The Cognitive and the Practical Reasoner

The closest approach to a description of the practical concerns of scientific action can be found in the literature of the cognitive sociology of science. Ever since the debates which followed Kuhn's theory of scientific revolution, social studies of science have emphasised that the cognitive (or technical, scientific) aspects of science must be included in its empirical investigation; to look simply at the social aspects of scientific organisation and communication has been considered insufficient. Scientific practice is marked by cognitive concerns, and we cannot hope to understand it without giving them due consideration.⁷⁸

The most influential line of research developed since is the study of speciality institutionalisation, whose cognitive components can be traced back to the paradigm-ingredients noted by Kühn (1970). For example, Whitley (1975) states that these components consist of the research practices, techniques, explanatory models, speciality concerns and metaphysical values or beliefs which underly an area's research activities. Weingart (1976) forms a hierarchy of relevant cognitive elements from conceptual schemes, artifact paradigms (or classical problem solutions), acknowledged scientific achievements, metaphysical paradigms and values.

Subsequent studies have tended to define their goals in accord with Whitley (1972), both in terms of how the social and cognitive components interact in the production of knowledge, and in the relationship between different forms of cognitive (scientific) knowledge and society. Until recently, the former question was dominant⁷⁹ and led to a series of contemporary and historical studies of discipline or speciality formation.⁸⁰

What we have advocated here is a second line of research which has just begun to emerge, ⁸¹ but which is equally interested in a more comprehensive study of science. It differs from the first by its choice of direct anthropological observation of scientists at work, making it somewhat akin to the microscopic studies of various aspects of scien­tific experimentation and argumentation advocated by Collins (1975) and Bloor (1976). One consequence of the observational approach seems to be a reaffirmation of doubts about the usefulness of the social-cognitive dichotomy.

The dichotomy can be challenged on several grounds. First, as Bourdieu (1975a: 22 f.) has argued, scientific or cognitive strategies are also political strategies. Every scien­tific choice (whether a method or a place of publication) can be seen as an investment strategy objectively directed at a maximisation of scientific profits, i.e., an increase in social authority and recognition.⁸²

Second, as Bloor has noted, the distinction between social and scientific is used to

The Scientist as a Practical Reasoner 23

separate the bias, fraud or distortion arising out of social influences, from what is ob­jective or true and has cognitive roots.⁸³ And it is used in this way not only by in­vestigators of science, but by scientists themselves, which implies that the social cognitive dichotomy must be considered first as a resource of strategic interaction.⁸⁴

Third, there is the problem of separating social and cognitive factors in a situation, such as the policy field, where many areas have been "scientised" (ver­wissenschaftlicht) by the hegemony of science (Küppers et al., 1978: 16). Before the mutual influence of social and cognitive variables can be determined, they must first be conceived of and measured independently.

Finally, Latour and Woolgar (1979: 32) have pointed out that the social/cognitive distinction prevents the social scientist from examining its role within scientific ac­tivities themselves. Furthermore, if some of these activities are prejudged as cognitive or technical matters, they may be spared any substantial, sociological investigation. While there is no necessary reason for this to happen, the actual practice of social studies of science seems to support the contention. For example, Weingart (1976: 51) has suggested that cognitive sociology of science has as yet to wait for a systematic (and presumably satisfactory) conceptualisation of the cognitive components of science.

But if it has not yet provided an adequate concept of the scientists' most substantial concerns, the cognitive sociology of science has stimulated the investigation of those concerns as part of the social study of science. Such urgings are taken to heart in the direct observation of the methods of producing and reproducing knowledge advocated here, for the focus is precisely on those activities of science called cognitive, and the methodical objective is to grasp them as closely and sensitively as possible.

Realising these goals renders the social/cognitive dichotomy obsolete. Distinctions between the cognitive and the social, the technical and the career-relevant, the scientific and the non-scientific are constantly blurred and redrawn in the laboratory. Further­more, traffic between social and technical or scientific areas is itself a subject of scien­tific negotiation: today's socially produced knowledge claim may be tomorrow's technical scientific finding, and vice versa.

Non-scientific matters become "scientised", not merely in areas of policy, but within the laboratory as well. In order to realise our interest in the scientists' "cognitive" concerns (rather than their social relations), we must view actual laboratory activities indiscriminately. To grasp the meaning of those activities, we must engage ourselves in laboratory reasoning, which reveals the scientist to be a practical reasoner who refuses to be split into social and technical personalities. What emerges from this reasoning is the practices of knowledge production, and not some abstract social or cognitive ingredients. The question of how knowledge is produced and reproduced asks nothing more (and nothing less) than a theory of such practices.

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