Ever since science became a going concern in the ancient world, people have asked: "What is this thing called science?" An early answer was given by Aristotle in his Organon, its focus being largely on the logic and methodology of scientific reasoning. Even if its substantive claims are now no longer central, it inaugurated a tradition of philosophical thought about science that has had wide acceptance by many scientists and philosophers; in their different ways recent philosophers such as Carnap, Popper, Lakatos and the Bayesians are all within this tradition. It involves belief in, and the application of, principles of logic, methodology and of rationality generally; on the whole such principles have been instrumental in leading scientists, if not others, to hold the scientific beliefs they do.
But these days this tradition has fallen out of fashion and has been replaced by the burgeoning fields of sociology of science, cultural studies of science, constructivism, postmodernism, and the like. Reasons for the change in fashion are several, one having to do with the political, economic and social uses of science, some of which, rather than enhance our lives, threaten our very existence. By blaming these ills on science itself, rather than, say, the uses to which it is put by the military, industry, commerce, governments and others, advocates of anti-science have placed the philosophical "ideologists" who talk of the rationality of science under a cloud of suspicion.
Another reason has to do with the status claimed by science. In countering claims about its rational basis, attempts have been made to de-legitimate and "demystify" science. Here the attack on the Aristotelian tradition is at its most profound. Science is alleged to be no more legitimate than many other non-scientific practices such as those embodied in "local knowledge", "ethnoscience" and what the postmodernist Lyotard calls "narratives". To claim otherwise is to indulge in philosophical metanarratives towards which Lyotard invites us to be incredulous, this being his definition of the postmodern. Nor, it is also alleged, can science claim to give us a picture of what the world is like, or a picture that is better than that given in non-sciences. It is not that science gives us, as many philosophers claim, either an ideal model of the world that approximates reality, or a picture that has only truthlikeness. Rather science is likened to a discourse that gives no picture at all since it fails to represent anything. Here critics of the Aristotelian tradition join hands with those who have strongly empiricist and anti-realist or irrealist inclinations about science.
So, what are the causes of our beliefs in matters scientific if the canons of rationality are to be abandoned as an unbelievable metanarrative, or if scientific beliefs do not represent? The Ancient Greek Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes, rather than Aristotle, gives us a clue. Xenophanes was a sceptic who denied that knowledge could be obtained by us humans; at best we merely have beliefs, the truth or falsity of which will remain largely unknown to us. Our beliefs are not a response to reality - but something else. Xenophanes illustrates his view in the case of belief about God, but it has wider application. He says of the causes of beliefs in the gods, or God: ‘Each group of men paint the shape of the gods in a fashion similar to themselves; the Ethiopians draw them dark and snub-nosed, the Thracians red-haired and blue-eyed’. And he has similar remarks about the gods that cows, horses and lions would draw if they had hands; they would, respectively, look just like cows, horses or lions.
One of the several points being made here is that if the gods are believed to be dark and snub-nosed, then the cause of this belief has nothing to do with the gods themselves; rather its cause has to do with some feature of ourselves. The gods themselves are not causally involved in our representations of them; rather it is something about ourselves that leads us to make the representations we do. It is as if the gods drop out of the picture as far as the causes of our beliefs is concerned; something completely non-god-like plays a causal role in the production of belief. In so far as this something else concerns social aspects of ourselves, then Xenophanes is the first sociologist of "knowledge" or, as we should more correctly say, the first sociologist of belief.
Subsequent sociologists have extended Xenophanes’ views on the causes of beliefs about God to scientific belief itself. A Xenophanes-like account of scientific belief has come to be adopted by a wide range of people such as Marx, Mannheim, contemporary sociologists of scientific belief, Foucault, Nietzsche, to mention a few. Surprisingly, even though they differ markedly over what they claim are the specific causes of belief, they all espouse the same general form of explanatory theory which is intended to replace explanations that appeal to scientific rationality. For many of them, scientific belief is not a rational response to the world; scientific "knowledge", as the title of David Bloor’s influential book has it, is nothing but social imagery.
Karl Marx was one of the first to suggest that the sciences, along with ideology, forms of consciousness, religious belief and the like, are also determined, shaped or caused by the prevailing forces and relations of production. Marx proposed a two-tiered view of all social factors in his doctrine of historical materialism. Forces and relations of production constituted the economic foundation of society while anything that has to do with ideas ("forms of consciousness") is to be placed in the superstructure, which depends, in some unspecified way, on the foundation. Marx bequeathed to the sociology of belief a problem that it has never been able to solve, viz., what exactly the relation of dependence is between beliefs or ideas and their alleged foundation.
In his programmatic pronouncements about historical materialism, Marx does not specifically mention science in the superstructure. But some of his other comments do indicate that he saw science this way, while yet other comments indicate that perhaps science might not fit into such a simple two-tiered model after all. Either the model is deficient, or science is simply a third item outside the two-tiered model. His followers from Engels onward were not so ambivalent; they see science as something "determined" by forces and relations of production.
Put this way, there is an evident confusion between the very content of science, such as its laws or theories, and other aspects of science such as the choices as to which lines of research to pursue, what programmes to fund, what applications of theory might be the most commercially promising, and so on. A case might be made for forces and relations of production playing some limited role concerning the latter; but they play no role in determining the former, the very content of science. It is here that those within the Aristotelian tradition of understanding science would claim that methodological principles play an important role (along with other factors) as a cause of belief. But this is denied by those who follow Marx and Engels in regarding such beliefs, even in the very content of science, as arising from the interplay between forces and relations of production.
As an illustration of not just the claims that Marxists might make, but also most sociologists of scientific "knowledge", consider Forman’s account of how German physicists in the Weimar period were caused to believe in physical acausality. In Xenophanes style, the causes have nothing to do with their purported objects, viz., indeterministic laws and happenings in the physical world. Rather it is the social milieu of the physicists of the Weimar period with its Spenglerian hostility to science and causality that is the cause of their beliefs. Forman’s story does not appeal to any forces and relations of production; so it does not fit Marx’s model. But as will be seen it supports other sociological stories about the cause of belief.
Such sociological explanations of scientific belief can be used to expose the "false consciousness" of the kind of explanations offered by philosophers in terms of (belief in) principles of rational methodology, and to debunk them. Physicists in Weimar Germany were deluded if they thought that methodological principles played a role in bringing about their scientific beliefs. Their beliefs are "social imagery’ caused by "socio-cultural conditions" (or by belief in such conditions). They are not caused by any (belief in) rational principles which accompany their theoretical and experimental endeavours. The "ideological" pretensions of rationalist philosophers, still working within the misleading framework bequeathed to us by the enlightenment, is now exposed, and debunked, by the rival explanations of the sociologists of "knowledge".
However one might well ask how the sociologists manage to establish their claims about the causes of belief if the do not accept some principles of rationality. What they need to show, but do not, is that that the physicists’ current beliefs in physics, and in methodology, are causally impotent in bringing about the Weimar physicists’ belief in acausality; what allegedly does all the work is their concurrent socio-cultural circumstance, or their beliefs about this. A necessary smoke screen is raised to obscure their failure to employ causal methodology at some point.
Karl Mannheim held that the two important progenitors of the sociology of "knowledge" were Marx and Nietzsche. We will turn to Nietzsche shortly. Mannheim himself proposed a sociology of "knowledge" in which, as he obscurely puts it, there is an "existential determination of knowledge". Mannheim does not get much further than talk of bare relations of thought or knowledge to "historical-social existence". But he does importantly suggest that there are some areas of thought or knowledge, such as mathematics and science, that are independent of historical-social existence and that evolve according to their own "inner dialectic" or "imminent laws". This liberality towards the independence of science is criticised by advocates of the Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific "knowledge". They claim that Mannheim lost his nerve in failing to extend the programme of the sociology of "knowledge" to science and mathematics.
The most recent incarnation of the basic ideas of Marx and Mannheim can be found in the Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific "knowledge". Its central causality tenet tells us that all scientific belief or "knowledge" is to be causally explained by social, historical or cultural conditions (or belief in such conditions, an important ambiguity in many formulations of the doctrine often passed over). These operate in conjunction with non-social causes which, because of their general occurrence across humanity, cannot be used to explain variation in belief; this is something only variable social factors can provide. Importantly, there is no mention of (belief in) any norms of method in the causality tenet as a possible cause of scientific belief. These are ruled out as explainers not only on the basis of the naturalism espoused by the Strong Programme, but also on the basis of the all-important symmetry tenet which says that the same kind of explanation must apply to all beliefs regardless of their truth or falsity, or their rationality or irrationality. Since on their view the only viable explanations are those which appeal to socio-historical causes, the symmetry tenet then rules out all explanation of scientific belief on the basis of normative methodological principles. Such normative explanations are said to be an unnatural intrusion upon the causal realm in which only naturalistic social (and naturalistic non-social) factors can be causally efficacious in bringing about belief. Such restrictions are imposed by the scientism of the Strong Programme in which, like any other science, only naturalistic causal factors and causal laws are to be admitted.
While there is some debate among sociologists of scientific "knowledge" as to the applicability of all the tenets of the Strong Programme, the symmetry tenet remains central. Explanations on the basis of rational principles of method are out. If such principles are admitted, then they are only accepted locally as what the community endorses; they have no further underlying authority or status. At this point advocates of the Strong Programme recruit Wittgenstein’s doctrine of rule following to their cause. In fact they adopt the communitarian interpretation of rule following in which what the community determines is the ultimate Court of Appeal and there is no further fact of the matter concerning the correctness of any rule of method. The crucial issue here is whether advocates of the Strong Programme deny that there is such a thing as scientific rationality expressed in methodological principles; or whether they think there are such principles but they are only locally accepted as such, and so are simply more grist to the mill of the causality tenet of their programme. If the latter, then advocates of the Strong Programme have undercut the authority of methodology (they believe it can be given no account) and instead of continuing the traditional discussion of scientific rationality they have, in effect, changed the subject under debate.
Much criticism of the Strong Programme centres around the many case studies its advocates have given of episodes in the history of science. One example already mentioned is that of the physicists in Weimar Germany and the allegedly social causes of their beliefs in acausality in physics. As always, the alleged causes of belief are all socio-cultural with no role for principles of method. But as already noted, principles of causal methodology have to be assumed in order to establish any causal link between scientists’ social circumstances and their scientific beliefs. So appeal to methods that are not merely locally accepted as such cannot be avoided even within the Strong Programme if any case studies in support of the central causality tenet are to be established. The general verdict of outsiders is that causal methodology has been badly applied and no convincing case has been established.
The power/knowledge doctrine of Michel Foucault bears a striking resemblance to the claims of Marx, Mannheim and advocates of the Strong Programme. Where he differs is in his claims about power and its alleged efficaciousness in bringing about "knowledge". In turn "knowledge" itself bringing about further power relations; and so on in a spiral of successive connections. While Foucault denies that "power is knowledge" he never makes fully clear what connection there might be between power and "knowledge"; but he always assumes that there must be one and never thinks that there might be none. He talks of power producing "knowledge", or of their being no "knowledge" without power, without further exploring the assumed connection. But as we have seen, lack of clarity about connection is endemic in social studies of belief.
Foucault has many perorations about the nature of power. Since he conceives it broadly as the effect that the actions of one person can have on the actions of another (either opening them up or closing them down but not completely), then power is simply everywhere, as Foucault notices. But this is more a defect in his implausibly broad notion of power than a new interesting discovery about its ubiquity. Nor does Foucault always talk about "knowledge" as being related to power. Power is also linked to a whole host of other items such as truth, discourses of truth, or simply discourses. Though many claim that Foucault restricted his claims about power to "knowledge’ in the human sciences, there is in fact evidence that Foucault also intended his doctrine to apply to other sciences such as chemistry and mathematics. Whatever the scope of Foucault’s doctrine, the boundaries of a plausible sociological investigation of aspects of science have been burst and extended in a quite unfounded way into the sociology of scientific "knowledge", that is, the very cognitive content of the sciences themselves. Finally Foucault does claim that his own genealogy of power is a better explainer of belief than, say, Marxism or Freudian analysis. But since he never discusses what he means by "better explanation" in a methodological context, or modifies the scope of his "power/knowledge" doctrine, this quite late appeal to methodology can have little force.
Finally turn very briefly to Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the "will to power" strongly influenced Foucault’s "power/knowledge" doctrine. Nietzsche’s doctrine shares the same form as all the other doctrines mentioned. But it is broader in that the "will to power" is both a metaphysical and psycho-social force at work in all of nature and life, including human life. Understood as a primitive psychological drive within people, it is causally efficacious in bringing about not only our beliefs in ordinary matters and in morality, but also our presuppositional philosophical beliefs in logic, in the identity that ordinary objects have and in the existence of ordinary everyday objects themselves. Nietzsche's doctrine is best illustrated in the case he makes about the origins of Christian moral values such as altruism, pity and the like. He famously claims that they are due to the resentment of those "slaves of morality" who advocated them while overthrowing the values of "master" morality. Here the will to power operates as a psychological drive of resentment in people causing them to bring about, and maintain, certain moral beliefs. In allegedly uncovering the sordid origins of Christian morality in resentment, Nietzsche hoped to debunk it.
Nietzsche is a master at proposing theories of the origins of our beliefs that rival those that are commonly accepted. In this way he hopes to unmask them, and then debunk them. The double unmasking/debunking move makes him the darling of postmodernism. This double move can be played out not only in the sphere of moral belief, but in any sphere of belief, such as our beliefs concerning logic, or truth, or our everyday framework of belief about objects. One of Nietzsche’s prime targets in this respect is Kant who, like a good modernist, attempted to give, as far as is possible, rational grounds for our ordinary beliefs and for morality. But one can be a critic of much of Kantian philosophy without accepting Nietzsche’s critique and its alternative worldview. What is important for our purposes is that the Nietzschean unmasking and debunking moves have wide application. Nietzsche extended it to a "genealogical" critique of truth and our pursuit of it; and it can be extended to the sciences and the methodological principles that many of a rational persuasion believe have been instrumental in the growth of science knowledge.
Those of a modernist persuasion hold that principles of rationality and of methodology can play an important role in bringing about beliefs in science and elsewhere, for some of us some of the time. But this is not so for the writers mentioned. Marxists regard all scientific belief as a response to the forces and relations of production. Mannheim holds that most belief is a response to the conditions of social existence in which we think and believe. Advocates of the Strong Programme postulate a strong causal role for social, historical and cultural factors in bringing about all belief. Foucault sees power is the prime mover of all belief in the sciences. And finally Nietzsche claims that the will to power operates even in the sphere of belief.
All these theorists have an in-house disagreement about what does the causal work, be it forces and relations of production, existential conditions, socio-historico-cultural factors, power or "will to power". But they all agree that, whatever it is, it cannot be anything rational. Rational explanations of belief are mystifications that need to be dragged out, unmasked and debunked. There are alternative explanations for why we believe what we do (though the grounds on why they may be better explanations remain obscure). In some cases they might be right - but not always. Each case needs to be determined on its merits. Moreover, one might well ask what kind of explanations do they offer. Often their model of explanation is one that a rationalist could also accept; what they resist are any explanations that appeal to rationality or methodology. But their reasons (assuming they believe that holding reasons can be efficacious) for the wide scope of their claims are quite lame.
What these theorists might also jibe at is that their own belief in the very doctrines they proclaim is itself merely an instance of the social, historical, cultural or psycho-causal theories of belief they advocate. More often than not they advance what they take to be profound truths; but at the same time they take themselves to be unmasking and debunking the failed modernist programme, part of which is the unmasking and debunking of the very notion of truth they employ. Their own views often fall victim to arguments similar to those Plato first advanced against the advocates of power, rhetoric and relativism about truth that he encountered in his own time from Protagoras to Callicles. The first time these considerations were played out they might have been tragedy (for Plato’s opponents); but to repeat them now is only farce.
Robert Nola's most recent book is Rescuing Reason: A Critique of Anti-Rationalist Views of Science and Knowledge (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, V. 230), published by Kluwer. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland.