This essay at least partially bounces off the title (though not the content) of a book called The Social Construction of What?, by the philosopher Ian Hacking. The point here being that there cannot fail to be at least some level of “social construction” in both scientific knowledge and science itself. But is social construction everything when it comes to science… or to anything else? Hacking, then, believes that social construction is real. So too does the philosopher Susan Haak. And it’s Haak’s work, rather than Hacking’s, which will be featured in this essay.
“Examples of social constructs range widely, encompassing the assigned value of money, conceptions of concept of self, self-identity, beauty standards, gender, language, race, ethnicity, social class, social hierarchy, nationality, religion, social norms, the modern calendar and other units of time, marriage, education, citizenship, stereotypes, femininity and masculinity, social institutions, and even the idea of ‘social construct’ itself.”
— See source here.
Of Course Science Is a “Social Construction”!
… At least it is in a simple and obvious sense.
All scientists are social beings who work within various social contexts. Indeed, theories are constructed by scientists within social contexts…
How could it be otherwise?
The English philosopher Susan Haak agrees.
In her paper ‘Towards a Sober Sociology of Science’, Haak tells us that “warrant is social in the sense that [ ] [o]ur judgements of relevance of evidence depend on our background beliefs…” She also believes that “scientific inquiry is a social enterprise…” Finally, she concludes:
“[T]he objects of scientific knowledge are socially constructed. Scientific theories are of course devised, articulated, developed by scientists; theoretical concepts like electron, gene, force, and so forth, are, if you like, their creation…”
As can be seen, each statement above is followed by three full stops. Thus, most readers will have guessed that Haak qualifies all of her statements. So there is a sense in which what she says is obviously true. After all, isn’t it the case that scientific theories are “devised, articulated, developed by scientists”? Yet the broad political and philosophical conclusions which some social scientists draw from all this are, in Haak’s view, false.
In more detail. The words “electron”, “gene” and “force” were all coined by scientists. Does this mean that electrons, genes and forces are also “socially constructed”? Indeed, the mathematics and theories used to describe such things were formulated by scientists. However, are electrons, genes and forces themselves created by scientists? Are the words “electron”, “gene” and “force” about — or do they refer to — the words “electron”, “gene” and “force”? Are scientific theories about — or do they refer to — scientific theories? After all, if (to cite Haak putting Kenneth J. Gergen’s position) “the world has little or no role in the construction of scientific knowledge”, then electrons, genes and forces aren’t to be found in the physical world. They’re to be found in the social world of the social beings we call “scientists”.
The clinical and philosophical psychologist Barbara S. Held also puts the point for the obviousness-of-social-construction in the following passage from her paper ‘Constructivism in Psychotherapy’:
“We all sometimes *construct* theories about how the world works, both in science and in life. The fact that knowing involves an active process on the part of the knower does not make all knowers antirealists, and all knowledge subjective. Put differently, *all theories are themselves linguistic constructions*. Constructing theories is the business of science, all science. But that fact does not make all scientists constructionists/antirealists.”
Held goes into more detail when she concludes:
“However, to then say that the theoretical construction we have just created is the *only reality* we have is to confuse two things: it confuses (a) the linguistic status of the theory itself with (b) the extralinguistic or extratheoretic reality that the theory is attempting to approximate indirectly. That is, the reality under investigation is not itself a mere linguistic construction.”
The philosopher Ian Hacking wrote a book called The Social Construction of What? That title alone perfectly represents Susan Haak’s position.
Again, in a qualified and limited sense, Hacking believes in the social construction of science. So too does Haak. Interestingly, Hacking tackles the positions of the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour (1947–2022) and the British sociologist Steve Woolgar (1950-), both mentioned, if only in passing, by Haak herself. According to Hacking, Latour and Woolgar believe that facts are made. This means that they don’t believe that facts are found and then simply registered.
Latour and Woolgar to put their own position on facts, and they do so by indulging in a bit of Heideggerian etymology. In their book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts), they wrote that
“[t]he word ‘fact’ comes from the Latin factum, a noun derived from the past participle of facere, to do, or to make”.
Hacking himself responds to that. He tells his readers that they shouldn’t be too shocked by that because “made things exist”. Indeed, Latour and Woolgar themselves say that they do not “wish to say that facts do not exist nor that there is no such thing as reality”. That, on the surface, is an easy thing to say. After all, if one believes that “peace is a ham sandwich”, then does one really believe in peace? Similarly with Latour and Woolgar when they use the words “fact” and “reality”.
The Real, Etc.
Susan Haak often uses the word “real”. She doesn’t really go into detail about what she means by it. However, she does say that “the entities posited in true scientific theories are real”. That said, she does in a way define the concept — if in a negative manner.
For example, Haak doesn’t believe that “electrons, genes, forces, etc. are brought into existence by the intellectual activity of the scientists who create the theories that posit them”. Thus, (to use a Continental capital) the Real is that which isn’t brought into existence by human beings and their theories. (The Real is there regardless of human beings.) This means that accepting the Real seems to be a kind of metaphysical realism, at least according to my own interpretation of Haak’s words.
Haak uses the word “objective” too.
For example, she tells us that
“[o]ur judgments of relevance of evidence depend on our background beliefs, but relevance of evidence is, nevertheless, objective”.
Here again Haak doesn’t elaborate. (No doubt the meaning of the word “objective” can be gleaned from the rest of her article.) As it stands, it seems that evidence is objective if it’s relevant… But how does that work? Sure, the fact that Stephen Hawking was a keen football fan may not be relevant to assessing his work on black holes, but his mathematical theories are. Still, why bring in the word “objective” here at all?
The Underdetermination of Theory
One trendy idea — which largely came from analytic philosophers (i.e., ones who greatly admired science — or at least physics) is the underdetermination of theory by data, and it’s been a godsend to postmodernists, constructivists, the critics of science, etc. To them, it means that if scientific theories are only partly determined by data, facts, evidence, or whatever, then the rest can be filled in with whatever you like. Haak herself says that postmodernists, etc. believe that “social values take up the slack”. Thus, because scientific theories are underdetermined, then there’s free reign to add to the determined… bit. In fact, postmodernists, etc. use the underdetermination-of-theory-by-the-data idea whenever they can when it comes to their political and/or deflationary views on scientific theories and to science itself.
In terms of the incomplete or inconclusive evidence for scientific theories, Haak expresses the postmodernist, etc. position by saying that
“[e]vidence never *obliges* us to accept this claim rather than that, the thought is, and we have to accept something; so acceptance is always affected by something besides the evidence”.
In other words, the evidence alone is never conclusive. It is never complete. Thus, why not make that extra something “social values”? Or, more plainly, why not make that extra something politics? This isn’t a conspiratorial conclusion. Many postmodernists, etc. are upfront about the fact that this space-beyond-evidence can be filled in such a way.
Communal Science and Evidence
Constructivists rightly pick up on the communal nature of science. Indeed, they pick up on the social nature of science. But is there anything more to science than its social or communal nature?…
Of course there is.
Haak now focuses on what she calls “warrant” in regard to “a scientific claim”.
Firstly, she tackles the position of her opponents. She writes:
“One misunderstanding is that the warrant status of a scientific claim is ‘just a matter of social practice’.”
Haak continues by saying that this claim is “elliptical for talk of how justified a scientific community is in accepting it”. However,
“how justified they are in accepting it does not depend on how justified they *think* they are, but on how good their evidence is”.
But isn’t evidence itself dependent on all sorts of prior detail too?
Haak recognises this when she puts her opponents’ position that “’how good,’ here, can only mean ‘how good relative to the standards of community C’”. Again, Haak believes that there’s more to it than that. So it’s not that she denies the relevance of “the standards of the community”, or that justification occurs within a “scientific community”. However, if all that were the whole story, then science would be nothing more than mutual navel gazing among scientists. To quote Richard Rorty, the “world [would be] well lost”.
In simple terms, justification has “the world” as part of its picture. Evidence and standards are dependent on the world too. That’s because evidence is evidence of something, and standards play their role when it comes to the physical phenomena which are external to the standards themselves.
Rival Constructivists
Susan Haak cites various individuals and schools within the social sciences who and which take a very deflationary (or simply political) position on science. She writes:
“[O]ne thinks of the Edinburgh School’s ‘strong programme’ in sociology of science, allegedly revealing the ‘threadbare fabric of… traditional philosophical accounts’; or Collin’s or Gergen’s assurance that the world has little or no role in the construction of scientific knowledge; of Latour’s or Woolgar’s insistence on approaching science as a process of producing inscriptions and thereby constructing facts; of Hubbard’s or Bleier’s or Nelson’s or Longino’s announcements that all inquiry is biased by the inquirer’s gender, class, or racial perspective; of the proponents of ‘democratic epistemology’ and the alleged ‘strong objectivity’ of multiple standpoint theory; and so on.”
The problem here is that all these schools and positions seem to be rivals. Surely they can’t all be held together. That said, some people may argue that they are all compatible with each other — or at least some of them are. After all, all these examples are simply approaching science from different angles, not necessarily rival angles. However, that is highly unlikely.
For example, if multiple standpoint theory offers us “strong objectivity”, then how does that sit with the view that “the world has little or no role in the construction of scientific knowledge”? How do “facts” (even if “constructed”, as in Latour and Woolgar) sit with the elimination of the world?
Social Science Rules
There may be good political reasons — as well as ones about “epistemic power” — as to why certain social scientists stress the point that science is a “social construction” [see here]. Haak makes this point in the following passage:
“[As] for those who argue that since scientific knowledge is nothing but a social construction, the physical sciences must be subordinate to the social sciences.”
Perhaps the following paragraph offers a somewhat crude take on how some social scientists see themselves.
Social scientists deal with everything that’s… social. Scientific knowledge (or science itself) is social. Therefore, the last word on scientific knowledge should be left to social scientists. More broadly, the physical sciences are carried out by social beings within social contexts. Such social beings (i.e., scientists) may be “naïve” or politically biased without their knowing it. They may not even be (fully) aware of the social contexts they work within. Social scientists, on the other hand, do know about social contexts. They aren’t naïve. And they aren’t unaware of our “political realities”.
Readers can see Haak’s point if they consider the words of the sociologist Professor Steve Fuller (1959-). In ‘Book Review: The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution’, Fuller told us that his prime motive was to “challenge these skimpily clad would-be emperors” — i.e., scientists. He went on to state the following:
“[T]o a sociologist, it will be apparent that many of the ‘deep puzzles’ that these scientists brood over could be solved, or at least dissipated, by a dose of social science [].”
Fuller then argued that “much of what is said [by scientists] could have benefited from the presence of a sociological interlocutor”. And finally:
“[D]espite their interdisciplinary pretensions, none of the scientists ever feels the need to refer to theories or findings of the social sciences (except for a few derogatory remarks about economists). When Gould wants to flaunt his well-roundedness, he quotes Horace and Shakespeare, not Marx and Weber [].”
Finally, and in simple terms, social scientists emphasise the social construction of science. They believe that most (physical) scientists ignore it. However, and as shown, it’s in certain senses, and in many ways, obvious that science is socially constructed. However, it isn’t only the end result of social construction. It is an end result of the Real (or the world) too.
Moreover, the sociologist Steve Fuller places an undue emphasis on social construction (or the “findings of the social sciences”, including the works of “Marx and Weber”) as a simple consequence of his own specialism (or career) and political leanings. Most (physical) scientists (despite “their interdisciplinary pretensions”), on the other hand, may well place an emphasis on their own specialisms, which is hardly a surprise.
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