Blore Moor I Mean More Bloor
A little more Bloor for you, in case you’ve been missing him.
The law which is at work here appears to be this: those who are defending a society or a subsection of society from a perceived threat will tend to mystify its values and standards, including its knowledge…[T]he variable of perceived threat operating upon underlying social metaphors explains the differential tendency to treat knowledge as sacred and beyond the reach of scientific study.
This is interesting stuff, because what Bloor means by ‘beyond the reach of scientific study’ is ‘not considered amenable to substantive analysis by people who are not trained in the subject.’ That is, he is claiming (in great detail, e.g. via an extended comparison of Popper and Kuhn and their relationships to the Enlightenment and Romanticism respectively) that scientists treat knowledge as sacred and beyond the reach of ‘scientific’ (by which he means sociological) study – because said scientists are not, for the most part, convinced that sociological studies can analyze the substance of, say, physics or geology or neuroscience. This lack of conviction is labeled ‘mystification’ and attributed to perception of threat. The far more obvious explanation for such a lack of conviction is not discussed.
After a brief discussion of history and its way with knowledge, he returns to the mystification theme:
The case is quite different for conceptions of knowledge which seek to cut it off from the world and which reject the naturalistic approach [by which, again, he means sociological study of the content of scientific research]. Once knowledge has been made special in this way, then all control over our theorising about its nature has been lost.
‘Made special.’ ‘seek to cut it off from the world.’ Again, what he means by those rather paranoid phrases is simply failure to agree that sociologists have something useful to say about the substance of scientific research. In other words, what would appear to be the quite natural opinion of geologists and astronomers that non-geologists and non-astronomers are, pretty much by definition, not likely to be able to judge the content of geology or astronomy, is labeled ‘making it special’ and ‘seeking to cut it off from the world’. Stark staring nonsense. It’s so basic. You don’t know about a subject unless you know about it. I don’t know how to fix a car or a computer unless I learn, do I (and I haven’t learned, and I don’t know). Some subjects take more learning, more time and effort, than others, and most if not all scientific subjects are at the high end of that scale. This is not exactly a secret, is it! It’s why people don’t study the subjects in huge numbers (except perhaps in Germany), it’s why science teachers are rarer than, say, Theory teachers or Media Studies teachers. The stuff is hard! There’s a lot of it and you have to learn it, you can’t fake it by spinning words. So why would we expect people who haven’t learned it to be able to say anything relevant about it? (‘It’ always being understood to mean the actual content, not the social conventions and institutions around it or the methodology or the rhetoric of the reports.) Why would we pretend that it’s ‘mystification’ to think that non-physicists don’t know a great deal about physics?
Who knows. For something to do. For attention. For tenure. Whatever. Anyway, it’s nonsense.
It’s hard to believe that he really honestly believes what he’s saying here, isn’t it?
If only it were possible to master the sciences without study. I would be training to be a science teacher rather than a social science teacher at this moment. Though I studied neither specifically, I was able to pass the Social Science competency test quite easily, but not the science. If I study hard enough, I may one day get the honor of a science teaching certification. That is, unless philosophy teachers suddenly come into demand. Then I’ll enthusiastically pursue that.
It is hard to believe. And yet this stuff turns up on many a syllabus.
“If only it were possible to master the sciences without study.”
Exactly. If it were, I might know something about them. But at least I know that I don’t, which seems to put me ahead of the Bloorites. Talk about mystification…
Putting my Beelzebub hat on: Does this mean that popular science books are deceiving us, then, when they make claims to explain science in lay terms?
To some extent, I gather they are. I heard a physicist on some Radio 4 thing (unless it was Night Waves) recently, talking about that. Someone asked him if the kind of stuff he did could be explained at all to the mathless and he said Well, no, not really. You really did need a fair bit math to understand it even loosely.
Mind you, some popular science books make that clear, and it’s not true of all subjects anyway. But you’re right: it is an issue. (My colleague just mentioned to me earlier today that it’s an issue about science journalism.)
That’s an interesting issue. I would guess that at least to a big extent one can get an idea of what the subject is about by popular science book (I’m not sure whether there’s a big difference here between science and humanities – mathematics makes a difference probably) – but the further you go, the further you study. It’s quite a different thing than saying that a science studies degree under Prof. Bloor would enable you to uncover the hidden Orientalist nature of the second law of thermodynamics.
Usually, reading, for example, New Scientist on linguistics/human origins makes me want to scream and jump out of the window. It makes me quite wary of what they write on astronomy or physics, where I do not have the slightest competence to judge whether it’s nonsense or not.
You wouldn’t be thinking of the deciphering of Rongo Rongo as a cosmogenic chant by any chance?
It is an interesting issue. I’m thinking maybe we ought to seek out some articles etc on the subject.
“I would guess that at least to a big extent one can get an idea of what the subject is about by popular science book”
What the subject is about, right. That’s what I would guess too, and what I would think via my own experience. I certainly have the impression that I learn something from reading Dawkins, Pinker, Gould, Ridley, Jones, and the like. More theoretical subjects like physics are another matter. But it’s also true that one of the things I learn from reading popular science is how much I don’t know.
And then, as I think you were implying, there’s a difference between learning about a subject and learning the subject. I think I can learn a little about biology etc by reading the odd book, but that doesn’t mean I think I’ve learned the subject, much less that I think I can second-guess biologists on questions of evidence. It takes a little more than that, I’m pretty sure.
Interesting about New Scientist.
Merlin says “Usually, reading, for example, New Scientist on linguistics/human origins makes me want to scream and jump out of the window.” I often feel that same urge when I read things in New Scientist or other popular science journals about human evolution and especially evolutionary psychology. But in most cases I’ve discovered that the problem isn’t New Scientist: When I go read the actual research papers or books by the scientists whose work NS is reporting, I experience the same screaming, hair-pulling, window-jumping frustration. Turns out that bad science journalism often isn’t the problem – it’s bad science. Especially when human origins and behavior are the topics in question, there is simply a great deal of shoddy scientific reasoning out there.
Interesting you picked geology as an example, because it admits of an interesting counterexample.
The question “How much oil/tin/copper is there in the world?” would seem to be purely a geological one, but as Julian Simon showed, it isn’t.
The estimate that geologists give in answer to the question “How much oil, etc is there?” will depend on how much effort has been expended on looking for oil, copper, tin, etc. This in turn depends on, among other things, the price of oil, copper, tin, etc. Which in turn depends in part on what people believe the answer to be to the question “How much oil, etc, is there in the world?”. The strangest things turn out to be social constructs!
(One might argue that “How much copper?” in this case means “How much commercially exploitable copper?” But, in the first place, “How much copper” in the sense of “How many Cu atoms?” is a more or less unanswerable question, and in the second case, it’s a question that couldn’t be answered by geologists. So one preserves the purity of geology by this means only by pretending that they can’t give answers to questions which are obviously part of geology!
Don’t know about Julian Simon but surely geologists answer the question “How much oil/tin/copper is there in the world?” by extrapolating from what they already know, so while ‘The estimate that geologists give in answer to the question “How much oil, etc is there?” will depend on how much effort has been expended on looking for oil, copper, tin, etc.’, the additional effort may well just reflect an increase in the precision of the estimate rather than some monotonic relationship between the effort expended and the estimate, implied by dsquared.
MikeS: What was in the back of my mind was a rather recent report about the words “mama” and “papa” being borrowed from the language of the Neanderthals.
GFelis: Good point (in one case where I followed up a “sensational report” the original article itself turned out to be just as bad as reflected in the report in NS).
95% of what I know aout science I know from reading New Scientist for the last 25 years, on and off, so I’m a bit worried if it’s unreliable. Looks better than Scientific American, which seems to have truly dumbed down in the last decade or so. No more math.
Even so, NS can print some things that look a bit silly even to me, usually when there’s a gosh-wow agenda involved. A few years ago I managed to get them to print a letter from me slagging off some sociobiological cack from a biologist who’d failed to realise the limitations of the social scientific evidence he was citing.
” But, in the first place, “How much copper” in the sense of “How many Cu atoms?” is a more or less unanswerable question, and in the second case, it’s a question that couldn’t be answered by geologists.”
Surely it goes without saying that an answerable question cannot be answered by geologists (or indeed anyone else), or else it wouldn’t be an unanswerable question.
In any event phrased as “How many Cu atoms” it may well be practically unaswerable, but what of it. I don’t suppose most gelogist would say such a question is not a concern of geoology, merely that it is not practically possible to answer. The exact number of stars in the milky way is unknown. That doesn’t mean such a question is not part of the remit of astronomy.
Seeing as all science is predicated on the fact that we don’t know everything yet, I am pretty unimpressed by attacks on science which involve claiming that science claims to know everything. Science is the very acknowledgement that we don’t know everything. So that fact that we don’t know something, puts it IN the remit of science (and its sub disciplines e.g. geology).
dsquared writes:
“The question “How much oil/tin/copper is there in the world?” would seem to be purely a geological one, but as Julian Simon showed, it isn’t.“
No, what cornucopian Julian Simon showed was that there is a distinction between the question “How much of raw material X is there in the world?” and the question “How much of raw material X is worth exploiting at a given stage of scientific and technological development?”
Both questions are, at least in principle, answerable.
The late Julian Simon may be guilty of many errors, such as unfamiliarity with the laws of thermodynamics, but he was NOT some kind of deconstructionist in libertarian clothing.
You the same dsquared who told the magnificent Carolos Obscuros to ‘fuck off’ from Crooked Timber a fortnight ago because you disagreed with his views on homosexuality?
Just wondering.
“No, what cornucopian Julian Simon showed was that there is a distinction between the question “How much of raw material X is there in the world?” and the question “How much of raw material X is worth exploiting at a given stage of scientific and technological development?”
Both questions are, at least in principle, answerable.”
And why that distinction is taken to be a ‘counter-example’ (counter to what?) is not clear.
“So one preserves the purity of geology by this means only by pretending that they can’t give answers to questions which are obviously part of geology!”
It really is remarkable how often rhetoric turns up in such musings. What ‘purity’? Purity, the border patrol, transgressing the boundaries – sheer strawmanism.
I think that dsquared was actually quite close to an interesting point. Some things really are different depending on how you measure them (fractals or things that look like fractals, like coastlines. Depending on the size of your measuring stick, you get very different answers for how long the coast of Great Britain is).
But these are mathematical things, dependent on a mathematical choice (of stick size). The geological example depends on real-world engineering constraints (for instance, the sea contains gold, but nowhere near enough to make it worth mining).
Once you’ve set your initial parameters, then the relevant scientific discipline should be able to give a answer, which could then be tested.
Maybe social science methods could be used to work out why you chose those initial conditions in the first place, but I’m not sure that these methods would help critique the actual scientific content.
“Maybe social science methods could be used to work out why you chose those initial conditions in the first place, but I’m not sure that these methods would help critique the actual scientific content.”
Just so. This is the whole issue. The first half is quite reasonable, and is dubbed the ‘weak programme’; the second is (I’m arguing) not so reasonable, and is dubbed by its practitioners (for reasons which might repay social science examination themselves) the ‘strong programme.’ We certainly don’t dispute that there are social reasons why scientists investigate one thing rather than another.
“The first half is quite reasonable, and is dubbed the ‘weak programme’; the second is (I’m arguing) not so reasonable.”
That is often the case with such nonsense; it is ambiguous and could either be interpreted as true and trivial, or false and non-trivial.
Not sure that the ‘weak programme’ is trivial, though it is true. Surely we can ask questions about paradigm shifts, where the money’s coming from, the nature of the Scientific Revolution, etc, and get useful and interesting answers?