Random Variable

Yesterday, Professor David Colquhoun gave a stirring lecture on the corporatisation of academia, and the rise of non-science. It was great to see an esteemed professor call university performance metrics a load of “meaningless bollocks”.

He attacked, and rightly so, the growth of homeopathy degrees in the universities. For me, there is only one reason why you would need professional homoeopathists. That is to lull those turning to alternative medicine into hospitals and then get them on normal treatment. But, that’s a marketing exercise, and a poor and expensive one at that, which detracts from what should be the real work of universities.

There are doubtless some hard left sociologists who did see the task in hand of destroying science. But, let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water of constructivism. As Latour says in Reassembling the Social, when we think about “construction”, we should think about how like a building (which is real and exists) is constructed – “how is it constructed?”, “how well is it constructed?”, “what were the materials used to construct it?”, etc… That should be the task of sociology applied to the sciences. Also, the actors in a sociological study of the sciences should be able to read an account of their construction of facts, and learn how to better construct them.

Some sociologists and theorists need to stop trying to destroy the sciences with obtuse language, and deal with the practicalities of assembling our collective. However, the sciences must be willing to learn from the sociological studies, in order to improve themselves.

Here’s an extreme case in point – Evolution. When experts claimed that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the classroom, it is not to say that creationism should be put on an equal footing with science. It should be taught alongside evolution so children can learn how each of these theories are constructed. To use a building analogy, one is made of straw, and the other is made of bricks. Unfortunately, and perhaps this is what the “experts” are missing, without the teachers being taught about the construction of knowledge, we cannot expect for one minute for them to teach evolution and creationism properly in the classroom without making a botch of it. On a side note, this is precisely why universities should be running the academies, not businesses.

On the issue of climate change, I have said many times that on some levels, the climate scientists are doing the job of the denialists for them. This may be an odd statement, but bear with me. For decades, we have taught children, and adults have learnt about the scientific method. However, the sociology of scientific knowledge revealed that the sciences are a whole lot more complicated. Funding disputes were discovered. It was discovered that the sciences are heavily influenced by the political status quo – right now, it’s insipid managerialism. However, it does not necessarily follow that the sciences reality doesn’t really exist. It simply adds to the explanation.

However, the denialists had a look at the open process of climate scientists and saw pretty much the same thing as the sociologists. However, their trick is to assert that the mythological pure scientific method is the “one true science”. As a result, they can dismiss the climate sciences of falsehood, and claim their scepticism to be superior.

Had the science wars been averted and the natural and social sciences had a conversation, then perhaps collectively we wouldn’t find ourselves in an age of endarkenment. The sciences armed with the reflexivity of constructivism would have been able to shield itself from the creeping marketisation it finds itself in.

I look forward to the day when scientists and sociologists can meet without the words “microfascist” and “Sokal” being exchanged.