The following entries under the heading “Science Studies” are reflections on an interdisciplinary science course at Portland State University called Science: Knowledge & Power. This course, taught by Professor Michael Flower, is a survey of the discipline of Science Studies, or what is sometimes called Science and Culture Studies. This discipline might be described as a sociology or anthropology of science, but also encompasses a historical analysis of science, systems of thought, and science (as represented in) fiction, and ties into philosophy of science. We might call Science Studies a meta-level analysis of the intersections where science, culture, politics, philosophy and religion meet (for better or worse). Science Studies approaches science as a social construct, subject to all too human factors, and not as the objective, disinterested product of pure reason as it is often presented.
Throughout this inquiry we will approach science on four levels:
Experimentation – Interpretation of data – Representation to laymen – use in culture and politics
Experimentation and the interpretation of data are what scientists traditionally do in the laboratory. This is where what Bruno Latour calls black boxes are made. A black box is a concept or piece of technology on which other concepts and technologies are built. Once established, a black box becomes closed, as it were, considered as a fact that goes unquestioned and unexplored. Latour takes this metaphor from cyberneticians who call a machine or set of commands that are too complex to analyze a black box. In order to continue working, the cybernetician cannot sift through every set of commands being used. Rather, he or she must simply assume that they work. Scientific facts and theories work in a similar way. The biologist in the lab must simply close the theory of evolution in order to continue experimentation. The average person with a high school education in science likely does a similar thing. Those with ideological or religious commitments aside, the average person believes in the Big Bang, evolution, that the Earth is round, and any number of scientific “facts” without necessarily understanding what scientific, historical and cultural factors produced these knowledges.
Throughout these entries I attempt a few tasks, which might look something like…
1) Exploring the differences and similarities in methodology between a few thinkers in Science Studies, namely Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault, and Peter Kosso.
2) Re-opening a few black boxes that I’ve taken for granted.
3) Addressing some of the major socio-political issues surrounding/involving science today: climate and ecology (climate change, pollution, geo-engineering), abortion and contraceptives, palliative care and healthcare, and the recent science-oriented atheist or naturalist identity that has arisen amongst “the new atheists”, namely Richard Dawkins.
4) And philosophy of science, or, in other words, a meta-level analysis of science. In particular, I would like to take a close look at Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of a community of inquiry.
For more on Science Studies, consider this article:
http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/kendrick/papers/omni.html
