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Features
If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it?
Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of
knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to
science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation
has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists,
philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask
fundamental questions about how the institution of science is
structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study.
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Episode 1 - Simon Schaffer
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 1
(runs: 52:22)
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Leviathan and The Air Pump published by Princeton University Press, 1985. |
In
1985 a book appeared that changed the way people thought about the
history of science. Until that time, the history of science had usually
meant biographies of scientists, or studies of the social contexts in
which scientific discoveries were made. Scientific ideas were
discussed, but the procedures and axioms of science itself were not in
question. This changed with the publication of Leviathan and the Air Pump, subtitled Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life,
the book’s avowed purpose was – “to break down the aura of
self-evidence surrounding the experimental way of producing knowledge.â€
This was a work, in other words, that wanted to treat something obvious
and taken for granted – that matters of fact are ascertained by
experiment – as if it were not at all obvious; that wanted to ask, how
is it actually done and how do people come to agree that it has truly
been done.
The authors of this pathbreaking book were two young historians, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer,
and both have gone on to distinguished careers in the field they helped
to define, science studies. Steven Shapin will be featured later in
this series, but How to Think About Science begins with a conversation with Simon Schaffer. David Cayley called on him recently in his office at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at Cambridge where he teaches.
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Episode 2 - Lorraine Daston
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 2
(runs: 51:56)
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Lorraine Daston |
The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
occupies an elegant and airy new building in a leafy suburb of Berlin.
It houses approximately a hundred scholars whose research extends from
medieval cosmology to the role of experiment in 19th century German
gardening to the ways in which medical technology has reshaped the
contemporary boundary between life and death. The director is American Lorraine Daston.
David Cayley
interviewed her recently in her office at the institute, and told him
that there was a time when she would not even have dreamed of a hundred
historians of science under one roof. When she was a graduate student
at Harvard in the 70’s, she says, the history of science was more a
collection of strays from other disciplines than it was a discipline in
itself. But a crucial challenge had been issued. In 1962
philosopher/historian Thomas Kuhn had published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
the book that suddenly put the previously unusual word paradigm on
everybody’s lips. Kuhn rejected the assumption of a continuous linear
progress in science. And thereby, Lorraine Daston says, he framed the
question with which her generation grew up, how to write the history of
science as something other than a triumphant progress to a foregone
conclusion.
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Episode 3 - Margaret Lock
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 3
(runs: 51:47)
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Anthropologist Margaret Lock |
In 1993 medical anthropologist Margaret Lock published Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America.
The book explores dramatic differences in the way women experience
menopause in each place. Such variation is usually taken as purely
cultural, but, in her book, Margaret Lock makes a surprising
suggestion. She proposes that there are biological differences between
Japanese and North American women. Culture doesn’t just interpret
biology, she says, it also shapes it. Margaret Lock is a professor in
the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill. In this episode
you'll hear her current reflections on what she calls “local biologiesâ€
later in the hour. David Cayley begins his conversation with a discussion of another pathbreaking book of hers called Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death.
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Episode 4 - Ian Hacking & Andrew Pickering
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 4
(runs: 52:25)
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Ian Hacking |
Philosophers
of science tended, until quite recently, to treat science as a mainly
theoretical activity. Experiment - science’s actual, often messy
encounter with the world - was viewed as something secondary, a mere
hand-servant to theory. Popular understanding followed suit. Theories
were what counted: one spoke of the theory of evolution, the theory of
relativity, the Copernican theory and so on. It was as thinkers and
seers that the great scientists were lionized and glorified. But this
attitude has recently begun to change. A new generation of historians
and philosophers have made the practical, inventive side of science
their focus. They’ve pointed out that science doesn’t just think about
the world, it makes the world and then remakes it. Science, for them,
really is what the thinkers of the 17th century first called it:
experimental philosophy. In this episode we hear from two of the
scholars who’ve been influential in advancing this changed view: first Ian Hacking, widely regarded as Canada’s pre-eminent philosopher of science, and later in the hour Andrew Pickering, author of The Mangle of Practice. |
Episode 5 - Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 5
(runs: 52:05)
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Ulrich Beck |
Few people ever apply a name that sticks to an entire social order, but sociologist Ulrich Beck is one of them. In 1986 in Germany he published Risk Society, and the name has become a touchstone in contemporary sociology. Among the attributes of Risk Society
is the one he just mentioned: science has become so powerful that it
can neither predict nor control its effects. It generates risks too
vast to calculate. In the era of nuclear fission, genetic engineering
and a changing climate, society itself has become a scientific
laboratory. In this episode 5 Ulrich Beck talks about the place of
science in a risk society. Later in the hour you’ll hear from another
equally influential European thinker, Bruno Latour, the author of We Have Never Been Modern. He will argue that our very future depends on overcoming a false dichotomy between nature and culture. |
Episode 6 - James Lovelock
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 6
(runs: 52:05)
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James Lovelock |
Forty-years ago British scientist James Lovelock put
forward the first elements of what he would come to call the Gaia
theory. Named for the ancient Greek goddess of the earth, it held that
the earth as a whole functions as a self-regulating system. At first
many biologists scoffed. Today, Lovelock’s ideas are more widely
accepted, even in circles where he was initially scorned. But even as
he has been winning scientific honours, James Lovelock has been growing more pessimistic about the prospects for contemporary civilization.
In this episode David Cayley presents a profile of James Lovelock. It tells the story of a career in science that began a long time ago. |
Episode 7 - Arthur Zajonc
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 7
(runs: 52:29)
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Arthur Zajonc |
One of Arthur Zajonc's inspirations is the great German poet Goethe.
Goethe died nearly two centuries ago. Arthur Zajonc works at the
cutting edge of contemporary quantum physics. But it is the old poet,
Zajonc thinks, who can best show us how we ought to contemplate the
puzzling discoveries of modern physics. In this episode, physicist Arthur Zajonc talks to David Cayley
about Goethe’s way of knowing, about the philosophical challenge of
contemporary physics, and about the role of contemplation in science.
And since his name so closely resembles the name of his subject, you
also hear many unintentional rhymes as Zajonc discusses science.
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Episode 8 - Wendell Berry
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 8
(runs: 52:21)
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Published by Counterpoint. |
Wendell Berry
is known to the reading public mainly for his poems, essays and novels,
not his commentaries on science. But in the year 2,000 he published a
surprising book called Life Is A Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition.
The superstition the book denounces is the belief that science will one
day give us a complete account of things. Science is admirable, Wendell
Berry says, but it can only be deployed wisely when we recognize the
limits to our knowledge. Science must submit to the judgement of
Nature. In this episode, Wendell Berry unfolds this philosophy to Ideas producer David Cayley. |
Episode 9 - Rupert Sheldrake
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 9
(runs: 52:12)
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Biologist Rupert Sheldrake |
Into 1981 British biologist Rupert Sheldrake published A New Science of Life.
The book argued that genes alone were not enough to account for life’s
intricate patterns of form and behaviour. There must be, Sheldrake
suggested, some sort of form-giving field that holds the memory of each
thing’s proper shape – he called it a morphogenetic field. This
intriguing idea was widely discussed in the months after the book’s
publication. Then the editor of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, Sir John Maddox,
wrote an editorial in which violently denounced Sheldrake’s work and
called it “the best candidate for burning there has been for many
years.†Years later in an interview with the BBC, he defended his
denunciation on the grounds that Sheldrake’s view was scientific
“heresy.†Maddox’s attack stuck Sheldrake a reputation for flakiness
that still lingers. A few years ago Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg
was still referring to the theory as “a crackpot fantasy.†But, for
Rupert Sheldrake, this zealous policing of the boundaries of science
only proved that scientific materialism had hardened into a rigid and
inhibiting dogmatism. He carried on with the research programme he had
put forward in A New Science of Life. Today on Ideas he shares the story of his journey with Ideas producer David Cayley.
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Episode 10 - Brian Wynne
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 10
(runs: 52:33)
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Misunderstanding science? Edited by Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne, published by Cambridge University Press, 2004. |
Technological science exerts a pervasive influence on contemporary
life. It determines much of what we do, and almost all of how we do it.
Yet science and technology lie almost completely outside the realm of
political decision. No electorate ever voted to split atoms or splice
genes; no legislature ever authorized the iPod or the internet. Our
civilization, consequently, is caught in a profound paradox: we glorify
freedom and choice, but submit to the transformation of our culture by
technoscience as a virtual fate. In this episode we explore the
relations between politics and scientific knowledge. David Cayley talks to Brian Wynne
of the University of Lancaster in the north of England. He’s the
associate director of an institute that studies the social and economic
aspects of genetic technologies, and one of Britain’s best-known
writers and researchers on the interplay of science and society. |
Episode 11 - Sajay Samuel
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 11
(runs: 52:28)
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Nicolai Copernici Torinensis De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Libri VI - On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, by Nicolaus Copernicus of Torin, Six Books (title page of 2nd edition, ex officina Henricpetrina Basel, 1566). |
In 1543 Nicolai Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the book that displaced the earth from the centre of the cosmos. Ninety years later, in his Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems, Galileo Galilei praised the achievement of his predecessor. Copernicus, he said, had made reason conquer sense.
Today
it is a commonplace that science requires us to renounce the evidence
of our senses if we are to understand the true nature of things. The
truth lies behind or beneath the appearances. This loss of the senses
has fateful consequences, according to Sajay Samuel,
a professor at the Pennsylvania State University. Without common sense,
he says, science fills ours entire horizon - leaving us no place to
stand outside of science, and no basis on which to judge what science
produces. Sajay Samuel shares his reflections on science and sense with David Cayley. |
Episode 12 - David Abram
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 12
(runs: 52:20)
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The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram. Published by Vintage, 1997. |
From
time to time, researchers test the public’s understanding of science.
The public, predictably, turns out to be woefully ignorant: 20% think
the moon is made of green cheese, 30% think an electron is bigger than
a molecule and so forth. But, for David Abram, this
demonstrably shaky grasp on the details misses the point. He thinks we
are conditioned by scientific understandings at a much deeper level,
and that the main effect of this conditioning is to make us distrust
our senses. For citizens of the republic of techno-science, he says,
the real world is not the one we can touch and taste – it is the one
that is disclosed by particle physics or radio astronomy. David Abram is a teacher and a writer, whose book The Spell of the Sensuous
has been widely read and much praised. He believes that we ought to
snap out of our technological trance and, literally, come to our
senses. He shares his thoughts with Ideas producer David Cayley.
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Episode 13 - Dean Bavington
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 13
(runs: 52:53)
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Codfish Newfoundland postage stamp. |
On July 3, 1992 Fisheries Minister John Crosbie announced
a moratorium on the fishing of northern cod. It was the largest single
day lay-off in Canadian history: 30,000 people unemployed at a stroke.
The ban was expected to last for two years, after which, it was hoped,
the fishery could resume. But the cod have never recovered, and more
than 15 years later the moratorium remains in effect. How could a
fishery that had been for years under apparently careful scientific
management just collapse?
David Cayley talks to environmental philosopher
Dean Bavington about the role of science in the rise and fall of the cod fishery.
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Episode 14 - Evelyn Fox Keller
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 14
(runs: 54:00)
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Evelyn Fox Keller |
Science, according to its first practitioners, was a masculine pursuit. Francis Bacon
writing in the early 17th century invited “the sons of knowledge†to
pass through “the outer courts of nature†and on into “her inner
chambers.†Science was male, nature female. And, according to Evelyn Fox Keller,
this was no mere figure of speech – it had a shaping influence through
the centuries on how science was imagined and how it was done. Evelyn Fox
is emeritus professor of the philosophy and history of science at MIT,
and a keen observer of the ways in which models and metaphors condition
our understandings. In recent years she has been particular critical of
the ways in which simplistic models of the all-powerful gene mislead
public understanding of genetics and developmental biology. And her
proposal with regard to what she calls “gene talk†is the same one she
made in her pioneering Reflections on Gender and Science in the 1980’s: “change the terms of the discussion.†Evelyn Fox Keller
shares some of her story and some of her thoughts on how gender,
language, model and metaphor have coloured the practice of science.
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Episode 15 - Barbara Duden & Silya Samerski
Listen to How To Think About Science - Episode 15
(runs: 54:00)
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Disembodying Women, by Barbara Duden. Published by Harvard Univeristy Press, 1993. |
When Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen coined
the term gene, in the early years of the 20th century, he described it
as “a very applicable little word.†And so it has turned out. Once a
purely scientific and technical term, it has now spread into common,
daily use. People speak familiarly of “my genes†or “your genesâ€,
newspapers report the latest “gene find,†and an American company - 23 and Me
- now offers anyone with a thousand dollars and a saliva sample the
chance to have their genome mapped. Under the slogan “Genetics Just Got
Personal,†the company’s website invites browsers to find out
“what…your genes say about you.†But what happens when a scientific
term migrates from the laboratory to the street in this way. What does
the word gene signify in everyday speech? The question is posed by two
German scholars: Barbara Duden and Silya Samerski. For several years they’ve been pondering what they call the pop-gene, the gene in popular culture. |
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