Book reviews

in Native terms? The list is endless and demands painful soul-searching for Natives and non-Natives alike.

Finally, no-one could write a book about Native Americans without a reference to their history, and the abuse generated by the new arrivals-the Europeans/Americans. Peat man- ages to cover the harrowing topic in the con- text of worldviews themselves. We must ques- tion ourselves. We must face and share the responsibility for what happened then. The past cannot be escaped (Other views hold that it is, in fact, cyclical), and facing the pain, guilt and confusion is the first step towards healing and understanding.

The question remains; where to go after

taking the first step? Here, Native Americans

Science as superstition

Jerome R Ravetz

Science Steve Fuller Open University Press, Buckingham, UK, 1997

This must be a personal review. Steve Fuller is one of the retatively few scholars who appreci- ates what I was trying to do in my book of 25 years ago (see his footnote 3 to Chapter 1). His own project has deep affinities with mine, along with stimulating differences in detail and style. Whereas my method was an heuristic analysis of the social activity of science, with the scholarly material almost entirely con- tained in footnotes, his is a thoroughly schol- arly historical and sociological analysis. I wrote before the ‘social deconstruction of science’ flourished, and he comes after; but we seem to share a belief that in focussing rather narrowly on a criticism of scientific knowledge, this tendency failed to connect with some of the most important issues. And

Jerome R Ravetz is Director of the Research Methods Consultancy and may be contacted

at 196 Clarence Gardens, London NW1 6AU, UK (Tel: +44 CO)171 224 7084; e-mail: 100105.2516@compuserve.com.)

must decide for themselves. They can decide whether they want to define themselves at all, and if so, how. Whatever happens, it must be on their terms and in their way.

Blackfoot Physics is a thought-provoking book that will do much to bring about a change in perception of the Native American world. The tragedy of these peoples lies in the fact that they, and many Others, have been urged by the dominant worldview to justify not only their concepts, but their very existence. Indeed it is true, as Albert Camus once said, that

through a curious transposition peculiar to our times it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.

finally, whereas I concluded my book with a somewhat breathtaking leap to the counter- culture, Steve refrains from giving any positive message. However, it is clear that we are in the same enterprise, and my evaluation of the book is coloured by that.

In one sense we are continuing a pro- gramme that became prominent and subvers- ive with Thomas Kuhn, but which can actually be traced back to Karl Pearson a century ago: the demystification of science. There is a pro- found paradox that science, serving for so long as the exemplar for those who would expose the false consciousness of other ways of know- ing and believing, is itself revealed as relying on myths and legends for its image of itself. This is seen in the traditional history of science read as the story of Progress, the trust in a Scientific Method which protects us from error, and hence the retrospective praising and blaming of scientists for their agreement (or disagreement) with present beliefs. Kuhn’s reaction to the discovery of ‘1984 history’ was one of anger at a betrayal by his teachers, and his work was enlivened, perhaps driven, by irony ever after.’

Somewhat later, I tried to provide a de- mystified but nonetheless constructively criti- cal account of scientific practice; my main

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Book reviews

concern was to lay the foundations for the quality-assessment of scientific practice rather than to expose the ideology of scientism. My programme did not attract much attention at the time among most of the critical scholars, for whom debunking of science seemed the most urgent task. Now it may be more relevant to common concerns, as quality-assurance and ethics become ever more urgent. Steve Fuller touches on these issues, but places them in a broader historical and cultural perspective of the rise and possible decline of science as we know it.

Fuller’s writing is always dense with ideas and insights; sometimes his sentences almost choke on them. But here the touch is usually light, as if this is a book he really enjoyed writ- ing. He invokes historical examples and cul- tural parallels from a wide, sometimes bewil- dering variety of sources. But coping with this is a small price for the reader to pay, for appreciating Fuller’s perspective on science as a cultural product of a very special civilisation, that of modern Europe. His final passages are about the ongoing transformation of science into a fragmented set of special techniques, lacking in the impulse to ‘mediate conflicting bodies of thought through critical inquiry’. This is characteristic of Chinese science, as exemplified in its most illustrious expert, Shen Kua (1031-95). He had the Chinese philo- sophy of mystery and duality to fall back on when confronted with incoherence; for us, suggests Fuller, it is La Condition Postmod-

erne. By implication, his answer to the ques- tion in the title of the final chapter, ‘Does Science Have a Future?‘, is ‘who knows?‘, with even a hint of ‘and does it really matter in the long run?‘.

His narrative gets off to a rattling good start, with the first chapter identifying ‘the pub- lic understanding of science’ as ‘our latest moral panic’. In this he announces his detach- ment from the social world of science, ques- tioning whether disciplinary specialization arises from the logic of scientific progress, or whether it is a matter of academic guilds insul- ating them from external pressures. He also distinguishes the Popperian, or Enlightenment, conception of science from the Kuhnian, or Positivist, in which, having agreed on their paradigm, ‘scientists retain their autonomy by displaying their authority’. Whether this is the best way for solving the big problems of society or of science, is another question.

The critical core of the book, and the high

point of its quality as an enjoyable read, is in Chapter 4, ‘Science as Superstition’. Here he playfully uses the literary device of a traveller’s tale, a Martian’s-eye view of the whole thing. His Martians are quite sophisticated anthropol- ogists, who know a lot about the culture even before they begin. Thus they wonder whether they should disguise themselves as ‘a member of a group that is essential to reproducing the social order of science but traditionally mar- ginal to its power structure’; such could include ‘women, ethnic minorities, postdoc- toral fellows and technical support staff’. How much is left of the pretensions of science as an open society, after that comment, is left to the reader to decide. After much illuminating dis- cussion, the Martians decide to use five categ- ories of traditional religious thought; these show how rationality slips into rationalisation, and involve an element of superstition ‘which obscures the causal mechanism relevant for understanding a range of social phenomena’.

If the filleting of scientific self-conscious- ness by the religious analogy were not enough, Fuller adds two appendices to his chapter. The first is on the famous Mertonian ‘four norms’ of scientific practice, defining the idealistic commitments which Merton thought neces- sary if science is to function. To Merton’s ‘positive spin’, defined by the ‘norms’ Univer- salism, Communism, Disinterestedness and Organized Scepticism, Fuller’s Martians pro- vide a ‘negative spin’, with Cultural Imperial- ism, Mafiosism, Opportunism, and Collective Irresponsibility. Would that Paul Feyerabend had lived long enough to read these lines! While Merton’s credo could be seen as an epi- taph for old ‘little science’, the Science Citation Index is the motto for the quantified, industrialised ‘big science’. But its objectivity is only apparent; Fuller shows that is a ‘hyper- real’ entity in the sense of Baudrillard (the French postmodern philosopher), that is a fic- tion abstracted from an activity which then becomes a standard for assessing the activity itself.

In such a rich collection, a reviewer will always find something to argue about; perhaps that is part of Fuller’s plan. The historical bits, thrown in as the occasion demands, can some- times become confusing. And at the end, I am still left with the question I explored in my original study. Given all its defects, science is still central to our civilization. Once it has been demystified, can it still go on? What pre- vents the operation of a Gresham’s Law of

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scientific products, with the shoddy driving out the good? What keeps science up, except for morale and commitment? And for this, does science need a Noble Lie about itself? If so, its trajectory could become one of the greatest of historic ironies. And Steve Fuller would have started to chart the path.

Notes and references

1. Ravetz, J. R., Ideological commitments in the philosophy of science. In The Merger of Knowl- edge with Power, J. R. Ravetz, Cassell, London, 1990.

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