"When someone speaks of the Social Construction of X, you have to ask, X = What?"
Ian Hacking (1936 - ) is a Canadian
philosopher, historian of science and an advocate of Scientific Realism.
In The Social Construction of What?
(1999), he argued that constructionist accounts of scientific theories tend to
lose sight of a basic question: what, exactly, is it that’s supposed to be
constructed? If we consider the case of gravity, for instance, we can
distinguish at least two different meanings for this word. Gravity can either
be (1) that non-verbalized property of reality which is responsible for objects
falling down when tossed up, etc., or it can be (2) the verbalized theory of
that property advanced by Isaac Newton in 1687. If we ask “is gravity socially
constructed?” then the meaning of both the question and the answer depends very
much on which definition we are using. If we mean gravity (1) then the answer
is almost certainly “no.” If we mean gravity (2) the answer is obviously “yes.”
The first criticism is absurd, the second banal. “Is gravity socially
constructed?” is, for Hacking, simply a bad question. We need to be more
specific.
The theory could have been different if
Newton was a different person or if it had been created in a different place,
but in so much as competing theories about gravity accurately describe it, they
will tend inevitably to converge toward a fixed point. There are many
perspectives on reality, but there is only one reality to be described. The
process of science is a process of refinement – the better a theory is, the
less integral it’s “socially constructed” aspects become. The equations given
by Newton describe the real properties of gravity, as they really are, as we
really experience them in our daily lives.
This position places Hacking near the
middle of the spectrum on philosophy of science, though certainly on the
Realist side of it. A thorough-going Realist, who is committed to the literal
truth of scientific theories, cannot maintain that (1) and (2) are different in
any meaningful way, because if Newton’s theory is correct, then it is nothing
other than the verbalization of a property of the universe. To the extent that
it is anything else (“constructed” rather than “discovered”) it is a false
theory. On the other hand, Hacking regards externalist sociological approaches
to the history of science as unduly skeptical. We are justified in believing
that the things described by theories really do exist, substantially as
described, because we can do things with them. Hume notwithstanding, inference
to the best explanation is the best method we have, and we should stick with
it.
Hacking’s Website: http://www.ianhacking.com/
Scientific Realism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/
Part of a series on Science, Technology,
and Society (XIX of XX)
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