A recent e-mail conversation I had with Harro Maas concerning one of my latest drafts (shameless self-promotion) made me buy and read Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's, Merchants of Doubts. In this recent and much discussed book, the authors tell the story of the scientists who have used the "tobacco strategy" to "obscure the truth" on scientific issues such as global warming. Their narrative studies the various networks operating in the diffusion of ideas that helped undermine the scientific discoveries that global warming or cancers are industrially generated diseases. Their argument is that these networks are based on the idea of a "commerce of doubt". If you can instill into the public at large the idea that there is still some kind of incompleteness in the scientific inquiries related to these topics, then you can simultaneously argue that those who advocate carbon emissions quotas or large tobacco excises are not real scientists, but mere ideologues. This reasoning, Oreskes and Conway argue, are in fact some dishonest nonsense because, contrary to these people's assertions, the scientific facts are clearly established, whereas the criticisms always come from industrially interested scientists with little relation to peer-reviewed (or "mainstream", as they put it) science. The story they tell is compelling at times and there are many reasons to feel outraged at these petty associations between opportunistic scientists and the powerful industries that help them fund their research. Still, I felt uncomfortable with the rhetoric they use to frame their claims. I found it more jarring than convincing. Let me quote from their introduction to try to explain where my discomfort occurs:
"Over the course of more than twenty years, these men [the dissenting scientists] did almost no original scientific research on any of the issues on which they weighed in. Once they had been prominent researchers but by the time they turned to the topics of our story, they were mostly attacking the work and the reputation of others. In fact, on every issue, they were on the wrong side of scientific consensus ... It is a story of a group of scientists who fought the scientific evidence and spread confusion on many of the most important issues of our time (p. 9)."
Over the past two decades, a number of essayists have tried to blame these attempts to "obscure the truth" on the rise of moral / cultural / scientific relativism, the idea that there no explicit demarcation between the good and the bad, the biological and the cultural, or the true and the false and that the only way to assess these questions is to study the complex relationships and networks that relate various communities and produce knowledge. It is often argued that social studies of science and creationists, for instance, are objective allies. I have often referred to these claims in the past (here and there) and with Roy Weintraub, I have recently undertaken a more academic criticism of these arguments. Oreskes and Conway do not go as far. After all, they are themselves historians of science and part of the science studies community. Still, the quotation above is problematic and this argument is repeated many times in the book. There seems to be two things here : Science (with a capital S and without quotation mark ) and "science". The former is published in leading, peer-reviewed scientific journals whereas the latter is published in the New York Times or in the Wall Street Journal. The former is carefully researched by devoted - meaning, disinterested - scholars whereas the latter is conceived during business meetings by resentful, outdated researchers ("Once they had been prominent ..."). But above all, whereas the former seems to need nothing else than the sheer beauty of scientific rigorism to exist and develop, the latter requires squadrons of public relations executives to be disseminated to a larger audience. This distinction, of course, could not be further from the truth and has been challenged many times in the past. Bruno Latour, for instance, has shown that the Pasteurization of France needed much more than the genius of Louis Pasteur to occur. Forces and networks are what are responsible for the stabilization of knowledge in any field, not only facts and evidences. The consequence is that, in order to be accepted and understood, scientists do need to argue and if they don't do it by themselves, they need to have various communities to support their ideas. In this process of translation (or of dispersion), the nature of the knowledge itsef which is transmited will change. It is not purely scientific anymore but it is an hybrid. Nonetheless, in Oreskes and Conway's narrative, facts and evidence are only on the good guys' side whereas communication and promotion are only on the bad guys' side. Scientists who have made "original research" are forced to loose time arguing with these business-oriented charlatans who trie to undermine their genuine discoveries.
A better story would have investigated the various networks through which not only businesses try to affect scientific research to sell their products but also, in return, the equally powerful networks scientists can create to respond to these attacks. Also, a more satisfying narrative would show that the "bad" scientists who promote cigarette smoking and polluting industries also use the rhetoric of scientific evidence in order to convince. After all, is this "merchants of doubt" phraseology really different from the Popperian perspective, which asserts that we can never fully prove anything and that the only thing that can be done is to reject scientific ideas? Is it relativism that really hurts here or its philosophical counterpart? Is that "merchant of doubt" ideology the squeleton in the positivist closet? Can we talk about those dangerous modernists, now?
Comments
In a recent discussion on network analysis, Clement mentioned to me Randall Collins's The Sociology of Philosophies : A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, in which the author explains the emergence of new philosophies by relocating some well known heros-philosophers within the intellectual, economic, social and religious networks of their times. Interestingly, he does so by complementing his historical narrative with the the complex graphical representation of networks softwares now allow. I haven't finished it yet, but though I'm a bit disoriented by the ambition of the book (no less than explaining the emergence and spread of new ideas anytime anywhere, including Ancient greek, Chinese, Indian and romantic German philosophers...), it is a kind of story that could supplement your claim. I wonder whether such work somehow relates or compares with Latourian accounts of science.
Thanks for the reference. I will check that. I would not be surprised if this contradicted or did not take into account Latourian views of science. My feeling is that the major advances in sociology of science are now going backward from the SSK perspective. This is all the more detrimental because it strips a lot of the complexities that the study of the dispersion of scientific ideas require. But, what can you do against a movement that is so powerful? After all, Latour & Co did not invent much as they rediscovered what people like Ludwig Fleck had already said - these were the premodern relativists as Barbara Herrnstein Smith call them. So after a few years, people will realize that all this globalizing quantitative analysis, though interesting on its own term, has overshadowed equally meaningful perspectives and that's alright with me.
Collins has no real connection with SSK. He's a pretty traditional sociologist of knowledge, and his networks are not the kind of networks of ANT. They are the filiations of ideas associated with charismatic philosophers, their students, their opponents,and so on. It's in fact closer to the idea of intellectual communities than thought collectives. Collins was concerned with the social contexts, theorization, master-student connections, and cross cultural world history of intellectual communities in which ideas, specifically ideas we term philosophical, develop and flourish.
He argues that:
“The most notable philosophers are not organizational isolates but members of chains of teachers and students who are themselves known philosophers, and/or of circles of significant contemporary intellectuals. The most notable philosophers are likely to be students of other highly notable philosophers. In addition to this vertical organization of social networks across generations, creative intellectuals tend to belong to groups of intellectual peers, both circles of their lives and sometimes also of rivals and debaters.” (Collins 1998, 65)
Of course his project is heroic in scope, but several reviews of the book by sociologists are somewhat restrained.
Dear Roy,
Thank you for this information. I plead guilty because I haven't searched much about the authors. I think they were at the HSS conference last year in Montreal and from this, I assumed they were part of the SSK-informed historians of science community one usually encounters in Isis. On the other hand, I did not want to do any prejudice to the authors and judge them on their mere intentions - if I chose to read only books by people who've been trained by Latour & al., that would reduce drastically the load! But anyway, the more I think about it and the more my feeling is that the book is of no use for those interested in the dispersion of ideas. It might be worth reading for those who want to be informed on the global warming debate - though I suspect that the "everything is settled" attitude they display from page 1 will definitely alienate those who think that doubt is a nice starting point when you're a researcher - or an independent thinker in general. I am missing here a discussion on the rhetoric of doubt, on how doubt is being politicized and transformed over time.
But anyway, what worries me the most is not so much the attacks against relativism by those who belong to other philosophical traditions - they will, I believe, long persist - but the recent conversion of those who once belonged to the relativist group to a more ecumenical - or at least what they perceive as such - conception. I am deeply convinced by Barbara Herrnstein Smith's conceptions on incommensurability. Nevertheless, I am troubled by the argument she had that conversions are possible, that the believer can become a sceptic and vice versa. Well, I thought the former was true but I did not believe in the latter. To me, once you have realized that the edifices of "truth" and "false" are fragile, there is a feeling of no coming back - or that would be like being a virgin once again. Yet, this is beginning to happen. We live in a period in which scepticism is quickly being depicted as an offense to reason and treated as some kind of justification for terrorism, fascism and so on - the Godwin point is quickly reached in these discussions.
Someday, someone will have to write a book on "the end of relativism" and its detrimental consequences. This would be especially useful to have that in the French debate where postmodern thinking has been totally dismissed in favor of reactionary neo-Kantism. This is the case because in France, postmodernism has been assimilated with the rise of pro-market thinking in the 1980s. Whereas postmoderns such as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard were criticized from their right side as ideologies of the 1968 movement, they were also criticized by Marxists as people whose "bourgeois" thought prevented social reform. This somewhat paradoxical association sealed the fate of postmodernism in the country it has been established. That Baudrillard and Foucault in particular have been depicted as apostles of corporate finance and hedonist capitalism by French managers did not help either. François Cusset has hinted at that in this book, but it has not been much discussed since then - and it has not been translated either, as the book is out of print.
To lay bare the networks shaping my own thoughts, I like Mannheim, Dewey, and James. And I participated in the academic investigation of the rhetoric of science during the 1990s and found it's thesis unconvincing. So it was with much delight that I read Bruno Latour's essay in Harper's in 2004. It is always possible to use language to destabilize a given belief. And in Plato's GORGIAS, Gorgias quite accurately claims that a rhetorician may triumph even over one who knows better.
Hence I treasure Latour's subsequent realization that the role of rhetoric for science is not to enable us to further distance ourselves from nature, but rather to enable us to draw even closer. It may be contradictory for light to be both a particle and a wave, but we have found it very useful nonetheless.
With regard to the field of economics, the sociology of its knowledge claims begins with its unit of analysis - the individual which follows from its compatibility with Protestantism, mathematics, and the prescribed necessity of non-contradiction. Hence a very interesting field, that wonderful oxymoron, political economy, was in due course reduced to the triviality of the modern economist. Our philosopher kings with the disposition of accountants, always busy running round and round in the circular flow of their own ideas - calculators of trajectory pretending to occupy the commanding heights of our cultural wars. But we do need accountants as a practical matter, they produce knowledge nonetheless.
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