Reliable Knowledge and Unreliable Stuff: On the Practical Role of Rational Beliefs

Abstract

Reliable Knowledge and Unreliable StuffOn the Practical Role of Rational Beliefs Edward W. Constant II (bio) Over the past twenty years or so, the collection of approaches and endeavours loosely known as "the social construction of technology," which may be construed broadly to include perspectives actually antagonistic to orthodox social constructivism (such as actor-network theory and ethnomethodology), undoubtedly has transformed the history of technology. On the whole, the result has been salutary. By directing attention to explicitly social processes, especially the role of interests and negotiation in producing "facticity," and thereby challenging claims of objectivity and optimality, social constructivists opened up the black box of technological practice with a bang. In so doing, they also opened the history of technology itself to new or reemphasized connections to political, social, and cultural history, as well as to studies of gender and influence.1 [End Page 324] Ironically, though, these "constructivist" approaches have been a whole lot better at deconstructing science and technology than at building a new theoretical consensus, or at explaining the remarkable stability and obduracy of technological practice. Actor networks, with their entropic alliances among actants, are inherently unstable, requiring continuous Cartesian action rather than coasting along trajectories prescribed by Newtonian momentum. Orthodox social constructivist accounts similarly are much better at showing how things come to be—reach "closure"—than at explaining how stability persists. The notable exception is Wiebe Bijker, with his concept of the "semiotics of power."2 But even there the explanation is almost purely social rather than material, which of course reflects the first axiom (or, at least, the first heuristic commandment) of social constructivism, that material results—facts—must be explained by social processes.3 This pretheoretical commitment, combined with a disdain for classical Parsonian structural-functionalist sociology, has led to the preeminence of "thick description," microstudies, and to a veritable and prolific zoo of theoretical perspectives in social constructivist investigations of technology and science.4 In the work of Andrew Pickering, Geoffrey Bowker, Stephen Shapin, Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch, Timothy Lenoir, and Hans Radder,5 [End Page 325] among many others, this focus on local practices leads, sometimes very explicitly, sometimes implicitly, to the claim that all knowledge and all practice is only local, and that no such thing as translocal, or spatiotemporally universal, knowledge can exist outside purely local reification.6 This empirical claim, in turn, entails the more discomfiting and controversial theoretical claim that all knowledge and beliefs are therefore in principle socially situated and culturally relative, that is, are spatiotemporally particular.7 These concerns in turn are bound up with a much broader set of doubts and discontents about science and technology.8 Social constructivism itself began quite self-consciously as a political challenge to the perceived hegemony of scientists and engineers or, more precisely, to those corporate, academic, and public institutions that so often comprise their practice.9 In part, unhappiness with science and technology may express a deeper sense of betrayal and malaise. Nothing quite lives up to its promises—not politicians, not products, not hard work or healthy lifestyles—and those things that do usually seem to come with unintended or [End Page 326] unknown and, for the most part, unsavory consequences.10 In a time of frustrated hedonism, all this unhappiness may simply reflect a general discontent with an immutable human condition. Be that as it may, a number of astute scholars, even some who are themselves social constructivists or who are generally sympathetic to the enterprise, recognize that these crosscurrents of doubt about the objectivity, realism, value, or veracity of scientific and technological knowledge hold profound dangers. First, the doubts lack empirical support. Historians of technology such as Walter Vincenti or Edwin T. Layton,11 historians of science such as Peter Galison or Alan Shapiro,12 practicing engineers such as Louis Bucciarelli,13 philosophers of science such as Nancy Cartwright or Clark Glymour,14 all in one way or another recognize that both scientists and engineers share a presumption, almost always valid, of unproblematic background knowledge in their everyday practice. Engineers and scientists behave as though veridical, spatiotemporally universal knowledge does exist, and much more often than not they get away with it...