Original Cao Cong Intellectuals 2024-06-16 07:56
Source: pixabay
Written by丨Cao Cong
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今年4月，美国哥伦比亚大学出版社出版了我的导师乔纳森·科尔（Jonathan R. Cole）教授的新书——《更光滑的鹅卵石：科学社会学论文集》（Smoother Pebbles：Essays in the Sociology of Science）。
Cole was a disciple of Professor Robert K. Merton, the founder of the sociology of science, and played a crucial role in the development and institutionalization of the sociology of science. From 1989 to 2003, he served as Provost and Dean of Faculties, or Chief Academic Officer at Columbia University, and as one of the most influential university administrators in the United States, he shaped the academic landscape of Columbia University and beyond. In recent years, he has become one of the most important voices defending the university.
In 1973, Merton published Sociology of Science: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration, the culmination of the sociology of science. Fifty-one years later, the publication of Smoother Pebbles was another important milestone in the development of the sociology of science.
The development and institutionalization of the sociology of science
In 1938, Merton published his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, which opened up a precedent for the use of sociological theories and methods to study science. For some time thereafter, he turned to the field of social stratification and social structure, and devoted himself to the construction of "medium-range theories" in sociology, and proposed such "unintended consequence of purposive social action", "focused interview", and "self-fulfilling". prophecy). In 1957, Merton announced his return to the study of the sociology of science in a presidential speech entitled "The Priority of Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science" at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
At Merton's initiative, the National Science Foundation began funding Columbia University to establish a research program on the sociology of science. The period from 1965 to 1990 was the heyday of the development of the sociology of science, and Merton trained students such as Cole and his older brothers Stephen Cole and Harriet Zuckerman, who went on to become the most important sociologists of science, forming the "Merton School" or rather the "Columbia School" of the sociology of science. Cole's Smoother Pebbles was published in memory of Merton and his brother Steve, who died in 2003 and 2018, respectively, and dedicated to his colleague, collaborator, and friend Zuckerman.
Before the mid-20th century, science was not considered a social institution and scientific discovery was seen as the work of individual geniuses. Merton and his students analyze how science operates as a social institution and explore its norms, values, and structures, among other things. At the same time, scientists who had resisted the study of science as a social system began to recognize the value of the work of Merton and others.
In addition to Merton's monograph Sociology of Science, his students' monographs include The Social Stratification of Science (1973) by the Cole Brothers, Zuckerman's The Scientific Elite: America's Nobel Laureates (1977), The Outer Circle: Women Members of the Scientific Community edited by Zuckerman, Cole and John T. Bruer (1991), Making Science: Between Nature and Society (1992) by Steve Cole, and Thomas K. Brown. Thomas F. Gieryn, The Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility at Stake (1999), among others. The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, published after Merton's death (with Elinor Barber, 2004), is a work on the sociology of science based on semantics.
当然，“默顿学派”或者“哥伦比亚学派”同样对科学知识社会学（sociology of scientific knowledge，SSK）和建构主义（constructivism）的兴起产生了巨大的影响。
Those "smoother pebbles"
The Smoother Pebble is a 680-page book that collects 34 essays, all but one of Cole's older brothers, all of which are his own essays, monograph chapters, and other essays. The book traces the process of the development and institutionalization of the sociology of science, which is both theoretical and empirical, and covers both core issues and a wide range of issues. For Stephen M. Stigler, a statistician at the University of Chicago, Cole's foreword to the book is both a recollection and an explanation of why the collection includes papers on different topics. In fact, this book is a summary of Cole's academic career.
The book is divided into four parts. The first section, "The Value and Rewards of Science," includes seven early papers by Cole and his collaborators, a memorial essay by Cole at the time of Merton's death, and three articles on American universities. These essays revolve around the core of the sociology of science, focusing on whether the scientific community adheres to certain core values, and assessing whether the scientific community is close to its ideal state by testing them.
The theme of the second part is "Free and Unfree: Women in Science". "Unfree" here means that the scientist's freedom of choice is limited by non-coercive means. Cole himself, especially with Zuckerman (three of the six articles collected in this section were collaborators), focuses on the opportunities available to women scientists in the first half of the 20th century and the opportunities they continue to face with limited choices, and explores the consequences of curbing women's aspiration to become scientists.
The third part, "Scientific Consensus: Judgment and Choice", consists of nine papers that focus on how members of the scientific community can form consensus through peer review. In the 1970s, the Cole brothers and collaborators participated in an evaluation of the National Science Foundation's peer review system, analyzing how the peer review system formed consensus within the scientific community from the perspective of structure, quality, and equity, thus influencing the allocation of federal government resources and the operation of the science award system. They found that there were interdisciplinary differences in consensus formation. This is the most extensive study of the peer review system to date, and it is still concerned and cited by relevant scholars today.
The fourth section, "Academic Freedom and the Quest for Freedom: Empowering Value," consists of two books published after Cole stepped down from academic leadership: America's Elite Schools: The Origins of Excellence, the Indispensable Role of the State, and the Reasons to Defend (2009) and Toward a Better University (2016). The former book is both a social history of American universities and a history of science in the United States, summarizing the remarkable achievements of American universities, mainly research-oriented universities, the important role they played in the rise of the United States, the reasons why they became prestigious universities, and how they are responsible for the challenges they face. In particular, Cole pointed out that "free exploration and academic freedom" are the most important of the 12 "core values" of American universities and the 13 "golden rules" that must be followed to become a famous school. The latter book is Cole's prescription for America's elite universities to maintain their global preeminence and increase their importance in creating knowledge and their social mission in the technological, human, cultural, and economic development of the 21st century. Interested readers can read these two monographs by Professor Cole.
Reflections on the "Columbia School"?
Loren R. Graham, a Soviet-Russian historian of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, commented that "Smoother Pebbles" not only gives readers an idea of Cole's great contribution to the sociology of science, but also allows readers to trace the evolution of his views over the past 50 years. Indeed, Cole not only revisits these papers in the context of the development of the "Columbia School," but also explores the broader social studies of science. He admits, for example, that the "Columbia School" may have focused too much on the scientific elite and less on discussing both the science and humanities.
From the mid-1970s onwards, the "Columbia School" was under the influence of sociology of scientific knowledge and social constructivism. Sociology of science treats science as a social institution, starting from the structure, norms, and values of the scientific community, and examines the behavior of scientists, as well as how scientific developments and technological breakthroughs affect the social organization and reward system of science. Influenced by Thomas Kuhn's book, Structure of Scientific Revolution, scholars from the sociology of scientific knowledge and social constructivism in Europe, mainly from Europe, have engaged in sociological analyses of scientific knowledge itself, aiming to open the "black box" of the knowledge-making process. They argue that scientific knowledge is socially constructed, and that the process by which scientists create knowledge is subject to social factors. These scholars are also highly critical of the positivist and empiricist approach to research promoted by the "Columbia School" and its followers. Merton and his students remained largely silent.
Circumstances change with the passage of time. Although Cole reiterates that there are important sociological variables that influence the choice of experiments, the techniques used, the evidence obtained, and the presentation of results, the "Columbia School" does not, or even avoids, a full and broad dialogue with scholars of the sociology of scientific knowledge and social constructivism.
In particular, Cole mentions that his brother Steve Cole's 1992 book The Science of Manufacturing was aimed directly at these European scholars. While accepting the idea that sociological variables play an important role in the process of scientific discovery, Steve argues that social constructivists fail to establish a direct causal relationship between these sociological factors and the concrete results of theoretical or experimental scientific work. Steve tried to strike a balance between the scientific consensus that both brothers were committed to research, and his own concept of the "core and periphery" of knowledge.
Specifically, Steve points out that "the core is made up of a small set of theories, analytical techniques, and facts given at a given time." …… The core is the starting point, from which scientists generate new knowledge. …… Another component of knowledge, the research frontier, includes all the work that is currently being carried out by all active researchers in a particular discipline. The research frontier is where all new knowledge is generated. Most observers of science agree that the key variable that distinguishes core knowledge from frontier knowledge is the presence or absence of consensus. According to Jonathan Cole, "It is the evaluation process that connects the core of knowledge to the frontiers of research." In fact, many of the Kohl brothers' essays collected in Smoother Pebbles point out that objective reality does not yield to individual beliefs, prejudices, or presuppositions.
From "Giant's Shoulders" to "Pebbles by the Sea"
We are all familiar with a quote from Isaac Newton: "If I can see farther, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants". In 1965, Merton published an epistolary monograph, On the Shoulders of Giants, which explored the origin and socio-cultural significance of the famous phrase, and coined the acronym OTSOG. In his view, Newton's statement (in fact, Newton was not the originator of this statement) implies the following implications: first, one's success owes to the legacy of public knowledge; Second, scientific achievements are essentially based on cooperation and accumulation.
We may all be familiar with another of Newton's famous quotes: "I do not know what I am in the eyes of the world; But to myself, it seemed to me that I was just a little boy playing by the sea, from time to time to please myself by looking for a smoother pebble or a more beautiful shell, without realizing that the sea of truth lay right in front of me. The preface to Professor Cole's Smoother Pebbles begins with this passage (again, Newton was not the originator of this passage)
。 From this seemingly fortuitous connection, we can see Merton's own influence on Cole – indeed, the "Columbia School" is in the same vein.
(We would like to thank Professor Li Junpeng, a member of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University and a professor at Central China Normal University, for providing information on Professor Cole's work.) ）