S5 E11 - Steven Shapin on the Social Life of Scientific Knowledge

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Steven Shapin, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard. Shapin reflects on his path into the history and sociology of science and discusses the central concerns of his work: how knowledge is produced, the social foundations of trust in science, the embodied nature of knowledge, and the performance of expertise. 

He revisits Leviathan and the Air-Pump, co-authored with Simon Schaffer, outlining the Boyle–Hobbes controversy and showing how seventeenth-century scientific credibility depended on rhetoric, social standing, and performance, while highlighting the broader relevance of the book’s insights into the social foundations of knowledge. Shapin considers contemporary challenges, including political interventions in science and universities, the effects of digital communication, and the fragmentation of expertise, and reframes the “crisis of truth” as a crisis of social knowledge.

Finally, he connects these themes to his recent work on taste and eating (Eating and Being), examining how communities form shared judgments about food and flavour, paralleling the intersubjective construction of objectivity in science.

In this episode:

• Recounts his path through Edinburgh, UCSD, and Harvard and what each taught about interdisciplinarity.
• Explains the story and broader thesis of Leviathan and the Air-Pump: facts are made credible through practice, rhetoric, and social arrangements.
• Reflects on shifting disciplinary fault lines.
• Describes how credibility is performed today and the growing value of face-to-face embodiment.
• Surveys credibility issues from science’s entanglement with business, government, and partisan politics.
• Discusses Eating and Being, drawing parallels between intersubjective agreement in science and taste.

Transcript being prepared.

Photo: Steven Shapin, Groningen, Netherlands, March 2020, by Newfrogm, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Relevant links

• Steven Shapin — Harvard profile / home page
• LARB Essay “Is There a Crisis of Truth?” (2019)
• Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985) – Wikipedia entry
• Steven Shapin's books

Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.

Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

Transcript

Welcome to the HPS podcast where we explore the history, philosophy, and social studies of science. This week we're joined by Steven Shapin, Professor Emeritus in the History of Science department at Harvard University where he taught from 2004 until his retirement, following earlier appointments at UC San Diego, and the University of Edinburgh. 

Steven Shapin's work has left a remarkable impact on how we've come to understand the making of scientific knowledge and its place in modern culture. His scholarship ranges from early modern science to contemporary technoscience. He's been recognised with major honours, including the Erasmus prize, the Sarton Medal, and Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences  

He's the author of Leviathan and the Air-Pump co-written with former guest of the show, Professor Simon Schaffer, and he is also well known for books such as A Social History of Truth, The Scientific Revolution, The Scientific Life, and Never Pure. His most recent book is titled Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves. 

In this episode, we cover a wide range of topics. We trace Steven's journey into the history and sociology of science, revisit enduring questions from his work about how facts are made and how credibility is earned, and examine why trust in science remains such a live issue. We also explore the performance of expertise in the digital age and the impact of some political interventions on scientific institutions and authority.  

____________________ 

Thomas Spiteri: Professor Steven Shapin, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Steve Shapin: My pleasure. 

[00:01:42] 

Thomas Spiteri: Steven, you've worked in many different spaces from the Edinburgh Science Studies Unit to UC San Diego's Science Studies Program, now at Harvard. To begin our discussion, could you talk a bit about how you found your way originally into the field of history and sociology of science and your experiences in these different academic settings?  

Steve Shapin: I belong to a generation of people who are now historian sociologists of science; I think more history of science. The proper answer to the question is we came into it by accident. Practically nobody in my generation was either trained as an historian of science, or in my case, even knew the thing existed as an undergraduate. The general pattern was for people with a scientific background to drift into it, discover it, things of that sort. I think it's different for sociology of science, the Robert Merton tradition had an institutional existence; philosophy of science, of course, had a major institutional existence; History of Science, not so much. 

I went to a small liberal arts college. I graduated, my first degree was in biology; I did one year of graduate work in genetics at the University of Wisconsin, and I had a diffuse sense: although I enjoyed science, the day-to-day practice of science was both interesting and, to me, not something that really grabbed my attention. I gave it up after one year: I did not give it up for the history of science—I did not even know the history of science as an academic discipline existed. I drifted for about a year; it was a very interesting drift. But I was thinking, I was very interested in the politics of science—this is the Vietnam era, of course—and on genetics: the early stages of genetic engineering, recombinant DNA; we were concerned about that. I was interested either in the possibility of becoming a science journalist or working in science politics. Not in electoral politics, but in the engine room of people, say, in the Library of Congress, Bureau of the Budget, or people assisting legislative assistance in the American Congress, of writing bills, organising testimony, and things of that sort. 

During that year, I was doing some work in the science policy area, and that's when I discovered the history of science existed. Even at that time, it was not that I had a calling for the history of science. I wanted at that time to come back to the worlds of journalism and politics, and I was told that I needed a graduate qualification in the history of science. So, I wound up at the Department of the University of Pennsylvania, which at that time was called the History and Philosophy of Science. There was no philosophy during my time there; it relabelled itself as the History of Sociology of Science. There was no sociology there, and I think I'm the first graduate in the world as a PhD in History and Sociology of Science. The short answer is, I fell into it by accident – but once I fell into it, I enjoyed it very much, and what I especially liked about it was the ability to think both humanistically and scientifically. I think humanistically and sociologically about science; I also, betraying my age, belonged to the C.P. Snow, as well as the Thomas Kuhn generation. 

[00:05:11] 

I did not personally enjoy narrow specialisation, and one thing that appealed to me immensely about the history of science was the ability to combine perspective, sensibilities, and practices. That's what I found that I enjoyed when I began doing the thing. That said, at Pennsylvania I was graduated for three years and three months, total. That's not a testament to my brilliance, far from it, but the department was very ill-formed at that stage, and I found the gaps in the system, and I was a PhD three years and three months after entering it. That's when I took up a job at the University of Edinburgh Science Studies Unit. I don't think the correct description of Edinburgh was that it was interdisciplinary, it was founded as a teaching and research unit to, in various ways, encourage to allow science students – just science undergraduate students, to think reflectively about what they were doing. My colleagues, then three colleagues: David Edge was the Director, a former radio astronomer and BBC journalist; Barry Barnes, nominally the sociologist; David Bloor, nominally the philosopher of science. But I think the point to remember, it was a shared project: what would it be to think sociologically about science? 

I don't think it happens at all that people would speak in the name of a discipline at Edinburgh. It was very much a shared project, although I taught, as it were, the nominal history course and Barry Barnes taught nominated sociology course and David Bloor, the philosophy. That sensibility about a shared project that paid relatively little attention to disciplines was a marked characteristic of Edinburgh, and I liked that enormously. After about 18 years there, and with some misgivings, I left Edinburgh for the University of California at San Diego, which was explicitly—the science studies program there—explicitly interdisciplinary; and that one was appointed in the Department of Sociology. In the Department of Philosophy, as Philip Kitcher was, in the Department of History as Robert [Westman was]. 

But there—and I think Philip Kitcher is right, it was at least for a period enormous fun and quite exciting that the atmosphere was people were speaking very much in the names of their disciplines: as a philosopher, this is how I see things; as an historian, this is how I see things, et cetera. I didn't thoroughly enjoy that because I was actually in the sociology department as an historian and I didn't I find it natural to me to defend the discipline; although, as your listeners will know, there were disciplinary wars, especially between the philosophers and the sociologists at that time. 

My early career, as it were, transits the question that you asked about disciplinary affiliation. Not to this day, I don't know what... I mean, I get described as an historian, which is fine by me; the first time I've ever been in a History department was in Harvard, History of Science. I've been in the Sociology department. I sometimes get called 'philosopher', although I have no idea why that is! It's been an interesting career, but I think not, how do I put it... not typical; and certainly, younger people coming into STS or history of science have very different experience than mine. 

[00:08:49] 

Thomas Spiteri: I'd like to go back to the period when you began working with Professor Simon Schaffer on Leviathan and the Air-Pump, now more than 40 years ago. For those who might not be familiar though, Steven, could you briefly outline the central argument of the book, and what was at stake in the Boyle-Hobbes controversy you examined? 

Steve Shapin: Again, you get a short answer or a long answer to your question. If people want to see a summary of the book, they can go on Wikipedia, and there's a long and not entirely horrible summary! The book that Simon Schaffer and I wrote, I guess starting, we first met in 1980 and there's evidence that we were working towards a long article that morphed into a book from about '81. 

The first thing to note about it: this is a specific story. You asked about an argument; it's a specific story about a specific controversy in 17th century experimental science. I think as Simon amusingly puts it, the process of writing this book took longer than the controversy that we're examining itself. It is a story about a controversy between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle that took place in and around the early 1660s, in England. It's a very detailed account of what the controversy was. It was about, for example, both the adequacy of certain experiments about the nature of air, and also about the legitimacy of going about answering questions about the nature of air in this way—and especially in Boyle's experimental way.  

Okay, so note, it's a piece of early modern history of science; a very detailed focused, piece of early modern history of science. When you ask about the argument of the book, and I think the subsequent reception of the book is evidence of that, it's not specific to the 17th century, or to Robert Boyle or Thomas Hobbes, or to experiment. There's a tagline in the book that, as it were, I think rhetorically expresses the argument that solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of order and, conversely, solutions to the problem of order are solutions to the problem of knowledge. That argument has travelled very widely, all sorts of people gratifyingly, if puzzlingly, have cited the book as an instantiation of that sort of argument. But – and I think that Simon Schaffer certainly agrees, the impact of the book on historians of early modern science has been slight. 

The argument seems to have travelled very widely in the academic world; I mean, just look at the citations. But people working on 17th century science, it's a story about Boyle and Hobbes and it's not a very interesting episode. So, it's kind of a, how to put it, a chivalrous citation that's marked its career, but what's important: is the study of a specific 17th century episode of science important, or is the argument – more or less separate from the empirical materials—important? I can see the sense of either evaluation. From the authors' point of view, the argument was geared to a traditional formulation of, not just of the sociology of science, but of the sociology of knowledge, in which the sociology of knowledge was framed as the question: 'What is the role, if any, of society or, as it was called, social influences or existential circumstances, on knowledge, and specifically on scientific knowledge?'. That certainly struck the authors of this book, Simon Schaffer and myself, as a curious way to think: why ever is it necessary or appropriate to think of society as something that influences knowledge? 

Why not think of knowledge, scientific knowledge as sustained by, made by, modified by social actors in certain social configurations. Why not think of society as a distributional field of knowledge? That's the general argument. As I think you can see, and certainly a number of people have realised—and notably, including Bruno Latour, that that argument, that sensibility can be either infuriating or interesting, destructive or productive, independent of anything you say about the Hobbes-Boyle controversy. 

It's a kind of puzzle, but it's a puzzle that I think the authors were partly knowledgeable about and responsible for. You can see that in the first and the last chapters of the book. Whereas the meat of the book, which I don't know how many people have actually read, is a very close and detailed study of a specific episode of a history of early modern experimental science. 

[00:13:54] 

Thomas Spiteri: Do you think readers today, Steven, respond to the book's arguments differently than they did in the 1980s? If you were writing Leviathan and the Air-Pump now, would you approach or frame its arguments in any different way?  

Steve Shapin: No, I... well, you know, two questions. What would you do differently? Well, let me try to say something about that. Book's 40 years old and historical books, as E.H. Carr once said, testify as much about the historian as they do about the historical past, and there's no exemption to that. One thing [that] marks the book as an historical object is, you find this especially in the last chapter of the book, it's about a sensibility; a fault line in the history and sociology of science that was very strong in the mid-1980s—and I think it's almost gone today, interestingly—and that is the so-called choice between externalism and internalism. Where externalism was largely defined as showing the importance of social influences; I'm doing air quotes now: "social influences" on science. Internalism maintained, air quote, "social influences" were either irrelevant to stories about the development of science, or destructive of the idea of science. I'm going to say that's a Cold War sensibility, and I've written a bit about that. 

If you look at the pages of the major journals of the history of science, I think you'd be hard put to find people taking up and labelling themselves as externalist or internalist or even using the notion of social influences on [science]. I don't think this is a result of what our book did; I think it's a reflection of changed sensibilities about the relationship between the scientific community and the sustaining and surrounding society at the time. If I were going to treat the book as a dead piece of history, I'd look at the last chapter of the book and say: 'Who cares about externalism and internalism?'. What would I do differently if Simon and I were writing the book now? We wouldn't frame it that way, because the world's changed. 

[00:16:18] 

Thomas Spiteri: I wonder if these delineations and these groupings —where people are identifying it at least methodologically —you think impacts in any distinct ways the way that the book would be received today?  

Steve Shapin: I know that there's recently been an attempt to insist on, or to revive fault lines between history of science and STS, or fault lines within STS. I have to say, speaking personally, I'm not bothered; and as I've been trying to indicate, I just happened to have had the kind of career and have the kind of sensibilities, that I'm not bothered about that. 

But I do understand that people are bothered about that and I don't criticise them for it. I personally am not engaged; I don't have a dog in that fight, as it were. One thing that is definitely true, if you look at the early days of journals like Science Studies, now Social Studies of Science, historians used to play, used to [be] big presences and used to go to those conferences; I did myself. Now, if you look at a journal like Social Studies of Science, the historians are gone. I exaggerate, but their presence has been diluted; as if STS is somehow either a self-contained discipline or not a place where historians have much to contribute—or simply a study of policy-relevant, present or near-present concerns about science and technology. That's a fact—I think it's a fact; I regret that fact because I'm an historian of science. I've been in a sociology department, I go to STS conferences, and I don't feel the pertinence or the necessity of those fault lines myself.  

At that point I have little to say, except it's part of the institutional career of these disciplines, that these tensions and/or fault lines are part of the lived experience of scholars now—but they're not mine. 

[00:18:25] 

Thomas Spiteri: Yeah, got you... In Leviathan and the Air-Pump, you and Simon Schaffer showed that Boyle had to work quite hard through experimental display and rhetoric, and social standing to make his knowledge credible. In today's digital world of data sets, code and preprints, do scientists still have to perform credibility? And if so, what does that performance look like now to you? 

Steve Shapin: Well, I think one annoying thing that historians do have to say about this sort of thing, and that have said, and that I'm tempted to say is: nothing's changed. I do want to retrieve something of the ability through digital change in my sensibilities about this; but I think it'd be wrong not to acknowledge very substantial change brought about by digital ways of communication. We're doing it now, yeah: you've turned off your camera because our faces are not going to be part of the transcript that's going to become part of your podcast, which is kind of interesting. So, I find myself making gestures as I'm sure you are when you talk to me, which are predicated upon a visual world of the face-to-face. But why are we doing this? Okay, I'll leave that as a question. 

Now, one thing I note about the power and the pervasiveness of digital communications is that precisely because they become so important, so much part of how we talk to each other and how we present ourselves, is that we're always looking for repairs to it. The Zoom video is one form of repair; the emoji is one form of repair: it's an email and WhatsApp communication. Related to that, just because we communicate so overwhelmingly through digital means, access to the actual embodied face-to-face and the so-called personal dimension where I'm looking at your body and you're looking at mine, has become scarce; and because it's a scarce good—at times increasingly valuable, it's a luxury good. It has been said that the world has become flat, and part of what's been meant by the flatness of the modern world is the digital. But the value in a flattened digital world of having a cup of coffee with someone looking them in the eye has become incredibly valuable. In that sense, the world has not become flat but become spectacularly lumpy. There are people who have cups of coffee with each other, and there are people who... The return to office movement in the post-COVID world, the talk about that and the urgency of that, and the resistance of that, as it were, focuses on issues of this sort. 

If I'm making myself at all clear, on the one hand, the digital form of communication creates its own economy of credibility—of suasion, but it has not squeezed out the world of the face-to-face and the embodied personal: it has made it more scarce and more valuable. I have had a little bit to say about these sorts of things in talking about entrepreneurial science, and biotech and high-tech business where, by perverse, apparently perverse form of argument, I want to say that supposedly pre-modern things like charismatic authority and the embodied solution to problems of 'what shall we do' and 'what an organisation is', have become more powerful—not less. 

[00:22:13] 

Thomas Spiteri: In A Social History of Truth, you explored how trust in science was historically grounded in personal relationships and ideals of civility. Today, trust is often mediated through institutions, journals and metrics, and things like this. Do you see this as a shift from virtue to bureaucracy, and what's at stake in that shift; have we lost something important about the moral image of science as a calling? 

Steve Shapin: Well, again, I think there are two ways of dealing with questions like that. The first is: the institutionalisation of science, the apparent loss of its personal dimension, its integration into the worlds of business, of the military, of government is undeniable and it's substantial. It's been an enormous success story, if you like, it's Bacon's Dream fulfilled, and there's no denying that.  

So, that's a success. I think it has created problems that we're now living through for the authority and credibility of science. That is, insofar as science has identified with the world of business, insofar as it's identified with government; and it is now inconceivable to think of business or of government absent [of] scientific expertise, it now has at least in part the credibility problems of business and of government. The idea of pure academic, disengaged sites now describes a smaller and smaller part of the scientific life. The idea of scientific independence, of integrity, is now coexistent at least with the idea that science speaks through business and through government. 

I think that's one way of identifying the credibility problems that science is now experiencing. There's the science of Exxon Mobil, and there's the science of Greenpeace; there's the science of concerns for the climate emergency, and there's the science speaking from petrochemical companies. There's the science of the current Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and the science of the threatened Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The experience, because of the integration of science into all of these powerful institutions, is a credibility quandary, which is one way of describing where we're currently at. I don't know if that's an adequate response to your question. 

[00:24:57] 

Thomas Spiteri: On that note, it's probably worth bringing up this Restoring Gold Standard Science Executive Order that the Trump administration issued: the idea that there's political appointees overseeing science. We've got this rhetoric of purity and rigor that's coming through this administration; what do you make of this? Obviously, you've shown us that science has always been entangled with politics and values and bodies, and that it's, in your words "never pure". Is this a throwback to older authority structures, or is it something distinctly modern?  

Steve Shapin: Two points about that. In a speculative sense I want to say something about Trump and science, but undeniably, if you read the Gold Standard Science Executive direction, it could have been written out of mid-20th century descriptions and celebrations of liberal, pluralistic critical science. For example, associated with the work of people like Robert Merton: science should be open, science should be independent, scientific claims should be replicable—it is absolutely traditional in that sense. It shows, by the way, in spite of all the supposed influence of STS, relativism and social constructivism, the continuing grip of this image of science, such that the president of the United States can describe this as the gold standard of what science should be. 

I don't take this very seriously, in the case of Trump, I don't think Trump thinks about Robert Merton; I don't think he thinks about the nature of science at all. I think one thing that we know about Donald Trump is he's vindictive: as a way of getting at science's overwhelmingly, shall I say, democratic, or left, or anti-authoritarian scientific community, it appealed to him and his advisors. I don't take the content of this Gold Standard statement at all seriously—except as evidence of the continuing appeal and grip of these apparently gone days of your conceptions of what science is. He's calling on whatever resources he can, he and his advisors, calling on whatever resources he can to punish the institutions and people who defy him, or who are critical of him, or contest his claims to expertise. 

It's the politics of resentment—that's of course to be taken very seriously. But the statement in Gold Standard Executive direction of what science is, I don't take that seriously at all. I don't think anyone else should either.  

[00:28:01] 

Thomas Spiteri: You've taught at Harvard for two decades, and Harvard stands as a symbol of prestige: academic, intellectual prestige, but it's also become a target by this same administration in political battles over credibility. What do you make of these attacks on universities, and what does it tell us about the cultural status of expertise today?  

Steve Shapin: I think it tells us something generally that's very important and very serious, and it also tells us something very specific. Start with the most specific thing. I really think this is an attack on Harvard and more generally, of private elite universities in general. Because Harvard—I don't know how widely this sensibility is global, whether it's shared in Australia, or Germany—but Harvard is a brand. It is an institution that I'm part of, but it's also a brand. It's a brand of what counts as elite education, and a certain conception of where expertise and a whole range of subjects is to be found, and we're the best expertise. Rightly or wrongly, it is a brand. I think Trump, following my suggestion [that] this is politics of resentment, it's got to be Harvard. It includes Columbia of course, because Columbia has got its own problems of elitism and left liberalism. 

The interesting thing, and this is just a suggestion: because science has become so well-integrated, scientific expertise so well-integrated into the economies of the modern world in general, the significant denial of resources; shall I make this up... The University of Oklahoma or Arkansas is going to precipitate problems, and is now precipitating problems which are very different from an attack on Harvard, because the funding of science and technology by the federal government is a creation of jobs. Republican presidents of universities and Republican politicians are not going to enjoy an attack on their local economies. I think my prediction is we're going to see this play out. We've got both... In a way, the specific thing, this is about Harvard, and about elite private universities. I don't know how widely this can become a general attack on the scientific community because so much is involved in the federal support of science: 'I give you jobs, economic growth'. That's a prediction, I don't know if it's right or not. 

In a general sense, of course expertise has become fragmented. Let me qualify that: our now-widespread acknowledgement, that there are various versions of expertise in all sorts of questions, is now accessible through the internet—that's true. So, the availability of different voices saying different things about the climate, about vaccines, about almost anything that you can name, is now accessible at the touch of a button; and that wasn't before. You are asking people to decide where authentic expertise is; and you're even asking people to decide whether there is or is not a consensus about, say, climate change, or the safety and efficacy of vaccines: and that's tough. The centrifugal tendency of the internet has created a fragmentation, and more than a fragmentation, there's a kaleidoscope of expertise. That is a general problem.  

The response, and I don't think we've got... We're looking for a way to respond to that. For example, my colleague at Harvard, Naomi Oreskes, consistently, persuasively announces that there is a consensus about the reality of climate change and anthropogenic climate change; but at the click of a button, people on the internet can hear people saying that there isn't such a consensus. This is the problem of our times, and I am not going to be foolish enough to say how that's going to play out. I've given you a Harvard-specific response to that, and I've given you an acknowledgement that the internet has created a centrifugal, kaleidoscopic world of expertise that is an enormous problem. 

[00:32:53] 

Thomas Spiteri: I want to go back to this expertise problem, and I'll call it a problem: we're in a moment of time where a great deal of people are very sceptical of experts. Paradoxically, quite desperate for expertise; so, it's both contested and sought. In your work, you've shown that knowledge is inseparable from the people who produce it. Is it possible, or even desirable to separate facts from their makers? 

Steve Shapin: You and many people have phrased the question as: 'Can you fully separate science or knowledge from the people that produce it?'. I want to really make a claim stronger than that. I want to say; I guess this gets back to the slogan in the Leviathan and the Air-Pump book, that the making of knowledge, the sustaining of knowledge, the modification of knowledge always and everywhere involves embodied people. People make it, people validate it, people sustain it, people change it: principle number one. 

Principle number two: is it possible to separate knowledge, say, facts from people; and you have to say in a certain tone of voice: 'Of course it is'. Because that's what people mean when they ask: 'Can you separate people, or the personal dimension from knowledge?'. You can say that disembodied knowledge, impersonal knowledge is knowledge, which is achieved through the action of people. This distinction, this divorce, this disembodiment; amongst the things that I and other people have been interested in is: how do people do disembodiment? Take the idea of disembodied knowledge. Take the idea of personal knowledge. Take the idea of the transcendent or abstract. How is it done? I've always been interested in 'how is it done'. 

Sometimes when I'm teaching a class, I ask students—who react to me with eye-rolling puzzlement—I ask them: do thinking, show me thinking, and they look at me like I'm crazy. Then someone does, and again, we can't do this on a transcript, but they do the Rodin Thinker: they close their eyes, they put their head on their fist and they bow their head. It's a performance: I am out, I'm not in play, I'm not doing social interaction, I'm in myself; I'm thinking, yeah? That's the kind of thing I'm interested in, both in a personal way and as a collective way: how is disembodiment actually made? The question is: how do they do it? 'How do people do things?' is an interesting question in the production, maintenance and characterisation of the disembodied, of the impersonal, of the abstract. I'm very impressed at seeing some of the best work in our field that is done by historians and sociologists of mathematics who are interested in apparently mundane things that historians of mathematics have not, in the past, been much interested in: blackboard work; proof as an extended collective train of work, assent that a proof has been established. 

I'm trying, I'm afraid in a convoluted, or long-winded way, to say: to take the idea of the disembodied, the impersonal—and always in everywhere find it possible. Not only possible, but interesting, of: 'How's it done?'. Not as a denigration, but as an accomplishment. I think we have an interesting body of empirical work which responds to that sort of sensibility. It's a way of asking: 'Can you fully separate facts or knowledge from the people that make their answers?'. Number one, yes. Number two, the experience, the characterisation of the disembodied, of the impersonal, one can ask: 'How was that done?'. 

[00:37:05] 

Thomas Spiteri: It's the normative element. I would love to hear your thoughts on the desirable part; should we aspire to that? There's traces of people in everything, and that point's appreciated, but should we be aspiring for this disembodied knowledge that you speak of— whatever that might be? 

Steve Shapin: Kind of interesting! Really, I thought it was an excellent question; I really haven't thought about it. There are cultural intellectual practices where success is defined as the divorce of the personal from knowledge; that's called success. But we have bodies of knowledge and excuse me for speculating: we have bodies of knowledge now where that divorce is neither achieved, nor valued. For example, craft knowledge, musical performances, novel writing. This is a contested area where the seeing of the doing, the recognition of this intellectual product, is being produced in front of us. That does not denigrate from its value, but its part of its value is the experience of much of our culture at present.  

Again, I don't want to speculate further in a world of a podcast transcript, but it would be very interesting to look at some of the charismatic technoscientific figures of our time, and to ask these sorts of questions about, from Oppenheimer to Steve Jobs, to Elon Musk. To think of the thing like, the value of the Tesla company in terms of the personal embodied presence of Elon Musk. It's a way of thinking that you find occasionally in the journalism of The Economist, and certainly in the business world, where the price of a company depends upon personal dimension. Importantly, I think these are inconsequential questions; I wouldn't take for granted the question that the achievement of the disembodied and the personal is always and everywhere the achievement of value in our culture, or even in the technoscientific world. 

[00:39:35] 

Thomas Spiteri: You responded to a question: 'Is there a crisis of truth?' in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and you argued it's not that there is a crisis of truth as such, but that we've lost the skill of knowing where to turn for reliable knowers. I want to ask you: how do you see that crisis playing out today, and do you still think that there isn't a crisis of truth?  

Steve Shapin: I think it's a way of describing... I had a little pushback in that short essay, that we're properly describing the state we're in as a crisis of truth. I regarded truth as a kind of table-pounding gesture. I think we're in a crisis of locating the authority to speak on a whole set of issues. Truth is a kind of fancy 'knowledge-gone-on-vacation' way of describing the state—where the state we're in is bad. The state we're in is a crisis, but I think if we look at the crisis of knowledge or of facticity of expertise that we're in, it's localised. Not surprisingly, it's localised in the areas that are politically, personally consequential: 'Are vaccines safe for the kids?'; 'Do I have to get an electric vehicle?'; 'Must I recycle my plastic bags?'. These are consequential because they involve us, our actions, our time, our resources. The Poincaré conjecture does not have that characteristic. 

Okay, so you follow my meaning. 

To describe the serious state we're in as a crisis of anti-science or of truth, I think misses the extremely serious, but localised nature of the crisis that we're in. In other words, the denial, or the problems of expertise in those areas that are consequential for political and personal action—bad enough. But now we're talking, we're describing the problem, I think, better than a problem of truth. Secondly, you asked the question... I say that this is not a problem of truth, or even a problem of anti-science, but a problem of social knowledge. Meaning, who do we recognise as having the rights to speak about these things of concern to us?  

I revert to some of the things that we've talked about a few minutes ago. Of the press of a button, I can find someone saying something different from a Harvard climate scientist. Secondly, in so far as scientific expertise has been so integrated into so many institutions in our society, including institutions that speak about states of affairs in different ways: that that press of a button is going to deliver us to the expertise that we want. That, I described as a crisis of social knowledge; in that it's not that we don't know who to turn to speaking reliably about the climate or about vaccines, it's that we don't know who we should count as an expert. Maybe the crisis of social knowledge is not the best way of describing that. 

I've just tried in a more long-winded way to describe... It used to be that the priest would pronounce about the nature of eternity and the nature of God, and of right moral conduct. Now at the press of a button, we can find anyone saying anything that we like. The echo chamber conception of the internet—I haven't got a solution to that, although I rather like the idea encapsulated in the Gold Standard Trump Executive direction. It would be nice if there were more of a space for science as saying that our science is not growing the economy and making profits providing jobs; but it would be nice, in the words of the Harvard motto, to say that we're in the search for truth: veritas. But, because of the integration of science into the civic world and into the economy, it's kind of old fashioned and embarrassing to say such things. We say we're going to grow the economy, we're gonna provide jobs. Well, I think a bit of the old-fashioned thing should be rediscovered. 

It's been some decades since scientists have said without embarrassment, that we're doing pure science in the search for knowledge, and we don't know what consequences there will be. I can think of all sorts of important reasons why we don't say that, but this is the mess we've made for ourselves, I think. We've made the rod with which our backs are being beaten. 

[00:44:32] 

Thomas Spiteri: You've recently written on food, and taste, and subjectivity; could you tell us a bit about what drew you to that work, and how it connects or contrasts with your earlier interest in science and objectivity? What's capturing your scholarly interests these days? 

Steve Shapin: Last year I did a book on the history of ideas about food and eating, and I would be dishonest if I said I didn't help myself from time to time to write about things that I care about in a more embodied and personal way. This is the book I've written, and other things that I've written about food and eating are not sharing my taste, they're not that kind of thing. But they're, as it were, a doppelganger to my other life: which is, there's certain things that I enjoy not as being as an academic. I thought it would be fun to find an academically serious way of writing about things that I, as a non-academic enjoy: number one. 

Number two: this is a fancy answer. So, from the Air-Pump book, and increasingly characterising much history, sociology and philosophy of science, we've been interested in objectivity. You've had Raine Daston, for example, or Peter Galison doing this splendid work on the history of ideas of objectivity. It occurred to me some time ago, that subjectivity has rather been in the dust bin. For the history of objectivity, especially in this vernacular mode, subjectivity is the grit in the machine that's supposedly producing objective knowledge. I've been interested in subjectivity, subjective judgments. 

I like this, why? I think Robert Redford was a great actor; I think Philip Roth is overrated—how are those taste judgements made? If, and as, and when are they made; how do they come to be shared? In other words, how do they do it? The performative question. In other words, moving from subjectivity as the grit in the system of the producing of objective knowledge: how was judgment done? Using the same sensibilities that science studies scholars have used in talking about how objective judgements are done.  

I'm interested in a series of soft things, using the hard/soft thing. How is judgment of beauty, of flavour, of the goodness of knowledge, of film—that same sort of sensibility, how do they do it? With what consequences? There's this famous saying: 'There's no accounting for taste', or de gustibus non disputandum est, which sometimes is rendered as: 'it's arbitrary'. 

You know, I think Rigoletto is a great opera; I have friends who think that The Ring Cycle is the only great opera. Are these judgments arbitrary? Well, they do have a different characteristic than 'twice two equals four' versus twice two equals five', but I don't think they are arbitrary. So, when people talk about the goodness of wine, or about the goodness of operas, they—yes, they talk about their taste, as belonging to them; but they're pointed to aspects of a painting, or a film, or a novel, or a musical performance. That, if you attend to it as I attend to it; look here, listen here; you may come to recognise that thing in the world, together with my framing of it, as an aesthetic good. It's a performance: it may work, it may not work; and what I notice in some of the work I've done, is that taste communities are formed. They're not universal; they're local, but they're consequential.  

Much of our social life involves shared judgment. The people that are friends are people who often share judgment. We have found ways of making the personal experience of beauty, of flavour—and I use the term intersubjective, so intersubjectivity, as an accomplishment. That's what I've been interested in. Put that way, one could say that much of what has happened in the science studies world, is the study of the achievement of intersubjectivity in science.  

These are, as it were, two sides to me of the same coin. That's the fancy way of saying why I've been interested in food, eating, and taste and judgment—not neglecting the fact that I like thinking about these things.  

[00:49:30] 

Thomas Spiteri: Professor Shapin, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a privilege to engage with you on themes that lie at the heart of science and our place in society and culture. We're very grateful for your time and generosity and for the intellectual example that you continue to set. Thank you very much for joining us today. 

Steve Shapin: Thank you for asking, it's been an absolute pleasure. 

____________________ 

Thank you for listening to the HPS Podcast. If you're interested in the detail of today's conversation, you can access the transcript soon on our website at hpsunimelb.org.  

Stay connected with us on social media, including Bluesky for updates, extras, and further discussion. And finally, this podcast would not be possible without the support of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant Scheme. 

We look forward to welcoming you back next time.  

Transcribed 

Contributor: Christine Polowyj 

Christine Polowyj is an undergraduate majoring in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. She is interested in examining how knowledge is undermined or obscured when appeals to logic are made in particular social and historical contexts.