Science Without Laws?

With this issue we introduce an occasional series, “State of the Art,” offering concise assessments of a particular field of study, generally taking off from a recently published book.

Philosophers who think about science are in trouble nowadays. The broad area known as “science studies” that includes them—as well as sociologists and historians—stands for considerable controversy, and quite public controversy at that. At issue—as hard as it is to believe—is the truth status of scientific knowledge.

The pragmatist in all of us recoils from a controversy about the obvious. When we go to the doctor or dutifully take our blood-pressure prescriptions we assume that there is a correspondence—however imprecise—between the knowledge being applied and what goes on in our bodies. That is enough truth for most people, including most scientists. But within the academic disciplines that study science, much that is new and interesting about how science works has made it possible to challenge simplistic notions of what constitutes truth.

Scientists often talk about an ideal world where laws uniformly apply. To put the matter as would Ronald Giere in Science Without Laws:

So what is the relationship between the idealized model pendulums of classical mechanics and real swinging weights? It is, I suggest, like the relationship between a prototype and things judged sufficiently similar to the prototype to be classified as of that type. … [T]he models themselves provide guidelines for the relevant similarity judgments.

The slip between the cup of the prototype and the lip of its analogue is where Giere wants to situate his philosophical position.

Giere wants science to proceed without the Procrustean bed of laws which, he argues, pertain to the prototypes and not to the reality of the everyday models. His naturalistic account, he claims, allows us to imagine that “what we have now [as] truths” might be different if we held to a different model of the world. Science provides maps, and “making maps is a cognitive and social activity of humans.” Mistakes about the terrain can easily be made, and Giere wants philosophers—and science studies in general—to stop fighting about whether or not maps actually represent physical spaces. “A better question is: How do we humans manage to use maps to represent physical spaces? This way of posing the question makes it less easy to forget that making maps is a cognitive and social activity of humans.” It is as if Giere wants to make the Creator’s wisdom, the actual world out there, a matter for Him alone to know. A nice thought, but in the face of the crisis current in the philosophy of science, does it amount to the foundations for the discipline that Giere seems intent upon setting?

When a discipline resorts to common sense in order to find its moorings, then it may be time to question the enterprise. Most of what Giere has to say makes good sense. He eschews the relativism fashionable in some academic circles, one that would have DNA be “constructed through the process by which scientists build networks of allies to defeat their scientific rivals.” There are actually social scientists and philosophers out there—the French anthropologist Bruno Latour and the British philosopher Harry Collins1—who believe entirely in the social construction argument that renders the relationship between the contents of the pill and the high blood pressure in the first instance largely irrelevant. Their relativism has even at moments taken the academic high ground, and the School of Social Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton wanted to offer Latour a permanent position. The offer failed over the objections from historians and scientists on its faculty. That the perfectly sensible Giere is forced to serve up to his readers a set of maxims most of us would regard as banal by virtue of their being obvious illustrates the depth the dilemma of what direction the philosophy of science should take.

Perhaps it is now clear why the philosophy of science is in trouble. Through no particular fault of their own, the current generation of philosophers is fighting battles about the truth status of relativism that are the fallout from an older idealization of science. The arguments begin to seem arid, and it appears that the discipline must look elsewhere for its repositioning.

One place to look lies with cognitive psychology, where simplistic models about the exact relationship between the mind and the world around it have given way to more sophisticated ways of testing that relationship. Retooling would be necessary because following the work of the psychologists can be as taxing as understanding the magnetic reversals in deep-sea sediments, a case study admirably handled in Giere’s account of how scientists know. The other place philosophers should go is to history itself.

Giere’s handling of the historical past is another clue to what has gone wrong in the philosophy of science. His understanding of the Enlightenment—where he claims science got the bad habit of indulging in universal laws—is simplistic at best. He thinks it arose out of the success of Newtonian physics—true enough—but the success, according to Giere, “was motivated by various political circumstances. In England it was seen as supporting both the restored monarchy and the Church of England.” He cites my work to vindicate that argument.2

The success of Newton’s physics (imbedded in the Principia of 1687) related politically to a parliamentary revolution in 1688–89 against the restored monarchy and the segment of the church that supported the divine right of kings. The Enlightenment habit of asserting laws, where it possessed a social dimension as well as a mathematical one, grew precisely out of the struggle to institute representative government and the rule of law in the West. The time may have come to speak of maps rather than laws—a distinction that might strike many as not making much of a difference—but not before we realize that the legacy of science is deeply tied to the defeat of absolute monarchy, censorship, and clerical privilege in the West.

Philosophers of science like Giere who actually want to see science be come more democratic, who are concerned about feminist issues as well as the question of who in the poorer world gets access to Big Science, should take consolation knowing that the progressive agenda lies at the foundations of Western science. Relativists who want science to be socially constructed think they are slaying the dragon of Big Science. In fact, all they are doing is forcing perfectly intelligent philosophers like Giere to state and restate the obvious. In the process, philosophy of science begins to sound like a private conversation with less and less relevance to the ethical and philosophical issues that concern many thinking people.

Margaret C. Jacob is professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is author of a number of books, including The Newtonians and the English Revolution (Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (Temple Univ. Press, 1988), Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), and, with Joyce Appleby and Lynn Hunt, Telling the Truth About History (Norton, 1994).

1. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); Harry Collins and S. Yearly, “Epistemological Chicken,” in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science As Practice and Culture (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 283–300.

2. Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution (Cornell Univ. Press, 1976; reprinted by Gordon and Breach, 1990).