In What is science and what is science taken to be? I argued that even if there are essential characteristics of science that distinguish it from other types of knowledge the definition of science still very flexible in practice. In this post I’ll briefly outline how the boundaries of science are maintained.
Whilst researching popular science some years ago I realised that discussion of science in popular contexts played a far greater role in shifting the boundaries of science than anyone had previously noticed. We think the boundaries of science are fixed by science itself or nature, or something, but actually they change all the time and it is in popular contexts including news reports where the change generally happens. Sometimes the shift is quite dramatic. In nineteenth century popular science, physicists argued that they should be consulted on crime policy and even that it should be a physicists' job to punish offenders. A similar suggestion today would cause bewilderment but for various reasons it made a lot more sense in the 1880s. The main difference between then and now is the intervening 'boundary work' - the process of defending or shifting the boundaries of science.
The boundaries between science and politics, art, economics, religion, or anything else are all subject to on-going boundary work. There is generally more riding on the location of the boundaries of science than, for instance, the boundaries between art and politics or religion and economics because science is taken to be a proxy for the world itself - the objective, independent context in which human affairs take place. In fact science itself is very human - perhaps the most human activity - but that's a subject for another post.
In my research I looked at the nineteenth-century physicists I mentioned above as well as debates over BSE in the 1990s and several other examples of boundary work. Usually boundary work involves something in-between science and politics (or whatever else science happens to bump up against). The atom bomb is an example of something that sits between physics and the military for instance - it depends on both. In the 1950s it was less clear than it is today whether nuclear weapons 'belonged' to physics or to the military. Was the bomb 'just' a weapon (which means that questions about their use do not come within the remit of 'science' even if scientists are involved in understanding the implications of their use) or was it a new kind of weapon, which meant that physicists would have to extend their remit and involve themselves in matters military and political?
After all the boundary work has been done it turns out that the bomb is just a weapon. Although it depends on both physics and the military it 'belongs' to the military. Nuclear war is not a branch of physics and both sides are happy with the arrangement. It seems simple and uncontroversial, but that's because boundary work tends to naturalise and de-historicise any outcome. Boundary work is not (usually) a conspiracy but it does nevertheless tend to cover its own tracks by naturalising and de-historicising the boundaries that emerge.
The current boundaries of science look eternal and natural to us and we assume they reflect essential and independent qualities of science (the essential characteristics I mentioned in the previous post) but this is an illusion. The boundaries seem natural in the same way that ideas about masculinity and femininity seem eternal natural and appear to reflect a deep truth – and indeed are informed by an independent reality even if it’s difficult to determine how, precisely. Nevertheless, the categories 'masculine' and 'feminine' change all the time and so does ‘science’.
PhD thesis: The popularisation of physics: boundaries of authority and the visual culture of science (http://bit.ly/3ej2d3)
Boundary negotiations in popular culture: 'intermediate dependent entities' and the ideological context of science policy (http://bit.ly/t0HPA)