Calling Science Pseudoscience: Fleck's Archaeologies of Fact and Latour's ‘Biography of an Investigation’ in AIDS Denialism and Homeopathy

Abstract

Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact foregrounds claims traditionally excluded from reception, often regarded as opposed to fact, scientific claims that are increasingly seldom discussed in connection with philosophy of science save as examples of pseudoscience. I am especially concerned with scientists who question the epidemiological link between HIV and AIDS and who are thereby discounted—no matter their credentials, no matter the cogency of their arguments, no matter the sobriety of their statistics—but also with other classic examples of so-called pseudoscience including homeopathy and other sciences, such as cold fusion. The pseudoscience version of the demarcation problem turns out to include some of the details that Latour articulates multifariously under a variety of species or kinds in his essay/interactive research project/monograph, ‘Biography of an Investigation’. Given the economic constraints of the current day, especially in the academy, the growing trend in almost all disciplines is that of suppression by threat: say what everyone else says or you won't be hired (tenured/published/cited). In this way, non-citation of outlier views generates what Kuhn called normal science. Finally, a review of Lewontin's discussion of biology shows the continuing role of ideology by bringing in some of the complex issues associated with the resistant bacteria (tuberculosis, Lyme disease, syphilis) and AIDS.

Notes

[1] There are a number of reasons for this, mostly historical but perhaps even more so, political reasons, including, most traumatically, the anti-Semitism that prevented his recognition in his early life and the personal suffering he endured during the war (forced to work for the Germans first in Lemberg thence to Auschwitz and Buchenwald), he luckily survived, but further historical (and political) reasons contributed to a lack of recognition after the war, a lack that persists to this day. See for some biographical accounts, Cohen and Schnelle (1986) and, to be sure, almost every general article written on Fleck.

[2] See for example, McCullough (1981), Toulmin (1986), Löwy (1988), Van den Belt and Gremmen (1990), and Wettersten (1991). And see more recently Hedfors (2007) as well as, for a counterpoint, the joint commentary offered by Amsterdamska et al. (2008). And see too my own discussion, Babich (2003b), as well as Brorson and Andersen (2001) and Koterski (2002).

[3] For Fleck's own account, see Fleck (1956) and, e.g. (in English), Fleck and Lille-Szyszkowicz (1956). The biochemist, Jaenicke's (2007) commemorative reflections on Fleck include a review of leukergy under the useful subtitle ‘Eine Tatsache ist tatsächlich keine Tatsache, sondern eine Gruppentat.’ [A fact is in fact no fact but a group achievement]. Jaenicke refers further to the cytologist Cremer (1985), noting his positive reception of Fleck's research.

[4] On Fleck's scientific achievements and reception, see the essay written by the medical research scientists, Sak and Pawlikowski (2012).

[5] Thus Carifio and Perla (2013) who, from a cognitive psychology perspective, also contend that Fleck's ‘key concepts’ accord with ‘modern information processing models and views’, and although rightly connecting Fleck with Reichenbach and Vygotsky, also characterize Fleck's epistemology as ‘relativistic’, a characterization that for their part also represents (this may be news to some philosophers) the increasing mainstream in the philosophy of science: ‘Fleck's relativistic epistemology can clearly be viewed as foundational to the contemporary philosophy of science perspective.’ Without disputing this in the least, it may be better to read Fleck's claims in the continental tradition that is associated with ‘objectivity’. See on this with specific reference to Heisenberg, Heelan (1965) and Rheinberger (2010) among others with specific respect to Fleck.

[6] See Latour (2004)—a mainstream (if only or simply qua Stanford/Harvard) lecture instructively published, alas, in a non-philosophy journal. The last, quasi-Bourdieu-style observation about the locus of publication (Latour has his own Bourdieu-style allusion when he describes himself and others as so many ‘good critics trained in the good schools’, Latour 2004, 242) accords with Latour's concluding remark: ‘Critical theory died away long ago’ (Latour 2004, 248). While I certainly concur with Latour (always, always, I do), I would also point out, as Latour himself does not do, good academic that he was and remains, that this is largely because the professors who held posts in Frankfurt for the last 45 years did not bother to sustain critical theory, indeed actively eschewed it, as did those employed at Harvard (or Stanford or Yale). I discuss some of this, including the Social Text set up and the science wars, in a contribution to the Festschrift (Babich 2002) that I edited in honour of Patrick Heelan as well as Babich (2003b). Here it is worth repeating that when I first wrote on the Sokal hoax in 1996, not one journal editor turned out to be willing to publish any critique of Sokal's be it mine or anyone else's (as it turns out) cooked or hoaxed—the editors of Social Text were not hoodwinked but to the contrary exactly complicit: see Babich 2003b, 101–102). My own essay on Sokal (and to date this remains the sole contravening reading of the Sokal hoax) may be seen in a reduced version in Telos (Babich 1996). The full version appeared in the autumn of 1997 and I am grateful to the editor of Common Knowledge, Jeffrey Perl, who, as he wrote to me to say, organized a special section of the journal around my essay, featuring it as the lead (Babich 1997) and including Rorty (1997) on Kuhn and culminating with Feyerabend's ‘It's Not Easy to Exorcise Ghosts’ (Feyerabend 1997). Instructively, neither essay has been engaged, critically or otherwise, in the literature that counts as the Sokal debate in philosophy and philosophy of science and it rarely if ever appears in bibliographies. This is, I think, not simply because I offer a continental take on the question, offering a literally hermeneutic reading of Sokal's pretended ‘hermeneutic’ but much rather because I take a critical approach to Sokal's ‘hoax’ as such. For another insider's, i.e. Duke University-style, discussion of the Sokal hoax (and Latour with a bit on Fleck), see Smith (2006). See on the very possibility of a critical philosophy of science, my more recent reflections, Babich (2010).

[7] I have good company here. See some of the notes to follow, and in particular Heelan (1986) among other contributors to Cohen and Schnelle (1986) as well as, more recently, Rheinberger (2010), 27ff. as well as Fagan (2009).

[8] This is either an unremarkable claim (for some scholars, especially Fleck scholars) or it is contested as Kuhn himself appears to do, which contestation is recurs in the judgement of Kuhn scholars.

[9] Fuller's (2000) biography draws on and develops Kuhn's remarks here.

[10] This is to be sure a relative matter but Terence Blake, an independent scholar (and very engaged and prolific blogger), sought to take Latour (2012) at his word when he invited scholars to ‘contribute’ to what appeared to be a literal enough knowledge project, the so-called ‘AIME Research Group: Inquiries into Modes of Existence’, but was dismayed to find his critiques unacknowledged and unanswered. Most of Blake's discussion of this appeared via blog posts, such as Blake (2014).

[11] See too on the amusing dimension of this critique, for those with German humour sensibilities, Kaplan (1991). Similarly German-minded in spirit, but by no means a joke, it corresponds to be sure to Fort's attested literary style, is the attributed ‘translated from the Fortean’ (Kaplan 1991, 3) An English version exists, of course: Kaplan (1993).

[12] For his own part, Fort spent his life linking the politics and the practices of the two establishments. For one contemporary discussion of one aspect of this theme in science, to be sure lacking Fort's prose stylistics, see the contemporary journalist on science, money, and politics, Greenberg (2001) and see too Oreskes and Conway (2010). Additionally from the side of practicing scientists themselves, in this case, perhaps more significantly given the politicized issue of ‘climate science’ and including the politics of the academy, including the politics of journal publishing and supposed peer review along with other political interior to science itself, Orrin Pilkey's chapter, co-authored with his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, on mathematical models (and the politics of the same) and his sole-authored chapter on shoreline erosion in Pilkey and Pilkey-Jarvis (2007), 22f. and 92f. respectively.

[13] It is important to note the continuing force of this chemical ‘challenge’, yet it is the distinction between physics and chemistry, and thereby the political order of rank between these two sciences that seems to have made all the political, theoretical difference for the scientific estimation and investigation of the first reports of cold fusion inasmuch as these reports were made by scientists who happened to be not physicists but chemists. Significantly, mainstream philosophy of science continues to regard cold fusion as an example either of pseudoscience or else as straightforward fraud. But see Biberian (2007) for an overview of the state of on-going contemporary research.

[14] See most recently, Grandjean and Landrigan (2014) as well as, among many, many others Fagin (2008) and Lu et al. (2000).

[15] In his preface, Kalichman seems to repeat his intentions to follow what would seem to have been an external reviewer's advice (it could not be claimed that he succeeds):

I have tried to remain objective and balanced in my examination of what the denialists are saying and who they are. Difficult as it may be, I have tried to take these guys seriously, even if not what they are saying then why they are saying it. I have also tried to avoid ad homonym attacks by focusing on what the denialists are saying than who they are. But that too was difficult. (Kalichman 2009, xv)

[16] Duesberg (1995) and see on Duesberg himself, see the survey essay by Cohen (1994) and the biographical account by Bialy (2004).

[17] Note that Trenn remarks that Kuhn encountered Fleck ‘about 1950’, citing Kuhn as writing that Fleck ‘anticipates many of my own ideas’, suggesting that Fleck was at least ‘partially instrumental’ in making him realize the relevance of ‘the sociology of the scientific community’ (Trenn 1981, 238). But as Trenn also remarks,

it is doubtful if Kuhn was prepared to adopt Fleck's viewpoint in depth, for nowhere in his writings does he incorporate Fleck's basic distinction between thought style and its carrier—the thought collective. Kuhn has come to see that his multifaceted use of the term ‘paradigm’ has been a source of ‘confusion’ … and this could have been avoided had he observed Fleck's restricted use of ‘paradigm’ exclusively for exemplars. (Trenn 1981, 238)

See on thought style and paradigm with further references to the literature on its many discontents, Babich (2003a).

[18] It always is, as Gerber (1885) argued in his studies of language and epistemology. In addition to Nietzsche's own repetition/reception of Gerber's reading of metaphor and knowledge in his unpublished notes, Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne. I discuss this in several places, see for example, Babich (2004), esp. 133–134 and see, too, Gustafson's doctoral dissertation (Gustafson 1982) for studies that are more methodologically philological than Lakoff's likewise valuable rhetorically and politically attuned studies (see in particular Lakoff and Johnson 2003).

[19] Diogenes Laertius on Diogenes the Cynic, book VI, ch. 2, I.20: see Diogenes Laertius ([1925] 2005, 22–23).

[20] According to several reports, Bohr was famously asked why he, a man of science, would keep a superstitious marker, namely a horseshoe, above his door: surely, the incredulous question came, he did not believe in such things. To which Bohr replied that he understood that the good luck of the charm worked whether he believed in it or not. See one account of this anecdote in Pais (1988, 210).

[21] Tracy Strong has my thanks for calling this exchange to my attention.

[22] See for a more detailed discussion of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Émile Durkheim, Robin Horton's chapter, ‘Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim and the Scientific Revolution’, in his book, Horton (1993, 63–104) and see, more recently, specifically on Fleck and Lévy-Bruhl, Werner (2014).

[23] See Fleck (1979, 139). Even Darwin uses a version of this germ schema as he did not know (of course) the genetic basis of heredity, so he worked with a germination schema of so-called gemmas. For further references, see Babich (2010) and see, for specific discussion of Fleck, Brorson (2006).

[24] For one anecdotal example, close to Fleck scholarship, when the Dublin-born philosopher of science, Patrick Heelan left Ireland in the early 1940s for the US to take up a fellowship for his PhD in physics at the University of St Louis, an x-ray required for a visa revealed that he had had tuberculosis when he was younger, manifestly recovered as a young adult, he remembered no earlier diagnosis, never having experienced any effects of this illness.

[25] Gradmann (1930, 641) as cited in Fleck (1979, 174–175).

[26] Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar [1979] 1986) is classic here, a tragic example of failing to attend to the complex politics of the laboratory and also jealousy in science may be found (not that Sapp endorses this reading, to the mainstream contrary) in Sapp's account of Franz Moewus in Where the Truth Lies (Sapp 1990). I offer further examples, including further literature, in Babich (2010).

[27] Hacking (1983). See on the relation between Fleck and Hacking, Stump (1988).

[28] This fact may surprise future historians just because Margulis spent her career working in the biological sciences at the very same university—Boston University—that was historically so influential in foregrounding Fleck's work in the history and philosophy of science in Cohen's and Schelle's Cognition and Fact inasmuch as Bob Cohen was a long-time and influential director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at that same university. But scholars and scientists can be innocently insular and Margulis was also limited to popular knowledge in her familiarity with the debate on Nietzsche's syphilis, which she simply took to be a ‘fact’. On the last see Schain (2001) and further Babich (2011–2012, 114).