Date: Wed, 7 Jun 1995 13:35:24 PCT
From: "Daniel A. Segal" <DSEGAL@bernard.pitzer.edu>
Subject: Bk. Rev: Shapin's *Social History of Truth*
Steven Shapin's *Social History of Truth: Civility and
Science in Seventeenth-Century England*(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994. xxxi+483pp, 13
illustrations)
Reviewed by James Bogen
Pitzer College
jbogen@bernard.pitzer.edu
This fascinating book is far too rich for adequate review
in a discussion of this length. I'll gesture at some of its
leading ideas and ask a few questions in hopes of tempting
you to read it.
By "truth" Shapin means claims which are accepted. Since
different groups accept different claims at different
times, truth, so conceived, is various and changeable. By
"social history of truth" Shapin means a history of
micro-social factors which influence the generation and
acceptance of claims by the groups (during times) chosen
for study. Shapin's primary focus is on scientific claims
developed by Robert Boyle and other 17th century members
and correspondents of the Royal Society.
He orients his study in opposition to some received views
about science and scientific discourse. One is
epistemological individualism--the official position of
the British empiricists--according to which the "legitimate
springs of empirical knowledge" are located, not in the
discourse of groups of people, but "in the individual's
sensory confrontation with the world" (202). On this view,
the ideal scientist bases his evaluations of empirical
claims as much as possible on his own observations and
reasonings, instead of depending on the testimony and
theorizing of others. Shapin argues, to the contrary, that
scientists rely so heavily on the testimony of others whom
they trust that we cannot understand the production of
scientific truth unless we understand how trust is
established and maintained, weakened and lost.
Shapin also opposes the idea that scientific discourse is
radically different from what Luhman, Oakeshott, and Rorty
call "conversation". The aim of "conversation" is to
perpetuate itself along with the social practices and
institutions which support and are furthered by it. By
contrast, says the received view, science is dedicated to
the discovery of facts, rigorous refutations of false
claims about facts, and rigorous demonstrations of true
claims. Thus scientific discourse is marked by skeptical
examinations and harsh criticisms which would be
non-conducive, if not fatal, to conversational discourse.
Shapin believes, to the contrary, that even if this
contrast between conversation and scientific discourse is
"...a significant actor's distinction...," the historian
or sociologist can "...illuminat[e] the nature of
scientific practice..." analyzing it on the model of
conversation (352). Social and political communities
cannot thrive, and their members cannot fruitfully
pursue their goals without mutual trust and the
sociability and cooperation it fosters (10-13) and Shapin
argues that the same holds for "communities" of working
scientists. The conventions of non-scientific, genteel
conversation provided ways to avoid (or where they could
not be avoided, to manage) disputes which could otherwise
weaken the trust and sociability required for community
life. His leading idea is that conversational conventions
deriving from those of genteel discourse were incorporated
into and performed the same function in the scientific
discourse of the Royal Society.
In a fascinating and authoritative survey of material from
17th century "courtesy literature" on what it is to be, to
act, and to speak like a gentleman, from political
philosophy and from Bacon, Locke, and other
scientifically minded philosophers of the period, from the
scientific correspondence of the Royal Society, and from
the life and writings of Robert Boyle, Shapin extracts
seven maxims (212ff) which the prudent l7th century
gentleman should use to assess the credibility of empirical
claims. So evaluated, the acceptability of a claim would
depend to a great extent, upon how closely the person who
made it conformed to the picture of a gentleman set out in
the courtesy literature and related ethical and political
writings. And it would also depend upon whether the claim
was made in a way which met the requirements of genteel
conversation.
Shapin's development of his thesis features a number of
meticulously described and engrossing case studies. In
one, Boyle resolved an apparent incompatibility between
travelers' descriptions of icebergs and received
hydrostatical principles by devising a story which allowed
both to be accepted without contradiction. Shapin thinks
an important reason for resolving the dispute this way
instead of by rejecting the travelers' accounts as
hydrostatically implausible was the gentlemanly authority
of the travelers (247-258): "Factual testimony from
gentleman-philosophers...was almost never gainsaid in the
public forums of seventeenth-century English science"
(124).
In a second case, the testimony of some deep sea divers who
claimed not to have felt crushing pressure underwater
conflicted with the principle that parcels of a body of
water should press upon one another no matter where the
body they belong to is located. Shapin claims that instead
of trying to reconcile principle with testimony as in the
first case, Boyle and others rejected the divers'
testimony because, unlike the travelers who described the
icebergs, the divers were too ungentle to merit trust
(258-266).
Shapin uses a third case study--the Royal Society's
handling of a controversy between the astronomers,
Hevelius and Auzout, over the position and trajectory of a
comet observed in the mid 1660s--to argue for the
similarity between scientific discourse and conversation.
Neither disputant met all of the conditions for gentility.
But they belonged to and had powerful friends in the Royal
Society. Because of this, and because it wanted to
maintain its access to the data Hevelius and Auzout could
provide, the Royal Society had a strong interest in
managing the dispute so as to minimize enmity among their
partisans, and to preserve their reputations as
trustworthy observers. Shapin thinks the explanation of
complicated social and theoretical maneuvers (including the
treatment of a proposal that the most troublesome of the
observations were sightings of different comets) by which
the controversy was diffused (266-291) lies in the
relocation to the scientific setting of conversational
practices historically "....adapted to protect the
reliability of testimony and the integrity of the moral
order...in gentlemanly society..." (125). Here and
elsewhere the task of preserving scientific conversation
itself not only took precedence over "...the attainment of
more, more exact, or more powerful truth" but shaped the
conversationalists' standards for factually acceptable
empirical claims (309).
Shapin's book makes it hard to doubt that a sociological
account of trust can be of great value to philosophers,
and historians, as well as sociologists of science. Its
value derives from the important fact--well illustrated by
Shapin's case studies--that isolated individuals typically
cannot find, establish, or promulgate answers to important
scientific questions and that the development of
scientific knowledge is the work of groups of people. (On
pain of trivializing Shapin's project, we must avoid
confusing this version of the claim that scientific
knowledge is a group product with the wholly uninteresting
version which can be established on the cheap just by
thinking of truths as claims which groups accept and
appealing to the banality that it takes the work of groups
of people to get claims accepted by groups of people.) But
although the sociology of trust can be quite important to
the study of science, it's worth asking whether Shapin
hasn't overemphasized the importance of "connections
between the identity of individuals...and the credibility
of what they claim" (126) and the influence of trust in
people on assessments of the reliability of their empirical
claims. Here are some questions about this.
First, Shapin's theme leads him to ignore how important
confidence in experimental and observational equipment and
in techniques for their employment can be to assessments
of the reliability of claims they are used to establish.
Consider the discredited divers. Shapin observes that the
results of experiments in which bottles were lowered into
the sea (e.g., implosions of glass bottles at 40 fathoms)
counted more heavily for the claim that water presses upon
itself than the testimony of the divers who said they felt
no pressure counted against it (264). Was the
non-gentility of the divers an important reason for this?
Quite apart from any questions concerning the reliability
of the divers or the truth of their testimony, it's
plausible that scientists believed that what happens to
submerged bottles was a clearer and more reliable
indication of whether water pressed in upon itself than
the experiences (no matter how accurately reported) of
submerged people. Why in general should confidence in
empirical claims derived from the employment of reliable
instruments, experimental designs, etc. have to be
explained mainly in terms of the "identities of
individuals"? (For more on this in connection with recent
science, see Peter Galison, *How Experiments End*, and
Alan Franklin, *Neglect of Experiment*, and *Experiment,
Right or Wrong*.)
Secondly, it's conceivable that people relied upon some of
the empirical reports Shapin considers because of external
constraints which encouraged truth telling and discouraged
speaking falsely rather than because of the character of
the reporter. The constraints built into to the work
situations of Shapin's non-genteel "invisible technicians"
are an example (Ch. Eight). Other reports might have been
relied upon not so much because of the identities or
situations of the reporters as because of perceptual and
cognitive psychological factors which made mistakes
unlikely. Thus Boyle's assistants describe some things
which cognitively and perceptually normal human beings
typically don't get wrong (385). Here it's worth
considering Annette Baier's discussion of reasons other
than trust for relying on others (see: "Trust and Anti-
trust" in Baier, *Moral Prejudices*).
Thirdly, Shapin documents the importance of the
plausibility of what is reported to the assessment of the
reliability of the report. There are obvious connections
between plausibility and trustworthiness; someone who
wishes to establish a reputation for genteel
trustworthiness is well advised to try to avoid making
implausible claims. More interestingly, there is a matter
of weighting. A prima facie implausible claim delivered
in a manner which "...inspires a just confidence" by
someone with the genteel virtues of "integrity and
disinterestedness" (212) will get a better hearing than the
same claim delivered in a boastful, wonder-mongering,
pedantic, or otherwise indecorous manner (221) or if it
came from the mouth of someone whose personal vices,
interest in a particular outcome, or susceptibility to the
influence of others argue against his veracity (223 ff.).
But plausibility has to do with the likelihood of what is
reported, and likelihood can depend upon biological or
physical probabilities; it's implausible, e.g., that an out
of shape sixty year old should high jump over 7 feet, or
that Santa Monica Bay should freeze over. It can depend
upon on psychological or sociological factors; it's
implausible that a British two year old should master
ancient Greek, or that a woman should be elected president
of the Royal Society during the 17th Century. And so on.
This makes it natural to ask to what extent assessments of
plausibility are influenced by facts of nature and other
factors Shapin tends to downplay. Consider the
astronomical controversy. What caused trouble was not
Hevelius's observations, but the implausibility of a comet's
trajectory which he calculated from them. This
implausibility derived from later observations which--if
they were observations of the same comet--would require
Hevelius's trajectory to continue in a physically
improbable way. In light of this, the suggestion that the
comet observed later on was not the same one Hevelius saw
seems plausible for reasons which don't sound particularly
sociological. The Royal Society's concern for its
continuing relations with Hevelius and Auzout must have
influenced its treatment of the dispute. But was this as
important a factor as the astronomical and mathematical
considerations which friends of the received view of
science would emphasize?
Many features of the science Shapin studied are
idiosyncratic to 17th century scientific practice. But a
tantalizing epilogue suggests how the morals of this book
might apply to current scientific practice. Shapin
speculates that even if present day "outsiders" treat
scientists with ungenteel skepticism of the kind which
Merton thought was essential to scientific practice, small
"communities" of scientists might nevertheless behave in
something like the manner of the manner of the Royal
Society (409-417). This is a fascinating idea. Its
implementation would require an account of what sort of
social unit a "community" is, and an investigation of the
epistemic significance of interactions between scientists
working on common problems in competing laboratories or
research groups as well as scientists working together in
the same groups. I hope Shapin will write something about
this. But whether or not he does his Social History of
Truth is one of the finest of science studies books, and a
model of how intellectual history should be done.
------------------------------
End of H-WORLD Digest - 6 Jun 1995 to 7 Jun 1995
************************************************