British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Diversity in Fact Production: Confronting Natural and Social Sciences
Professor Martina Merz
Institute of Sociology, University of Lucerne,
Bruchstrasse 43/45, PO Box 7456, CH-6000 Lucerne 7, Switzerland
An abstract presented to the conference
‘Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary conference’
at the British Academy, London, on 14 December 2007
Biography
Martina Merz is a professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Lucerne (Switzerland). She is also a guest professor at the Technology and Society Laboratory, EMPA St. Gall and a regular visiting scholar at the How 'Well' Do Facts Travel? Project at LSE. She holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich but turned to sociology and to science and technology studies in the early 1990s. In her research she is particularly interested in issues pertaining to conceptual scientific practice, to the reconfigurations involved with computer-based research, and to the constitution of novel research areas (e.g. nanosciences). She is the co-president of the Swiss Association for the Studies of Science, Technology and Society (STS-CH) and a council member of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).
The conception of science as a unified enterprise that can be characterized by a standard set of methods, theories and research programs has been severely challenged over the last years. In this wake, science studies scholars have begun to explore the disunity of science, probing into heterogeneous forms of knowledge production and drawing out the specifics. However, despite the upsurge of interest in the disunity of science, the number of studies that directly address this issue is still very limited. One exception is Karin Knorr Cetina's (1999) seminal study that contrasts molecular biology and particle physics with the aim to uncover the different "machineries of knowledge production" by highlighting their technical, symbolic and social dimensions.
Furthermore, the diversity of fact production has been addressed primarily to reveal differences between the natural sciences. The divide between the "Two Cultures" (in the sense of Snow) has been postulated rather than investigated empirically: It seems that, what appears to many as an unbridgeable gap between the natural sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other, has impeded efforts to engage in and contrast the respective fact production regimes on both sides. The underlying assumption appears to be that fact production in these different knowledge cultures is too dissimilar to be meaningfully compared. The projected presentation will challenge this supposition by exploring a way to contrast social and natural sciences.
The presentation will introduce the idea that fact production in empirical (both social and natural) sciences relies on the use of "revealing techniques" – that is, techniques that render visible and uncover facts from empirical material. The assumption underlying this move is that a focus on such revealing techniques or practices will allow one to draw out new kinds of similarities and dissimilarities between scientific cultures, quite unlike what emerges from the use of more traditional classificatory schemes (e.g. "hard" vs. "soft" science). Based on the understanding that there exists a variety of revealing techniques, some of them specific to individual scientific cultures, some of them shared across cultures, two will be singled out in the presentation: (1) imaging and (2) multi-case studies comparison. These two types of revealing techniques will be introduced by drawing on one case of contemporary science each:
(1) The practice of imaging will be investigated for the emerging field of nanoscience and nanotechnology with a specific interest in different forms of microscopy. A scanning tunnelling microscope, for example, uses a single atom to attain atomic resolution – that is, it is a revealing technique that makes accessible atomic structures for investigation and manipulation. This case will draw on my current research on the epistemic practice and culture of nanoscale research.
(2) The practice of uncovering facts by strategically employing multi-case studies comparison will be discussed for a social science (in particular, social studies of science). It starts out from the understanding that the social sciences exhibit several rationales of comparison, which are associated with different epistemic functions. Comparison as a revealing technique relies on identifying surprising comparative dimensions. It is employed as a powerful lens to investigate social phenomena that are of such complexity that all investigation is necessarily partial.
The respective fact production regimes will be unravelled for these two cases with the aim to understand how facts are acquired and how they can be shared within and between fields.