The Elusive Sociological Imagination and the Pursuit of the Hard Case Sal Restivo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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The Elusive Sociological Imagination and the
Pursuit of the Hard CaseSal Restivo, Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute Nottingham University UK

• Fireside Chat 1976 and all that
• Society for Social Studies of Science annual
  meeting
• November 1st, 2006
• Vancouver, British Columbia CA

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Since its beginnings, STS has undergone numerous
modifications and reincarnations, yet the initial
work stands as an early articulation of its
continuing provocative potential.We need to
understand the dynamics whereby the
disobedience fostered by STS can flourish and
persist.STEVE WOOLGAR, 2004
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Emile Durkheim

• Anti-science and relativism are not necessary
  ingredients of social constructionism. Durkheim
  (1961 31-32) himself already remarked that
• From the fact that the ideas of time, space,
  class, cause or personality are constructed out
  of social elements, it is not necessary to
  conclude that they are devoid of all objective
  value.

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Karl Marx

• Marx (1958 104)
• Even when I carry out scientific work, etc., an
  activity which I can seldom conduct in direct
  association with other men I perform a social,
  because human, act. It is not only the material
  of my activity like the language itself which
  the thinker uses which is given to me as a
  social product. My own existence is a social
  activity.

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AWhat were your aspirations for the field in
1976 or whenever you started)? What did you
want to achieve in terms of our understanding of
science, technology, and society?B How have
those aspirations been fulfilled or
disappointed? What do we know now that we did
not know then?C How, as a result of the
unfolding of events or understanding, have your
aspirations changed?DWhat are today's
aspirations, especially in respect of how we are
to build on our new knowledge?

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JOE NEEDHAM 1900-1995
Schematic diagram to show the roles of Europe and
China in the development of ecumenical science
(Source Needham (1970b), p. 414.)

• THE NEEDHAM PROBLEM

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the laboratory ethnographiesThe mysterious
morphology of immiscible liquids
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Ethnography of engineering labs
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Physics and Mysticismcontra-Capra
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Sociology of mathematics

• Girl power a study of girls, mathematics and
  society
• Dr Margaret Walshaw
• It is generally agreed that being good at maths
  is a real plus in society, but traditionally,
  girls have had more trouble achieving in
  mathematics education than boys. These days,
  however, things have changed, and girls are doing
  as well as, if not better than, boys in maths.
  These figures would seem to indicate that
  girl-power has made its debut, and that New Age
  women have what it takes for success as
  responsible numerate citizens. But does this new
  success in mathematics actually represent what is
  happening when it comes to the success of women
  in the real world?
• Dr Margaret Walshaw of the Department of
  Technology, Science and Mathematics Education, at
  Massey University, is trying to find the answer
  to this question. Funded by a Fast-Start Marsden
  grant, Dr Walshaw's national study, "Girl Power
  Explorations into the making of our future
  numerate citizens", is aimed at gaining a better
  understanding of the connections between girls,
  mathematics and social practices.

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Social Robotics
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From Math to a Mathematicians Brain

• Paul Erdos as a Social Network

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Einsteins Brain
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Einstein, or Einsteins Brain?
When I meet Albert Einsteins brain,I meet
Einstein. Professor Kenji Sugimoto
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Leslie BrothersFridays Footprint How
Society Shapes the Human Mind

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Data from application of Restivo Draw a Brain
protocols.
Drawing of mind by 10 year old boy.
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ETHNOGRAPHY OF MAGICTHE MAGIC CASTLE AND
ACADEMY OF MAGICAL ARTS
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The Sociology of the Brain
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The Sociology of God
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Putting the social back into social
constructionsism

• AND OH, BY THE WAY, SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM IS
  NOT A PHILOSOPHICAL IDEA, IT IS NOT A
  CRITICO-POLITICAL TOOL, AND IT IS NOT ANYTHING
  LIKE WHAT SOME FRENCH ÜBER-THINKERS CLAIM IT IS.
  IT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL THEOREM OF GENERAL
  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY, THE CENTRAL DOGMA OF THE
  SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION.

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• Since its beginnings, STS has undergone numerous
  modifications and reincarnations, yet the initial
  work stands as an early articulation of its
  continuing provocative potential.We need to
  understand the dynamics whereby the
  disobedience fostered by STS can flourish and
  persist.STEVE WOOLGAR, 2004
• Modern Science and Anarchism
• Peter Kropotkin

the sciences and science studies in permanent
revolution
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ANARCHY AND INQUIRY Irving Louis Horowitz

• Irving Louis Horowitz
• INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY HAS BECOME INCREASINGLY
  ANARCHIST IN POSTURE.

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Kropotkin

• Anarchism is one of the sociological sciences.
• Called for the application of the methods of the
  natural sciences to the study of human
  institutions.

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The Final Frontier

• The Transcendental Fallacy
• that there is a world or that there are worlds
  beyond our own transcendental worlds,
  supernatural worlds, worlds of souls, spirits and
  ghosts, gods, devils and angels, heavens and
  hells.
• The sociological imagination has been from at
  least Durkheim onwards aligned with the rejection
  of the transcendental (as well as the immanent
  and the psychologistic). The many worlds
  interpretation in quantum mechanics may be
  contaminated by this fallacy as a result of
  mathegrammatical errors or illusions. No doubt
  the world, the universe, is more complex than we
  can know or imagine but that complexity does
  not include transcendental or supernatural
  features.

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There is no there, there A Manifesto in
Defiance of The Cult of der Reine Vernunft1

• We must wonder about the resistance of Platonic
  and transcendental thinking to the lessons of
  modernity and postmodernity. These lessons,
  admittedly, are buried beneath the rubble of the
  wars, holocausts, political economic failures,
  and ecological disasters of the twentieth
  century. The brilliant flare-up of the very idea
  of the social between 1840 and 1912 and the
  discovery sciences it gave form to has remained
  virtually invisible on the intellectual landscape
  formed over the last one hundred and fifty years.
  Until and unless we uncover that revolution, we
  will continue to be haunted by the ghosts of
  Plato, Descartes, and God. These ghosts cannot
  be banished by materialism per se. What is
  required is a sociological materialism, a
  cultural materialism. It is no simple
  ideological or political victory we champion but
  an adaptation, an evolutionary matter of life
  and death. So long as these ghosts haunt us, we
  will be unable as a species to take advantage of
  whatever small opportunities are left to us to
  make something worthwhile flourish on this planet
  for even a little while. The issues here are
  that big. So it is that we must chase these
  ghosts down at every opportunity. Every time a
  critic of social and cultural thinking about
  science raises the banner of the brute fact he
  or she raises the banner of belief in God. We
  can, as David Bloor, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and
  Restivo have demonstrated over and over again for
  thirty years, have a critically robust realism
  sans Plato, Descartes, and God that is consistent
  with a social and cultural theory of science,
  mathematics, and logic.
• So long as we allow ourselves to be deluded by
  the transparent claim that Gödel, Einstein, and
  Heisenberg have given us the three most important
  insights into who and what we are, a claim made
  by Rebecca Goldstein (2005), we will be stuck on
  a path of almost daily and almost universal
  suffering, and face a future that can only
  promise more of the same without respite. In
  fact it is to Darwin, Marx, and Durkheim that we
  must turn for the more important insights. We do
  
• great harm to ourselves and our planet if we rely
  on Gödel, Einstein, and Heisenberg for our
  self-image as persons and as a species. We are,
  indeed, thermodynamic systems and we run at some
  level according to the laws of physics, biology,
  and chemistry. But what we are above all is a
  social and a cultural thing, a society, a social
  being, a cultural entity sui generis. We are,
  individually and collectively, social facts.2
• The mysteries of intuitions, geniuses, and
  eternal truths outside space and time nourished
  by philosophers like Goldstein are no mere
  exercises in pure reason for the sake of pure
  reason. They sustain a worldview that is more
  medieval than modern. We social ones must take
  our stand again and again against those, however
  well intentioned, who continue to support
  knowingly and unknowingly, the One Logic, the One
  God, and the separation of the realm of faith and
  belief from the realm of science and knowledge.
  The most pernicious dogmas flourish in this
  atmosphere. For example, undergraduates are fond
  of repeating this truism learned from the
  masters You cant prove or disprove God. And
  what leg do you stand on when public
  intellectuals like Stephen Jay Gould, a scientist
  of unimpeachable brilliance, argue for the
  separation of science and religion? Proofs are
  social constructions, social institutions,
  indexical. Claims such as this one can only make
  sense in a world of science that excludes social
  science. Once we admit social science to the
  halls of verifiable, validated, discovery
  sciences and proof communities such claims
  evaporate. Within a framework that includes the
  social sciences we can determine what God (in
  whatever guise s/he-it appears) is, that is, the
  referent for whatever we mean by God. That
  referent is always going to be a sociocultural
  one, rooted in the material earth and its peoples
  and not in some supernatural or transcendental
  realm.
• Even the strongest opponents and upholders of
  this claim tremble as they make it. They tend to
  leave openings for
• believers, including themselves in some cases,
  because the barriers to banging the last nails
  into the coffin of religious faith and belief
  are, let us admit, formidable. They are
  formidable, as both Marx and Durkheim recognized,
  because they have something to do with keeping
  society and individuals from becoming unglued.
  So lets put this bogey man out to pasture right
  away. It is not religions and belief in God or
  gods that are universal but rather moral orders.
  All societies, all humans, require a moral order
  to survive, to move through the world and their
  lives. That is, they require, to put it simply,
  rules about what is good and bad, right and
  wrong. Religion is just one way to systematize
  these rules. There are other ways to do this we
  can organize moral orders around almost any human
  interest from politics to physical fitness.3
  And there are ways to construct moral orders that
  do not depend on unreferred entities. The more
  general problem we are faced with here is the
  problem of abstraction. How does one account for
  abstract ideas without falling into the traps of
  transcendental and supernatural realism? The
  solution is to stop making a distinction between
  concrete and abstract ideas. 1 There is no
  there, there was famously uttered by Gertrude
  Stein when she went to find a childhood home and
  found the space empty.
• 2 We acknowledge the gendered danger of
  standing on the shoulders of these giants but
  remind you that they and we stand on the
• shoulders of so many other giants that gender,
  race, and class may not matter. If we contradict
  ourselves, if we fail to stand apart from our
• own gender, race, and class we can remain silent
  or carry on. We choose to carry on.
• 3 One of the most articulate exemplars of a
  political basis for a moral order is Michael
  Harringtons (1983) essay on the spiritual
  crisis of western civilization. Harrington
  described himself as, in Max Webers phrase,
  religiously musical but a non-believer. His
  goal was to fashion a coalition of believers and
  non-believers to challenge the wasteland of
  nilihism, hedonism, and consumerism spreading
  across the western cultural landscape.