MAR Y HESSE *

COMMENTS ON THE PAPERS OF DAVID BLOOR AND STEVEN LUKES

DAVID Bloor and Steven Lukes have both been kind enough to refer to what I

called the ‘network model’ for descriptive language. Let me therefore first comment on what they say about my concepts of correspondence and coherence in connection with that model, before turning to more general historiographical issues.

My use of the terms ‘correspondence’ and ‘coherence’ in relation to the network model was intended to signal its connection with more traditional theories of truth. But in fact, as Bloor implies, the model is very different from those traditional theories, and the terminology may well be misleading. It seems to have misled Lukes, who quotes my ‘correspondence postulate’ to the effect that truth is ‘a relation between the state of the world that produces empirical stimuli and the observation statements expressed in current descriptive language’ (S.L. p. 316). He should not assume, however, that this expression is inconsistent with anything Bloor says. In his present paper Bloor explicitly allows for ‘reference to the world and . . . the light of experience’, and states that ‘concern with the prediction and control of nature is not automatically sacrificed by giving nature a moral employment’ (D.B. p. 283). Again, in his reply to Lukes he says ‘of course the world enters into the structure and development of our knowledge, but always and necessarily in conjunction with our conventions, decisions and purposes’ (D.B. Reply p. 320). It is just that element of ‘constraint’ originating in the natural world that I tried to indicate by my use of the term ‘correspondence’ in the network model. Truth in that model is indeed ‘a relurion’ between the world and language, but what is further said about the language, that is the other relatum of the relation, is far from simple. The language incorporates ‘coherence conditions’, that is, categories, classifications and preferred models of the world. I am grateful to Bloor for supplementing my vague and mysterious remarks about the nature of the coherence conditions, by showing how they can be understood in a broadly Durkheimian picture of social interests, to which the network model as I described it in 1974 can indeed be said to point, albeit obscurely.

Turning now to Lukes’s more specific objections to the Durkheim - Mauss

*Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, U.K.

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., Vol. 13, No. 4 pp. 325 - 331, 1982. 0039-3681/82/040325-07$03.00/O Printed in Great Britain. 0 1982 Pergamon Press Ltd.

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thesis, a question must be raised about the character of the arguments that may be expected to be relevant to such a thesis. The force of Lukes’s objections derives from the claim that neither the general argument nor particular cases in Bloor’s paper entail or are entailed by his conclusions (S.L. p. 313). Again, the finding of a ‘non sequitur’ in Mary Douglas’s thesis is apparently taken as sufficient for its dismissal (S.L. p. 316). Sometimes, indeed, the strong logical relation ‘entail’ is weakened to ‘logically related’ (S.L. p. 315), ‘supported by’ (S.L. p. 316), and ‘show’ (ibid.). But sureiy a philosophical comment on a thesis such as Bloor’s should be more reflective about the kinds of inferential connections that would be appropriate to the thesis. It is rare that any interesting thesis regarding interpretations in epistemology or in the history of science is susceptible of proof by entailment. At best there must be an accumulation of supporting arguments. The question therefore is, has Bloor marshalled a sufficient set of appropriate arguments to make the thesis plausible?

I believe it will clarify matters to separate three questions. There is first the question as to whether what I have called the coherence conditions which pervade scientific knowledge do have a social character. Second, if they do, does this include a two-way interaction between scientific knowledge and other social structures? Third, if this is the case, do the social constraints exhibit some domain of primary causality, for example institutions of social legitimation and control (Douglas), or economic substructures (Marx)?

1. The argument for the existence of coherence conditions is primarily a philosophical argument, and rests on the Quinean thesis of under- determination of theory by data. I will not rehearse these arguments here, since the exposition of the network mode1 in Bloor’s paper provides sufficient material for the present purpose. Lukes himself is not disposed to reject the thesis out of hand, for he says ‘Even if scientific theories are underdetermined by data, it does not follow that “the way the world is” exercises no constraint on theory choice’ (S.L. p. 317). (Bloor has sufficiently explained in his reply that he is not in fact committed to holding that there is no constraint.) On the other hand, Lukes does appear to think that ‘scientific arguments’ might suffice to explain the beliefs held by, for example, Boyle and Newton, without recourse to social interests (S.L. p. 318). He does not, however, explain here what these ‘scientific arguments’ might be if they are not exhausted by arguments from empirical data. Given underdetermination, a problem remains about the character of the extra-empirical conditions that constrain theory-choice. If we suppose as we must, that these are not adopted fortuitously or arbitrarily by individual investigators, then they must have some public character. After all scientists do manage to come to reasonable consensus about theories in spite of underdetermination, and whether the explanation for this lies in rational rules or social constraints, it is at least

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public. In the history of epistemology there have been broadly two sorts of

candidates for the extra-empirical conditions. They have either been held to be a priori conditions of rationality, supported by metaphysical arguments (for example, Descartes), or by transcendental arguments from the categories of perception (Kant), or they have been held to be derivative from social classifications and functions (Durkheim). Durkheim faced this issue in his explicit programme for the ‘socialization’ of Kantian transcendentalism in his introduction to The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. More recently Lukes and others’ have argued that, on the contrary, there are principles of rationality that are trans-cultural, and that are required in the very process of linguistic communication. Whatever may be the upshot of this argument, and however coherence conditions are distributed between the cultural and the trans-cultural, there seems no reason to deny that coherence conditions are at least essentially public in their character. In the case of the Kantian, and more recently the phenomenological traditions, this conclusion has been somewhat obscured by the pervasive individualism of these philosophies. But it is an individualism of the ‘standard individual’, and certainly presupposes the existence of public language which embodies the transcendental categories. Both kinds of argument, then, whether rationalist or social, surely agree in locating coherence conditions in the social domain.

2. The second question concerns the types of interaction to be found between scientific theory and social interests. Even Lukes does not seem disposed to deny that there may be a one-way influence from theory of nature to its ‘social message’, or that social analogies in the opposite direction may influence laymen in their adoption of theories and other beliefs about the natural order (S.L. p. 316). What he denies is any stronger cause-effect relations from social interests to types of theory in the case of scientists who are concerned to ‘get their explanations right’. And here he can draw support from Bloor’s admission that Boyle, Newton, etc. will ‘believe what they do because experience, or reason, or the Bible make it plain to them’ (D.B. p. 290). To seek social explanation beyond the reasons given by the actors, as Bloor does, seems to offend against the widely accepted maxim of historical and anthropological interpretation, namely that ‘actors’ reasons are privileged’.

Should we, however, accept actors’ claims (if they make them) that their ‘scientific arguments’ are sufficient to determine their theories? Quite apart from appeal to historical examples, a moment’s reflection on the logic of the situation is sufficient to show that we should not. Boyle may have thought he

‘For example, S. Lukes, ‘Some Problems about Rationality’, in Rafionatity, B. Wilson (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), p. 194; M. Hollis, ‘The Limits of Irrationality’, ibid., p. 214; S. Lukes, ‘On the Social Determination of Truth’, in Modes of Though?, R. Horton and R. Finnigan (eds.) (London: Faber and Faber, 1973). p. 230.

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had conclusive arguments for the corpuscular view of nature, but we now know that he did not, because his beliefs are largely false according to our theories; moreover, our theories fit the evidence he had as well as or better than his own. Hence our theories at least constitute logically possible but inconsistent alternatives to his own, and his arguments for his own therefore cannot have been logically conclusive.

Notice that this argument goes through even on the rationalist assumption, which presumably Lukes shares, that the notion of what it is to ‘fit the evidence’, and the nature of the evidence itself, are invariant from Boyle’s time to our own. So Lukes’s attempt to argue that Boyle’s ‘scientific arguments’ are a sufficient explanation of his scientific beliefs fails even on his own premises. They are not, of course, premises likely to be acceptable to Bloor, who will hold that notions of what constitutes evidence and the character of the ‘fit’ between evidence and theory, also depend on historical and social context. But in that case the question of logically conclusive and context-independent ‘scientific arguments’ does not even arise.

There is one further recourse of the committed rationalist. This is to assume that, although historical factors other than the empirical have influenced theory construction in the past, nevertheless present science demonstrates by its success and progressive character that the modes of rational theory-choice now adopted are the ‘right’ and sufficient ones to lead to truth, and that they may therefore be used as the standard in terms of which to judge past scientific arguments, and to detect the ‘deviant’ influences of social interest. This view would entail abandoning the maxim ‘actors’ reasons are privileged’, for it would operate on the assumption that actors’ reasons are only privileged when they conform to the accepted rational criteria of our own science. In spite of Lukes’s appeal to the grounds on which Boyle and Newton believe what they believe, it is difficult to imagine him giving equal privilege to Boyle’s belief, for instance, that he has conclusive grounds for thinking that matter and motion must constitute the two and only two primary elements of nature, or Newton’s belief that he ‘made no hypotheses’ in his inference from the laws of planetary motion to the universal law of gravitation. Nor, of course, is it likely that any past scientist’s claim that he had conclusive arguments from the Bible would be accepted by any present-day rationalist.

I will not repeat here the reasons for thinking that any such claim of privilege for the theory-forms of modern science is misguided. Arguments against this claim are to be found not only in Bloor’s own thesis of ‘symmetry’ of social explanations as between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ science, but also in the philosophical literature regarding scientific realism and progress.’ It

‘D. Bloor, Know/edge ond SociuI Imagery (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1976). For references and discussion on realism, see for example M. Hesse, ‘Truth and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge’, in Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Brighton: Harvester, 1980). p. 140.

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is sufficient for present purposes to regard the thesis of symmetry, or non- privilege, as a fruitful hypothesis for historians and sociologists to pursue.

If that is the case, however, the thesis must be pursued by contingent historical and not by a priori philosophical arguments. Lukes asks for too much if he supposes that such arguments can be conclusive. They can only be cumulative, yielding increasing historical plausibility. But historians’ judg- ments about plausibility should not be biassed at the start by the ghosts of an a priorism that purports to show the sufficiency of autonomous scientific arguments for explaining all episodes of theory-change and theory-choice.

3. Given the possibility that two-way interactions may be historically demonstrable between social context and scientific theory, in both old and new science, questions still remain about the detailed character of such interactions. Here again it would be foolish to dogmatize - to assert either the primacy of ‘ideas’, or of economic substructure, or of social control, or of clan divisions, or whatever. Some factors will be found more important in some contexts and others in others. At least we have as yet nothing like enough evidence from different sorts of cases to suggest any interesting generalizations across time or across culture-types.

Nor is it clear that Bloor wishes to argue for any such global generalizations. He is concerned only to explain the relative consensus regarding scientific beliefs at a given period of time, and their relative stability. His own examples illustrate a variety of types of constraints on theories, not all of which involve extra-scientific factors. Some are ‘social’ only in the sense of being ‘negotiations’ within the scientific community, between proponents of different theories or accepted theoretical models. And his extended example regarding Boyle, Newton and the theory of matter is explicitly a report of a number of recent first-hand historical studies, the plausibility of whose conclusions can surely be judged only by going to the studies themselves, and not on the basis of Bloor’s comparatively brief summary of them.

On the question of whether systems of ideas such as scientific theories should find their primary explanation in the domain of social structure, it is interesting to note that even Durkheim and Mauss do not quite agree with the Durkheim of the Elementary Forms. In Primitive Classification’ ‘every classification implies a hierarchical order for which neither the tangible world nor our mind gives us the model. We therefore have reason to ask where it was found’,’ and Durkheim and Mauss find it in the social classification of men, that is in the socio-economic substructure. And not only does the idea of classification arise from such structures as kinship, clan and village groupings, but, for example among the Zuni as described by Cushing:

‘Primitive Chssi)ication, trans. R. Needham (London: Cohen and West 1963). ‘Ibid.. p. 8.

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we find . . . a veritable arrangement of the universe. All beings and facts in nature, ‘the sun, moon, and stars, the sky, earth and sea, in all their phenomena and elements; and all inanimate objects, as well as plants, animals, and men’, are classed, labelled, and assigned to fixed places in a unique and integrated ‘system’ in which all the parts are co-ordinated and subordinated one to another by ‘degrees of resemblance’.”

The ‘division of the world is exactly the same as that of the clans within the pueblo’.s Primitive theory of nature is derived from social structure.

By the time of the Elementary Forms,’ however, Durkheim has made his celebrated shift to the thesis of the sui generis character of religion. It is worth quoting the relevant passage at length:

It is necessary to avoid seeing in this theory of religion a simple restatement of historical materialism. . . . In showing that religion is something essentially social, we do not mean to say that it confines itself to translating into another language the material forms of society and its immediate vital necessities. It is true that we take it as evident that social life depends upon its material foundation and bears its mark, just as the mental life of an individual depends upon his nervous system and in fact his whole organism. But collective consciousness is something more than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological basis, just as individual consciousness is something more than a simple efflorescence of the nervous system. In order that the former may appear, a synthesis sui generis of particular consciousnesses is required. Now this synthesis has the effect of disengaging a whole world of sentiments, ideas and images which, once born, obey laws all their own. They attract each other, repel each other, unite, divide themselves, and multiply, though these combinations are not commanded and necessitated by the conditions of the underlying reality. The life thus brought into being even enjoys so great an independence that it sometimes indulges in manifestations with no purpose or utility of any sort, for the mere pleasure of affirming itself. We have shown that this is often precisely the case with ritual activity and mythological thought.’

Replacing ‘religion’ and ‘ritual’ by ‘science’ in this long quotation, we may conclude that, a fortiori, the later Durkheim would allow for many-way interactions between social structure and scientific theory, and even for the relative autonomy of internal rules of scientific development. This is not to restore an a priori rationalism (which is explicitly excluded in the anti-Kantian arguments of the Introduction to Elementary Forms), but to open the possibility that some social practices, including scientific theorizing, become subject to ‘laws all their own, a life indulged for the mere pleasure of affirming itself’. Among its various possible characterizations, science as play is not the

Llbid., p. 43. 8Ibid., p. 44. ‘E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain (New York:

Collier Books 1961). ‘Ibid., pp. 423 -4.

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least interesting from the historian’s and sociologist’s points of view. It is not only rationalist illusions about the ‘truth’ claims of science that need sociological scrutiny, but also the social fact that science as play is tolerated and indeed encouraged in certain sorts of society, just as religion as play appeared to be tolerated in the societies Durkheim studied.

This suggests that a study supplementary to Bloor’s would be one in which the possibility of relatively free ‘aesthetic’ theorizing would also be recognized,

and explained as a social phenomenon - a sociology of methodologies to supplement the sociology of knowledge. Habermas’s comments about ‘contemplative’ science in Greece might yield such a sociology; another example is to be found in recent studies of positivism as itself a socially conditioned ideology.’ And Bloor’s own example of the early Royal Society illustrates the ideology of ‘scientific autonomy’ which, in the aftermath of Civil War and Restoration, is itself socially explicable. Such examples show how conscious methodology can sometimes be used to screen off direct

influence between social interest and the content of scientific theory, and thus give the illusion of logically autonomous scientific arguments.

*J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human fnferesfs, trans. J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1972), Appendix; A. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1970), chap. 4.