Sources of Reconstruction: The Internal and the External

The lack of any simple equivalent to chance mutations throws up an analogical stumbling-block when we consider scientific development as a process of reconstruc­tion of knowledge. The distinction between system and environment also raises dif­ficulties when we consider the rationale for such a progressive reconstruction. For systems theory, progressive reconstruction (or an increase in complexity) is the system's response to a hypercomplex environment to which it adapts by increasing its own degree of complexity. More specifically, the internal reconstruction of a system results from a difference in complexity between system and environment.

But in scientific investigation, the accelerated reconstruction of scientific products is

The Scientist as a Practical Reasoner 15

itself the issue of work—it is endogenous to scientific production. As we have seen, it results from the purposive and directional effort of scientists oriented toward the pro­duction of new information as defined relative to discursive problematisations. Where, then, do we locate the environmental challenge we need?

Systems theorists would probably choose to see science as a subsystem of society specifically designed and "differentiated" (in Luhmann's sense)⁵² to solve the pro­blems of complexity in some more global system, say an industrialising society. Science, in this view, becomes the instance of modern society in which a certain kind of complexification (technological?) is institutionalised, in which complexification is manufactured for modern society, with the social sciences perhaps specialising in human organisation. The reconstruction and diversification of scientific knowledge becomes a system goal to be distinguished from questions of adaptation. However, if the reconstruction of interest here is endogenous to the solution, the role of the en­vironment with respect to this reconstruction becomes obscure.⁵³

The difficulty remains even if we switch from the notion of environmental adapta­tion to that of environmental selection, as required by the biological analogy. In Toulmin's model, the distinction between system and environment seems to corres­pond to the distinction between the "internal" world of science and the "external" af­fairs of a wider social context. Yet the logic of events is reversed: we do not get, first, a science-internal production of variants (innovations), and then a societal selection of those variants most well adapted to the social context. According to Toulmin, the pro­duction of innovations is influenced by external factors through various channels, whereas their selective survival is regulated by the internal decisions of the scientific community (at least under normal and ideal conditions).

It is absurd, of course, to assume an opposite division of labour in which innovations are internally produced by scientists and externally selected by the non-scientific members of a society. Yet it is not clear why the former distinction, in which selective power is limited to scientists while external influences are limited to the process of research production, should necessarily be more compelling—if for no other reason than that the locus of selection is itself in the laboratory where it cannot be separated from the process of production. Thus, factors which influence the production of new information will also influence the selective solidification of previous information from which the new, to a significant degree, is derived. If the model of an evolutionary development of science emphasises (correctly, I think) that the content of a pool of cognitive variants at a given point in science is the product of "internal" and "exter­nal" factors, it cannot claim simultaneously that the selection of these variants—which largely occurs during the production of the variants themselves—is an exclusively "in­ternal" matter.

The idea of environmental adaptation, and the distinction between system and en­vironment it presupposes, create difficulties within the system theory analogy of science because complexification appears less as a response of the system to an external context than as a constitutive characteristic of scientific work itself. In the evolutionary analogy, the idea of environmental selection—and the separation it creates between the process of production and the process of selective survival of innovations— brings about difficulties because production and selective survival are hopelessly inter­mingled in the laboratory; consequently, each must be affected by the model's "inter­nal" factors as well as by the environmental (or "external") ones.

16 The Manufacture of Knowledge

Apart from these specific problems, we must deal with the more general fact that, unlike organisms, social systems do not have clearly defined boundaries with regard to some social environment of the system.⁵⁴ Social studies of science have long suffered from this difficulty, as demonstrated by the varying use of the internal/external dichotomy in analogy to a system/environment distinction. As noted by Kühn, the distinction has been "lived with rather than studied",⁵⁵ and occasional controversies over the meaning of the distinction make it clear that different authors have lived with it in very different ways.⁵⁶ System theory makes a partial recognition of the difficulty by emphasising that boundary maintenance itself is at stake in social systems.

The fights among professional interest groups for legally sanctioned boundaries to define their professional authority and set conditions of access to the profession im­mediately come to mind as an example of such boundary regulating endeavours. Along with individual scientists' everyday distinctions between "we" and "they", or between matters of "science" and matters of something else, there are degrees of freedom in­volved in these disputes, just as there are in the social scientist's various re-generations of the distinction. Yet I see no reason to assume a priori that the degrees of freedom between one disciplinary speciality and another are necessarily less than the degrees of freedom between scientists who work in a field and non-scientists who represent a social (or political, or economic) interest in the field. Indeed, if we counted their respective interactions and communications, and if we considered the interests invoked in laboratory selections, we would most likely get the opposite impression.

Degrees of freedom as manifest in perceived borderlines are seen here as a function of the self-organising process itself. They interest us only with respect to the selections of the laboratory, leading (in Chapter 4) to the notion of transscientific—rather than scientific—fields. Putting aside the distinction between an internal scientific system and an external social environment (or between an environment-influenced process of production and an internal scientific process of selection), we shall consider the undif-ferentiated context from which the constructions of the laboratory emerge. Rather than seek the origin of indeterminacy in the individual and that of directional change in the decisions of the social group, we shall place the root of indeterminacy within the social context with its symbolic and interactional quality, and leave the origin of pur­posive and directional behaviour with the individual to whom it belongs.⁵⁷ We will see the symbolic and the interactional manifest themselves in the selections of the laboratory, which marks the process of scientific investigation as constructive rather than descriptive.

The decision-translations through which the selections of the laboratory are produced refer us to the context in which they are embedded. The selective interpretations of the laboratory are situationally and contextually contingent. In this way, the process of "natural selection" can be reconceived as one of contextual reconstruction in which the internal and the external are not analytically separated. In the chapters which follow, I shall attempt to establish the symbolic, contextually contingent and construc­tive character of the scientific manufacture of knowledge I have introduced here. The analogies of neo-systems theory and biological evolution have given us a plausible argument for a contextual interpretation of scientific change and for the role which in­determinacy plays in the process. In so far as these analogies tend to lead us into the trap of predetermined distinctions that prove inadequate to the actual analysis of scien­tific practice, my recourse to them is at best half-hearted.

The Scientist as a Practical Reasoner 17

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