Approaching Kuhn’s Gap

Review of Rehg, W. (2009). Cogent science in context: The science wars, argumentation theory, and Habermas. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Introduction

The beginning of the so-called “science wars” in the 1960s is the academic consequence of a complex set of causes amongst which the fall of logical empiricism and the birth of quantum physics occupy a significant place.  The central problem is easy to formulate but surprisingly difficult to solve: how can scientific knowledge be at the same time rational but not formally logical[1]? This trend challenged defenders of Science (capital S!) to develop conceptions of scientific rationality that are more realistic than the logical ones developed by, e.g. Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel in the 1920s and 1930s. This “gap” is sometimes referred to as Kuhn’s Gap since for the first time it became plainly visible (and urgent) in Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 Structure of scientific revolutions (Kuhn, 1996). William Rehg’s book reviews suggestions that have been given to this fill this gap and ultimately attempts one of his own, centred on the notion of cogency in a critical contextualist framework. For William, the answer is in a re-conceptualization of the notion of cogency as a boundary concept which integrates both a normative-dialectical idea of argument strength and a psychological-rhetorical one of convincingness.

But is argumentation theory the right tool? Of course scientists argue and perhaps they do so very often, but is this an essential aspect of what they are engaged in? Isn’t science also something else aside from discourse? The criticism embodied in these questions is in fact a warning against over-emphasis on the linguistic aspects of scientific activity; it is a warning that the context of discovery might be disregarded in favour of the context of justification. This criticism is responded at the very beginning of the study in two ways. First he points to the rather feeble basis of the discovery/justification distinction a remark which is supported by studies of actual experimental practice (Mayo, 1996).Second, he assures us that an argumentation theoretical approach takes into consideration the “material” context as well as the “discursive” one for (1) trying to improve one’s experimental method is a way of producing better arguments by using it and (2) experimental practices are heavily oriented towards the production of public knowledge (p. 19).

The rhetorical turn

After Kuhn, epistemologists and sociologists came closer to one another in what Rehg describes as a rhetorical turn. This turn comprises many approaches and it is thus difficult to condense in a few lines. However, according to Rehg, all of them centre on a conception of science as socially-situated argumentation. On the classical threefold radar comprising logic, dialectic and rhetoric – a distinction Rehg ends up challenging later on in the book – some approaches will be situated closer to the prescriptive end (Lakatos, 1976), some closer to the descriptive one (Shapin & Schaffer, 2011). Rehg investigates closely three of the more recent of these approaches, and starts by ordering according to their position on the “prescriptivism” scale: the most dialectically oriented (Pera, 1994), the less dialectically and more rhetorically oriented (Prelli, 1989), and the fully socio-rhetorically oriented (Latour, 1987).  

In Pera’s Discourses of Science (1994), the task of assessing scientific arguments is assigned to dialectics, which he dubs “the logic of science”. The dialectic of science is a dialogue between three players: the scientist, Nature and the scientific community. This is an implicit attack to the Popperian (Popper, 1965) idea that rational science is governed by a model of decision between theories, namely, the falsificationist model. In fact, Pera claims, the choice is arrived at in this context of dialectical scrutiny in which the scientific community has a central role. For Pera the challenge is to make this move without falling into the relativism of “countermethodologists” such as Rorty and Fayerabend. Thus, Pera introduces the notion of dialectical factors which taken together define a scientific tradition. Following Rescher’s dialectics (Rescher, 1977), Pera divides these factors into substantive and procedural. It is “the scientific community itself, as carrying on that tradition” that “constitutes the normative arbiter of cogent argumentation” (p. 63). In other words, it is not this or that scientific community, but the Scientific Community that formulates the critical standards. Whether the workings of such a scientific community can be identified into actual instances of argumentation is an open question to which Rehg’s summary does not answer.

Prelli’s Rhetoric of science (1989) moves away from these questions by starting from an Aristotelian approach combined with stasis theory. To Prelli, every field and subfield of argumentation has its “disciplinary matrix” which comprises a set of rhetorical aims, a set of topoi and a set of stases. In scientific discourse, the four major stases are: the evidential stasis (to prove that such-and-such exists), the interpretive stasis (to show that you interpret phenomena correctly), the evaluative stasis (to support the significance of your claims) and the methodological stasis (to show that you apply the correct methods). “The basic idea,” Rehg notes, “is that scientist consider an argument reasonable only if they can see how it responds to one or more of the four [of these] exigencies” (p. 67). It is interesting to observe that these four stases can be used as institutional – or, to us Prelli’s terminology rhetorical – aims which then govern the procces of critical testing instances of argumentation in actual activity types.

By far the most rhetorically oriented is the next perspective, Latour’s approach to scientific activity (Latour, 1987). This approach goes the farthest towards a sociologically informed rhetoric of science by embedding it in Latour and Collen’s Actor Network Theory. Noteworthy is the general aim of scientific practice as it is seen by Latour: to transform statements with a qualifying modality (e.g. There is evidence for x being y) into ones without qualifying modality (e.g. x is y)! I think the applicability of such a general aim depends on what one means by “to transform” as it is used above, but the claim seems original. For Latour, everything concerning scientific activity is spelled in quasi-military terms. For instance, one strategy is described by Latour as “to overwhelm and isolate the sceptical reader by demonstrating the sheer number of ‘allies’ and resources the author can enrol in support of the article” (Rehg, 2009, p. 72). In a different place, Latour explains that scientists are driven by very concrete network purposes, spelled out (maybe a bit crudely) as: “weaken your enemies, paralyze those you cannot weaken” (p. 73). From this viewpoint, it is only natural that force and reasonableness intertwine to the point that they become indistinguishable; “right” and “might”, reason and force, at least function simultaneously if they are not, in extremis, the same process.

To each of these three perspectives, Rehg responds the “classical” kind of criticism: to the more dialectical ones that they are too dialectical, to the more rhetorical ones that they are too rhetorical. In a chapter following the presentation of these three perspectives, Rehg turns to Habermas’ theory of communicative action {{26 Habermas, J. 1985;27 Habermas, J. 1987/a;}}, hoping that this theory would finally be the sort of integration he was looking for. However, after a long, detailed, investigation, Rehg concludes that it is in fact not the case. I will thus not follow this path here. Habermas’ idealized dialectics prove ultimately too abstract to be applicable to actual cases where argumentation needs to be reconstructed from specific contexts.

The critical contextualist approach

Rehg’s working hypothesis is that the contextualist approaches such as those of ethnomethodologists “already contain the key to the solution” (p. 214). There is no contradiction involved in combining critical standards with context-dependent theories provided that one starts from the latter and not from the former. It is in this sense that Rehg joins the contextualist camp which has criticized the doubtful universality of some of Habermas’ concepts (e.g. validity claims, consensus-oriented communication). ESW (ethnomethodology of scientific work) is compatible with critique, Rehg says, but it doesn’t start from it analytically. In many places, the exact meaning of “not to start from” remains ambiguous. The claim that is repeated many times is that the standards – whatever these may be – are “glosses” which acquire meaning and intelligibility only in context. But this idea implies precisely that one knows what the standards are to begin with (one has even formulated them), and now his first step when evaluating is to look for the “situated” version of those standards. Thus, it cannot be in this sense that Rehg intends the primacy of context.

Rehg resolves the question of relativism by transforming the over-criticized in the Toulminian field (Toulmin, 1958) into the more reliable cross-field. The broader scientific community, the funding agencies, technologists, lay persons – the critical reactions of all these people constitute the rational basis for scientific argumentation. As Rehg puts it, “a truth claim assumes not so much the counterfactual assent of an ideal audience, but rather the potential relevance and contextualizability of that claim in an indefinite range of scientific contexts” (p. 225). The standards themselves are like topoi which become more particular when applied and more cogent when convincing this indefinite range of audiences. Since all this is rather abstract – and, in my opinion, not significantly different than what has been presented in the previous chapters of the book – Rehg offers a case study in which he applies the critical contextualist framework.

The three dimensions of argument cogency

Rehg takes a as his case-study a document published in 1985 by the American NAS (National Academy of Sciences) entitled Diet, Nutrition & Cancer. What he proposes is to replace the three-fold distinction between product-procedure and process with a three-fold division of contexts. I am not sure I completely understood what the three “layers” are supposed to be. The general labels he uses to refer to them are content, transaction and public[2]. At each such level there are specific “merits” and the analyst who intends to understand and evaluate the argumentation going on in a specific context, needs to specify, in advance, which of the three merits he is after: content merits, transaction merits and public merits. Cogency is then a contextualized unification of these three merits, according to the weight given to them in particular situation (for “that, too, is a context-sensitive matter”, p. 266). In a “neutral” situation, where all three merits are equally important, a cogent argument justifies his conclusion well, via a reasonable discussion procedure that “wins broad acceptance across social space” (p. 251). This, according to Rehg, is hot Kuhn’s gap can be filled.

Unfortunately, the study is rather unconvincing. The conclusions are vague, restrained and scattered throughout the analysis. To give an example of the kind of indefinite conclusions Rehg arrives at, consider the following paragraph:

In a word, the participants themselves, both lay readers and scientists, defenders and opponents, already acted as critics who assessed arguments in light of the three sort of merits. On balance DNC seems to have held up reasonably well to such critique. Insofar as one can judge from the CAST report, scientific scrutiny uncovered no single devastating flaw in content or transactional merits (again, the dietary recommendations aside). […] Thus, the committee seems to have done a passably good job with the content and transactional merits of their argument. And the relatively benign reception of DNC overall speaks in favour of public merits. (p. 268).

This evaluation seems pre-theoretical rather than theory-driven. Also, strangely enough, at the very end (p. 278), he makes explicit some methodological principles which the reader would have liked to see before the case study.

Conclusion

The book offers a very instructive overview of the kind of debate going on nowadays in science studies. The solution it proposes, however, are not equally instructive. Or maybe they are, but the examples Rehg has used to illustrate their theoretical prowess have not achieved their purpose.

Bibliography

Habermas, J. (1985). The theory of communicative action: Reason and the rationalization of society (T. McCarthy Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action: Lifeworld and system, a critique of functionalist reason (T. McCarthy Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press.

Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakatos, I. (1976). Proofs and refutations: The logic of mathematical discovery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Mayo, D. G. (1996). Error and the growth of experimental knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pera, M. (1994). The discourses of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Popper, K. R. (1965). The logic of scientific discovery. London: Hutchinson.

Prelli, L. J. (1989). A rhetoric of science: Inventing scientific discourse. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Rehg, W. (2009). Cogent science in context: The science wars, argumentation theory, and Habermas. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Rescher, N. (1977). Dialectics: A controversy-oriented approach to the theory of knowledge. New York: State University of New York Press.

Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (2011). Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (2nd ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[1] Or, more explicitly, “If argumentative practices in ordinary sciences depend so heavily on paradigmatic presuppositions for their intelligibility and cogency, then arguments in which those very presuppositions are at issue seem to lose their rational footing” (Rehg, 2009)

[2] Throughout this chapter, Rehg constantly equivocates between the noun public and the adjective public. In the distinction, it is the noun he seems to refer to – since the other two are also nouns – but everywhere in the analysis where he mentions merits, he uses the adjective. Needless to add, a public something and the public are not the same thing.

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