minnesota studies volume paper

8/8/2019 Minnesota Studies Volume Paper

1/36

Originally published in Cognitive Models of Science, Minnesota Studies in thePhilosophy of Science, vol. 15, ed. R. Giere (University of Minnesota Press,1992), pp. 427-59.

1EPISTEMOLOGY RADICALLY NATURALIZED:

RECOVERING THE NORMATIVE, THE EXPERIMENTAL, AND THE SOCIAL

Steve FullerCenter for the Study of Science in Society

Virginia Polytechnic InstituteBlacksburg VA 24061-0247

I argue that a radically naturalized study of knowledge wouldapply the methods and findings of psychology and the socialsciences to itself. The results would make epistemology morerobustly normative, experimental, and social than it currently is,

indeed, more in the spirit of the original American naturalizersof epistemology: Peirce, Dewey, and Mead. I begin by brieflysketching how my own philosophical program, social epistemology,captures this spirit. I then proceed to show the limits to theradicalism of various naturalizers: Churchland's eliminativematerialism, mainstream experimental psychology, analyticepistemology, and even the sociological school ofethnomethodology. In the last section, I tackle head on the mosthostile opposition to experimentation from within the sociologicalcamp, which leads me to propose an experimental design that evenBruno Latour could love.

1. The scope of social epistemology

Social epistemology (Fuller 1988, 1989) is aninterdisciplinary project that mobilizes the empirical resourcesof the "sociology of knowledge" (understood very broadly to rangefrom cognitive social psychology, through the sociology ofscience, to the social history of ideas) for the purposes ofinforming a normative philosophy of science. The project moves onthree fronts: (a) as a metatheory, (b) as an empirical researchprogram, and (c) as knowledge policy.

So far, social epistemology has functioned primarily as ametatheory designed to reinterpret what philosophers and social

scientists are doing when they study knowledge. All but the lastpart of this paper continues that job. The social epistemologist'smain metatheoretic move is to "naturalize" knowledge, and therebytake seriously that knowledge is in the world of which it isabout. After the promise of naturalism at the start of thiscentury, normative philosophical accounts of knowledge have grownsteadily apart from, if not antagonistic to, empirical socialscientific accounts. The fact that recent "postmodernist"


2/36


2philosophers (e.g. Rorty 1979) have felt the need to abandon the

normative project in order to pursue the empirical (often

specifically historical) project is a testimony to this rift, onewhich the social epistemologist takes to be the product of amistaken understanding of the role of philosophy among thesciences. For, properly understood, the naturalization ofknowledge should involve not the withering away of epistemologybut the dissolution of the boundaries separating epistemology fromthe social scientific study of knowledge.

But metatheory aside, social epistemology is also anempirical research program and a vehicle of knowledge policy. Onthe empirical side, the general strategy is twofold. First, toanalyze normative philosophical claims about the growth ofknowledge (i.e., theories of scientific rationality) in terms of

the historiography of science that they presuppose (e.g., fromwhose standpoint is the history told? Cf. Fuller 1991b). Second,to decompose epistemically salient historical episodes into their"working parts" by simulating them in the laboratory, so as todetermine the difference that the presence or absence of anepistemic norm made to the outcome of the episode. Section 2.6 ofGorman's contribution to this volume carries out that task, aswell as the last section of my own. On the policy side, the socialepistemologist aims to develop a rhetoric for converting itsmetatheory and empirical research into a means of increasing thepublic accountability of science (cf. Fuller 1991a).

2. Naturalizing knowledge and cognition: momentum lost andregained

A common thread that runs through the naturalistic movementin philosophy--linking thinkers as otherwise diverse as Bacon,Comte, and Dewey--is the belief that epistemology is alwaysplaying catch-up with the disciplines at the cutting edge ofscientific inquiry. If we take this view seriously, then twentiethcentury philosophy, at least in the English speaking world, hasmoved two steps forward and one step back. For what had, at thestart of the century, distinguished the naturalist most sharplyfrom the classical epistemologist (whose exemplar was usuallyDescartes or Plato) is nowadays perhaps its least touted feature.

It is the thesis of metaphysical monism, the epistemologicalcorollary of which is that knowledge is an integral part of theworld of which it is about.

According to Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, GeorgeHerbert Mead and other early twentieth century Americannaturalists, the cardinal sin of classical epistemology was toassume that the knower somehow stood metaphysically apart from the


3/36


3knowable world; hence, the problem of the external world.

Moreover, this externality was necessary for the possibility of

having knowledge. The knower could represent the world orderbecause she did not need to intervene significantly in its causalprocesses. It is clear enough, at a commonsense level, what theclassical epistemologist had in mind here. If we put aside largelaboratories, knowledge appears to arise from an individual'sinitial sensory contact with the environment, which is then givena socially acceptable verbal formulation. At that level ofdescription, the causal processes involved seem quiteunexceptional and self-contained: most of the epistemicallyrelevant changes occur inside the individual and in the puffs ofair it takes to exchange words with other individuals. It wouldseem, then, that the world order is not particularly disturbed bythe production of knowledge. This picture of the naturalist's

opponent has been variously called "transcendental idealism," the"spectator theory of knowledge," or simply "intellectualism."Although no philosopher ever baldly assents to intellectualism, itmay nevertheless be the best explanation for many of themethodological intuitions advanced by philosophers of sciencetoday. These intuitions pertain to the nature of knowledge and thenature of the knower.

In the case of knowledge, when psychology and the socialsciences are portrayed as offering a form of knowledge inferior tothat of the natural sciences, the difference is often attributedto the degree of intervention that is necessary for the socialscientist to constitute her object of inquiry. For example,although even simple experiments in physics are arguably moreartificial than ones in psychology, the physicist is usually takento be better than the psychologist at presenting her laboratoryartifact as the reflection of some natural fact that existed priorto the intervening experiment. It is the mark of intellectualismto value an experiment because it adds to our knowledge withoutadding to the world. In the case of the knower, intellectualismappears in the parsimony-based appeal to methodological solipsismin cognitive science (Fodor 1981, ch. 9): If knowledge is possiblebecause the knower is autonomous from the world, then why notsimply study the knower without the world? Unfortunately, givenmethodological solipsism, what enables knowledge to be had at all

also explains why knowledge is not always to be had: If the knowerleaves no significant trace in the world as she tries to representit, then how does it happen that the world manages to leave asignificant trace on her representations? This worry accounts forthe re-emergence of skepticism as the signature problem ofanalytic epistemology in the last thirty years (cf. Pollock 1986).

Both philosophers and sociologists of science have recently


4/36


4rediscovered the importance of intervention to knowledge

production, but the sociologists have been more thoroughgoing in

returning intervention to the status it had in the original agendaof naturalism. Philosophers have stressed the role of interventionin standardizing laboratory phenomena upon which more phenomenacan then be experimentally grounded (Hacking 1983, part 2).However, they have shown remarkably little interest in howscientists use their laboratory findings as a basis forintervening in non-laboratory settings (an exception is Rouse1987, chs. 4, 7; cf. Fuller 1990). In other words, philosophershave confined themselves to what psychologists call the"internal," as opposed to the "external," validity of experiments(Houts & Gholson 1989; Fuller 1989, pp. 131-135). One consequenceof this self-imposed limitation is that today's epistemology ofexperiment is practiced in complete isolation from, say,

technological ethics, a field that has typically been concernedwith interventions of more general social import. Anotherimplication is that the normative dimension of epistemology andthe philosophy of science remains limited to the approximation ofinternally generated standards. Whereas philosophers of sciencealways used to worry about whether theories were chosen accordingto sound methodological criteria, they are nowadays increasinglyconcerned with whether phenomena have yielded suitably robusteffects across a wide range of laboratory contexts. Thus, thesuccess or failure of an experimental intervention is judgedexclusively in terms of the expectations and intentions of thescientists working in the laboratory, not in terms of theextra-mural consequences to which the experiment gives rise.

By contrast, sociologists of science--often in spite ofthemselves--are much more in the spirit of the normative missionof naturalism. Consider the extended setting in which some of themexamine experimental intervention. If, as Dewey (e.g. 1960)maintained, an action must be judged by the concrete exigenciesthat arise from it, then the normative naturalist (pace Laudan1987) would want to follow scientists outside the laboratory tothe networks in society at large that must be forged before theexperimental result constitutes a stable piece of knowledge (cf.Latour 1987). As Bruno Latour and other actor-network theoristsamong the sociologists have argued, this process of "manufacturing

knowledge" (Knorr-Cetina 1980) involves the interrelation of manyotherwise quite unrelated people and things (i.e."actor-networks"), most of which are displaced from their normalactivities, sometimes irreversibly so (Callon, Law & Rip 1986).The people include not only competing theorists, but alsotechnicians, editors, politicians, financiers, all of whom enablethe theoretical competition to take place by their being made tohave a stake in its outcome. The experimental result that


5/36


5establishes a victor can then be evaluated according to the types

of changes that these "enrolled actors" undergo: Who (or what) is

empowered by the result, and who (or what) is not (cf. Fuller1989, pp. 42-52)? Why have philosophers been slow to embrace thisextended normative sensibility? I now venture a diagnosis thatwill serve as a springboard for the rest of this paper.

One way to understand the naturalist slogan "knowledge isboth in and about the world" is as a call to self-reflection, orreflexivity. Traditionally, the reflexive turn has been portrayedas inhibiting what the inquirer can do. This Russellian view ofreflexivity is illustrated in the strategies used to solve theparadoxes of logic and set theory. The self-contradictoriness of aparadox forces the logician to separate and restrict the domainsto which the different uses of some problematic term apply.

Without this additional structure, the paradoxical claim expressesno determinate proposition and is, therefore, without meaning.However, it is not clear that the neatly divided, well-boundedworld of the Russellian is consistent with the naturalist'smonism. Suppose we say, instead, that the paradox is indeedmeaningful, but that its meaning is concealed in its outmodedexpression, such that the paradoxical term needs to be replaced,not simply refined. Let us call this contrasting view ofreflexivity, Hegelian, as it captures Hegel's aufgehoben, anexpansion of inquiry (indeed, the model of Dewey's concept ofintelligence) that occurs by eliminating and transcending aconceptual impasse. To see the contrast at work, consider the caseof someone--say, Paul Churchland (1979, 1989)--who believes thatpeople do not have beliefs. The Russellian would parse thisparadoxical claim by immunizing Churchland's own second-order"belief" from the general denial of beliefs implied in hisfirst-order use of the term. The Hegelian would, in contrast,argue that a world in which Churchland's claim makes sense is onein which the ontology that supports beliefs--either his or anyoneelse's--needs to be replaced. This is, in fact, what I will nowargue, in the course of which I reveal the partial character ofChurchland's allegedly radical naturalization of cognitivescience.

3. Churchland and the limits of radical naturalism

The core tenet of Churchland's position, eliminativematerialism, is that the belief-desire psychology used to explainaction in both commonsense and most cognitive science settings isprobably false, or at least misleading enough to warrant itsabandonment by cognitive scientists. But is not Churchland'sespousal of eliminative materialism itself a belief? Churchland(1989, pp. 21-22) addresses this reflexive charge by arguing that


6/36


6a variety of semantic theories are available to determine the

truth value of a sentence that do not make reference to the status

of the sentence as a belief. But the reflexive charge runs deeper.We commonsensically hold Churchland to be the relevant cause ofthe sentences that come out of his mouth--however their truthvalues are determined--because we take him to be a system whosetransactions with the environment serve to maintain his ownwell-being and goals in the face of whatever resistance theenvironment might provide. Indeed, this is just to say that wetreat Churchland as an autonomous organism (cf. Bernard 1957). Heis not merely the passive site in which significant causalprocesses are played out, but rather an active player, whoseintervention decisively affects how those processes aremanifested. Not surprisingly, then, while Churchland denies therelevance of beliefs and desires to an explanation of his

behavior, he does not go so far as to deny the image of theautonomous organism that is commonsensically defined bybelief-desire psychology. Whereas in theory Churchland (1989, pp.20-21) is willing to countenance the possibility of a world brainof which each individual is just a part, in practice he treatseach brain-bearing beast as its own self-contained cognitive unitwhose principal source of knowledge is its own immediatetransactions with the environment. In fact, this beast, whoseadherence to belief-desire psychology is held to be radicallyfalse, is nevertheless also said to possess scientific "theories"of the sort that have traditionally interested philosophers. Howcan Churchland's neurocomputational human be so transparent to theworld yet so opaque to herself?

This question suggests that Churchland has failed tonaturalize consistently. But why the inconsistency? It is clearfrom the table of contents of A Neurocomputational Perspectivethat Churchland is interested in neuroscience, less to transcendthe distinction between philosophy and psychology than to providealternative answers to standing questions in the philosophy ofmind and the philosophy of science. However, these questions makesense only when posed against the backdrop of the (human) organismas a well-bounded cognitive unit. By contrast, the neuroscienceresearch on which Churchland (esp. chap. 5) relies assumes a quiteplastic brain that is subtly susceptible to changes in the

environment, indeed, to the point of the brain-world interfacebeing continually redefined. Thus, Churchland's overridingcommitment to the well-bounded organism goes against theontological assumptions of the neuroscience--and even some of theexperimental psychology--that he uses to deny the existence of thebeliefs and desires that define such an organism. But why retainthe shell of an ontology whose contents have been eliminated?After all, if memory limitations and perceptual biases are said to


7/36


7prevent us normally from understanding the causes of our behavior,

as Churchland readily admits, then why shouldn't he also admit

research of a similar nature (cf. Faust 1985, Cherniak 1986) thatshows our inability to store, let alone reason with, somethinghaving the computational dimensions of a scientific theory?Admittedly, to allow this additional psychological research wouldbe to undermine the epistemic autonomy of the organism. And hereChurchland's fixation on the organism is so strong that heretreats from naturalism to the sort of commonsense understandingsof "explanation" (as translation to the familiar [pp. 198-199])and "theory" (as any sort of conceptual framework [pp. 154-159])that in any other case he would loathe. To be sure, explanationsand theories in their folk senses can be neatly parceled out inindividual brains with limited capacities, but they are at bestbased on puns on the words that philosophers of science have tried

to explicate since the heyday of logical positivism.

Churchland fails to face the possibility that, left to speakfor themselves and not dragooned into pre-existent philosophicaldebates, the cognitive sciences may invalidate not just this orthat theory of the mind but the metatheory that says that theindividual mind is the relevant unit for analyzing the mostinteresting features of knowledge. Churchland should havesuspected something from the fact that analytic epistemology andphilosophy of science have pursued separate research trajectoriessince the days of logical positivism. The problem of justifying ascientific theory is not a version of the problem of justifying anindividual's belief. In fact, philosophers of science have tendedto make a point of resisting an individualist interpretation oftheir project, for example, by denying any interest in scientificdiscovery and by making the objects of epistemic appraisal suchcrypto-social entities as "paradigms" (Kuhn), "researchprogrammes" (Lakatos), and "research traditions" (Laudan).Moreover, this tendency is not limited to the historicists. Backin the 1930s, Reichenbach (1938, pp. 3-16) came close toidentifying scientific epistemology with a normative sociology ofknowledge, while Popper (1968), as a reaction to the logicalpositivist tendency to ground knowledge in individual experience,emphasized the conventional, presumptive, and hence publiclyaccountable, character of so-called observation sentences. And

even perception has not been immune to the latent sociologism ofthe philosophers. Polanyi, Hanson, and Kuhn stressed the role ofperception in science only to show that each scientist'sperception is laden with a Weltanschauung that marks her as amember of a particular scientific community. Although thisWeltanschauung imparts a look to the world that it would otherwisenot have, it does not follow that the scientist has much voluntarycontrol over the look that is imparted (Suppe 1977, pp. 125-221).


8/36


8Very unlike Churchland's metatheory of the autonomous organism, on

this view at least the normal scientist is portrayed as

instantiating the collective consciousness of her community.

At this point, Churchland might counter that his residualcommitment to the autonomous cognizer is benignly consistent withcurrent psychological and neuroscientific research, which, for themost part, still studies individual organisms in laboratoryisolation. In addition, he could argue that the evidence againstthe ultimacy of individuals is by no means as conclusive as theevidence against the existence of beliefs and desires. Yet, allthat these responses could show is that the cognitive sciences areas yet just as unreflexive in its naturalism as philosophy. Thehistory of science has repeatedly overturned the idea that theultimate units of analysis for a given domain are individuals that

appear discrete to the naked eye. For, just as mid-sized objectstraveling at mid-speed turned out to be inappropriate forconceptualizing mass in physics, and similar-looking organismsturned out to be unsuitable for individuating species in biology,so too (I argue) the solitary cognizer is unlikely to proveadequate for understanding the nature of knowledge (cf. Hull 1974,p. 48; Fuller 1989, pp. 58-62). From the fact that an individualregisters the presence of knowledge in her utterances and otherbehaviors, it does not follow that she is the relevant causalsource of that knowledge. After all, a meter registers thepresence of electric current, but from that we would not inferthat the meter is the source of the current. Rather, the meterenables the current to be manifested to some appropriately trainedobserver. The medieval scholastics would have said that the "formof the current" was "communicated" from the meter to the observer.In more modern guise, the social epistemologist says that thecognizer is a better or worse vehicle (cf. Campbell 1989, part 6)for transmitting knowledge, depending on how the reception of itstransmissions by other vehicles stands up against relevantstandards of transmission. This is not the place to flesh out thisalternative picture (cf. Fuller 1989, pp. 82-88, 120-124). I justwant to drive home the negative point that the reflexivenaturalization of the mind would cast doubts on theappropriateness of the individual as the unit of analysis for thecognitive sciences.

It is a truism among historians of philosophy (cf. Rorty1979, ch. 3) that when rationalists like Descartes deemed theelements of thought "intuitively clear," they were treating ideasas if they had the clarity of individual objects moving in theforeground of one's visual field. For example, thecomprehensibility of an idea corresponded to the viewer's abilityto encompass an entire object in her line of vision without having


9/36


9to move; the combinatorial properties of the idea corresponded to

the viewed object's ability to bring about new situations by

interacting with other objects; and so forth. In short,rationalists have exploited the "positive analogy" betweenthinking and seeing, and philosophers, psychologists, and othersocial scientists continue to reap the benefits of thatexploitation, even after the rationalist project has beenofficially abandoned. Cognitive psychologists would find thispoint unremarkable, as it reflects the mind's tendency tocapitalize on heuristics, i.e. biases in how we think that playoff of our limitations (Wimsatt 1984, 1986). And so, althoughDescartes and his successors have been always quick to admit thatimmediate experience is an unreliable guide to ultimate reality,nevertheless they have had no choice but to use experience as acorrigible model for what reality might be. The question for the

cognitive psychologist, then, is when does the rationalist'sheuristic become more a hindrance than a help to further inquiry.

The heuristic in this case is the tendency to attributecausation to objects that move freely against a background inone's visual field. The heuristic works in everyday life becausethere we need a concept of causation to coordinate our actions inrelation to other things in the immediate environment. The thingsdeemed "causal" are the ones whose movements are likely to makesome difference to what we decide to do (cf. Kahneman 1973). Insuch settings, we generally do not need to speculate about whetherthe object's motion is sychronized with the motions of othervisually occluded or distant objects. Yet, a speculation of thissort is appropriate once we start wondering whether what we see isall that there is, that is, whether visually discriminable objectsare the right units for thinking systematically about reality.Although our intuitive notions about causation are ill-suited forsatisfying a metaphysical impulse of this sort, without anotherintuitively acceptable theory to act as corrective, these notionsfunction as a kind of default theory.

Contrary to what many philosophers seem to think, lack ofintuitive acceptability--and not lack of developedalternatives--has been the big cognitive obstacle facing thereinterpretation of the mobile individual as either an

instantiation or a part of some greater social process. Forexample, however much we may intellectually assent to theexplanatory potency of, say, socio-economic relations in humanaffairs, we still do not intuitively see the need to postulateclass differences in order to explain a single transaction thatmight be observed between two scientists in the laboratory. Whynot simply invoke the intentions of the specific parties involved,and avoid reference altogether to an occult entity like class? The


10/36


10plausibility of class as an explanatory principle grows with an

awareness that many such transactions occur in many places and

times that are systematically interconnected by counterfactuallyrealizable situations (e.g. if one party does not conform, thenthe other party can impose certain sanctions), the entirety ofwhich transcends the awareness of any of the individualsparticipating in or witnessing a particular transaction. But suchawareness has emerged slowly in our understanding of science. If adiscovery is made, a scientist is still credited; if fraud iscommitted, a scientist is still blamed. We may nod sagely thatthese events are "strictly speaking" the systemic effects of, say,class struggle acting "through" the scientists, but this learnedopinion does not undo our bias toward attributing causation towhatever moves something else. And, as far as the eye can see,people move apparatus, but class struggle does not move much of

anything in the lab.

4. The limited naturalism of experimental psychology

I have been arguing that the tendency to treat the individualorganism as the generative source of the behavior it manifests isa deeply intuitive one. Historically, this tendency was reinforcedby the institution of experiments in psychology, which exaggeratedthe foregrounding effects of ordinary vision by physicallyisolating the organism in the artificially sparse setting of thelaboratory. It was no accident that virtually all of the originalexperimental psychology laboratories were founded by professionalphilosophers and housed in philosophy departments for the firstfifty years of psychology's existence (roughly 1870-1920; cf. Ash& Woodward 1987). Once techniques were introduced in themid-nineteenth century to determine the increment of physicalstimulus necessary for altering a subject's sensory response,philosophers started to believe that they were on the verge ofquantifying the mind's grasp of the external world; hence, thename "psychophysics" was given to these techniques which soonformed the core methods of experimental psychology. But almostimmediately, every philosopher with an interest in psychologyrealized that psychophysics alone would not solve the problems ofepistemology. However, the philosophers differed over whypsychophysics was insufficient.

The two most powerful figures in late nineteenth centuryGerman psychology, Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Wundt, are nowadaysportrayed as exemplars of, respectively, geisteswissenschaftlichand naturwissenschaftlich approaches to the study of human beings(Fuller 1989, pp. 56-58). Nevertheless, they both agreed thatpsychophysical methods could not fathom higher order cognitiveprocesses because these processes, as products of culture, are


11/36


11supra-individual facts that can be accessed by the hermeneutical

understanding (Verstehen) of texts but not by the controlled

introspection of sensations in the psychology lab (Tweney 1989).Notice that, by this time, the experimental method had beenidentified with the study of isolated individuals, and hencerestricted to only those (sensory) features of human experiencethat are properly regarded as resulting from an individual'sdirect encounter with the world. This rare moment of agreementbetween Dilthey and Wundt served to create a stereotype about thelimited appropriateness of human experimentation that has nowlasted over a century. However, from our standpoint, the moreimportant arguments against the sufficiency of psychophysics tosolve the problems of epistemology were made by the now largelysuppressed opposition to Wundt and Dilthey, a variegated group of"proto-cognitivists" that included Franz Brentano and Alexius

Meinong, who founded the first two psychology laboratories inAustria, and, most influentially at the time, Wundt's researchassistant, Oswald Kuelpe (cf. Lindenfeld 1980). All of thesethinkers urged an expanded role for experimentation in the studyof human beings, in terms of both objects and methods.

The proto-cognitivists argued that the alleged limitations ofthe experimental method were an artifact of the epistemology thatimplicitly informed psychophysics, namely, the radical empiricismof the British associationist tradition. In the typicalpsychophysics experiment, a specific sensory modality isstimulated, eliciting a response from the subject that is reportedas an image consisting of primitive sensory qualities that aredirectly present to consciousness. Keep in mind that "subject" and"experimenter" usually exchanged roles and were sometimes one andthe same person (Danziger 1985, pp. 134-135). Since a subject hadto learn the right ways of reporting her experience before shecould participate in an experiment, she essentially internalizedthe experimenter's perspective as her own. Indeed, when subjectand experimenter were officially different people, the latter didlittle more than manipulate instruments. One drawback of thissocial arrangement, which became evident as psychology moved awayfrom its empiricist origins, was that it did not allow for thedistinct third-person perspective that is nowadays associated withthe experimenter's standpoint. Such a standpoint enables the

systematic study of features of the subject's thought processesthat would normally elude her own conscious awareness. The thrustof this point may be seen in an example with which both defendersand opponents of an epistemically relevant experimental psychologygrappled.

According to a standard reading of Hume, we infer causalrelations from nothing more substantial than the regular


12/36


12association of spatiotemporally proximate events. The

proto-cognitivists observed that Hume seemed to presume that all

that is given in experience are the objects (or "contents") ofexperience, and not the very act of experiencing. Admittedly, thiscorresponds to the standpoint of the psychophysics subject, whohas internalized a precise language for reporting her experiencein the "natural attitude," a language that preserves the fact thatwe normally have only peripheral awareness of the act ofexperiencing, that is to say, the "intentional character" of theexperience. However, the proto-cognitivists argued, what is onlyindirectly known to the subject may be more directly known to anobserving third-party who is able to ask the sorts of questionsthat will get the subject to attend more closely to these elusive,yet probably more fundamental, features of her experience (cf.Humphrey 1951). The proto-cognitivists realized that the sensory

and mental images that constitute most of our waking lives arenot, pace Hume and Wundt, ultimate units of psychic reality, butsimply the products of habitualized constraints on how the worldis made to appear to us. Change the constraints, and the subjectmay be able to reveal the conditions that give her everyday imagesfocus and meaning. Here the proto-cognitivists were unwittinglyreinacting Descartes' attempt to methodically distance himselffrom his ordinary habits of mind. However, by the late nineteenthcentury, the Cartesian project had been assimilated to aninternally prompted form introspection, instead of aself-administered set of protocols ("rules for the direction ofthe mind," as Descartes said of his own book) for penetrating thedeliveries of introspection (Scharff 1990).

All of this implied a more interventionist role for theexperimenter, one requiring the design of innovative tasks andprotocols, little of which would be directly tied to apparatus.The use of hypnosis (i.e. "the method of suggestion") duringpsychiatric treatment had already set a precedent for thispractice in the medical community (Danziger 1985, pp. 135-136).Both the psychiatrists and proto-cognitivists agreed that the keydeterminants of thought normally subsisted at a level removed fromthe subject's conscious experience. Interestingly, thepsychiatrists described this level as beneath consciousness,whereas the proto-cognitivists saw it more as a framing device

behind consciousness. Both, however, understood the unconsciousaspect of thought as giving direction to the subject's experience,often to the point of rigidly biasing it. When the biasfacilitated problem solving, it functioned as a mental set; whenthe bias impeded this process, it functioned as a neurosis (cf.Humprhey 1951). Moreover, this natural affinity between theproto-cognitivists and the psychiatrists was pursued from bothdirections. (For a recent revival of this affinity, cf.


13/36


13"computational psychiatry" in Colby & Stoller 1988). Not only did

Freud study with Brentano, but Kuelpe campaigned to transfer

psychology's academic assignment from philosophy to medicine (Ash1980).

Although the proto-cognitivists failed to convince most oftheir contemporaries of the value of experimentally studying thehigher thought processes, their impact has been diffusely felt inboth philosophy and psychology. For example, Karl Popper, who tookhis Ph.D. in educational psychology under Kuelpe's student, KarlBuehler, conceived of falsification as a compensatory strategy formental sets in scientific reasoning (Berkson & Wettersten 1984).And Herbert Simon has gone so far as to draw a direct line ofdescent from the problem-solving protocols developed in Kuelpe'sWuerzburg School to the ones commonly used in today's cognitive

psychology experiments (Baars 1986, pp. 365-366; cf. Ericsson &Simon 1984). Why, then, did the proto-cognitivists fail? Mydiagnosis is that they were unselfconscious of the sociologicalcharacter of their enterprise.

Consider the following objection to the proto-cognitiviststhat was also made of psychiatrists: If the experimenter canobserve deep features of the subject's psychology that normallyelude the subject's consciousness, could not a third party say thesame about the experimenter, in which case why trust theexperimenter's judgment any more than the subject's? Aside fromappealing to the experimenter's special psychological training,the proto-cognitivists had little to say by way of response, whichsuggests that they felt obliged to answer in terms of thecognitive powers of individuals. After all, they could have saidthat the objection only shows that there must be communicationbetween at least two people (e.g. experimenter and subject) beforeattributions of intentionality and the deeper features ofcognitive life can be made. In other words, in going beyond Wundtto standardize the two-person experiment, Kuelpe's WuerzburgSchool can be seen as having discovered the socially minimalenabling conditions for the emergence of cognition.

Moreover, as the structure of the objection itself implies,the addition of each new potential communicant into the

experimental situation enriches the contexts in which cognitiveproperties can be attributed, until, at the limit, the laboratorygroup is no longer a simulation, but an actual instance of thesort of "natural" cognition that ultimately interests thepsychologist (cf. Doise 1986). Conversely, when the communicantsare removed, the individual internally represents (or, better,re-enacts) the missing parties. This point can be most readilyseen in cases of group deliberation, where the sorts of comments


14/36


14that group members make to each other are rehearsed as

meta-commentary that an individual makes of her own thought.

Although it has been traditionally held that group interactionminimizes the level of individual reflectiveness, and henceprovides a degraded context for the study of cognition, recentexperimental work suggests that, rather, the "higher thoughtprocesses" associated with reflection is a stylized arrangement ofmultiple voices abstracted from the group (Clark & Stephenson1989; cf. Bazerman 1988, ch. 11).

The failure of proto-cognitivism was also bound up with theintrospective method's general loss of credibility withinexperimental psychology. Instrumental here was J.B. Watson's(1913) reductio that if the subjects in each German universitycould introspect in the professor's preferred categories, then

that only demonstrated the ease with which subjects can beconditioned to respond in a desirable manner--an implicit call tobehaviorism, if there ever was one! But, clearly, what doomedintrospection was not, as Watson had thought, the method'sgrounding in occult mental entities, but rather the failure of theearly psychology labs to agree on the techniques by which datawere generated and the language in which they were reported. Inshort, the introspectionists lacked "data domains" that could bereliably produced regardless of the psychological theory used toaccount for them (cf. Ackermann 1985, ch. 4). By contrast, in theseventeenth century, the founding secretaries of the French andBritish scientific societies, Marin Mersenne and Henry Oldenburg,made a concerted effort against the natural incommensurability of"philosophical systems" by standardizing the means by whichscientists presented their observations to each other, namely, bythe institution of the scientific journal (Dear 1985, 1988;Bazerman 1988, chs. 3-5). The goal was to have the community ofscientists in, respectively, France and Britain, constitute aliteral body of knowledge that transcended their differences ofopinion on metaphysics and other contestable issues. Mersenne andOldenburg succeeded by enabling each scientist to use the other asa potential source of information for his own research. In modernpsychological terms, the writings of one scientist could functionas an "external memory store" for another, who would then bereminded of some other observation or principle that would forge

the link between his research and that of the first scientist.Together, then, the scientific community embodied one "transactivememory" of the sort commonly seen today in research teams thatsuccessfully act as a unit (Wegner 1986). Inveterate philosophersto the end, the introspectionists never had a Mersenne or anOldenburg, and consequently the students' lab work seemed to dolittle more than to offer suggestive support for largerspeculative points in their major professor's system.


15/36


15

5. The limits of naturalism in analytic epistemology

In the 1950s, proto-cognitivism yielded two robustdisciplinary offspring. The more obvious one is experimentalcognitive psychology. The less obvious one is analyticepistemology, which learned well the lesson of data domainswithout acknowledging the lesson's sociological character andwhile forgetting the function of experiments.

Analytic epistemology first laid claim to the legacy ofproto-cognitivism when Roderick Chisholm recovered Brentano's andMeinong's work for the English-speaking world just after World WarII (cf. the footnotes in Chisholm 1966, a standard epistemologytextbook). The calling card of the analytic epistemologist is her

supposition that the problem of knowledge is to be solved byeliciting (one's own) intuitions about whether people would haveknowledge under a variety of conditions that are designed to testa proposed definition of knowledge, usually a sophisticatedversion of "justified true belief." Now, as it turns out, thesorts of conditions that end up surviving philosophical intuitionsare highly artificial ones, requiring that knowers be in the rightstate of mind, with just the right background beliefs, observingthe objects under just the right ambient conditions, and so forth.

While these intuitions are notoriously difficult to elicit fromone's undergraduate students, they flow easily and rigorously fromthe trained epistemologist. The original introspectionists wouldbe very impressed by the degree to which this inquiry has beenstandardized over the last thirty years, such that even the likesof Chisholm, Keith Lehrer, and Alvin Goldman, philosophers whodiffer substantially on their proposed definitions of knowledge(roughly, self-evidence vs. coherence vs. reliability as thejustificatory ground), nevertheless share a body of intuitionsabout the paradigmatic states of knowledge for which any adequatedefinition must account. In this context, the idea of individualsas mobile mnemonics that inform a common memory is especially apt,as analytic epistemologists form a close-knit subculture who,through frequent written and oral rehearsals of the test cases forknowledge, prime each other's intuitions into mutual conformity.As a psychologist of collective memory might expect, the only

other times in this century when intuitions (or basicobservations) played such an important role as philosophical datawere during the heydays of moral intuitionism at Oxbridge andlogical positivism at Vienna, each of which involved awell-defined highly interactive group whose members inferredtruths of universal scope from the character of their interaction(cf. Cohen 1986, esp. part 2). The significance that the communityof analytic epistemologists have attached to cultivating


16/36


16intuitions explain a still more puzzling feature of their

enterprise.

What analytic epistemology gained in standardization overproto-cognitivism, it lost by ignoring any criteria ofexperimental validity aside from the intersubjective agreement ofanalytic epistemologists. Happening upon an epistemologyconference, an experimental psychologist would most naturallyinterpret what the philosophers are doing when they are tradingintuitions as comparing recipes for producing knowledge in animaginary laboratory: e.g. if you put someone in this sort ofsituation, then the belief she is most likely to have about thisobject will constitute knowledge. But having made thisinterpretation, the psychologist will then be struck by the extentto which the epistemologists neglect the two crucial validity

questions, especially given their avowed normative aspirations(cf. Berkowitz & Donnerstein 1982):

(i) Ecological Validity: What is made of the fact that thesecontrived situations are highly unrepresentative of theconditions under which people try to make sense of the world?Could it mean that we have a lot less knowledge than wethought, or that we need to have knowledge a lot less than wethought, or maybe that what the epistemological recipe givesus is not knowledge after all?

(ii) External Validity: What steps could be taken to make ourordinary cognitive circumstances more like the artificial onein which knowledge is shown to be produced? Would theresults be worth the effort? In short, can a real worldknowledge enterprise--a science--be improved by teaching itspractitioners a particular theory of knowledge? If so, how?

If not, why not?

In section 1 of his contribution, Gorman has already weighed therelative significance of these two validity claims for anexperimental social epistemology. The point that needs to bestressed here is that both types of validity are routinely ignoredby analytic epistemologists. In effect, the epistemic predicament

of the analytic epistemologist is that of someone who gradesclassroom performance without ever having had any teachingexperience (cf. Fuller 1989, pp. 141-145).

But is the situation any better for the avowed naturalistsamong the analytic epistemologists? Consider the "ought impliescan" principle, the calling card of the analytic naturalist (e.g.Goldman 1986). According to this principle, the requirement to do


17/36


17something implies the ability to do it, or conversely, the

inability to do something implies that one is not required to do

it. Naturalists invoke this principle when arguing that that thereare empirical constraints on reasonable norms for human conduct,specifically, a theory of scientific rationality fails to becompelling unless human beings are cognitively capable of using itreliably. Interpreted in this way, "ought implies can" puts theexperimental psychologist in a position to empirically underminephilosophical theories of rationality. Indeed, some claim to haveundermined all the standard normative models of inductivereasoning (cf. Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky 1982), while an evenlonger tradition exists that casts aspersions on our abilities asdeductive reasoners (cf. Tweney 1981, parts 3-4). The most commonepistemological response to this line of research is to deny thevalidity of the experiments in one way or another, but in any case

to preserve the presumption that a theory of scientificrationality must apply to an individual human being. Philosophershedge against potential refutations by using thecompetence-performance distinction to argue that these experiments(or experiments in general) do not tap deeply enough into thecompetences that tacitly inform an individual's everyday life (cf.Cohen 1981). In other words, the picture of the autonomousorganism exerts a strong enough grip on the thinking ofcontemporary analytic naturalists that they would rather renege onmuch of their naturalism--especially the susceptibility of theirtheories to empirical test--than relinquish their commitment tothe individual as the seat of cognitive power. (We shall see, inthe next section, that this criticism applies no less tosociologists.)

The social epistemologist prefers another interpretation of"ought implies can," one that preserves the integrity of theexperimental method but dislodges it from the grip of theautonomous organism. It starts by taking the "ought" side of theprinciple somewhat more in Kant's original spirit than analyticnaturalists have been inclined to do. Kant (e.g. 1938, p. 290)first proposed "ought implies can" as part of an argument for theexistence of a moral faculty that enables us to do the sorts ofthings required by the categorical imperative. Translated intonaturalistic terms, this means that a norm governs a realm of

entities, the identity of which is a matter for empirical inquiryto decide (cf. Fuller 1989, pp. 85-102). Now pair this point withthe tendency, especially among philosophers of science, to expressepistemic norms as counterfactuals. That is, normative accounts ofscientific rationality are typically defended on the grounds thathad they been followed, certain epistemically desirable outcomeswould have resulted. This explains the great popularity amongphilosophers of rationally reconstructed histories, which


18/36


18typically define the relevant outcomes in terms of theory choices

that would have consistently moved the research trajectory of the

past closer to the science of today (cf. Lakatos 1979). In caseswhere such claims are plausible, it would be foolish to dismiss atheory of rationality simply because certain historical figuresdid not in fact use the theory or even because human beings arenot cognitively well-disposed to use it (cf. Fuller 1991b) . Butneither do we need to deny these facts in order to shelter thetheory from revision. Rather, the facts should lead us to concludethat perhaps the isolated individual is not the unit of analysisto which the theory applies.

A good case in point, one in which Gorman and his associateshave been heavily involved, pertains to Popper's falsificationprinciple (cf. sections 2.1 and 2.5.1 of Gorman's contribution to

this volume). Popper held that if scientists had always chosen thetheory that had overcome the most attempts at falsification,science would have progressed at a faster rate than it in facthas. Now, someone interested in increasing the rationality ofscience, or the quality of its knowledge products, needs to asknot whether Popper's assertion is entirely true, but ratherwhether it is true enough so as to be in the interest of scienceto manifest more falsificationist tendencies. Notice that the word"science" is operating here as a placeholder for whatever unitturns out to be the appropriate one for falsificationism to work.There is a clear role for experimentation in determining the sizeof this unit. For example, the psychological evidence suggeststhat individuals are both cognitively and motivationallyill-disposed toward falsifying hypotheses that they themselvesgenerate. However, subjects can learn to become better falsifiers,and thereby improve their performance on rule discovery tasks thatmodel some of the basic features of scientific reasoning. Thatalready introduces a level of normative intervention thattranscends the aspirations of the typical epistemologist.

Of course, it remains an empirically open question whetherthe learning techniques used in, say, Gorman's lab can betransferred to the workplaces of real scientists with comparableimprovements. Yet, at their most prescriptive, philosophers tendto suppose that individual scientists ought to be taught

falsificationism (or whatever happens to be the chosen theory ofrationality) until it becomes second nature. But if individualsare as resistant to rationality as the experimental evidencesuggests, then it is probably more efficient to aim to compensatefor cognitive deficiencies than to eliminate them outright. Inother words, where the reasoner cannot be changed, change thereasoner's environment (cf. Fuller 1989, pp. 141-151). After all,this is how experimental design is supposed to overcome the


19/36


19cognitive deficiencies of the experimenter! In the case of

scientists as subjects, relevant compensatory mechanisms may

include altering the incentive structure of science so thatscientists come to think that trying to falsify their ownhypotheses is in their own best personal interest (and not merelyin the interest of science as a collective enterprise) orconceiving of falsification as a social strategy whereby eachindividual is her own bold conjecturer but her neighbor's rigorousrefuter (cf. Faust 1985). An advantage of the latter idea is thatit makes a virtue out of another cognitive adversity that socialpsychologists have found, namely, the human tendency tounderestimate one's own level of error, while overestimating theerrors of others (Jones et al. 1987).

6. The limited naturalism of ethnomethodology

As Gorman has already observed in this volume, althoughartificiality is often counted as a mark against the experimentalmethod, defenders of experiment have traditionally countedartificiality in its favor, since they have realized that thepoint of experiment is to compensate for the cognitive biasesbuilt into normal observation that would normally prevent us frompenetrating the phenomena. For example, if I notice that the vastmajority of scientists swear by the hypothetico-deductive method,if I am also of an experimental turn of mind, I will then wonderwhether that degree of convergence might be an artifact of theconditions that prompted them to issue their opinions. After all,(philosophy) textbook views of scientific method are easy to holdif one tends to talk about method only in contexts far removedfrom actual research. In that case, a change of conditions mightchange the tenor of the scientists' responses. The risk that isrun by not experimenting, especially on human beings, should beclear: namely, a failure to realize the extent to which theroutine settings of everyday life constrain the opportunities forpeople to express all that they might, both individually andcollectively.

The strategic advantage afforded by experimental interventionmay be seen in a large scale social phenomenon like scienceitself, a proper understanding of which requires studying the

interaction of "macro" and "micro" perspectives on human behavior(cf. Knorr-Cetina & Cicourel 1981). The macro level is thesystems-theorist's bird's-eye view of the regularly governedsociety, the tables of statistically normal behaviors that testifyto the capacity of norms to stereotype the actions of individualsinto functionally interdependent role-expectations. But if normsare the means by which individuals are mobilized for the benefitof society, they are equally the means by which individuals


20/36


20mobilize societal resources for their own benefit, in the course

of which the norms may themselves (unwittingly) change. At this

point, we have reached the micro level of the ethnomethodologist,who strategically intervenes to reveal the array of motivationsand competences hidden behind normal behavior (Turner 1975).Ethnomethodologists are notorious for maintaining that even themost universally shared forms of behavior do not run very deep inhuman beings, as they are more the product of the routinizedsettings that call for such behavior than of some incorrigiblefeature of the human psyche. And while ethnomethodologists are onrecord as being among the staunchest critics of experimentation,their opinion on this issue is very much one with theexperimentalist.

Consider the role of "being a scientist," which is manifested

across disciplines both in the rhetorical uniformity of scientificwriting and in convergent expectations about the scientist'spersonal behavior. Can this uniformity and convergence be observedin the same people outside of the settings in which they aretypically held to be accountable as scientists? This is a naturalquestion for both experimentalist and ethnomethodologist to ask.The difference between them comes in the ethnomethodologist'sexpectation that the setting would not have to be altered verymuch for a significantly different behavioral response to beelicited from the scientists under study. This point is usuallycast in terms of the radically conventional character of socialbehavior, such that people behave like scientists only in thosesituations in which such behavior is expected of them. In theprivacy of their own labs, say, the scientists become totallydifferent people. For her part, the experimentalist need notpresume the truth of such a radical conventionalism, but maychoose to treat it as a hypothesis whose level of empiricalsupport will probably vary, depending on the kind of behaviorunder study.

Despite their obvious affinities with the experimental turnof mind, ethnomethodologists are generally suspicious ofexperiments. A brief look at the tenor of their objections revealsboth blindness and insight into how experiments work. Common tothese objections is the observation that experiments are

themselves social situations associated with a host of conventionsand role expectations: e.g. the subject must respond within theconstraints of the experimental protocols, the experimenter is thefinal authority on the experiment's interpretation, etc. I havealready alluded to some of the interesting historical work thathas been done on the early battles fought to institutionalize thetwo-person experiment as a valid means of obtaining knowledgeabout humans. The implication often drawn from these histories is


21/36


21that experimental situations are typically contrived so as to

cause subjects to behave in ways that will enable the experimenter

to assert that people generally have certain incorrigibletendencies, even though these tendencies would never have emergedin more natural settings. In one sense, this should count againstthe ecological, or even the external, validity of the experimentalresult. Yet, experimentalists have historically been able to turnthe tables and use the very elusiveness of these tendencies ineveryday life as grounds for increasing the power of psychologiststo study and monitor people even more closely, both in and out ofthe lab (cf. Morawski 1988). In effect, a methodological adversityhas been converted into a political virtue. The experimenterunreflectively (or is it deliberately?) attributes the effectproduced in the lab to a tendency in the subject rather than to atendency in the situation defined by the interaction of subject

and experimenter. By erasing her own presence from theauthoritative interpretation she gives to this situation, theexperimenter implicitly absolves herself from any causal or moralresponsibility for what the subject has done.

But does this "ethno-historical" critique argue against theepistemic legitimacy of experiment per se, or, rather, against onevery entrenched way of interpreting the outcome of an experiment,namely, as revealing the hidden character of the individualsubject? Clearly, I would claim the latter, and, moreover, wouldtrace the persistence of this interpretation to the failure ofexperimenters to apply their own work to themselves. After all,they were the ones who originally identified the biases in causalattribution in social contexts (e.g. Nisbett & Ross 1980), aninstance of which must be the experimenter's own analysis of asubject's behavior.

It is doubly ironic, then, that most ethnomethodologicallyinspired critics of experiments (e.g. Cicourel 1964, Harre &Secord 1979) turn to so-called natural settings as appropriate forhighlighting the capacities of the autonomous individual. In thefirst place, artifice is hardly eliminated from the naturalsetting, as may be quickly seen by focusing on the interpretiveartifice required to give someone "the benefit of the doubt."Perhaps the most common of all ordinary interpretive principles,

it involves imagining that had a natural situation been slightlydifferent, the person's behavior would have more closelyapproximated some normative standard. Indeed, this ongoing,largely unconscious, process of rational reconstruction mayexplain why our memories tend to be stereotyped (or idealized, asthe case may be; cf. Kruglanski 1989, ch. 3).

Second, and more importantly, the ethnomethodologists are no


22/36


22different from Churchland in failing to challenge the visually

biased ontology--the foregrounded mobile organism is still the

principal cause of its own behavior--but the background has nowchanged to something more visually familiar. Notice that thisresponse marks a retreat from the ethno-historical critique ofexperiment, since it would seem now that when people are in theirnative habitats, society merely enables the display of theirpowers, but does not actually constitute them. The latter, whichentails a more thoroughgoing sociologism, would require showingthat claims about the existence of innate or fixed humancapacities have depended crucially on agreement over paradigmcases of competent performance and standards for measuring thedistance of particular performances from those cases, all ofwhich, in turn, have been made possible by the existence ofinstitutions desgined to discipline those capacities. It is no

accident that the oldest faculties of the liberal arts--logic,grammar, mathematics--should be the ones most often proposed astapping into such capacities (cf. Gellatly 1989). Could it be thathistorically humanity became first acquainted with its most innateand fixed cognitive capacities and then only later with thecapacities that are subject to change and convention because theyrequire "specialized training"? Or, is it rather more likely thatthe disciplines with the longest histories of imprinting andeliciting their forms of knowledge are the ones that turn out todefine canonical performances of cognitive competence moregenerally (cf. Hoskin & Macve 1986)? State the choice that way,and clearly the latter is the more plausible scenario.

7. Towards an experimental constructivist sociology of science

It is now time to be more positive in our efforts to definean experimental social epistemology. In sections 2.5 and 2.6 ofhis contribution to this volume, Gorman has outlined the rudimentsof an experimental research program for investigating the issuesthat most concern social epistemology, namely, the transmissionand reception of knowledge (cf. Fuller 1988, esp. parts 2-3). Hisdiscussion focuses on experiments that were designed to track thereproduction of certain normative standards, an especiallypertinent issue given the considerations raised at the end of thelast section. Another complement of experiments, performed mostly

by European social psychologists, tracks the conditions in whichpeople are regarded as originators, transformers, or simply usersof knowledge available to a group (cf. Wicklund 1989). However,none of these studies truly addresses the concerns of the mostradical sociologists of science, the "constructivists," whoserhetoric has been most hostile to any rapprochement withphilosophy and psychology in forging a "cognitive science ofscience" (e.g. Woolgar 1989). In the remainder of this paper, I


23/36


23will meet this hostility with an extended proposal for an

experimental framework that incorporates constructivist concerns.

The most common experimental setting for studying science isto have subjects solve problems that share some of the featuresthat are thought to be salient in the problems that scientistssolve. Not only does this identification of scientific reasoningwith problem-solving have a distinguished pedigree in behaviorist,Gestalt, and contemporary cognitive psychology studies ofthinking, but it also has the endorsement of philosophers ofscience as otherwise diverse as Carnap, Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, andLaudan--all of whom assume that scientific inquiry is best seen asa sophisticated exercise in problem-solving. However,constructivists in the sociology of science (e.g. Woolgar 1988)have critiqued this entire approach as begging the question in

favor of an "autonomous" or "internalist" conception of science,one in which problems are unambiguously given to scientists asworthy of solution because of the clear place that the problemsoccupy in the larger edifice of scientific knowledge.Psychologists reproduce this bias when, in designing theirexperiments, they simplify the real working conditions ofscientists, especially when they try (and presume to havesucceeded in) presenting subjects with a clear-cut, non-negotiabletask along with "background information," rudimentary cognitivetools such as blackboards and calculators, but no access to otherpeople with potentially useful skills (cf. Lesgold 1988).

When confronted with this criticism, psychologists may beinclined to respond in a way that serves to reinforce theinternal-external (or cognitive-social, as it is nowadays oftenput) distinction that the constructivists are trying to subvert.The psychologist may take the criticism as simply a call tosupplement the laboratory situation with additional factors thatbring the subjects' problem-solving task closer to the sort oftask that normally faces scientists. This call for greaterecological validity may include motivating the task by giving thesubject a vested interest in her solving the problem within acertain amount of time or before some competitor does. And whilethe addition of these factors undoubtedly improves the ecologicalvalidity of the psychologist's experiment, it does not get to the

heart of the constructivist's concerns. For all that thepsychologist has admitted at this point is that there are materialconstraints within which problems must be normally solved. Callthese constraints "motivational," "social," or "political," theyare nevertheless conceptualized as things external, and hencesuperadded, to the core cognitive processes proper toproblem-solving (cf. Thagard 1989). But in denying theinternal-external distinction, the constructivist means to be


24/36


24making the stronger claim that these constraints are actually

constitutive of the cognitive processes themselves. How can this

point be made in an experimental setting?

As might be expected, when the constructivist talks about"problems," it is usually about their construction rather thantheir solution. This already sheds some light on how theexperiment ought to be designed: namely, subjects should beallowed to construct a problem out of a set of material (andhuman) resources, rather than be given a problem prepackaged bythe experimenter. In other words, it would be better to treatsubjects more like Koehler treated his apes than Thorndike treatedhis cats (Fuller 1988, p. 199). But what motivates this shift inemphasis? For the constructivist, the most interesting featureabout "problem-solving" in science is not the discovery of a

solution but the discovery of a problem. We are led to believe,especially by Callon (1980), that most of the real cognitive workoccurs at the planning stages of scientific research, during whichthe team director determines the best way to mobilize all of herresources to make the biggest impact on the scientific community.The most obvious point at which such thinking takes place is inthe formulation of research grant proposals. But in the actualcourse of research, the problem is also subtly reconstructed tofit changes in resources, personnel, the state of competition,and, of course, new data and analyses--though these factors arenot as neatly parceled as one might think. For example, data mayacquire new significance, once a team member has been lured to thecompetition, which then forces the team to reconstruct the pointof their project so as to maximize the remaining resources.Ultimately, a grant renewal deadline turns out to determine theexact nature of the team's accomplishment, since at that point theresearch director is forced to construct a problem-solvingnarrative that makes it seem as though the team had taken the mostefficient course of action toward some predetermined goal--a goalthat the team might not have acknowledged as paramount or evenimportant a few weeks earlier. Once problem-solving is seen inthis light, it should be clear why constructivists find the usualfocus on "solving" misguided, since the problems that scientistsexplicitly set out to solve are really themselves temporary andcorrigible solutions to the ongoing meta-problem of managing

laboratory life and the impressions it makes to the outside world(cf. Lindlbom & Cohen 1979).

The staunch internalist might protest that all we have hereis an admittedly sophisticated account of external constraints onproblem-solving that do not touch the cognitive processes thathave traditionally interested philosophers and psychologists. Tosupport her suspicions, the internalist could point to the


25/36


25difference in the way she and her constructivist foe describe the

laboratory situation. Where the internalist sees theories being

tested, the constructivist sees resources being mobilized. But atthe meta-level, where the internalist sees two differentactivities, one involving theories and the other resources, theconstructivist sees the same activity under two differentdescriptions (Fuller 1989, pp. 25-29). If, as psychologists, wewant to take seriously the constructivist's claim that theinternal-external distinction makes no real difference (cf. Latour& Woolgar 1986, postscript), then we must design experiments wheretalk of theories and talk of resources turn out to be alternativeways of characterizing laboratory life. Specifically, subjectsshould work on something that enables them to alternate betweenthe two types of talk as they see fit. This does not meanabandoning experimental protocols, but rather developing protocols

that do not bias the subject's verbal reports in one of these twoways. We can then compare the circumstances under which subjectsnaturally use theory-talk and resource-talk.

Taking a cue from Callon (1980) and his collaborators inactor-network theory, the best circumstances for comparing the twotypes of talk are when explicit translations need to be effected.For example, Callon points out that one of the first things that aresearch director must do is to construct the "socio-logic" of theproblem that her team is about to tackle. That is, she needs tointerrelate people and tasks. Now, there are two ways in which theresearch director might think about this process:

(1) She might assign tasks to people (or "map" tasks "onto"people), which involves thinking of the team as a fixed unitdivided into parts (people), each of whom may perform one orseveral of the tasks required for solving the problem.

(2) She might assign people to tasks (or "map" people "onto"tasks), which involves thinking of the problem as a fixedunit divided into parts (tasks), each of which can beexecuted by one or several people in the team.

The subtle difference between (1) and (2) is, in fact, quite

profound, as it marks the moment at which theory-talk andresource-talk become complementary ways of viewing the samephenomenon. In (1), the research team itself is seen as settingthe ultimate constraints on problem-solving. In effect, thescarcity of talent and inclination determines which problems getsolved. Clearly, this is to think about things from an"externalist" standpoint, one in which the business ofproblem-solving itself turns out to be a highly negotiable


26/36


26enterprise. By contrast, in (2), the nature of the problem sets

the ultimate constraints on how manpower is deployed. The relevant

"scarcity" here pertains to the limitations imposed on the ways inwhich the problem may be legitimately solved: e.g. it must bederivable from certain standing theories and compatible with othertheories and findings (cf. Nickles 1980). Clearly, we have here an"internalist" construal of what is at stake, one in which theenergies of the team are deployed in whatever ways it takes to getthe job done. A vivid way of casting the difference between (1)and (2) is to imagine the research director in (1) using a tablewith the academic track records of the members of her team as thebasis for deciding which problem to tackle, and the researchdirector in (2) using a flow chart of a hypothesized procedure fortackling an unsolved problem as the basis for deciding who shoulddo what.

The difference between (1) and (2) suggests a reason whyinternalists tend to denigrate sociological considerations, whileexternalists return the compliment by denigrating philosophicalones. The research director who models her situation as in (1)presumes that people can solve any number of problems, dependingon their ability and inclination to work with each other.Consequently, the sorts of problem-solving flow charts endemic tocognitive science research is unlikely to impress the directorunless she can envisage who would be doing the job prescribed byeach of the little boxes on the chart. However, the researchdirector in (2) thinks of matters much differently. She isunlikely to worry as much about the division and coordination oflabor because she reckons that if the problem depicted on the flowchart is both soluble and worth solving, then there are a varietyof ways in which people can be arranged to work on it (cf.Prentice-Dunn & Rogers 1989, on the phenomenon of "deindividuated"labor). This difference is replayed, in exaggerated form, when wemove from the research director's office to the departments ofphilosophy and sociology. When philosophers of science talk abouta theory saving phenomena or solving problems, they are typicallynot concerned with the people and circumstances involved in thetheory's use, since such information would seem to be incidentalto whether the theory "really" saves or solves. And, sociologistsrarely dwell on these philosophical matters because they see

theories as inherently meaningless tokens that are exchanged in agame of power. Put somewhat more positively, they are prone tothink that virtually any theory can be shown to work if the rightsort of effort is mobilized on its behalf.

Notice that although my arguments have been based on anexample drawn from the initial stages of research, it would bemisleading to conclude that the research team is permanently


27/36


27locked into the mindset represented by either (1) or (2)--contrary

to what defenders of internalist and externalist approaches to

science might think. The psychologist should only expect thatsubjects will alternate between models as the situation demands.Of particular interest will be how the subjects reconstruct theentire problem-solving session after the experiment is over, forit is then that the most translation between models is likely totake place. As they recount what happened during the experiment,do the subjects make it seem as though the cognitive is made tobend to the social, or vice versa? Assuming that the experimenterhas also been observing the problem-solving session, thedebriefing session may offer considerable insight into the aspectsof laboratory life that are more and less susceptible to rationalreconstruction, thereby enabling historians to make more informedinferences from a scientist's notebooks and articles to the events

putatively described.

Now let us suppose that the psychologist defines the aboveexperimental situation more strictly by dividing up the subjectsinto two groups, one explicitly instructed to act as the researchdirector does in (1) and the other to act as she does in (2).Although each group would still be working on a challengingproblem, an epistemologically interesting aspect of the challengewould drop out, namely, the aspect that comes from subjects havingto alternate between orthogonal ways of organizing research. Whenthe experiment was more open-ended, subjects were confronted withthe mutual interference of cognitive and social factors: e.g. teammembers who refused to work together, even though each had skillsthat were necessary for assembling a solution to a problem.However, once one set of factors is portrayed as indefinitelyplastic to the fixed needs of the other set, it becomes easy tosee science as either socially or cognitively determined,depending on whether subjects are instructed in (1) or (2). Thus,by restricting the subject's considerations to either social orcognitive factors, the experimenter in fact relieves the subject'sreal world epistemic burden. In military circles, this lighteningof the load would be readily recognized as indicative of themovement, in Clausewitz's (1968) terms, from the standpoint ofKritik to that of Theorie, a sure-fire way of jeopardizing one'schances of winning a war (Wills 1983). In conclusion, I propose to

take seriously Latour's Clausewitzian maxim that "science ispolitics by other means," as well as the military metaphors thatpepper his writings and those of his sociological colleagues (e.g.Callon & Latour 1981), for they may be read as implicit warningsto the experimentalist not to put her subjects in a position ofmerely theorizing about, rather than genuinely organizing,scientific research.


28/36


28Clausewitz argued that strategists in the past have given

tactically poor advice, and even lost entire wars, because they

imagined that a rational approach to war required a "militaryscience" whose theoretical perspective would be comparable to thatof the other sciences. Clausewitz's diagnosis here can be read asan attempt to locate the limitations inherent in the rationalistheuristic of modeling cognition on vision. The strategist's errorconsists in taking the metaphor of theories as "mirrors" or"points of view" too literally. As a result, two quite differentprinciples of interrelating objects are conflated, which afterPiaget (1971) may be termed spatio-temporal andlogico-mathematical. The former refers to interrelations based onthe objects' physical distance from one another, whereas thelatter refers to interrelations based on properties that theobjects share with other objects not necessarily in the immediate

vicinity. While the cartographer must explicitly negotiate betweenthese two principles whenever she designs a map (cf. Robinson &Petchenik 1976), most philosophers and sociologists unwittinglyconflate the principles in their theorizing.

Consider the difference between bottom-up and top-downtheoretical orientations. The metaphor suggests, respectively, awidening and a narrowing of the theorist's angle of vision (cf. DeMey 1982, ch. 10). It is as if higher-order concepts, laws, andstructures were things that could be actually seen (like an aerialview of a marching band that forms its school's name), if onestood far enough away from an entire domain of phenomena. This isthe systems-theorist's bird's-eye view, against which theexperimentalist and ethnomethodologist were earlier portrayed asjoined in common cause. Conversely, lower-order concepts, atomicsensations, and micro-interactions are supposed to appear as thetheorist intensifies her gaze on a specific part of the domain(cf. Capek 1961). Ubiquitous talk of structures as "emergent" anddata as "foundational" just reinforces this conflated image. Theimage is conflated, of course, because the farther back one standsfrom a field of micro-objects, the less distinct those objectsbecome, but not necessarily because they are yielding to somestable overarching pattern of macro-objects. If anything,enlarging one's perspective on the field should reveal long-termuncertainties and opportunities that were obscured by the

immediacy of day-to-day combat. This is the method of Kritik. Inessence, then, Clausewitz's military strategist errs because shejumps too quickly from a spatio-temporal to a logico-mathematicalorientation, and as a result, fails to realize that a war is wonnot by seeing one's own plans as the emergent structure of thebattefield, but rather by remaining open to new courses of actionthat are suggested by seeing the field from different locations.


29/36


29As a reflexively Clausewitzian thinker, Latour (esp. 1987)

both portrays successful scientists as masters of Kritik, not

Theorie, and casts in this light his own success at capturing"scientists in action." In particular, Latour avoids anyontological commitments to macro-objects, at least macro-objectsthat exist at a level of reality "above" micro-objects. However,this does not mean that he is an ordinary empiricist orpositivist. Pace Quine, while Latour's world is flat, it isnevertheless densely populated with entities. For example, ascientific law is not something that theoretically hovers in aworld above the data, but rather it exists side-by-side as part ofa long and resilient network, the actors in which (producers ofdata) have their interests served by allowing the law to speak ontheir behalf--that is, to represent them. (The price one pays, inthe Latourian picture, for abandoning the cognition-as-vision

metaphor, is to assume that the mind and the politician"represent" in the same sense. Cf. Pitkin 1972; Fuller 1988, pp.36-45.) How are actors enrolled in such a network? AlthoughLatour characteristically eschews anything that would smack of atheory of enrollment, some insight may be gleaned from Piaget'saccount of how the child's cognitive orientation evolves fromspatio-temporal principles to logico-mathematical ones.

According to Piaget, the child moves from a spatio-temporalto a logico-mathematical orientation when she becomes able torearrange objects to her liking, which typically involves groupingcertain objects together and separating them from others. In thisway, primitive set theoretic relations of inclusion and exclusionemerge. Because the material character of the objects offerslittle resistance to her manipulative efforts, the child can playwith the objects without concern for the consequences of herinteraction with them. The successful theorist is likewise one whoproposes, say, a lawlike generalization that manages to replacethe interests of a vast number of actors (i.e. producers of thedata subsumed under the law) with her own, as a result of thoseactors coming to accept (or at least, to not object to) theredescription they receive under the law. In short, they offer noresistance, and the disparateness of their original interests canbe contained in a Latourian "black box" (cf. Latour 1986).However, most real world theorists do not succeed in this task

because actors provide interminable resistance, which reminds thetheorists that objects exist not only in the logico-mathematicalworld of theoretical manipulation but in the spatio-temporal worldof alternative interests and agendas. The prominence given to thisfact in the first formulation of the problem constructionexperiment affords it a greater advantage in studying science as aprocess than the methodologically tighter second version of theexperiment, which only succeeds at approximating the conditions


30/36


30needed for theorizing science as determined by either social or

cognitive factors exclusively.

Acknowledgements: The oral version of this paper was subject to aspirited discussion at

minnesota studies volume paper

Documents