Previous articleNext article FreeSecond LookComment All Pumped Up about the Sociology of Scientific KnowledgeTrevor PinchTrevor Pinch Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn my 1986 review of Leviathan and the Air-Pump, published in the most widely read sociology journal in the United Kingdom, Sociology, I described Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s book as “brilliant and highly readable.” Looking back now and rereading this review for the first time in thirty years, I wonder why I used these particular words. I was certainly prescient in lavishing praise on a book that undoubtedly has turned out to be a major work in the history of science. It has also become a central text for the newly emerging field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). For instance, at our own STS graduate program at Cornell, it has been a staple of our introductory graduate seminar reading list since the program’s inception. But “highly readable” seems perhaps needlessly provocative for a book that many reviewers have puzzled over for its use of what they call sociological jargon. For me, it is important to recall that at the time I was teaching in a sociology department and working on the social construction of technology—an approach that also has been labeled by some historians as unnecessarily full of jargon. I wanted to make the point that we should actually welcome sociological terminology if it does real analytical work.As Azadeh Achbari notes, as a sociologist I was one of the few reviewers who actually felt comfortable with Shapin and Schaffer’s argument about the power of social, rhetorical, and material technologies in bringing about experimental assent. For me—versed in the radical relativism of the Bath and Edinburgh schools of sociology of science, and familiar with the exploration of difficulties over replicating experiments such as those raised by Harry Collins in his book Changing Order—Shapin and Schaffer were doing a case study in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Indeed, it was the locus classicus case of experimental knowledge: Boyle’s air-pump experiments. Furthermore, they were extending the approach by showing for the first time how the wider society, and in particular the religious, political, and cultural life of Restoration England, shaped the details of knowledge produced by what was the big science of its day. It was the sort of case study we had always dreamed of doing—but we hadn’t got the historical chops to pull it off!To understand the book’s reception, it is important to recall the context in which it appeared. Although, as Owen Hannaway notes in his review, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a huge influence, Kuhn had famously gone back on the radical relativist reading of his book and had actually disparaged the relativists of the Edinburgh School Strong Programme and rejected David Bloor’s symmetry tenet of treating perceived true and false claims as sociologically equivalent.1 We sociologists, practicing what we increasingly called SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge), explicitly advocated a radical reading of Kuhn. We came to this reading through the lens of the later works of Wittgenstein (“experimental life” in the Shapin and Schaffer subtitle signals the influence of the Wittgensteinian term “form of life”). As we noted at the time, “Kuhn n’est pas Kuhnist.”2At the core of Leviathan and the Air-Pump—and most reviewers seem to agree that this is one of the main technical achievements of the book—is an analysis of a scientific controversy between Hobbes and Boyle as to what counted as a working air-pump. This sort of detailed analysis of scientific controversy and the putative replication of experiments was grist to the mill of the empirical sociology of scientific knowledge approach being forged at the time by scholars at Edinburgh and Bath. The roots of Leviathan and the Air-Pump can actually be traced back to a meeting held at Bath University in 1980, organized by Collins, that brought together for the first time SSKers and historians of science (Martin Rudwick was present and was one of the few historians of science at the time who was a contributor to SSK). Simon Schaffer, whom we knew to be a student of Robert Young’s, attended that meeting at Bath, as did Steven Shapin (this is where they first met), and I distinctly recall Schaffer arguing for the radical Marxist approach toward science. The next I heard was that Schaffer was closeted with Shapin, writing a book about Boyle’s air-pump experiments that would finally show the power of SSK approaches in history of science. In our networks, we all knew the book was in the works; and for us, as upstart sociologists, it was gratifying to have truly brilliant historians such as the young Simon Schaffer (he obtained his Ph.D. in 1980) and the slightly more seasoned Steven Shapin on board! Most historians of science at the time didn’t know about SSK—and if they did they were, like Kuhn, hostile to it. There was an enormous camaraderie between the historians and sociologists as we fought the common enemy (the philosophers of science who beat up on relativism and felt the sociological approach to be impossible). As Lorraine Daston later made clear, this early bringing together of sociology of science with history of science was to have a lasting impact on the field.3I do not feel qualified to remark on the historical nuances raised in this review forum, but it is important to note that from the perspective of sociology of science what might have been seen to be a crowning achievement of the SSK approach—finally showing what Harry Collins had long called for, the impact of the wider society on knowledge produced at the laboratory bench—turned out to be something of a Pyrrhic victory. Leviathan and the Air-Pump became merely the launching pad for an even more radical sociology of science, one that has come to dominate the field to such an extent that all earlier work starts to appear to be a footnote to it. I refer, of course, to the writings and approach of Bruno Latour. The significance of Latour’s review of Leviathan and the Air-Pump needs to be drawn out further. It is not just a review but a blueprint for one of his most influential books, We Have Never Been Modern. Latour was very much a part of the early SSK story, arranging for the translation of many of the key works of Edinburgh and Bath into French and organizing SSK meetings on the empirical study of scientific controversy.4The main distinction between Latour’s approach and that of early Edinburgh and Bath (this distinction emerged clearly only at the start of the 1980s) is that rather than the social being used as a way to explain science, the approach favored in Edinburgh and Bath, for Latour the social is itself “co-produced” with the science. In short, social order and natural order are co-produced together; and according to Latour this is what Shapin and Schaffer had shown. Leviathan and the Air-Pump concludes with the sentence “Hobbes was right,” meaning that knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions. Earlier Shapin and Schaffer had argued that “solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order.” This is not the same as claiming that social order is caused by or co-produced with knowledge. By pushing a more radical argument, complete with typical flourishes and presented with his usual panache, Latour was able to make allies of Shapin and Schaffer’s writings.An influential book is, of course, one that is constantly debated and one from which new interpretations are drawn. Leviathan and the Air-Pump (now in a second edition) has achieved that, and over time the quibbles of historians as to what they missed and what was not quite as they claimed, and the quibbles of sociologists as to what wider sociological thesis is to be drawn from the book, seem to miss the point. And as to sociological jargon—I ask Isis readers to ponder this: in light of what Latour and myriad clones have released on the field, is “social, material, and rhetorical technology” really that tough to understand?NotesTrevor Pinch is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He has published extensively in the sociology of science and the sociology of technology and, more recently, in the new interdisciplinary field of sound studies. His most recent book (with Simone Tosoni) is Entanglements: Conversations on the Human Traces of Science, Technology, and Sound (MIT, 2016). Department of Science and Technology Studies, 323A Morrill Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA; [email protected].1 See, e.g., Kuhn’s comments in Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1977). For the importance of the radical and conservative interpretations of Kuhn see Trevor Pinch, “Kuhn—The Conservative and the Radical Interpretations,” Social Studies of Science, 1997, 27:465–482.2 Quoted in Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science (1982; London: Routledge, 2008), p. 177.3 Lorraine Daston, “Science Studies and the History of Science,” Critical Inquiry, 2009, 35:798–813.4 I have recently relived these early days in a series of interviews: Simone Tosoni with Trevor Pinch, Entanglements: Conversations on the Human Traces of Science, Technology, and Sound (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 108, Number 1March 2017 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691414 © 2017 by The History of Science Society. 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