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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.
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