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Socially Constructed Belief If the preceding considerations are correct, social construction talk does not cogently apply to the facts studied by the natural sciences; does it fare any better when applied to the beliefs about those facts produced by those sciences? 5The issue is not whether science is a social enterprise. Of course, it is. Science is conducted collectively by human beings who come equipped with values, needs, interests and prejudices. And these may influence their behavior in a variety of potentially profound ways: they may determine what questions they show an interest in, what research strategy they place their bets on, what they are willing to fund, and so forth. The usual, view, however, is that none of this matters to the believability of a particular claim produced by science, if that claim is adequately supported by the factual evidence. Kepler may have become interested in planetary motion as a result of his religious and occult preoccupations, and for all I know, he may have been strongly invested in getting a certain outcome. But so long as his eventual claim that the planets move in elliptical orbits could be justified by the evidence he presented for it, it does not matter how he came to be interested in the question, nor what prior investment he may have had. The view is now there, with a claim on our attention, and the only way to reject it is to refute the evidence adduced in its favor. It is irrelevant that Kepler would not have engaged in his research had it not been for preoccupations that we do not share or that he may have had extra-evidential motives for hoping for a certain outcome. To put this point another way, we commonly distinguish between what philosophers of science call the “context of discovery” and what they call the “context of justification.” And while it’s plausible that social values play a role in the context of discovery, it’s not plausible that they play a role in the context of justification. Social constructionists about knowledge deny this; for them it is naïve to suppose that while social values may enter into the one context, they need not enter into the other. Well, how could social values enter into the context of justification? There are four distinct ways of articulating the thought a constructionist may have in mind here; while all four may be found in the literature, they are not always sufficiently distinguished from one other. To begin with, a constructionist may hold that it is not the factual evidence that does the justifying, but precisely the background social values. And while it may seem incredible that anyone could have seriously thought anything like this, but there are certainly assertions out there that seem to demand just such a reading. Here is one (Kenneth Gergen, “Feminist critiques of science and the challenge of social epistemology,” in Feminist Thought and the Structure of Knowledge, edited by Mary Gergen, 1989): The validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence. However, anyone who really thought that, say, Maxwell’s Equations could be justified by appeal to Maxwell’s, or anyone else’s, social or political beliefs would betray a complete incomprehension of the notion of justification. An item of information justifies a given belief by raising the likelihood that it is true. Admittedly, this is not an unproblematic notion. But unless we are to throw it out altogether, it is perfectly clear that one cannot 6hope to justify the fundamental laws of electromagnetism by appeal to one’s political convictions or career interests or anything else of a similar ilk. If one were absolutely determined to pursue something along these lines, a slightly better avenue, and the second of our four options, would be to argue that, although social values do not justify our beliefs, we are not actually moved to belief by things that justify; we are only moved by our social interests. This view, which is practically orthodoxy among practitioners of what has come to be known as “science studies”, has the advantage of not saying something absurd about justification; but it is scarcely any more plausible. On the most charitable reading, it stems from an innocent confusion about what is required by the enterprise of treating scientific knowledge sociologically. The view in question derives from one of the founding texts of science studies, David Bloor’s Knowledge and Social Imagery (1977). Bloor’s reasoning went something like this: If we wish to explain why certain beliefs come to be accepted as knowledge at a given time, we must not bring to bear our views about which of those beliefs are true and which false. If we are trying to explain why they came to hold that some belief is true, it cannot be relevant that we know it not to be true. This is one of the so-called “Symmetry Principles” of the sociology of knowledge: treat true and false propositions symmetrically in explaining why they came to be believed. It’s possible to debate the merits of this principle, but on the whole it seems to me sound. As Ian Hacking rightly emphasizes, however, it is one thing to say that true and false beliefs should be treated symmetrically and quite another to say that justified and unjustified ones should be so treated. While it may be plausible to ignore the truth or falsity of what I believe in explaining why I came to believe it, it is not plausible to ignore whether I had any evidence for believing it. For some reason that is never explained, however, Bloor and his colleagues seem to think that the two principles are on a par and are both equally required by the enterprise of treating scientific belief sociologically. Bloor builds both into the very foundation of the subject: [The sociology of knowledge] would be impartial with respect to truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or failure. However, absent an argument for being skeptical about the very idea of a good reason for a belief – and how could there be such an argument that did not immediately undermine itself? – one of the possible causes for my believing what I do is that I have good evidence for it. Any explanatory framework that insisted on treating not only true and false beliefs symmetrically, but justified and unjustified ones as well, would owe us an explanation for why evidence for belief is being excluded as one of its potential causes. And it would have to do so without undermining its own standing as a view that is being put forward because justified. 7This is not, of course, to say that scientific belief must always be explained in terms of the compelling evidence assembled for it; the history of science is replete with examples of views – phrenology, for example – for which there never was any good evidence. It is simply to insist that scientific belief is sometimes to be explained in terms of compelling evidence and that the history and sociology of science, properly conceived, need have no stake in denying that. This brings us to a third, milder conception of how social values might be indispensable for the justification of scientific belief. On this view, although evidence can enter into the explanation for why a particular view is believed, it can never be enough to explain it. Any evidence we might possess always underdetermines the specific belief that we arrive at on its basis. Something else must close the gap between what we have evidence for and what we actually believe, and that something else is provided by the thinker’s background values and interests. This idea, that the evidence in science always underdetermines the theories that we believe on its basis, has exerted considerable influence in the philosophy of science, even in non-constructionist circles. In its modern form, it originated in the thought of the turn of the century French physicist and philosopher, Pierre Duhem. Suppose that an experimental observation is inconsistent with a theory that you believe: the theory predicts that the needle will read ‘10’ and the needle does not budge from zero, say. What Duhem pointed out is that this does not necessarily refute the theory. For the observational prediction is generated not merely on the basis of the theory, but, in addition, through the use of auxiliary hypotheses about the functioning of the experimental apparatus. In light of the recalcitrant observational result, something has to be revised, but so far we do not yet know exactly what: perhaps it’s the theory, perhaps it’s the auxiliary hypotheses. Perhaps, indeed, it is the very claim that we recorded a genuinely recalcitrant result, as opposed to merely suffering some visual illusion. Duhem argued that reason alone could never decide which revisions are called for and, hence, that belief revision in science could not be a purely rational matter: something else had to be at work as well. What the social constructionist adds is that this extra element is something social. This is a clever argument that does not long conceal its difficulties. Is it really true that we could never have more reason to revise one of our theories rather than another in response to recalcitrant experience? Consider Duhem’s example of an astronomer peering through his telescope at the heavens and being surprised at what he finds there, perhaps a hitherto undetected star in a galaxy he has been charting. Upon this discovery, according to Duhem, the astronomer may revise his theory of the heavens or he may revise his theory of how the telescope works. And rational principles of belief fixation do not tell him which to do. The idea, however, that in peering at the heavens through a telescope we are testing our theory of the telescope just as much as we are testing our astronomical views is absurd. The theory of the telescope has been established by numerous terrestrial experiments and 8fits in with an enormous number of other things that we know about lenses, light and mirrors. It is simply not plausible that, in coming across an unexpected observation of the heavens, a rational response might be to revise what we know about telescopes! The point is not that we might never have occasion to revise our theory of telescopes; one can certainly imagine circumstances under which that is precisely what would be called for . The point is that not every circumstance in which something about telescopes is presupposed is a circumstance in which our theory of telescopes is being tested, and so the conclusion that rational considerations alone cannot decide how to respond to recalcitrant experience is blocked. Perhaps, however – to come to the fourth and final way in which belief and social values might be intertwined – the correct thought is not that the social must be brought in to fill a gap left by the rational, but simply that the rational itself is constitutively social. A good reason for believing something, according to this line of thought, only has that status relative to variable social factors – a sharp separation between the rational and the social is illusory. This is currently perhaps the single most influential construal of the relation between the rational and the social in constructionist circles. What it amounts to is a relativization of good reasons to variable social circumstance, so that the same item of information may correctly be said justify a given belief under some social circumstances, in some cultures, but not in others. It is nicely expressed in the following passage (Barry Barnes and David Bloor, “Relativism, rationalism and the sociology of knowledge,” 1981): …there is no sense to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such. But this is an impossible construal of reasons for belief, as Plato understood some time ago (see his Theatetus). We cannot coherently think of ourselves as believing and asserting anything, if all reasons for belief and assertion are held to be inexorably tied to variable background perspective in the manner being proposed. There are many ways to show this, but perhaps the most telling is this: not even the relativist would be able to adopt such an attitude towards his own view. For, surely, the relativist does not think that a relativism about reasons is justified only relative to his own perspective? If he did, why is he recommending it to us who do not share his perspective? When we believe something we believe it because we think there are reasons to think it is true, reasons that we think are general enough to get a grip even on people who do not share our perspective. That is why we feel entitled to recommend it to them. It’s hard to imagine a way of thinking about belief and assertion that precluded the possibility of that sort of generality. The Cultural Authority of Science Neither a generalized constructionism about the objects and facts investigated by the natural sciences, nor one about the reasons for belief provided by those sciences carries 9much plausibility. To what does this matter? Here are two contrasting views. Rorty (“Phony Science Wars,” Atlantic Monthly, 1999): The science wars are in part a product of deep and long-lasting clashes of intuition, but mostly they are just media hype – journalists inciting intellectuals to diabolize one another. Diabolization may be helpful in keeping intellectuals aroused and active, but it need not be taken very seriously. By way of contrast we have Dorothy Nelkin: Current theories about science do seem to call into question the image of selfless scientific objectivity and to undermine scientific authority, at a time when scientists want to claim their lost innocence, to be perceived as pure unsullied seekers after truth. That is what the science wars are about. I think that Nelkin is closer to being right. As social constructionists realize only too well, we would not attach the same importance to science if we came to be convinced by constructionist conceptions of it. In what does the cultural importance of science consist? This is, of course, a vast subject, but there are, it seems to me, two central elements. First, and most importantly, in matters of belief we defer to science. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of this practice, reflected as it is in what we are prepared to teach our children at school, to accept as evidence in courts of law and to base our social policies upon. Second, we spend vast sums of money on basic scientific research, research that does not look as though it will have any immediate practical payoff. Rorty’s laid-back attitude depends on the thought that neither of these practices has any interesting philosophical presuppositions, and so cannot be vulnerable to constructionist critique. But this seems wrong. For deference to make sense, it has to be plausible that science delivers the sort of knowledge that everyone has reason to believe, regardless of their political or more broadly ideological commitments. But this would be directly challenged by a constructionist thesis about reasons for belief, on any of its available versions. If we look at the practice of spending vast sums on basic science, science with no foreseeable practical payoff, it is arguable that an even greater amount of philosophy is presupposed, that we have to hold not only that science delivers knowledge that everyone has reason to believe, but that it delivers true or approximately true knowledge of the structure of an independently existing reality. For if we ask why, given the many pressing social problems we face, we should spend tens of billions of dollars to build a super-collider that will smash ever smaller particles into each other in the hope of releasing ones that we have never seen but which our theories predict, what could possibly be a compelling answer if not that doing so will help us to understand the fundamental, hidden constitution of the universe, and that that is worth doing? If it doesn’t make sense to think that there is such a hidden constitution to probe, or even if 10there is, if it doesn’t make sense to think that science is capable of probing it, what rationale could there be for spending such vast sums, when that money could equally be spent on AIDS or on poverty? ( To be clear: I am not saying that a search for the fundamental truths automatically trumps all other considerations, only that its coherence as a goal is required to make sense of the importance we attach to basic science.) Conclusion At its best – as in the work of de Beauvoir and Appiah – social constructionist thought exposes the contingency of those of our social practices that we had wrongly come to regard as inevitable. It does so by relying on the standard canons of good scientific reasoning. It goes astray when it aspires to become either a general metaphysics or a general theory of knowledge. As the former, it quickly degenerates into an impossible form of idealism. As the latter, it assumes its place in a long history of problematic attempts to relativize the notion of rationality. It has nothing new to add to these historically discredited views; if anything, social constructionist versions tend to be murkier and more confused than their traditional counterparts. The difficulty lies in understanding why such generalized applications of social construction have come to tempt so many. One source of their appeal is no doubt their efficiency. If we can be said to know up front that any item of knowledge only has that status because it gets a nod from contingent social values, then any claim to knowledge can be dispatched if we happen not to share the values on which it allegedly depends. There is no need to get into the often complex details. But that only postpones the real question. Why this fear of knowledge? Whence the need to protect against its deliverances? Hacking writes of certain feminists, for example, who …see objectivity and abstract truth as tools that have been used against them. They remind us of the old refrain: women are subjective, men are objective. They argue that those very values, and the word objectivity, are a gigantic confidence trick. If any kind of objectivity is to be preserved, some argue, it must be one that strives for a multitude of standpoints. (p96) Hacking professes not to know whether to side with this thought. But he should know. Whatever legitimate worry may be at work here, it cannot be expressed by saying that objectivity and abstract truth are tools of oppression. At most what these observations entitle us to say is that there have been occasions when those concepts have been used as tools of oppression; and no one will want to dispute that. But the fact that a concept can be, and has been, abused can hardly be a basis for indicting the concept itself. Are we to be suspicious of the value of freedom because the Nazis inscribed “Arbeit Macht Frei” on the gate at Auschwitz? The intuitive view is that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively 11reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their ideological perspective. Difficult as these notions may be, it is a mistake to think that recent philosophy has disclosed any good reasons for rejecting them.