the elusive sociological imagination and the pursuit of the hard ...

1. The Elusive Sociological Imagination and the Pursuit of the Hard CaseSal Restivo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute & Nottingham University UK Fireside Chat: 1976 and all that� Society for Social Studies of Science annual meeting November 1st, 2006 Vancouver, British Columbia CA

3. Emile Durkheim Anti-science and relativism are not necessary ingredients of social constructionism. Durkheim (1961: 31-32) himself already remarked that �From the fact that the ideas of time, space, class, cause or personality are constructed out of social elements, it is not necessary to conclude that they are devoid of all objective value.�

4. Karl Marx Marx (1958: 104): Even when I carry out scientific work, etc., an activity which I can seldom conduct in direct association with other men � I perform a social, because human, act. It is not only the material of my activity � like the language itself which the thinker uses � which is given to me as a social product. My own existence is a social activity. I do not wish to start a war over what Durkheim and Marx meant, really meant, or could have meant. But I do want to link their sociological program � which can be described as grounded in the rejection of transcendence, immanence, and psychologism � to the Woolgar problem of provocation in science studies. I am not going to deny Woogar�s claim that the very idea of the �hard case� is indexical, situational, contextual. All this claim does is force me to locate myself when I discuss my notion of the hard case. And I locate myself here � with Durkheim, and Marx, and Mary Douglas, and Bloor, and Mao. Mao? Yes, because the long-term solution to the Woolgar problem is science studies in permanent revolution. Science Studies can still be provocative and still be dangerous. It is not difficult to see that the �hard cases� tend to converge on the general hard case of the transcendental. And it is here that the sociology and anthropology of God meets social studies of scientific knowledge, and especially pure mathematics and logic. I don�t think it would be difficult to defend the idea that science studies has something to say about the very idea of the transcendental. I want to make the stronger claim that it has something to say about God. Just as there can be no criticism without the criticism of religion, there can be no sociology of knowledge, no sociology of science without the sociology of religion. Then there can be no social studies of mathematics, no social studies of logic, no social studies der Reine Vernunft without the social studies of God. And here the provocation and danger comes from the proof � at the very least by consiliency of evidences or inductions, or by ensemble of probabilities � that God is in all respects a human creation, a social construction. I have expressed this as the fallacy of transcendence or of the transcendental.What have we learned in 30 years? Well, we weren�t the first generation to understand that science and technology were social relations, social institutions, social constructions, social networks. Even if Mannheim and Merton and Kuhn didn�t get SSK, we would have had no trouble discussing this idea with Marx and Durkheim and Neitzsche, and C. Wright Mills. What we did learn, however, was how to demonstrate this insight empirically and how to do it across disciplinary boundaries with convergent results. We also learned that scientists are very protective of the boundaries of science and hesitant to admit social scientists to their ranks and strongly jurisdictional when it comes to studying, analyzing, and theorizing science. We thought we�d learned too what it meant to say science is socially constructed. But early on some of us made the mistake of thinking we�d mastered the very idea of �the social� and went on from there. This has produced many misunderstandings within science studies, misunderstandings that have been exploited by our critics. I don�t have much of a feeling for irony (which makes me an easy target for the ironists, and they might now get ready to strike while the irony is hot), nor for creatively exploiting metaphors. The result is that I tend to be boringly realistic. It turns out, however, that being boringly realistic is the most important thing you can be when it comes to things like crossing the street. And it is at street level that all of society and culture begins. And it is also at street level that science begins and ends. Social constructionism in science and technology studies is neither relativist, reductionist, nor naively deterministic. The focus on humans as quintessentially social does not eliminate the idea of humans as biological or thermodynamic systems. Stressing the social does not erase the various physical and natural substrata on which the social interactively nests. Genes and neurons are clearly part of the larger picture. It may be that the difficulties these ideas pose for us are rooted in a wrongheaded system of categories and classifications that separate mind, body, brain, and social order. Post-postmodern sociology may have to theorize genes and neurons, bodies, brains, and social orders at the general level of information systems. Social constructionism in science and technology studies is neither relativist, reductionist, nor naively deterministic. The focus on humans as quintessentially social does not eliminate the idea of humans as biological or thermodynamic systems. Stressing the social does not erase the various physical and natural substrata on which the social interactively nests. Genes and neurons are clearly part of the larger picture. It may be that the difficulties these ideas pose for us are rooted in a wrongheaded system of categories and classifications that separate mind, body, brain, and social order. Post-postmodern sociology may have to theorize genes and neurons, bodies, brains, and social orders at the general level of information systems. We already see movements in the direction of conceiving new ways of categorizing and classifying these traditional units of our experiences and experiments in the writings of neuroscientists (e.g., Brothers, 1997; Rose, 2005), psychologists (e.g., Donald, 2001), biologists (Fausto-Sterling 2005), and sociologists (e.g., Restivo, 2005a: Social constructionism in science and technology studies is the social sciences most promising route into this interdisciplinary convergence. The implication here is that it is now time to integrate the sociology of mind, which has a long and distinguished history in the discipline from Durkheim, Marx, and Mead to C. Wright Mills, Randall Collins, and Sal Restivo with a sociology of brain already emergent in Geertz, 1973: 74-5) and made more explicit in Geertz, 2000: 203-17; and see Crane, 2001 for a model of how to move back and forth between sociocultural and biological frameworks to insightfully reveal how the brain works. Conclusion. �There is no there, there:� A Manifesto in Defiance of The Cult of der Reine Vernunft[1] We must wonder about the resistance of Platonic and transcendental thinking to the lessons of modernity and postmodernity. These lessons, admittedly, are buried beneath the rubble of the wars, holocausts, political economic failures, and ecological disasters of the twentieth century. The brilliant flare-up of the very idea of �the social� between 1840 and 1912 and the discovery sciences it gave form to has remained virtually invisible on the intellectual landscape formed over the last one hundred and fifty years. Until and unless we uncover that revolution, we will continue to be haunted by the ghosts of Plato, Descartes, and God. These ghosts cannot be banished by materialism per se. What is required is a sociological materialism, a cultural materialism. It is no simple ideological or political victory we champion but an adaptation, an evolutionary matter of life and death. So long as these ghosts haunt us, we will be unable as a species to take advantage of whatever small opportunities are left to us to make something worthwhile flourish on this planet for even a little while. The issues here are that big. So it is that we must chase these ghosts down at every opportunity. Every time a critic of social and cultural thinking about science raises the banner of the �brute fact� he or she raises the banner of belief in God. We can, as David Bloor, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Restivo have demonstrated over and over again for thirty years, have a critically robust realism sans Plato, Descartes, and God that is consistent with a social and cultural theory of science, mathematics, and logic. So long as we allow ourselves to be deluded by the �transparent� claim that G�del, Einstein, and Heisenberg have given us the three most important insights into who and what we are, a claim made by Rebecca Goldstein (2005), we will be stuck on a path of almost daily and almost universal suffering, and face a future that can only promise more of the same without respite. In fact it is to Darwin, Marx, and Durkheim that we must turn for the more important insights. We do great harm to ourselves and our planet if we rely on G�del, Einstein, and Heisenberg for our self-image as persons and as a species. We are, indeed, thermodynamic systems and we run at some level according to the laws of physics, biology, and chemistry. But what we are above all is a social and a cultural thing, a society, a social being, a cultural entity sui generis. We are, individually and collectively, social facts.[2] The mysteries of intuitions, geniuses, and eternal truths outside space and time nourished by philosophers like Goldstein are no mere exercises in pure reason for the sake of pure reason. They sustain a worldview that is more medieval than modern. We social ones must take our stand again and again against those, however well intentioned, who continue to support knowingly and unknowingly, the One Logic, the One God, and the separation of the realm of faith and belief from the realm of science and knowledge. The most pernicious dogmas flourish in this atmosphere. For example, undergraduates are fond of repeating this �truism� learned from the masters: �You can�t prove or disprove God.� And what leg do you stand on when public intellectuals like Stephen Jay Gould, a scientist of unimpeachable brilliance, argue for the separation of science and religion? Proofs are social constructions, social institutions, indexical. Claims such as this one can only make sense in a world of science that excludes social science. Once we admit social science to the halls of verifiable, validated, discovery sciences, and proof communities such claims evaporate. Within a framework that includes the social sciences we can determine what God (in whatever guise s/he-it appears) is, that is, the referent for whatever we mean by �God.� That referent is always going to be a sociocultural one, rooted in the material earth and its peoples and not in some supernatural or transcendental realm. Even the strongest opponents and upholders of this claim tremble as they make it. They tend to leave openings for believers, including themselves in some cases, because the barriers to banging the last nails into the coffin of religious faith and belief are, let us admit, formidable. They are formidable, as both Marx and Durkheim recognized, because they have something to do with keeping society and individuals from becoming unglued. So let�s put this bogey man out to pasture right away. It is not religions and belief in God or gods that are universal but rather moral orders. All societies, all humans, require a moral order to survive, to move through the world and their lives. That is, they require, to put it simply, rules about what is good and bad, right and wrong. Religion is just one way to systematize these rules. There are other ways to do this: we can organize moral orders around almost any human interest from politics to physical fitness.[3] And there are ways to construct moral orders that do not depend on unreferred entities. The more general problem we are faced with here is the problem of abstraction. How does one account for abstract ideas without falling into the traps of transcendental and supernatural realism? The solution is to stop making a distinction between concrete and abstract ideas. [1] �There is no there, there� was famously uttered by Gertrude Stein when she went to find a childhood home and found the space empty. [2] We acknowledge the gendered danger of standing on the shoulders of these giants but remind you that they and we stand on the shoulders of so many other giants that gender, race, and class may not matter. If we contradict ourselves, if we fail to stand apart from our own gender, race, and class we can remain silent or carry on. We choose to carry on. [3] One of the most articulate exemplars of a political basis for a moral order is Michael Harrington�s (1983) essay on �the spiritual crisis of western civilization.� Harrington described himself as, in Max Weber�s phrase, �religiously musical� but a non-believer. His goal was to fashion a coalition of believers and non-believers to challenge the wasteland of nilihism, hedonism, and consumerism spreading across the western cultural landscape.I do not wish to start a war over what Durkheim and Marx meant, really meant, or could have meant. But I do want to link their sociological program � which can be described as grounded in the rejection of transcendence, immanence, and psychologism � to the Woolgar problem of provocation in science studies. I am not going to deny Woogar�s claim that the very idea of the �hard case� is indexical, situational, contextual. All this claim does is force me to locate myself when I discuss my notion of the hard case. And I locate myself here � with Durkheim, and Marx, and Mary Douglas, and Bloor, and Mao. Mao? Yes, because the long-term solution to the Woolgar problem is science studies in permanent revolution. Science Studies can still be provocative and still be dangerous. It is not difficult to see that the �hard cases� tend to converge on the general hard case of the transcendental. And it is here that the sociology and anthropology of God meets social studies of scientific knowledge, and especially pure mathematics and logic. I don�t think it would be difficult to defend the idea that science studies has something to say about the very idea of the transcendental. I want to make the stronger claim that it has something to say about God. Just as there can be no criticism without the criticism of religion, there can be no sociology of knowledge, no sociology of science without the sociology of religion. Then there can be no social studies of mathematics, no social studies of logic, no social studies der Reine Vernunft without the social studies of God. And here the provocation and danger comes from the proof � at the very least by consiliency of evidences or inductions, or by ensemble of probabilities � that God is in all respects a human creation, a social construction. I have expressed this as the fallacy of transcendence or of the transcendental.What have we learned in 30 years? Well, we weren�t the first generation to understand that science and technology were social relations, social institutions, social constructions, social networks. Even if Mannheim and Merton and Kuhn didn�t get SSK, we would have had no trouble discussing this idea with Marx and Durkheim and Neitzsche, and C. Wright Mills. What we did learn, however, was how to demonstrate this insight empirically and how to do it across disciplinary boundaries with convergent results. We also learned that scientists are very protective of the boundaries of science and hesitant to admit social scientists to their ranks and strongly jurisdictional when it comes to studying, analyzing, and theorizing science. We thought we�d learned too what it meant to say science is socially constructed. But early on some of us made the mistake of thinking we�d mastered the very idea of �the social� and went on from there. This has produced many misunderstandings within science studies, misunderstandings that have been exploited by our critics. I don�t have much of a feeling for irony (which makes me an easy target for the ironists, and they might now get ready to strike while the irony is hot), nor for creatively exploiting metaphors. The result is that I tend to be boringly realistic. It turns out, however, that being boringly realistic is the most important thing you can be when it comes to things like crossing the street. And it is at street level that all of society and culture begins. And it is also at street level that science begins and ends. Social constructionism in science and technology studies is neither relativist, reductionist, nor naively deterministic. The focus on humans as quintessentially social does not eliminate the idea of humans as biological or thermodynamic systems. Stressing the social does not erase the various physical and natural substrata on which the social interactively nests. Genes and neurons are clearly part of the larger picture. It may be that the difficulties these ideas pose for us are rooted in a wrongheaded system of categories and classifications that separate mind, body, brain, and social order. Post-postmodern sociology may have to theorize genes and neurons, bodies, brains, and social orders at the general level of information systems. Social constructionism in science and technology studies is neither relativist, reductionist, nor naively deterministic. The focus on humans as quintessentially social does not eliminate the idea of humans as biological or thermodynamic systems. Stressing the social does not erase the various physical and natural substrata on which the social interactively nests. Genes and neurons are clearly part of the larger picture. It may be that the difficulties these ideas pose for us are rooted in a wrongheaded system of categories and classifications that separate mind, body, brain, and social order. Post-postmodern sociology may have to theorize genes and neurons, bodies, brains, and social orders at the general level of information systems. We already see movements in the direction of conceiving new ways of categorizing and classifying these traditional units of our experiences and experiments in the writings of neuroscientists (e.g., Brothers, 1997; Rose, 2005), psychologists (e.g., Donald, 2001), biologists (Fausto-Sterling 2005), and sociologists (e.g., Restivo, 2005a: Social constructionism in science and technology studies is the social sciences most promising route into this interdisciplinary convergence. The implication here is that it is now time to integrate the sociology of mind, which has a long and distinguished history in the discipline from Durkheim, Marx, and Mead to C. Wright Mills, Randall Collins, and Sal Restivo with a sociology of brain already emergent in Geertz, 1973: 74-5) and made more explicit in Geertz, 2000: 203-17; and see Crane, 2001 for a model of how to move back and forth between sociocultural and biological frameworks to insightfully reveal how the brain works. Conclusion. �There is no there, there:� A Manifesto in Defiance of The Cult of der Reine Vernunft[1] We must wonder about the resistance of Platonic and transcendental thinking to the lessons of modernity and postmodernity. These lessons, admittedly, are buried beneath the rubble of the wars, holocausts, political economic failures, and ecological disasters of the twentieth century. The brilliant flare-up of the very idea of �the social� between 1840 and 1912 and the discovery sciences it gave form to has remained virtually invisible on the intellectual landscape formed over the last one hundred and fifty years. Until and unless we uncover that revolution, we will continue to be haunted by the ghosts of Plato, Descartes, and God. These ghosts cannot be banished by materialism per se. What is required is a sociological materialism, a cultural materialism. It is no simple ideological or political victory we champion but an adaptation, an evolutionary matter of life and death. So long as these ghosts haunt us, we will be unable as a species to take advantage of whatever small opportunities are left to us to make something worthwhile flourish on this planet for even a little while. The issues here are that big. So it is that we must chase these ghosts down at every opportunity. Every time a critic of social and cultural thinking about science raises the banner of the �brute fact� he or she raises the banner of belief in God. We can, as David Bloor, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Restivo have demonstrated over and over again for thirty years, have a critically robust realism sans Plato, Descartes, and God that is consistent with a social and cultural theory of science, mathematics, and logic. So long as we allow ourselves to be deluded by the �transparent� claim that G�del, Einstein, and Heisenberg have given us the three most important insights into who and what we are, a claim made by Rebecca Goldstein (2005), we will be stuck on a path of almost daily and almost universal suffering, and face a future that can only promise more of the same without respite. In fact it is to Darwin, Marx, and Durkheim that we must turn for the more important insights. We do great harm to ourselves and our planet if we rely on G�del, Einstein, and Heisenberg for our self-image as persons and as a species. We are, indeed, thermodynamic systems and we run at some level according to the laws of physics, biology, and chemistry. But what we are above all is a social and a cultural thing, a society, a social being, a cultural entity sui generis. We are, individually and collectively, social facts.[2] The mysteries of intuitions, geniuses, and eternal truths outside space and time nourished by philosophers like Goldstein are no mere exercises in pure reason for the sake of pure reason. They sustain a worldview that is more medieval than modern. We social ones must take our stand again and again against those, however well intentioned, who continue to support knowingly and unknowingly, the One Logic, the One God, and the separation of the realm of faith and belief from the realm of science and knowledge. The most pernicious dogmas flourish in this atmosphere. For example, undergraduates are fond of repeating this �truism� learned from the masters: �You can�t prove or disprove God.� And what leg do you stand on when public intellectuals like Stephen Jay Gould, a scientist of unimpeachable brilliance, argue for the separation of science and religion? Proofs are social constructions, social institutions, indexical. Claims such as this one can only make sense in a world of science that excludes social science. Once we admit social science to the halls of verifiable, validated, discovery sciences, and proof communities such claims evaporate. Within a framework that includes the social sciences we can determine what God (in whatever guise s/he-it appears) is, that is, the referent for whatever we mean by �God.� That referent is always going to be a sociocultural one, rooted in the material earth and its peoples and not in some supernatural or transcendental realm. Even the strongest opponents and upholders of this claim tremble as they make it. They tend to leave openings for believers, including themselves in some cases, because the barriers to banging the last nails into the coffin of religious faith and belief are, let us admit, formidable. They are formidable, as both Marx and Durkheim recognized, because they have something to do with keeping society and individuals from becoming unglued. So let�s put this bogey man out to pasture right away. It is not religions and belief in God or gods that are universal but rather moral orders. All societies, all humans, require a moral order to survive, to move through the world and their lives. That is, they require, to put it simply, rules about what is good and bad, right and wrong. Religion is just one way to systematize these rules. There are other ways to do this: we can organize moral orders around almost any human interest from politics to physical fitness.[3] And there are ways to construct moral orders that do not depend on unreferred entities. The more general problem we are faced with here is the problem of abstraction. How does one account for abstract ideas without falling into the traps of transcendental and supernatural realism? The solution is to stop making a distinction between concrete and abstract ideas.

5. AWhat were your aspirations for the field in 1976 or whenever you started)? What did you want to achieve in terms of our understanding of science, technology, and society?B How have those aspirations been fulfilled or disappointed? What do we know now that we did not know then?C How, as a result of the unfolding of events or understanding, have your aspirations changed?DWhat are today's aspirations, especially in respect of how we are to build on our new knowledge? The Thirty Years Science WarsA) What were your aspirations for the field in 1976 or whenever you started)? What did you want to achieve in terms of our understanding of science, technology, and society?In the wake of my activities as a founding member of Science for the People, I was in the early �70s looking for a professional home among Marxist and other �radical� scholars. I was working on problems in comparative science studies, specifically the so-called �Needham problem.� I was not comfortable with the radical venues for a variety of reasons, nor did I find academic sociological settings congenial. It was at this moment in the fall of 1974 that I received a call from the late Nick Mullins inviting me to join him and a group of others planning to attend the February meeting of the American Sociological Association. Their objective was to form a new professional society dedicated to the sociology of science and technology. I attended the first meeting of the new society in the fall of 1976 and was received warmly both personally and professionally by neophytes and elders alike. I had found a professional home, and was immediately caught up in the machinations of the society�s administration through my new friendship with Daryl Chubin. I could see that there was something new brewing on the sociology of science horizon, where some of my new colleagues had already headed and in some cases breached. I don�t know how well I had articulated �aspirations� except that I was extremely curious about how science worked and especially intrigued by the idea of the �hard case.� I was soon hot on the trail of hard cases and this would become a life long quest � the Needham problem, the social realties of scientific practice, the relationship or non-relationship between physics and mysticism, mathematics, mind, brain. Slowly I realized that the transcendental represented the limit of the hard case, and that we had to be able to sociologize God and the gods in order to tame the brute fact and the pure sciences.B) How have those aspirations been fulfilled or disappointed? What do we know now that we did not know then?I suppose I have to say my aspirations have been fulfilled, both in terms of what I myself have achieved and what my colleagues have achieved collectively. We don�t know more in general terms than Durkheim and Marx knew about the nature of science, but we definitely know more in specific and in-depth terms about the nature of scientific practice. We know the details of how science works in laboratories and in research organizations, we know a great deal about the machinations of science policy, and we know more about how to ground �pure� science and mathematics in the realities of the mundane world. The disappointments turn around, in the first place, what Woolgar refers to as the institutionalization of the provocationism in early science studies and the routinization of disobedience. In the second place, they turn around the resistance to the idea of social construction within and outside of science studies.C) How, as a result of the unfolding of events or understanding, have your aspirations changed? Grasping the sociological nature of mathematics, especially pure mathematics, led me to leave the study of mathematics and turn to the study of mind and then brain. Insofar as I can articulate aspirations, I can say that I am very excited by the potential for offering a sociological alternative to gene and brain centered assumptions about, theories of, and research on human behavior. The sociology of brain takes us right into the center of the hottest areas of scientific research in terms of professional science and in terms of the public arenas of science. In the second place, I have increasingly returned to my sociological foundations and been less inclined to champion undisciplined interdisciplinary studies. D) What are today's aspirations, especially in respect of how we are to build on our new knowledge?We build on new knowledge the way all sciences do, by continuing to inquire, to exercise our curiosity and creativity, and most of all perhaps by training and educating the next generations of science studies researchers. I can see new ways of thinking about science, new modes in interdisciplinary research and theory, emerging in the work of my graduate students. I have great hopes for exploiting the explanatory potential of science and religion studies in ways that impact not only our understanding but whole cultural patterns. There are limits to all forms of inquiry, and sociology and science studies may go the way of natural philosophy. It will be harder to disassemble and re-manufacture social and cultural analytical theories, methods, and perspectives. The Thirty Years Science WarsA) What were your aspirations for the field in 1976 or whenever you started)? What did you want to achieve in terms of our understanding of science, technology, and society?In the wake of my activities as a founding member of Science for the People, I was in the early �70s looking for a professional home among Marxist and other �radical� scholars. I was working on problems in comparative science studies, specifically the so-called �Needham problem.� I was not comfortable with the radical venues for a variety of reasons, nor did I find academic sociological settings congenial. It was at this moment in the fall of 1974 that I received a call from the late Nick Mullins inviting me to join him and a group of others planning to attend the February meeting of the American Sociological Association. Their objective was to form a new professional society dedicated to the sociology of science and technology. I attended the first meeting of the new society in the fall of 1976 and was received warmly both personally and professionally by neophytes and elders alike. I had found a professional home, and was immediately caught up in the machinations of the society�s administration through my new friendship with Daryl Chubin. I could see that there was something new brewing on the sociology of science horizon, where some of my new colleagues had already headed and in some cases breached. I don�t know how well I had articulated �aspirations� except that I was extremely curious about how science worked and especially intrigued by the idea of the �hard case.� I was soon hot on the trail of hard cases and this would become a life long quest � the Needham problem, the social realties of scientific practice, the relationship or non-relationship between physics and mysticism, mathematics, mind, brain. Slowly I realized that the transcendental represented the limit of the hard case, and that we had to be able to sociologize God and the gods in order to tame the brute fact and the pure sciences.B) How have those aspirations been fulfilled or disappointed? What do we know now that we did not know then?I suppose I have to say my aspirations have been fulfilled, both in terms of what I myself have achieved and what my colleagues have achieved collectively. We don�t know more in general terms than Durkheim and Marx knew about the nature of science, but we definitely know more in specific and in-depth terms about the nature of scientific practice. We know the details of how science works in laboratories and in research organizations, we know a great deal about the machinations of science policy, and we know more about how to ground �pure� science and mathematics in the realities of the mundane world. The disappointments turn around, in the first place, what Woolgar refers to as the institutionalization of the provocationism in early science studies and the routinization of disobedience. In the second place, they turn around the resistance to the idea of social construction within and outside of science studies.C) How, as a result of the unfolding of events or understanding, have your aspirations changed? Grasping the sociological nature of mathematics, especially pure mathematics, led me to leave the study of mathematics and turn to the study of mind and then brain. Insofar as I can articulate aspirations, I can say that I am very excited by the potential for offering a sociological alternative to gene and brain centered assumptions about, theories of, and research on human behavior. The sociology of brain takes us right into the center of the hottest areas of scientific research in terms of professional science and in terms of the public arenas of science. In the second place, I have increasingly returned to my sociological foundations and been less inclined to champion undisciplined interdisciplinary studies. D) What are today's aspirations, especially in respect of how we are to build on our new knowledge?We build on new knowledge the way all sciences do, by continuing to inquire, to exercise our curiosity and creativity, and most of all perhaps by training and educating the next generations of science studies researchers. I can see new ways of thinking about science, new modes in interdisciplinary research and theory, emerging in the work of my graduate students. I have great hopes for exploiting the explanatory potential of science and religion studies in ways that impact not only our understanding but whole cultural patterns. There are limits to all forms of inquiry, and sociology and science studies may go the way of natural philosophy. It will be harder to disassemble and re-manufacture social and cultural analytical theories, methods, and perspectives.

6. JOE NEEDHAM 1900-1995 THE NEEDHAM PROBLEM

8. Ethnography of engineering labs

9. Physics and Mysticismcontra-Capra

10. Sociology of mathematics

11. Social Robotics

12. From Math to a Mathematician�s Brain Paul Erdos as a Social Network

13. Einstein�s Brain

14. Einstein, or Einstein�s Brain?

15.

16. Data from application of Restivo Draw a Brain protocols.

18. The Sociology of the Brain

19. The Sociology of God

20. AND OH, BY THE WAY, �SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM� IS NOT A PHILOSOPHICAL IDEA, IT IS NOT A CRITICO-POLITICAL TOOL, AND IT IS NOT ANYTHING LIKE WHAT SOME FRENCH �BER-THINKERS CLAIM IT IS. IT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL THEOREM OF GENERAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY, THE CENTRAL DOGMA OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION.

21. Since its beginnings, STS has undergone numerous modifications and reincarnations, yet the initial work stands as an early articulation of its continuing provocative potential.We need to understand the dynamics whereby the �disobedience� fostered by STS can flourish and persist.STEVE WOOLGAR, 2004 Modern Science and Anarchism Peter Kropotkin

22. ANARCHY AND INQUIRY Irving Louis Horowitz: Irving Louis Horowitz ��INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY HAS BECOME INCREASINGLY ANARCHIST IN POSTURE.�

23. Kropotkin Anarchism is one of the sociological sciences. Called for the application of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of human institutions.

24. The Final Frontier The Transcendental Fallacy that there is a world or that there are worlds beyond our own � transcendental worlds, supernatural worlds, worlds of souls, spirits and ghosts, gods, devils and angels, heavens and hells. The sociological imagination has been from at least Durkheim onwards aligned with the rejection of the transcendental (as well as the immanent and the psychologistic). The �many worlds interpretation� in quantum mechanics may be contaminated by this fallacy as a result of mathegrammatical errors or illusions. No doubt the world, the universe, is more complex than we can know or imagine � but that complexity does not include transcendental or supernatural features.

25. �There is no there, there:� A Manifesto in Defiance of The Cult of der Reine Vernunft[1] We must wonder about the resistance of Platonic and transcendental thinking to the lessons of modernity and postmodernity. These lessons, admittedly, are buried beneath the rubble of the wars, holocausts, political economic failures, and ecological disasters of the twentieth century. The brilliant flare-up of the very idea of �the social� between 1840 and 1912 and the discovery sciences it gave form to has remained virtually invisible on the intellectual landscape formed over the last one hundred and fifty years. Until and unless we uncover that revolution, we will continue to be haunted by the ghosts of Plato, Descartes, and God. These ghosts cannot be banished by materialism per se. What is required is a sociological materialism, a cultural materialism. It is no simple ideological or political victory we champion but an adaptation, an evolutionary matter of life and death. So long as these ghosts haunt us, we will be unable as a species to take advantage of whatever small opportunities are left to us to make something worthwhile flourish on this planet for even a little while. The issues here are that big. So it is that we must chase these ghosts down at every opportunity. Every time a critic of social and cultural thinking about science raises the banner of the �brute fact� he or she raises the banner of belief in God. We can, as David Bloor, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Restivo have demonstrated over and over again for thirty years, have a critically robust realism sans Plato, Descartes, and God that is consistent with a social and cultural theory of science, mathematics, and logic. So long as we allow ourselves to be deluded by the �transparent� claim that G�del, Einstein, and Heisenberg have given us the three most important insights into who and what we are, a claim made by Rebecca Goldstein (2005), we will be stuck on a path of almost daily and almost universal suffering, and face a future that can only promise more of the same without respite. In fact it is to Darwin, Marx, and Durkheim that we must turn for the more important insights. We do great harm to ourselves and our planet if we rely on G�del, Einstein, and Heisenberg for our self-image as persons and as a species. We are, indeed, thermodynamic systems and we run at some level according to the laws of physics, biology, and chemistry. But what we are above all is a social and a cultural thing, a society, a social being, a cultural entity sui generis. We are, individually and collectively, social facts.[2] The mysteries of intuitions, geniuses, and eternal truths outside space and time nourished by philosophers like Goldstein are no mere exercises in pure reason for the sake of pure reason. They sustain a worldview that is more medieval than modern. We social ones must take our stand again and again against those, however well intentioned, who continue to support knowingly and unknowingly, the One Logic, the One God, and the separation of the realm of faith and belief from the realm of science and knowledge. The most pernicious dogmas flourish in this atmosphere. For example, undergraduates are fond of repeating this �truism� learned from the masters: �You can�t prove or disprove God.� And what leg do you stand on when public intellectuals like Stephen Jay Gould, a scientist of unimpeachable brilliance, argue for the separation of science and religion? Proofs are social constructions, social institutions, indexical. Claims such as this one can only make sense in a world of science that excludes social science. Once we admit social science to the halls of verifiable, validated, discovery sciences and proof communities such claims evaporate. Within a framework that includes the social sciences we can determine what God (in whatever guise s/he-it appears) is, that is, the referent for whatever we mean by �God.� That referent is always going to be a sociocultural one, rooted in the material earth and its peoples and not in some supernatural or transcendental realm. Even the strongest opponents and upholders of this claim tremble as they make it. They tend to leave openings for believers, including themselves in some cases, because the barriers to banging the last nails into the coffin of religious faith and belief are, let us admit, formidable. They are formidable, as both Marx and Durkheim recognized, because they have something to do with keeping society and individuals from becoming unglued. So let�s put this bogey man out to pasture right away. It is not religions and belief in God or gods that are universal but rather moral orders. All societies, all humans, require a moral order to survive, to move through the world and their lives. That is, they require, to put it simply, rules about what is good and bad, right and wrong. Religion is just one way to systematize these rules. There are other ways to do this: we can organize moral orders around almost any human interest from politics to physical fitness.[3] And there are ways to construct moral orders that do not depend on unreferred entities. The more general problem we are faced with here is the problem of abstraction. How does one account for abstract ideas without falling into the traps of transcendental and supernatural realism? The solution is to stop making a distinction between concrete and abstract ideas. [1] �There is no there, there� was famously uttered by Gertrude Stein when she went to find a childhood home and found the space empty. [2] We acknowledge the gendered danger of standing on the shoulders of these giants but remind you that they and we stand on the shoulders of so many other giants that gender, race, and class may not matter. If we contradict ourselves, if we fail to stand apart from our own gender, race, and class we can remain silent or carry on. We choose to carry on. [3] One of the most articulate exemplars of a political basis for a moral order is Michael Harrington�s (1983) essay on �the spiritual crisis of western civilization.� Harrington described himself as, in Max Weber�s phrase, �religiously musical� but a non-believer. His goal was to fashion a coalition of believers and non-believers to challenge the wasteland of nilihism, hedonism, and consumerism spreading across the western cultural landscape.