Blogging has been a bit light lately, in part because I was persuaded to teach half of a graduate seminar during the summer session. The first half of the seminar looked at philosophical approaches to epistemology (basically, a set of issues around what counts as knowledge and what could count as reasonable ways to build knowledge). The second half, which I am teaching, shifts the focus to what scientists seem to be doing when they build knowledge (or knowledge claims, or theories, or tentative findings).
In the course of our reading for this week, I came upon a couple passages in a chapter by Karin Knorr Cetina [1] that I found really striking:
[T]he person insisting on a face-to-face inspection distrusts his or her mind, in favor of his or her senses, in identifying and processing the relevant information. Many scientists feel it is impossible to try to reason through the problem or to pick up the important clues from oral or written descriptions. In order to know what to think, one has to place oneself in the situation. The body is trusted to pick up and process what the mind cannot anticipate. (97-98)
[S]enior scientists too will frequently insist on seeing or doing things themselves rather than delegate tasks to technical assistants. The preference is warranted not only by the belief that doing the procedures oneself will increase the chances that they will work, but also by the idea that only through personal experience does one know the real meaning (the strengths, the weaknesses, the implications) of the results obtained. To have performed the relevant tasks of an inquiry oneself — or at least to have seen them done — is the capital on which trust in the results is based. Results not seen directly or not produced through embodied action cannot be properly evaluated and are prone to misinterpretation. (98)
These passages are in a chapter describing the epistemic culture of molecular biology, although I suspect that there are denizens of other scientific fields who are also inclined towards getting their own hands and eyes on a system rather than simply working from the accounts of their trainees, coworkers, and competitors.
On the one hand, it seems obvious that words fall short. The systems scientists study are complicated, and even very elegant experiments may have enough going on that some of what there is to observe can’t help but be left out of experimental reports. Working just from someone else’s report necessarily reduces the amount of information you have about the experiment relative to all the information that was available to report on. Given that different scientists might notice (and record in their reports) different aspects of what there is to observe in a given experiment, the preference for seeing or doing an experiment oneself seems likely to lead to a scientific community with more insight, overall, about what’s going on in an experimental system. Too, this is a personal preference that seems likely to encourage scientists to actually try to reproduce experiments, whether reported in their lab groups or in the scientific literature.
However, there are limits. At a certain point, unless you’re up for the task of building all of your knowledge yourself, you need to trust knowledge claims of others. You need to find ways to make words capture enough of the experience of the experiments so that journal articles can communicate knowledge claims to scientists who haven’t done those experiments, and so that those communications can be used to build more knowledge.
In other words, there seems to be a tension between dividing the labor of building scientific knowledge of the world and personally pursuing empirical engagement with the phenomena as the most direct and reliable source of knowledge. Even if all the other scientists in your field are scrupulously honest, can they ever be as trustworthy as your own direct experience?
I’d be interested to hear from the scientists as to how you and those in your field weigh the epistemic strength of doing it yourself relative to reading or hearing the results of others.
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[1] Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
I think one of the key issues is that so much of science is in the details. Exactly how much potassium was in this solution? It does matter for accurate interpretation of the results.
One bigshot prof came to give a seminar talk and failed miserably at question time–the prof eventually said something like, “You’d have to ask my postdoc who did all the experiments, it’s really his work.” To this day we mock the professor. It’s often meaningless to know the data if you don’t know a lot of specifics about how it was acquired.
Interesting post and it hearkens back to some of the discussions about PIs who do experiments vs supervise closely vs don’t supervise at all….
For me, and for my advisors (and I would guess physiologists in general), it’s my experience that if there is a particular question or experiment that you have some strong interest in (e.g., it’s directly related to your project, or is needed as a foundation for your further work), then you ALWAYS do it yourself. There’s no substitute for your own hands and eyes. Similarly, if you have personally done an experiment whose results are contradicted by written reports by others, all scientists I know trust themselves (though that’s not to say you’re not wracked with doubt much of the time).
Now, the main thing that would counteract this would be the presence of multiple reports of substantially the same observation in the literature. As with the wisdom of crowds, multiple reports help to solidify the certainty of the early results. Of course, the “strength” of each of these reports is weighted by a combination of the quality of the work in the report, and by the reputation of the group producing it.
I don’t really get too worked up about watching experiments being performed–although with physiological measurements, it can be useful. What I do care a great deal about is seeing with my own eyes the full spectrum of raw data, and not just the selected subset that my trainees might choose to show me.
Does Cetina present any evidence for her assertion about senior scientists? Or is she just talking out of her hat?
“Even if all the other scientists in your field are scrupulously honest, can they ever be as trustworthy as your own direct experience?” I think the answer is, obviously, “of course.” Am I missing something?
Does Cetina present any evidence for her assertion about senior scientists? Or is she just talking out of her hat?
I had exactly the same question. What she says may be true in some fields; it absolutely is not the case in molecular biology, nor was it in 1999.
Reading that more closely:
[S]enior scientists too will frequently insist on seeing or doing things themselves rather than delegate tasks to technical assistants.
Senior scientists, technical assistants: notice a couple of classes of lab personnel missing from that list? I.e., the people who would replicate a key finding 99% of the time? Sorry, but if this passage is representative, Cetina doesn’t have the slightest familiarity with the workings of a real molecular biology lab.
Agreed, JSinger. This looks like another embarrassment for the armchair jockeys.
Could you post the reading list used for the seminar? thanks
Whether this mockery is justified depends completely on the specific nature of the question. If the question was something highly methodologically specific about an experiment–like “what was the typical resistance of the electrode?”–then the person who should be mocked is the questioner, not the speaker.
PP–So true, but I assure you in this instance the prof was being asked a series of highly relevant questions about the experimental setup, not questions about the series….
I agree that she’s a little out of whack with the reality of how molecular biology is practiced. I wonder if it has something to do with contrasts she is trying to highlight with the high energy physics community (which appears to be dealth with in other parts of her book). And two reasons jump to mind why ‘doing it yourself’ is less common in high energy physics: cost of apparatus (obvious) and furthermore I think the strength of the mathematically based theory. Those factors aren’t relevant for most molecular biology expts.
Still though, I have to wonder about this sentence:
The body is trusted to pick up and process what the mind cannot anticipate.
I think that’s garbage. She’s clearly never looked into a microscope to look at a new type of cells, or organ section, etc., that she’s never seen before. When I do that, I am initially bewildered, and can’t ‘see’ what cells are what. Then if I look at them say 5 more times, I get more and more information each time, even though the initial sensory input my body receives is the same.
Perhaps she’s using some other meaning for ‘mind’ and ‘body’ in this case, and I’m using more colloquial ones.
Yes, but you don’t merely sit and think about cells in order to understand what they are or how they work. You did some physical work with your body before those cells got onto that slide, and you are using your eyes to look at them, you are adjusting the microscope, you chose a certain stain or preparation, etc. That is, you are gaining your knowledge through bodily action, not sitting and cogitating about it.
What’s interesting to me is this: the body must be involved in the creation of certain kinds of knowledge. It’s okay for theoretical physicists to sit around and cogitate but for nearly every other kind of knowledge creation in science, you need the body. This seems obvious, and yet there is so much privileging of the mind over the body in science. Indeed we are supposed to, in effect, divorce ourselves from our bodies and their unruly passions and become pure mind in the laboratory. In reality, this simply isn’t possible, mind and body can’t be separated in that way, probably not even for theoretical physicists. For example: some people think and write better with pen on paper, others on a computer; for the pen and paper folks, the quality of the pen can affect the quality of the thought they can achieve. There is something about the physicality of the act of typing or writing that would seem to me to be very different from, say, speaking into a recorder – though someone else might find that mode to be a preferable way of creating.
The body is trusted to pick up and process what the mind cannot anticipate.
What is so controversial about this? If your mind could already anticipate accurately the result of an experiment, there would be little need for you to do it. But your mind can’t anticipate everything that can possibly happen when you set out to do any given experiment; and so we trust our bodies to help us out.
A common theme in this book is the contrast of how high energy physicists make new knowledge and how the molecular biologists do. How the HEP scientists personify their detectors while the biologists treat their animals as machines. Knorr-Cetina spent 20 years in the labs at CERN (as an ethnographer), but – from what I remember – is using another researcher’s data for the biologists. So I think what we have here is a quote that is setting up a contrast later with how the physicists do it – the fact that they can’t really *touch* anything – they use detectors and look for small bumps on a graph whereas the biologists in these studies were working with live animals and sort-of getting their hands dirty.
In any case – no – this doesn’t seem right to me. It seems that all scientists have to rely on other scientists, technicians, suppliers, and a whole web of other actors. There is the craftsmanship of lab work – the transfer of tacit knowledge or embodied knowledge through apprenticeship or hands-on work – but much has to be conveyed other ways or science would never move forward…
Yes, but you don’t merely sit and think about cells in order to understand what they are or how they work.
Well of course; I’m no Aristotelian. I guess I was more reacting to what I read as Knorr Cetina’s hard dichotomy between the body and mind.
The body is trusted to pick up and process what the mind cannot anticipate.
Again, it’s not that the body has no part to play (how else do you actually do the physical expt?), but rather that without the mind, the sensations of the body aren’t given meaning. And the meaning of what you sense changes depending on what your mind expects. So I don’t trust the body alone to detect something without the mind, nor do I think a disembodied mind can discover things about the natural world without sensation.
Now I’ll freely admit that I’m no philosopher, so I may be completely futzing up this discussion of the mind-brain problem.
I regularly want to be involved for part of the data acquisition and write some of the data anaysis codes myself for work done in my research group. (physics) Typically this happens just because I need to teach the students how to do certain things, and it is more efficient to teach by helping them do part of what needs to be done. Sometimes it is to double check that things were done right. And sometimes it is just so that I really understand what has been done. It is not so much wanting to “place oneself in the situation” or anything mysterious like trusting the body and not the mind.
A lot depends on whether it is a relatively new measurement with a home built apparatus where I don’t fully know what to expect (which is more likely than not in my lab), or whether it is a standard procedure for which the recorded data and previous experience tells me pretty much the whole story.
A common theme in this book is the contrast of how high energy physicists make new knowledge and how the molecular biologists do…Knorr-Cetina spent 20 years in the labs at CERN (as an ethnographer), but – from what I remember – is using another researcher’s data for the biologists.
Anyone else seeing the irony here…?
The problem, from an epistemological point of view, is how to arrange the process of research and publication (how to ‘divide de work’, so to say), in order to maximise the (cognitive or whatever) value of the items that end having the status of ‘knowledge’.
A not well known aspect of the process is how the presence of different interests by part of different scientists affects this value.
May I recommend a recent paper with a game-theoretic analysis of this question:
http://www.uned.es/dpto_log/jpzb/docs/2006%20RHETORIC,%20INDUCTION,%20AND%20FREE%20SPEECH%20DILEMMA.pdf
Best
JZ