A rchive Date
[ 15-06-2000 ]
Category
[ Sociology ]
sub-Categoy
[ Cultures ]
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The Social Construction of What?
by Ian Hacking.
Harvard University Press, 1999
One has been aware for some time of Ian Hacking as a philosopher with an idiosyncratic and rather appealing style, but without quite getting him into focus. The present book, which draws on various earlier writings, gives one the opportunity to get to know him better. Judging from it, his idea of the philosopher's enterprise is, rather markedly, not "the quest of the absolute." He thinks the duty of the philosopher is to be helpful—helpful, that is to say, to ordinary people, among whom he counts himself.
Indeed he goes fairly far along that line and likes to measure his own personal "score" in regard to certain vexed questions—for instance the claims of "nominalism" versus those of "realism" - tending usually to come out somewhere in the middle. He is a nominalist part of the time, but not all the time, and ditto with relativism.
He is also a notably tender-hearted philosopher. He often has occasion to talk about our current "science wars" and "culture wars" and almost always in terms of distress. According to him, they "plague" contemporary intellectual life; they are fueled by a "profound malaise" of which he is "an unhappy witness...saddened by what it does." It is the metaphor of "wars" that he does not like. He writes: "These conflicts are serious. They invite heartfelt emotions. Nevertheless I doubt that the terms 'culture wars,' 'science wars' (and now 'Freud wars') would have caught on if they did not suggest gladiatorial sport. It is the bemused spectators who talk about the 'wars.' The metaphor betrays us into an insensibility towards the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars are."
Actually, I am not sure one need go along with Hacking all the way about this. There is a lot to be said against—shall we say—the "Freud wars." Much silliness and posturing gets into them, and, what is worse, they can encourage obsession in the protagonists. Toppling an idol is not a healthy occupation for a whole lifetime. But that said, there is quite a bit going for these "wars" as a spectator sport. Hacking does not mention the current "Darwin wars"; and I doubt whether simply reading about the "Darwin wars" has ever made anyone unhappy, or whether it has proved them to be sick people, suffering from a "malaise."
But these "wars" are not the central subject of Hacking's book. This is, rather, the expression "the social contruction of..." He believes that the very first book to have "social construction" in the title was The Social Construction of Reality (1966), by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. But after Berger and Luckmann the deluge. "What a lot of things are said to be socially constructed!" he remarks mildly; and he begins his book with an alphabet of them, drawn from a library catalogue. It runs fom "Authorship," "Brotherhood," "The Child viewer of television," via "Emotions," "Quarks" and "Serial homicide," to "Women refugees," "Youth homelessness" and "Zulu nationalism."
Simply as a phrase, "social construction" has become a vogue, a tic, a pest, and Hacking is frank about not really liking it. On the other hand, he says, it will not go away, nor are all its implications nonsense. It is at least very helpful to certain people, who find it liberating. The proposition that motherhood and its meanings are "socially constructed" and not the fixed and inevitable consequences of childbearing and rearing means that mothers "do not have to feel quite as guilty as they are supposed to, if they do not obey either the old rules of family or whatever is the official psycho-pediatric rule of the day, such as, 'you must bond with your infant, or you both will perish.'" On the other hand, he thinks that those who find "social construction" talk liberating were probably on the way to liberation anyway.
He indeed sees much wrong in the expression itself; for, as he very sensibly says, "Most items said to be socially constructed could be constructed only socially, if they are constructed at all." Thus, at least in their case, the term "social" is tautologous. ("If lesbianism is constructed, how other than socially?") It is different when what is said to be "socially constructed" is something the average simple-minded person would never have supposed to be connected with the "social": for instance the concept of "quarks" in high-energy physics, or Einsteinian relativity, or current theory regarding the conversion of limestone into dolomite. The word "social" is doing some useful work here.
Nevertheless, Hacking maintains, it is the word "constructed" that is the important one. Is gender innate or is it constructed? Are the subatomic particles known as "quarks" (first posited, or at least named, in 1963) or "nano-bacteria," which are bacteria a thousand times smaller than the ones usually studied by bacteriologists, real? Or are they merely "constructed," i.e., no more than theoretical conveniences? These, if understood rightly, are certainly worthwhile questions, and they amount, basically, to the same question. But if we go on to ask, "Are these things socially constructed?" though this could be a reasonable question too, the answers—and this is a trouble—would use the word "social" in all sorts of different senses. It is Andrew Pickering's contention in Constructing Quarks (1984) that the concept of "quarks" was arrived at because this was what a group of scientists, getting on very well together and in great favor, felt enthusiastic about; it was what archetypal precedents suggested to them was the likely way that things would be in Nature; and it was what the particular laboratory apparatus they were using encouraged them to focus upon. Nothing derogatory is suggested here, merely an insistence on contingency and the notion that theory, given other circumstances, might have gone quite another way, with no "quarks."
Other "social construction" theories about science would, by contrast, impute sinister social or political motives. They take the form of an "unmasking" of the social forces at work unseen behind so-called scientific "objectivity." The name of Bruno Latour comes in here. Latour, acting as an ethnographer and participant observer in the Salk Laboratories in San Diego, gave a firsthand account of a research project in endocrinology (concerning a certain hormone or peptide called thyroropin) which won a Nobel Prize. The book, which he wrote with Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979), argued that the "fact" about thyroropin emerging from this research was socially constructed: that, moreover, such is in general the truth about scientific "facts." Contingency and "external" factors enter into laboratory life at every point, and the direction a given piece of scientific research takes is by no means governed by pure logic, though this is the impression that scientific papers like to give.
The book caused a considerable stir, for it would appear that the authors' grasp of the particular problem in endocrinology was impressive. Jonas Salk, of the polio vaccine, wrote, says Hacking, a "bemused but admiring" preface for their book. "He had no problem with Latour and Woolgar's description of activities in the laboratory he founded."
This was an essay in "unmasking," though it is not too obvious on behalf of what. Its conclusions are subtle and philosophically complicated and evidently owe something to Thomas Kuhn's classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to which the same epithets apply. Latour claims, at least, not to be denying the objectivity of science and "the reality of the laws of nature"; he is merely asking us to re-think the word "fact." Moreover, in the second edition of his and Woolgar's book, they dropped the word "social" from the title.
However, in an article "A relativistic account of Einstein's relativity" (in Social Studies of Science, 18 (1988), Latour writes in a very different spirit. Here he is visibly wishing to unmask sinister motives. He maintains that the theory of relativity is itself (his italics) "social." Basing his work on Einstein's popular exposition, Relativity: the Special and General Theory, he portrays an Einstein with a panic fear of untrustworthy human "observers" of spatio-temporal events and a desperate determination to preserve the privileges of an "enunciator" or author. He depicts Einstein as, patriarchally, introducing this figure as third and authoritative system of reference in the system. But in fact Einstein nowhere mentions any such third system of reference (nor, for that matter, does Newton). Indeed, surely the very meaning of Einstein's term "relativity" is that no system of reference is privileged? The only appropriate word for this article of Latour's seems to be "dotty."
I mention this because it reinforces Hacking's point that in "the social construction of..." he is studying not a concept but a phrase, used to express widely or even wildly different ideas, some of them sensible and others not. It is important to remember, though, that—judging at least for myself—one simply has, in these days, to be a "constructionist." It is the basis of the ideas that mean most to us. It was above all the lesson of "constructionism" that made so deep an impression on us in Freud. Who, after Freud, can doubt that the fact that human faeces are felt by us to have an abominable smell—to be, as it were, an ultimate in bad smells—has its roots in taboo, which is to say in forms of social organization: that it is, in a word, "constructed," not a "given"? (It is one of the things that must puzzle dogs about their masters or mistresses, these smells being, for dogs, of the greatest interest and the carriers of most valuable information.)
The same is of course true of Marx. One is never likely to forget the passage in his German Ideology in which he takes Feuerbach to task for dreamily taking "Nature" as a "given."
He [Feuerbach] does not see that the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed a product in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, and modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest "sensuous certainty" are only given him through social developments, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become "sensuous certainty" for Feuerbach.
For Hacking it is Kant who is "the great pioneer of construction." He is thinking of Kant's explanation, in The Critique of Pure Reason, for the fact that we know the truths of arithmetic and geometry just by thinking and yet can apply them in the real world, which exists independently of thought. Kant's answer, as we know, is that all experience takes place in space and time, which is not a fact about experience but a precondition of it; and that space is structured by the laws of geometry and time by the laws of arithmetic, structures derived from the nature of thought itself. This was, unquestionably, an epoch-making piece of "constructionism." But Kant, I feel, is less relevant for our purposes here than Freud and Marx; for what they stand for is, plainly, not just "constructionism" but "social constructionism," thus proving that the phrase can have a valuable meaning.
Hacking, ready to be fair to "social construction" talk, though he does not like it, says: do not get hung up on the definition of social constructionism. "Don't ask for the meaning, ask what's the point"; and the point or purpose, he says, is almost always consciousness-raising. There are three theses entailed, in rising order:
1. X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.
2. X is quite bad as it is.
3. We would be much better off it X were done away with, or at least radically transformed.
To these theses there correspond six "grades of commitment," in ascending order as regards consciousness-raising: the historical (a historical constructionist merely says that, far from inevitable or "in the nature of things," X is the contingent upshot of historical events); the ironic (the ironist is a "kibitzer" who understands the architecture of the world that produces X but feels no urge to change it); the reformist (the reformer affirms thesis 2 and, though not seeing any obvious way of doing without X, can see ways to make it less of a bad thing); the unmasking (the unmasker aims not to refute ideas but to undermine them by exposing their covert function); the rebellious (which angrily affirms all three of the theses); and the revolutionary (which moves beyond ideas to action). Familiar enough categories, but Hacking likes to create this sort of tidiness before moving any further.
His next step is to ask the question promised in his title: i.e., what exactly is it, in social-construction talk, that is being said to be "constructed"? It can hardly be a thing, an object, though that is a favorite trope in book titles: it must actually be an idea. He rebukes himself for having written in 1995, apropos of an article on "The Social Construction of Child Abuse," that child abuse "is a real evil, and it was so before the concept was constructed. It was nevertheless constructed. Neither reality nor construction should be in question." On this he comments wryly: "What a terrible equivocation! What 'it' is a real evil? The object, namely the behavior or practice of child abuse. What 'it' is said to be socially constructed? The concept. My switch from object (child abuse) to idea (the concept of child abuse) is worse than careless."
This is his lead-in to what is, in a sense, the central thesis of his book, and of his writing generally. "Construction" in the sphere of the social, he argues, is, in one quite fundamental way, a different affair from "construction" in the natural world. For the problems involved in "constructionism" are really better thought of as problems concerning classification; and whereas it makes no difference to a "quark" or a hormone to be classified in a certain way, or to learn that it is a certain kind of entity, it may make all the difference to a person. To form the classification "child abuse" is not only to label people in a dramatic way as "child abusers"; it is also to cause them to label themselves in this way, a fact which may have large consequences.
Hacking's long chapter on child abuse (adapted from an essay first printed in 1992) is altogether impressive and, in its way of proceeding, original. He dates "child abuse," as a way to describe and classify actions and behavior, from a meeting of the American Medical Association in 1961, when a group of pediatricians from Denver reported their discovery of the "battered child syndrome." This applied to children three years or under, and the implication was not initially sexual; but by the end of the decade it had been rewritten as a sexual issue, simultaneously becoming a politically radical one. Later, for a brief period in the early 1990s, it incorporated a "Satanic ritual" scare, and there have been other accretions along the way.
Can philosophy help in understanding what is going on here? Philosophers, Hacking says, have a habit of examining very old ideas, "hence Hegel's tag about the owl of Minerva flying at dusk," but he has wanted to do philosophical analysis "if not in the heat of the midday sun, at least in the early afternoon." He wants "to give the sense of a powerful idea being molded before our very eyes."
In approaching child abuse philosophically he draws on what Nelson Goodman has written about "world-making" and "kind-making." The selection and organization of "kinds," according to Goodman, determines what we call the world; and in child abuse, says Hacking, we have a striking example of "the complex ways in which a kind can be made and molded—and, in the end, change the world." The concept of child abuse enters civil life in all sorts of ways. It does so through being an interactive kind, in the sense intended by Hack-ing's phrase "the looping effect." (Child abuse is a concept which changes people when they apply it to themselves, but in this process it itself suffers change.) It claims to be a scientific idea (or "kind"); it has wide-spreading ethical, legal, and social-care implications; and it even, in a sense, could be said to change the past. To see themselves as having been sexually abused as children "has changed the past of many people, and so changed their very sense of who they are and how they have come to be."
Hacking claims that his approach to child abuse is "skeptical and analytic" and therefore narrowly circumscribed. He may seem, he says, to be in the business of reform and of showing what is wrong with the child abuse movement (or with social science in general), but that is not really his intention. He is interested, strictly, in what this newly invented "kind" does to us. One detects some understatement there, or a struggle to keep painful feeling under control, but his success makes one want to cheer.
Let me turn now to "social construction" in the natural sciences, a topic that Hacking does not take so much to heart. Here his most intriguing specimen is Andrew Pickering's well-known Constructing Quark: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984). There was, according to Pickering, a decisive change in the direction of high-energy physics in the 1970s. It involved a redirection not only in theory but in interpretative practices and in instrumentation (the bubble chamber being partially replaced by new kinds of detectors). "The old physics," says Pickering, "focused upon the most common processes encountered in the HEP laboratory: resonance production at low energies, soft-scattering at high energies. The new physics instead emphasizes rare phenomena: the weak neutral current, hard-scattering, and so on." This reorientation involved many judgments and decisions which were far from simply following, in inevitable fashion, from the logic of theory. There was in them a very considerable social element—using the word "social" to refer to the pressures and prejudices at work within a small and closely united group of scientists. One would never have guessed this from the retrospective accounts of its work; but, in fact, there was so much mere contingency in the way that the new physics developed—it seems so possible and even likely that things might have gone in a different direction—that one is forced to think of the new physics and its world-view as simply "incommensurable" with the old.
It is generally agreed that Pickering's detailed history of these developments is extremely well-informed—though of course it is miles above one's head (or at least above mine). However, what caused most stir was his final chapter, which is the one I have been quoting from; and it is plain from this chapter that, in the end, there is something wrong with Pickering's reasoning. For in his very last paragraph he drops a bomb. He writes, "On the view advocated in this chapter, there is no obligation upon anyone framing a view of the world to take account of what twentieth-century science has to say." This, surely, is absurd.
Moreover, one can point out what has gone wrong. It lies in that word "incommensurable," especially when allied to the word "world." The point about this came home to me, originally, in a quite different context: Isaiah Berlin's theories regarding "pluralism." Berlin argues that there is no single overarching value or set of values against which we can judge the values of a particular culture: the values of different cultures or societies, he says, are, or may be, simply "incommensurable." It is an appealing proposition, but when one examines it, it turns out to be meaningless. For values can be, and frequently are, incompatible, but no sense can be attached to the idea of measuring them against one another. The expression "incommensurable" is being used here with the sole purpose of avoiding using the word "incompatible."
Now, much the same is true of "incommensurable" as used by Pickering; and it acquires what plausibility it has from collusion with the word "world," as in the phrases "the new-physics world-view" and "the world of the new physics." The important thing about the word "world" is that it has a built-in ambiguity. At some moments one thinks of it as referring to the earth, and at others as referring to the cosmos—that is to say, to "everything that there is." (The OED's definitions reflect this: "The earth or a region of it; the universe or a part of it.") This makes it possible to speak of "worlds" in the plural, which in turn makes it possible to speak of them as "incommensurable," implying that the physics or chemistry of one world could simply have no relation to the physics or chemistry of another. It is a pleasant fantasy and is of course the father of science-fiction. Indeed, talk of "worlds" in the plural always has an element of the entertaining in it: one remembers the grand siècle fun that Fontenelle has in his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. But it is important not to take it seriously, or to think that you could mean anything serious by it. Nothing could be more reasonable than to imagine the existence of other planets with large likenesses to the earth (including living creatures) and large differences from it. But where the notion of "worlds" in the plural gets its appeal, and also its basic absurdity, is from the other sense of the word "world," as meaning "everything that there is." Pickering's phrase "the world of the new physics" is merely a semantic muddle, not far different from that catch-all formula beloved of publishers, The World of Jane Austen, Leonardo da Vinci and His World—a blank which it is left to us to fill in, in whatever way we choose.
Pickering's talk of "incommensurability" and of "worlds" clearly derives in a considerable degree from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution, where such terms play an equally important role. Kuhn, however, uses them more hesitantly. He says, of his own remark that "after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked in a different world," that this is a "strange locution" which he would avoid if he could. Again, when speaking of "the incommensurability of competing [scientific] paradigms," he says: "In a sense that I am unable to explicate further [my italics], the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds."
I think that, despite his reservations, this is the weak spot in Kuhn's memorable book. He likens what occurs at a scientific "revolution" to a Gestalt switch, as when one first sees some marks on a piece of paper as a duck, and then as an antelope or rabbit. With his usual caution, he admits that the parallel can be misleading, since "Scientists do not see something as something else; instead they simply see it." But the mistake lies, rather—I would suggest—in his using the word "seeing" and physical vision as a metaphor for how a scientist studies phenomena. I am thinking of a characteristic passage like the following, apropos of physicists before and after Galileo:
Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other.
Or again, where he writes that "when Aristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the first saw constrained fall, the second a pendulum." But actually, according to legend (and a very plausible one), what Galileo was seeing when he constructed the theory of the pendulum was a lamp—a swinging bronze lamp in the cathedral at Pisa. He interpreted it as a pendulum, indeed it helped him to invent this concept, but it simply creates confusion to say that he "saw" a pendulum.
For the point is, to see a lamp is itself an act of interpretation, and this is true of all seeing. Seeing is a matter of classification and recognition. What we see is not a colored patch but a lamp or a house or a table. Admittedly, we sometimes say that we cannot make out what something that we are looking at is. (Is it a haystack or a castle? We cannot be sure, because we cannot determine how far away, and therefore how big, it is.) But this merely goes to confirm the crucial point that all seeing is a matter of "seeing as." Thus Kuhn's analogy of the Gestalt switch—"the duck-rabbit shows that two men with the same retinal impression can see different things"—is beside the point. Equally he is surely wrong to suggest that, even hypothetically, one might get behind mental "paradigms" to the "raw data" of experience and construct some neutral observation language, "designed to conform to the retinal imprints that mediate what the scientist sees." Retinal imprints or images cannot come into the matter; they are no doubt the precondition of seeing, but they play no part in the experience of it. It was Kuhn's triumph to explain how it is that scientists on one side of a revolutionary paradigm shift cannot, and cannot be expected to, communicate fully with those on the other. But in this, the metaphor of seeing is more of a hindrance to him than a help.
Ian Hacking evidently regards "that somber revolutionary" Thomas Kuhn as the most formidable figure among theorists about science: more profoundly a "constructionist" than might appear at first sight; an extreme nominalist, most unwilling to regard science as establishing the truth of a world "out there"; and a supreme debunker of science's claims to authority. Kuhn's picture of scientific progress as away from past science rather than towards a right account of the world is, for Hacking, and no doubt rightly, subversive in the highest degree.
Hacking, in his orderly way, defines three "sticking points" for us to refer to when considering theories about science: Contingency, or the view that scientific developments are influenced by external causes, social or otherwise, rather than purely internal logic; Nominalism, or the view that we must not regard the names by which we classify things as corresponding to real entitities; and Stability, or the question whether things like Maxwell's Equations or the Second Law of Thermodynamics are likely to be with us for ever. He uses these sticking points as a checklist, calibrated from 1 to 5, to show where one stands on "social construction." His own score is, with characteristic middle-of-the-roadness, 2, 4, and 3, and he invites us to mark ours. As for Kuhn's score, it is, in his opinion, 5, 5, 5!
P. N. Furbank, who lives in London, is the author of books about Defoe, Diderot, E. M. Forster, and social class, among other subjects]
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