“科学对科学的看法是一种科学”,想当然吧


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送交者: habpi 于 2006-11-18, 21:16:42:

回答: 看来,这个地方不对路子。 由 worldbioforum 于 2006-11-18, 21:00:21:

下面是Christopher Kelty文章里的一段。看一下是不是实质一些。
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Doing Science

Is science like open source/free software? Yes, but not necessarily so. There
are far too many examples in science of secrecy, meanness, Machiavellian
plotting, and downright thievery for us to believe the prettied-up claim
that science is inherently characterized by openness and freedom. Curi-
ously, this claim is becoming increasingly accurate. From the sixteenth
century on, norms and forms of openness have improved and evolved
alongside the material successes of science and technology. The creation
of institutions that safeguard openness, peer review, trust, and reputation
is coincident with the rise and dominance of scientific and technical exper-
tise today. The myth of a scientific genius toiling away in an isolated lab,
discovering the truths of nature, bears little resemblance to the historically
situated and fundamentally social scene of Robert Boyle demonstrating his
air pump before the assembled Royal Society. Though it is easy to show
how political, how contextual, or how “socially constructed” science is,
this is not the point I am making (for some canonical references in this
field, see Bloor 1976; Barnes 1977; Collins 1985; Pickering 1984; Latour
1986; Haraway 1997). Rather, the point is that the creation and mainte-
nance of the institutions of science over the last 400 years has been a long,
tortured, and occasionally successful attempt to give science the character
of truth, openness, and objectivity that it promises. However, we are not
there yet, and no scientists are free from the obligation of continuing this
pursuit.
One compelling study of how science has become analogous to the
OS/FS movements is the work of Robert K. Merton, the American sociolo-
gist who first attempted to think through what he called the “normative
structure of science”—a sociological account of scientific action that
focused on the reward system and the ethos of science (Merton 1973). The
ethos of science (not unlike the famous “Hacker Ethic,” Himanen 2001) is
that set of norms and forms of life that structure the activity of scientists
across nations, disciplines, organizations, or cultures. Merton identified
four norms: universalism, communism (Merton’s word), disinterestedness,
and organized skepticism.
These norms are informal, which is to say that they are only communi-
cated to you by your becoming part of the scientific establishment—they
are not written down, and are neither legally nor technically binding
(along the same lines as “You are a hacker when another hacker calls you
a hacker”). However, despite the informal character of these norms, the
institutions of science as we know them are formally structured around
them. For example, communism requires a communication structure that
allows the communally owned property—ideas, formulae, data, or results
—to be disseminated: journals, letters, libraries, university postal systems,
standards, protocols, and some more or less explicit notion of a public
domain.
Or, another example. The norm, disinterestedness, is not an issue of
egoism or altruism, but an institutional design issue. For disinterestedness
to function at all, science must be closed off and separate from other parts
of society, so that accountability is first and primarily to peers, not to man-
agers, funders, or the public—even if this norm is continually under assault
both from within and without. Similarly, organized skepticism is not
simply methodological (whether Cartesian doubt or acceptable “p” values),
but institutional as well—meaning that the norms of the institution of
science must be such that they explicitly, if not exactly legally, promote
the ability to maintain dissent even in the face of political power. Other-
wise, truth is quickly compromised.
To take a historical example, consider Robert Boyle, as told by Steven
Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) in Leviathan and the Air Pump. Boyle’s
genius lay not only in his formulation of laws concerning the relation of
temperature, pressure and volume (a significant achievement in itself),
according to Shapin and Schaffer, Boyle’s activities also transformed the
rules of modern experimentalism, of “witnessing” and of the means for
establishing modern facts. Boyle’s experimental air pump was seventeenth-
century “big science.” It required Boyle’s significant fortune (he was, after
all, the son of the Earl of Cork), access to master glass blowers and crafts-
men, a network of aristocratic gentlemen interested in questions of natural
philosophy, metaphysics, and physics. Perhaps most importantly, it
required the Royal Society—a place where members gathered to observe,
test, and “debug” (if you will) the claims of its members. It was a space by
no means open to everyone (not truly public—and this is part of the
famous dispute with Thomas Hobbes, which Shapin and Schaffer address
in this book), because only certain people could be assumed to share the
same language of understanding and conventions of assessment. This is a
shortcoming that OS/FS shares with Boyle’s age, especially regarding the
relative absence of women; the importance of gender in Boyle’s case is
documented in (Potter 2001); there is much speculation, but little scholar-
ship to explain it in the case of OS/FS.
To draw a parallel with OS/FS here, the Royal Society is in some ways
the analog of the CVS repository: demonstrations (software builds), regular
meetings of members (participation in mailing list discussion), and inde-
pendent testing and verification are important structural characteristics
they have in common. They both require a common language (or several),
both natural and artificial.
Hackers often like to insist that the best software is obvious, simply
because “it works.” While it is true that incorrectly written software simply
will not compile, such an insistence inevitably glosses over the negotia-
tion, disputation, and rhetorical maneuvering that go into convincing
people, for instance, that there is only one true editor (emacs).
A similar claim exists that scientific truth is “obvious” and requires no
discussion (that is, it is independent of “our” criteria); however, this claim
is both sociologically and scientifically simplistic. It ignores the obvious
material fact that scientists, like programmers, organize themselves in col-
lectivities, dispute with each other, silence each other, and engage in both
grand and petty politics. Boyle is seen to have “won” his dispute with
Hobbes, because Hobbes science was “wrong.” This is convenient short-
hand for a necessary collective process of evaluation without which no one
would be right. It is only after the fact (literally, after the experiment
becomes “a fact”) that Boyle’s laws come to belong to Boyle: what Merton
called “intellectual property.” A science without this process would reduce
simply to authority and power. He with the most money pronounces the
Law of the Gases. The absurdity of this possibility is not that the law of
the gases is independent of human affairs (it is) but that human affairs go
on deliberately misunderstanding them, until the pressure, so to speak, is
too great.
Merton and others who study science and technology like to point out
just how widespread and extensive this system of disputation, credit, and
reward is: it includes eponomy (the naming of constants, laws, and
planets), paternity (X, father of Y), honors, festschrifts, and other forms of
social recognition, prizes like the Fields medal or the Nobel, induction into
royal societies, and ultimately being written into the history books. These
mechanisms are functional only in hindsight; it is perhaps possible to say
that science would still proceed without all these supports, but it would
have neither collective existence in nor discernible effect on the historical
consciousness and vocational identity of practicing scientists. That is to
say, the question of motivation is meaningless when considered in isola-
tion. It is only when considered as a question of institutional evolution
and collective interaction that motivation seems to have a role to play. In
the end, it is equally meaningless to imagine that people have a “natural”
desire to pursue science as it is to suggest that we are somehow pro-
grammed to desire money. Curiosity and greed may be inevitabilities (this
hangs on your view of human nature), but the particular forms they take
are not self-determining.




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