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Abstract
We outline the political implications of the program known as the ‘Third Wave of Science Studies’. Here we develop the politics of the Third Wave showing how it bears on technological decision-making in the public domain. The main concern is to combat ‘technological populism’. The prescriptions that emerge include asking and answering as many technical questions as is reasonable and giving these questions and answers the maximum exposure before making what is always a political decision. The implication is a preference for democracies which actively promote discussion and debate of technical matters yet which reject populism of all kinds while still rejecting technocracy. Central to the overt politics of the Third Wave is ‘elective modernism’ which includes scientific values among those which should be at the heart of a good society.
Acknowledgments
This paper was written following an invitation from Professor Frank Fischer. We are grateful to him for the opportunity to discuss the political implications of the Third Wave. As noted in the main text, a longer version of this paper, entitled ‘The politics of the Third Wave and elective modernism’, can be found at http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/expertise. The main differences between the two versions are that the extended version includes a more detailed response to the criticisms of our work that have emerged from STS, including some suggestions about how we may have contributed to the manifest misunderstandings of our intentions, and the analysis of the additional examples listed in the main text.
Notes
1. The paper was called the ‘Third Wave’ because the authors believed that the history of science studies could be seen as comprising two prior waves. The first of these was based on the absolute authority of science that grew from the success of the exact sciences during and immediately after World War II. The second was the reaction to this which ‘deconstructed’ the idea that science had any special authority and gave rise to some of the new uncertainty about science. Among the early contributors to this movement was one of the authors of this paper (see Collins Citation1975, Citation1992, Collins and Pinch Citation1998). As noted at the time, Wave Three was supposed run alongside Wave Two, not subsume it, especially as the authors continue to contribute to Wave Two (Collins Citation2004, 2011).
2. ‘Technological decision-making in the public domain’ is the term we will try to use consistently. It refers to political decision-making processes that depend to a significant degree on scientific or technical knowledge. This meaning of the term might overlap or even be congruous with other terms such as ‘governance of science’ (Fuller Citation1999), ‘science and technology governance’ (Bora and Hausendorf Citation2008), ‘science in policy’ (Brooks Citation1964, Citation1984), ‘risk decisions’ (Fiorino Citation1990), ‘technically-based policy issues’ (Fiorino Citation1989), science-based policy-making’ (Irwin Citation2001), ‘public issues that involve technical expertise’ (Wynne Citation2007), ‘technical decisions’ (Krimsky Citation1984a), ‘scientific and technical decision-making’ (Martin and Richards Citation1995), ‘science-intensive policy’ (Cozzens and Woodhouse Citation1995), and ‘technological policy-making in the public realm’ (Fischer Citation2009).
3. Social Studies of Science, in which the paper was published, is the most impactful journal in the STS area according to citation based measures and, as of autumn 2009, the Third Wave is the most cited paper in the journal since its publication by a factor of 4 and, unusually, citations continue to increase year-on-year. Even in the calendar year 2008 (the latest figure available) the Third Wave was downloaded twice as often as the next most downloaded paper while the publisher's table shows that the other papers that appear on the list of ‘high downloads’ for 2008 have all been published relatively recently. Outside of sociology, the ideas have so far been applied in areas including criminology (Edwards and Sheptycki Citation2009), journalism (Boyce Citation2006, Citation2007), agriculture (Carolan Citation2006), psychology (Gorman Citation2008, Schilhab Citation2007), philosophy (Selinger et al. Citation2007) marine conservation (Jenkins Citation2007) and other places indicated by the papers extensive positive citations. It would be wrong not to point out, however, that some of the bibliographic impact was due to the initially heated opposition to the paper in the established heartland of STS. Early negative responses include three papers published in Social Studies of Science (Jasanoff Citation2003, Rip Citation2003 and Wynne Citation2003) – see Collins and Evans (Citation2003) for a response. More recently, Frank Fischer has published a lengthy critique of the initial formulation of the work (Fischer Citation2009).
4. The paper is motivated in part by our reading of Fischer (Citation2009) who does make an attempt to set the Third Wave into a policy context.
5. It is important to emphasize that the Third Wave does not see increased public participation in politics as problematic as long as extensive opportunities for debate and learning prior to decision-making are provided. Unfortunately, critics of the Third Wave such as Wynne (Citation2003, 2007) and Fischer (Citation2009) do not seem to recognize the distinction between public participation in science and public participation that informs the Third Wave approach.
6. The problem seems to be that the concept of specialist expertise is usually only deconstructed, but never re-constructed. The ‘baby’ of specialist expertise is therefore thrown out with the ‘bathwater’ of deconstruction. Without a re-constructed concept of expertise it is difficult to see how the extension of the notion of ‘specialist’ to everyone is to be avoided; this of course would mean that there were no specialists left.
7. This claim was based on the outcome of a series of focus group meetings, the discussions being well-documented in the report. The authors unashamedly assimilate moral choice and choice of lifestyle with technical judgment. ‘In general, the anxieties were more pronounced the closer particular proposals came to challenging people's sense of an established moral order’ (Economic and Social Research Council 1999, pp. 16–17). ‘There was a feeling that scientific and technical interventions moved food even further from its (desirable) natural state’ (p. 7). The distrust of GMOs, was also based on an ‘instinctual’ [the word is used approvingly in the report] distrust of the ‘unnatural’. This is documented on page after page of quotations from focus group members in an annex to the report (p. 37) as well as in the report's analytic main body.
8. The term ‘populism’ is used extensively in this paper. Here we define it as a political or social program appealing directly to the opinion of the mass of the people in the absence of informed debate. The ‘folk wisdom’ view, exemplified in the quote from the ESRC document mentioned above, holds that ordinary people are as wise or wiser in matters of science and technology than scientists and technologists themselves. Krimsky (Citation1984a), who uses the term ‘folk wisdom’ differently, is aware of its epistemological limits. For a description of more sources of what can be termed the ‘folk wisdom’ view in modern social studies of science see Kusch (Citation2007).
9. For discussions of the Third Wave and citizen participation see Evans (Citation2004) and Evans and Plows (Citation2007).
10. The term ‘formative intentions’ is taken from Collins and Kusch (Citation1998). Formative intentions – which can also be referred to as ‘vocabularies of motive’ – are the legitimate ways of intending to do things that characterize a social group. For example, in the UK it is a legitimate formative intention to dance to win a medal but not to bring on rain. The content of science's distinct form of life is discussed below under ‘elective modernism’.
11. Actually, this is one of the most recent arguments belonging to the Third Wave program (for more see http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/expertise) but we put it first because separating science from other activities comes first in the logical sequence of things.
12. This is quite compatible with action programs that aim to increase the numbers of, say, minorities doing science because these are inherent the norm of science known as ‘universalism’. Science should be socially balanced so as to even out intrinsic political biases but the activities of scientists as scientists cannot be overtly political.
13. The ‘technical phase’ refers to the making of technical knowledge in expert communities and seems to correspond to Fischer's ‘technical decision-making inside the expert communities’ or, as Wynne(Citation2007) has put it, to ‘expert technical debate’. The ‘political phase’ is more or less synonymous with Fischer's ‘technical decision-making in the public domain’ as it is both public and concerned with political policy-making.
14. See Collins and Evans (Citation2007) for an explanation of what is meant by expertises being ‘real’.
15. Needless to say, there will be much argument about who knows what they are talking about and what it is they should be talking about. As Wynne (Citation2007, p. 108)says: ‘[T]he collective societal definition of what the issues and concerns are which should enjoy priority public attention and attempted resolution [are] not unconnected with specialist technical expertises, and where appropriate it should be informed by these, but it does not at all reduce to this’. In so far as this quotation represents Wynne's position, what he writes could be our position. What Wynne's work, along with most of the ‘participatory turn’, lacks, and what the Third Wave is trying to add, are: (a) a method and framework for investigating the meaning of expert in the phrase ‘specialist technical experts’ and (b) the distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic politics and between technical and political phases as a basis for thinking about the meaning of ‘where appropriate’.
16. Contrary to what Collins and Evans had in mind, Fischer (Citation2009, p. 146) interprets ‘scientism4’ as advocating the ‘unreflected adoption’ of all sorts of technologies, whether their use is contested or not. Fischer's reading of scientism4 overlooks the distinction between political and technical phase of technological decision-making in the public domain. Scientism4 is compatible with Fischer's interpretation (Citation2009, p. 147): ‘Western technological culture, however, could also mean a culture that accepts the positive advantages of scientific technologies but still considers their place in democratic society, where citizens would ask whether they want to implement certain technologies, and, if so, how.’
17. In retrospect, the authors would never have written the Third Wave in the first place if they had not been informed by something like elective modernism. Why be concerned with the degradation of the notion of expertise and the rise of technological populism if one did not have a preference for the preservation of a society which treated scientific values as central?
18. By this we simply mean that public and political pressure should have no influence on the conclusions reached in the technical phase. Lysenkoism is the best known example of what happens when these values are not observed.
19. It does not matter whether this is truly the case or not; what matters is that we have to know whether it is the case.
20. It must bear ‘reasonably’ because it is possible to ask an indefinite number of technical questions about anything.
21. There are many variants of democracy (see e.g. Barber Citation1984, Held Citation1999) and the Third Wave is compatible with a range of them.
22. This does not mean that every passage of scientific work exhibits the norms and it certainly does not mean that democracy is co-extensive with science. Science has many other subsidiary norms to do with its special subject matter and special investigative methods; democracy is distinguished by values and norms that have nothing to do with science – such as moral imperatives which have to do with the special value of human life.
23. The only reason that capital punishment has not returned to the UK; according to a recent poll the majority of the UK's population would welcome its return (Conlan Citation2009).
24. As we have stated throughout, this does not mean that the Third Wave favors technocracy – on the contrary, it is explicitly against it.
25. See Collins and Evans (Citation2007), Collins (Citation2010b), Collins (Citation2011, ‘Envoi’) and ‘Elective Modernism’, available from: http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/expertise [Accessed January 2010].
26. See also Collins (Citation2010a) for an analysis of the meaning of the tacit knowledge which underlies the Periodic Table.
27. This example refers to South African President Thabo Mbeki, who in 1999 publicly claimed that he had read on the internet that AZT might not be safe (e.g. Nattrass Citation2007, Weinel Citation2007, Cullinan and Thom Citation2009). Mbeki's unfounded claims delayed the introduction of drug-based programs to reduce the risk of mother-to-child transmission by more than two and a half years and, according to recent estimates, are likely to have cost in excess of 30,000 lives (Chigwedere et al. Citation2008, Nattrass Citation2008).