Mixing things up: science, politics and lay knowledge
Meeting Room 1, Conference Centre, Lancaster University
Wednesday 19 March 2008, 13.30-17.30
A workshop organised by the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change
(CSEC) and the ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen)
Invited speakers:
Robert Evans (Cardiff)
Katharine Farrell (UFZ, Leipzig)
John Law (Lancaster)
Jerry Ravetz (Oxford)
Larry Reynolds (Lancaster)
Bronislaw Szerszynski (Lancaster)
Claire Waterton (Lancaster)
Brian Wynne (Lancaster)
In recent decades many social scientists have argued that, in order for policy decisions in the
area of science and technology to be robust and legitimate, they need to draw on forms of
knowledge that lie outside that of accredited technical experts. For example, Funtowicz and
Ravetz have proposed that problems characterised by high levels of uncertainty and high
decision-stakes exceed the capacity of Kuhnian 'normal' science to provide answers, requiring a
'post-normal science' in which 'extended facts' are considered by an extended peer community.
Brian Wynne has argued that publics properly draw on a wider set of hermeneutic, lifeworld
judgements about technologies, such as those concerning the trustworthiness and implicit
worldviews of the institutions involved. Collins and Evans agree that lay citizens can contribute to
policy debates but have suggested that epistemic rigour in the construction of facts be maintained
by selectively extending the epistemic community to include 'uncertified experts', leaving lay
citizens to act in different, more overtly political settings. And Bruno Latour has argued for new
decision-making arrangements in which modernity's founding distinction between nature and
society - and thus between science and politics - is abandoned.
In this informal workshop we will explore the implications of these and other approaches to
reconceptualising the relationship between politics, science and the public.
All are welcome, but numbers will be limited so please reserve a place in advance.
The workshop is free, including tea and coffee at the break.
Maps can be found here http://www.lancs.ac.uk/travel/maps.htm (the conference centre is
marked 21 on the campus map).
For all communications, please contact Bronislaw Szerszynski (bron@lancaster.ac.uk).
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Rob Evans
For Collins and Evans, and the ‘SEE perspective’ more generally, 1 the key steps in arguing for
more inclusive processes for policy formation and debate are to distinguish between the different
kinds of debate that might inform a policy decision and to classify the different kinds of expertise
that are (or are not) needed to take part in these various debates. In making these distinctions it
is useful to remember that the prescription for what should happen, by virtue of its critique and
hence calls for change, may not correspond to the description of what typically does happen.
In distinguishing between different types of debate, Collins and Evans distinguish between
technical and political phase or (less problematically?) questions that prioritise propositional
concerns (i.e. matters of fact as conventionally understood) and those that are framed more
broadly (the policy decision as conventionally understood). The classification of expertise relates
to this distinction between technical and political phase because propositional questions rely on
specialist expertises for their answers, whereas political questions rely on ubiquitous expertises
for their resolution. Separating the specialist from the ubiquitous is thus part of deciding
when/how lay people should participate.
Technical Phase
The relevance of the technical phase comes from the normative idea that policy questions should
have some concern for what the facts of the matter are understood to be. This is not the same as
saying facts are the only things that matter or that the standard ways of producing facts are the
only ways to proceed. It is also recognised that, because of STS, we know that facts come
impregnated with politics and one reason for including more heterogeneous experts within factmaking debates (e.g. sheep farmers, crop sprayers, AIDS treatments activists) is to encourage
expert reflexivity about their implicit politics.
Nevertheless, separating description from prescription, Collins and Evans argue that even if facts
are imbued with politics (the description), the construction of facts should not be driven by politics
(the prescription). In practical terms, this means that research for policy should be driven by the
evidence and not the desire to satisfy political or public opinion.
Political Phase
The relevance of the political phase follows directly from recognising the limits of ‘science’ or
specialist expertise as highlighted by STS. For example, expert framings of problems are, even
under more heterogeneous conditions, still expert framings and the facts they prioritise will
inevitably be the result of some internal choices to which the wider society will not have access.
In addition, in cases where there is controversy about framing and hence the relevance of
particular expertises, there will be no clear consensus about what the ‘facts of the matter’ actually
are. In both cases, however, a political decision will still need to be reached about what the policy
should be. Because the decision is ‘political’ it will (or at least can) be taken for different reasons
to the ‘technical’ decision – e.g. it is perfectly reasonable for a policy to be driven by public
opinion.
Again, separating description from prescription, Collins and Evans would agree that one difficulty
with many of the policy decisions that feature in the STS literature is that they read scientific
consensus as incontrovertible truth and impose this as the meaning. In these cases, where there
is expert controversy (where experts include experience-based experts as well as scientists),
Collins and Evans agree that the policy decision needs to be based on something other than a
partial reading of the contested evidence. The prescription that follows is that, in these
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http://tinyurl.com/2nq6hd
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circumstances, everyday expertises of trust and competence have a role to play in deciding who
and, therefore, what to believe. A one-size-fits-all prescription of ‘more participation’ is tricky to
sustain, however, as it doesn’t seem to fit those cases that don’t feature so prominently in the
STS literature, namely those where there is no expert controversy and/or no policy controversy
(e.g. tobacco and cancer?). In these cases, is more participation really needed and, if not, why
not?
If there is a policy prescription that follows SEE, it is that the stronger the expert (not scientific)
consensus the more policy should defer to it. In testing this idea, the interesting cases are thus
those where expert dissensus/ consensus does not match the weighting given to it in policy
debates: e.g. where strong policy statements either appear to ignore expert controversy (sheep
farmers, nuclear power) or to contradict what looks like an robust expert consensus (e.g. African
AIDS policies, climate change?).
Summary
Collins and Evans agree that
for policy decisions in the area of science and technology to be robust and legitimate,
they need to draw on forms of knowledge that lie outside that of accredited technical
experts
They further argue that policy decisions must combine different elements if they are to achieve
both robustness and legitimacy. The potentially controversial bit of the Third Wave is the
separation of these different elements and the claim that different kinds of expertise are needed
for each. The distinction they make can be summarised as follows:


Technical phase – concerned with propositions and requires specialist expertise;
contributes to political phase but does not determine it
Political phase – concerned with framings and requires ubiquitous expertise; draws on
(and drives?) technical phase but cannot be reduced to it.
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Katharine N. Farrell
MUD AND THE MONA LISA: pathways between description and prescription 2
Premise 1:
in order for policy decisions in the area of science and technology to be robust
and legitimate, they need to draw on forms of knowledge that lie outside that of
accredited technical experts.
Premise 2:
when mixing of accredited technical expertise with other forms of knowledge
takes place in the course of a science and technology policy decision-making, it
may be a chosen strategy but it may also be a received condition.
Premise 3:
the mixing of accredited technical expertise with other forms of knowledge is one
among several type of mixing that can occur within a techno-political, science
and technology policy complex comprised of multiple, interrelated relationships
between various politics, sciences, publics and participants.
Premise 4:
relationships depend upon difference, so the quality of a relationship can be
construed by observing how the members of that relationship manage the
boundaries that reify their differences.
-------------------------------------------------------------The methods by which accredited technical expertise and other forms of knowledge are mixed
together in situations of ‘technical decision-making’ are not trivial: poor Quality mixing procedures
can lead to outputs of poor technical Quality (not-robust); poor political Quality (not-legitimate); or
poor overall Quality (not-robust and not-legitimate).
One way of measuring the Quality of these mixing procedures is to consider how they deal with
violation and blurring of the fundamental dichotomies at the core of the western Enlightenment
mythology, upon which modern science and technology have been built. Here four aspects of
boundary management are explored briefly: with respect to the concept of post-normal science
and with respect to Bruno Latour’s concept of a parliament of things.
1. Good quality boundary management – good quality relationships.
post-normal science: While Funtowicz and Ravetz provide tools and techniques (e.g. NUSAP
Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1990) for communicating scientific knowledge under conditions of
uncertainty, the concept of post-normal science, which is basically an empirically derived
heuristic, does not explicitly problematise the characteristics of extended peer review processes.
Procedures for adjudicating the quality of alternative boundary management strategies are
implicit within the heuristic but they are not systematically developed.
a parliament of things: The idea that good quality boundary management is important for good
quality techno-political science and technology policy relationships is central to Latour’s
arguments regarding the need for a new political ecology meta-physic. Within the new
constitution of society that Latour propose, assignment of category typologies (what is it?) and
statuses (it is with or without?) is a central and important responsibility. Presumption that better
boundary management will improve relations is implicit.
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ideas concerning boundaries are informed by intensive discussion with Kozo Mayumi, University of
Tokushima, (funder: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science / Royal Society).
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2. Boundaries are always set by someone, for some reason.
post-normal science: Purposive boundary setting by active agents is explicitly addressed.
Strategic adoption of extended peer review processes is engagement with purposive boundary
setting. The idea that scientific Truth is replaced by Quality knowledge (i.e. fit for a specified
purpose) is an explicit recognition that purposive agents are responsible for managing the objects
that fall into the boundary zone, between science and politics.
a parliament of things: Latour (2004) offers a lot of ideas but fails to effectively problematise the
matter. The presumption that all entities are engaged in boundary setting is surprisingly
Hobbesian. How authority is imparted and to whom remains undiscussed. When making the
leap from social theory into political theory, as Latour does, one must contend with that question,
which he does not.
3. Discussion of boundaries presumes A and not-A, and a dialectical penumbra.
post-normal science: the dialectical penumbrae between facts and values, between pure politics
and pure science is where the action is. The ambiguity is made explicit and developing means
for coping with that ambiguity is the main task at hand
a parliament of things: dialectical penumbrae are affirmed and ambiguities appreciated. Latour
seems not so much to be suggesting that the distinction between facts and values should
somehow be abandoned but that the values guiding fact creation are relevant. He presents not a
rejection but an embracing of the othering practices that are inevitably part of boundary setting
and boundary management.
4. It is impossible to separate the normative and empirical aspects of boundary setting. –
however, the concept Quality makes it is possible to structure the relationship.
post-normal science: extended peer review (‘technical decision-making’) processes may be de
facto or strategic and both have empirical and normative aspects which constitute ‘post-normal
science conditions’. Although post-normal science is basically a heuristic that does not purport to
resolve the normative issues it raises, indications for how to improve the Quality of extended peer
review process is implicit within the conceptual frame (Funtowicz, 2001).
a parliament of things: I am at a loss – I find it difficult to distinguish between the descriptive and
normative arguments in Latour’s work. I get the feeling that he would see them as companions.
Still, without discussion of their difference one cannot could draw out a theory regarding their
relationship to one and other.
References:
Funtowicz, S. (2001). Peer Review and Quality Control. In International Encyclopedia of the
Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier, 11179 - 11183.
Funtowicz, S. O. and J. R. Ravetz (1990). Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy. the
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Latour, B. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to bring the science into democracy. Translated by C.
Porter: Harvard University Press.
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John Law
Bron writes:
‘…social scientists have argued that, in order for policy decisions in the area of science and
technology to be robust and legitimate, they need to draw on forms of knowledge that lie
outside that of accredited technical experts.’ and adds that we need to ‘… reconceptualise[e]
… the relations between politics, science and the public’.
I recognise the issue and don’t have much to say about it directly. I guess my problem and my
task are different.
1. Policy? I’m quite straightforwardly worried that in our STS we are allowing policy to displace
politics even in what are obviously important questions – such as how to foster democratic as
opposed to technocratic forms of decision making). Policy is important, sure. Indeed I work
on foot and mouth policy, and farm animal welfare policy. But there are many modes of
politics which do not reduce to policy or its needs.
2. Performativity. I am also worried about the performativity of our STS work. How we frame our
problems and our work has indirect effects. It tends to do versions of the world. So I want to
suggest that the way we structure many of our more standard discussions and policy/politics
assumes something about the ….
3. Location of politics ….Centring. That there is a place, there are some places, where
(important) decisions are made. Obviously this isn’t wrong,. But (point 1) what about other
modes of politics? And what about the performative effects of making the assumption that
there are centres? I think we’re buying into/colluding with the agendas of the powerful when
we frame our problems in this way. Which is not, by itself, a knock-down criticism. There are
moments for such intervention. So I’d like it if foot and mouth culling policy was better thought
through, or farm animal welfare were better protected in Europe. But there are alternatives.
Then again, I also think that our standard discussions assume that ….
4. Politics is related to discretion, to discretionary subjectivities. Here we’re usually, perhaps not
always, talking about human agency. So when we work in the way we often do I take it that
we’re mostly enacting a set of humanist assumptions. H-NH and all that. Powerful people
make decisions. In a democracy all the people are consulted. That’s the polarity, the space
made by the kind of debate we’re discussing. Again, this isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does
set limits to the conditions of politics.
So how might we think otherwise?
Here are two of the issues I try to wrestle with. They precisely tug against centring and
discretionary, humanist, agency
5. Politics as decentring: … we might imagine that politics is enacted in all the locations where
there is ‘play’ (in the engineering sense) where things might have been, could be, could be
made to be, otherwise. If we think this way (I try to follow Haraway, Mol and Foucault) politics
might take the form of (1) making differences, enacting them, discovering them, and (2) of
interfering in the play enacted and discovered, to re-vision things one way or another. Note
that this is a distributed, decentred project, an endless set of interferences, with no great
overview, but a propensity to politically-motivated (I insist on ‘politically motivated’)
deconstruction and (more important than deconstruction) interference. None of which is
necessarily so far from a version of ‘democratisation of technological decision-making’, STS
inspired or otherwise. (For instance, I think culling in 2001 should have been locally shaped).
But …
6. Politics as ontological practice: … this is where my unease really kicks in. In a non-humanist
version of politics, the ‘play’ between versions of the real becomes, or is made to be,
productive. And here our STS helps. We’ve a long tradition of studying instrumental
practices. In the performative version of this tradition we also say that methods practices do
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versions of the real as well as representations thereof. This is why methods are so very
interesting. (Thank you Claire!) They are ontological practices. Survey methods, focus
groups, issue-crawlers, whatever. Not to mention ELISA tests for viruses. Or endocrinological
measures of animal stress. With more or less difficulty methods practices do reals and redo
reals in more or less subtly different ways. And in more or less desirable ways. Then those
reals circulate (they get done somewhere else) or they don’t, and they get done together with
other reals (or they don’t). (What is happening with the European farm animal: a set of
representational/ ontological enactments circulating to a set of sites to do well-cared for
animals. But which would be better? Which reals? Which animals? Which instruments? And
at which locations?)
7. Combine these two thoughts together: … and we have multiple locations, multiple
circulations, multiple representations, and multiple putative reals being done that intersect
and interfere with one another …. (Those animals again). There is never any political centre,
except one that is enacted (instrumentally?) for very particular purposes (The European
Commission?). There is no discretionary agency, except at a particular moment (these
measures don’t fit together, how are we going to do this?) There is never a single reality but a
ragged, woven, texture of reals being done (animals multiple). And politics? This takes the
form of interferences here and there that might make differences in particular ways in
particular places. Make some reals realer. For instance, versions of the animal. Versions of
animal suffering. Versions of animal welfare. (Lots of different experts, by the way, no
particular core set).
8. All this can be defeated. There are good reasons for worrying about policymaking and
democratisation. And (to be clear) I’m not claiming that it is easy to do reals and get them to
circulate. But I am bothered with our apparent propensity to lose sight of the performative,
material, and non-humanist lessons from STS as we struggle with, define, and help to enact,
political (policy?) issues. And I’m bothered by the idea that politics is necessarily (a)
discretionary and discursive, and (b) to do with centring. I think we are often being trapped in
a particular, procedural/constitutional, power-saturated and singular version of the conditions
of political and ontological possibility.
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Jerry Ravetz
Post-normal science in action
The extended peer community does not always wait to be invited to the dialogue. To understand
the present working politics of science, we need to take into account exposure, muckraking and
boycotts, as a counter to manipulation, suppression and victimisation.
The British public has recently had two educational experiences in the political economy of
modern science, what we might call the socio-political-commercial-administrative construction of
ignorance. It appears that every concerned stakeholder can know of the suppressed research on
psychopharmaceuticals except for the agency that advises on their effectiveness. The official
regulator receives full reports as required by law. Independent academics can demand American
documents under the Freedom of Information Act. But the National Institute for Health and
Clinical Excellence is permitted to know only that which the industry grants it permission to know.
It cannot demand documents from the industry, it cannot obtain them from the regulator (there
they are doubtless commercially confidential), and it has no powers to obtain them otherwise as
any citizen could and did. Hence it was in no position to determine by a meta-analysis that a
leading drug is not established as better than placebo.
In a parallel case, it appears that a major drug company knew for some time that the ‘off-licence’
use of a psychopharmaceutical product was putting young people at serious risk. It eventually
advised against the use of the product. The British authorities worked for a long time to see
whether the law was broken by this practice, which prima facie does appear to be putting profit
before welfare. To the chagrin of everyone except the firms, it was decided that there is a
loophole in the law; since the firm did not recommend its use for young people and only permitted
it, there is no chance of a conviction.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we have an ongoing situation of ruthless firms and toothless
watchdogs. In terms of Post-Normal Science, the Decision Stakes for the firms are so high, that
even when the Systems Uncertainties are very low, it’s still Post-Normal for them, and normal
protocols of evidence, inference and policy go out the window. Of course, Americans are long
since familiar with this, given the writings of Sheldon Krimsky and others.
We must ask whether the original PNS heuristic should now be considered as a seriously
sanitized version of reality. The description of the work of the Extended Peer Community did
mention activist engagement of various sorts, but the need for this was not spelled out. That was,
after all, twenty-five years ago, when even to mention uncertainty in policy-related science was a
radical move.
For brevity I will mention only one example of muckraking as part of the counterattack on the
kleptocratic regime in science policy. This is the writings of Michael Crichton. In his very first
book on this theme, Jurassic Park, he made it plain in the Preface that this was a parable about
the corruption of biological science. His most recent book, Next, is very thinly veiled fiction;
indeed he shows the reader that all the scientific incidents he uses have actually occurred. For
Crichton, scientists are not merely like the city traders who repackage and then speculate on subprime mortgages; they are city traders who repackage and then speculate on sub-prime science.
Crichton’s locale is California, where there is more fast money to be made than in our own groves
of academe; but his lesson is universal.
The question for me is when it will be universally recognised that ‘the public understanding of
science’ is shaped more by Crichton’s best-sellers than by the well-intentioned science cafés.
Whether ‘Post-Normal Science’ will still be the most appropriate label for the new situation,
remains to be seen.
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Bronislaw Szerszynski
Here are some thoughts on deliberative processes (which I’ll use as a shorthand for the use of
event-genres such as citizen’s juries, consensus conferences and focus groups to inform policy).
They aren't designed to directly compare Collins & Evans, Latour, Wynne, Funtowicz & Ravetz,
etc, but more to share some relevant lines of inquiry in my own work.
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Despite my fascination for and advocacy of deliberative processes, one thing I tend to
agree with Collins and Evans about (though not for the same reasons) is the merits of
maintaining a distinction between the state and civil society. Here I draw much of my
inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and On Revolution. Arendt
defends a politics of freedom, paradigmatically instantiated in the revolutionary pre-political
moment before the instauration of a system of sovereignty. She laments the way that in
modernity the political realm is no longer a place where the human person is revealed
through speech and action and can achieve a this-worldly immortality, a place where the
radically new can happen, a realm of freedom rather than necessity or utility. Instead she
says that politics has been reduced to the mere the administration of things, the
management of a household writ large.
Similarly, I argue that civic discourses and energies should not be subordinated to the logic
of administration. It is true that deliberative processes can be useful for the state, going
some way towards compensating for ‘state failure’: they can provide alternative information
feeds and sources of legitimacy for policy decisions under conditions where the
conventional processes of representative democracy and policy formation are no longer
adequate (e.g. Poulantzas’s ‘authoritarian statism’). But I’m more concerned about the
effects in the other direction – the way that such processes try to make civic discourse do
administration’s work – as Stefano Harney put it at our 2006 ‘Bioeconomy’ workshop, they
try to make multitude's loquaciousness productive. Civic discourse should be about public
issues, and often about policy, and it should have its effects on the state, but it should not
be folded into the state's operations. To do so is to try to render it ‘uneventful’ in Badiou’s
sense of the event, as a disruption of the same (Lezaun & Soneryd). Here’s to the
unruliness of those who do not rule.
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One could think of civil society as a layer which itself contains layers. If one imagines it as
a layer above the private sphere of the household and below that of the state, then
somewhere probably near the top of it goes on things we might call the public sphere,
which Michael Warner (2002) defines as a ‘social space created by the reflexive circulation
of discourse’. This is the space that institutions want to sample when they are interested in
public opinion – a realm of opinions, that are both individual and shared, that take part in
the flow and intertextuality of public discourse. But often institutions want to tap into
something a bit different, something closer to the private worlds of people – in Collins &
Evans’ terms, the substantive knowledge of uncertified experts, perhaps, or the metaexpertises that people can use to make ‘common sense’ judgements simply because they
are members of society.
But just as in the case of public opinion, the nature of the language going on here can be
profoundly misrecognised. When 'members of the public' talk about technological and
environmental risks they are not necessarily making pure propositional claims. They are
often doing other things with language – employing other speech acts, which reproduce or
contest their social positioning and social relationships. Much lay risk talk can only with
violence be forced into the straightjacket of being considered as knowledge that can
circulate.
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Recently I’ve also been influenced by the Dutch intellectual historian Frank Ankersmit, who
in Aesthetic Politics argues for an understanding of modern representative politics that
draws on the 'substitution' theory of artistic representation of Burke, Gombrich and Danto.
As Ankersmit puts it, '(Re)presentation is a making present (again) of what is (now) absent.
More formally, A is a representation of B when A can take B's place; hence, when A can
function as B's substitute or as B's replacement in its absence' (Ankersmit 2002). Artistic
representations are not judged on the basis of how much they resemble the represented,
but on how effectively the artist has worked creatively in the gap between representation
and represented.
Ankersmit, argues that political representatives, like works of art, have an autonomy from
those whom they represent. Elected representatives do not have to resemble those they
represent - indeed, we might say they ought to be different. And this gives both the
representative and the represented room for play, for autonomy, in respect of each other.
'Interaction between represented and representative transforms the represented, the voter,
from a hard and unchanging given into something more fuzzy and continuous with his
representative’ (Ankersmit 2002).
Ankersmit uses this as a defence of representative democracy against both excessive
bureaucracy and direct democracy, both of which try to close the gap between
representation and represented, and thus destroy the gap in which politics can occur. But I
think it can be used to help understand deliberative forms of democracy in a similar way,
through notions of substitution. The other Caerdyddians Horlick-Jones et al (2007), in their
critical analysis of the 2003 GM Nation public engagement exercise, helpfully introduce the
notion of ‘translation quality’ in order to address concerns over the efficacy with which
information elicited in one phase of the process was used to shape and inform
subsequent stages. But (depite their talk of framing and interpretation) there is a danger
here of understanding ‘quality’ as if it consisted simply in the undistorted passing on of
information, thus falling into the ‘resemblance’ version of representation. Ankersmit’s
‘substitution’ approach can help draw attention to the creative role that mediators of
deliberative processes play in preserving and working politically within the gap between the
public and the representations that are made of it.
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Claire Waterton
Some thoughts on science, politics and lay knowledges:
The call for papers in the 4 yearly jamboree of science studies work – the 4S/EASST conference
has highlighted ways in which some STS scholars are moving towards critical collaborations with
the scientists, designers and technical experts whose work they want to study. I would like to
reflect on this and on the idea, taken from Haraway that we are “in the action, ... finite and dirty,
not transcendent and clean” (Haraway 1997:36) ( thanks Rebecca for the quote).
In relation to this I will talk about some work where I and colleagues find ourselves in the ‘dirty’
role! To help us think about what is at stake, and how to act, we have tried to work around a
previous model used by STS scholars who are studying innovation in science. I will rehearse
some aspects of this so-called ‘ PROTEE’ method developed by Duret, Latour, Mcnally and
others, whilst looking at the way that it has played a role in our study of the geneticisation of
global taxonomy.
Second, I will talk a little about getting involved in local politics around a polluted lake in Cumbria.
Here I may be able to reflect on Collins and Evan’s separation of the technical and the political (I
disagree that the STS scholar should attempt this), whilst exploring other ways forward around
this complex social/ecological/economic/technical situation symbolised by the polluted lake.
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