Woolgar et al A Turn to Ontology in STS? Page 1/10 A Turn to Ontology in STS? 1.2 Some notes by way of a preliminary provocation Steve Woolgar, Tarek Cheniti, Javier Lezaun, Daniel Neyland, Chris Sugden and Christian Toennesen Introduction 1, We observe a discernible increase in recent years of the use of the term “ontology” in STS literatures. What if anything does this signal? Can this be construed as a turn to ontology and what does this mean? Are there turns? Or are there a few people trying to attend to a theme, something to attend to? 2. Does an increasing use of the term ontology simply reflect a change in vocabulary? Is it different from “radical constructivist” perspectives? For example, did Woolgar’s (1991) injunction to find out how “the reality of the technology [is] itself created, described and sustained” foreshadow Mol’s (2002) focus on how “ontologies are brought into being, sustained or allowed to wither away” without actually mentioning the term? I'd say the Ontological Meandering was about the same thing too and actually it is all in Bachelard already...or in Ian Hacking for that matter. Charis, Thompson (in the Nineties, in her Cussins guise) called doctors practicing metaphysicians — which, i thought, was a great term — it is one that has not quite caught on. Is saying that processes and practices enact phenomena the same as saying they are constitutively social? Not at all the same! Enacted is a material practice as much as a social one; a technical achievement as much as an organisational one.. Are STSers by and large still pursuing the same agenda or does the emergence of “ontology” reflect a significant change of emphasis? My impression is that STSers by and large have not even noticed the emergence of ‘ontology in practice’, and still focus on meaning, interpretation, and other such knowledge/symbolic issues. The ontology crowd (working in a material semiotic line) is tiny. 3. Ashmore (2005) suggests that Annemane Mol's (2002) articulation of the ontological is very similar to STS concerns about how knowledge is created, maintained and destroyed. He suggests the difference between knowledge and ontologies is not clear, and asks if ontic practices can take place independently of epistemic practices. As you might expect, i disagree with Malcolm about this — and for me, it is crucial to try to decentre knowledge and its alleged importance. Take a surgeon cutting an artery: then and there he contributes to enacting atherosclerosis as an obstruction of an artery, not by thus knowing it, but by cutting the obstruction away, or by bypassing it. Is the original ontic/epistemic distinction, inherited from Anglophone philosophy, now in need of rethinking? Yes. But not so as to submit all ontics to epistemics — as in everything has a meaning. But quite differently so: epistemic relations are a small part of the various ways in which we interact with the worlds we live in. Operating is cutting, not knowing. And eating for instance is not quite knowing either.. but something else. 4, Some authors (eg Law, 1996) have made explicit the distinction between analysing science and technology at the level of ontology as opposed to (mere) epistemology. The argument being that STS approaches targeted on epistemology leaveWoolgar et al A Turn to Ontology in STS? Page 2/10 unchallenged certain base assumptions about the existence of phenomena, But in what ways and to what extent is ontology different from epistemology? Epistemology continues to take knowing as our most important way of relating to the rest of the world — and that is a way {o presume there is one world, variously known — while attending to ontologies — different ones — makes counting a lot more difficult, 5. What are the various ways in which “ontology” is being used by STSers and others? Is the use of the term now a normative feature of our disciplinary practice i do we risk exclusion if we do not pepper our analyses with terms such as “ontology “the material” and so on? I have not at all noticed this happening, have you? 6. At this point, can we all just pause a minute to reflect on the delightful irony in asking whether or not surface mentions of ontology actually relate to a real (underlying?) concerns about ontology? Good point of course. 7. Is the use of “ontology” Gust) a way of laying claim to a more radical, thoroughgoing, sceptical perspective? Is this the sense in which the adjective is used when promoting ideas such as ontological gerrymandering (Woolgar and Pawluch, 1985) and ontological disobedience (Woolgar, 2005)? Is it? For me it is not, a scepticism is about knowing — and my primary concern was not with the insecurity of all knowledge, but with the question which version of the world we come to inhabit — maybe this gets_more clear if i say that it comes partly out of a feminist concern with the question which version of ‘woman’ is enacted in the sciences — something that fairly immediately helps to shape how i am made/allowed to live — or not to live. (cf Hirschauer/Mol 1994) ‘What’ sina turn? 8. What's in a “turn”? Much of the history of STS could be construed as a history of turns eg through the pursuit of successive versions of symmetry; the tum to the material, Is the turn to ontology another such turn? Yes — why do you use this term turn? To draw attention? As said above, i have not seen a turn happening. 9, Javier wonders about the political economy of turns in STS. What is driving these turns? What is it that makes STS go through successive upheavals and changes of direction, such that what previously seemed radical now becomes tame (cf Pollner, 1991)? Is there some kind of prevailing ideology of innovation which forces the turn? Are we all just basically in love with some Kuhnian notion of “progress”? Are we? 10. Are people like Woolgar (2004) merely feeding this ideology of lost radicalism when they complain about the lack of provocation in (current) STS? Or is calling something a turn just an attempt to make it happen? A tickling strategy? 11, Can you imagine how awful it would be, say two years after this meeting, still to be stuck in the turn to ontology? But haven’t the next two ‘turns’ been happening without anyone noticing...? (Ah, the turn to care, of course....)Woolgar et al A Turn to Ontology in STS? Page 3/10 12, Recent work on mundane terror shows how ordinary objects in eg airport settings become transformed into objects requiring various apparatuses of regulation, monitoring and control (Woolgar and Neyland, forthcoming). Ordinary objects acquire an insecure ontology. A water bottle is transformed into a potential object of terror. The ontologies of ordinary objects turn out to be subject to a precise local choreography (cf Thompson, 2005). For example, when Dan and Steve travelled from Heathrow recently, they started by getting security cleared (and having various liquids confiscated in the process). Steve then purchased a terror free bottle of water in the departures lounge. But they managed to misread the signs (in the chaos of terminal 1) when walking to the departure gate and found themselves again the wrong (“dirty”) side of another security check. At this point the terror free bottle was transformed into an object of potential terror and promptly confiscated. Does this suggest that ontologies can become insecure in virtue of a particular local history of passage and spatial alignment? Yes and the ‘insecure’ and shifting ontology of the water bottle is a wonderful thing to describe. But also different from the multiplicity in the BM — there is one plastic entity in the middle, and as you have a potential time axis story there, taking a bottle along etc — welcome differences if you ask me; what more variants can we make? (cf the wonderful story of Tiago Moreira of the way in which blood pressure is enacted variously (a) by surgeon and anesthetist (b) in the course of an operation they are jointly engaged in.) 13, Much of the focus of recent attention is upon the ontology of technical things and objects. But why wouldn’t we also want to include other entities: for example and “natural” things? Biodiversity is one of those interesting areas where “nature” has come to prominence. The existence of this “nature” needs to be preserved through the elaborate use of numbers and registers. Christian is looking at how “Pacific Gray Whales” come to life in a vast jungle of standards, policies and political struggles, yet they do not speak for themselves (or maybe they do) and very few people have ever seen one. An ontology thus develops whereby whales, along with Indigeous Peoples, Steller’s sea eagle, and rare salmon, exist only in relation to extractive operations and not much else. It is said that that hearing damage could occur if a whale is exposed to sounds louder than 180 dB re 1 uPa, that ships over 80m in length, especially if travelling at 12-13 knots or more, cause most severe or lethal injuries in case of a collision, and so on, and so on. (“Of course, all this information is heavily contested, so please do not take my word for it.”) So what comes into being here — a whale? Or information? A whale in and as a part of information? Or a whale in changed fishing practices or boat engineering? Or something else yet again? 14, Jasanoff (2005) argues that policy choices are based on two main ontologies: biotechnology as a certain and manageable technology on the one hand, and biotechnology as an unknown and risky technology on the other. She demonstrates, that those two ontologies are expressed differently according to the political culture of each country, thus informing different policy responses. But what is gained by describing these different perspectives and interpretations of biotechnology as ontologies? Interesting question, as perspectives and interpretations are indeed — something else (i.e. not ontology). If you'd ask me 15, Things, objects, people, arguments, disciplines, nature, these are all some of the vast legion of entities whose ontology might fruitfully be understood as implyingWoolgar et al A Turn to Ontology in STS? Page 4/10 various courses of action, policy and governance. What is the relative strength of these entities? Are objects more robust, more effective than, for example, STS accounts? (Marres, 2008). Where? Which objects? (Cf the Virgin Mary may not do as well in a policy meeting in Brussels than a report by Arie Rip, but this is different in Lourdes.) 16, As is well known, actor network approaches challenge the idea that humans and non humans are distinct entities with specific properties. For our purposes is this the same as saying that ontologies are relational? Latour (2004) argues, for example, that the very existence of a gap between subjects and objects is an erroneous assumption which is deeply political. Interestingly, Bruno seems to skip the fact that ‘the subject” is made in two ways in the westem tradition: once as a ‘subject of knowledge’ and once as a ‘subject that is an object of knowledge’. In discussions about medicine, there is a lot of attention for this double position of the subject of knowledge and the subject known. Somehow i think that decentring knowledge as a practice is again a ‘good move to make to get rid of the issues haunting us here. The very distinction is a politically constituted ontology. Law (2004) talks of “ontological interference realities are [not only] being done, but are also complex, non-coherent, uncertain and in interference with one another” 17, As these examples suggest, changes in ontology are both consequential for, and expressive of, changes in accountability relations. What does this mean for the age old problem of the relation between “is” and “ought”? Despite David Hume's misgivings, the enactment of a particular ontology does seem to have consequences for action, behaviour and policy. Is this always the case? Does ontological enactment inevitably have implications for more or less preferred courses of action? This is the kind of question that calls for studies that not just focus on how reality is being done, but, in addition, also of how the good is being done — variously, and linked up with various versions of reality, but in non-linear ways. Boltanski and Thévenot have worked on this in a somewhat different mode for a long time, And with a few dutch friends this is what we do in our studies of care practices. Philosophical and STS versions of ontology 18. Chris reports his (initially perplexing) experience of moving from the philosophical notion of ontology as an analytic object, or field of study, to the STSish idea that people, things and other entities can “have” ontologies. It seemed odd that persons or things might be said to “have” ontologies, in the same counterintuitive sense that it might be possible for there to be a people’s physics. What then are the key differences between philosophical and STS construals of ontology? Well, this perplexity was (is!) exactly what we try to produce, isn't it? The westem philosophical tradition has it that ontology precedes everything else, and thus to locate it inside practices (robbing it of its universal and unified character in the process) is, the interference with philosophy that is sought (that, speaking for myself, i seek). (Next to that of messing up the neat divide between ontology and epistemology!) 19, Some typical (but doubtless caricatured) questions which philosophy might ask include: What is the point of doing ontology? (of doing it or of studying it?) What is social ontology? (What is this term? Social? Social ontology? What does it mean?) Are ontologies indispensable? (who might want to dispense here and of what?) WhatWoolgar et al A Turn to Ontology in STS? Page 5/10 are the criteria for a good ontology? (in studying the good and modes of doing good setting criteria obviously emerges as a specific and only very locally desirable mode of doing good.) Is social ontology an academic specialty? (Schatzki, 2008). 20. Some typical (but doubtless caricature) responses from STS might include: How can we even begin to ask what *is* social ontology? Is this not presuming a basis for existence (in this case, of social ontology) when we would want instead to document how such bases are claimed, contested and sustained? How can ontologies be either ‘good or bad? Well as part of practices they are constantly made to be good or bad, ‘good and bad, contested, etc. Are such assessments in the gift of we analysts? Should we instead be asking: What is the communal/conventional basis whereby such assessments are made and made to stick?? There is no basis: complex practices, there, 100. And the analyst is not outside them. 21. Are the differences also something like this? That when philosophy talks about ontology it aspires to the level of the general, transcendent, context indifferent? But when STS talks about ontology it emphasises the local, contingent, particular and specific? Indeed — and that is to confuse and change philosophy, see above. 22. Lynch (2006) reminds us that one of the strengths of STS is its capacity to deflate high minded, lofty, abstract concepts, for example, to show that cognition is material practice, that mathematics is number work; that logic is messy and contingent. Is then the very idea of ontology a prime candidate for deflation at the hands of STS? What is ontology in practice? To say that ontology might be in practice, is precisely a way of deflating an abstract concept, that is ontology as philosophers had it, for that had nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with practice — the move is quite analogous to saying that cognition is material. 23. What is added by speaking of social ontology or relational ontology, rather than just ontology? Relational ontology captures the view that the essence and existence of entities are best understood as the temporary upshot of interconnecting relations. But is there a danger that the former epithetised formulations imply the possibility of an ontology free from the social or the relational? Where are these terms used and to do what and when to move them, then? They seem yet again ways in which the analysts is the one ‘having’ an ontology (social, relational) rather than ontologies emerging/existing in practices. 24. On the other hand is an advantage of the term “social ontology” that it suggests, not simply that ontology “involves the social” (that is, various contingent “social” circumstances are involved in ontological enactment), but also that what counts as social is itself the upshot of enactment. Now there’s one that deserves a lot more work! 25. It is tempting to fashion a long list of differences between different disciplinary approaches. But we would rather not return to the kind of turf wars argument that characterised early STS debates between objectivist philosophy and the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Indeed, it is unclear, since they are so local, contingent, specific, that such categorisations are very helpful.Woolgar et al A Turn to Ontology in STS? Page 6/10 Marres’ (2004) characterises Mol's (2002) project as aiming to “articulate an ontology — one which posits the multiplicity of reality”. She does this, says Marres, by “transforming the ethnography of techno-science into @ philosophical practice.” Well, as itis, i disagree with Marres on this, as she attributes and ontology to me, or to the BM-author me, while the attempt of that project was to shift the doing of ontologies from ‘me’ (the study, philosophy, the analyst) to the practices that formed my object, of research, hospital practices. Now there is of course such a thing as (my) research practice (and its ontologies), too, but it makes things confusing to want to articulate that at the same time. What is gained there? I know what is lost: the ability to indeed localise ontologies in practices: instead of presuming them to precede or otherwise reside outside. How much is to be gained by pursuing a philosophy which “tums sociological questions into ontological ones”? Which questions are sociological to then be tured into ontological questions? Instead, what happens is a shift from the question how do people know disease, into how do they/we live with it. Ambivalence, plurality, multiplicity, fluidity and deferral 27. The post essentialist agenda has been supplemented by ideas about ambivalence (eg Singleton and Michael, 1993; Law, 1997) - which stresses the contention that the impact, use and interpretation of entities is never certain nor fixed; plurality (Stirling, 2008) — the idea that different objects and interpretations can exist side by side; multiplicity (eg Mol 2002; de Laet and Mol, 2000; Quattrone and Hopper, 2001; ‘Thompson, 2005) - that objects and claims simultaneously exist in many different guises; and deferral (eg Rappert, 2001; Lee, 1999) - that the impact, use and interpretation of entities is delayed and/or dispersed through organisational networks, often with the effect of dissipating accountability. What is the connection between these? Ah, to add a question, and what are the differences? 28. They can all be seen as a form of relational ontology. But in the case of multiplicity in particular, what are the entities multiples of? Fluidity and multiplicity are different enactments of the same thing, but what exactly is this thing? See 30. 29. A similar question arises in relation to fluidity. Certain technologies are more fluid than others (iconically, the Zimbabwe bush pump, de Laet and Mol, 2000), but how and where is the property of fluidity instantiated? Proponents of the fluidity argument would presumably not want to claim that fluidity is an inherent (essential?) property of the technology? So can anything in principle become fluid? Ask this question to physics: if you make matter hot enough... 30. Are certain entities (eg in Mol’s case, bodies) more multiple than others? Or can anything become multiple? Why would fluidity and multiplicity be an attribute of characteristic of objects? Doesn't it make more sense to wonder in which kinds of practices they may or may not emerge and/or continue to be? E.g. in research practices there is a reward on making objects singular, as everyone tries to do them with similar materials and methods, so to speak, and then write about them; while in hospital practices the ‘same’ objects (again blood platelets; atherosclerosis etc.) are far more easily multiple, as these practices are so dispersed and there is a premium on ‘helping’ not on ‘truth’. Mol’s answer to parts of this question specify the important role of co-ordination work. Atherosclerosis in the laboratory is different from atherosclerosis in the doctor's surgery, yet they are made to be multipleWoolgar et al A Turn to Ontology in STS? Page 7/10 manifestations of the same thing in virtue of the coordinating work which is done by the participants involved. In other words, the relation of multiplicity to its common “it” is the upshot of constant achievement (accomplishment, construction, fabrication) on the part of the actors in situ. 31. But how much coordination work is being done by the STS actor (viz Annemarie)?! Well, in the hospital it is harder work to un-coordinate and take apart what everyone takes to be singular — as there is a ‘belief’ at work there that is different from the sts story about disease and body being multiple. Conclusion 32. So what is the answer? (The answer?!) Shouldn’t answers be linked with what we do sts for? Like: first it was maybe undermining the arrogance of the natural scientists (being sceptical helps there). And/but in the BM case: it is making more space for ~ to put it very flat — walking therapy and other clinical realities in a world where these get squeezed by numerical and laboratory versions of what a disease is (angiography and operations). The issue is thus: what it is to have disease? How may we live with it, in which various ways? (A question that ‘cannot’ be asked if ontology is left as something beforeloutside practices, and if philosophy’s universalist tradition is respected.) So, I would ask: what is the fun and/or political and intellectual strength of multiplying the water bottle? And what else is there for us to do? 33. Consistent with (parts of) the STS agenda, are we forced to conclude that the tur to ontology is itself real and significant to the extent that it is enacted? Of course. What are the ontologies involved and how is this workshop helping to create them? But not just ontologies are involved: so are goods — fears — hopes — what not? References Ashmore, Malcolm (2005) ‘Book Review: The Life Inside/The Left-Hand Side’, Social Studies of Science 35(5). Berg, Marc (1998) ‘The Politics of Technology: On Bringing Social Theory into ‘Technological Design’, Science, Technology, & Human Values 23(4). 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