The Laboratory: Context of Discovery or Context of Validation?

To view scientific investigation as constructive rather than descriptive is to see scien­tific products as highly internally constructed in terms of the selectivity they incor­porate. To study scientific investigation, then, is to study the process by which the respective selections are made. Does such a study simply shift the focus of analysis from the philosophers' context of justification to that of the generation of ideas? Or from the sociologists' realm of consensus formation to the origin of the discoveries about which an opinion is formed?

Unfortunately, such distinctions as that between discovery and validation tend to embarrass, rather than help, the social scientist who actually begins to look at scientific investigation. But why should this be the case? Are we not actually leaving the context of justification to study the process of scientific result fabrication when we enter a laboratory? Are we not justified in assuming that discovery and validation are separate processes, each independent of the other? The social scientist is embarrassed because the answer is no.

Let us begin with the philosopher's contention that validation is in practice a process of rational consensus formation within the scientific community.²⁶ Since the validators who form this community are presumably independent of the producers of knowledge, their critical judgement constitutes an objective basis of validation. However, if we look at the process of knowledge production in sufficient detail, it turns out that scien­tists constantly relate their decisions and selections to the expected response of specific members of this community of "validators", or to the dictates of the journal in which they wish to publish. Decisions are based on what is "hot" and what is "out", on what one "can" or "cannot" do, on whom they will come up against and with whom they will have to associate by making a specific point. In short, the discoveries of the laboratory are made, as part and parcel of their substance, with a view toward poten­tial criticism or acceptance (as well as with respect to potential allies and enemies!).

At the same time, one finds that validations are made with an eye toward the genesis of the results being validated. Whether a proposed knowledge claim is judged plausible or implausible, interesting, unbelievable or nonsensical, may depend upon who proposed the result, where the work was done, and how it was accomplished. Scientists speak about the motives and interests²⁷which presumably gave rise to the "finding", about the material resources available to those who did the research, and about "who stands behind" the results. They virtually identify the results (and we will come back to this soon) with the cir­cumstances of their generation. Thus, it is the scientific community itself which lends crucial weight to the context of discovery in response to a knowledge claim.

On a more general level, we must recognise that both the producers and the evaluators of knowledge claims are, according to those who favour the distinction between discovery and validation, generally members of the same "community". Thus, they are held to share a common stock of knowledge and procedures, and presumably common standards of evaluation, professional preferences, and ways of making a judgement. Furthermore, the validators of a knowledge claim are, at the same time, clients who potentially need a scientific result in order to promote their own investigations. We have already said that the selections of previous research become a resource for continuing scientific operations, as well as being a topic of problematisation in further research. So the validators of a knowledge claim are often the most "dangerous" competitors and antagonists a scientist

8 The Manufacture of Knowledge

has in the struggle for credit and scientific authority.

What else does it mean when the head of a widely recognised research group says that his grant proposal has been rejected because "there are only two strong groups in the area, ourselves and MIT. So we get every one of their important proposals to review, and they get ours. Of course they don't want me to go ahead, because money is scarce. "²⁸ The point is that the producers and validators who share methods and approaches, the pro­ducers and clients who need each other's services, and the competitors engaged in a strug­gle for credit or money cannot at the same time be assumed to be independent and, in that sense, objectively critical. Any separation between discovery and validation along these lines is not borne out if we look at scientific practice.

There is a second critique of the separation which should be made clear. We have heard that validation or acceptance, in practice, is seen as a process of consensus formation qualified as "rational" by some philosophers, and "social" by sociologists of science. But whether rational or social, the process appears to be one of opinion formation, and as such, located somewhere else than within scientific investigation itself. Hence, the usual classification of studies of investigation as enquiries into the context of discovery, with lit­tle or no concern for problems of validation, leading to the well-known thesis that studies of the production of knowledge in the laboratory are irrelevant to questions of accep­tance.

But where do we find the process of validation, to any significant degree, if not in the laboratory itself?²⁹ If not in the process of laboratory decision-making by which a previous result, a method or a proposed interpretation, comes to be preferred over others and incorporated into new results? What is the process of acceptance if not one of selec­tive incorporation of previous results into the ongoing process of research production? To call it a process of opinion formation seems to provoke a host of erroneous connotations.

We do not as yet have science courts for official opinion formation with legislative power in the conduct of future research. To view consensus as the aggregate of individual scientific opinions is misleading, since (a) short of regular opinion polls we have no access to the predominant, general or average opinions of relevant scientists, and (b) it is a com­monplace in sociology that opinions have a complex and largely unknown relationship to action. So even if we knew what scientists' opinions were, we would not know which results would be consistently preferred in actual research. What we have, then, is not a process of opinion formation, but one in which certain results are solidified through con­tinued incorporation into ongoing research. This means that the locus of solidification is the process of scientific investigation, or in the terms introduced earlier, the selections through which research results are constructed in the laboratory.

To be sure, scientists do express opinions about the results of others in a variety of contexts: lunchtime chats, discussions following a speech, or in regard to an article which someone has just read and found reason to comment on. But these opinions are arguments which depend on the context of articulation. They are not necessarily consistent within different contexts, nor do they always reflect the selections which will be made in the laboratory. It is these latter which, over time, will be transformed into the "confirmed facts" and the "technical achievements" attributed to a science. Consequently, it is the process of production and reproduction of research in the laboratory we must look at in order to study the very "context of justification".³⁰

The Scientist as a Practical Reasoner 9

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