Science studies is an interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts. It uses various methods to analyze the production, representation and reception of scientific knowledge and its epistemic and semiotic role.
Similarly to cultural studies, science studies are defined by the subject of their research and encompass a large range of different theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. The interdisciplinary approach may include and borrow methods from the humanities, natural and formal sciences, from scientometrics to ethnomethodology or cognitive science.
Science studies have a certain importance for evaluation and science policy. Overlapping with the field of science, technology and society, practitioners study the relationship between science and technology, and the interaction of expert and lay knowledge in the public realm.
Scope The field started with a tendency toward navel-gazing: it was extremely self-conscious in its genesis and applications. From early concerns with scientific discourse, practitioners soon started to deal with the relation of scientific expertise to politics and lay people. Practical examples include bioethics, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), pollution, global warming,Martello M (2004) Global change science and the Arctic citizen.Sci Public Policy 31(2):107–115Jasanoff S (ed) (2004) States of knowledge: the co-production of science and social order. Routledge, Abingdon biomedical sciences, physical sciences, natural hazard predictions, the (alleged) impact of the Chernobyl disaster in the UK, generation and review of science policy and risk governance and its historical and geographic contexts. While staying a discipline with multiple metanarratives, the fundamental concern is about the role of the perceived expert in providing governments and local authorities with information from which they can make decisions.
The approach poses various important questions about what makes an expert and how experts and their authority are to be distinguished from the lay population and interacts with the values and policy making process in liberal democratic societies.
Practitioners examine the forces within and through which scientists investigate specific phenomena such as technological milieus, epistemic instruments and cultures and laboratory life (compare Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger) science and technology (e.g. Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Thomas P. Hughes) science, technology and society (e.g. Peter Weingart, Ulrike Felt, Helga Nowotny and Reiner Grundmann) language and rhetoric of science (e.g. Charles Bazerman, Alan G. Gross, Greg Myers) aesthetics of science and visual culture in science (u.a. Peter Geimer), the role of aesthetic criteria in scientific practice (compare mathematical beauty) and the relation between emotion, cognition and rationality in the development of science.International Studies in the Philosophy of Science Volume 16, Issue 1, 2002, Recent work on aesthetics of science DOI:10.1080/02698590120118783 James W. McAllister pages 7-11, 21 Jul 2010 semiotic studies of creative processes, as in the discovery, conceptualization, and realization of new ideas.Zeichen für Kunst: Zur Organisierbarkeit von Kreativität Detlev Nothnagel, ZfS, Band 29, Heft 4/2007 ZfS, Band 29, Heft 4/2007 or the interaction and management of different forms of knowledge in cooperative research.Organisierte Kreativität: Die vielen Gesichter der Innovation, Rene J.Jorna, in Zeichen für Kunst: Zur Organisierbarkeit von Kreativität Detlev Nothnagel, ZfS, Band 29, Heft 4/2007 ZfS, Band 29, Heft 4/2007 large-scale research and research institutions, e.g. particle colliders (Sharon Traweek) research ethics, science policy, and the role of the university.Mario Biagioli: The science studies reader. Routledge, New York 1999, Derek de Solla Price: Little Science, Big Science. Von der Studierstube zur Großforschung. Suhrkamp, 1982, .
History of the field In 1935, in a celebrated paper, the Polish sociologist couple Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski proposed the founding of a "science of science" to study the scientific enterprise, its practitioners, and the factors influencing their work.Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski, "The Science of Science" [originally published 1935], reprinted in Bohdan Walentynowicz, ed., Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, Dordrecht, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1982, pp. 82–95.Matthias Kölbel: Wissensmanagement in der Wissenschaft, Berlin: Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsforschung e.V. c/o Inst. f. Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2002, elektronische Bereitstellung 2011. Earlier, in 1923, the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki had made a similar proposal.Florian Znaniecki, "The Subject Matter and Tasks of the Science of Knowledge" (first published in the Polish journal Nauka Polska [Polish Learning, or Polish Science] in 1923 as "Przedmiot i zadania nauki o wiedzy"), English translation in Bohdan Walentynowicz, ed., Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, Dordrecht, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1982, pp. 1-81.
Fifty years before Znaniecki, in 1873, Aleksander Głowacki, better known in Poland by his pen name "Bolesław Prus", had delivered a public lecture – later published as a booklet – On Discoveries and Inventions, in which he said:
It is striking that, while early 20th-century sociologist proponents of a discipline to study science and its practitioners wrote in general theoretical terms, Prus had already half a century earlier described, with many specific examples, the scope and methods of such a discipline.
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) increased interest both in the history of science and in science's philosophical underpinnings. Kuhn posited that the history of science was less a linear succession of discoveries than a succession of paradigms within the philosophy of science. Paradigms are broader, socio-intellectual constructs that determine which types of truth claims are permissible.
Science studies seeks to identify key dichotomies – such as those between science and technology, nature and culture, theory and experiment, and science and fine art – leading to the differentiation of scientific fields and practices.
The sociology of scientific knowledge arose at the University of Edinburgh, where David Bloor and his colleagues developed what has been termed "the strong programme". It proposed that both "true" and "false" scientific theories should be treated the same way.David Bloor, "The strengths of the strong programme", Scientific Rationality: The Sociological Turn, Springer Netherlands, 1984, pp. 75-94. Both are informed by social factors such as cultural context and self-interest.Wiebe E. Bijker et al, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, MIT Press, 2012.
Human knowledge, abiding as it does within human cognition, is ineluctably influenced by social factors.Harry M. Collins, "Introduction: Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism", Social Studies of Science, 1981: 3-10, in JSTOR.
It proved difficult, however, to address natural-science topics with sociological methods, as was abundantly evidenced by the US science wars. Use of a deconstructive approach (as in relation to works on arts or religion) to the natural sciences risked endangering not only the "hard facts" of the natural sciences, but the objectivity and positivist tradition of sociology itself. The view on scientific knowledge production as a (at least partial) social construct was not easily accepted. Latour and others identified a dichotomy crucial for modernity, the division between nature (things, objects) as being transcendent, allowing to detect them, and society (the subject, the state) as immanent as being artificial, constructed. The dichotomy allowed for mass production of things (technical-natural hybrids) and large-scale global issues that endangered the distinction as such. E.g. We Have Never Been Modern asks to reconnect the social and natural worlds, returning to the pre-modern use of "thing"In premodern times (and various languages) the term both meant an object and an assembly—addressing objects as hybrids made and scrutinized by the public interaction of people, things, and concepts.
Science studies scholars such as Trevor Pinch and Steve Woolgar started already in the 1980s to involve "technology", and called their field "science, technology and society".An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies Sergio Sismondo John Wiley & Sons, 17.08.2011. This "turn to technology" brought science studies into communication with academics in science, technology, and society programs.
More recently, a novel approach known as mapping controversies has been gaining momentum among science studies practitioners, and was introduced as a course for students in engineering,MIT web.mit.edu Retrieved on 2009-02-21Ecoles Polytechniques Fédérales de Lausanne mappingcontroversies.epfl.ch Retrieved on 2009-02-21 and architecture schools.University of Manchester mappingcontroversies.co.uk Retrieved on 2009-02-16 In 2002 Harry Collins and Robert Evans asked for a third wave of science studies (a pun on The Third Wave), namely studies of expertise and experience answering to recent tendencies to dissolve the boundary between experts and the public.Social Studies of Science April 2002 vol. 32 no. 2 235-296 The Third Wave of Science Studies Studies of Expertise and Experience H.M. Collins and Robert Evans doi: 10.1177/0306312702032002003
Application to natural and man-made hazards
Sheepfarming after Chernobyl
A showcase of the rather complex problems of scientific information and its interaction with lay persons is Brian Wynne's study of Sheepfarming in Cumbria after the Chernobyl disaster.Wynne B (1989) Sheepfarming after Chernobyl: a case study in communicating scientific information. Environment 31(2):33–39. He elaborated on the responses of sheep farmers in Cumbria, who had been subjected to administrative restrictions because of radioactive contamination, allegedly caused by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986. The sheep farmers suffered economic losses, and their resistance against the imposed regulation was being deemed irrational and inadequate. It turned out that the source of radioactivity was actually the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing complex; thus, the experts who were responsible for the duration of the restrictions were completely mistaken. The example led to attempts to better involve local knowledge and lay-persons' experience and to assess its often highly geographically and historically defined background.
Science studies on volcanology
Donovan et al. (2012) used social studies of volcanology to investigate the generation of knowledge and expert advice on various active volcanoes.Amy Donovan, Clive Oppenheimer, Michael Bravo. Social studies of volcanology: knowledge generation and expert advice on active volcanoes. Bulletin of Volcanology, Springer Verlag (Germany), 2012, 74 (3), pp.677-689. doi:<10.1007/s00445-011-0547-z insu-00691620 It contains a survey of volcanologists carried out during 2008 and 2009 and interviews with scientists in the UK, Montserrat, Italy and Iceland during fieldwork seasons. Donovan et al. (2012) asked the experts about the felt purpose of volcanology and what they considered the most important eruptions in historical time. The survey tries to identify eruptions that had an influence on volcanology as a science and to assess the role of scientists in policymaking.