Wednesday, March 22, 2006

PostGrad Café Report - Professor Harry Collins

Please note that there will be no PostGrad Café on Wednesday 29th March. The next Café will be held at the end of April. Please chack back here, or contact one of the PostGrad Café Team for more details.

On Wednesday 15th March the PostGrad Café hosted Professor Harry Collins. Professor Collins discussed the use of relativism in the Sociology of Knowledge (SSK). He introduced the audience to Karl Mannheim, the founder of the Sociology of Knowledge, whose relativism did not extend to Mathematics and the Sciences. With the development of SSK, which can be traced to the work of Thomas Kuhn and Robert Fleck, these areas of human activity which were previously considered to be the producers of universal Truths were brought within the range of human activities that could be satifactorily analysed from a relativist position.

The PostGrad Café was well attended, with a broad cross section of postgraduate students present. Some had a keen interest in, and some a distaste for, relativist methodolgies in the Social Sciences. Professor Collins described the passionate responses that his positions have evoked. He recalled the seminars where he was accused, in a manner he described as 'McCarthyite', of being a ‘relativist’ in a distinctly pejorative sense, and moreover of not understanding the way in which Science works. At pains to disassociate himself from nihilistic positions that are attached to relativism, he described his embarrassment at the rhetoric of the SSK being used to support moves to include the teaching of Intelligent Design as part of the Science curriculum of some American states.

Professor Collins argued that methodological relativism in SSK means ignoring ideas of scientific truth, and falshood, and concentrating on the social processes that are involved in a group choosing one idea over another. The presentation of this methodological position resulted in a discussion among those present. Some saw a tension, even a contradiction, involved both suspending claims to Truth on the part of Science while making Sociological claims to knowledge of the way that the World is. Professor Collins that while this might be a philosophical contradiction, it was by no means unique. And, nevertheless, he was an skilled practitioner in SSK, and, as a Sociologist of Expertise he had come to the position that it was important to perform the role in which one is skilled.

That said, how much knowledge ought one have of a scientific discipline before conducting a Sociology of the knowledge within that discipline? This question was subject to a lively debate. He rejected the idea that the naïf possesses a privileged position, and the corollary, that estrangement and 'going native' were serious problems for the sociologist. He argued, first, that it is perfectly possible for sociologists to retain professional detachment and perform sociological studies of their own societies. Second, that it impossible to perform a sociological study of a society unless you understand the language of that society. Thus, to do an effective peice of SSK research, Collins argued that you need a not insignificant level of expertise in order to understand the language in which some things become true and others are made false.

Professor Collins explained that the emphasis has changed between the publication of the first book in the 'Golem' series and the publication of the third. Whereas the first two books concentrated on science and technology respectively, the third 'Golem' addressed medicine. Countering the fashion to descredit medicine he argued that although there is still much that we do not understand about the human body, science and medicine is the best available process. He used the example of plumbing. There is good plumbing and bad plumbing, just as there is good science and bad science. More, it is the business of experts to carry out this process. If there are examples of bad plumbing it does not mean that plumbing is discarded as way of solving problems, and neither must science and medicine. This does not mean that the social processes involved in producing the knowledge of plumbing ought not be analysed.

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