Thanks much Jon--this looks like a useful source
indeed. The reference is appreciated.
Sally
Sally & All,
Just a brief note on the question of sincerity.
A useful set of concepts for discussing
this issue can be found in the work of Argyris
and Schön, where they make a distinction
between "espoused" goals, values, etc. and
"enacted" or "actual" goals, values, etc.
In these terms, honesty, integrity, sincerity,
etc. would be measures of coherence
or consistency between the espoused and the enacted.
Jon
Sally Ness wrote:
Segment 4
Dear List,
This post will address paragraphs 18 to 21 of
the paper, "Sciences as Communicational
Communities." The paragraphs are reproduced
below in their entirety. As I have mentioned
before, this segment appears to be the crux of
the paper, where JR lays out his vision of
scientific communication (similar in most
respects to that already discussed in this slow
read in relation to the paper, "Peirce and the
Socratic Tradition"). He then formulates his
understanding of the relation of scientific
communication to academia, and delivers his key
insight regarding how, in practice, scientific
communication can be maintained, despite the
realities confronted in academic institutions.
JR makes four important points in these
paragraphs about the character of scientific
communication:
1) [P18] Scientific communication must be
sincere. Otherwise multiple perspectives on
the subject-matter will fail to cohere in a
coordinated manner, and the subject-matter will
cease to control inquiry.
2) [P19] Scientific communication must be about
subject-matter that is unitary and real.
Otherwise, the subject-matter itself will fail
to produce a coherence of perspectives.
3) [P19] Scientific communication must evidence
objectivity, which can be defined both as an
attitude of the inquirer and as a formal
feature of the inquiry process. Otherwise,
communication will tend toward chaos.
4) [P20] Scientific communication must regard
all (sincere) participants as being peers,
equal with respect to both the shared public
understanding of the community's subject matter
and with regard to being entitled to respect in
relation to the perspectives they contribute to
the community's communication. Otherwise the
coordination of perspectives will become
deranged (fail to cohere as the subject-matter,
in truth, would dictate).
JR then concludes with a final point about the
relation between scientific communication and
academia:
5) [P21] While the fundamentally hierarchical
character of academia inevitably plagues the
sciences, corrupting and compromising its
practices, the norms of science remain
unchanged by this corruption and stand in
enduring opposition to those of academia.
In this section, JR sets forward an alternative
to the academic politician's negotiational view
of the relation between scientific inquiry and
academia. He grants that science is generally
situated in academic contexts that disease and
deform it politically. However, JR does not
recognize the same degree of integration
occurring at the science/academic interface
that the sociologist of knowledge does. In
JR's view, this interface does not permeate the
sciences so completely as to have modified the
community's basic norms of conduct. As a
result, it is still possible to conceive of
living a scientific life while also maintaining
a separate status as a professor. The two
identities may come into conflict when their
norms are not in harmony, but they nonetheless
each have their own discrete character.
In this final point, JR is able to explain how
the authoritarian, hierarchically-oriented,
politically-governed behavior that scientists
have been accurately documented as occasionally
(even habitually) exhibiting can be seen to
occur while science in general can remain
apolitical. Because scientific norms remain
uncorrupted and uninfluenced by academia, it is
possible for scientists, even if they are also
professors, to engage in scientific inquiry
according to the norms of a scientific life
proper. If they fail to do so, it is because
they fail to conduct themselves according to
the norms of science, not because science is
nothing but a "negotiational" endeavor.
A few questions arise in relation to JR's views presented in this segment:
* How distinctly is JR speaking "in the spirit
of Peirce" here, with regard to his 4-fold
definition of scientific communication? Does
Peirce place the same kind of stress on each of
these four points as JR does? Is there any
deviation or inclination, however subtle, that
might identify a Ransdellian take on Peirce
here? Would Short, or Ketner, or Houser, or de
Tienne, or Apel, or deWaal, or even Eco, or
other interpreters of Peirce put it quite the
same way?
* What, exactly, is "unitary" subject-matter as
JR employs the term? A great deal is hanging on
this concept, it would seem. Is inorganic
subject-matter more unitary than organic
subject-matter? If so, that would explain why
the hard sciences have the superior status they
are granted in this paper (it might even
necessarily explain it, following JR's logic of
objectivity). I have no immediate recollection
of how Peirce uses this concept in relation to
science. Perhaps some listers may be able to
give some additional detail on this.
* In the paper, "Is Peirce a Phenomenologist?,"
listers may recall that JR stressed the
differences between what he termed the
"mechanistic-technological" conception of
science (p. 5, 6), associated with Descartes
and, more recently Kreis and Carnap, and
Peirce's pragmaticist (teleological) conception
of science. JR claimed that for Peirce, the
character of the subject-matter did not
exercise a defining influence on the identity
of science. In this earlier paper, JR writes
that Peirce, "does not identify science or the
scientific by reference to any special type of
property of the subject-matter of the science
(its "primary qualities," for example), or by
reference to some special "scientific method"
(in the sense in which that would usually be
understood) but rather by reference to the
communicational relationships of its
practitioners . . ." In view of the arguments
presented in the paper now under discussion, it
would seem that JR, in the phenomenology paper,
is edging up to more of a "negotiational"
perspective than would seem to be tenable under
the terms of the present paper. I wonder what
"unitary-ness" is if it is not a "primary
quality" of scientific subject-matter. I
wonder what "controlled observation" is if it
is not a special method developed in relation
to the primary quality of unitary-ness of
scientific subject-matter. Do other listers
see here a contradiction in JR's two papers?
It seems worth noting that, in the
phenomenology paper, which was not addressed to
scientists, JR seems strongly critical of the
mechanistic-technological conception of science
and characterizes that conception as having
"reigned in modern times." One would assume
that JR saw it as having reigned in modern
times in the discipline of physics as well as
in the other sciences. However, in this paper,
addressed as it is to physicists, JR seems to
be retreating from that critical view of the
reigning conception of science in their
discipline. Instead, JR presents a view in
which "unitary and real" subject-matter is an
essential condition for enabling scientific
communication, and praises the hard sciences
for its special method of dealing with such
subject-matter. Has JR compromised Peirce's
perspective here as well as his own? Has he
made the subject-matter of science
unnecessarily exclusive and hierarchical? For,
if some subject-matter is better for science
than others (more "unitary"), is there not then
a politics inherent in the hierarchy of
unitary-ness as exhibited by the various
objects of scientific inquiry? If not, how can
JR's views as presented in these two papers be
reconciled?
I hope to post again in 5 days times.
Best,
Sally
SEGMENT 4 of "Sciences as Communicational Communities"
[paragraphs 18-21]
But leaving the plight of the sociologist aside
for the present, I believe that if the basic
conception of scientific publication as
communication that I articulated above in a
crude but basic form is thought through
consistently, it will be seen that this entails
first of all that everything said about the
subject-matter should be said responsibly and
sincerely, which is to say that lying,
misdirection, evasion, waffling, and all other
forms of deliberate or tolerated
misrepresentation--in short, any of the many
forms of insincerity--are the most fundamental
of all violations of scientific method. Secrecy
is a limitation on science: where secrecy
begins science ends, strictly speaking; but
that is a limitation on the scope of inclusion
of a scientific community, and although
necessarily crippling to whatever extent it is
practiced, it is not secrecy but rather
insincerity--lying in its most general
form--that kills science immediately insofar as
it enters into it effectively. Why? Because no
real subject-matter can be understood from the
perspective of a single person--reality has
facets--but is essentially a matter of the
coordination of multiple perspectives on the
same thing, and lying introduces
pseudo-perspectives that tend toward defeating
attempts within a scientific community to
establish a coherent coordination of the
perspectives available at a given time, thus
deracinating inquiry by destroying the
integrity of its connection with its
subject-matter as its ultimate source of
control.
[19]
The coordination of the diverse
perspectives of the individual members of the
community, which is a primary function of the
publication process, assumes that the
subject-matter which concerns its members is
unitary and real, since if it were unreal this
would be shown by a continuing inability to
establish such a coordination. And what is
meant by objectivity in inquiry, considered as
an attitude of the inquirer, is the commitment
to establishing such a coordination by
reference to a common object, and by the
cultivation of communicational practices
designed to maximize the kind of collaboration
that can have such a result. Objectivity
considered as a formal feature of the inquiry
process, rather than as a stance taken by the
inquirer, is that referential structure in the
communicational process regarded logically.
Where such communicational practices exist,
authentic publication policies are in effect
and are working effectively; where there is no
attempt at such a coordination there is no
objectivity in the field, and the publication
practices are more likely to be conducive to
chaos than to growth and to function more as a
blight than a blessing.
[20]
Though it may not be readily apparent,
this also implies that every individual in such
a community is to be regarded as presumptively
equal with every other as a provider of content
to be assimilated into the coherent
coordination of perspectives sought for, and
although it is true that some people's opinions
will inevitably be weighted more heavily in
practice than others--and no doubt should be if
they establish a track record that warrants
it--this must remain at the level of individual
judgment and not be confused with the shared
public understanding of a given scientific
community, which is always concerned only with
characteristics of the subject-matter since it
is that and that only which constitutes the
concern constitutive of the particular
community of inquirers as such. In other words,
no community of scientific inquiry as such can
legitimately concern itself with ranking its
own members in terms of their status and worth
in the community because to do so is to lose
sight of its subject-matter by lapsing into
group introspection instead. More could be said
about this, and will be elsewhere, but I will
only add further here that we see here the
typical point of attempted entry of
authoritarianism into inquiry, and can see why
its effective entry always corrupts to the
extent that this effect ramifies.
[21]
This is why it is of the first importance
not to confuse what it means to be a scientist
of this type or that with being a professor of
this rank or that in a local hierarchical
university system. I don't doubt that such
confusions do in fact plague the sciences like
they plague every other academic field, causing
a falling away from science into the acrimony
of politics, and that the essential
egalitarianism of science is betrayed in many
ways as it actually exists in practice; but
these compromises and betrayals are academic
diseases and deformities, inherited as
congenital birth defects due to the origins of
academia as a medieval hierarchical
institution, not a norm of the scientific life
proper, which is fundamentally at odds with
this hierarchical heritage. Let me stress that
the point is not to adopt an unrealistic view
of the importance of prestige and
accomplishment, but rather to recognize that
pains should be taken not to allow this to
subvert in practice the principle of
presumptive equality which is the essential
element of the idea of a peer. The reason is
essentially the same as in the case of lying: a
peer is--logically regarded--equivalent to a
respected perspective on the subject-matter,
and to treat a peer either as superior or
inferior is to derange the coordination of
perspectives which is the constant task of the
ongoing science.
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