CONVERGING EPISTEMIC CULTURES?

Abstract

Convergence of research fields under a new techno-scientific paradigm is currently being discussed among scholars of social studies of science and technology, and in the context of research funding programmes and frameworks of science and technology policy. Mostly, these discussions refer to the macro-scale and adopt a broad understanding of convergence. The present paper introduces a focus on epistemic cultures and raises the question of what convergence might imply on the micro-level of everyday research practices. Relative similarities and differences of various epistemic cultures are indicated, drawing upon empirical investigations. Three forms of scientific change over time are distinguished (convergence, divergence and emergence) and three modes of convergence are further elaborated (cooperation, integration and assimilation). On this conceptual basis the thesis is put forward that the emergence of new technosciences is driven by the technological visions and realities of recent (bio)scientific developments. These, in turn, result in a fundamental reconfiguration of science and its role in society.

Notes

1. A notable exception is Nordmann (2004, 2006) in reference to conceptual work on technoscientific culture by Hacking, Latour and Haraway. For further discussion of the term ‘technoscience’, see also footnote 15.

2. The research project ‘Nichtwissenskulturen’ (Stefan Böschen, Karen Kastenhofer, Luitgard Marschall, Ina Rust, Jens Soentgen, Peter Wehling) was conducted at the University of Augsburg, Wissenschaftszentrum Umwelt (2004–2007), and funded by the German Federal Department of Education and Research (BMBF) within the research programme ‘Knowledge for Decision-Making Processes – Research in the Context of Science, Politics and Society’.

3. In total, 11 exploratory interviews and 56 in-depth interviews with experts from science, government, NGOs and industry in Germany were conducted (each lasting approximately 90 min). This sample of 67 interviews includes 20 interviews with distinguished scientists of the relevant scientific fields from which I mainly draw in this article.

4. ‘Building biology’ is a recent translation of the original German term ‘Baubiologie’. It denotes a field of consultancy located primarily in Germany and only just starting to spread to other countries and continents. It has been described as ‘a movement promoting the use of healthy building principles as a means to improve living and work spaces and the health of people who occupy them’ and ‘a new field of education, characterized by the terms biological, ecological, sensitive to nature, healthy, vital, human, organic, high quality, cultural and holistic’ (see: http://www.buildingbiology.net/). Building biologists address possible risks of the electromagnetic fields of mobile phones and mobile masts, among other issues.

5. In the recent research project, the German term ‘Nichtwissen’ was used to signify a situation where knowledge in demand in an evidence-based decision process is not available. This term is meant to refer to all situations of limited (individual or collective) knowledge or attention, limited tangibility (of an object or a research question) or limited certainty (about assumed evidence or facts), thereby including states of ignorance, uncertainty, ambiguity or unknown unknowns. Peter Wehling coined the term ‘Nichtwissenskulturen’ to highlight the analytical emphasis on the different epistemic ways to deal with the unknown. Unfortunately, the translation of the German term ‘Nichtwissen’ to English language poses some problems. Two options, ‘non-knowledge’ and ‘ignorance’, have a misleading negative flavour, that is not implied in the German version. Others, like ‘uncertainty’ or ‘ambiguity’ are too specific and fail to encompass all different kinds of not knowing. The umbrella function of the German term ‘Nichtwissen’ is specifically important in a context of plural epistemic cultures, because it allows for a reference to all sorts of framings of the unknown without favouring a specific approach or normative judgement. In the following text, I will switch between different translations to include all these specific kinds. For an in-depth discussion of ‘Nichtwissen’ in the context of an extended sociology of scientific knowledge, see Wehling (2006).

6. This formulation refers to Weinberg's concept of ‘trans-science’ (Weinberg, 1972). ‘Trans-science’ addresses ‘issues which arise in the course of the interaction between science or technology and society’ and refers to ‘questions, which can be asked of science and yet which cannot be answered by science’ (Weinberg, 1972, p. 209). It roughly equals a specific understanding of transdisciplinarity and transdisciplinary research as research that transcends the realm of science by addressing societal problems (e.g. Pohl, 2005). As the latter term is also used quite differently, e.g. in Stichweh's definition of ‘transdisciplinary concepts’ (Stichweh, 1994), the term ‘trans-scientific’ is used here to refer to research undertaken on behalf of public policy processes and characterized by essential scientific intangibility.

7. The concept of post-normal science is presented in Funtowicz and Ravetz (1993).

8. For a detailed discussion see Böschen et al. (2006) and Kastenhofer (in preparation).

9. A preliminary presentation of results of the underlying research project ‘Nichtwissenskulturen’ (Stefan Böschen, Karen Kastenhofer, Luitgard Marschall, Ina Rust, Jens Soentgen; University of Augsburg, Wissenschaftszentrum Umwelt) is given in Böschen et al. (2006).

10. An analysis of ‘evidential cultures’ in the scientific context of the research laboratory is presented in Collins (1998).

11. A primary orientation towards basic research can be understood as the conception of a scientific field as basic research. The other three orientations point to diverse forms of applied research and consultancy.

12. For a more detailed presentation of this aspect, see Kastenhofer (in preparation).

13. Questions concerning historical developments were included in the interviews with scientists, but comparable interviews taken in other periods as an empirical basis to reconstruct the development of epistemic cultures over time are lacking.

14. Harwood (2005) conceptualizes technoscience ‘as the outcome of a process of convergence in which technological knowledge acquires many of the characteristics of scientific knowledge while the latter shifts in the opposite direction’ (p.329). Nordmann (2006) stresses that ‘in technoscientific research, the business of theoretical representation cannot be dissociated, even in principle, from the material conditions of knowledge production and thus from the interventions that are required to make and stabilize the phenomena. In other words, technoscience knows only one way of gaining new knowledge and that is by first making a new world’ (p. 2). Hoyningen-Huene (1989) explains why modern experimental sciences are – contrary to Aristotelian science – especially apt for technological application. Still, to what extent the term ‘technoscience’ addresses a mere change in the perception of science and technology or refers to a more fundamental historical change, and how this change may best be characterized, is still open to discussion. Current analyses (especially Nordmann, 2004, 2006) point to a multidimensional shift and to the difficulty of discerning ‘technoscience’ from ‘normal science’ due to a lack of stringent, explicit and comprehensive characterizations of ‘normal science’.

15. For a discussion of the import of molecular biology and genetics to biomedicine, see Lederberg (1996); a contrasting analysis of knowledge in biomedicine and in clinical practice is presented by Nederbragt (2000); Palladino (2002) analyses the importance of scientific knowledge and medical practice ‘in the making of the genetics of cancer’ (quote from the subtitle).

16. For an analysis of the molecularization of biology, see Kay (1996); for an analysis of the molecularization of biology and medicine see de Chadarevian (1998) and Rose (2001); for a discussion of the molecularization of immunology see Tauber (1996); for an analysis of the molecularization of toxicology see Shostak (2005); for an analysis of molecularization within medical practice see Löwy (1998); for a critique of the molecularization of medicine see Ioannidis (2005).

17. Kay (1996) criticizes the convergence of the life sciences and industrial technology.

18. For further elaborations on the relationship between vaccinology as a science and industry, see Blume and Geesink (2000); for an analysis of the proactive role industry takes in epistemic processes and processes of world making, see Hedgecoe and Martin (2003); for emerging university–industry–government relations in the field of biotechnology, see McKelvey (1997).

19. Beckwith (1996) discusses reductionism within molecular biology; Strand (2000) criticizes the ‘naivety’ of the molecular life sciences.

20. For systems biology, see Fujimura (2005).

21. Epistemological problems arising from the double-orientation of medicine towards the scientific production of knowledge and the therapeutic intervention in a clinical context are presented in Paul (1998).

22. For its critique, see e.g. Pestre (2003).

23. These three realizations of convergence are not to be understood as exclusive, but are most likely to be combined in one way or the other.

24. Research here mainly focuses on a few health risk hypotheses: that high-frequency electromagnetic fields emitted by mobile phones and masts might induce or promote stress symptoms, sleeping disorder, headache or different kinds of cancer, or might have a negative impact on chromosomes, the central nervous system, the blood–brain barrier, the immune system or the hormone system. At the time of our investigation, none of these hypotheses had been proved beyond doubt.

25. Rheinberger (2002) defines ‘experimental cultures’ as clusters of groups of experimental systems, and claims that it is these experimental cultures rather than disciplinary differentiations that determine scientific cooperation, scientific competition, and the realm of epistemic negotiations (Rheinberger, 2002, p. 149). He also emphasizes the fluid boundaries of spontaneously developing informal communities of scientists below the organizational level of institutions and the importance of epistemic rather than theoretic compatibility.

26. Which is partly not the case. The improper ignorance of a lack of understanding of the employed technical objects renders the overall research question experimentally attainable, but also allows for possible misinterpretations of the particular research results. Any outcome (e.g. a negative outcome) of an experiment (e.g. exposure of rats to a source of electromagnetic fields) may then either be due to certain characteristics of the research object (e.g. rats are not sensitive to electromagnetic fields), or may be due to unknown but relevant features of the employed technical objects (e.g. electromagnetic fields disperse unevenly in the experimental setting and, as a result, the experimental animals are not exposed to any fields at all).

27. Epistemic cultures are more frequently referred to as an obstacle to convergence between scientific fields in the form of cooperation or integration. C.P. Snow in his Rede lecture (Snow, 1959) originally addressed such a clash of cultures between the field of art and literature and the scientific field. Empirical studies on conflicts between scientific cultures followed (Huber ,1991; Huber & Thurn, 1993; or Collins, 1998); for recent work on this subject, see Tuunainen (2005) or van Buuren and Edelenbros (2004).

28. An example for the transfer of an existing technique or method from one scientific field to another is the application of epidemiological modelling in ecosystem ecology and population ecology. An account of the transfer of epidemic models to plant pathology in the context of risk assessment in genetic engineering is given by Teng and Yuen (1991).

29. As one biophysicist narrated: ‘[We arrived at the “lab-on-a-chip” technology almost by chance,] and then I said to myself: Okay, now that we have these nice things, let's see how we can make use of them. It was on these lab-on-a-chip systems that we started to co-operate with biophysicists and to do biophysics ourselves and soon afterwards this approach proved successful’ (a biophysicist, I 44).

30. The term ‘system theory’ is avoided as it is an established term within sociological theory. Stichweh (1994) refers to system theory as a ‘transdisciplinary concept’.

31. A more detailed preliminary list of technoscientific attributes is put forward in Nordmann (2004, 215–216).