The 16 readings here were the required ones featured on the exam.

Merton, Robert K. 1942. “The Normative Structure of Science,” pp. 267-278

• Early text in science studies — analyzing science as an institution, trying to identify norms.

• Merton is an institutionalist (institutions in the sense of trust and behavior) — so studied science as a collection of internal rules and scripts (“norms”)

  • Matthew effect
  • Norms can be studied by sociologist

There are four main norms that constitute science: universalism, communism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism. (CUDOS)

• Universalism: “The acceptance or rejection of claims entering the lists of science is not to depend on the personal or social attributes of their protagonist.”
  • Careers have to be open on a merit basis
• Communism: “Findings in science are a product of social collaboration and are assigned to the community.
  • Priority disputes are normal given the only kind of esteem is a mnemonic and commemorative
• Disinterestedness: acting for the benefit of the common scientific enterprise and not for personal gain
  • Defined negatively (opposition to self-interest, distinct from altruism)
• Organized Skepticism: “temporary suspension of judgement and the detached scrutiny of beliefs in terms of empirical and logical criteria”
  • “The scientific investigator does not preserved the cleavage between the sacred and the profane, between that which requires uncritical respect and that which can be objectively analyzed.”
• Things around science
• Basic concepts: the norms of science.

Kuhn, T.S. 1963 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

• Pre-paradigmatic science — everyone just constantly redefining terms
• Normal science — Everyone under consensus, linear progress
• Anomalies — Puzzles that can’t be solved
• Crisis — puzzles that can’t be solved (entered within one paradigm), called anomalies
• Revolution — When there’s too many anomalies
• New Paradigm — incommensurable with last one because new language games
• Shift from context of justification to context of discovery (responding to Popper, who says we can’t know the context of discovery)
• Opens up radical relativism (first internal critique of science)

Bloor, David. 1976. Knowledge and Social Imagery pp. 3-23, 131-56 (chs. 1, 7).

• Strong Programme (RISK)
  1. Concerned with conditions that bring about beliefs or states of knowledge
  2. Impartial with respect to truth and falsity
  3. Symmetrical in style of explanation
  4. Reflexive (Method should apply to yourself)
     1. No one does causal, impartial, symmetrical reflexivity of science studies (no one wants to read that)
• Hates Lakatosh (who does rational reconstruction of scientific histories; hard core of scientific theories with belt that can be challenged around — theories can be degenerative or generative)
• If you’re not explaining false beliefs, you’re only getting half the story and it’s a story that perpetuates a certain (Lakatoshian, teleologically motivated) view of science
• Knowledge is a set of arguments
• Only studying the social causes of “failed” science implicitly reaffirms the teleological view of science.
• Whether a belief is true or false has nothing to do with whether it has a cause.
• Edinborough School
• Bloor showing the strength of institutions with Azande witches stuff (logic is secondary to social institutions — negotiate to protect a given culture/society)
• syllogism reasons in a circle → in condition to assert first premise know final premise
• Negotiation

Collins, Harry. 1975. “The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics,” pp. 205-224.

• Experimental Regress — facts can only be generated by good instruments, but instruments are only good if they generate facts
  • So analyze real time negotiations of matters of fact/experiment quality (science is an amalgam of place and setting)
  • Negotiating character of the fact (ships in bottles)
• Bath School (empirical program)
• The only way a scientist can know if he has the knowledge to replicate an experiment probably is to make a replica which does what is counted as working

Latour, B. (1987). Science In Action, pp. 103-44, 179-213 (chs. 3, 5).

• Since a settled argument is taken to represent nature, you can’t appeal to nature to solve arguments. There are only associations (or networks, or alliances). Focus on those connections because they characterize what is considered fact and what is considered belief.
• Chapter 3:
  • Inscriptions, inscription-devices (instruments)
    • Inscription device transforms something that is a natural object transform it into a measurement (transforms the natural object on which scientists work, into something that can be processed further)
      • distinguish between field and laboratory and observational science (Pasteurization of France)
  • Diagrams and spokespeople (Actor Network Theory)
    • Outsider must dissociate the spokesperson from the inscription to demonstrate that they speak not for the inscription alone but for himself
      • “subjective individuals or objective representatives”

• Chapter 5: Tribunals of Reason

  • Reality exists and is certain — “that is, what resists all efforts at modification, has been defined, at least for the time being, and the behavior of some people has been made predictablem in certain ways at least.”
  • Actor network theory —
    • “The word network indicates that resources are concentrated in places — the knots and the nodes — which are connected with one another — the links and the mesh: these connections transform the scattered resources into a net that may seem to extend everywhere.”
    • What is in-between the mesh of the networks?
      • Asymmetry inside and outside of network
        • outside of network is subjective, they have a belief, it says more about the person making the claim
        • inside network is objective
      • Avoid irrational belief by asking, “Who are the accusers?”
    • “Instead of looking for explanations as to why people hold strange beliefs, the first thing to do, when told [something is irrational] try to reverse their outcome.”
      • Apply to society of the story teller
      • Invoke context
      • Retell but let it go on longer
      • Rules of logic broken, but not by story teller → Jury becomes convinced that the others are not so much illogical as simply distant
    • Everyone is innocent of the crime of irrationality, or, more exactly, no one can be proven guilty of such a crime. After having peopled the world with irrational minds because we naively wondered why there were so many people who were not scientists, we now understand that it was our wondering that created the problem..we live in a logical enough world. People mind their business and get along…
    • Logic requires negotiation
      • “margin of negotiation”
      • “adapt it to circumstance”
    • Fifth Principal: Irrationality is always an accusation made by someone building a network over someone else who stands in the way; thus, there is no divide between minds, but only shorter and longer networks. Harder facts are not the rule but the exception, since they are needed only in a very few cases to displace other on a large scale out of their usual ways.
    • Sixth Rule of Method: When faced with an accusation of irrationality, or simply with beliefs in something, we will never believe that people believe in things or are irrational, we will never look for which rule of logic has been broken, we will simply consider the angle, direction, movement and scale of the observer’s displacement.
      

Star, S. L. and J. Griesemer. 1989. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley ́s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19: 387-420.

• Tension between diverse group of actors and need for collaboration
• Interessement - the process of translating the concerns of the non-scientist into those of the scientist
• ecological analysis - unit of analysis is whole enterprise
  • versus funnelling, avoid managerial bias
• Standardization of methods and the development of boundary objects (both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to maintain identity across them)
  • Repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms
• Boundary objects — analytic concepts of those scientific objects which inhabit several intersecting social worlds

Latour, Science in Action, 63-100, 215-257. (Ch. 2,6)

• Don’t look at the intrinsic qualities of a statement to evaluate it; look at its use by others; the history of technoscience is the history of inventions that make action at a distance possible.
• Chapter 2:
  • Machines independent of bodies, tools not
  • > We cannot be more relativist than scientists about these parts and keep denying evidence when no one else does. Why? Because the cost of dispute is too high for an average citizen, even if he or she is a historian or sociologist of science. If there is no controversy among scientists as to the status of facts, then it is useless to go on talking about interpretation, representation, a biased or distorted world-view, weak and fragile pictures of the world, unfaithful spokesmen. Nature talks straight, facts are facts. Full stop. There is nothing to add and nothing to subtract.
  • Relativist perspective vs. Perspectives vs. Realist
• Chapter 6
  • Theories are the center of a network
  • Immutable and combinable mobiles — are those objects produced by inscription and transported back to the center, and then combined with other such objects.
    • A map is a perfect example. It is mobile while the actual land is not. It is immutable while a native man’s drawing on the sand is not. So by drawing a map on paper, you bring the remote land back to the center while you are not really taking the actual land with you.
  • formalism: excessive adherence to prescribed forms
    • epistemic strategy that gets you further
    • mostly quantitative
  • information — the compromise between presence and absence
    • the form of something without the thing itself
    • same as an inscription
  • 7th Rule of Method — a moratorium on cognitive explanations of science and technology
  • Metrology — name of the gigantic enterprise to make of the outside a world inside which facts and machines can survive
  • Sixth Principle — The history of technoscience is in a large part the history of all the little inventions made along the networks to accelerate the mobility of traces, or to enhance their faithfulness, combination and cohesion, so as to make action at a distance possible.

Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures, 26-45.

• The notion of lab emerged historically as a set of differentiated social and technical forms, carrying systemic weight in our understanding of science
• Usually, lab studies imply “malleability” of natural objects, but scientists are also malleable (shaped by nature of objects they study)
  • “self-other-things” — the nature of the scientist changes as well
• Most people in the lab don’t have contact with experiments
• reconfiguration - recast and upgrade
• relational units — labs gain power by instituting differences with their environment (specific differences)

Latour, Bruno. 1983. “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,”

• Recontextualizing lab studies (so as not to fall back into the internalist version of science)
• We pay for labs because they destabilize the notion of the real difference between the inside and outside and the difference of scale between micro and macro
• labs change scales (lots of interests)
• lever to move the world (becomes another force in the social world, but actors are acting in all things) — content of trials can alter composition of society

Shapin, S. and Simon J. Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 22-79, 110-54.

• Chapter 2: Seeing is Believing
  • Boyle: knowledge comes from experiments
  • Hobbes: experiments never yield philosophical certainty
  • Matters of fact are the mirror of nature
  • Certainty of knowledge (Hobbes) vs. Probability (Boyle)
    • Boyle used witnessing in room, but not everyone was let into room (Hobbes wants everyone in)
  • Boyle’s Three Technologies — material technology (construction and operation of instruments), literary technology (phenomena were made known to not direct witnesses), social technology (conventions others use in considering knowledge claims)
    • Technologies work to make the appearance of matters of fact as given items (technologies function as an objectifying resource)
      • nature, not man that enforces assent
    • material provides protection to experimenter
    • literary creates experimental community
    • social technology constitutes an objectifying resources by making the production of knowledge visible as a collective enterprise
  • Air pump is the an emblem of Boyle’s Experimental program (used in designs)
  • The power of instruments: “reason disciplined the senses, and ways disciplined by it, so the new scientific instruments disciplined sensory observation through their control of access”
    • The issue with the pump and the vacuum
  • Testimony based on witness’ credibility and trustworthiness
    • If knowledge was to be empirically based … then its experimental foundations had to be witnessed
    • Multiplying witnesses to experimentally produce phenomena facilitated replications
      • replication rarely accomplished
    • virtual witnessing — production in the reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental cene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication
      • most powerful technology in constituting matters of fact
      • visual representations as memetic devices
    • seeing and believing
  • “Experimental practices were to rule out of court those problems that bred dispute and divisiveness among philosophers, and they were to substitute those questions that could generate matters of fact upon which philosophers might agree.”
  • Boyle’s New Experiments exexmplified a working philosophy of knowledge — Boyle used ostension (showing others through his own example what it was like to work and talk as an experimental philosopher)
    • “the language game that Boyle was teaching the experimental philosopher to play rested upon implicit acts of boundary drawing”
      • boundary between experimental result and philosophical explanation of result
  • The experimenter must be modest
    • write modestly (no flowery prose)
    • speak confidently of matters of fact
  • Not philosophy
• Chapter 4: Trouble With Experiment
  • Hobbes’ Issues:
    • Skeptical of public nature
    • One experiment should suffice if there is consensus
    • Philosophy demonstrated how effects followed from causes of inferring causes from effects (experiments do not)
    • Refuse to acknowledge boundaries between positive regularities produced by experiment (facts) and identifying physical cause for them (theories)
    • Treated hypotheses and conjectures as statements about real causes
    • Superior explanations to Boyles’
    • Theory embedded in the actual construction and functioning of the apparatus (assumptions could be challenged)
      • also known as Duhem-Quine thesis
    • Hobbes wanted to bypass the individual (provide absolute certainty to avoid civil war)

S. Harding. 1986. “From the Woman Question to the Science Question.” In Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, 15-29.

• The Science Question in Feminism
  • Science bear marks of creators (i.e. race, class, gender)
  • Scientific activity gendered in the sense of gender as an “analytic category within which humans think about and organize social activity”
  • gender symbolism — assigning dualistic gender metaphors to various perceived dichotomies that rarely have anything to do with sex differences
  • gender structure — division of labor by gender
  • individual gender — individual identity or behavioral expressions of masculinity and femininity
• Five Research Programs:
  • Equity studies documented historical resistance to women’s getting the education, credentials and jobs
  • Studies of the uses and abuses of biology, the social sciences and their technologies have revealed the ways science is used in the service of sexist, racist, homophobic and classist projects
  • The selection and definition of problematics
  • Read science as a text
  • Epistemological inquiries that lay the basis for an alternative understanding of how beliefs are grounded in social experiences, and what kind of experience should group the beliefs we honor as knowledge
• A Guide to Feminist Epistemologies
  • Feminist empiricism — sexism and androcentrism are social biases correctable by stricted adherence to the existing methodology norms of scientific inquiry - “..only bad science as the problem, not science as usual. “
  • Feminist standpoint — men’s dominating position in social life results in partial and perverse understandings, whereas women’s subjugated position provides the possibility of more complete and less perverse understandings - standpoint — a morally and scientifically preferable grounding for our interpretation and explanations of nature and social life
  • Feminist postmodernism — embraces fruitful grounding for inquiry the fractured identities modern life creates - Skepticism about universals (embrace difference as solidarity) → Moves us from the Women Question in science to the Science Question in feminism
  • how used for emancipation
    

E. Martin. 1991. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16(3), 485-501.

• Egg and sperm in popular and scientific accounts rely on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female.
• Three revisionist accounts of egg and sperm, but cannot escape the hierarchical imagery of older accounts
• cybernetics — with feedback loops, flexible adaptation to change, coordination of the parts within a whole, evolution over time and changing response to the environment — common in endocrinology, genetics and ecology
  • cybernetic metaphors play role in social control though
• More egalitarian, interactive metaphors
• Wake up sleeping metaphors in science (becoming aware of when we are projecting cultural imagery onto what we study will improve our ability to investigate and understand nature)
• Should be aware that we describe/entities of science as things with personhood
  

D. Haraway. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3), 575-599.

• Pushing against dichotomies that circulate around discourses of science
  • Unmasking objectivity (as critique) gave criticizers an excuse to not keep up with modern science
  • feminist empiricism — more women doing science
  • How do we have simulataneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims while still holding a no-nosense commitment to faithful accounts of a real world
• The Persistence of Vision
  • Feminist objectivity means, quite simply, situated knowledges
  • Vision is a double edged sword: “seeing everything from no where” (i.e. vision for disembodiment), but can be reclaimed because locally rooted
    • Only partial perspective promises objective vision — recognizing own partiality, location, embodiment
    • Never the God Trick
    • embrace the “split and contradictory self”
  • Accept knowledge as provisional
  • Under this mode of analysis, objects are both actors and agents

T. Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms.” Canvas Site.

• Six dimensions of public relevance algorithms that have political valence:
  • Patterns of inclusion — the choices behind what makes it into an index in the first place, what is excluded, and how data is made algorithm ready
  • Cycles of anticipation — the implications of algorithm providers attempts to thoroughly know and predict their users, and how the conclusions they draw can matter
  • The evaluation of relevance — the criteria by which algorithms determine what is relevant, how those criteria are obscured from us, and how they enact political choices about appropriate and legitimate knowledge
  • The Promise of algorithmic objectivity — the way the technical character of the algorithm is positioned as an assurance of impartiality and how that claim is maintained in the face of controversy
  • Entanglement with Practice — how users reshape their practices to suit the algorithms they depend on, and how they can turn algorithms into terrains for political contest, sometimes even to interrogate the politics of the algorithm itself
  • The production of calculated publics — how the algorithmic presentation of publics back to themselves shape a public’s sense of itself, and who is best positioned to benefit from that knowledge.