HIST 17502/HIPS 17502
Science,
Culture, and Society III
Instructor: Adrian Johns
Assistants: Catherine Gainty, Marcia Holmes, Caren Walker
Spring Quarter, 2008
Syllabus
[http://home.uchicago.edu/~johns/scs_3_2008.html]
Course Outline
In recent years science has provided some of the biggest headlines in the world's press. From the argument over genetically modified foods to the debate over nuclear missile defense, and from the controversies over alleged spying at Los Alamos to the struggle over intellectual property in digital media, many of the major issues of the day emerge from the worlds of science, medicine and technology. This course finds much of its rationale in such cases, where scientific questions become inseparable from social ones. It has two main aims. First, it helps students to understand what science itself is, as a social as well as intellectual enterprise. And, second, it helps us to decide what role that enterprise plays - and should play? - in our society.
The course is organized around a series of broad questions about science. These questions are addressed by means of examples drawn from both the past and the present. The historical cases arise in chronological sequence, ranging from the development of experimental methods in the late seventeenth century to the advent of biotechnology in the modern era. They furnish a selective set of materials for a history of scientific practice. Their other purpose here, however, is to highlight the depth and importance of many problems still confronting the world of science today – problems that are cultural as well as scientific, and that demand of us an understanding of what science is and how it works.
No scientific knowledge of any kind is needed to take this course.
Course Requirements
Class sessions meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12:00-1:20 in HM 130.
Written work. This falls into three categories.
1. Students are to prepare a one-page paper every week (except for April 29 and June 3), due at the time of the class on Tuesdays. They will generally be returned at the Thursday class. In total these papers amount to 20% of your final grade.
2. A short (5-7 page) paper is due on April 29. 30%. This should be an analysis of an issue or subject raised in the first half of the course.
3. A longer (12-15 page) paper is due on June 3. 50%. This should be a more extensive study of an issue or subject addressed in the course; it cannot be on the same subject as the short paper. Students graduating this quarter – and therefore needing to get their grades submitted early – should contact me to determine a different schedule.
Students should obtain the approval of an assistant for the title of the longer essay before writing it. For both of the two papers, they should use academic conventions - in particular, they should cite full bibliographic and page information for any source from which they quote or employ ideas, using footnotes or endnotes. They should also include bibliographies. These essays should try to do more than simply describe; they should attempt some critical engagement with ideas and issues. They should also strive to be grammatical. Papers should be word-processed and stapled, and you must retain copies of them. They may not be submitted electronically, but must be handed to a TA (or otherwise by approval). Students who submit papers late without reason may be penalized.
Readings
There is no single textbook for this class. Three highly readable books revealing important aspects of the modern scientific enterprise are recommended, however, and you should have read through all three by the end of the quarter. They are available at the Seminary Co-op:
It is further suggested that you keep yourself informed of new developments in the world of science by means of a major newspaper (the New York Times is a good choice). Periodicals such as The Economist, The New Yorker, New Scientist, and Scientific American also contain regular reports on relevant topics. It is especially interesting to contrast the stances towards science and scientific claims taken by such different periodicals: The Economist and the Wall Street Journal, for example, are consistently very different in this respect from Newsweek, which is in turn very different from the New York Times.
Appointments
My office is in Social Sciences 505. I have office hours on Fridays at 10-12. You are welcome to come by at this time and ask me anything about the course; if you plan to do so, please try to sign up on the sheet at my office door. You are also welcome to schedule appointments at other times. My phone number is 702-2334. My email address is johns@uchicago.edu.
Science,
Culture, and Society 3
Schedule
of Topics
This is a provisional schedule of topics. The subjects we actually address may differ from these, depending partly on developments in science itself.
1
What is a scientific fact? 04-01, 04-03
Facts are the bedrock of science. They are commonly taken to be
incontestable bits of truth, discovered objectively and shorn of all social or
cultural content. Some of these facts have enormous influence. But
humans have not always thought of nature in terms of "facts."
So where did these things come from, and why did we come to believe in them?
We can understand what facts are (and are not) by looking at how they are
arrived at, how they become the subjects of controversy, and how they sometimes
disappear.
Historical
example: Robert Boyle and the "experimental philosophy" (17th
century).
Modern examples: DNA fingerprinting, missile defense.
2 What is a scientific discovery? 04-08, 04-10
Science makes discoveries. That is, it reveals to us new things in the natural world: things like oxygen, electrons, and living coelacanths. The endless parade of new discoveries is largely what has given science its immense cultural value. Looked at closely, however, the process of discovery itself becomes distinctly mysterious. Is there a "logic" of discovery - a method by which discoveries may be attained? If so, what is it? What is the relation between the discovery and its discoverer? Finally, how do we decide that a dramatic new claim is in fact a discovery after all?
Historical example: Joseph Priestley and the discovery of oxygen (18th century).
Modern example: Joseph Weber and
the non-discovery of gravity waves; (perhaps) cold fusion and the recent Oak
Ridge fusion claims.
Extracts
from Priestley, in J.B. Conant (ed.), Harvard Case Studies in Experimental
Science (1957), I, 88-103.
T.S.
Kuhn, "The historical structure of scientific discovery," in Kuhn, The
essential tension (1977), 165-77 (orig. 1962).
H. Collins and T. Pinch, The Golem: What you should know about science (2nd edn., 1998), 91-107.
3 Did science slay God? 04-15, 04-17
Ever since its first publication, the Darwinian theory of evolution has been
the focus of bitter controversies about science and religion. One recent biography of
Historical examples: Darwin; the
Scopes Trial (1850s-80s;1920s).
Modern example: "Intelligent design" and the politics of science education.
4 What is a scientist? 04-22, 04-24
The figure of the scientist is an enormously influential one in modern society.
But what are the characteristics that denote a scientist? Where do they
come from, and why are they so respected? Above all, how are they
changing today? To answer these questions we'll begin with the coining of
the term "scientist" itself, and with sociologist Max Weber's classic
formulation of science as a "vocation." Then we'll compare that
formulation to the portrait given in James
Watson's Double Helix - the first modern warts-and-all account of a
scientific discovery, and itself something of a classic. Finally we shall
consider how the figure of the scientist is changing as university researchers
engage in today's realm of biotechnology.
Historical examples: The invention
of the "scientist" (1830s-40s); Max Weber on science as a vocation
(1918).
Modern examples: James Watson and the discovery of DNA; the culture of biotech.
5 What is a scientific laboratory? 04-29, 05-01
Scientific experiments and tests are most commonly carried out in places
called laboratories. The word is an old one, coined in the
seventeenth century. It originally seems to have referred to an
alchemist's den - a place of work (in Latin, labor) and a place of
prayer (oratorium). But today's
laboratories are highly professionalized places. How do the
characteristics of the lab affect the work that goes on there? And how
can we be confident that the artificial conditions of the lab properly reflect
the circumstances of the "real world" outside? To answer those
questions we'll consider the fortunes of Louis Pasteur in the late nineteenth
century, when he attempted to use laboratories to revolutionize the life
sciences of his time. But we'll also find that they remain live issues
today in the testing of Genetically Modified Organisms.
Historical
example: Louis Pasteur (1870s-80s).
Modern example:
GMO testing.
Translated extracts
from Pasteur's "Memoir on the organized corpuscles which exist in the
atmosphere," in J.B. Conant (ed.), Harvard case studies in experimental
science, II (1957), 508-17.
B. Latour,
"Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world," in K. Knorr-Cetina and M. Mulkay
(eds.), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (London:
Sage, 1983), 141–70.
C.C. Mann, "Biotech goes wild," Technology Review July/August 1999.
6 What is a scientific prediction? 05-06, 05-08
Scientists supposedly test their claims. They do so largely by
making predictions and then seeing if those predictions come true. But
what tolerances do they adopt when they perform such tests? More
generally, how much certainty should the public place in scientific
predictions, especially of great events that cannot be closely modeled in a
laboratory? Major policy issues may hang on such questions, as in the
case of nuclear waste disposal, which demands an understanding of events
100,000 years in the future. And what about disciplines whose predictions
don't work, as has been the case with earthquake science?
Historical
example: Albert Einstein and the testing of relativity (1880s-1930s).
Modern examples: nuclear waste disposal; earthquake science.
7 What is a scientific instrument? 05-13, 05-15
Scientific tests and predictions often rely on machines called
instruments. The manufacturing of scientific instruments is an enterprise centuries old, but in the last hundred years
or so the scope, scale and size of such instruments has increased dramatically.
Today's devices are no longer the children's toys that Isaac Newton bought from
his local fair in order to investigate the behavior of light. They are
specialized, complex equipment, often developed specially for the
purpose. But as we depend ever more on these machines, we need to ask the
simple question: what comes first, the instrument or the science? Do
ideas drive technology, or does the available technology determine the science
that is done?
Historical
example: cloud and bubble chambers (1890s-1980s).
Modern example:
LIGO (and we may also talk about the Hubble Space Telescope).
C.T.R. Wilson,
"On a Method of Making Visible the Paths of Ionising
Particles through a Gas," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 85
(1911), 285-88 (online at JSTOR here).
P. Galison and A. Assmus,
"Artificial Clouds, real particles," in D. Gooding, T. Pinch,
H. Collins, “LIGO becomes big science,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (2003), 261-297.
8 Did science get too big? 05-20, 05-22
Starting in the middle of the twentieth century, people began to talk in
terms of something they called “big science.” By this they meant a kind
of large-scale, state-funded enterprise – something that could never be carried
out by small groups of researchers, let alone an individual scientist.
The original instance of big science was the Manhattan Project, which
culminated in the dropping of two atomic bombs on
Historical example: Totalitarian science, the Manhattan Project, and the establishment of big science.
Modern example:
9 Is science
moral? 05-27 (No meeting
05-29)
It is fairly common to hear science characterized as an ethical enterprise - one with its own norms of conduct, which are policed by the scientific community itself. Thus many people believe that science is less subject to fraud or hucksterism than most human activities, and that when such misconduct does occur it is quickly rooted out by virtue of the very process of testing that makes science what it is. If this is so, then what exactly are the norms of science? Where did they come from? What effect do they have on the practice of scientific work? And, perhaps most important, who makes sure that they are observed? We'll begin to answer these questions by looking at the classic description of the scientific ethos as moral and self-policing. We shall then examine three recent cases where important elements of that ethos have been questioned: the so-called "Baltimore case," in which Congress insisted on imposing outside oversight of laboratory practices; Bjorn Lomborg’s controversial critique of climate science, which led to his being temporarily accused of misconduct; and the recent declaration by the Union of Concerned Scientists that the Bush administration has actively censored the scientific process.
10 Who owns science? 06-03
One of the "norms" that Merton posited for science was what he called
"communism." He meant that scientific knowledge itself was
common to all humanity. But it turns out that knowledge can be
made a subject of property, at least temporarily: this is what patents and
copyrights are for. But where should property rights in scientific
knowledge stop? This has become a vital question today in two
respects. First, there is a strong public movement for access to the
results of publicly-funded research. The NIH has recently declared that
science produced under its auspices, for example, should be freely available
after six months. This accords well with our image of science as public
knowledge – but it also imperils the economic processes by which that knowledge
has been circulated since