Science, Technology & Human Values

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Acceptance: Science Studies and the Empirical Understanding of Science

Barry Barnes
Science Technology Human Values 1999 24: 376
DOI: 10.1177/016224399902400304

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Science,/ Acceptance
Barnes Technology, & Human Values

Acceptance: Science Studies and the

Empirical Understanding of Science

Barry Barnes
Exeter University

It has been an honor and a pleasure to be invited to address the Society for
the Social Studies of Science conference, but also a deeply interesting experi-
ence. I have watched this field of study grow from small beginnings. It is very
striking how many people now gather together from such diverse fields, how
many different themes they discuss, and in what detail. The meeting is
remarkable for its richness and diversity, which is, of course, precisely as it
should be. If we want to convey the character of contemporary science with
all its variety and heterogeneity, and its rapid rate of change at every level,
then we ourselves must bring a diversity of resources to its study. Scientists
today work in a great variety of institutional settings and carry a similarly var-
ied range of skills and bodies of knowledge. In every respect, science is now a
Protean phenomenon. Indeed, it may be an oversimplification to speak of sci-
ence even in this way. We need to remain open to the thought that science is
not one thing at all, however complex; that it is actually many different things,
all needing to be described and understood in different ways, and perhaps to
be evaluated very differently. This should lead to the reflection that scholarly
attitudes to science today, insofar as such things are products of experience at
all, must depend on experience of some very small, and almost by necessity
atypical, part of it.
Those of you who have read my own work will know that it involves an
explicitly pro-scientific bias, and perhaps that it is sometimes criticized as
scientistic. In the light of my biography, this is scarcely surprising. My own
experience of the natural sciences, through initial education, work in a faculty
of natural sciences, the teaching of natural science students, and indeed per-
sonal and informal relations, has been and continues to be almost entirely
favorable. I suspect that in some profound way this experience of particular

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a revised version of the 1998 J. D. Bernal Prize acceptance speech
given October 1998.

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 24 No. 3, Summer 1999 376-383
© 1999 Sage Publications Inc.

376

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 Barnes / Acceptance 377

forms and styles of science has conditioned my attitude to science in general.

To give just a small illustration, the teachers responsible for my scientific
education came from a generation active in the schools in Britain in the 1950s
and 1960s that is now recognized to have been (for various contingent rea-
sons) an exceptionally gifted one. They were people little inclined to rational-
ize what they did, who conveyed the value they set on science by their sheer
enjoyment of teaching and doing it. I do not recall their ever launching into
philosophical issues, or making use of terms like methodology or rationality.
I do recall the care they took, working in excellent school science laborato-
ries, to provide samples of the substances and materials they talked about,
and demonstrations of the physical processes they believed to be at work in
the world. I recall as well that this was a context wherein an unselfconscious
empiricism provided a perfectly adequate idiom in which to speak of these
things.
I am sure that this particular background makes itself felt when I reflect on
the achievements of our own field. Above all, as I see it, social studies of sci-
ence have advanced our understanding of science as practical activity by
looking in detail at particular cases and examples. In truth, what I should like
to say is that we have advanced the empirical understanding of science. I
should like to say that our work merits celebration as an extension of science
itself, and that its concern with how scientific research actually gets done (a
concern that we express in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways) is in
keeping with all that is best in a tradition of empirical enquiry. Much as I
should like to, however, I know that I cannot say these things—not if I wish to
be taken seriously. No doubt I should be told that we are now too philosophi-
cally sophisticated to contemplate justifying our work in the language of
naive empiricism, or even that it runs counter to the key findings of our field
to do so. But how otherwise should I speak of the impressive achievements of
the field if not in this way? How otherwise does one suggest that the account
of someone who has looked closely at an activity is more trustworthy than
that of someone who has not? On reflection, I can think of no better way of
doing so than in the language of empiricism; and this compels the further
thought that there must be something of value in that old-fashioned perspec-
tive after all.
We currently lack anything approaching an adequate account of how
knowledge is, or ought to be, evaluated, although we may be clear that collec-
tive action is involved and reference to an inheritance of shared understand-
ings. This remains the case whether it is scientific knowledge that is referred
to or our own supposed knowledge of science. In the absence of such an
account, we evaluate knowledge, and its carriers, by means of an assortment
of models and stereotypes. We should not despise these things. Inadequate

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378 Science, Technology, & Human Values

they may be, but they are nonetheless essential. And, indeed, the use of sev-
eral stereotypes, even opposed or contradictory stereotypes, may actually be
desirable given that our forms of knowledge are themselves diverse and per-
haps lacking in any essential similarities. Among these stereotypes is that of
simple empiricism. As such, it does not function as a theory of knowledge but
rather as something that structures credibility. It encourages us to place our
trust in immediate experience, in the particular and that which is close to the
particular, in what lies close to hand and immediately under the eye. Indeed,
in academic contexts, the empiricist stereotype has long provided a vehicle
for those who would valorize the particular and engender skepticism about
general laws and universal claims. We should not shrink from acknowledging
that much that is valuable in our field is valuable in just this way, or even from
using the rhetoric of empiricism to show how it is valuable. The empiricist
stereotype is an essential component in our toolkit of cultural resources, and
we should not connive in what seems to be its increasing neglect.
Another important component of this same toolkit is the stereotype of
rationalism, which encourages us to have faith in the power of reason and to
place our trust in just those kinds of universal laws and unrestricted theories
that empiricism regards with some skepticism. Like empiricism, rationalism
is wholly inadequate as an account of the evaluation of knowledge. But, again
like empiricism, in stereotypical form it is an essential resource in the order-
ing of trust. The two stereotypes, conflicting though they may be, both have
roles to play at this level. Unlike that of empiricism, however, the rationalist
stereotype is in no danger of neglect. Indeed, a striking instance of the resil-
ience of the rationalist stereotype is provided by some of the shifts that have
occurred over the last few decades in our own field of study. It is now gener-
ally understood that the standard accounts of science and scientific progress
with which the postwar period began have become untenable, and that there
was something very seriously amiss with the attempts to combine rationalism
and empiricism that were characteristic of the philosophy of science of the
period. But the way that all this is now routinely referred to is fascinating. We
were obliged to move, so it is said, to a postempiricist philosophy of science.
And, indeed, it is commonplace now to talk of the existence of such a postem-
piricist perspective but never, that I can recall, a postrationalist one. Yet, the
technical difficulties identified in the previous orthodoxy were by no means
confined to just the one of its two components, and indeed in my recollection
they were (and remain) predominantly associated with the rationalist element
of the attempted synthesis.
There seems to have been a movement in our understanding of science at
the stereotypical level away from empiricism in the direction of rationalism
and rationalist styles of thought. To be more precise, there seems to have been

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 Barnes / Acceptance 379

a movement toward that version of rationalism, the Enlightenment version

perhaps we should call it, according to which reason and science stand
together scarcely distinguishable at the cutting edge of human progress. In
the academic context, both enthusiasts and critics of the Enlightenment
appear to have contributed to the change. Thus, rationalist popularizations of
science now stress the immense reach across space and time of the knowl-
edge of fields ranging from theoretical physics and astronomy to evolution-
ary biology, and take the unrestricted applicability of that knowledge entirely
for granted. Apologists for science in the academic world increasingly favor a
rationalist idiom, both when persuading colleagues in other fields of the mer-
its of their views and when going to war with them. But just as important,
since there are probably even more attacks on this position than defenses of it,
critics of the rationalist view attack it with rationalist arguments, and thereby
reinforce at the fundamental level of thought style what they appear to reject
at the level of doctrine. As a result, there are now parts of our culture in which
the empiricist stereotype is almost completely passed over or no longer
known. At the everyday level, this means that many interesting perspectives
on science are not being heard and certainly not being understood. And at the
level of academic discourse, there is a proliferation of alternative ways of val-
orizing the particular and engendering skepticism about laws and universal
claims. Certainly, this is one way of understanding the rise of postmodern and
radical deconstructivist accounts of knowledge, although perhaps not the
best possible way. Considered as functional equivalents, it has to be said that
they function no better than the old empiricist stereotype while lacking its
immediate intelligibility.
None of this is more than speculation, of course, but before reflecting on it
let me add a final embellishment. Important stereotypes, both in academic
and everyday contexts, are always associated with myths and stories that
reinforce them. The rationalist stereotype, of course, is associated with the
myth of the Enlightenment. The dominance of rationalism implies the domi-
nance of that myth, the myth in which science and reason are allies, in the
thought of both apologists and critics of science. There are, of course, many
other ways of telling the story. Consider, for example, how rationalism and
empiricism were long treated in pre-Enlightenment philosophy as opposed
and wholly irreconcilable positions, and imagine that this is what they con-
tinue to be to the present. This suggests a story of the natural sciences as cul-
tural and epistemological developments best understood in terms of an
empiricist stereotype, wherein scientific practice stands in opposition to
Enlightenment thought. A story of this kind could point to the impressive
proliferation of scientific and technological activity in eighteenth-century
England and note the striking lack of an English Enlightenment at this time.

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380 Science, Technology, & Human Values

And it could make much of the familiar link between Enlightenment thought
and the centralized administrations of mainland Europe with their growing
bureaucracies and autocratic rulers. Such a story could serve not merely to
contrast science with Enlightenment rationalism but to identify the two as
enemies. It would allow the traditional conflict of empiricism and rationalism
to be recognized still in what the late Martin Hollis was happy to regard as a
continuing battle between Science and Reason. Hollis was a wholly uncom-
promising rationalist philosopher, but his clarity of vision was exemplary
here, and it is useful and interesting to look at things just as he did. From the
other side of the battle, as it were, it reminds us that a string of Enlightenment
philosophers, from Friedrich Hegel to Jurgen Habermas, however valuable
their work is reckoned in other ways, were among the most profoundly unsci-
entific of the thinkers of their respective times.
This off-the-cuff story of science and the Enlightenment, it goes without
saying, is no more satisfactory a summary of history than the standard ration-
alist story. The point is not to recommend the one story as preferable to the
other but to insist that it is better to be familiar with both rather than with
either one of them, just as it is better to be familiar with both empiricist and
rationalist stereotypes of science. Indeed, I ought to reiterate here that the
unjust neglect and the low repute of the empiricist stereotype are the objects
of criticism, not the good health of the rationalist alternative.
It could easily be, of course, that the complaint is unjustified or else mer-
ited only in a very few specialized contexts. I can offer it only as speculation,
and I have no systematic evidence with which to support it. And, indeed, I
suspect that those deeply involved with current developments in the natural
sciences may find the complaint odd and counterintuitive. The actual practice
of scientific research has after all become more closely bound up with the
narrow technical needs of the economy and is more than ever a matter of
“detail work.” Surely, the truth is that a stereotype of the scientist as technical
expert is now emerging, and that the general understanding of science is now
dominated by the image of technosciences like I.T. and biotechnology. The
response to this must be to say that in a sense what is claimed is true, but that
no new stereotype has been disseminated, of either the activities characteris-
tic of these fields or how knowledge is evaluated within them. At this level,
the rationalist stereotype continues to be deployed in accounts of what makes
the new forms of knowledge trustworthy. And it continues here as well in the
guise of the perpetually discredited and perpetually reiterated myth of tech-
nology as applied science. Indeed, so influential does this last version of the
stereotype remain that seasoned veterans in our own field still inadvertently
lapse into it in unguarded moments. It is arguable that current modes of under-

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 Barnes / Acceptance 381

standing new fields like biotechnology actually stand as further testimony to

a turn away from empiricist stereotypes and thought styles.
Perhaps changes at the level of specific practices are not what matter most
where the ups and downs of images and stereotypes are concerned. It could
be that these depend more on the position and standing of the relevant institu-
tions. There seems to be a historical tendency for the most powerful and
authoritative institutionalized sources of knowledge to be associated espe-
cially closely with reason and rendered in terms of rationalist stereotypes.
Science, of course, has presented itself in different ways at different times;
indeed, as rendered by the scientific naturalist movement in England in the
nineteenth century, it was not very far from being empiricism incarnate, as
Frank Turner has described at length. But these scientists were seeking to
undermine the cognitive authority of religious institutions and their tradition-
ally accepted position as sources of knowledge. And invocations of the priority
of reason over experience figured among the devices of their enemies. Now
that science possesses practically undisputed cognitive authority itself, and is
itself secure as our accepted repository of technical knowledge, this kind of
radical empiricist self-justification is much less in evidence, if indeed it is in
evidence at all.
In the realm of stereotypes, power and reason do have a notable affinity,
and the superiority of the rational over the empirical is a familiar theme
whenever bodies of knowledge are ranked in hierarchies and assigned their
due extent of honor. Historical examples of this are easy to find in every
period since the time of the scientific revolution. And language itself testifies
to the same thing: the term empiric, of course, long denoted quackery and
implied contempt. Nor is it difficult to find current examples of the same kind
of evaluation. Ian Hacking has evoked a whole genre of them with marvelous
economy in a recent remark on the popularity of the “me rational, you Jane”
form of argument. For a general answer to why there is this affinity, we
should perhaps look to anthropologists. But, intuitively, the link is scarcely
surprising in societies like our own, wherein order and control involve ration-
alized legal and bureaucratic hierarchies, and neither is its extension to
encompass science, as the knowledge trusted and relied on by these hierar-
chies. There is also the simple point, in addition to any symbolic affinities,
that a rationalist stereotype permits a greater assertiveness on behalf of the
scope and authority of existing bodies of knowledge, and the extent of their
trustworthiness, than empiricism does. Indeed, in technical debates, rational-
ists frequently point out that empiricism implies relativism, which is of
course perfectly correct, and points to certain limitations of an empiricist
stereotype in this regard.

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382 Science, Technology, & Human Values

Let me return now to my complaint. Whatever the reasons may be, in our
orientations to the natural sciences, the empiricist stereotype has suffered
unjust neglect. And to the extent that this has been so, it has handicapped that
distant understanding and evaluation of science, via stereotypes, that in our
differentiated societies is of very great importance as a correlate of essential
relations of trust. The implied message that we should take this stereotype
more seriously, however, is made with an eye to the future more than the past,
and especially to the future of our own field with its particular concern to
study science as an ongoing activity. I have been speaking of stereotypes of
trustworthiness, and whether or not we would have it so, the matter of the
trustworthiness of knowledge looms darkly over everything that we do. It
particularly confronts that important part of our field that deals with the gen-
eral credibility of scientific knowledge and the role of professional scientific
expertise in the overall context of an increasingly specialized society. Work
of this kind includes studies of controversy between experts, the general
reception of their claims, and clashes between expert and lay knowledge. All
kinds of recent historical developments—the expansionist and colonialist
tendencies of many expert professions, the addiction of many governments to
an ever more intimate regulation of everyday life, the rise of environmental-
ism, the growth of social movements and pressure groups opposed to various
developments in advanced technology, the increasing use of technical experts
by those groups and movements (in a nutshell, the entire secular pattern of
social change)—is giving this part of our field an ever-increasing importance
and stimulating more and more work within it.
There is an especially noticeable growth of immensely impressive studies
of the tension between expert and lay knowledge, of what might perhaps even
be described as clashes of professional and lay expertise—where lay exper-
tise derives from immediate and extensive involvement with the states of
affairs wherein problems are arising and professional expertise derives from
formal training in a discipline and its characteristic skills. Recent contribu-
tions of this kind fulfill their primary responsibilities as social studies of sci-
ence wonderfully well, with rich descriptions of how trust, or skepticism, was
actually engendered, or how a battle between lay and professional expertise
actually unfolded. But readers of such studies invariably evaluate what goes
on within them, as indeed do authors themselves. There is a differentiating
literature here that celebrates the trustworthiness and insight of lay technical
knowledge; and much that is reminiscent of the characteristic rhetoric of
empiricism is now to be found in sociological work that valorizes lay knowl-
edge and lay understanding and urges those professional experts confronted
with it to accord it due respect.

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 Barnes / Acceptance 383

Indeed, there is no reason for avoiding a straightforward and explicit

empiricism here. To echo a question I asked earlier, How otherwise should
one recommend the virtues of local knowledge and hands-on experience?
Just as we trust studies of expertise partly on the basis of evidence of their
close engagement with what they describe, so may we trust the expertise
itself partly on that same basis. We share enough in the way of convention,
custom, and background understanding to make this way of describing our
orientation to expertise entirely appropriate. There is, however, more to be
drawn from these studies. Their accounts of lay knowledge and expertise are
struggling to link credibility to presence and proximity, to knowing through
doing, to modest and cautious induction, to immediacy of analogy. And they
wonder how claims to credibility based on these things may be weighed
against, or reconciled with, the very differently based claims of trained
scientific experts. Only in fortunate, specific circumstances will the answer
to this question be for all practical purposes an obvious one. In its general
form, it is the question, and to address it thus it is necessary to press our
thinking beyond the level of stereotypes. The empiricist tradition of thought,
however, itself extends well beyond the level of stereotypes, and at this level
too it remains an unjustly neglected resource in several areas of our
postempiricist academic culture.

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