The Contextuality of Laboratory Construction

Let us dwell for a moment on the idea that to study the process of production of research in the laboratory is in fact to study part of the context of justification, or acceptance. The incorporation of an earlier result into the ongoing process of investigation is seen as a potential step toward solidification. The selection of an available method or interpretation extends its presence (for example, into one more publication) and prolongs its duration. It thereby increases the chances of its further selection and incorporation. An important question, then, is how these selections are made.

Let us first consider what the scientists themselves say when asked such a question. Much as in the case where one scientist evaluates another's work, we are referred to the specific situation in which the decision was made. When we ask, for example, why a particular instrument was chosen for a certain purpose, the response may range from "Because it's expensive and rare, and I want to get to know it", to "It's more economical in terms of energy"; from "John suggested it and showed me how to use it", to "It happened to be around, so it was the easiest thing to do"; from "What I had in mind didn't work, so I tried something new", to "They asked me to use this because it's just been bought and we have to show that we needed it"; from "It always works, according to my experience", to an astonished stare and the question, "Well, what else could you do?"

From the few examples above, it is obvious that these factors have different roots and different implications, that they rise from different points in the scientists' problematisation preceding a decision, and that they reside on different levels of generality. Taken together, they refer us to the varying situations which the scientists recall as grounds for their decisions. The existence of an energy crisis, or of the presence of a friend with a suggestion; a failure which triggers a variation in procedure, or a purchase which needs to be justified; a personal "experience" composed of the particulars of a scientific career, or official practice at a given point in time. It seems clear that we cannot hope to reduce these situations to a small number of criteria, much less a principle of rationality, which will allow us henceforth to predict a scientist's laboratory selections. Rather, we will have to take these selections as the product of the co-occurrence and interaction of factors whose impact and relevance they happen to constitute at a given time and place, i.e., of the circumstances within which the scien­tists operate.

Historians have long portrayed scientists' decisions as contingent upon the historical context in which they are situated, and some recent arguments in the philosophy of science also point in this direction.³¹ If we take the idea of contextual contingency one step further to suggest that acceptance is a form of environmental selection analogous to the model of biological evolution, we have a plausible alternative to the model of (rational) opinion formation. Like adaptation, acceptance can be seen as the result of contextual pressures which come to bear on the scientists' selections in the environmental niches provided by the laboratories. If such an interpretation is take for granted in biological evolution, why is it not an equally plausible characterisation of the process of selective "survival" of scientific results? It certainly has the advantage of specifying as potentially relevant the larger social context in which science is embedded and of which the scientists' decisions form a part.

10 The Manufacture of Knowledge

But it also has a disadvantage. If we cannot name, once and for all, the criteria according to which scientific results are chosen or eliminated, we are unable to say which selections scientists are most likely to make.³² If the context of selection varies over time and place and as a function of previous selection, the rationale for scientific selections will likewise vary. If we add to these variable contextures the chance interactions of circumstantial variables from which selections crystallise, we cannot hope to arrive at generally valid observations about these crystallisations. In short, we are left with the somewhat disheartening picture of an indeterminate contextual variation and a social scientist who cannot provide any definite specification of it. Consequently, those who have advocated this direction in the recent past have been accused of handing science over to the reign of irrationality, and ruling out the idea of directed or progressive scientific change.³³

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