Social Studies of Science

Marcellin Boule's Neanderthal research, and his conclusion that the slouching cave brute could not be ancestral to modern man, were pillars of human paleontological theory for the first half of this century. Moving from the initial selection of the Neanderthal problem to the international acceptance of his ideas, Boule's research is analyzed in terms of various social and theoretical commitments linked to his position in the French and international paleontological communities. In particular, the paper tries to delineate the factors that made the stooping Neanderthal caricature so appealing and plausible to Boule and his contemporaries, thereby setting the stage for the infamous Piltdown forgery.

In this sequel to my paper on the nature and pitfalls of the argument that there are parallels between modern physics and ancient mysticism, I discuss parallelism as a strategy in intellectual conflict. I contrast parallelist and sociological perspective on mysticism, physics, and the relations between physics and mysticism, and sketch the societal and historical contexts of parallelist and antiparallelist arguments. Parallelists, I argue, use the ideas of physics and mysticism as cultural resources in their struggle to organize, preserve, or advance their interests. The paper concludes with a bibliographical essay on the major issues and problems involved in studying the complex relationships between physics and mysticism.

Drawing a distinction between the micro-level process of theory choice and the macro-level process of theory selection within science, this paper presents an analysis of the development of the weak-electromagnetic unification programme within the specialty of weak interactions in high energy physics. Bibliometric techniques are used to understand the process of theory selection during the rapid interaction of new theoretical and empirical developments. Employing an evolutionary analogy, the interplay of theory and experiment is analyzed during the theory selection process in the context of the history of the specialty. From this perspective, theory and experiment are seen to be closely dependent, as theorists depend heavily on experimental results for both the construction and confirmation of models, while at the same time experimental work depends on theory for understanding the relevance of results.

Most contemporary studies of science operate with some notion of scientific specialty communities as the basic units within which science is socially and technically organized. This paper presents a critique of scientific communities as sociological constructs which appear to be largely irrelevant to scientific work. Furthermore, the paper criticizes the prevailing quasi-economic models of such collectives for what appears to be a naive internalism and functionalism compared with the realities of scientific everyday life as they concern scientists themselves. It is argued that the arenas of action within which scientific (laboratory) inquiry proceeds are transepistemic — that is, they in principle include scientists and non-scientists, and encompass arguments and concerns of a `technical' as well as a `non-technical' nature. The paper also argues that the transepistemic connection of research is built into scientific inquiry (and thereby into the products of research) through the decision criteria invoked in laboratory work. The paper draws upon one year of observation in a scientific laboratory in Berkeley, California, which provides the grounds and the illustrations for the theoretical arguments presented.

In the 1930s a deviant science, parapsychology, penetrated the boundaries of academia and underwent a degree of institutionalization therein. This paper analyzes these developments using the analytic categories found in recent sociological studies of the emergence of new disciplines (and subdisciplines) in science. It is shown that parapsychology's emergence displays characteristics typical of non-deviant sciences at their emergence, and, more particularly, that those who undertook parapsychological research had a similar distribution of social status to psychologists who were active in similar well-established fields.

This Note draws attention to the emergence of what is generally acknowledged to be a very satisfactory interactive model of the science-technology relationship. It goes on to ask why such a model should not be extended to describe the relationship of science with other sub-cultures, besides that of technology.