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Abstract
The historicist approach to science has been accompanied by a spatial one in the last decade or two. Referring to the cultural origin of the fundamental standards, advocates of the “geographical turn” claim that “just as there is a rich history of science, so there is a rich geography of science” (Withers and Livingstone, 2011: 3). The emerging localism is perpendicular to the old historical segmentation and the combination of the two present science as a bunch of quasi-independent cognitive endeavours scattered in time and space. Taking the debate about the existence of the N-ray as an instructive example, I argue that by developing location-independent disciplinary communities, history made the community-structure of science culturally unique. Different historical eras may use incompatible concepts, methodological norms, and epistemological standards, but as this diversity does not extend onto its synchronous dimension, relativism remains one-dimensional in science.
Highlights
Two kinds of cultural relativismThe historical approach to science in the middle of the last century revealed that scientists in different eras use incompatible concepts, methodological norms and epistemological standards for constructing and justifying scientific knowledge
Thereby a “geographical” or “spatial turn” has been added to the historical one, creating a new dimension of relativism in science. The protagonists of this spatialist approach agree that the “... issues of space – location, place, site, migration, region – are at the heart of scientific endeavour” (Livingstone, 2003: 5, my emphases) and with “the ‘geographical turn’ evident across science studies ... different geographies of science are emerging” (Powell, 2007: 309). The addition of this further “turn” to the already existing ones is meant to indicate that concepts and standards of science vary with regions, “just as there is a rich history of science, so there is a rich geography of science” (Withers and Livingstone, 2011: 3)
Cartographers of science take on the task to reveal “the specific sites” at which “... particular scientists with particular skills, materials, tools, theories and techniques” (Turnbull, 2002: 6, my italics) produce locally authenticated beliefs
Summary
The historical approach to science in the middle of the last century revealed that scientists in different eras use incompatible concepts, methodological norms and epistemological standards for constructing and justifying scientific knowledge. The disagreement between the two communities seemed irresolvable by the standard means of science: Blondlot’s positive results could be valid detections and other physicists’ inability to replicate could be caused by their using an inappropriate (exclusively physical) instrument – or the other way round: their instrument was adequate and they did not see the N-ray because it did not exist.
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