SCIENCE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION by John Ziman

Let us endeavour to see things as they are, and then enquire whether we ought to complain. Whether to see life as it is will give us much consolation, I know not; but the consolation which is drawn from truth, if any there be is solid and durable; that which may be derived from error, must be, like its original, fallacious and fugitive. Samuel Johnson

Natural science is transforming human society. In assessing the changes that science produces, we come to question the sources of its power. We have begun to doubt many opinions that were long taken for granted: that all science is good science; that scientific research is away of personal purification; that support of science by the state is enlightened self-interest. Opponents of Science, whose voices had long been muffled, have begun to say things that we thought would never be listened to again: that scientists are selfish, irresponsible and arrogant; that scientific knowledge is grossly misused; that mankind already knows too much for its own good. This book is not a sermon on these moral issues. Each of us, as a responsible citizen of the world, must find his own answers to such controversial questions. But to think constructively about these matters, it is necessary to know a little bit about the nature of science as a human activity. It is not sufficient to understand the discoveries that scientists have made about the world; we must also learn to see scientific research as an integral part of modern way of life. Rational debate on the political and moral issues concerning science and its place in society should be staged against some backcloth of facts and agreed principles..The aim of this book is to sketch out a background for such debates. The trouble is (if I may say so) that the whole subject is much more complicated than many people realize. All too often, sweeping statements are made about the relationship of science to technology, or the proper machinery for the planning of research, or the wickedness of scientists when they do war research, without any regard to quite familiar facts that would contradict

-----------*REPRINTED FROM: John Ziman, The Force of Knowledge: Scientific Dimensions of Society (Cambridge Univ. Press: Cambridge, 1976) Chapter 1, pp. 1-7. the whole argument. Various grand ideological schemes are putforward; a smoke screen of empty abstractions hides their failure to explain reality. Intellectuals of all parties ask for a deeper analysis of the relationship between science and society without having explored and mapped out the surface of the subject. They tell us what should be done now, and what will happen next, without having looked at what really happened in the past, and where we now stand.

It is just not possible to gather together all the different current opinions on these topics, and to discuss their pros and cons. Nor can one set out a complete catalogue of the appropriate facts, from history, from philosophy, from politics, from economics, from sociology or from psychology; nobody is made wise by reading an encyclopaedia. I propose therefore to take take up some of the significant themes that arise in these debates, and to illustrate them by reference to episodes chosen from history and from contemporary life. In each case I want to show the sort of evidence that might be used for, or against, a particular interpretation or general principle. In the spirit of natural science itself, I believe that one should try to aquire an overall impression of the relevant facts before trying to fit them into a theory. The main effort has been to make every example as concrete as possible. Scientific knowoledge, in its purest and most sublime form, is so much a product of the mind that we tend to ignore the body within which that mind must live. It is, of course, impossible for me to correct my own ideological prejudices in presenting this subject, but the deliberate bias has been sociological rather than philosophical. Scientific research should be observed as a daily task of particular people with a place in society; it should be seen as the organized labour of groups of people banded together in social institutions such as universities and research laboratories, managing one another, paying one another salaries, and using expensive technical equipment. To emphasize the concreteness and reality of this way of life, the text is illustrated profusely with drawings, portraiys, photographs, cartoons, graphs and tables of numbers - 'corroborative detail intended to lend an air of verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative'. As much can be learnt from these illustrations as from the text in which they are embedded. THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN SOCIETY The map of the intellectual world is learnt by most science students looks rather like Fig. 1.1. The history of science over many centuries, is represented as a continuous expansion at the expense of religion, philosophy and the humanities, which are left to scratch a meagre living in a few barren corners. Some parts of these disciplines have begun to masquerade as `social sciences', but they are only allowed this title when they speak in the language of formal theory and mathematical symbolism. This naive and arrogant interpretation of the place of science in society will not survive a serious study of the facts. In fig 1.2 I have tried to indicate the complexity of the relationship between science and other human activities. In a general way science is taken to mean `The Art of Knowing'. It is almost the same thing as research, which means the accumulation of knowledge by systematic observation, deliberate experiment and rational theory. But this activity is closely connected with the practical arts or techniques on the one hand, and with the spiritual sphere or religion on the other. These in turn link with one another in the material culture of Society, where they minister to individual human needs for food, health and psychological satisfaction. But there are no sharp divisions between these different aspects of the human condition; each activity overlaps and merges with its neighbours. We all know the practical difficulty of drawing a line between science and technology--the `Art of Knowing How' applied to an actual technique such as mechanical engineering or agriculture. How

do we make a further distinction between the technique itself, and the technology that guides it? What is the subtle relationship between a technology such as medical science and the practice of the technique by experts such as physicians and surgeons? It is more correct to describe medicine as both a technique and a science - to say that it is has theoretical, experimental, observational and practical aspects - than to force it into one of other of these boxes for the sake of mental tidiness. Rather than cluttering up the argument with pedantic definitions, let us aloow the territories governed by each of these terms to shade into one another and overlap without formal boundaries. On the other side of the picture, science and religion are shown merging in an area that is also occupied by philisophy, which draws especially heavily on theory - the special art of `Knowing Why'. Here we make contact with the spiritual needs of men, such as are ministered to by religion, which is closely connected in its turn with the social organization that is required to provide for our material needs. To lend a little more reality to our own map, it should be closed on itdelf, as if it were drawn on a cylinder or a globe. We need to bring material culture into contact with science, through educcation, economics and sociology. The latter belongs neither to technology nor to philosophy but bravely attempts, by observation and theory, to consolidate a body of knowledge concerning culture, religion and technique. Is sociology a genuine science? This is not merely a matter of definition or prejudice; claims to expertise, authority and power are at stake. Perhaps the ambiguity of the placing of these disciplines on our diagram is a fair indication of the uncertainty about where they really belong in the intellectual world. Observe, at the very centre of our diagram, the most antihuman of human activities - war. Notice that it interacts with all other aspects of social life. I do not mean by this representation to give war the central place in modern society; but it has played, and continues to play, such an important part in the development of science and technique that it must not be banished to a distant corner of our minds, to be conveniently forgotten. Un-warlike science is almost as dated as un-scientific war, in our wicked world. But this scheme is only an idle doodle, not meant to be taken literally. there are many other ways of analysing our subject. We talk about the traditional hierarachy of the sciences, from the abstract mathematical properties of elementary particles, through atoms, molecules, cells and organisms, to the political behaviour of nations. We could make a political analysis, distinguishing carefully (and unfavourably) science under capitalism from science under socialism, and noting especially the injustices suffered by colonial nations under imperialist domination. It is sometimes convenient to see science as a point of balance along three dimensions of existence - the intellectual, the personal and the social - all in tension with one another (Fig. 1.3). This diagram help us to understand the complex relationship between the individual scientist and the scientific community. 'Scientific authority', for example, may be intellectual power acquired by research or it may be social standing as a recognized leader of the scientific community. The issues that may be depicted on this diagram are the special concern of the discipline now called the sociology of science, although obviously this is only a small portion of the whole subject. In all human affairs, however, there is a single dominant variable time. To make sense of the present state of science, we need to know how it got like that: we cannot

avoid an historical account. In the languages of physics, to extrapolate into the future we must look backwards a little into the past, so as to estimate the time derivatives of our functions. In the languages of biology, there must be an embryology of science, explaining form through growth and growth through form. But the detailed history of science is very subtle - and often very misleading. The deeper pry, the less we see of pattern or principle. The further back we go, the more uncertain the facts, and the more ingenious their interpretation. It is a subject for the academic mind, giving more pleasure to the writer or lecturer than to the reader or student. In the first half of the book, we look back over the past, often for many centuries, choosing familiar and characteristics episodes to illustrate each in some of its features, such as the system of formal communication, science has scarcely changed since the seventeenth century, in other aspects, such as scale and internal organization, it has become entirely different within a lifetime. The proper contribution of history to sociology is to stablish the time scales of change, and the variability of the circumstances in which social institutions may survive. But these snippests of history are no substitute for a general knowledge of the actual development of the various sciences, such as may be obtained by any serious student, over a period of a few years, by systematic and miscellaneous reading. The example are not important in themeselves; they merely suggest what one could be looking for in such reading. In the later chapters, we shall concentrate on the present century on the past few decades, and on the present day, where (alas) it is our own fate to live. This material is not so readily available in academically digested gobbets, but one only has to look around inside laboratories, in the newspapers, and in a few specialized journals, to find plenty more evidence of the various phenoment to which reference will be made. To the sharp- minded student one may also recommend the practice ofreading some of the more doctrinaire books on the theme of 'Science and Society' and seeking counter-example to the generalizations that are confidently propounded by their authors. Surprisingly, in a book with a sociological emphasis, much of the text deals with particular individuals. This is not because I believe that science is the activity of an elite, but because until very recently research was actually done by people working pretty much on their own, claiming personal rewards for their discoveries and exercising independent judgement on the problems to be tackled. It is precisely the transformation from this 'cottage industry/village market' system to the contemporary ' factory production/planned ecomony' style that is the main theme of this book.