The Reinvention of - Specialized Research AI at MIT

The Reinvention of
Grand Theories of the
Scientiªc/Scholarly
Process

Marion Blute
Department of Sociology,
University of Toronto

Paul Armstrong
Department of Sociology,
University of Toronto

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In the mid-twentieth century, the reigning understanding of the scientiªc
process, logical positivism, disintegrated. Subsequently, there has been frag-
mentation in science studies (Hess 1997; Yearley 2005; Sismondo 2008;
Restivo and Croissant 2008). Many have emphasized the postmodern theme
that general theories or grand narratives are impossible. Despite a profusion
of diversity, some sociologists and sociologically-minded philosophers of science
continue to produce general theories of the scientiªc/scholarly process. Through
textual analysis and interviews, we studied ten such theories empirically on
eleven issues, assessing their compatibility or lack thereof with each other,
aiming to determine whether a new general theory is emerging.

I. Data and Methods
This research was inspired by Werner Callebaut’s (1993) classic in which
he interviewed major contemporary philosophers of science (speciªcally of
biology) at a time when the interdisciplinary label of “science studies” had
hardly been invented. The “real” in his title, Taking the Naturalistic Turn:
How Real Philosophy of Science is Done, was a playful reference to debates
over realism in Philosophy—the title as a whole drawing attention to his
intent to study science studies empirically. That, for Callebaut, was “real”
philosophy.

In the research reported on here, the works of ten major theorists of the

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.

Perspectives on Science 2011, vol. 19, no. 4
©2011 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

391

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The Reinvention of Grand Theories

scientiªc/scholarly process were studied (but not exclusively of biology
and chosen from a larger set which were considered). No formal sampling
method was used in this selection. Theorists were chosen largely on three
grounds—(i) that they be sociologists or sociologically-minded philoso-
phers of science (i.e., who seek to understand science/scholarship as a hu-
man social activity); (ii) that they tend to believe that a general theory of
such is achievable; and (iii) that their theories addressed a wide range of is-
sues in understanding the scientiªc/scholarly process. Hence we did not
include those whose intent was mainly normative or whose interest in sci-
ence/scholarship was only incidental to an interest in culture and social or-
ganization more generally. Nor did we include those whose theories were
primarily psychologically—rather than socially-oriented; whose work was
almost exclusively an historical case study; or feminist science studies
scholars, for example, who, while interesting in their own right, did not
address an otherwise wide range of issues. The text of the major work rele-
vant to the study of the ten chosen was studied (usually a book but in one
case a long article although we sometimes also refer to other works by the
same authors). For the list of names, afªliations, and major work exam-
ined, see Table 1. In addition, interviews were conducted with the major-
ity (seven out of ten), usually at scholarly meetings between the summers
of 2007 and 2009. In one case, the author, John Ziman, died after an in-
terview was arranged but before it could be carried out. In two other cases
(Bruno Latour and Donald MacKenzie) we could not arrange interviews
for different reasons but included them in the study anyway based on
written works alone. Quotes or references from the main texts, where it is
obvious who the author is, are identiªed by page number only. Quotes or
references to their other writings are additionally identiªed by year. In all
cases quotations which are not referenced are from the interviews.

Each theorist is associated with one or two unique ideas about the
scientiªc/scholarly process. These are emphasized in the summaries of
their theories in Section II and listed in Table 3. In addition to clarifying
the unique character of their respective theories, we explored their views
about a series of issues. The issues and their views on them are discussed
one at a time in Section III with the issues listed in Table 3 and their views
on them summarized in Table 4. The issues considered arose in three
roughly classiªable ways. The senior author had some preexisting interest
in Darwinian-style theories of sociocultural change (Blute 2010 was in
preparation during the same period) and some issues about history, ori-
gins, and change mechanisms (Table 2; see issues 3, 4, and 6) arose natu-
rally from that. In other cases such as unique theoretical features, patterns
of change, and compatibility (see issues 1, 5, and 11) emerged from our
readings of the texts as obvious points of comparison and contrast. More

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Perspectives on Science

393

Table 1. Theorists, Afªliations and Major Work Analyzed

Andrew Abbott
Gustavus F. & Ann M. Swift Distinguished Professor, Dept. of Sociology, U. Of Chicago.
2001. Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mario Bunge
Frothingham Professor of Logics & Metaphysics, Dept. of Philosophy, McGill University.
2003. Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.

Randall Collins
Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania.
1998. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.

Gili Drori
Lecturer, International Relations Programme, Stanford University.
2003. With John Meyer, Francisco Ramirez and Even Schofer. Science in the Modern World
Polity: Institutionalization and Globalization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Scott Frickel
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Sociology, Tulane University.
2005. With Neil Gross. “A general theory of scientiªc/intellectual movements.” American
Sociological Review 70:204–232.

Steve Fuller
Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick.
2006. The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies. New York: Routledge.

David Hull
Professor Emeritus, Dept. Of Philosophy, Northwestern University.
1988. Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of
Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bruno Latour
Professor, Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), Paris.
1979. With Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientiªc Facts. Sage
Publications Inc. Reprinted with a new Postscript as Laboratory Life: The Construction of
Scientiªc Facts in 1986 by Princeton University Press.

Donald MacKenzie
Professor, Dept. of Sociology, University of Edinburgh.
2006. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge MA:
The MIT Press.

John Ziman
deceased, formerly Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Bristol.
2000. Real Science: What It Is and What It Means. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

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The Reinvention of Grand Theories

Table 2. Unique Ideas

Andrew Abbott

Mario Bunge

Randall Collins

Gili Drori

Scott Frickel

Steve Fuller

David Hull

Bruno Latour

Donald MacKenzie
John Ziman

Fractal cycles

Origin of novelty in convergence (mergers)

Interaction ritual chains & law of small numbers

Globalization & cultural authority of science

Scientiªc/intellectual movements

Social responsibility of science, public involvement

Individuals and interaction in evolution

Social construction

Performativity
PLACE has replaced CUDOS

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than anything else however, they came from the issues discussed widely
about the social nature of science/scholarship—internal versus external,
progress, the role of competition and constructionism (see issues 7, 8, 9,
and 10) for example. For each interview we drafted a list of questions
along the lines of these issues (hence with much overlap between authors),
but also extensively tailored to the work of each author. The interviews
were open-ended; we allowed the theorists to discourse at their preferred
length on a particular topic and in some cases, interviews became quite
conversational. The interviews were taped and transcribed. In one case
(Frickel) there was a mechanical failure and our comments on his views are
from notes made immediately after the interview and do not include di-
rect quotes. Our overall conclusion that a Darwinian sociocultural evolu-
tionary theory can incorporate both the common and useful unique fea-
tures of contemporary theories of the scientiªc/scholarly process is drawn
in Section IV.

II. Unique Ideas
All of the theorists under consideration have one or two unique ideas
which distinguish their theories from others including each other (see
Table 2.)

Andrew Abbott, a Professor of Sociology, is most well known for his
research on occupations. He has, somewhat unusually, combined an histor-
ical and a quantitative bent in his work. Abbott sees the pattern of change
in science as a branching process similar to a segmentary kinship system.
However, the additional twist is that he sees this taking place in a fractal

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Perspectives on Science

395

pattern. Fractals are things which are self-similar on different scales. For
example, in sociology among both functionalists (who emphasized cooper-
ation) and neo-Marxists (who emphasized conºict) there are those who put
somewhat more emphasis on one, and those who put somewhat more em-
phasis on the other. Similarly among those who emphasize quantitative
versus qualitative methodologies. In short, distinctions on a larger scale
are repeated on a smaller scale. In general he sees the process of change as
competition causing a split whereby one side typically loses. The winners
then spread out to occupy the niche space of the losers, a step which he de-
scribes as “ingestion”—the whole being a “fractal cycle.” As a conse-
quence, the old division is recreated so that in essence, there is nothing
new under the sun. “There is no real progress, no fundamentally new con-
cept. We simply keep recalling a good idea.” (p. 17)

Mario Bunge, physicist turned proliªc philosopher of science, is
the author of more than 80 books and 400 papers. He is a traditional phi-
losopher in the sense that he unabashedly embraces ontology and episte-
mology. “Philosophy without an ontology is spineless and without epi-
stemology it’s totally incapable of appreciating the true intellectual
characteristics of modernity—namely (that) science is the engine of mo-
dernity.” “All of these criticisms of ontology and epistemology come I
think mainly from linguistic philosophers—Wittgensteiners—who have
no philosophy of their own. They have nothing to establish their thesis.”
“I think philosophy should use science and the only way to justify a philo-
sophical hypothesis is to see where it is (and) where it’s not consistent with
science . . . and nowadays technology too.” Hence science has been a cen-
tral preoccupation of his work. His ontology is “systemism”: “everything
is either a system or part of a system.” According to his “CESM” systems
model, all systems (including natural, social, technical, conceptual, and
semiotic) (p. 33) have a composition, an environment, a structure, and im-
portantly, a mechanism (p. 37) which is “a process in a system.” He views
his version of systems theory as the alternative to reductionism and
wholism. His epistemology is “rational selection” by individuals. It would
seem therefore that there would be little reason to include him in a study
of sociologically-minded students of science except that the book under
discussion has, as its central thesis, a proposition about the social history
of science. His concern is with “emergence,” the origin of qualitative nov-
elty in science. While aware of extinction (“submergence”) and of branch-
ing processes (“divergence”) in the history of scientiªc disciplines for ex-
ample, he thinks the most important way novelty emerges is via
“convergence.” He deªnes “convergence” in science in the preface: “the
merger of initially independent lines of inquiry, such as developmental
evolutionary biology, social cognitive neuroscience, socio-economics, and

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The Reinvention of Grand Theories

political sociology.” Other examples include physical chemistry, biochem-
istry, psychophysics, and medical sociology (p. 5). These are “mongrel dis-
ciplines” (p. 124) created by a process he explicitly compares to biological
hybridization (pp. 272, 280). He believes that real problems can only be
solved by “border trespassing” (p. 5) (i.e., by inter, multi, trans, cross, etc.
disciplinarity)—an example is why integration succeeds in social studies
in Chapter 11. He believes that in this way the sciences are becoming
more, not less uniªed—moving towards the state idealized originally by
the logical positivists, the unity of knowledge.

Randall Collins is a well-known sociological theorist whose book un-
der consideration is distinctive relative to the others not only in its length
(more than 1,000 pages). It applies his theory of ritual chains (see also
2004) inºuenced by Durkheim and Goffman to the sociology of scholar-
ship (speciªcally philosophy) as well as to science. His theory that intellec-
tual change is based on face-to-face interactions in historically-situated
networks is located in all of micro, meso, and macro realms. In intellectual
life, cultural capital is constantly creating puzzles that need to be solved,
both conªrming and refuting past ªndings and coming up with new ones.
Intellectual creativity at solving puzzles is the sacred object of intellectual
rituals. With respect to the micro, face-to-face interactions at rituals such
as seminars, lectures, etc. invest (or divest) actors with emotional energy.
Emotional energy ºuctuates depending on the nature of the interaction.
Domination and inclusion in social experiences raise emotional energy
while being dominated and rejection lower it. Rituals then are the key
communicative tool among intellectuals.

In the meso realm, networks are the key. Ritual interactions take place
within and among groups, social networks, and hence are chained in inter-
action ritual chains. Interaction rituals produce solidarity within networks
and competition among them based on individuals’ desires to gain emo-
tional energy and cultural capital. Networks necessarily make their way
“into the inner experience of the individual’s mind” (p. 7), thus suggest-
ing that the group or network is always present in the formulation of new
ideas. The level of emotional energy attained also varies depending on the
status position of a given network and can be affected as well by external
pressures including institutional and organizational shocks. One of Col-
lins’ most noted ideas is a proposed law of small numbers. At any given
time, a single argument may only support three to six “knots” or compet-
ing networks because of limited attention space. In the macro historical
realm, chains across generations are important as well. New ideas are al-
ways based in part on past ideas and past sacred objects and emotional en-
ergy can be transferred to pupils. Hence his comparative world history of
intellectual communities including those of ancient Greece, China, India,

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Perspectives on Science

397

Japan, Judaism, the Arab world, and European Christendom is replete
with genealogical diagrams of intellectual inºuences through generations,
highlighting among other things, the law of small numbers.

Social life in “rapid discovery science” (fueled largely by technological
tinkering and developments in mathematics) is both similar and different
from that in philosophy. Science-in-the-making operates like philosophy
and follows the law of small numbers as rival networks vie for attention
space. However, science after the research front is characterized more by
consensus and cumulation because it is easier to make a reputation by
moving on rather than clinging to old controversies (pp. 532–543), a view
Collins equates with Latour’s (1987) two faces of science.

Gili Drori is a sociologist specializing in international relations. The
book under consideration of which she is the ªrst author is concerned with
the globalization of the organizations and institution of modern, western
science. From its origin in the west, science has multiplied and diffused
around the world, and is recognizable in that form everywhere. The
authors document its growth and spread in the form of science organiza-
tions (including the professional, socially, and developmentally-oriented)
(Chpt. 3); national science policies (Chpt. 4) and Ministries of Science and
Technology (Chpt. 5); the incorporation of science into elementary school
curricula (Chpt. 6); and the inclusion of women (Chpt. 8). While recog-
nizable everywhere, global science is not a monolithic practice. Elements
of the spread can be “loosely coupled.” For example, a nation which estab-
lishes sciences in universities may not subsequently develop research labo-
ratories (Chpt. 7). Scientiªc “styles” are somewhat “glocalized.” Thus, for
example, “cutting edge” hard sciences are more likely to propagate in na-
tions with high GDP’s since they can purchase the equipment and fund
the labs required to conduct them. Conversely, nations that were histori-
cally communist witnessed the emancipation of soft sciences whose prac-
tice was previously suppressed and discouraged by regimes that concen-
trated exclusively on the hard sciences (Chpt. 9).

This book emerged from the “neo-institutionalist” research program in
the social sciences of her mentor and co-author, John W. Meyer. While
true to that program in the sense of emphasizing the explanatory impor-
tance of institutionalized norms over rational choices for example, this
book is somewhat different in emphasizing a distinction between organi-
zations and institutions on the one hand and culture more generally. The
central thesis of the book is that the main consequence of the diffusion of
scientiªc organizations and institutions is best understood as a homoge-
nizing cultural, cognitive phenomenon, a generalized belief in the orderli-
ness of nature including our capacity to learn to control it. This rationaliz-
ing ethos (which Weber saw as emanating from capitalism but which is

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398

The Reinvention of Grand Theories

seen here as emanating from science), effectively replaces religion and per-
vades discourses not only of science itself, but also those of law, politics
etc. The important effect of science is not to its practical usefulness or con-
tribution to development or democracy. In fact, evidence they present sug-
gests that expanded scientiªc research (as opposed to labor-force training),
and particularly socially relevant research, actually slowed economic
growth between 1970 and 1990 (Chpt. 10).

Scott Frickel is a sociologist specializing in science studies with a po-
litical emphasis who has studied the rise of genetic toxicology. The
coauthored article under discussion (of which Frickel is the ªrst author)
presents a general theory of scientiªc/intellectual movements (SIMs).
The theory proposes that change in science/scholarship takes place
through social movements among practitioners, not unlike the social
movements which occur in other realms of human activity. Social move-
ments are a form of collective action which can include organizations as
well as individuals. Although not formally centrally organized as a whole,
they collectively attempt to bring about (or oppose) some social change—
normally in the face of resistance, commonly from elites. Historically im-
portant social movements include abolitionism, the labor movement, and
more recently the civil rights, women’s, gay rights, and environmental
movements for example. Political scientists note that social movements
sometimes give rise to new political parties such as social democratic and
green parties.

Frickel and Gross think that change in science/scholarship such as the
emergence of new research programs takes place in a similar fashion. They
emphasize the conscious, contentious, inherently political, collective, and
historical nature of SIMs which vary in scope. They offer a series of propo-
sitions illustrated with many examples from the case study literature
about what is required for success. These implicitly include the intellec-
tual (grievances), the social structural (access to resources and contexts for
recruitment), and the cultural (ideas framed in a way that resonate with
the concerns of those in the ªeld).

Although Steve Fuller’s PhD is in the history and philosophy of sci-
ence, he is currently a Professor of Sociology. He relishes putting forth
contrarian theses. Hence, for example, historians of science studies have it
wrong in portraying Kuhn as the hero (“subjectivist, relativist and
historicist”) and Popper as the bad guy (“objectivist, realist and positiv-
ist”). Instead “Kuhn was . . . authoritarian and Popper libertarian in their
attitudes to science” (2003, p. 13–14). Similarly, contemporary scientists
view some fundamentalist Christians as waging a war on evolution in the
name of intelligent design. To the contrary, according to Fuller, who wrote
in Dissent over Descent on “evolution’s 500 year war on intelligent design”

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Perspectives on Science

399

(2007b). His testimony on behalf of intelligent design in the Dover trial
in 2005 in the U.S.A. evoked consternation in the science studies commu-
nity. Michael Lynch (past chair of the Science, Knowledge and Technology
section of the American Sociological Association and past president of the
Society for Social Studies of Science) plaintively asked, “Did he not
know?” (see Lynch 2009 and Fuller’s response).

Steve Fuller is a proliªc author whose research program of “social epis-
temology” straddles the border between the traditional philosophy and
the sociology of science/of scientiªc knowledge. What are we to make of
it, and how should we respond, once the normative character of traditional
philosophy of science has been confronted with sociology—whether that
of external inºuences or of internal processes of construction through ne-
gotiation and so on, not unlike those which affect and create any other in-
stitution? As he puts it, the central question is “how science is to be legiti-
mated once social constructivist accounts are widely accepted” (p. 17).
The traditional answer to such questions was provided by Max Weber
long before the advent of modern science studies in his twin essays on
“Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation” (Gerth and Mills
1958). They cannot and should not be; science and politics are different
“vocations.” A scientist has no more authority by virtue of his or her ex-
pertise to pronounce on questions of value than does a layperson. Science
can however be brought to bear on questions of value. At its best, given an
end, science might be able to say how it can best be achieved; given a
means, it might be able to say what its effect is likely to be; and given
more than one end, it might be able to say whether they are compatible.
Weber’s view is sometimes stereotyped as describing science as “value
free” but he was not making an empirical sociological claim, but was in-
stead holding up an ethical ideal for both scientists and societal leaders
not to overstep the bounds of their competencies.

Fuller has been consistent in his very different answer for science—
science must become more publicly accountable. In order to achieve
that, society needs to be “let in,” science made into a radical “republic”
(2007a, p. 109) which is democratized. Hence his support for creation sci-
entists teaching intelligent design alongside of evolutionists teaching evo-
lution in universities (2007b). More broadly, he believes that a “struggle
for recognition” in humans, a struggle to “give,” can replace that for sur-
vival in humans and proposes that social science should align itself with
socialism (2006).

David Hull is a founder of the modern philosophy of biology and au-
thor of its ªrst textbook. With others he has argued there is a class of gen-
eral selection processes which include not only biological evolution, but
also individual learning and the adaptive immune response (Hull et. al.

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The Reinvention of Grand Theories

2001). All selection processes include variation, replication, interaction,
and selection (in biology, according to Hull, genes vary and replicate, or-
ganisms interact and are selected, and lineages evolve). He is most known
for two speciªc theses. The ªrst, also put forward by Michael Ghiselin, is
that biological species are “individuals” not in the sense of being organis-
mic-like, but in the philosophical sense that they are historical entities
with places and times implicitly included in their names rather than be-
ing the universally speciªed classes of traditional physics. The second is
that (contra Dawkins) organisms, not genes, are selected in evolution and
hence “interaction” is a necessary term in the basic description of an evo-
lutionary process. In his Science as a Process (1988), he applies his theory to
sociocultural evolution, speciªcally to conceptual and social change in sci-
ence. Curiosity is necessary but not a sufªcient condition for scientiªc
change. It provides conceptual variation but science is importantly built
on giving “credit” preferably with a citation to those who have inºuenced
us (i.e., on descent) as well as on “checking” (which he equates with selec-
tion). He abandons the common philosophers’ bent for thought experi-
ments, and morphing into a sociologist, tests various inferences from his
evolutionary theory of science on the social life of the biological systemat-
ics community using a variety of methods—historical comparative, archi-
val (referees reports), survey, in depth interviews, and participant observa-
tion. (Like the anthropologist who becomes king of the tribe he is
studying, Hull became President of the Society of Systematic Zoology for
a time.) For example he ªnds that like biological species, the sociocultural
concept of a species (and by inference all other concepts) has varied and
changed historically. Like organisms, scientists act so as to maximize their
(conceptual) inclusive ªtness. In interaction, they both compete and coop-
erate but in a study of six years of editing and refereeing of the journal Sys-
tematic Zoology, he found that these processes were at least somewhat biased
in favor of those with related, and against those with unrelated philosoph-
ical, theoretical, and methodological positions. He also considers the the-
ory’s ability to explain known empirical generalizations from the sociol-
ogy of science such as the strength of self-policing in science relative to
other professions and the harsher punishment of lying (which hurts all
who have built on a fraudulent ªnding) than theft (which detracts only
from the plagiarized). Ultimately he employs a “visible hand” explanation
for the social and conceptual development of science. Science is so socially
structured that what is good for scientists is also good for science.

Bruno Latour, a French sociologist, and his coauthor Steve Woolgar
with their classic Laboratory Life (1979) initiated an important stream of
research, laboratory studies of science. Laboratory Life was the ªrst anthro-
pological-style ethnographic study of the goings-on in a scientiªc research

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401

laboratory, in this case, the lab of neuroendocrinologist Roger Guillemin
at the Salk Institute in San Diego. It helped the interest in this study that
Guillemin was awarded 1/4 of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medi-
cine for the development of radioimmune assays of peptide hormones in
1977, the year after Latour’s book was published. The authors declared
right in their ªrst chapter that “our very speciªc interest in laboratory life
concerns the way in which the daily activities of working scientists lead to
the construction of facts” (p. 40). Some themes of Laboratory Life are that
acquiring credibility (Chpt. 5) and investing it in the production of
scientiªc papers (Chpt. 2) are the central activities of scientiªc laborato-
ries. According to Latour and Woolgar, there are at least ªve degrees of
“facticity” of statements from the speculative to the taken-for-granted,
and that in the process of research and writing, statements move back and
forth along this scale (Chpt. 2). An analysis of the literature on the mole-
cule TRF(H) (Chpt. 3) shows that citations to the key papers eventually
declined even as the term TRF(H) continued to increase in the titles of pa-
pers, illustrating the transformation of its existence into a taken-for-
granted fact. In this process, resources matter. Eventually deªning the
problem as the sequence structure of the TRF(H) molecule required
equipment that only a relatively few could afford. Facts only have mean-
ing in particular relational or network contexts. For example, outside of
particular kinds of laboratories, TRF(H) is only some kind of a white pow-
der. Chapter 4 analyzes some laboratory conversations to show how facts
are “stabilized” by micro processes of interaction which are not fundamen-
tally different in science than they are elsewhere.

Much of this would be uncontroversial even to very traditional sociol-
ogy. However the use of the term “social construction” in the subtitle
and elsewhere helped spark a long lasting and sometimes bitter contro-
versy, “the science wars,” over subjectivity versus objectivity or relativism
versus realism in science. It seemed to many to suggest that the subjectiv-
ity of scientists is everything and the objective properties of the natural
world mean nothing in science. Of course extreme subjectivity or relativ-
ism is easy to ridicule: “show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand
feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite” (Dawkins 1995, pp. 31–2) and “just try
negotiating the AIDS virus into a benign commensal” (Hull 1994,
p. 505).

Once Latour got everyone stampeding in one (the constructionist) di-
rection, he put on the breaks. “Do you believe in reality?” “But of course!”
(1999, p. 1) and perversely, “I have disputed for twenty-ªve years that sci-
ence is socially constructed” (1999, p. 299)! But not quite. More broadly,
in books subsequent to Laboratory Life (e.g. 1987; 1988; 1993; 1999)
Latour has made himself somewhat more clear. Modernity posited a radi-

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402

The Reinvention of Grand Theories

cal separation between the natural and the social and that was never the
case; they are one and the same, hence the title We Have Never Been Modern
(1993). The perspective that both man (including scientists) makes nature
and nature makes man (including science) might be called interactionist,
mutually constitutive, or what he sometimes calls in noun form “articula-
tion” (1999, p. 142). Most often however he disputes even that degree of
distinction. Instead he claims to have “done away with the subject-object
dichotomy altogether” (1999, p. 294).

Most recently, he turned to an evolutionary metaphor. In 2008 he glee-
fully described an exhibit in the New York Natural History Museum ti-
tled “a textbook case revisited.” The museum exhibit illustrated two views
of the fossil history of horses—a nineteenth century linear progressive
story of small to large bodies, many to fewer toes, and short to long teeth,
and a twentieth century bushily branching and diverse story of multiple
lineages each adapted to their local milieu of which one ultimately sur-
vived to the present. Latour views these stories through a science studies
lens (as it seems do the curators) not as stories of objects, but of our knowl-
edge of objects. He wonders why the messy, complicated modern view of
the history of fossil objects is so calmly received, while the similarly
messy, complicated modern (“romantic? postmodern? reºexive? construc-
tivist?”) view of the history of epistemic objects is greeted with such con-
sternation. He thinks the curators have displayed a healthy “relativism”
(emphasis in the original), deªned as “establishing relations between
frames of reference through the laying down of some instrumentation.”

Donald MacKenzie is a sociologist, one of the most accomplished of
the participants in the sociology of scientiªc knowledge movement whose
work is also interesting because he studied a social science—ªnancial eco-
nomics. His overall view of science (which does not come until the last
chapter of this prize-winning book) is fairly simple. Modern ªnancial the-
ory has the character of a “cascade.” Some innovations are stillborn, but in
inºuence can be traced, achieved sometimes
other cases lineages of
through reading and sometimes through personal contacts including stu-
dents. In this way modern ªnancial theory spread and was cumulatively
modiªed through business schools aspiring to a more science-based pro-
fessionalism beginning in the 1950s but accelerating greatly in the 1960s
and 1970s largely in the U.S. This research program prized plausible, in-
novative, simple mathematical models which could be used as a founda-
tion for further research. Models of efªcient markets, capital asset and op-
tions prices, and of portfolio selection were proposed that incorporated
neo-classical economic assumptions. To simplify, any instrument priced
signiªcantly above or below its asset value and the risk-free rate of return

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Perspectives on Science

403

(which could be achieved by the purchase of government bonds) would be
subject to arbitrage. The over-priced would be sold, the under-priced
bought, and hence ªnancial markets should be efªcient, i.e., tend towards
an equilibrium at which prices fully reºect all publicly available informa-
tion. (Of course models based on rational expectations and efªcient mar-
kets do not explain recurring booms and busts, episodes of “greed and
fear” as they are sometimes called, including the recent ones in the hous-
ing and credit markets.)

MacKenzie’s thesis about this science however is expressed in his title:
An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. The mathe-
matical models of modern ªnancial theory are not simply a camera, i.e.,
they do not simply describe ªnancial markets, but they are an engine, i.e.,
they have shaped those markets. This is a form of constructionism; science
does not just describe and explain the world, it constructs it. However,
MacKenzie does not like the term constructionism/constructivism and in-
stead he prefers “performativity” from the philosopher J. L. Austin
through Barry Barnes (1983), MacKenzie’s mentor. The use of a theory
can make the world resemble more (or resemble less—“counterperform-
ativity”) the way the world is depicted in the theory. In a detailed history
including interviews with many of its creators (Paul Samuelson declares in
a blurb that MacKenzie “knows this exciting story, and tells it well”),
MacKenzie searches for performativity in modern ªnancial theory and
eventually ªnds his best case in the Black-Scholes-Merton options pricing
model. Many traders even began to carry computer-derived sheets of theo-
retical prices generated by the model for all options traded on U.S. option
exchanges on the ºoor with them after they became available (Chapter 6).
“The ªt between the Black-Scholes-Merton model and empirical patterns
of option prices was originally only approximate, but it improved rapidly
after the model was published and adopted by market practitioners”
(p. 256). In short, the model was “an engine, not a camera.”

John Ziman (1925–2005) was an English physicist turned philoso-
pher and sociologist of science who became a proliªc author on the latter
subjects (e.g. Ziman 1968; 1976; 1978; 1984; 1987; 1994; 2000). He de-
scribes a gradual transformation from the “academic science” which pre-
vailed from roughly the mid-nineteenth century when the term “scientist”
was invented, until the 1960s during and after which academic science has
been increasingly replaced by “post-academic science.” The culture of aca-
demic science was characterized by Merton’s (1942) norms of communal-
ism, universalism, disinterestedness, originality, and skepticism which
Ziman dubs “CUDOS.” It was ªnanced by generous donors and govern-
ments; carried out by individuals free to set their own research agendas

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The Reinvention of Grand Theories

Table 3. Issues

1) What is the unique idea that distinguishes their theory?
2) Do they think a general theory of science/scholarship is possible?
3) Are they historically conscious?
4) Do they think new things come into existence in science/scholarship?
5) What is the nature and pattern of change?
6) What is the mechanism of change?
7) Is their emphasis internalist or externalist?
8) Do they believe in progress or cumulation in science/scholarship?
9) Do they emphasize competition, conºict or cooperation?
10) Are they constructionist?
11) Do they think their theory is compatible with that of any of the others?

and to publish; built on previous work by others; motivated by recogni-
tion in their scientiªc communities; and was largely carried out in univer-
sities institutionally organized there, as well as more broadly in scientiªc
and scholarly societies in disciplines. In return “grateful” scientists,
through peer review systems, provided their societies and governments in
particular with credible, reliable, reproducible knowledge and the latter
drew on them for expertise and advice. By contrast in “post-academic sci-
ence,” the norms of “PLACE” replace those of “CUDOS”—propriety, lo-
cal, authority, commissioned, and expert. Knowledge may not be made
public, work is done on local technical problems, governed by a manage-
rial hierarchy, commissioned to solve speciªc problems, and the scientist is
valued as a technical expert rather than for creativity. Post-academic sci-
ence may be carried out in a privatized setting or in a university but in ei-
ther case it is industrialized with a high division of labor. According to
Ziman, there was a reason why skeptical views of science which scorned
traditional claims of its “disinterestedness,” for example, became popular
in this period—because science was indeed becoming less so.

III. Views on Issues
The issues we explored are listed in Table 3. We summarized issue (1): the
unique features of their theories in Section II above. At the beginning of
the interviews, we conªrmed their views on issue (2): that they thought
that a general theory of the scientiªc/scholarly process was achievable. The
only author about which a “yes” answer to this is questionable is Fuller,
who turned out to not be very interested in that kind of question. The
other nine issues we explored are discussed in order in this section with all
of the results (except for the last “compatibility” issue) summarized in
Table 4.

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(3) Are They Historically Conscious? (Table 4, line 3)
Virtually all of these theorists display a strong historical consciousness
which might be simpliªed as the view that everything comes from some-
thing, nothing comes from nothing. Bunge explicitly states that “what-
ever emerges does so from some pre-existing thing” (p. 30). Whether we
are talking about Abbott’s repeated fractal splits, Collins’ interaction rit-
ual chains and genealogies of inºuence among philosophers, Frickel’s re-
cruitment into and spread of social movements, Hull’s giving credit with
citations yielding lineages, MacKenzie’s cascades, or on grander historical
scales, Ziman’s story about the history of modern science in the west or
Drori’s about the diffusion of western science into a global phenomenon—
for all of these theorists the story of science, whether in particular or in
general, begins with history. Even in the work of Latour and Fuller where
this is less explicit that tends to be the case. Latour’s analysis of citations
to TRF(H) displayed how as the term spread, the once novel became taken
for granted. Fuller everywhere writes about the history of the philosophy
and sociology of science/scientiªc knowledge as well as that of cultural
and social theory generally. Moreover, to most of them the inºuence of
the past on the present does not take place in some ethereal realm of free-
ºoating ideas. Instead, it is a matter of people directly inºuencing other
people—whether in person or in print. Most of what scientists know or
think they know comes from textbooks and the rest from their graduate
school mentors, colleagues, journals, etc. and a relatively modest amount
of it from their own research. It is also worth noting here too that Frickel
seems to have independently converged on the Hull-Ghiselin thesis about
the particularistic nature of historical phenomena. “SIMs exist as historical
entities for ªnite periods” (p. 208) and opportunity structures are “a func-
tion of contingent historical circumstances” (p. 214).

(4) Do They Think New Things Come into Existence in Science/
Scholarship? (Table 4, line 4)
Abbott is the outlier here with his cyclical theory of history. “Chaos of Dis-
ciplines is a pretty original book, even though it’s a book about how there
isn’t any originality. Which is kind of interesting.” “Good ideas come
back again and again . . . at the level of general thinking about social life
there aren’t that many different ideas and we’ve had most of them before
and they’re going to keep coming back . . . we use new names for them.”
“In New York, medical licenseship came and went basically a dozen times
in the 19th century. There must have been something like a total of eigh-
teen projects to either make licensing more strict or make it less strict
over the course of the century. It’s not as if . . . there was this battle passed
and now we have licensing afterwards. In fact, things can be dismantled.”

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Perspectives on Science

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“If you happen to have one of the great ideas, you’re only renting it. It’s
like a house you get to live in for a while, and then young people push you
out . . . of course they move in with new names and they redecorate . . .
but the ideas are still the same ideas we just don’t get to live them
forever.”

By contrast, for all of the others while the present comes from the past,
it is constantly being modiªed in the process—for Bunge, Hull, Frickel,
and MacKenzie the emergence of new disciplines, concepts, and social re-
lationships, SIMs and models respectively are the explanatory focus. Mac-
kenzie, for example, shows not just cascades of inºuence in modern
ªnancial theory, but how its models were cumulatively modiªed as they
were passed on, and on a larger scale, how the whole movement toward
mathematical models was a transformation from the old institutional
study of ªnance which emphasized what is sometimes called “plumbing”
such as the banking system. To Collins, intellectual life is composed not
just of ritualized chains of inºuence; creativity at solving puzzles is the sa-
cred object of those rituals. To Latour, facts are constantly being con-
structed in social interaction. To Ziman, modern science has been trans-
formed from CUDOS to PLACE, and to Drori, science spread from the
west to be sure, but it became “glocalized” in the process.

(5) What Is the Nature and Pattern of Change? (Table 4, line 5)
Evolutionists usefully distinguish between two kinds of similarity. Simi-
larity can be homologous (due to a recent common history) or analogous
(homoplastic, i.e., convergent) in which organisms without a recent com-
mon history nevertheless converge on a similar solution to a problem. For
example the similarity in bone structure of the forelimbs in vertebrate
groups as different as amphibians, birds, and mammals, despite the very
different uses to which they are put, are homologous, while the similarity
of body shape of ªsh and marine mammals representing independent ad-
aptations for efªcient motion in an aqueous medium are analogous or
homoplastic. In science studies, historians are often impatient with phi-
losophers who confound these. For example a philosopher might describe
two theorists as “idealists” even though there is no historical connection
between them. The philosophers may not necessarily be wrong about the
similarity, it is just that what historians want to know is the actual histor-
ical pattern of connections. It was not surprising then that when we asked
Hull with a background in philosophy whether he considered himself a
philosopher or a social scientist these days that he replied: “In general I
tried to be put in (with) scientists, systematics, actually doing science . . .
history has been the hardest part. You just have to spend too much time
reading carefully and checking references and what have you because if

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The Reinvention of Grand Theories

you’re going to do work in a particular area you have to do it according to
the standards of that area. Now philosophy, you can make up crazy exam-
ples . . . you do that in history, you’re in real trouble, or sociology, you’re
in real trouble.”

A variety of patterns of change are also possible. Change can be linear
in which one kind of thing is gradually or rapidly transformed into a dif-
ferent kind (phyletic evolution or anagenesis). Ziman views change in
modern science in this linear way, it has gone from CUDOS to PLACE.
Similarly with Frickel, a new research program arises and “displaces” (or
fails to displace) an existing one although he brieºy notes that not all aim
for dominance, they may instead simply carve out a niche for themselves.
Alternatively, change can be branching, the generation of different clades,
different lines of descent (cladogenesis). Abbott sees change in science in
this way, repeated branching (on the same dimension) yielding a fractal
pattern. Drori too emphasizes branching. “Every time an institution
spreads around the world, depending where it lands, it already starts shap-
ing itself a little bit differently becoming not a global or a local but rather
a glocal institution. So in replication you replicate something but because
it is situated in a somewhat different institutional environment it is no
longer the same institution because it interacts, its boundaries are porous
to different demands, to different relations, therefore it changes its own
core.” “We surely are imitating, but we don’t replicate.”

A variety of kinds of mergers are also possible in evolution. Bunge
thinks the most important kind of change which takes place in science is
emergence by mergers among different research programs, disciplines, etc.
(what he calls convergence and compares to hybridization). The usage of
the terms inter, multi, trans, and cross disciplinarity are quite varied in
the modern science studies literature as too are the psychological and so-
ciological mechanisms by which they can be brought about. For example
an individual might apply facts, theories, or methods from one discipline
to a problem in another; dual or multi-person teams of individuals with
different disciplinary backgrounds can work together on a problem; or
whole disciplines or segments of them can merge creating a new disci-
pline. These are not unlike horizontal gene transfer, symbiosis, and hy-
bridization respectively in biological evolution.

Stability as well as change is possible. Collins thinks that three to six
alternative research programs can coexist in competition for a time. It is
interesting to note that biological ecologists are even more stringent.
They argue that if species are in “perfect” competition, then no more than
one will persist, a principle called “competitive exclusion.” If more than
one species is occupying exactly the same niche, then their properties are
unlikely to be exactly equally adapted to it. Of course multiple species do

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Perspectives on Science

409

persist as do multiple research programs, topic, ªelds and disciplines in
science—in part because they overlap in the niche only partly or not at all.
To put it in Frickel’s social movement terms, they are not attempting to
recruit the same people. Indeed according to some evolutionary theorists,
it can sometimes be precisely because it is adaptive to avoid competition
that they have diverged in the ªrst place.

Hull’s evolutionary theory can in principle admit of all of these pat-
terns. The distinction he is preoccupied with establishing between philo-
sophical individuals and classes, however, makes hybrids difªcult to cope
with because they are neither—so he prefers to call them chimeras
(p. 505). We have classiªed MacKenzie and Latour as implicitly evolu-
tionary. In MacKenzie’s case, that is not because he is particularly con-
scious of these distinctions, but because he tells many stories of “cascades,”
and also of individuals independently coming up with similar ideas, of in-
dividuals from different backgrounds getting together to collaborate, and
so on. In Latour’s case, it is not because of Laboratory Life, but because of
the conclusions he seems to have drawn more recently from his museum
experience. The theorists who do emphasize some particular nature and
pattern of change, when speciªcally asked about others in our interviews,
mostly readily conceded that this variety is possible. For example Frickel
(whose own major research after all has been on the development of a new
interdiscipline—genetic toxicology) conceded that patterns other than
displacement are possible and Bunge conceded that patterns other than
mergers are possible. Bunge: “one (pattern) is specialization and the other
convergence. They have been going in parallel for centuries although re-
convergence is relatively new—it appears only let’s say about two hundred
years ago with the emergence of biochemistry and biophysics and
psychophysics and so on. The two processes, specialization and synthesis
or convergence are necessary. I think they are—they should go on. One of
the latest ones and most important is the emergence of cognitive neurosci-
ence.” When discussing the history of science studies Fuller tends to de-
scribe a linear picture. When questioned about this, however, he claimed
that from Kuhn “you’ve got this very fragmented, diffuse, differentiated
kind of history of science which nobody in their right mind can deny.”
The interesting thing is that he actually wants it to be linear, i.e., towards
“improving the human condition.”

(6) What Is the Mechanism of Change? (Table 4, line 6)
Neither Abbott nor Drori appear to provide a mechanism of change.
When asked about this Abbott responded: “I’m confused by this stuff, it
just kind of happens. I don’t know, that’s natural. I’ll go back to Park and
Burgess on this, competition is a natural state of things.” And later he

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410

The Reinvention of Grand Theories

added: “I’m doing the same thing that Newton did, change is the primi-
tive and that means you have to explain stability.” Of course competition
in and of itself does not provide a mechanism of change. Why, for exam-
ple, do not alternatives always just go on competing indeªnitely? Simi-
larly Drori does not provide a mechanism. When asked why this particu-
lar religion, i.e., science, spread rather than just Christianity itself she did
profer that progress is a theme from Christianity and that science “billed
itself” as practically useful even though traditionally most technological
innovation came from practitioners not scientists. Collins on the other
hand does provide a mechanism, gain and loss of “emotional energy,” but
one which is difªcult to accept. It is implicit in this that when we observe
others gain or lose emotional energy from holding a particular position,
we would tend to be swayed for or against that position. But why go to
competition for emotional energy rather than to the Weberian-Mertonian
tradition that science is about status, for admiration and emulation by our
peers which Fuller does, for example, when he spoke to us of a “struggle
for recognition”? There are other alternatives as well, including language
and reason. For Latour, it is largely rhetorical devices in interaction that
move statements back and forth along the scale of “facticity.” For
Bunge, it is “rational selection” by individuals. But that cannot explain
the spread of something socioculturally. A person may learn to individu-
ally/rationally choose something but be unable to persuade others of it.
That the goal is receipt of emotional energy however is particularly prob-
lematic given that it is long established in psychology that intermediate
rather than high or low levels of arousal is most effective in performance (a
principle so well established that it reached the status of a law, the
“Yerkes-Dodson law” early in the twentieth century). Indeed extremely
high and extremely low levels of arousal are the very deªnition of emo-
tional pathology—mania and depression respectively. Collins has interest-
ingly commented elsewhere that he went there because he needed a uni-
versal goal, what he calls “a common denominator of choice” (Collins
2005, p. 9).

Evolutionists like Hull do provide a common denominator, i.e., a uni-
versal mechanism of change—selection. Apart from rates of innovation
and sampling error in ªnite populations, selection is meant to incorporate
everything that causes something to spread. Ziman too eventually explic-
itly embraces a Darwinian-style sociocultural evolutionary theory of the
process change in science (2000, pp. 276–288). Because selection depends
upon interaction between properties of the social movement, say which is
spreading, and properties of the environment, the reasons for success or
the lack thereof can vary enormously. Some view these as ultimately his-
torically speciªc; others hold out hope for more speciªc but universal laws.

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Perspectives on Science

411

We therefore view the kind of speciªc stories that MacKenzie offers for
“cascades” of models and the general intellectual, social structural, and
cultural reasons Frickel offers for why a SIM spreads as implicitly selec-
tionist theories of the mechanism of change in science.

There are mechanisms of particular patterns of change as well. Consider
for example branching. Drori sees this as taking place for essentially geo-
graphic reasons—the social milieu in different countries is different, thus
glocalizing science, and she is probably right. In other cases however,
branching may take place “sympatrically,” as evolutionists say, for purely
ecological reasons, or divergence can result from adapting to different
niches in the same geographical area, or even because it is adaptive to be
different, to avoid competition. Similarly, consider Bunge’s pattern of
convergences, i.e., mergers and the three different ways mentioned in
(5) above about how they could be achieved. An individual might apply
facts, theories, or methods from one discipline to a problem in another;
dual or multi-person teams of individuals of different disciplinary back-
grounds can work together on a problem; or whole disciplines or segments
of them can merge creating a new discipline—similar to horizontal gene
transfer, symbiosis, and hybridization respectively in biological evolution.
In our questions and conversation about these Bunge kept mentioning
new disciplines, e.g.,”biochemistry and biophysics and psychophysics and
so on,” but still wanted to maintain that “convergence should occur
mainly in individual brains.” Then paradoxically he went right on to dis-
cuss the importance of outsiders in the formation of new disciplines—
e.g., like the expertise Crick (a physicist, speciªcally a crystallographer)
brought to Watson (a biologist) and before that the father and son Bragg
team bringing together traditional crystallography with a new tool,
x-rays, and a mathematical tool—Fourier analysis!

(7) Is Their Emphasis Internalist or Externalist? (Table 4, line 7)
There do exist extremes in their relative emphasis on whether causal fac-
tors are mainly internal or external to science. Abbott commented: “Chaos
of Disciplines is actually an internalist theory . . . The sociology of science
community contrived to completely ignore this book . . . the key reason
not to like it is that it’s internalist.” When Bunge was asked directly
whether he attributes a lot of signiªcance to external factors in science he
was brief: “No. Except in cases where a dictatorship makes the research
impossible or distorts research in the cases of Stalinism and Nazism—
those cases of course.” Yet at one point he offered an externalist explana-
tion for several cases, e.g., he cited admiringly the work of an Argentinian
who early in the twentieth century wrote on the Sociology of Philosophy and
he explained away Ziman’s emphasis on societal inºuences on science that

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way (see 12 below). On the other hand, when we suggested to Drori that
since she does not view science as functional, that would be consistent
with Merton’s view that it is mostly about seeking status from peers, she
disagreed. “Science depends so much on external resources, then why
would he assume that all the satisfaction you get is from each other.” Also
after describing the particularly strong growth of the social sciences since
the Second World War she said, “Clearly it was the era of policy, of public
policy. And science has really been instrumental in the world of the ªfth
branch of government. Science is the science of policy making these days.”
Embracing both extremes, Ziman’s theory of the transition from CUDOS
to PLACE implies that modern science has shifted from largely respond-
ing to the internal to largely responding to the external. However, the ma-
jority includes both—we have put Collins, Fuller, and MacKenzie in that
category. While Frickel’s emphasis is clearly internal he makes a point of
noting: “Although the ªelds in which SIMS develop are relatively autono-
mous from wider cultural and political-economic contexts, we take it as
axiomatic that SIMs are inºuenced by direct or indirect pressures emanat-
ing from the broader cultural and political environments” (p. 209). Simi-
larly, MacKenzie, while mostly preoccupied internally, often refers to ex-
ternal conditions that affected various developments, e.g., institutional
changes in the environment that made trading in ªnancial futures respect-
able, speciªcally that the opening of the Chicago Board Options Exchange
(Chpt 6) was assisted by the Nixon administration. “Attention to per-
formativity does not render redundant economic sociology’s focus on the
embedding of economic actions in cultures, in political systems, and in
networks of interpersonal connections” (p. 263). Hull shifted ground. In
his book he implies that science is largely an internal matter by typically
equating selection with “checking,” i.e., evidence. But in our interview he
admitted that his completely ignoring that science exists in society there
was a bit dense. He claims to “always pay attention to my critics” and that
seems to be the case. He amusedly explained: “I was getting ªnancial aid
from the National Science Foundations’ little subset for history and phi-
losophy of science. So they (the university) didn’t have to pay me a salary
for (he calculates). For twenty years they never had to pay my salary. And I
got money for the university . . . Did it ever occur to me that money was
that important? No, I see it in retrospect. At the time I was doing my
stuff I was internalist, idealist, all those things!” Latour too is fascinating
in this respect. In Laboratory Life, the emphasis is largely internal although
even there he saw the role of funding as important. In The Pasteurization of
France (1988) on the other hand, the emphasis is almost the opposite.
There he is much concerned with explaining the broader context of just
how and why Pasteur’s work was received both favorably and unfavorably

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Perspectives on Science

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in various quarters in France, albeit in true Latourian fashion, he wants us
to understand how Pasteur made France as much as France made Pasteur.
Not surprisingly, those who emphasize the external are more interested
in the relationship between science and society. Obviously Fuller has the
strongest interest in this with his emphasis on the social responsibility of
science and the need for more public participation in decision-making in
science. There is a great difference among theorists in their attitudes to-
wards the relationship. Basically traditionalists like Bunge think science
needs to be defended from society while radicals like Fuller think society
needs to be defended from science.

(8) Do They Believe in Progress/Cumulation in Science/
Scholarship? (Table 4, line 8)
Frickel’s view on this tends to be the norm in science studies in adhering
to Bloor’s (1976) strong program in the sociology of scientiªc knowledge
which purports to be impartial with respect to the truth or falsity of a be-
lief, i.e., to be symmetrical in its explanation of both. Hence Frickel
avoids making these kinds of judgments: “SIMs may be progressive, push-
ing the ªeld forward in new directions, or reactionary, urging a revival of
past ideas to counter what are perceived as pernicious current tendencies”
(p. 208). Ziman’s voice in his book too is one of studied, objective neutral-
ity towards the changes that he sees as having taken place in modern sci-
ence. But despite this neutral voice inºuenced by modern science studies,
from his previous work we in fact doubt that he liked these changes very
much and regretted that because of his untimely death, we did not have
the opportunity to ask him about that.

A minority of the theorists gives a pretty unqualiªed “no” or “yes” to
this question but more complex positions are more common. Abbott re-
sponded: “I don’t believe in that much.” “We’re all under the sign of this
progressivist ideology of the nineteenth century that . . . we’re going
somewhere. And maybe we aren’t going anywhere. Just going.” We infer
that Drori too tends towards the negative on this point because of her
view that the spread of a scientiªc ethos as the new religion (as opposed to
labor-force training) has not been particularly practically useful nor con-
tributed to development or democracy around the world. Collins on the
other hand responded: “He (Abbott) says you never accumulate. Well I
don’t think that’s true. If you take sort of a pragmatic standpoint, there are
quite a lot of areas where we feel like we can subsume this stuff that was
done 100 years ago. I think that political sociologists are better than Max
Weber now. Max Weber was very good but the really good ones, Michael
Mann is one that I like, I think we know more about certain things about
the state than we used to. And I don’t doubt that’s true in many of the

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physical sciences.” Bunge too gives an unequivocal “yes” answer to this
question. He thinks that decision making in science is largely a matter of
rational choice, “rational selection” by individuals, but also emphasizes
that mergers of research programs are normally a good thing, particularly
in the social sciences, and particularly for solving practical problems.

Some of the more interesting “yes but” views explicitly or implicitly
separate cumulation from progress. Latour generally sees cumulation to a
degree but does not view that as progress particularly. MacKenzie’s
“performativity” is a good example of that. The models he studied were
deªnitely cumulative but does that imply progressive in the sense of com-
ing to approximate reality more? At times yes, where performativity is
present, but that is because they create their own reality. Moreover models
built on rational expectations and efªcient markets in his view could not
explain the crash of 86 let alone, he would surely think, the most recent
one. Fuller falls into this camp in his own way. “I’m not very attracted to
this idea of truth as the end of knowledge—it doesn’t tell you very much
. . . You can get reliable knowledge about all kinds of things . . . Nazis can
get reliable knowledge . . . Why (do) we want knowledge in the ªrst place
. . . we’re trying to do something to improve the human condition.” Else-
where he makes it clear that it is not progress unless it is progress towards
socialism (2006b).

There are four elements in Hull’s view on this. First, by equating selec-
tion with “checking,” i.e., with logic and evidence, he tends to create the
impression that he believes in cumulation and progress. Secondly how-
ever, when directly addressing the question he emphasizes that like bio-
logical evolution, while it may be locally progressive, “it can (only) be
made to look globally maximizing by careful editing” (p. 474). This is the
view that Latour arrived at through his museum visit. Thirdly, in a socio-
logically sophisticated “however to the however,” Hull also believes that
the institution of science is (happens to be?) socially-structured in such a
way that what is good for scientists is also good for science. He agrees with
Merton that scientists seek status among their peers (“credit” he calls it).
But in the scientiªc process, two conventions are important. The ªrst is
that the ªrst published gets the credit which militates against secrecy in
science, i.e., it forces scientists to make their work public so that others
can use and build on it. But of course mistakes, publishing non-repeatable
results, bring discredit, so a balance is created between ambition and reck-
lessness. The second convention of citations—showing that work ºows
from other well-established work—increases its acceptance, but also de-
tracts from claims to originality so a balance is created between continuity
and innovation. These conventions of the institution of science, Hull be-
lieves, typically make self-policing in science more effective than else-

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Perspectives on Science

415

where in society and tends to create the impression again that he believes
in cumulation and progress. Fourthly, in his research Hull described many
examples of overt conºict in science such as priority disputes. That should
not be good for science as a whole any more than a biologist would claim
that what is good for one particular species is necessarily good for the eco-
system. Subsequently therefore he came to admit, that while still defend-
ing his visible hand explanation, that “this discord can hold back the
progress of science” (1977). Actually, one could argue over whether, as im-
plied by the subtitle of his book “an evolutionary account of the social and
conceptual development of science,” he did or did not successfully turn an
evolutionary into a developmental theory of science.

(9) Do They Emphasize Competition, Conºict or Cooperation?
(Table 4, line 9)
We certainly conªrmed in our interviews that those who study science at
least compete for status. When asked about how satisªed they were with
how their theories had been received, only one expressed unreserved satis-
faction. Drori replied “very nicely,” which made us wonder if this is a gen-
der thing. Bunge, the author of over 80 books, complained that he has al-
ways had a problem getting his books published! Abbott noticed that
sociologists of science had not reviewed his book. Latour complains in
print that he does not recognize himself in others’ accounts of his work:
“the science warriors too often waste their time attacking someone who
has the same name as mine” (emphasis in original 1999, p. 299). Hull, who
is about as prominent a philosopher of science or at least of Biology as one
can be, complained “[I am] not as satisªed as I wish I were. It just takes so
long to get the news out.” But he also added “that’s a characteristic of sci-
ence in general, not anything particular to me.” Even when the tone of the
response tended towards the positive, there usually were signiªcant “buts”
attached. Frickel thought pretty well, but complained that social move-
ment people have not really paid much attention. Collins told us about
the various translations that had been done of his book including to Chi-
nese, Russian, and Spanish, but explained that “since I regard the intellec-
tual world as conºict between different factions, I wouldn’t expect to get
more than the support of a particular faction.” Fuller expressed satisfaction
that the journal he founded has lasted for 20 years so far and mentioned a
couple of students he had produced. But he also fretted, “if there’s a prob-
lem, it (his research program) hasn’t really been embraced by any particu-
lar discipline, it’s really kind of more free-ºoating inter-disciplinary pro-
gram at this point so I think it’s institutional future is pretty uncertain.”
Bunge, Drori, and Ziman do not seem particularly interested in this
question. When Drori was asked directly about the role of conºict and co-

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The Reinvention of Grand Theories

operation in science she responded, “They both conceive of the process as a
functionalist one and here is where I have a problem with it . . . the role
(of science in society) is not as a functionalist institution that reaps partic-
ular rewards for us.” Generally there is more of an emphasis on negative
than on positive social relationships in this literature. Abbott: “Competi-
tion is a natural state of things.” Collins: “I regard the intellectual world
as conºict between different factions.” Frickel: “Intellectual life is consti-
tuted around oppositionality.” Fuller spoke of scientists “battling over
common turf.” Most however admit (or at least by the time of our inter-
views admitted) of positive relationships as well. Despite the fact that
Abbott’s book emphasizes competition in initial splits and implicit
conºict in the subsequent ingestion, he added to us that “cooperation is
something that just happens like competition . . . People are always in in-
teraction . . . sometimes it’s conºict, sometimes it isn’t.” Collins noted
that there are “multiple conºictual groups (in science but) the groups
themselves have Durkheimian solidarity to them.” He then referred to his
more recent book on violence in which one theme is that violence is actu-
ally rather difªcult for people to engage in to make the point that recently
“I’ve found the Durkheimian space kind of more available.” “I kind of
come back much closer
to Talcott Parsons’ position, or certainly
Durkheim’s position.” When we challenged Frickel in our interview that
perhaps competition and conºict relative to cooperation may have been
overemphasized in his work and in science studies more generally, he ad-
mitted that may be the case. In his book, Hull described social relation-
ships in science as a mixture of conºict and cooperation, cooperation ob-
taining particularly among those with historically related philosophical,
theoretical, or methodological views. While reviewers tended to think
that he overemphasized the nasty side of science, he claimed in our inter-
view that “I think I may have emphasized the cooperation more than the
competition,” i.e., the visible, like the invisible hand, implies overall
efªciency. Both Latour and MacKenzie describe many examples of compe-
tition for status by publishing but also describe much collaboration in re-
search as well. Fuller is interesting in this respect. While emphasizing
competition, what he seeks is cooperation. His ideal of “republican sci-
ence” is the combination of “individual freedom and collective responsi-
bility” (2007a, p. 109) and the latter is why Collins called him a utopian
in our interview.

There is a lot of confusion in the science studies literature as in the so-
cial science literature more broadly surrounding the concepts of competi-
tion, conºict, and cooperation. Historically sociologists, for example, tend
to distinguish between conºict (as in Marxism or conºict theory more
generally) and cooperation (as in functionalism). Traditionally, neoclassical

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Perspectives on Science

417

economists recognized competition and cooperation but deªned conºict as
outside their subject matter! Biologists usefully draw distinctions among
all three. Competition exists when utilizing the same resource(s). If re-
sources are plentiful, the relationship can be 0 0, if scarce it can be (cid:2) (cid:2),
i.e., what one gets another does not so each is limited by the presence of
others. In either case however there need be no actual social interaction.
For example in science, one can pursue one’s own research program while
simply ignoring rather than attacking or supporting that of others. Coop-
eration and overt conºict on the other hand do involve actual social inter-
action which can be mutually beneªcial (cid:3) (cid:3), antagonistic (cid:3) (cid:2), altruis-
tic (cid:2) (cid:3), or even (rarely) (cid:2) (cid:2) spiteful. All of these kinds of social
interactions can be favored under similar conditions (e.g. crowding) but
also under different ones (e.g. degree of relatedness as Hull emphasized).
Social scientists however tend not to make these distinctions, hence my
use of “positive” and “negative” social relations above, i.e., terms like
competition, conºict, opposition, etc. mean pretty much the same thing
there. However, in this science studies literature and our interviews there
are hints of recognition of the important distinction between competition
and conºict. For example Frickel distinguishes between competitor and
countermovements (p. 216) and writes: “intellectual life is constituted
around oppositionality . . . but can vary with respect to how they go about
formulating these characterizations and critiques. This can be done po-
lemically . . . or in a sophisticated fashion” (p. 224). “SIMs are rarely con-
tentious in the same way that political activism is contentious” (p. 226).
In our interview Abbott stated, “Competition is a very general mechanism
for me. It’s not like this focused cut-throat disorderly thing that we have
sometimes (assumed).”

(10) Are They Constructionist? (Table 4, line 10)
Some of the difªculty in answering this question stems from the fact that
to be constructionist (or constructivist, used interchangeably) has taken on
more variety of meanings than the terms commonly used to deªne most
issues in social and cultural theory. Virtually no one today uses “construc-
tion” in the original Berger and Luckmann (1967) sense of an emphasis on
the micro over the macro. Probably the most common meaning it has
taken on in social and cultural theory more broadly implies just an em-
phasis on sociocultural over biophysical causation, i.e., to do social science.
That is the sense in which Collins declared to us that: “Social construc-
tionism is so deep in everything I’m doing.” That is the only sense in
which Frickel too could be considered constructionist: “We . . . take it as
axiomatic that SIMs are sui generis social phenomena.” Similarly for Drori
“it’s not because anything has changed in our physiology!” and Abbott as

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418

The Reinvention of Grand Theories

well: “Well, I’m pretty constructionist in the sense that I think that I as-
sume the pragmatist theoretical tradition. I think social life is made. We
make everything. We make our ideas . . . so I’m a pretty thoroughgoing
constructivist in that sense.”

But that is not the sense of scientists “constructing” facts, for example,
with which Latour originally stirred up such a controversy in science stud-
ies. It was rather implying or being interpreted as implying an emphasis
on subjectivity over objectivity or relativism over realism which did.
Bunge most deªnitely is not a constructionist in that sense; indeed he sub-
sequently published a book defending realism (2006). Nor is Ziman for
the most part, nor Abbott. “What happened to the sociology of science is
the generation came out in the 1970s and decided to just, you know, kick
everything out in the teeth and so on, and then they get on this ludicrous
constructionist stuff.” “I really gave up reading the sociology of science
because the sociology of science was just so caught up with these ridicu-
lous debates about social construction and it just seemed incredibly silly
to me.” We think it is fair to classify Latour, MacKenzie, and Fuller as
“yes, but” on this question. The “but” in the ªrst two cases is because
Latour later either backed off that position or claimed to have been misun-
derstood, and MacKenzie prefers his own term. Fuller declares “social con-
structivist accounts of science are largely correct” (p. 11) but claims else-
where that the difference is that realism holds propositions to be true
irrespective of place and time and constructivism does not,” i.e., he
equates it with historical speciªcity. Our “no, but” interpretation of Hull
is derived from the following. While not a constructivist proper, he does
concern himself with his own subjectivity, “reºexivity.” When he says sci-
entists think this or do that, he typically stops to check his conclusions by
reºecting on his own thoughts and actions. “If I am engaged in the same
activity as my subjects, then anything that is true of them had better be
true of me” (p. 6).

(11) Do They Think Their Theory Is Compatible with that of any of
the Others?
One of the things that most surprised us in the interviews was how unfa-
miliar most of the authors were with the work of most of the others. We
were prepared for some of this and so, as much not to embarrass them as
anything else, we had potted summaries of the work of others available if
they wished to comment on them anyway. In providing these, we could
not always be certain of the extent of their previous knowledge, but most
of the time they were frank about that, Abbott perhaps most of all: “I
don’t actually read other people’s theories at all.” And later, “I read lots of
things, I read, but what I read is data. So I read ethnographies, I read nov-

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Perspectives on Science

419

els, I read case histories, I read stuff, I read history, I read about things, but
I don’t read other people’s theory. Ever. Haven’t done that since the 80’s.”
In any event, the most informed author seemed familiar with about half of
the others. This clearly showed that in choosing general theorists of the
scientiªc/scholarly process, we had not chosen what evolutionists would
call a “natural” or “homologous” group, i.e., one the similarity among the
members of which is due to a recent common history. Rather, the group
was “analogous” or “homoplastic,” i.e., one whose members had converged
on a broadly similar topic from different historical backgrounds. Given
the different disciplinary backgrounds, it was not that we expected to see
homology. It was just that given the high level of generality of all of their
theories, we expected they would have been scanning the intellectual hori-
zon so to speak, and would have picked up on others aiming to occupy a
similar niche, whether pro or con.

Hull, sociological convert that he is, was most socially astute in at-
tempting to provide as big a tent as possible. He had not read Collins but
after we told him about it, his reaction was that perhaps he should. On
Collin’s emphasis on the importance of face to face interaction, his reaction
was “yeah, yeah” and when told about the law of small numbers his reac-
tion was “sounds right to me.” When the emphasis of other authors’ dif-
fered from his, he incorporated it and then went on to extend it. For exam-
ple on Bunge’s emphasis on mergers he noted: “splitting is difªcult;
merger is even more difªcult. The question is why. Splitting is not as
common as we thought it was, merger turns out to be more common than
we thought it was . . . Now how different and how common is merger in
all these areas whether it’s biology or science studies? We have to do em-
pirical research because there’s no a priori answer to that question.” In a
review of Ziman’s book in Nature he had previously called Ziman’s view of
science “detailed,” “realistic,” and “well-rounded.” In our interview he
stated: “I made my stuff sound as Mertonian as possible because I was
aware of his school . . . plus I thought there was plenty to say. Ziman ap-
proached me and wanted to start developing a working relationship which
was ªne with me. But then he died. Science evolves. He (Ziman) looked
back, (and saw that) science has changed through time. And I think he’s
right. Do we now have ªnally the right notion of science? No, it keeps
changing.” He sometimes used the opportunity of any congruence to drive
home a theme important in his own work. With respect to Drori, he
talked about the importance of variation in sociocultural evolution (using
the example of variation in tenure requirements in universities), and,
while unaware of Abbott’s work nor apparently of what fractals are, he dis-
cussed mechanisms of speciation including the sympatric (geographical)
and allopatric (ecological). Given that we, the interviewers, were sociolo-

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420

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gists: “Of all social scientists, I like sociologists the best, like being the
tallest midget in the freak show (laughing).”

Collins was among the more knowledgeable about the others and was
generally conciliatory or at least polite towards them as well, but often
with a “but” attached. He had reviewed Abbott’s theory favorably in print
as compatible with his own as long as the law of small numbers was
added. In our interview however he also made a point of disagreeing with
Collins’ view that there is no cumulation in science. On Hull: “Well I
don’t know this in detail . . . there is one point that I think has not been
well picked up by people. Biological evolution looks like a candelabra
with branches and branches and some branches end . . . Continuous
branching with a certain amount of dying off. The intellectual world has
that in common but the biological one doesn’t have a law of small num-
bers as far as I can see. You can have thousands of species whereas the at-
tention space that humans can deal with seems to be much more limited
than that.” He claimed to agree to some extent with Latour, Ziman, and
Fuller. “I actually like Bruno Latour quite a lot and sort of incorporated
some of his stuff . . . I particularly like the idea about networks of labora-
tory equipment.” “I like Ziman too actually . . . he’s more narrowly a phi-
losopher of science per se.” On Fuller’s view of the need for broader partic-
ipation in decision making in science he agreed but opined: “I’m not as
utopian or optimistic as Steve Fuller is.”

At the opposite extreme, Bunge was the least accommodating of others
although his criticisms were focused and to the point. On Abbott’s fractals
“it clearly seems to me a wild fantasy . . . it’s a very old hermetic tradition
that the microcosmos and the macrocosmos are similar.” On Drori, “sci-
ence was global in the 17th century: a network of about 200 scientists who
participated and collaborated.” As for the cultural authority of science, “I
wish it had.” “There has been a (postmodern) reaction against science in
the States and in western Europe . . . that you won’t notice in Asia or Latin
America.” “About 17% of students are enrolled in science and technology
courses in the States and roughly the same in Europe nowadays. In China
and India it’s twice as much, 34%. In India, China, Japan, and Latin
America science still enjoys great prestige. And they are increasingly pro-
ducing science.” Despite having claimed in his text that his “present work
is partly a belated spinoff of evolutionary biology,” when asked about
Hull’s evolutionary theory of curiosity, credit, and checking in science his
response was: “Of course selection—one selects, one replaces a hypothesis
with another one—one eliminates what one regards as falsity. But the
analogy is completely superªcial . . . Popper says the same thing,” and he
went on to contrast “lawful” natural selection in biology with “rational”
selection in science. He explained away Ziman’s theory of PLACE on the

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Perspectives on Science

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basis of the kind of physics Ziman originally did. “Ziman was a specialist
in solid state physics and solid state physics is applied science and very
close to engineering. Solid state physicists are asked to study special mate-
rials—for instance semi-conductors that have direct applications to com-
puter science, the computer industry. And so of course that kind of work is
closely supervised by managers and it is subsidized by big companies and
so on.” He went on to argue that is not the case with astrophysics, psy-
chology, pure mathematics, particle physics, or paleontology, for example.
He also added his view that the current pressure exerted by governments
including the Canadian one on academics to work with the private sector
is “pragmatism in action” and “destructive of science—basic science.”

Drori too was not shy about disagreeing with some others but not ex-
clusively. On Hull, “we (she and her coauthors) give a lot more credit and
power to the interaction between science and other institutions,” i.e., they
are more externalist relative to Hull’s internalism. On Ziman, “I disagree
with him . . . I do not think that science became more applied.” “I come
from Stanford, which is mythologized as the hub of silicone valley and
where undergraduate students struck it rich creating Google, so it’s not
that scientists are blocked from making money, it’s just that they will not
describe it as such. They talk about self satisfaction and contributing to
community, it’s more relevant than applied.” She was not familiar with
Abbott’s work and went on to talk about glocalization, but she chose to
interpret Fuller as “a call for maintaining scientiªc freedom” and so agreed
with him.

Frickel is pretty balanced in his reaction to the theories of others, some-
times agreeing, sometimes disagreeing. He worked Collin’s competing for
“intellectual attention space” (p. 205) and his “law of small numbers”
(p. 216) into his theory but he also thinks Collins places too much empha-
sis on competition for status which “unnecessarily ºattens out variation in
the motives of intellectual actors” (p. 211). In his view, intellectual dissat-
isfaction is a prerequisite. He cites Latour (pp. 208, 221, 227) and Fuller
(p. 204) in a more formulaic way than anything else, but when asked
whether he agreed with Fuller that science should become more respon-
sive to the public interest his answer was deªnitely positive, referring to
he and Fuller as being on the same wave length even though there was no
mention of that issue in the target article. Fuller agreed with Drori as he
put it that “the greatest impact that science has on people, not just scien-
tists but people in general, is at the ideological cultural level.” But he also
thinks that “if you were to ask a scientist, give them enough time to come
up with their own sociology, it would kind of look like Randall Collins
. . . it’s purely internal . . . larger political and economic changes and so
forth are pretty much (a) backdrop.” Latour’s book was published before

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422

The Reinvention of Grand Theories

any of the others so we would not have expected him to take their work
into account, but while published later than most, MacKenzie is also light
on reference to the others. He only cites some of Collins’ earlier work and
Latour on the constructed nature of the social world (p. 26).

IV. Conclusion
We conclude that it is a powerful argument in its favor that a Darwinian
sociocultural evolutionary theory can incorporate both all of the common
and all of the useful unique features of contemporary grand theories of the
scientiªc/scholarly process. This general view of science was pioneered by
Stephen Toulmin (1972) and David Hull (1988) which is not necessarily
to defend every aspect of their theories. However, we conclude this for
nine reasons which correspond to the discussions of issues in (3) to (11) in
Section III. Evolutionary theory’s twin pillars of sociocultural descent with
modiªcation incorporate both the traditional and the innovative nature of
science and scholarship. We truly do both build on the shoulders of others
but do so creatively as well. While sometimes change can be cyclical as we
revert to older ideas, very often novelty instead emerges. Evolutionary the-
ory recognizes all of the patterns of change that have been observed in
science by the theorists discussed—linear, branching, converging, and
merging. It offers a universal mechanism, selection, which (along with in-
novation rates and sampling error in ªnite populations), can be under-
stood to include all of the historically particular and generalizable reasons
why social movements embracing different concepts, theories, methods,
research programs, etc. spread or do not spread successfully in science. It
recognizes that many factors both internal and external to the culture and
institution of science are important in its evolution. It accepts that
cumulation and progress towards improved understanding are common in
science but not universal. No credible theory of science could ignore the
follies of phrenology, Lysenkoism, Nazi race science, or cold fusion, for ex-
ample. It includes all of competition, cooperation, and conºict. Competi-
tion is ubiquitous in science as elsewhere, but common too are both coop-
eration and overt conºict. The latter are both means by which competition
takes place under some circumstances. Less well known is that evolution-
ary theory also incorporates the subjective or constructed as well as the ob-
jective or structured nature of scientiªc knowledge. (Biologists, for exam-
ple, have recently come to appreciate more so than they did in the past
that organisms construct their environment as much as they are structured
by it; see Lewontin 1983; Odling-Smee et. al. 1996; 2003.) In science,
new environments both internal and external to the institution itself can
restructure old ideas, new ideas can reconstruct old environments, and
sometimes both can even occur simultaneously so that they structure and

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Perspectives on Science

423

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it. In conclusion, historical social science recognizes diversity and change,
postmodernism celebrates them, but only evolution can explain them.

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