Facts and Fabrications

The Manufacture

Of Knowledge

An Essay on the Constructivist

and Contextual Nature of Science

by

KARIN D. KNORR-CETINA

Department of Sociology

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Oxford: Pergamon Press. ©1981

Chapter 1

The Scientist as a Practical Reasoner:

Introduction to a Constructivist and

Contextual Theory of Knowledge

My lord, facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough, they generally run away.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Facts and Fabrications

Dorothy Sayers' analogy between cows and facts hides both a philosophical and a methodological point. Since both will guide us throughout this book, I will begin by discussing each at some length. The philosophical point is that facts are not something we can take for granted or think of as the solid rock upon which knowledge is built. Actually, their nature is rather problematic—so much so that confrontation often scares them off. The methodological point is that the confrontation has to be long, hard and direct. Like cows, facts have become sufficiently domesticated to deal with run-of-the-mill events.

That facts are indeed problematic has been known to philosophers for quite some time. Indeed, the quest for the nature of facts—the core of the quest for the nature of knowledge—is a major reason for the proliferation of epistemological theories. The key dispute is where to locate the problem, and how to approach it. Kant, for example, saw the quest as a search for the conditions of possibility of pure science, and found his answer in the categorical make-up of the human mind. In marked contrast, one of to­day's much discussed concepts sees the core of the problem not in the human mind, but in social history. Its proposal is to search out the social relations of production from which the nature of knowledge is thought to originate.¹

Recent theories of knowledge have tended to transfer the problem from a knowing subject's constitution of the factual to a variety of other locations. Most influential, perhaps, is the shift toward the logic of scientific inference advocated by what some have called objectivism.² To the objectivist, the world is composed of facts and the goal of knowledge is to provide a literal account of what that world is like.³ The em­pirical laws and theoretical propositions of science are designed to provide those literal descriptions. If empirical laws and theoretical propositions literally describe an exter­nal world of facticity, then an enquiry into the meaning and connection of "facts" becomes an enquiry into the meaning and connection of laws and propositions. If the knowledge of scientific accounts is reality represented by science, then an enquiry into the nature of the "real" becomes an investigation of how the logic of scientific ac­counts preserves the lawlike structure of the real.⁴

2 The Manufacture of Knowledge

But there are other positions. To the anti-realist, for example, it is precisely this last question which needs to be reversed.⁵ Why should our interest-geared, instrumentally-generated world order mirror some inherent structure in nature? The problem of fac-ticity is not external to science, but internal to knowledge itself. Science, says Feyera­bend, is nothing but one family of beliefs equal to any other family of beliefs.⁶ Systems of belief develop within social and historical contexts. Thus, the study of facticity is the study of history and social life. But if science, like the magic of the Azande, is merely a belief system, the objectivist might argue, can we not infer that the two are inter­changeable? And if this position is unthinkable, does it not imply that the argument itself is a naive form of scepticism, inconsistent with itself in the sense that it disregards

the very social and historical context it otherwise postulates to establish the relativity of knowledge? According to Marx, the mark of idealism is to forget that reality is con­structed neither accidentally nor under conditions of free choice.⁷ In view of what can be explained by positions like the scepticist's "anything goes",⁸ realism has been called the only concept "that doesn't make the success of science a miracle".⁹

Can we say, then, that the problem of facticity is to be located in the correspondence between the products of science and the external world, and that the solution is to be found in the descriptive adequacy of scientific procedure? There is more than one negative answer to such a proposal. To begin with, while objectivism (in accordance with Marx) stresses the constraints (here identified with nature) which limit the pro­ducts of science, it is itself oblivious to the constituted character of these products, Peirce has made it the point of his work to argue that the process of scientific enquiry ignored by objectivism (its "context of discovery") is itself the system of reference which makes the objectification of reality possible.¹⁰

Thus, the problem of facticity is as much a problem of the constitution of the world through the logic of scientific procedure as it is one of explanation and validation. While the work of Bohm, Hanson, Kuhn and Feyerabend may not have resulted in a satisfactory model of scientific success, it is generally credited with pointing to the meaning variance or theory dependence of scientific observation. This meaning variance is another aspect of the active constitution of facticity through science, and one most disturbing for objectivism.¹¹

Equally relevant here is the fact that models of success which do not require the basic assumptions of objectivism are both thinkable and plausible, and have been proposed within the sciences themselves. Psychiatrists, for example, have often used behavioural therapy to successfully treat both major and minor psychic disorders for which they claim not to have nor to need any descriptively adequate explanation.¹² A better illustration, perhaps, is the mouse that runs from the cat.¹³ Must we assume that the mouse runs because it has in its mind a correct representation of the natural enmity inherent in the cat? Or is it not more plausible to say that any species which fails to run from its natural enemies will cease to exist, which leaves us only with those that did run? Like the progress of evolution itself, the progress of science can be linked to mechanisms which do not assume that knowledge mimics nature.

Finally, objectivism has been criticised within its own ranks for assuming a factual world structured in a lawlike manner by the constant conjunction of events. According to this critique, constant conjunctions of events result from laboratory work which creates closed systems in which unambiguous results are possible and repeatable. But in practice, such constant conjunctions are the rare exceptions—as is predictive success.¹⁴

The Scientist as a Practical Reasoner 3

Consequently, the laws proposed by science are transfactual and rule-like, rather than descriptively adequate. Thus, the practical success of science depends more upon the scientist's ability to analyse a situation as a whole, to think on several different levels at once, to recognise clues, and to piece together disparate bits of information, than upon the laws themselves. As with any game, winning depends less upon the rules than on what is done within the space created by those rules.

Bhaskar's analysis suggests that there is no necessary link between the "success of science" and the assumptions made by empirical realism, and that, indeed, the success of science may have to be explained on grounds very different from the thesis of symmetry between prediction and explanation. His "transcendental realism" adds another aspect to the constitutive role which both pragmatism and scepticism attribute to scientific investigation, i.e. that the experimenter is a causal agent of the sequence of events created, and that conjunctions of events are not provided for us but created by us.^ls At the same time, he holds that the questions which man puts to nature must be phrased in a language that nature "understands" and takes the instruments of science as "devices designed to decipher the vocabulary of nature".¹⁶

The purpose of the present study is to explore how those constanl conjunctions are created in the laboratory (suspending for the moment any assumptions about the vocabulary of nature). Rather than view empirical observation as questions put to nature in a language she understands, we will take all references to the "constitutive" role of science seriously, and regard scientific enquiry as a process of production. Rather than considering scientific products as somehow capturing what is, we will consider them as selectively carved out, transformed and constructed from whatever is. And rather than examine the external relations between science and the "nature" we are told it describes, we will look at those internal affairs of scientific enterprise which we take to be constructive.¹¹

The etymology of the word "fact" reveals a fact as "that-which has been made", in accord with its root in the Latin facere, to make.¹⁸ Yet we tend to think of scientific "facts" as given entities, and not as fabrications. In the present study, the problem of facticity is relocated and seen as a problem of (laboratory) fabrication. Clearly, then, we step beyond philosophical theories of knowledge and their objectivist (or ami-objectivist) concerns. But I would argue that once we see scientific products as first and foremost the result of a process of construction, we can begin to substitute for those concerns, as some have suggested, an empirical theory of knowledge.¹⁹

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