THE PROJECT OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE and COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY "What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate, and we've been arguing over that for a long time. That question is one of metaphysics and ontology, and gets into some very problematic areas. A related question, which is, "How do we know what we know?" has formed the basis of epistemology, a traditional area of exploration for philosophy, and recently, for the history of science. There are many epistemological theories, but it should be pointed out that necessarily the epistemological question enters into other philosophical problems such as ethics (how do we know what's right to do?), the mind-body problem (what is consciousness, the mind, the self?), and language (what is it that we do when we communicate?) Most epistemological theories have been versions of either naive realism, which suggests that there are "things" out there which we percieve, however imperfectly, or idealism, which suggests that there are no "things", only mystical monads, thoughts, ideas, or Platonic essences which cannot ever be known. (One form of idealism is phenomenalism, which focuses on the experiencing subject and posits that whether or not there are "objects," all that subject can know is their own sense-impressions; another recent form of realism has been so-called mediated realism , which suggests that we know the world through 'templates' or 'maps' derived from previous experience, and not directly through perception.) The first position is objectivist, and leads to the problem of how subjects differ from objects, if they do at all. The second position is subjectivist, and leads to perhaps some outrageous sollipsism or New Ageism ("we all create our own personal reality") Recently, however, some cognitive scientists and sociologists have considered the constructivist theory of knowledge as an epistemological theory. Constructivism suggests we do not discover the objects of nature, but instead create or invent them. Constructivism differs from other theories because it admits that there may be something "out there," but whatever it is we impose the structures of our mind upon it. And unlike idealism, constructivism suggests that the objects of the world are built through a social process (through agreement, power, language, persuasion, belief, culture, worldview, etc.) rather than within the sollipsistic mind of a single Cartesian ego. Sociologists working on the "social formation of knowledge" discover how observations (perceptions) change status from nonfact to fact. Basically, according to Foucault's discourse theory, all statements are statements within discourses; and discourses are edifices for judging the truth-claims of certain kinds of statements. Scientific discourse establishes certain principles as to what is or is not a true statement, within science, just as legal discourse establishes what is legally true or false; but such statements are not universal truths. The key factor in Foucaultian theory is that discourses evolve, often in a discontinuous manner. Statements about certain things may move between various discourses: just as attention to sexuality has moved from theological to scientific discourse. The boundaries between discourses can be fluid and often overlap; one discourse can often 'eat' another, as chemistry has been assumed within physics. Kuhn would say that when scientific discourses transform, this can be called a 'paradigm shift.' Sociologists of knowledge are interested in the social factors which result in such discourse changes. Many who follow Wittgenstein or Benjamin Lee Whorf follow a linguistic epistemology, which suggests that the world is a text, and that everything in the world is a function of the rules governing the way we talk about it. Foucault goes beyond this, and notes that knowledge and power are united in a social nexus: that power validates certain kinds of knowledge (and not others) by promoting certain narratives and silencing others; and that knowledge is a source of power because knowledge confers social position and techniques of social control. (i.e. behaviorism) As Foucault sees it, language is a sphere of power relations, because language both serves power functions and is transformed by power: but power is mediated in non-semiotic (significatory) ways. When sociologists of knowledge examine discourse shifts within science, they ask discomforting questions like: whose interests within society are served? (C.S. Pierce's pragmatist theory of knowledge: accepting a statement as true means one agrees with all the consequences that follow from accepting it.) How does science change discourse to influence its own acceptance, interests, professional status, etc? What ideological factors are involved? How do sociocultural factors shape the areas and models of inquiry? What social processes within the scientific community contribute to the validation or non-validation of observations, to the formation and confirmation of scientific theories, or to the avowal or disavowal of methodologies? What norms does the scientific enterprise present, and how much are those norms followed? What purely 'political' (i.e. institutional power) factors determine the outcomes of scientific controversies and debates? What 'externalist' factors (such as the control of the State over research funding, the need of the State to validate itself through 'scientism' or the appropriation of scientistic images and concepts, and social attitudes toward various areas of inquiry) impinge upon the 'internalist' model of science as essentially autonomous, free inquiry? Are certain scientific objects really "heuristic constructs" needed to further a research programme? Cognitive anthropologists working on these same problems have begun to examine the social nature of cognition itself: how perception, thinking, judgement, and attention are shaped in social praxis. They examine how the objects of cognition are shaped by the process of cognition: what methods of categorization are employed; what metaphysical or ontological presuppositions are made (as to the nature of space, time, and self); what cultural expectations exist; and what linguistic devices (metaphors, metonymy, etc.) are used for signification/description. They have examined many of the world's "ethnosciences" (i.e. the application of knowledge as found in pre-Industrial Revolution Asia, Africa, etc.) and discovered that they are equally valid, if not, superior to "Western science" in certain areas, despite the lack of assumptions found within the "scientific method." The whole question of what intelligence, rationality, or logic are appears to be a question of particulars, because they seem to be multiple . There may be many potential rationalities, many kinds of intelligence, many types of cognitive functioning: as Levi-Strauss points out, mythmaking is a very sophisticated, patterned way of organizing the world; and not necessarily more 'primitive' than describing it in other ways. Some scientists feel that cognitive anthropology/sociology of knowledge/ constructivism make science out to be somehow irrational, or arbitrary (having no relation to the world), or "purely politics." As one scientist put it, "You believe my theory because I have a bigger club." No sociologist of knowledge thinks that science makes statements that are unempirical or unfalsifiable: but the processes of validation or falsification are simply not quite as "naive" as naive realists might want. Some observations are paid more attention than others; every model eliminates certain 'noise' to look for a particular 'signal'; no theory exists in a sollipsistic vaccuum. The selection of data within the 'information stream' of science occurs in much the same ways as the "blooming, buzzing confusion" that impinges on the senses is handled within the brain: filtration. But one cannot be "naive" as to how power plays a role in that selection process. Science will act to defend its own perceived interests, as well as the interests of the people who participate in its enterprise, and cannot help but be shaped by what social strata those people occupy (vis-a-vis gender, 'race', ethnicity, class, educational status, prestige or reputation, etc.) Most scientists agree that they make models or approximations of reality with predictive value; they do not describe it. The proof is in the pudding, they say; their theories fly or fall based on evidence and testing by their peers. However, the nature of confirmation and verification is social, as one can see based on debates as to what constitutes a meaningful prediction derivable from theories such as sociobiology, etc. There are many examples from science where unconscious prejudices prevented fair evaluation of various kinds of evidence. Stephen Jay Gould points out that the 'craniometry' movement - concerned with measuring skulls of various races - may not have so much cheated with their data (i.e. lied about their results) as subtly biased it because of their unconscious preconceptions. In the modern world, knowledge exists in a nexus with power, discipline, and authority, and the importance of that nexus cannot be ignored. Knowledge validates certain types of power, and makes manifest others, especially realms of discourse known as the 'human sciences'. We should be careful in accepting the claims of "pure disinterested inquiry" and look closely at the social forces in the formation of knowledge claims. Around the nexus of positions identified as postmodernity - identified with figures such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard - are important conceptions of the relation between the act of knowledge and the act of representation. To such postmodern theorists of knowledge, the world-as-text can only be interpreted or re-presented through the existing symbolic order, whose hermeneutics are prefigured in culture. As they see it, scientific texts use the same devices as other texts figured as 'literary' - namely, rhetoric, metaphor, and metonymy. Scientific texts simply differ in that they assume their referents - the posited "subjects" of science - are 'real' rather than 'fictional.' Postmodernists have a particularly acute relativistic (or perhaps pessimistic) position regarding the notion of truth: by and large truth is a function of persuasion more than anything else, but the world-in-itself is unknowable, its structure radically open, as there is no "transcendental signified" to hold it together. The possibility of an Order of Things, of a Great Chain of Being, is denied: those structures are a function of the same ones we "impart" to texts in the act of literary interpretation. Just as criticism is an act of artistic creation, scientific investigation is also a creative act, bringing forth additional meanings which can never refute their predecessors totally. This is the problem of "paradigm incommensurability" referred to by Paul Feyerabend and T.S. Kuhn. One cannot say that the Copernican worldview "superseded" or "replaced" the Ptolemaic one, any more than one can say that the Einsteinian view "superseded" the Newtonian paradigm. Einstein's world-picture answers some unsolved questions that Newton's did not, but Newton's world-picture has hardly been abandoned by physics, and its assumptions (such as absolute time and classical determinism) are still in place, and are better for addressing most slow-moving phenomena. Newton's worldview and Einstein's are two different maps, but they are not the territory - they can each only convey different aspects of the terrain, and are designed for access for different destinations. Neither is 'better' or 'worse' than the other, merely addressed to different questions and problems. Chemistry is not an "improvement" over alchemy, but one might acknowledge that today people are more interested in the practical value of chemistry than in the results of alchemy. Scientists only abandon paradigms when the process of "saving the appearances" becomes too difficult, i.e. the effort to preserve the reigning paradigm is greater than chucking it out and starting all over again. As Korzybski always liked to say, is is a dirty word. But most standard scientific textbooks present knowledge in this way. M12838 "is" a black hole, not "an entity which we posit as a black hole because its characteristics suggest that it is and our understanding of the universe as conceived under our current research programme would be advanced if we accepted it as such." Science is not a "privileged" form of knowledge, somehow exempt from the dictum of social science that the ruling ideas of any age by and large are those that reflect the interests of the dominant social class. If anything, the fact that scientists try to claim a privilege for their knowledge-claims should make us want to examine the connections between the 'privilege' of their ideas and the support of the ruling Western power elite, namely the military-industrial-consumer complex. Philosophy, the handmaiden of theology and whore of science, should become the wife of true critical, skeptical, existential inquiry, which is sometimes, but not always, science. Steve Mizrach, aka Seeker1