The concept of alternation and the sociology of scientific knowledge

Abstract

Collins discusses the concept of alternation. He explains that he learned of it from Peter Berger’s book Invitation to Sociology (1963). The idea of alternation also fits in with Wittgenstein’s notion of “forms of life” – alternation is switching between forms of life. There are many related concepts such as Schutz’s “taken-for-granted reality”, Durkheim’s “social collectivity”, Flecks “thought collective” and Kuhn’s “paradigms.” These concepts allow us to see individuals as constituted by the forms of life in which they participate. Forms of life can be big or small and are embedded within each other after the fashion of a fractal. They can also overlap in multi-dimensional ways. Collins argues that forms of life are sometimes incommensurable and sometimes not, with Kuhn’s notion of “incommensurability” being a better way of thinking about these relationships than Berger’s “logical incompatibility” Using the example of his many case studies and different ways of handling them, Collins shows that social analyses of science based on forms of life can be of many different types. Crucially, where forms of life in science are incommensurable, their investigation, at least in Western societies, takes place within a higher level shared culture with academic culture encouraging cooperation.