What!? The Established Scientific Community is an illusion!

Cultural definitions are sometimes defined as something so incorporated in everyday life and understanding that we hardly ever start to question them. Like furniture, we don’t pay much attention in them unless something gets broken or is being talked about. So, what makes a theory or a device a part of the ‘real science’ or the Established Scientific Community? Such a thing must exist since almost every transhumanist I have met or chatted with do claim that ‘transhumanism is not (yet) accepted in the scientific community’.

That is a duality I can start off with.

As a sociologist I have questioned this duality from early on. A few days ago I was reading more books about the sociology of knowledge. Sociology of knowledge is a field of sociology, that examines the different forms of knowledge in society as well as the way they are created and how they interact. It is not only because of methodological concerns that sociology of knowledge is important but it also raises theoretical issues. This is especially true in the field of science and technology research.

Technology is a rather novel concept. I’m not going to discuss the origins or the formation of the modern concept of technology. There is plenty of time to go into that in later posts. For now it suffices to bear in mind that technology is not the same as science and that technology is much more than just devices we use to make our microwave diners. In fact, at this point, the question of what is technology gets very tricky.

Unsurprisingly I am currently reading Scientific Knowledge – A sociological Analysis by Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry (1996). The book is built from blocks that you can imagine analogous with the process of scientific research. It starts off with ‘observation and ‘interpretation’ and then moves on to discuss how scientific theories are created in and with language. The rest of the book is refining the main argument: every scientific theory is culturally produced knowledge and there is no objective link between it and the “real world”. That is a very crude shortening of the 200 and so pages but it will do for now.

There are two things from the book I’d like to point out here.

One, scientific knowledge is always linked to other systems of meaning in society. The microwave oven is a technological device that has a certain meaning in culture of cookery, urban living or healthy eating. The machine itself is connected to different fields of physics and the way it is produced is a part of a very large global economic and transport system. Also, the theoretical work behind the technology exists somewhere in thousands of research rapports and university lecture halls.

The second point is, that scientific knowledge is not a special kind of knowledge. Science as a ‘method’ does not stand for absolute objective guarantee for truth. I know it’s hard to stomach, but that’s what some theories of the sociology of knowledge come down to. For a sociologist, this is good news because it means we can address the ‘culture of science’ like any other field of human social behaveour. However, it may be bad for the atheist trying to peace together his argument against Intelligent Design (actually, it’s not a problem because it is possible to point out that intelligent design is not a scientific theory in the ‘common’ meaning of the word.)

Now, these are big claims and I do agree with them to some extent. I do take a stand against relativism, so I hope to find some way to postulate information that could pass as ‘objective’ in a sense that all humans or human-like-actors would agree. I’ll have an interesting angle on this subject as I get to the ‘technology as social relations’ part of my PhD.

If science and technology are just one kinds of cultural systems, how can transhumanism as a movement or a philosophy be ‘cast out’ from the “main stream science community”?

There must be power at play here somewhere! As I was trying to get my research question fine tuned to post here in the blog, I realized that until I get a clear understanding of how transhumanism and ‘the established scientific community’ are related, I actually have no place to start collecting my data. I’ll start of with two fundamental questions:

1. How the relation between society and science (and technology) is defined historically.

2. Does the transhuman concept of technology open some new ways to conceptualize technology AND relate to society.

Something like that I’ll try to figure out in my first article that I’m now starting to work on.