Callon, Michel, John Law, and Arie Rip. “How to Study the Force of Science.” Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World. Houndmills [u.a.: Macmillan, 1998. 4+. Print.
Summary of Notes:
I’ve reconstructed the text as I understand it.
There was a lot of backlog for this chapter to get to their several points:
They argue that the fair way, I guess, shown by Machiavelli in The Prince, to understand social and scientific change requires us to abandon several things: 1. the dichotomy of science as truth and politics as power because science is politics by another means (p.4), fear and favour because the idealisms of morality can blind a person in the study of how society takes shape and is transformed from its strategic loci (p5).
In other terms, it is important to follow the actors of science closely, when the enter the strategic loci, because it is the interests of the forces at work to conceal the way in which they act.
QUESTION: What does “FORCES AT WORK” mean? Sounds a little mystical to me. I question their motives on this one because they clearly state that their intent is to make things less OPAQUE.
MY GUESS: Forces at work may mean the temptations of sociological reductionism or ideas of scientific genius. Special people have access to determining the nature of the world. (P. 7)
In particular science and technology students, et al. have been particularly unwise when analyzing social and scientific change. I guess the authors mean that students all too easily contribute social and scientific change to only a select few. That’s what they were taught to do.
Students’ counter argument is that their starting points are the links in their articles making connections between scientific developments and other social institutions.
P.10 Texts make possible the construction of linkages between existing entities and the formation of novel entities and thereby constitute an important method for attempting to control the environment.
Texts are agents to build a world to persuade others.
P.13 By Following the texts the analysts may trace the appearance and disappearance of forceful words and durable linkages and so build up a picture of the area of science in question.
Corresponding gain– converting texts into skeletons of words makes it possible to handle larger databases and to use statistical and graphical methods for the display of features of the Worlds of Science. P 13
(The authors don’t make this all very clear. I have to fill in a lot of blanks because they themselves are very opaque. )
We need one thing in order to complete a analysis of science/social change or to analyze anything really: AUDACITY.
I kinda read this like you have to have the gull to abandon self serving idealisms and ask questions that will not serve either side of the princes or the subjects, or in lamans terms, a special few. You have to take a non-partisan approach.
(Im not sure if my interpretation is right there.)
MACHIAVELLI’S ANTI-REDUCTIONISM
Don’t use reductionism when analyzing social and scientific change because people all too often like to reduce the evolution of societies to the actions of a few “special” people.
–Abandon the western culture notion that SCIENCE IS PURE and does not partake in profane activities.
There are Marxists and writers influenced by Weber that claim that the nature of science and technology is that they are constituted as a form of domination. P.7 Thus also incompatible with humanistic and egalitarian social relations.
* The problem is to understand scientific power and where it is taking us.
* Scientists are building a structured world and the attempt by analysts to force it to conform w/ criteria of demarcation tends to distort if not destroy the coherence of that world. P. 9
MYTHS
There is a gap between science and politics.
There is a special scientific method, a realm where truth prospers in the absence of power.
Science is pure and set aside from profane activities.
Notion- society can shape science w/out itself being influenced is as false as the converse image of a science and technology that find themselves able from their own resources to impose a structure unilaterally on their social environment.
TERMS
Priori grounds
Strategic loci
Proverbial
Political Efficacy
Audacity
Despotism
Usurpation
Priori distinctions
Questions: Why are the authors intentions to make “the force of Science” less opaque but seemingly throughout the text they are opaque.
Why have they not constructed more categories for this text in order for the audience to have a better idea of how they PUT it together?
