Rethinking Reductionism, or, the Transformative Work of Making the Same

Abstract

Plant-based drug discovery has long served as an iconic instance of both the power and the folly of scientific reductionism: this is a project, after all, that seeks to turn complex indigenous therapeutic practices into isolated molecules, to be scaled-up, and set into mass circulation. This arena has, for good reason, served as an example of the economic and epistemological violences enacted in forms of ‘recognition’ or ‘translation’ that treat scientific idioms and industrial value as the arbiters of truth and value. But here, I ask whether we are giving too much away, in analytic terms, when we take reductionism for granted. In this essay, I draw on my ethnographic research in Mexico, as well as broader philosophical debates, to suggest critical resources that might allow us to do something other than restage the familiar, infelicitous encounter between ‘embedded’, relational indigenous knowledges and isolating, abstracting, reductionist science. Here, I consider pharmaceutical research and development as a process that works less by reducing than by proliferating materials: in particular, by producing and recontextualising chemical compounds as simultaneously the same, and not the same. This formula has a strong place in pharmaceutical chemistry, and it resonates somewhat surprisingly in domains ranging from transnational drug regulation, to marketing strategies for generic drugs in Mexico, to debates within the philosophy of chemistry about the nature of chemical entities themselves. These conversations offer conceptual resources for rethinking reduction(ism), itself one of the key operators in charged projects of recognising and translating knowledge.

Keywords:

• Pharmaceuticals
• Mexico
• Indigenous Knowledge
• Science Studies
• Chemistry

Notes

[1] My thanks to Richard Davis, James Leach, two anonymous reviewers, and the lively and thoughtful participants in the 2011 workshop ‘Recognising and Translating Knowledge’ at the University of Western Australia.

[2] Stengers (2000) is in dialogue with Bruno Latour (see Latour [1993]) as she calls into service the ‘principle of irreduction’ in the ongoing ‘science wars’ in the scholarly world itself. The point is important given that the accusation of reductionism has been directed at social scientists as well, and Haraway too, following the above passage, proves just as concerned with reductionist acts on the part of STS scholars (Haraway 1988, 580). Stengers, for her part, notes that for many social scientists and science studies scholars, it has proven strikingly difficult to talk of science as political or social without being seen as ‘reducing’ science to mere political or social interests.

[3] Alzate, as with many Creole scientists in the New World, was unconvinced of the power or utility of Linneaus’ system to name and describe the rich botanical world around him. ‘With all due respect to the memory of the famous Linneaus … of what use is it to establish a new language if it does not help us acquire knowledge relative to the uses of plants, which is what is most important? Of what use is it to reduce this or that plant to this genus or that species, if it holds virtues that are utterly opposed to those which it should have, according to its appearance in [Linneaus’] assigned class? (Moreno 1989, 3).

[4] Bioequivalence too is riven with intriguing contingencies, though I will not go into them here (see Carpenter and Tobbell 2011; Greene 2011).

[5] Refutation is the hallmark of the classic falsificationist project identified by Karl Popper as the defining activity of a ‘real’, rather than a ‘pseudo-science’ (Popper 1959; see Stengers 2000).