indifference 243
The Social Epistemologist at the Bargaining Table 249
Thought Questions 257
PART IV: SOME WORTHY OPPONENTS
9 Opposing the Relativist 261
The Socratic Legacy to Relativism 261
The Sociology of Knowledge Debates: Will the Real
Relativist Please Stand Up? 262
Interlude I: An Inventory of Relativisms 265
Interlude II: Mannheim's Realistic Relativism 267
Is Relativism Obsolete? 268
Counterrelativist Models of Knowledge Production 274
Thought Questions 283
10 Opposing the Antitheorist 285
What Exactly Does “Theory Has No Consequences” Mean? 288
Fish's Positivistic Theory of “Theory” 290
Toward a More Self-Critical Positivist Theory of “Theory” 293
The Universality, Abstractness, and Foolproofness of Theory 294
Convention, Autonomy, and Fish's “Paper Radicalism” 297
Consequential Theory: An Account of Presumption 300
Thought Questions 309
Postscript:
The World of Tomorrow, as Opposed to the World of Today 311
Appendix:
Course Outlines for STS in a Rhetorical Key 316
viii CONTENTS
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
References 323
Author Index 341
Subject Index 347
Acknowledgments
The first edition of this book was written while I was teaching in the
Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech,
which remains the largest and most successful program of its kind in the
United States and perhaps the world. It was in this context that I met Jim
Collier, whose own interests inspired the pedagogical side of the first
edition and whose presence is more explicitly felt in this one. He is also
responsible for persuading Lawrence Erlbaum Associates to publish the
new edition, for which I am very grateful.
The last ten years has seen a shift of geographical focus in my career
from the United States to the United Kingdom. Britain has proved a very
fruitful gateway for encountering the full spectrum of world opinion
concerning the issues raised in these pages. I have applied, extended, and
tested the arguments in this book in multiple settings, though most recently
the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the
Copenhagen Business School has provided the impetus for making the
editorial revisions needed for making it more useable in the classroom.
Among those who over the last ten years have contributed most to a
sympathetic yet critical appreciation of this work, I would like to thank
Thomas Basbøll, José Antonio Lopez Cerezo, Christine Isager, Bill Keith,
Joan Leach, Peter Plöger, Sujatha Raman, and Francis Remedios. Special
thanks also for the unswerving moral support of my partner, Stephanie
Lawler.
This book continues to be dedicated to William Lynch, formerly a
student at Virginia Tech and now a tenured associate professor in the
Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Wayne State University, Detroit. In my
original dedication, I said that he was the sort of person whom I could
imagine someday writing a book like this one. His first book,Solomon’sChild
(Stanford University Press, 2001), which I recommend to readers of these
pages, serves to illustrate one of the fundamental theses of this book—that
theorizing is a political practice. In particular, Lynch shows that the
discourse of method in the Scientific Revolution in 17th-century England set
normative boundaries around the community of inquirers, even though it
did little to constrain day-to-day scientific practice. It is just this macro-
structural character of scientific rhetoric—what used to be called its
‘ideological’ function—that deserves further critical attention from those
inclined to sustained historical and sociological work.
—Steve Fuller, Coventry, UK
ix