"A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England." By Steven Shapin, University of Chicago Press 483 pp.; $16.95, paper

Time was when the ideals of natural science reigned imperiously over every other form of knowledge. Bona fide statements about history, society, religion, human nature, and much else besides, were supposed to follow the strictures of the physical sciences. Natural knowledge, to put it another way, dominated the study of the social world. From this naturalistic impulse there developed all kinds of seemingly mutant intellectual and disciplinary species: social physics, scientific history, behaviorist psychology, positivist sociology, functionalist anthropology, scientific management, naturalized theology.

That science itself might be considered a social practice or a cultural construct was never entertained as a serious possibility. Even anthropologists like Emile Durkheim, with a penchant for socializing religious categories, norms of rationality, and most everything else, drew back from applying anthropological method to science--and indeed to social science itself.

It seems, however, that we have come full circle, as sociologists of scientific knowledge are plying the tools of their new trade. Now, the sociological is eating up the science. The basic idea is that scientific theory, both present and past, constitutes a belief system, much like any other, and should be investigated in the same way that anthropologists study tribes and trances, rituals and riots, funerals and fiestas, social structures and spatial arrangements. Science, in this scenario, becomes just another of the symbolic belief systems characteristic of cultures in general and open to the methods of sociologist and social anthropologist.

One major implication of this sociological turn, of course, is that questions about the truth or falsity of any scientific claim can simply be shelved because accounts of why certain theories survive are to be sought in the realm of the social. Terms such as truth, rationality, and knowledge enter the story only insofar as they are used by participants in the drama to describe their own beliefs and behavior. What now occupies center stage in explaining the evolution of science are matters to do with who controls the discourse, who can recruit for his or her own cause the stronger legitimating voices, who can secure the most persuasive testimonial attestation. Scientific knowledge, to put it another way, is regarded by the practitioners of the sociology of science as constitutively social.

What has, at least in part, animated some of these moves is a trend toward situating rationality. What is taken to be rational, it is argued, is dependent on time and place--the spatio-temporal circumstances--in which actors find themselves. Things that are rational for a member of a tribal society, who remains isolated from other cultures, to believe are in all likelihood different from things that a member of the modern Western intelligentsia can rationally believe. Rationality is thus, in good measure, condition-specific; it is, in effect, situated rationality. In turn, this emphasis on situatedness is precipitating a spatial turn in the sociology of science as its practitioners inquire into the significance of the spatial setting in the production of experimental knowledge, the diffusion tracks along which scientific ideas and their associated instrumental gadgetry migrate, the management of laboratory space, the power relations exhibited in the transmission of scientific lore from specialist space to public place, and the political geography and social topography of scientific subcultures. In all of these, the sites are now being seen as anything but neutral containers; they are, instead, active arenas profoundly conditioning their knowledge products.

Steven Shapin--formerly at the University of Edinburgh and now at the University of California, San Diego--has been a leading figure in many of these most recent moves in the social history of science, having already provided a provocative (though certainly not uncontested) reading of experimental knowledge in his arresting book with Simon Schaffer, "Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life" (1985), a volume systematically socializing seventeenth-century laboratory life. Now he takes up what seems--at least on the face of it--an even more ambitious undertaking: a social history of truth.

The substance of this latest offering, however, is actually more effectively encapsulated in the volume's subtitle: "Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England." While the detail of the argumentation and narrative is both rich and rewarding, it is necessary to attend initially to the major issue with which Shapin sets out to grapple. His title, of course, is intentionally tantalizing. How can there be a social history of truth? Surely truth stands above the messiness of social life, free and uncontaminated by the vicissitudes of human affairs.

This is precisely the claim that Shapin wants to challenge. To him, truth is earthed in the mundanities of social relations. Truth is a human production: it is what people give their epistemic allegiance to; it is what enjoys a society's rational and moral approval; it is managed and manufactured--not discovered.

Shapin thus asks in what circumstances is "knowledge" made? "What social conditions have to be satisfied for the collective good called knowledge to exist?" he wonders. In this scenario, "knowledge" is nothing more than accepted belief. I shall want to say something in due course about the content of this claim, but first it will be appropriate to survey something of the historical terrain over which Shapin travels.

For all the rhetoric about the central role of individual experience--observation and inspection--in science, scientific beliefs in fact routinely depend on testimony and trust. As Shapin puts it: "Scientists, like the laity, hold the bulk of their knowledge … by courtesy." Knowledge requires trust, and trusting, he reminds us, is a form of faith indispensable to "the folding and growth of scientific knowledge."

Most of what we know about the natural world we believe on somebody's authority. We have not directly observed the revolutions of Earth around the sun or of electrons around a nucleus. Yet we believe such things. Why? Because accredited authorities say so. The underlying assumption is that somebody has been witness to these events. But how do we know?

Whom to trust?--that is the question. And it is a question as crucial to the emergence of modern science as it is to modernity itself. For trust, as sociologists such as Anthony Giddens have told us, lies at the very heart of modernity; the "disembedding mechanisms" of our world operate in such a way that social relations are more and more conducted between agents separated in space. On this reading, modernity is calibrated in the shift from the trust derived from face-to-face interaction to trust in abstract and expert systems. Believing what the medical experts say depends as much on trust as does the circulation of money.

Testimony and trust provide the twin analytical tracks along which much of Shapin's analysis of the genesis of modern science runs. The production of scientific knowledge is, and always has been, intimately connected with believing the reports of the right witnesses. Shapin thus directs our attention to "the ineradicable role of people-knowing in the making of thing-knowing." For systems of plausibility, in which we are all enmeshed, are grounded in decisions each of us routinely makes about just who is a trustworthy witness. Resolving the issue of whom one should believe is not always an easy matter, of course. In the seventeenth century, not every social group was assumed to value truth; truth-telling was expected to display an uneven social distribution. And it was the Gentleman, largely because of his financial independence, that constituted the culture's paradigmatic instantiation of the truth teller. To put it another way, the social geography of credibility rather neatly followed the contours of what was regarded as civil society. Shapin thus spends a good deal of time surveying the different roles and models of gentility available at the time--chivalric, humanist, and Christian; but whatever the variety, the key links between cognitive privilege and social standing reassert themselves.

Crucial to these social-cognitive arrangements, moreover, was a code or culture of honor whose social history Shapin seeks to uncover. The upshot is that the practices of virtue that were enshrined in English civil society and that enabled the polity to "manage credibility" came to typify the new scientific enterprise. For the chasm between the gentle and the ungentle ran the length and breadth of early modern England, with great amounts of time and energy being devoted to determining just where this crucial social-suture line lay.

Seventeenth-century English scientist Robert Boyle constituted a paradigm case of the Christian gentleman, and Shapin devotes considerable space to the way in which Boyle and his associates carved the identity of the Christian Virtuoso out of the available genteel resources for warranting knowledge. This construction not only set limits on who was to be believed, but also provided what Shapin calls an "epistemological decorum" through which conflicts could be resolved in a gentlemanly fashion. The courtesy texts of the day, Shapin points out, required the genteel not to be too dictatorial, too extravagant, or too pushy in their claims to knowledge. After all, if you spoke that way, you could end up in a life-and-death duel. Decorum allowed demurring without discourtesy.

Now, according to Shapin, this gentlemanly model of scientific practice throws light not just on the conduct, but also on the content of Boyle's own science. Epistemological decorum--epistemic good manners--requires, as it were, a certain "slack" in the system because it trades in probabilities and judgments. But this is precisely what mathematics abhors. It seeks precision, accuracy, measurement. To Boyle, therefore, however valuable for some purposes mathematics certainly could be, its dominance of the scientific conversation would be stifling, for it would remove that very flexibility and fluidity necessary for gentlemanly discourse. Mathematics was epistemically indecorous. Its expectations of precision were, Shapin argues, unseemly, and had the added disadvantage of unnecessarily restricting the company of scientific virtuosi to too small a group of experts.

Moreover, its hankering after exactitude ran counter to the empirical latitude that did characterize contemporary science--an imprecision that itself vouchsafed to peers the reliability of the scientific practitioner. Lusting for an impossible precision might fan the flames of data falsification. Mathematical infatuation placed one in a morally risky state. As Shapin puts it: "Mathematical as well as physical dogmatism, pride, and pedantry were contrasted to experimental modesty."

The consequences of this story about the actual practice of science are of considerable proportions. The cognitive claims of the scientific community, rhetorically believed to rest upon direct, firsthand experience of an unmediated real world, actually turn out to be grounded in a network of testimony whose moral conviction was rooted in social status. Drawing on a range of empirical cases, Shapin shows time and again that determining reliable testimony (not empirical observation) was what was at stake in scientific disputes. Whether it was the reports of travelers to distant places or the work of the "invisible servant-technicians" employed in Boyle's laboratory, the trustworthiness of another's mind and body was crucially significant.

Shapin thus opens up a hitherto hidden gap between testimony and truth while at the same time he exposes the duplicity of a scientific culture rhapsodizing about the triumph of experience over authority, and all the while relying on the trustworthiness of distant witnesses or skilled technicians. As Shapin argues: "The trust relationship is … inscribed in space. Those who cannot directly witness a phenomenon must either reject its existence or take it on trust from those who have, or from testimony still more indirect." And yet it was the gentleman--not the seaman or the technician--who had the moral and epistemic capacity to make knowledge.

Throughout the book, Shapin illustrates his arguments with impressive historical detail, supported by telling citations from original sources. His unveiling of the social relations of the laboratory, for example, with its coterie of masters, servants, mechanics, and so on is extraordinary.

Yet, having followed this story through its dense undergrowth of seventeenth-century social polity, moral propensity, and epistemological decorum, what are we left with? Do we have here a social history of truth? Certainly not in the standard sense. Despite the confidence of his title, Shapin himself does indeed acknowledge that "nothing" in his book "counts as an argument against the classic, correspondence notion of truth."

What we do have is a telling social history of what has counted as warrant, of what passes as rational, of the social geography of trust, of the moral morphology of entitlement to belief, of knowledge claims. All of this is enlightening, but it hardly amounts to a social history of truth in anything other than in a conventionalist sense. For the terms truth and knowledge have--for the sociologist of scientific knowledge--no "realist locution," to use Mary Hesse's phraseology.

Many other questions, of course, could also be asked about Shapin's own project. Isn't there a sociology of the sociology of scientific knowledge? To what extent, I wonder, are the metaphors of management and production, with which the volume is replete, themselves the product of an advanced industrial, managerial society? We hear now of the "management" of the self, of society, of truth. Of course, this presupposes some kind of ontology about how things are: that our world is such that selves can be packaged, that truth can be made, that credibility can be manufactured. Just what status this truth claim has is left unexamined.

Besides, there is also the troubling sense that Shapin's narrative is so historically compelling that it seems to refute its own relativist inclinations. What I mean is that Shapin seems to have told a truer story about how science actually got made than the standard rationalist-progressivist accounts in the sense that it accords better with "what really happened in the past." Perhaps that is why he concedes on the very first page that "much of this book can be read in the mode of old-fashioned historical realism."

Given his own construal of "truth," however, it is not easy to see just how to read this admission. It seems a little strange to allow history to be read in a realist fashion and yet to remain staunchly relativist about science. As Ernan McMullin nicely puts it: "how can ethnographers claim to give an objective account of science 'as it happens,' if they deny a similar ability to natural scientists in their pursuit of natural knowledge?"

Having said all this, however, there is surely much to commend in Shapin's analysis. Our epistemology has been, to use Richard Foley's term, far too "egocentric." It has been too much dominated by quadriplegic metaphors of "brains in vats" that fail to take with sufficient seriousness our "locatedness" in the world. Locating knowledge claims and intellectual standards in the context of our social settings is central to sorting out issues of responsibility, obligation, and so on. Socializing the human effort to understand the world thus has its benefits.

Besides, it is surely never wrong to ask of any claim, whether scientific, social, theological, or whatever: Does this serve someone's interests? Does somebody lose out? Who is controlling this discourse and for what political purposes? It strikes me that addressing these questions could throw as much light on debates about scientific creationism and biblical hermeneutics as on the nuclear industry and embryological experimentation. My instinct is that in many of these acrimonious feuds the cognitive claims are routinely made the vehicle for carrying a good deal of ideological freight.

Given the overweening claims of post-Enlightenment scientism, a serious chopping of science down to size, seeing it as a cultural and collective practice, might enable us to work with a more--what shall I say?-- "realistic" picture of an enterprise that has dominated the Western mind for nigh on three centuries. Besides, it should encourage us to consider just how often our own assertions mask other kinds of interest. Shapin's book is good medicine for those of us who too easily take our own rhetoric at face value. And given the story about human fallenness that the Christian tradition has to tell, it would surely be surprising if claims to scientific knowledge remained untouched by the ravages of the fall.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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