Science Is "Good to Think With"

Sandra Harding

Thinking Science, Thinking Society

IT is ironic that the major criticism of the new social studies of science and technology from the antidemocratic right in fact provides yet more evidence for the value of those science studies. The new science studies shows how the "order of knowledge" has also been the "order of society." When challenges to the social order have arisen, these challenges have also changed the prevailing ways that the production and legitimation of knowledge have been organized, and vice versa: the social order and the structure of a culture's sciences are generated through one and the same social transformations (see, for example, Merchant 1980; Restivo 1988; Shapin 1994; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). This is pretty close to what the antidemocratic right believes: the new science studies, feminism, "deconstructionism," and multiculturalism threaten the downfall of civilization and its standards of reason. The latter criticism does not contest that the order of knowledge and the social order shape and maintain each other, but only the way science studies reveals how such science-society relations have worked in the past and operate today, and the proposal in some of these science studies tendencies for more open, public discussion about the desirability of prevailing science-society relations. It is significant that the Right's objections virtually never get into the nitty-gritty of historical or ethnographic detail to contest the accuracy of social studies of science accounts. Such objections remain at the level of rhetorical flourishes and ridicule.

Democracy-advancing social movements, building on and expanding the earlier class-based analyses, have argued that the natural and social sciences we have are in important respects incapable of producing the kinds of knowledge that are needed for sustainable human life in sustainable environments under democratic conditions. The conventional conceptual frameworks of the natural and social sciences have been designed for quite different projects—in short, for producing the kinds of information useful to the administrators and managers of nation states, multinational corporations, and militaries. These institutions have central interests in continuing European expansionist projects that benefit primarily elites, and they all embody particularly destructive ideals of manliness and womanliness that facilitate such expansion. Important kinds of information and understanding wanted by those who bear disproportionate shares of the costs of how these institutions organize social relations, both in the North and the South, cannot be gathered through the kinds of conceptual frameworks that natural and social sciences have developed for such administrative/managerial projects.

The antidemocratic right often accuses the new science studies of relativism, but it is wrong about just what it is to which the new science studies "relativizes" sciences. Science studies does not claim that sciences are epistemologically relative to each and every culture's beliefs such that all are equally defensible as true. Rather, the point is that they are historically relative to different cultures' projects—to cultures' questions about the natural and social orders. Different questions produce different answers containing distinctive, sometimes conflicting, representations of nature and, indeed, of science, and the representations that conflict do not fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

For example, the representations of nature, society, and science appearing in the answers to those questions of most interest to nation states, multinational corporations, and militaries often conflict with the representations that appear in the answers to the most pressing questions for those who bear the costs of those institutions' projects. If you want to do modern agribusiness, modern technosciences can help; if you want to maintain a fragile environment and biodiversity, those sciences, so far, have been of little assistance. This is so in part because the representations of nature's regularities and underlying causal tendencies in technosciences and in some forms of environmentalism are conflicting. The representations of nature, society, and maximally effective knowledge production in the sometimes more effective "local knowledge systems" conflict with those in modern technosciences. This is as true of different sciences within the same culture as it is of "the same science" in different cultures, of course. The conceptual frameworks of modern physics, chemistry, and biology on the one hand, and environmental sciences on the other hand do not fit together perfectly. The latter require learning to negotiate between the principles of these modern sciences and of both local and social knowledge of environments, neither of which has a place in the conceptual frameworks of those modern sciences (see Seager 1993). Indeed, the conceptual frameworks of those three modern sciences no longer appear unifiable (Dupre 1993).

Of course, this kind of historicization of scientific projects does indeed generate a different epistemology for science than the standard ones that set out to show how reasonable it is that truth always manages to land on the side of the latest arrival among modern sciences. This epistemology supports thinking with/between more than one knowledge system, from their "borderlands," so to speak (Anzaldúa 1987; Collins 1991). It is exactly in opposition to the claim that there are no rational standards for deciding between them. This kind of epistemology simply openly asserts that whatever their explicit topic, rational standards are always about both the natural and social orders. I turn shortly to suggest how important such an epistemology is for the barely initiated project of developing anti-Eurocentric Northern science studies.

Displacing Anxieties

Another way to state my point here is that science is always "good to think with," as Lévi-Strauss said about sex. For "educated classes" whose own status depends on the same appeals to objectivity, rationality, expertise, and progressiveness on which science's legitimacy depends, science discourses can be mobilized to encourage people to think in politically...