On the question of trusting experts

Over the years, journalist Chris Mooney has made a name for himself as a chronicler of what he has called The Republican War on Science: the numerous battles being fought within/across America's political landscape over issues like global warming, pollution and regulation.  As time has gone by, Mooney has also started to draw on social psychological and brain imaging research on political bias: how people interpret scientific findings and facts in the light of their ideological convictions, or as Mooney's article for Mother Jones was titled, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science: How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link."  From an STS perspective, these findings, even though couched in the slightly problematic scientistic idiom of social psychology, make perfect sense: they suggest that "data" is always interpreted in the light of previously held beliefs; that facts and values are not easily separable in practice. (Mooney's second book is titled "The Republican Brain" which does sound problematic.  But since I haven't read it, I'm not going to comment on it.  See this discussion between him and Mother Jones' Kevin Drum: here, here and here.)

In a new article in the Washington Post, Mooney reports on a recent experiment from social psychologist Dan Kahan to argue that you should, yes, trust experts more than ordinary people.  Kahan and his collaborators asked the subjects in their pool (judges, lawyers, lawyers-in-training and laypeople, statistically representative of Americans) to interpret whether a given law was applicable to a hypothetical incident; the question was: would they apply the rules of statutory interpretation correctly? So first, they were informed about the law that bans littering in a wildlife preserve.  Next they were told that a group of people had left litter behind, in this case, reusable water containers.  But there was a catch: some were told that these were left behind by immigration workers helping illegal immigrants cross over the US-Mexico border safely.  Others were told that the litter belonged to a construction crew building a border fence.  All were polled to understand their political and ideological affiliations.  Predictably, depending on their ideological beliefs, people came down on different sides of the issue: Republicans tended to be more forgiving of the construction workers, etc.  What was different was that judges and trained lawyers tended, more than laypeople, to avoid this bias.  They interpreted the law correctly (the correct answer here was that it didn't constitute littering because the water bottles were reusable) despite their ideological convictions. Well, so far so good. As an anthropologist, I interpret the experiment to be saying that lawyers are subjected to special institutional training, unlike the rest of us, and that this habitus lets them reach the "correct" result far more than us. Experts are different from the rest of us, in some way.

But what's interesting is the conclusion that Mooney draws from this experiment: that while experts are biased, they are less biased than the rest of us, and that therefore, experts should be trusted more often than not.  Well.  Scientific American's John Horgan has a pragmatic take on this: that this, of course, leaves open the question of which experts to trust, and scientists, like other experts, have been known to be wrong many many many times.  To trust experts because they are experts, seems, well, against the spirit of a democratic society.  (Another Horgan reponse to Mooney here.)

But I think there's something here about the particular result that Mooney is using to make his point.  Something that I can think can help to show that yes, experts matter, but no, that doesn't mean that there's a blanket case for trusting experts more than others.  Lawyers and judges do come to different conclusions than the rest of us when it comes to statutory interpretation.  But there is one huge elephant in the room: the US Supreme Court, at this very moment we speak, is considering King vs. Burwell, a challenge to the Affordable Care Act that hinges precisely on questions of statutory interpretation. How do you interpret a law that says that the federal government will provide subsidies to insurance exchanges created by "States"?  Does "States" mean the states that constitute the United States or does it mean state, in the abstract, whether it's the federal government or the states?  How difficult can that be?  It seemed very clear in the long battle over the ACA that the subsidies were meant for everyone.  But no, the question was contentious enough that that courts disagreed with each other and the Supreme Court took it up.  With a good chance that they might rule in a way that destroys the very foundations of the Affordable Care Act.

How might one reconcile the findings of the Kahan study with what's happening with the Supreme Court?  The Supreme Court judges are certainly experts, elite, well-trained, and at the top of their respective games.  And yet, here they are, right at the center of a storm over what journalist David Leonhardt has called the "federal government's biggest attack on inequality."   I think there's a way.  Experts are conditioned to think in certain ways, by virtue of their institutional training and practice, and when stakes are fairly low, they do.  But once stakes are high enough, things change.  What might seem like a fairly regular problem in ordinary times, a mere question of technicality, may not look like one in times of crisis.  At this point, regular expert-thinking breaks down and things become a little more contested.

And we do live in a polarized time.  As political scientists have shown time and time again, the polity of the United States experienced a realignment after the Civil Rights movement.  The two major parties had substantial overlaps before but now they don't.  They cater to entirely different constituencies: the Republicans being the party of managers, evangelicals and the white working class, the Democrats being the party of organized labor, affluent professionals and minorities.  Political polarization has meant that even institutions which are supposed to be non-political (but really have never been so) start to look more and more political, because there are basic questions of disagreement over things that may have seemed really simple and technical.  This explains the spate of decisions from the Supreme Court where the conservatives and liberals on the bench have split neatly along ideological lines.  

But does that mean that judges are just politicians in robes? (Which is the thesis that Dan Kahan and others set out to debunk.)  Not really.  The US Supreme Court actually resolves many many cases with  fairly clear majorities; more than a third of them through unanimous decisions.  These cases hardly ever make it into the public eye, and they involve, to us at least, what seem like arcane questions of regulation and jurisdiction.  Another way to interpret this is to say that these cases are "technical" because they are not in the public eye, no great "stakes" attach to these decisions, unless it's to the parties in question.  When stakes are high -- Obamacare, campaign finance funding, abortion, gay marriage -- the Supreme Court, just like the rest of the country, is hopelessly polarized.  And a good thing too because fundamental crises in values are best addressed through Politics (with a capital P) rather than leaving them to bodies of experts.

Does this sound at all familiar to you?  STS has come a long way since The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but this is not unfamiliar to what Kuhn calls a time of crisis. Scientists and others have (often in self-serving ways) taken up the message of the book to be that science moves in cycles of innovation: a time of normal science, and then a time of revolutionary science (ergo, starting a new paradigm is the best way to do science).  But really, the point of the book that's missed is that the crises that Kuhn talks about (that happen through a buildup of anomalies) are organizational crises; at such times, fundamentally taken-for-granted understandings of what is right and wrong break down.  New taken-for-granted understandings emerge, but they emerge along-side a different organizational order.

Social psychological experiments on political bias in the "public understanding of science" need to be understood not as grand truths about how people interpret, but as historically contingent findings.  Yes, judges will vote more "correctly" than laypeople, but a toy case presented as part of a social psychological study is not the same as an actual case.  Real cases have audiences, as do the judges and the lawyers.  I remember when the first original challenge to Obamacare was floated, many liberals (including me) found the question of the constitutionality of the individual mandate ridiculous.  Of course, the federal government could mandate that everyone needed to purchase health insurance, that's what governments do!  (Not to mention that it provided subsidies to those who couldn't afford it, so it was hardly unjust.)  But the case just about squeaked through the Supreme Court in our favor and it could have well gone the other way.  Burrell vs King is, if anything, an even sillier case, but no one is underestimating it anymore.

It seems like social psychological studies of "bias" might be doing in this day and age what the social studies of scientific expertise did many years ago.  Although Mooney seems to misunderstand the point of science studies.  These studies weren't meant to show that experts are "biased."  They were meant to show that that expert practices and discourse are designed to construct certain questions as "technical."  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does, at certain points, drown out other voices who disagree with the experts' conclusion (again, this is true of all political choices, usually). What is more, once experts are framed as objective and arguing only from facts rather than values, opposing voices, who have no recourse to the language of facts, get delegitimized even further.  STS recommendations were not that you need to trust experts more or less, but that questions about competing values needed to be brought to the fore in public  debates that involved science and technology (along with technical expertise, of course).  And while scientific and legal experts work in different institutional ecologies, all experts work within institutional ecologies, which means their work is shaped by their collective understandings of what is technical and what is not.  The solution is not to trust experts more but to find better ways to debate differences in fundamental values, while still using what we can from experts.  

Harold Garfinkel again

In the latest issue of Social Studies of Science, Michael Lynch has a nice review essay (and obituary) of Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology and its relationship to STS.  Well worth your time, and the bibliography, I think, is a great resource!

Related post: How to read Garfinkel.

How to read Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel died a couple of weeks ago.  (See obituaries here and here.)  And since I've never done a post on him on this blog - despite the fact that discovering him was tremendously important for my research - perhaps this is the appropriate time to pay tribute.  I don't claim to understand Garfinkel fully - his prose is notoriously opaque** - but I hope to suggest some kind of reading guide to "Studies in Ethnomethodology," his magnum opus - in the hope that it may be useful to other novices like me - who are just starting out.

I first heard of Garfinkel when I read Paul Dourish "Where the Action Is" and then Lucy Suchman's "Plans and Situated Actions."  The field of ethnomethodology had a big impact on me - and was one of the reasons why I decided I wanted to study social science rather than design technology.  In a way, the building assumption of both Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks fed into the reductionist part of me.  I understood them to be saying: Fine, you want to investigate social life?  Then don't start with the big things: class, gender, conflict, revolutions.  Start small, let's first understand how day-to-day interaction is structured and constituted.  Then - once we have a better understanding of this - only then, let's go on to understanding the big things.  This fit in well with the part of me that liked physics and mathematics: in physics, you start off by understanding the motion of bodies in space - but that helps you explain planetary motion as well.

It's debatable whether this reductionist stance can be applied to social life - do we need to understand micro-social interactions in order to understand macro-social phenomena?  I don't know - but I don't believe in this as strongly as I did before, when I first heard of ethnomethodology***.  But let me get back to where I originally wanted this post to go: a novice's reading guide to Garfinkel for other novices. 

First, don't read Garfinkel at all at the beginning.  (Ha!)  I suggest reading the following texts in this order:

John Heritage's essay on Garfinkel in "Key Sociological Thinkers."  This is a simple, easy-to-read, and accessible introduction to Garfinkel's key sociological insights.  [Email me if you want a pdf.]

Then read John Heritage's (again!) review essay on ethnomethodology in "Social Theory Today."  [pdf]  These two should be enough. 

But at this point, it might be good to dip into Heritage's book-length exposition of Garfinkel: "Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology."  This is, in its own way, a difficult text to read - and it's a whole book.  But I'd say concentrate on chapters 4 and 5. 

• Chapter 4 is titled "The Morality of Cognition" and among other things, has an account of Garfinkel's famous "breaching experiments."  My own favorite example is on pages 94-94 that contains a transcript of a conversation between a husband and wife - which shows how much is taken-for-granted, and therefore incomplete in seemingly ordinary conversations. 
• Chapter 5 is titled "Actions, Rules and Contexts" and is pretty dense. However, it is a good introduction to how Garfinkel goes against the typical notion of "rules" as driving action.

And now - finally - read Garfinkel himself, "Studies in Ethnomethodology."  I think it's important to read him because Studies is worth reading and reading again.  But don't read the book in sequence (and definitely don't start with Chapter 1 which is deceptively titled "What is Ethnomethodology?" and has some of the densest prose).  Instead, use the following order: 

• Read Chapter 3 first - titled "Common sense knowledge of social structures: the documentary method of interpretation in lay and professional fact finding."  This chapter gives - with vivid examples - a nice account of the work that goes on in day-to-day social interactions. 
• Then read chapter 8 titled "The rational properties of scientific and common sense activities." 
• Then read chapter 2 titled "Studies of the routine grounds of everyday activities" - again, there are some funny breaching experiments here - but more importantly, these experiments serve to ground what Garfinkel is trying to point out.
• And finally - yes! - read chapter 1, "What is Ethnomethodology?"   I don't guarantee that this will help you understand this chapter but it does help to place it in context. 
• And finally, after all this, read the remaining chapters in whatever order you like.  Don't miss Chapter 5, "Passing and the management achievement of sex status in an 'inter-sexed' person, part 1" which concludes with an almost fantastic revelation that would rival the sting-in-the-tail stories of O'Henry.

--------------------------
** For example, here is how Garfinkel outlines his key notion of "account-ability":

The following studies seek to treat practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study, and by paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention usually accorded extraordinary events, seek to learn about them as phenomena in their own right. Their central recommendation is that the activities whereby members produces and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those settings “account-able.” The “reflexive,” or “incarnate” character of accounting practices and accounts makes up the crux of that recommendation. When I speak of accountable my interests are to such matters as the following. I mean the observable-and-reportable, i.e. available to members as situated practices of looking-and-telling. I mean, too, that such practices consist of an endless, ongoing, contingent accomplishment; that they are carried on under the auspices of, and are made to happen as events in, the same ordinary affairs that in organizing they describe; that the practices are done by parties to those settings whose skill with, knowledge of, and entitlement to the detailed work of that accomplishment – whose competence – they obstinately depend upon, recognize, use, and take for granted; and that they take their competence for granted itself furnishes parties with a setting’s distinguishing and particular features, and of course it furnishes them as well as resources, troubles, projects, and the rest.

John Heritage, whose book on ethnomethodology is really really good, has this to say about Garfinkel's writing style: 

These studies are discussed in a difficult prose style in which dense thickets of words seem to resist the reader's best endeavours, only to yield, at the last, forceful and unexpected insights which somehow remain obstinately open-ended and difficult to place.

To be fair, Heritage also mentions that Garfinkel's short story was anthologized in the 1941 "Best American Short Stories" volume -- so the man could clearly write!

***That said, my sense is that the guiding principle of ethnomethodology is also the guiding principle of Science and Technology Studies.  In Science Studies, we like to show the work that goes on, even in the most routine, taken-for-granted situations - for example, the notion of "transmitting" knowledge, especially scientific knowledge is not as simple as it seems.  There are pedagogic practices (for example, the instructor solving problems and then setting examples for students to solve on their own), exam structures (what kinds of questions are students tested for?), and most importantly, the background understandings these create when scientists schooled in one discipline interpret the work of others.  Garfinkel's analysis of the work that goes on even in the most day-to-day social encounters is tremendously useful here.

Yes, yes, but the social sciences have been here before ...

Chris Mooney's latest piece in Mother Jones titled, nicely, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe in Science" is pretty good and refers to some interesting studies that I hadn't heard of.  The article's main point is: modern neuroscience and psychology have shown that our emotions color our capacity to reason, even when we are looking at scientific evidence. 

But may I just point out that the sociology reached this conclusion a century ago?  You don't really need neuroscience or fancy brain mechanisms to understand this; looking closely at social practices will get us there faster.  I don't really have any bone to pick with the article -- if neuroscience is what the public needs to understand that there is no such thing as pure unadulterated rationality, then I'll take that any day.

But there are still a couple of points that I'd like to make -- because they are implicit in Mooney's article and in the arguments of some of my friends as well.

It's nice that psychologists and neuroscientists think that values color the way we think of facts.  The problem is that even after knowing this, we still like to think of "facts" and "values" as useful terms.  Even more problematic is that we continue to think that people change their minds because of arguments.  This, to me, is almost entirely wrong, and still is the guiding assumption of Mooney's piece.  No one ever became an atheist because someone presented him with an irrefutable proof of God's non-existence (which is why I find the New Atheists a bit boring).  The secularization of Europe did not happen because Voltaire's diatribes against God -- it happened because a Church-State separation was put into place following all the bloody wars of religion that people were so tired of.  This separation, the rise of industrial capitalism and the separation of spheres that forms such a big part of the classical liberal political system -- all of these were instrumental in the rise of secularism (and Voltaire must be understood as a part of this current, rather than someone who made arguments that presented certain "facts" to the reader.)

When I say this to my friends, the answer always is: "But that's not true.  We did change our minds because of someone's arguments."  Or "that's not true.  I know plenty of people who became atheists after reading Dawkins."  Now there's no way I can offer a mathematical proof of what I am saying.  My point is simply: that this so-called argument that changed someone's mind was simply, to use a tennis metaphor, the last point of a match. Of course, the winner wins the last point -- but it's even more crucial to know the events that led  up to the last point.  If we want to know why someone changes his mind about something important, we need to look at the wider narrative of practices and that person's history, rather than just at some fact that convinced him (even if he himself attributes his change of beliefs to the presentation of certain facts).

A question about Hawk-Eye statistics: who owns them?

I've been working on a course project that looks at the various aspects of the Hawk-Eye system used in tennis for adjudicating line calls.  For those that don't follow tennis, Hawk-Eye is a computer vision-based system, that infers the trajectory of the ball on the tennis court and calculates where it hit the ground (inside, outside, on the line, etc.)  The idea is to eliminate the human sources of error when calling the ball "in" or "out"; errors that can be all the way from "the ball is too fast for the human eye" to "the linesman hates this player."

But there's one place where I'm getting stuck.  The Hawk-Eye system, once deployed on a court, generates a bunch of statistics about the ball placement.  Who owns these statistics?  The tournament organizers, who have presumably purchased the Hawk-Eye system?  The television stations, like Tennis Channel, who use the Hawk-Eye generated statistics (and the awesome visualization) in their broadcasts?  Or is it a combination of the two?   And if someone wants to use the Hawk-Eye statistics for coaching or strategic purposes (say, for Andy Roddick to figure out how to beat Federer in the next match), how do they get those statistics?


Any help would be much appreciated.  If you have any suggestions, answers or tips (including books or links I could look up), please use the comments.  Thanks!

The Republican War on Science and David Bloor's Symmetry Principle

In Knowledge and Social Imagery, his manifesto for the Strong Program in the sociology of science, David Bloor lays out his four principles for the discipline of Science Studies.  One of these is the Symmetry principle which he expresses as follows:

[The Strong Program] would be symmetrical in its style of explanation.  The same types of cause would explain, say, true and false beliefs.

There is a certain aesthetic reasonableness to this principle that I like very much: after all why should there be different explanations of true and false beliefs?  And the principle itself is intended to oppose the traditional conception of scientific knowledge: that true beliefs need no explanation, but false beliefs do.  The explanation of false beliefs is usually distorting factors like personal beliefs, commitments and ideology.

But I've always found it hard to explain the utility of the symmetry principle to others.  What's the use of it? is usually the question.  And I must admit it was always hard to explain its utility outside the field.  As a principle in understanding any kind of knowledge (including scientific knowledge), the symmetry principle has always seemed to me an indispensable tool.  What it could be used for -- outside of the sociology of knowledge --  I couldn't really say. 

Well, until today, that is.

I've been reading Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.  The book is a meticulously researched piece of political journalism.  The story is galvanizing, if a little wearying in its repetitiveness: how a handful of scientists, financed by corporations, helped to create doubt about the scientific consensus on topics like the risks of smoking and acid rain to the ozone hole and global warming, leading to considerable delay in the enactment of regulatory policies (and for global warming, no policies at all).  It's astonishing how the same names of the same scientists keep popping up in every debate: these guys really were deep-pocketed merchants of doubt.  They had a clear objective which they shared with the rest of the American conservative movement: to oppose any possible Government regulations on corporations as well as dismantle the already existing ones. 

So far so good.  Unfortunately, despite all the wonderful data that the authors have combed through, the story the authors tell is frustratingly traditional and asymmetric.  It's true that the road to the regulation of tobacco (and now it seems global warming) was long and arduous and disturbing.  But the road to regulation for acid rain and the ozone hole was arguably much shorter.  We were able to regulate the emissions of sulfur and CFCs despite the doubts created by the right-wing machine using both straight-forward bans and cap-and-trade mechanisms.  Why were regulators quick to respond in these cases but not in the others despite the right-wing noise machine?  The authors, it seems to me, don't think it is especially relevant.  For instance on page 124, they say:

The combined results of the Ozone Trends Panel and the field expeditions caused the Montreal Protocol to be renegotiated. The results also convinced the industry that their products really were doing harm, and opposition began to fade. CFCs would now be regulated based on what had already happened, not on what might happen in the future. Because the chemicals had lifetimes measured in decades, there was no longer any doubt that more damage would happen.  [My emphasis]

But didn't they spend the previous three chapters describing how industry leaders almost never accept scientific findings when they go against their own interests (e.g. Big Tobacco on the risks of smoking)?   So why should the industry be convinced in this case?  It seems to me that the authors don't really care.  When scientific findings lead to the appropriate regulations, it's because they were true.  When they don't, it's because of the right-wing doubting machine and its near-fanatical free market ideology.

This is where the symmetry principle would have been useful.  If we assume that there is one process that leads from scientific findings to the appropriate regulations, then the same process holds irrespective of whether said regulation was enacted or not.  (It's not as if the doubting thomases didn't start beating their drums during the ozone hole controversy, it's just that they were not successful in blocking regulation.)  So knowing what we did right in the ozone hole and acid rain case will arguably be important for us if we want to enact global warming regulation.

I don't mean to suggest that if the authors did treat these cases symmetrically, we would know what to do to enact emissions reductions in the US.  No.  And it's possible that the difference is just that the right-wing machine threw less money at these problems where we were able to enact regulation.  Or maybe because of the consequences of acid rain or ozone depletion were so close to home (skin cancer, etc.) whereas the consequences of global warming are strikingly diffuse (what exactly does it mean for average temperatures to rise by 2 degrees?), the American public was just more supportive of regulation in these cases.  But whatever it is, it would be useful to treat the cases of successful regulation and delayed (or impossible) regulation symmetrically.

The Symmetry principle is often derided for its relativism towards science.  Here is one case where it could be used (although in a political economic analysis) for science, and not against it.

[I don't mean to hit on the book, I think it's rich and very detailed and a rich source of data for anyone who wants to understand the political economy of scientific findings and their relation to regulation.  I highly recommend it.]

Why did the prestige of science and engineering decline in the US?

I just finished reading The Great Stagnation a couple of days ago and enjoyed it very much.  There's a lot there to think about -- especially about technological changes, even for an STS-er.  Plus the book is only about 20000 words -- go for it!

In the chapter "Can we fix things?" Cowen offers the following policy prescription: "Raise the social status of scientists."  And by social status he seems to mean something like: "do something that makes doing science something more young people aspire to."  (And remember this book is specifically about the United States.)

I think that is exactly right.  But I'm curious: does anyone have any ideas why the social status of science (and I presume, engineering and technology) declined in the US?  And when it started to decline?  I am starting to get particularly interested in this question.  Any books, articles, or your own hypotheses that you think are relevant to this?


Please leave your response in the comments.

Defending Thomas Kuhn from Errol Morris

Errol Morris' series on Thomas Kuhn started amusingly: it was fun to hear that Morris -- the director of great documentary The Fog of War -- was actually a first-year graduate student in the History of Science program at Princeton (and rejected by Harvard's History of Science department!).  (I don't know, that gave me quite a kick.)  And it was funny to hear that he and Thomas Kuhn hadn't gotten along, that Kuhn had thrown an ash-tray at him because he refused to give up his Whiggish ways of doing the history of science.  (There's probably some poetic license here, but it's still funny!)

But as the story progressed (parts two, three, four, five), my enjoyment started to wane.  It wasn't the flowing, free-associative style, which was still fun, although I really didn't see what the digressions into the Pythogorean society had to do with the concept of incommensurability.  No, it was the intellectual portrayal of Thomas Kuhn.  If one reads Morris without reading Kuhn, then Kuhn comes across as an idiot.  And all of us who found The Structure of Scientific Revolutions useful come across as either idiots or fashionable post-modernists who like Structure because it fits in with the relativistic fashions of the day.

What is Morris' problem with Kuhn (other than that he clearly didn't like him)?  Two things.  First, he argues that the concept of incommensurability is incoherent.  And second, that it opens the doors to all sorts of relativism.  The second point is old hat.  Much ink has been shed on how if we give up the idea of Truth, of an unmediated reality out there that we are accountable to, then we are on a slippery slope to ethical relativism.  That it leaves us without a reply to totalitarian dictatorships, that it leaves the door open to the O'Briens of the world who want us to believe that 2+2=5.  Etc.  The first point is old hat too.  As John Holbo points out, incommensurability was criticized in just this way even when Structure was published.  The idea here is that if two paradigms are incommensurable, then we have no way of doing the history of science; so the fact that Kuhn himself could understand the older paradigms proves that paradigms are not really incommensurable.  

As fields, the history of science, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) have moved on: the idea of a linguistic conceptual framework that under-girds scientific theories has been replaced by a search for material practices that constitute science.  Kuhn is studied less as someone who offered fresh new insights but as one of  the oldies: routinely grouped together with Popper, Feyerabend and Lakatos.  (I also think that while Kuhn makes several missteps in Structure -- he tries to define incommensurability linguistically, he starts to talk about using computer programs to understand incommensurability -- the idea of science as being constituted by material practice is there in the book.  As are other things that we now look for as STS scholars: the practices of pedagogy and training in science, the incentive structure, etc.) 


Still.  I'd like to offer a defense of Kuhn and of Structure and why the criticisms that Morris offers are mistaken.  Reading Structure was a transforming experience for me -- and I'd like to bring out why. 

So without any further ado, here goes.

Kuhn's book is more heard about and talked about than read.  For example, I knew (or thought I knew) the fundamentals of its argument long before I read it.  That argument goes something like this:

• That scientific advances happen not cumulatively, but in bursts -- conceptual revolutions alternating with periods of "normal" science
• That  underlying all scientific theories is something called a "paradigm" (think of it as some kind of underlying conceptual scheme) and that one paradigm gets replaced by another during a scientific revolution.  
• And finally, when paradigms change, when a new paradigm replaces the old one, the two are incommensurable, so that when scientists argue for the merits of either paradigm, they are essentially talking past each other.  The paradigm that wins out wins not because it is true.  

The key thing to understand here is that most people would be fine with this argument if it wasn't for the incommensurability part.  Here, for instance, is Thomas Nagel, reviewing Alan Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense:

Much of what Kuhn says about great theoretical shifts, and the inertial role of long-established scientific paradigms and their cultural entrenchment in resisting recalcitrant evidence until it becomes overwhelming, is entirely reasonable, but it is also entirely compatible with the conception of science as seeking, and sometimes finding, objective truth about the world. What has made him a relativist hero is the addition of provocative remarks to the effect that Newton and Einstein, or Ptolemy and Galileo, live in "different worlds," that the paradigms of different scientific periods are "incommensurable," and that it is a mistake to think of the progress of science over time as bringing us closer to the truth about how the world really is.

Before I read Structure, I pretty much agreed with this.  (How could I not?)

When I did read Structure, however, I realized that while this summary was not wrong, the book said a great many other things.  I realized that: 

That Kuhn is not doing philosophy of science, despite the fact that he's almost universally known as a philosopher of science.  It's true that Structure makes a series of bold, philosophical claims.  But it also tries to back them up with historical evidence -- not by using anecdotes but with the kind of concrete, archival research that historians do.  Analytic philosophy, on the other hand, is not an empirical field.  The subject it resembles the most is pure mathematics: you solve "problems" (the problem of knowledge, of skepticism), you use symbolic logic, you use paper and pencil, you construct proofs and thought experiments.  But you do NOT collect data of any sort, you do not make hypotheses that you then hope to confirm by looking at the data.  Kuhn was grounded in the history of science, the theory of scientific change that he propounded came from his close study of early modern science. (Although, as Ian Hacking points out, very few historians of science mix history and philosophy in quite the way Kuhn did -- which is probably why he is more known as a philosopher than as a historian.)

That the biggest claim in Structure -- one that usually flies under the radar -- is not the concept of scientific paradigms, even though much space is spent talking about paradigm changes.  No.  Rather, the central aspect of science, according to Structure, is that the activity that doing science most resembles is solving puzzles.   Kuhn calls this puzzle-solving activity "normal science."  We need to understand the claim here: the point is not to denigrate scientific activity.  The point is that puzzle-solving is not usually understood as a search for knowledge.  So even if science, understood as a collective activity, is engaged in a search for knowledge, in actual concrete terms, this search for knowledge gets done by building and solving puzzles.  Now, to an extent, constructing and solving puzzles is part of all knowledge fields.  Kuhn's point though is that nowhere is this reduction of knowledge into puzzles as prevalent or as polished as in the sciences.  (This is related to how a scientific community is structured as well as its pedagogical practices.)

Finally, the paradigm is not just a linguistic conceptual scheme.  This is the mistake that interlocutors like Morris make.  They think that a paradigm and incommensurability are philosophical concepts.  They are not.  They are not even linguistic (although Kuhn sometimes talks about them that way).  They are -- and this is more important than anything else -- about practice.  My key to Structure, the moment when it all came together for me -- what a paradigm was and how it functioned.  I'm going to reproduce the full paragraph from Kuhn:

A phenomenon familiar to both students of science and historians of science provides a clue.  The former regularly report that they have read through a chapter of their text, understood it perfectly, but nonetheless had difficulty solving a number of the problems at the chapter's end.  Ordinarily, also, those difficulties dissolve in the same way.  The student dicovers, with or without the assistance of his instructor, a way to see a problem as like a problem he has already encountered.  Having seen the resemblance, grasped the analogy between two or more distinct problems, he can interrelate symbols and attach them to nature in the ways that have proved effective before.  The law-sketch, say f = ma, has functioned as a tool, informing the student what similarities to look for, signaling the gestalt in which the situation is to be seen.  The resultant ability to see a variety of situations as like each other, as subjects for f = ma or some other symbolic generalization, is, I think, the main thing a student acquires by doing exemplary problems, whether with a pencil and paper or in a well-designed laboratory.  After he has completed a certain number, which may vary widely from one individual to the next, he views the situations that confront him as a scientist in the same gestalt as other members of his specialists' group.  For him they are no longer the same situations he had encountered when his training began.  He has meanwhile assimilated a time-tested and group-licensed way of learning. (Structure, pg 189) [emphasis mine]

Believe it or not, this is exactly how it happened for me.  I studied how to draw free-body diagrams on my own, just after 10th grade.  So I had no teacher to take me step-by-step through a few solved examples, which is generally the case.  Instead, I had to read the solved examples in my textbook -- many of which struck me as incomprehensible.  I remember staring at diagrams of bodies moving on inclined planes in frustration, almost ready to cry because I didn't know what to do.  My frustration was accentuated, I think, because we had moved to a new town and I was just starting to adapt to it.

And then one day -- I am not sure how --  it went away, .  All I remember is that one fine day I found I could do free-body diagrams just fine, that in fact, I even enjoyed doing them.  Gestalt switch is probably a really good way of describing the change.  A diagram of a body on an inclined plane now means something to me that it did not before.  To use some of Kuhn's own expressions, it was as if, for me, the world had changed and while I could recall recall my frustration with how the world had looked before, I could never recapture my previous world-view; it was irretrievably lost.  Kuhn's description of paradigm shifts as gestalt switches and his talk of scientists with differnet paradigms living in "different worlds" often leads people like Morris and Nagel to call him an idealist and a relativist but I know exactly what he is talking about.

Personal remininsces aside, it's worth unpacking the paragraph in detail and making explicit all the points that Kuhn is making in it:

• A paradigm is not a set of rules.  It's more like practice, a skill, like knowing how to apply the equation f=ma to different types of scenarios (a body moving on an inclined plane, an oscillating pendulum, a body attached to a spring, etc.)   There is no way to describe in the form of rules what it means to solve problems using f=ma, you just have to learn to do it.  It's tacit knowledge, sort of like riding a bicycle.  At the same time, being able to solve problems is the only way to become a scientist.
• One has to literally go through hell to be initiated into a paradigm.  And as a matter of pedagogy, scientists have it down pat what it takes to create a competent member of their community: you teach him or her the concepts, and then you make them solve a bunch of problems.  Somewhere along the way, the student gains competence.  This authoritarian way of doing things turns away many people from doing science, but it works wonderfully well for those who like it. 
• Finally, it provides an explanation of incommensurability, of what Kuhn means when he asserts that when scientists argue over competing paradigms, they are essentially talking past each other.  Yes, if they wanted to, if they took time and effort, they could possibly understand each other.  Philosophically, incommensurability can be refuted (as Morris tries to do).  But practically, in practice, it exists.  Because learning a paradigm is a long back-breaking process, and is done usually when one is a student, established, practicing scientists have neither the time, nor the inclination, to imbibe and learn a new paradigm.   So they keep on arguing without truly understanding each other.

"But doesn't that open the door to relativism?" Morris might say.  Kuhn's answer is that the paradigm that wins out is one that the community perceives as more productive. The key word here is productive.  Scientists should feel that a certain paradigm allows them to create a rich set of problems (puzzles) that they can then solve -- which makes them prefer that paradigm.  So there is some sort of progress.  But what about the role of nature, you might ask.  Does nature play a role in the choice of a paradigm during a revolution?  The answer is yes.  And again, it goes back to the learning.  Paradigms need to be learned: by solving problems and by practicing doing experiments; nature plays a role in both of these. 

All in all, Structure taught me three things.  First, to pay attention to material practices and craft-work that are often the building blocks of any kind of scientific or engineering work.  And second, contrary to rhetoric, to pay attention to the values that often underlie scientific work.  By values, I mean things like what counts as a "good" problem, what counts as an "elegant" solution etc.  To be able to use these words successfully is to have mastered scientific practice.  Scientific knowledge can't be studied without a close understanding of the practices and values that produce it.  And finally, pedagogy is incredibly important.  Pedagogy is how a community licenses its practitioners.  How scientific practitioners are made is important if we want to understand scientific knowledge. 

I am not sure Morris will buy this defense of Kuhn.  He is an admirer of Saul Kripke, after all.