I recently spoke at two great conferences, one hosted at my home IHPST at the University of Toronto and the other hosted by the stunning Institut Menorquí d’Estudis in Menorca, Spain.

The first conference was Metaphysics & the Philosophy of Science (you can spy me in some of the pictures) and my talk was about challenges for Ontic Structural Realism in the context of Quantum Field Theory. Specifically, I argued that Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking creates two equally good—but inconsistent— structures that an OSR-ist should believe in. Basically, the point is that OSR (as expressed most by Angelo Cei and Steven French) reifies structure, but that these structures as provided by physics aren’t unique, and therefore aren’t good candidates for singular, fundamental entities.

The next was the 6th European Spring School on History of Science and Popularization, and the theme was “Visual Representations in Science,” in stunning Maó, Menorca. There I got to hang out with people who gave me new perspectives on my Penrose diagram work and listen to a lot of great talks at the interface of History of Science and Art History. The School had pre-circulated papers, and it was a real privilege to have so many in-depth responses to my work. I’m reading one suggested book now, Bender and Marrinan’s The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, 2010).

Thanks to all the participants and organizers!

(Plus, I’ll be talking at 4S—joint with HSS and SHOT—in November in Cleveland.)

all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. [The Truth Wears Off]

He calls it the “decline effect.” The idea is that many early, positive, evidence for some phenomenon are in fact statistical anomalies. As more studies are done, Lehrer observes that the size of many effects—pharmaceutical effectiveness, alleged psychic powers—reduces over time.

At first blush this may be expected. As more studies are done, early results reveal themselves to be statistical fluctuations, and the true value comes out. So the surprise is that results that researchers felt were tested enough, weren’t really. This is the first problem for people who would like to believe in scientific results: (1) we’re not good enough at determining when a result is certain.

This could point to technical problems. Perhaps our standards of statistical significance are bad. They’re certainly arbitrary: why is a p-value of 0.05 considered significant in many sciences (meaning that you have a 5% chance of seeing an effect where there isn’t one)? Why not 0.01, or 0.000001? Or perhaps experimental scientists  don’t get enough training in statistics. Lehrer quotes epidemiologist John Ioannidis on the scope of the problem. Ioannidis published a paper in PLoS Medicine called “Why most published research findings are false” (open access here) discussing these issues. Many (most?) studies are poorly designed, such that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”

More than simply statistical analysis is in question here. Study design is a cultural and structural feature of scientific fields. Ioannidis summarizes the factors he sees at play:

In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance.

We can get an intuitive grasp on how much these non-statistical factors matter by asking what we would expect if the problem was wholly due to bad statistics (or bad luck). If the first 10 studies about some effect, say the effectiveness of a drug, had results that were statistical fluctuations we would expect them to be roughly equally divided between positive (the drug helps) results and negative (the drug harms) results. But that’s not what Lehrer finds when he talks to scientists. Most often, the early results are positive ones.

This is usually explained as publication bias: journals want to publish positive findings, so that’s what gets published. Scientists also self-select null results out by not submitting them in the first place. Following Ioannidis’s work, we can ask about monetary conflicts of interest as well. It is well known that pharmaceutical companies actively suppress studies that they commission but that find null results. Philosopher and sociologist Sergio Sismondo, just up the 401 from me at Queen’s University, has done some excellent work detailing the current research situation in biomedicine (papers here). We can call this problem (2), the structure of modern science biases results.

But there is another more personal source of bias that runs through Lehrer’s article. Scientists want to find positive results. They may choose the statistical method that creates the best result, not the method best suited to their data; they may improperly dismiss “outlying” data”; or they may unconsciously see what they want to see in the experiment itself. Lehrer and Ioannidis refer to this as “selective reporting,” but attention to the limits of scientists’ perception dates back (at least) to nineteenth-century German astronomer Friedrich Bessel. Simon Schaffer has a classic paper on the astronomer’s “personal equation” here. And these issues have not left physics. Peter Galison has detailed how “scanning  girls” were used in particle physicists’ bubble chamber experiments in the 1960s. They scanned the thousands of photographs the bubble chambers produced to identify possibly interesting physics events. Eventually computers were invented that were designed to correct errors of identification the scanners made. At Berkeley, physicists used computer simulations to create “fake” event pictures to test how well their programs worked. And at an even higher level, the physicists created fake histograms—the same way particle physics results are presented in journals—full of statistical fluctuation. If they couldn’t identify the real data that was a candidate for the detection of a new particle from the crowd of 99 fakes, they couldn’t trust their result (p. 397). The lengths to which these scientists put themselves to address this version of selective reporting speaks to how important it is, and how difficult it is to deal with. This is a third problem (3) people see what they want to see.

To recap, there are three problems for people who want to believe in the results of science here:

(1) we’re not good enough at determining when a result is certain;

(2), the structure of modern science biases results; and,

(3) people see what they want to see.

Lehrer got a number of letters in response to his article, which he links to in a follow-up post here. I won’t recap his discussion, but in the end he restates his original conclusion:

The larger point, though, is that there is nothing inherently mysterious about why the scientific process occasionally fails or the decline effect occurs. As Jonathan Schooler, one of the scientists featured in the article told me, “I’m convinced that we can use the tools of science to figure this”—the decline effect—“out. First, though, we have to admit that we’ve got a problem.”

It is inevitable, I suppose, that one of the letter writers challenged Lehrer for writing something critical of science when there are creationists running amok, and so he ends on a note that justifies his writing as the first step on the road to science’s recovery. I don’t think we need to heed scaremongering about creationists when writing about science, and I certainly don’t adhere to the AA model of criticism (“I’m a scientist, and I believe in naive objectivity…”). This is especially true when some of the major lessons one can draw from Lehrer’s piece is that there is a problem with the scientific method (such as it is). It is reassuring, I suppose, that the scientists Lehrer quotes think that science will solve science’s problems here, but we need some reasons for optimism.

The decline effect is a philosophical problem … and I’ll have some more thoughts on this in part 2, to come.

How to draw a black hole? Errrr...

My talk asks how we can explain the revival of the study of GR that started in the mid-1950s and built strongly into the 1970s. One explanation has been that new observational and experimental evidence made the field more reputable—closer to the real world than the realm of high theory.

New experimental included Pound and Rebka’s 1959 confirmation of the gravitational redshift of light at Harvard, and Joseph Weber’s 1968 announcement that he had detected gravity waves at the University of Maryland. New observational evidence included the discover of “quasi stellar objects” (now called quasars) as strong radio sources in 1959, the discovery of pulsars in 1967, and the measurement of the ~3K Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.

But this can’t be the whole story. First off, because this GR revival started before 1959, and the exciting work on black holes got going before 1967. Secondly, because the increase of energy in the field was in both high theory and observation. Thirdly, the communities of astrophysics and GR theory were reasonably distinct. (And, current `Relativists’ and Cosmologists benefit from casting the modern revival of their field in terms of solid observations and experiments; not in terms of theoretical advances.) I think the root of this revival came from theorists, and in particular the importation of new techniques from mathematics into physics.

In particular, I’m interested in Roger Penrose’s application of topology to GR, and the diagrams that went along with them. Penrose shook up the field in 1965 when he proved that any sufficiently-large star that collapses must create a singularity. Previously, it was known that a perfectly spherically symmetric star would create a singularity. But, physicists reasoned that because no star is actually spherically symmetric, the singularity could be avoided. (And at the time, there were no computers to approximate the non-symmetric situations.) But Penrose proved that whatever the shape, singularities must form.

This is an exciting and challenging idea—something that make you reconsider your understanding of space-time. When Penrose and Stephen Hawking extended the stellar collapse to cosmological situations in 1970, questions became bigger.

All this would be attractive to students, fueling the development of the field. Moreover, because topology was a relatively well-developed field in mathematics, aspiring physicists knew that there would be a lot of interesting results just from applying the new tools.

But in addition to these sorts of draws, I think that Penrose’s diagrammatic representations of the universes of black holes (representations of solutions of the Einstein Equations) made it easier to approach the subject. GR involves intricate mathematics, and a diagram of the entire system keeps you connected to the physical situation. It allows you to reason about the connections between different regions of space-time, for instance. (See for instance Brandon Carter (1966)).

When this work was incorporated into Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler’s Gravitation, students (and post docs, and young professors) knew that learning this material would help them understand GR and put them in a position where generalizations from homework problems are publishable results. I think this goes a long way to explaining the “Renaissance” of General Relativity.  And, it provides insight into what it means to think with diagrams and also the relationship between research and pedagogy in physics.

So the task of the regularity-theorist is to try and identify what has to be added to the notion of regularity that will allow us to separate laws of nature from accidental generalizations. This has led some regularity-theorists to argue that one thing that separates laws from accidental generalizations is their use by scientists (see e.g. Dretske 1977). That is, what counts as a law is contingent.

This contingency is not a happy position for those philosophers who want laws to be somehow objective, mind-independent, and eternal. Scientific realists are not fans of contingency. And so realist philosophers have tried to offer an explanation that is (in their minds) objective, eternal, etc. and these explanations revolve around supposing the existence of something more than just observed regularities.

One such realist account is offered by Chris Swoyer (1982). He proposes that laws are expressions of relations between properties.  (There is a subtlety here about laws as mind-independent things vs. law-like statements that are expressed by humans. For this discussion I’ll ignore the issue.) Swoyer thinks that the properties things have—colour, mass, energy—are the key players in laws, and that properties exist in the world independently of any object that might exemplify them.

To Swoyer it is worth accepting the existence of properties because they help explain things about laws that the regularity account cannot. For example, regularities cannot be confirmed by their instances. This mean that when I look at planets and see that they move according to Kepler’s laws, I have found one more object that fits in the class of things that exhibit this regularity. But this is just making the data in my regularity bigger, it’s not helping me say something like All planets behave this way. Or, if I saw a new planet, it would behave this way. Our observation gets folded into the regularity, and does not explain it. But of course we want to say that when we observe something that fits a law that we have confirmed it. Swoyer argues that we can explain Kepler’s laws in terms of it holding between objects with a certain property (mass and a range of angular momenta). It is the fact that his properties explain that Swoyer thinks we should believe in them.

Indeed, the only reason I can see for supposing that there are such things as properties at all is that a philosophical theory of them has explanatory value. (original emphasis, 204)

Without going any further into Swoyer’s account, we can see a problem. Properties may help philosopher’s explain laws, but how can we argue that the best thing for philosophers is what dictates out metaphysics?

Swoyer is just pushing the anthropocentrism around. For regularity theorists laws are contingent, meaning that hey are relative to the minds of scientists trying to prove or disprove them. The people at the centre of the regularity theorist’s anthropocentrism are scientists. For Swoyer, laws are not longer dependent on scientists’ minds, and he thinks he’s done away with contingency. But he’s just moved the centre to himself. Now laws (and quite a bit more of our ontology) are contingent on what philosophers think is best for them.

This is hardly an improvement.

So here’s a possibility. Cosmology is so popular, not just because of the science, but because it allows us to ask the big questions — where we come from, who we are, where we’re going. It’s metaphysics by other means.

He thinks “the most obvious example of “theophysics” concerns the so-called God particle,” the Higgs boson. Pausing here for a moment, this is clearly off-base. Yes, Nobel Laureate and ex-Fermilab director Leon Lederman christened the Higgs boson as the “God” particle in 1993. (CERN has a short writeup here; an authoritative technical summary of Higgs searches from the PDG in pdf is here.)

But the searching for the Higgs is not theology. It is searching for a particle our best current theories predict; this strategy has worked well in the past (see Alvarez on “bump hunting”). If one was looking for something to call “theophysics,” I would point you toward “Physical Eschatology” the “nascent discipline” of physicists theorizing about what the end of the universe (and after) will be like. (Better phrased: theorizing about what “end of the universe” could mean, see Dyson, 1979.)

Heading back to Veron’s piece, two things struck me. The first was that he puts cosmological “speculation” on the same plane as Scholastic “speculation” about the number of angels you can fit on the end of a pin. Whether or not Scholastics actually ever argued about that, Vernon must know the reference is pejorative. But, I was never under the impression that religion was about speculating at all. Depending on your religious orientation, religion seems to be about practice and belief. Whatever your thoughts on Hawking’s latest, people aren’t running out to become cosmologists, and believing what Hawking tells you is rather different from believing in (a) god. This is a sad brush with which to paint religion or cosmology.

So Vernon missed the mark in his physical and religious examples. What about his claim, above, that cosmology’s popularity is about asking and answering the big questions? This sounds on the right track. Many many scientists describe their motivations to become scientists as rooted in wonder at the origins of things, or a grand design. But why is this connected to religion?

Vernon’s questions are entirely anthropocentric: “where we come from, who we are, where we’re going.” And herein lies the problem. When applied to Cosmology, Vernon’s questions assume that we are part of the answer. There is an idea in Cosmology called the Anthropic Principle. Basically, the idea is that humanity’s existence can be used in physical arguments about the creation and evolution of the universe. The Templeton Foundation, at least, thought there was a strong enough connection to religion to award John Barrow their prize in 2006 (for work like this). But this is a controversial issue (see the Smolin-Susskind discussion here), and these minutiae can’t explain the broad public appeal of cosmology. I think Vernon’s questions are unnecessarily anthropocentric. I want to know about the universe, not about whether I am so important as to have somehow caused it to be the way it is. It was Vernon’s poor questions that led him to religion, not cosmology.

Cosmology’s appeal might be due to the lure of big questions, but these questions are bigger than we are.

The pitch is:

As Norton Wise wrote “much of the history of science could be written in terms of making new things visible—or familiar things visible in a new way” (2006). Despite this, the vast majority of science studies concentrate on the textual. Visual scientific representations offer a focus for multidisciplinary conversations about visual cultures, the boundaries of art and science, the epistemology of pictures, and how scientific representations change across time, media, and space. The workshop will explore the role of scientific visual representation from a range of disciplinary perspectives; participants represent anthropology, art history, history, and philosophy. Each talk will be addressed to non-specialists. The workshop will introduce participants to a diverse selection of ongoing work on this theme in Toronto. It will exhibit the breadth (and the limits) of visual representation as a thematic focus for studies of science.

The speakers and titles of papers are:

Brian Baigrie, “Picturability in Scientific Practice: Philosophical Perspectives.”

Bernard Lightman, “Modelling the Planet: James Wyld’s Great Globe.”

Natasha Myers, “Excitable Tissues and Elastic Temporalities: Visualizing Life through Time-lapse Media.”

Alison Syme, “Scientific Images and the History of Taste.”

Aaron Wright, “Visual Reasoning and the ‘Renaissance’ of General Relativity.”

Coordinates:

December 10, 2010

Victoria College Rm. 304,

9 a.m. — 4:30 p.m.

IHPST, U of T

***

All are welcome, but please r.s.v.p. to me to aid planning, and to inform us of any special accommodations you may require. Victoria College is building “VC,” near Museum Station, on this map.

I hope to see you there.

The Pasteurization of France (1988) treats the simultaneous transformation of French society and bacteriology that took place from 1887 to 1919. Latour’s research is based on reading three French journals for this period: the Revue Scientifique, Annales de l’Institute Pasteur, and Concours Médical. During this period Pasteur’s advances in bacteriology were matched by changes in the influence and domain of application of hygiene  and hygienists on French society.  Pasteurization can be seen as a “companion book” (fn. 7, 252) to the more fully articulated Actor-Network Theory of Latour’s  Science in Action (1987). Latour explains Pasteurization in military terms: Pasteur succeeded because he was able to enlist the most “allies” to support his conclusions. This is consonant with other sociologies of knowledge that have argued that “He who has the most, and the most powerful, allies wins.” (Shapin and Schaffer 1985, 382) Controversially, Latour counts microbes among Pasteur’s allies—they have agency, just as people do. The conception of scientific practice Latour advances rests on this politics.

Semiotic tools and concepts underlie the distinctness of Latour’s politics. First, Latour need not play deconstructionist games and assert that everything can be read as a ‘text.’ His primary sources are journal articles, so the primacy of textual analysis is justified by his sources. Semiotics motivates Latour’s most controversial move: ascribing agency to inanimate objects. This is because Latour’s story is not about Pasteur, per se. Rather the story is played by “actants” from a dictionary of semiotics. (Greimas, 1972) Actants are the things given agency by the author of a text. Pasteur certainly counts, but so do the microbes. “Society is not just made up of just men, for everywhere microbes intervene and act.” (Latour 1988, 35) The story about microbes played out in nineteenth-century journals is played by actants. But who is watching the play? Latour presents the real subject of his book as the semiotician’s “ideal reader,” that is, the reader to whom the articles in the Revue Scientifique were written. This ideal reader understands articles  Latour uses a semiotic method to avoid anachronistically assuming that our current understanding of microbes is correct; it is his way of ‘playing the stranger.’ (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985 Ch. 1; Latour, 1988 fn. 26, 257) The anglophone sociologists of knowledge  insist on playing the stranger to allow them to write about scientific controversies ‘symmetrically’: to avoid hagiography, the winners and losers of scientific debates must be analyzed in the same way. For Latour, the symmetry allowed by semiotics is not between warring scientists but between scientists and the objects they study. “[I]t is crucial to treat nature and society symmetrically and to suspend our belief in a distinction between natural and social actors.” (Latour 1988, fn. 6, 260)[1] Latour’s goal in not to investigate the boundary between true and false knowledge, but to investigate the boundary between nature and society. (Callon and Latour in Pickering 1992) It is in some ways a more conservative (or at least, realist) position than anglophone social constructivism. SSK would have scientific practice taking place between only people, with no reference to nature; for Latour the practice of science is organized on an axis between nature and society.

Latour uses semiotic methodology, and we can see semiology in his analysis. Following Michel Callon, Latour explains science in action in terms of the translation of interests. He cautions that “whenever I use the words ‘interest’ and ‘interested,’ I am not referring to the ‘interest’ theory expounded by what is now called the Edinburgh School. [...] I am rather referring to the notion of translation.” (Latour 1988 fn.5, 260) Pasteur enlisted allies in society, like the army, by translating the work of his laboratory into terms that aligned with the army’s interest in flighting disease. Pasteur translated the action of microbes in the laboratory—through inscriptions—to the action of microbes in society (causing disease, dictating the social importance of doctors versus hygienists). Critics of the original 1984 version of  Pasterization—Les microbes: guerre et paix suivi irréductions—accused Latour of ignoring the practice of science in the laboratory. Latour was able to defend himself in the notes to the English edition: “I am not interested here in offering a social or a political explanation of Pasteur as an alternative to other cognitive or technical interpretations. I am interested only in retracing our steps back to the moment when the very distinction between [natural] content and [social] context had not yet been made.” (Latour 1988 fn. 10, 252)
In fact, if we examine an example of Latour’s semiotics in action, scientific practice does emerge. For Latour “the definition of a new object is provided by semiotics” (Latour 1988 fn. 19, 262)

for instance, this new agent that appears of the scene, in the 1890s, which is defined by the list of actions it made, and which yet has no name: ‘From the liquid produced by macerating malt, Payen and Persoz are learning to extract through the action of alcohol, a solid, white, amorphous, neutral, more or less tasteless substance that is insoluble in alcohol, soluble in water and weak alcohol, and which cannot be precipitated by sublead acetate. Warmed from 65º to 75º with starch in the presence of water, it separates off a soluble substance, which is dextrin.’ (Latour 1988, 79)

For Latour and for the Pasteurians  “[i]n the laboratory any new object is at first defined by inscribing in the laboratory notebook a long list of what the agent does and does not do.” (Latour 1988, 80) As Latour argues in “Drawing things together,” the power of the laboratory—the efficacy of laboratory practice—comes from marshaling inscriptions. (Latour in Woolgar 1990} “In  inscribing the answers in homogeneous terms, alphabets, and numbers, we would benefit from the essential technical advantage of the laboratory: we would be able to to see at a glance a large number of tests written in the same language. [...] In the laboratory unprecedented things were now to be expressed in written signs.” (Latour 1988, 80–83. Original emphasis) For Latour, the practice of science is about making inscriptions that translate interests. It is easy enough to argue that Latour’s attention to Pasteur’s laboratory is insufficient. (Schaffer 1991, 186) But it is more interesting to ask why Latour offers explanations that do not emphasize laboratory practice.

In a brilliant review, Simon Schaffer blames Latour’s “neglect [of]  experimental labour” on his “hylozoism, an attribution of purpose, will and life to inanimate matter, and of human interests to the nonhuman.”(Schaffer 1991, 182)  [2] But as we have seen above, Latour does not eschew Pasteur’s laboratory. Really, Schaffer’s critique is that Latour has ignored others’ laboratories. Schaffer contextualizes Latour’s work within other scholarship on Pasteur that engages with Pasteur’s rival Robert Koch, who invented a solid medium in which to grow microbes.

‘Solid media’ were indeed decisive, but their use was not self-evidently good news for Pasteur’s friendly microbes; rather was it good news for Robert Koch. Latour, in striking contrast, asks only what shifted the views of the ‘ideal’ readers of the Revue Scientifique. Unsurprisingly, he can explain this shift in loyalty by reference to Pasteur’s experiments alone, and the good behaviour of the microbes, because he deliberately omits their most potent enemies. (Schaffer:1991, 188)

But if Latour can explain with reference to Pasteur alone, what is wrong with that? If, in physics I can demonstrate a theorem without reference to some quantity—say, position—I have proved the valuable result that the phenomenon  described by the theorem is independent of position (equivalently, that linear momentum is conserved). That is, in certain sciences, using as few variables as possible in a demonstration is a virtue. And after all, Latour is presenting as a scientist. (Schaffer 1991, 183; Latour 1988, 12) The fact that Latour explains events without recourse to laboratory techniques is not, in itself, a problem. It is a reflection of his view of scientific practice. Schaffer prefers Harry Collins’s (and others’) sociology of scientific controversy. But SSK sees scientific practice as a politics between groups of people. Latour sees scientific practice as politics between nature and society (mediated by scientists). Of course Latour does not concern himself with other laboratories, and the fact that he can explain some controversy without appealing to laboratory competitions shows the strength of his methods.

The debate is—or should be—about SSK versus Latour’s conceptions of scientific practice, rather than about the consequences of those conceptions. At this ‘higher’ level of analysis, Latour is battling the view that science can be reduced to society, that science is socially constructed. Part two of the English version is an aphroistic attack on reductionism, “Irreductions.” That is why, even though Pasteurization can be read as having a lot in common with SSK (Schaffer 1991, 181) it can also be read as the scene of SSK’s  death [3] Of course, one cannot recommend the SSK approach as a cure for Pasteurization‘s ills, when the book explicitly attacks the reductionism of social construction. For this reason, Karin Knorr-Cetina’s criticism is most apt.

My major criticism of Latour’s scheme is that it appears to be boldly reductionist, and hence runs against his pronounced goal to develop a non-reductionist analysis of science. Throughout the book, Latour appears curiously unreflective in this matter, and never seems to notice that his reduction of social and scientific life to a particular form of political power struggle which rests upon alignment and translations does not escape the criticism he advances against other versions of reductionism. (Knorr-Cetina 1985, 581–82)

Attention to different senses of ‘scientific practice’ shows that the best reason for concern about Latour’s approach is that his anti-reductionism conflicts with his conception of scientific practice.

Notes:

1. See also “we must accept a certain degree of agnosticism about which actors are human and which are nonhuman, which are endowed with strategy and which are unconscious,” fn. 26, 257

2. Also, “Latour’s semiotic interpretation of the roles of both the humans and nonhumans in his story gave little regard to the actual practices of experimentation.” (Creager 2002, 320)

3. “ Les Microbes, guerre et paix est un dépassement du programme fort qui équivaut a une mise à mort.” (Isambert 1985, 486)

(And more Hist of Sci. Practice to come shortly.)

http://jaivirdi.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/navigating-the-history-of-science-blogosphere/

I contend that…

…the most important question is not Who does the practicing? but rather What do we mean by scientific practice? Focusing on what scientific practice means for each author puts the debates over agency in a new light and points the way to a more productive historiographic debate. (A debate that still needs to happen in public.)

But before wading into any more historiography, it will pay to take a closer look at what ‘scientific practice’ means. ‘Scientific’ has a straightforward meaning ”3. Of or pertaining to science or the sciences; of the nature of science” (Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition 1989). But the quotations provided indicate that this is not quite the sense we are looking for. The adjective modifies “studies,” “truth,” “language,” “temper,” and “spirit.” “Studies” is close to a practice, but it is an early usage (1722) outweighed by the later usage that applies “scientific” to concepts and intangibles. Rather we should look to “4. a. Of an art, practice, operation, or method: Based upon or regulated by science, as opposed to mere traditional rules or empirical dexterity,” where we find “Scientifick Dyalling” [using a sun dial] (1678) and “scientific taxation” (1902). So, some activity is scientific if it is “based on or regulated by science.” We should note that what is scientific need not be part of science, but can be an extrapolation of science or something regulated by science. This simultaneous ascription of ‘scientific’ meaning ‘activity that has science at its heart/base’ and scientific meaning ‘regulated by science’ is matched by the definition of ‘practice.’

The first entry for ‘practice’ in the OED (June 2010 revision) refers to professionals: “1. The carrying out or exercise of a profession, esp. that of medicine or law.” This refers to both the rationale at the base of the activity, but also the social structure surrounding it. Professionals have a vocation but also a socio-politics (Shapin, 2008). The second definition of ‘practice’ captures the idea of practice as practical. “2. a. The actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to the theory or principles of it; performance, execution, achievement; working, operation; (Philos.) activity or action considered as being the realization of or in contrast to theory.” The opposition of practice to theory is a common theme in contemporary history of science, but it is  worthwhile to note that the OED cites a 1969 translation of Husserl’s  Formal & Transcendental Logic: “The distinction is after all a relative one; because even purely theoretical activity is indeed activity—that is to say, a practice.” From this parsing, `scientific practice’ means an action that is based on or regulated by science; this action is exercising a profession or the application of an idea, belief, or method.

The naive view of science that so often stands as a straw-man for historians of science is the positivist view of science as (rationally reconstructed) theoretical progression. By the time the 1980s this was a non-starter. The new naive view (expressed in caricatures of “technical” historians of science and in histories written by scientists) is that science is what happens in journal pages. And already—without introducing Actor-Network Theory or social construction—a brief linguistic analysis suggests this cannot be right. Scientific practice by definition includes the social structure of science, the actions of those regulated by science, and the functioning of scientists as professionals in society.

I think focusing on what understanding of ‘scientific practice’ underlies authors other methodological moves—studies of Actor-Networks, experimental systems, epistemic things, trading zones—can clear up the issues at play and allow for useful comparison across authors. Does Latour’s Pasteurization of France fail to account for scientific practice? Or is it just Latour’s stress on the regulatory and professional aspects of the phrase. Watch this space for some examples in the (hopefully) near future.

Thanks for reading!