Transcript 1976 and all That." Plenary

The Elusive Sociological
Imagination and the Pursuit
of the Hard Case
Sal Restivo, Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute &
Nottingham University UK
Fireside Chat: 1976 and all that…
Society for Social Studies of Science annual meeting
November 1st, 2006
Vancouver, British Columbia CA
Since its beginnings, STS has undergone numerous
modifications and reincarnations, yet the initial work
stands as an early articulation of its continuing
provocative potential.
We need to understand the
dynamics whereby the
“disobedience” fostered by
STS can flourish and persist.
STEVE WOOLGAR, 2004
Emile Durkheim
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Anti-science and relativism are not necessary
ingredients of social constructionism. Durkheim
(1961: 31-32) himself already remarked that
“From the fact that the ideas of time, space,
class, cause or personality are constructed out
of social elements, it is not necessary to
conclude that they are devoid of all objective
value.”
Karl Marx
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Marx (1958: 104):
Even when I carry out scientific work, etc., an
activity which I can seldom conduct in direct
association with other men – I perform a social,
because human, act. It is not only the material
of my activity – like the language itself which the
thinker uses – which is given to me as a social
product. My own existence is a social activity.
A
What were your aspirations for the field in 1976 or
whenever you started)? What did you want to
achieve in terms of our understanding of science,
technology, and society?
B
How have those aspirations been fulfilled or
disappointed? What do we know now that we did not
know then?
C
How, as a result of the unfolding of events or
understanding, have your aspirations changed?
D
What are today's aspirations, especially in respect of
how we are to build on our new knowledge?
JOE NEEDHAM 1900-1995
Schematic diagram to show the roles of Europe and China in the development of
ecumenical science
(Source: Needham (1970b), p. 414.)
THE NEEDHAM PROBLEM
the laboratory ethnographies
The mysterious morphology of
immiscible liquids
Ethnography of engineering labs
Physics and Mysticism
contra-Capra
Sociology of mathematics
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Girl power: a study of girls, mathematics and society
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Dr Margaret Walshaw
It is generally agreed that being good at maths is a real plus in society, but traditionally, girls have
had more trouble achieving in mathematics education than boys. These days, however, things
have changed, and girls are doing as well as, if not better than, boys in maths. These figures
would seem to indicate that girl-power has made its debut, and that New Age women have what it
takes for success as responsible numerate citizens. But does this new success in mathematics
actually represent what is happening when it comes to the success of women in the real world?
Dr Margaret Walshaw of the Department of Technology, Science and Mathematics Education, at
Massey University, is trying to find the answer to this question. Funded by a Fast-Start Marsden
grant, Dr Walshaw's national study, "Girl Power: Explorations into the making of our future
numerate citizens", is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the
connections between girls, mathematics and social practices.
Social Robotics
From Math to a Mathematician’s Brain

Paul Erdos as a Social Network
Einstein’s Brain
Einstein, or Einstein’s
Brain?
“When I meet
Albert Einstein’s
brain,
I meet Einstein.”
Professor Kenji
Sugimoto
Leslie Brothers
Friday’s Footprint: How
Society Shapes the Human
Mind
Data from application of Restivo Draw
a Brain protocols.
Drawing of “mind” by 10 year old boy.
ETHNOGRAPHY OF MAGIC
THE MAGIC CASTLE AND
ACADEMY OF MAGICAL ARTS
The Sociology of the Brain
The Sociology of God
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AND OH, BY THE WAY, “SOCIAL
CONSTRUCTIONISM” IS NOT A
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEA, IT IS NOT A
CRITICO-POLITICAL TOOL, AND IT IS
NOT ANYTHING LIKE WHAT SOME
FRENCH ÜBER-THINKERS CLAIM IT
IS. IT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL
THEOREM OF GENERAL
SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY, THE
CENTRAL DOGMA OF THE
SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION.
Putting the social back into social constructionsism

Since its beginnings, STS has undergone numerous modifications and
reincarnations, yet the initial work stands as an early articulation of its continuing
provocative potential.
We need to understand the dynamics
whereby the “disobedience” fostered by
STS can flourish and persist.
STEVE WOOLGAR, 2004
Modern Science and Anarchism
 Peter Kropotkin

the sciences and science studies
in permanent revolution
ANARCHY AND INQUIRY
Irving Louis Horowitz:
Irving Louis Horowitz
“…INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY HAS
BECOME INCREASINGLY ANARCHIST
IN POSTURE.”
Kropotkin
Anarchism is one of the sociological
sciences.
 Called for the application of the methods
of the natural sciences to the study of
human institutions.

The Final Frontier
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The Transcendental Fallacy
that there is a world or that there are worlds beyond our own –
transcendental worlds, supernatural worlds, worlds of souls, spirits
and ghosts, gods, devils and angels, heavens and hells.
The sociological imagination has been from at least Durkheim
onwards aligned with the rejection of the transcendental (as well as
the immanent and the psychologistic). The “many worlds
interpretation” in quantum mechanics may be contaminated by this
fallacy as a result of mathegrammatical errors or illusions. No doubt
the world, the universe, is more complex than we can know or
imagine – but that complexity does not include transcendental or
supernatural features.
“There is no there, there:” A Manifesto in Defiance
of The Cult of der Reine Vernunft[1]
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We must wonder about the resistance of Platonic and transcendental thinking to the lessons of modernity and postmodernity. These lessons, admittedly,
are buried beneath the rubble of the wars, holocausts, political economic failures, and ecological disasters of the twentieth century. The brilliant flare-up of the very
idea of “the social” between 1840 and 1912 and the discovery sciences it gave form to has remained virtually invisible on the intellectual landscape formed over the last
one hundred and fifty years. Until and unless we uncover that revolution, we will continue to be haunted by the ghosts of Plato, Descartes, and God. These ghosts
cannot be banished by materialism per se. What is required is a sociological materialism, a cultural materialism. It is no simple ideological or political victory we
champion but an adaptation, an evolutionary matter of life and death. So long as these ghosts haunt us, we will be unable as a species to take advantage of whatever
small opportunities are left to us to make something worthwhile flourish on this planet for even a little while. The issues here are that big. So it is that we must chase
these ghosts down at every opportunity. Every time a critic of social and cultural thinking about science raises the banner of the “brute fact” he or she raises the banner
of belief in God. We can, as David Bloor, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Restivo have demonstrated over and over again for thirty years, have a critically robust realism sans
Plato, Descartes, and God that is consistent with a social and cultural theory of science, mathematics, and logic.
So long as we allow ourselves to be deluded by the “transparent” claim that Gödel, Einstein, and Heisenberg have given us the three most important
insights into who and what we are, a claim made by Rebecca Goldstein (2005), we will be stuck on a path of almost daily and almost universal suffering, and face a
future that can only promise more of the same without respite. In fact it is to Darwin, Marx, and Durkheim that we must turn for the more important insights. We do
great harm to ourselves and our planet if we rely on Gödel, Einstein, and Heisenberg for our self-image as persons and as a species. We are, indeed, thermodynamic
systems and we run at some level according to the laws of physics, biology, and chemistry. But what we are above all is a social and a cultural thing, a society, a social
being, a cultural entity sui generis. We are, individually and collectively, social facts.[2]
The mysteries of intuitions, geniuses, and eternal truths outside space and time nourished by philosophers like Goldstein are no mere exercises in pure
reason for the sake of pure reason. They sustain a worldview that is more medieval than modern. We social ones must take our stand again and again against those,
however well intentioned, who continue to support knowingly and unknowingly, the One Logic, the One God, and the separation of the realm of faith and belief from
the realm of science and knowledge. The most pernicious dogmas flourish in this atmosphere. For example, undergraduates are fond of repeating this “truism” learned
from the masters: “You can’t prove or disprove God.” And what leg do you stand on when public intellectuals like Stephen Jay Gould, a scientist of unimpeachable
brilliance, argue for the separation of science and religion? Proofs are social constructions, social institutions, indexical. Claims such as this one can only make sense
in a world of science that excludes social science. Once we admit social science to the halls of verifiable, validated, discovery sciences and proof communities such
claims evaporate. Within a framework that includes the social sciences we can determine what God (in whatever guise s/he-it appears) is, that is, the referent for
whatever we mean by “God.” That referent is always going to be a sociocultural one, rooted in the material earth and its peoples and not in some supernatural or
transcendental realm.
Even the strongest opponents and upholders of this claim tremble as they make it. They tend to leave openings for
believers, including themselves in some cases, because the barriers to banging the last nails into the coffin of religious faith and belief are, let us admit, formidable.
They are formidable, as both Marx and Durkheim recognized, because they have something to do with keeping society and individuals from becoming unglued. So
let’s put this bogey man out to pasture right away. It is not religions and belief in God or gods that are universal but rather moral orders. All societies, all humans,
require a moral order to survive, to move through the world and their lives. That is, they require, to put it simply, rules about what is good and bad, right and wrong.
Religion is just one way to systematize these rules. There are other ways to do this: we can organize moral orders around almost any human interest from politics to
physical fitness.[3] And there are ways to construct moral orders that do not depend on unreferred entities. The more general problem we are faced with here is the
problem of abstraction. How does one account for abstract ideas without falling into the traps of transcendental and supernatural realism? The solution is to stop
making a distinction between concrete and abstract ideas.
[1] “There is no there, there” was famously uttered by Gertrude Stein when she went to find a childhood home and found the space empty.
[2] We acknowledge the gendered danger of standing on the shoulders of these giants but remind you that they and we stand on the
shoulders of so many other giants that gender, race, and class may not matter. If we contradict ourselves, if we fail to stand apart from our
own gender, race, and class we can remain silent or carry on. We choose to carry on.
[3] One of the most articulate exemplars of a political basis for a moral order is Michael Harrington’s (1983) essay on “the spiritual crisis of western civilization.”
Harrington described himself as, in Max Weber’s phrase, “religiously musical” but a non-believer. His goal was to fashion a coalition of believers and non-believers
to challenge the wasteland of nilihism, hedonism, and consumerism spreading across the western cultural landscape.