Technical Work and Critical Inquiry: Investigations in a Scientific Laboratory

Abstract

Critical studies of science reject the programmatic separation between technical and social aspects of science. By analyzing the social history of controversies, the rhetoric of scientific discourse, and informal aspects of laboratory work, recent studies have attempted to demonstrate that the objective products of scientific research are fraught with social contingency. The present paper agrees that the products of scientific activity are inextricable from the social contexts of their production, but raises the further question of how the relevance of any of the potentially endless varieties of social contingency is to be established in concrete instances of scientific work. Commonly, social studies of science specify such contingent relationships by relying on the established methods of the social science disciplines, while ignoring the fact that the natural scientific disciplines studied themselves include inquiries which specify such relationships as a necessary part of their ordinary practice. The alternative recommended here is to take an ethnomethodological approach. The distinguishing feature of the latter approach is that it recognizes the analytic primacy of context-specifying activities which occur at the sites of natural scientific inquiries. A transcript of conversation in a neuroscience lab is analyzed to show how `critical inquiry' operates as a practical feature of natural science research rather than being a privilege of professional social scientists.