The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2003
Thomas F. Gieryn
Distancing Science from Religion in
Seventeenth-Century England
Isis
Volume 79, Issue 4
Dec. 1988, 582-593
Index
The Postulate of Institutional Differentiation
Functionalism to Constructivism
An Ambivalent Border between Science and Religion
I FIRST
READ Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England as a
third-year graduate student at Columbia, just after Robert Merton asked me to
become his research assistant. I was struck immediately by the contrast
between the book and then-current research (1975 or so) in the sociology
of science by Merton and his close collaborators Harriet Zuckerman, Jonathan
Cole, and Stephen Cole. To resuscitate
for the moment an archaic conceptual dichotomy, the old stuff was as
steadfastly “externalist” as the new stuff was
Department of Sociology, Indiana
University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405.
582
“intemalist.”
To set Science, Technology and
Society alongside, for example, the Coles’ Social Stratification in
Science must have forced a perplexed neophyte to ask the real sociology
of science to please stand up. [1] Should I write my dissertation on the cultural and economic
factors in society that, shape the growth and direction of science? Or should I write it on social and cognitive
processes within the institution of science, considered autonomously from the
rest of society?
Now, more than a decade
later and some seven hundred miles from Morningside Heights, I have read Science,
Technology and Society for the third or possibly the seventh time. What struck me then as a puzzling choice
between two promising but almost irreconcilable research agendas for the
sociology of science appears now to be the consequence of a postulate that runs
straight through Merton’s studies of science from the 1930s to the 1980s: the
“postulate of institutional differentiation.” In this brief celebration of the Merton thesis
(the eponym has been certified by Isis [2]), I shall identify the
postulate of institutional differentiation and say two things about it: first,
the postulate leads Merton to focus on a seventeenth-century rhetoric that links
science and religious values but to neglect coexistent rhetorical efforts
that distance science from certain elements of religion; second, the
postulate serves as a measure for theoretical progress in sociology of science
over the last half century, especially so for the most recent tumultuous
decade.
The Postulate of Institutional Differentiation
The postulate of
institutional differentiation is a theory of societal change that has become
taken-for-granted sociology. Simply put,
the postulate assumes that society can be analyzed in terms of institutions - science
or religion, politics or family - and that through history these institutions
become differentiated as they approach a never-complete autonomy. Sociologists have yet to reach consensus on
just what is meant by “institution” (a signal that the postulate deserves reconsideration
[3]),
though a definition offered by that introductory sociology textbook now
commanding the largest market share would satisfy some: “a stable cluster of
values, norms, statuses, roles and groups that develops around a basic social
need.” [4] To adopt the structural and
functional language that has served Merton well, institutionalization is the
functional differentiation of society into more-or-less independent subsystems
that satisfy (again, more or less) discrete societal needs: the family
transmits social identities and cultural values to new generations, politics
and the economy allocate scarce material and symbolic resources, religion
prescribes morality and settles ultimate questions, science extends certified
knowledge.
1. Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society
in Seventeenth-Century England (orig. publ. in Osiris, 1938, 4:360-632) (New York: Howard Fertig, 1988); and Jonathan R. Cole and Stephen Cole, Social
Stratification in Science (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1972).
2. Gary A. Abraham, “Misunderstanding the Merton Thesis: A Boundary
Dispute between History and Sociology,” Isis, 1983, 74:368-387. Use of the eponym was sufficiently widespread
by 1968 that Thomas S. Kuhn could refer to “the so-called Merton thesis” in his
entry “History of Science,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, Vol. XIV (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p.
79. See also “Merton Thesis,” in Dictionary
of the History of Science, ed. W. F. Bynum, E. J. Browne, and Roy Porter
(London: Macmillan, 1981).
3. Cf. Abraham, “Misunderstanding the Merton Thesis,” pp. 374-375.
4. Ian Robertson, Sociology, 3rd ed. (New York: Worth, 1987), p.
659.
583
To assume that social
institutions have become, with time, increasingly differentiated implies at
least the following four historical developments. First, behavior within designated institutions
becomes increasingly specialized: activity appropriate or necessary in one
institutional sphere may be neither in another. “Disinterestedness” and “communism” are
functional imperatives if scientists are to achieve the institutional goal of
science, but they are folly as norms for traders on the floor of the New York
Stock Exchange. Second, as institutions
become increasingly autonomous, they assume greater (but never monopolistic) internal
control over the evaluation, reward, and punishment of behavior within
their sphere: physicians police physicians, parents
guide children. Third, institutions
legitimate their activities in an increasingly self-referential way, justifying
themselves by their own values and goals rather than appealing to values or
goals of other institutions. Fourth,
institutions increasingly gather momentum and set their own agendas: social
change is centrifugal, as institutions move away from each other and from a
hypothesized center or origin when they were more of a jumble.
What could be more... sociological?
The postulate of institutional differentiation
solves that once-puzzling contrast between Science, Technology and Society and
Social Stratification in Science: the contrast results from choices to
examine science at an early or later stage in its institutionalization. The study of seventeenth-century science must
be externalist, for the institution then had so little functional autonomy that
its activities could not be disentangled from values and goals of other social
institutions. Internalist
study of reward and evaluation systems within today’s scientific community is
enabled by three centuries of institutionalization, during which the legitimation of science has become self-referential and
many of its activities autonomous. [5] Perhaps this
modest insight will stave off future efforts (so tedious in exegesis of Marx)
to distinguish young Merton from old: externalist or internalist
tendencies in Mertonian sociology of science are due
to historical stages in the institutionalization of science, not to competing
theoretical or methodological principles.
I shall argue in a moment
that the postulate of institutional differentiation is no longer taken for
granted by many sociologists of science who have embraced an alternative
postulate. For now, let me document the
centrality of the postulate for Merton’s 1930s thinking about science. The following set of contentions forms - at
this lofty level of theoretical abstraction - the core of the book: science in
seventeenth-century England was preinstitutionalized;
science then had little of the functional autonomy and institutional
specialization that it has now; the seventeenth-century rise in the prestige or
valuation of science - correlated with a rise in its practice - is explained by
the interdependence of science with other important social institutions;
specifically, scientific activity was legitimated by its affinities with other
values, through linkages to religion via its expression of Puritan values of
utility, rationality, empiricism, and individualism, and to the economy via its
claims to technological solutions of practical problems.
5. This is not meant to imply that externalist studies
of science in the modern period are impossible: as Merton notes repeatedly (see
quotations below), institutional autonomy is never complete. An enduring theme in Merton’s structural
analysis is the attempt to gauge the extent and kind of interdependence among
social institutions; see Merton, Science, Technology (cit. n. 1), pp. ix-x.
584
Textual illustrations from Science,
Technology and Society for the postulate of institutional differentiation
are several and consistent. In a
discussion of how Puritan values served as motive force for the new science,
Merton describes the institutionalized science of today:
Once science has become firmly institutionalized, its
attractions, quite apart from any economic benefits it may bestow, are
those of all elaborated and established social activities. These attractions are essentially twofold:
generally prized opportunities of engaging in socially approved patterns of
association with one’s fellows and the consequent creation of cultural products
which are esteemed by the group. Such
group-sanctioned conduct usually continues unchallenged, with little
questioning of its reason for being. Institutionalized
values are conceived as self-evident and require no vindication.
This was not the situation
of science in seventeenth-century England:
New patterns of conduct must be justified if they are
to take hold and become the foci of social sentiments. A new social order presupposes a new scheme of
values. And so it was with the
new science. Unaided by forces which had
already gripped man’s will, science could claim only a bare modicum of
attention. But in partnership with a
powerful social movement [here, Puritanism] which induced an intense devotion
to the active exercise of designated functions, science was launched in full
career.
After noting that
Puritanism served “to establish [science] more firmly as a socially estimable
pursuit,” Merton again mentions the subsequent differentiation of science and
religion: “The fact that science today is largely and probably completely
divorced from religious sanctions is itself of interest as an example of the
process of secularization.” Later Merton
considers the same process of institutionalization and increasing autonomy with
respect to the relationship between science and its technological applications:
For as usefulness becomes the
exclusive criterion of scientific achievements, the bulk of problems which are
of intrinsic scientific importance can no longer be prosecuted. The
scientists’ exaltation of pure science is thus seen to be a defence
against the invasion of norms which limit possible directions of potential
growth... But with the rise of the modern era [in the
seventeenth century], when science had not yet attained social autonomy, the
emphasis on utility served as a support. Science was socially countenanced, even
esteemed, largely because of its potential use... In the seventeenth
century, the most effective sponsor of science was the utilitarian standard;
today, it occasionally acts as a curb on science.
A final extract illustrates
a persistent theme that the subsequent differentiation of science from religion
was largely unanticipated by seventeenth-century virtuosi and publicists for
science:
At various times, the dominant ideals and sentiments
of a society are chiefly expressed in one or another of these fields, and it is
they which largely determine the social attitudes toward other spheres. When, as was apparently the case during the
seventeenth century, utilitarian norms are dominant, other activities are
evaluated in respect of their apparent accordance with these ideals and, in
this sense, may be said to be dependent upon them... The social values inherent
in the Puritan ethos were such as to lead to an approbation of science because
of a basically utilitarian orientation, couched in religious terms and furthered
by religious authority... The
585
possibility that science, as a means toward a religious end,
would later break away from such religious supports and in a measure tend to
delimit the realm of theologic control, was seemingly
unrealized. [6]
That the postulate of institutional
differentiation is not an incidental part of Merton’s analysis of
seventeenth-century English society is evidenced by his frequent mention of it
in the preface to the 1970 edition of Science, Technology and Society.
A principal sociological idea governing this empirical
inquiry holds that the socially patterned interests, motivations and behaviors
established in one institutional sphere - say, that of religion or economy - are
interdependent with the socially patterned interests, motivations and behavior
obtained in other institutional spheres - say, that of science... Separate
institutional spheres are only partially autonomous, not completely so. It is only after a typically prolonged development
that social institutions, including the institutions of science, acquire a
significant degree of autonomy.
The postulate is later
identified as a “principal assumption underlying the entire book”:
The substantial and persistent development of science
occurs only in societies of a certain kind, which provide both cultural and material
conditions for that development. This
becomes particularly evident in the early days of modern science before it was
established as a major institution with its own, presumably manifest, value. Before it became widely accepted as a value in
its own right, science was required to justify itself to men in terms of values
other than that of knowledge itself... Before science had acquired a
substantial autonomy as an institution, it needed these extraneous sources of legitimation. It was
only later that this dependence of science upon other institutionalized values
began slowly to change. Science
gradually acquired an increasing degree of autonomy, claiming legitimacy as something
good in its own right... But in the seventeenth century, the sometimes
excessive claims for the utilities of science were mainly prelude to its
institutionalization. Once science was
established with a degree of functional autonomy, the doctrine of basic
scientific knowledge as a value in its own right became an integral part of the
creed of scientists. [7]
To the sociologist, all
this talk of “functional autonomy” and “institutionalization” evokes Emile Durkheim, who (more than any of the discipline’s other
founding fathers) made institutional differentiation a staple of social theory.
[8]
6. Ibid., pp. 83, 83-84, 97, 231-232, 78-79. Space does not allow further documentation of
Merton’s assumption of the postulate of institutional differentiation, but
other apposite discussions appear, in Science, Technology, on pp. 103
and 225. The postulate is also at work
in papers published by Merton at roughly the same time. In, e.g., “Science and Democratic Social
Structure,” the classic 1942 paper that spelled out the normative structure of
science, Merton wrote: “Three centuries ago, when the institution of science
could claim little independent warrant for social support, natural philosophers
were likewise led to justify science as a means to the culturally validated
ends of economic utility and the glorification of God. The pursuit of science was then of no
self-evident value. With the unending
flow of achievement, however, the instrumental was transformed into the
terminal, the means into the end. Thus
fortified, the scientist came to regard himself as independent of society and
to consider science as a self-validating enterprise which was in society but
not of it”: Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 2nd
enlarged ed. (New York: Free Press, 1968), p. 605.
7. Merton, Science, Technology, pp. ix, x, xix, xxii-xxiii.
8. In several important ways, Durkheim’s
description of the institutionalization of science anticipates Merton’s: “That
[science] was born indicates that society needed it. For such a complex and [differentiated organization could scarcely
function under a rigid system of blind instinct... One sees a kind of crude and
nascent science appear in religious myth, but still wrapped up in, and mixed up
with, all kinds of incompatible elements. Little by little, it separated from these
alien elements to establish itself independently under its own name and with
its own special methods. This occurred
because society, as it became more complex, made such a development
imperative”: Emile Durkheim, Moral Education (1925;
New York: Free Press, 1961), p. 70. Cf. Durkheim, The Division
of Labor in Society (1893; New York: Free Press, 1984), pp. 119-120. That Merton had studied Durkheim
by the time he wrote Science, Technology and Society is indicated by the
titles of his first two published articles: “Recent French Sociology” (Social
Forces, 1934, 12:537-545) and “Durkheim’s
Division of Labor in Society” (American Journal of Sociology, 1934,
40:319-328).]
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587
Merton does not mention Durkheim in the text of Science, Technology and Society,
but instead records a debt to Max Weber, who, at least for sociologists,
pioneered the study of affinities between the Puritan ethos and nontheological activity in distinctive institutions - the
spirit of capitalism for Weber, the spirit of natural philosophy for Merton. [9] However, it is precisely the Durkheimian tone of the Merton thesis that
makes Science, Technology and Society of a piece with the next five
decades of his sociology of science: the preinstitutionalized
state of science in the seventeenth century compels sociologists to seek its
understanding in relationships to values and goals of extrascientific
institutions, just as the relatively autonomous state of modern science allows
sociologists to seek its understanding in (for example) the internal processes
of reward and evaluation. And it is
precisely the Durkheimian tone of the
Merton thesis that distinguishes Science, Technology and Society from
much research in the sociology of science of the late 1980s.
Functionalism to Constructivism [10]
There is an alternative to
the postulate of institutional differentiation; in this context, it might best
be called the postulate of institutional construction. The “social construction of scientific
knowledge” has been widely used as an umbrella to cover disparate brands of
post-Mertonian sociology of science. [11] The common points of “constructivism” appear to be these:
scientific knowledge is a social construction rather than a mirror of nature;
scientific facts are fabricated in laboratories and in journals, as scientists
persuade others that their account of
9. Only after Merton began his study of the religious commitments of
seventeenth-century natural philosophers did he come upon Weber’ s mandate to
investigate “the significance of ascetic rationalism” for “scientific
empiricism”; see Merton, Science, Technology, p. xvii. For a passing reference to Durkheim
in the notes see ibid., p. 60 n. 10. The Weberian mandate
appears in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905;
New York: Scribners, 1958), pp. 182-183.
10. Talcott Parsons reminds us that Merton has
long objected to the “-ism” form of “functional analysis” on grounds that the
suffix is more appropriate to social movements or hyperbolic ideology than to a
theoretical orientation. But I have
never seen “constructive analysis,” and my only excuse for the two “-isms” is
symmetry. See Parsons, “The Present
Status of ‘Structural-Functional’ Theory in Sociology,” in The Idea of
Social Structure, ed. Lewis A. Coser (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 67.
11. Studies of science and technology from a “social
constructivist” perspective would now make for an extraordinarily long
footnote. A sampler of constructivist
studies of science by key players (e.g., Barry Barnes, Harry Collins, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour,
Michael Lynch, Michael Mulkay, Steve
Woolgar) is found in Knorr-Cetina
and Mulkay, eds., Science Observed (London:
Sage, 1983). The equivalent book for
studies of technology is Wiebe Bijker,
Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of
Technological Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). For the following account of constructivism I
have often relied upon Trevor Pinch, Confronting Nature (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986).
587
nature is true; nature allows for many descriptions
and explanations – “interpretative flexibility” is omnipresent - and
sociologists of science remain agnostic about the truthfulness of one or
another account (or, perhaps better, they see truth as a social accomplishment,
as provisional “closure” of interpretative flexibility); the meaning of a
knowledge claim (or of a “norm” or of a technical procedure) is “contextually
contingent” in that its interpretation resides in localized negotiations at,
for example, a designated laboratory; nature, as socially constructed, is
available for sociological study only through the discursive practices of
scientists (their “inscriptions” in talk or text or pictures). Nuances that diffract constructivism into the
“interest model” or the “strong program” or “discourse analysis” or the
“empirical program of relativism” are trifling compared to the gulf that
separates constructivism from the postulate of institutional differentiation.
Constructivism takes
scientific knowledge as its explanandum - How
are scientific facts manufactured? - and I believe that
it is still safely said that most of its empirical studies have been what once
upon a time were called “internalist.” Back in 1983, Harry Collins could “look
forward to a third stage which will relate the mechanisms of closure to the
wider social and political structure.” [12] While this “third stage” is fast upon us, there is a detectable
reluctance to get constructivism out of the laboratory. Even when Bruno Latour
explains the success of Pasteur’s vaccine for anthrax in terms of “wider” political
or economic or professional factors, “society” is brought into Pasteur’s laboratory
for analysis. [13]
The postulate of
institutional construction is, in effect, the application of constructivism to
the study of science “as an institution.” But that phrasing invites misinterpretation,
because this postulate makes institutions into something distinct from
institutions according to the postulate of institutional differentiation. When constructivism is expanded from a theory
of scientific knowledge to a theory of social knowledge - from a
theory of what scientists know to a theory of what anybody knows – “institutions”
become something other than the objective social facts that Durkheim
and subsequent structural-functionalists presume. Institutions are social constructions in
that their definitions, relationships, values, and goals are negotiated by
ordinary people in ordinary settings. [14] The postulate
12. Constructivists eschew the distinction between “internalism”
and “externalism” because there is no definitive or objective or universal
boundary that separates science from the society around it or in it or of it. For Collins, the first stage of his constructivism
is “the empirical documentation of interpretative flexibility of experimental
results,” while the second stage examines the “way that the limitless debates
made possible by the unlimited interpretative flexibility of data are closed
down”: Harry Collins, “An Empirical Relativist Programme
in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge,” in Science Observed, ed. Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (cit. n.
11), pp. 95-96 (emphasis added).
13. Bruno Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory
and I Will Raise the World,” in Science Observed, ed. Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay, pp. 141-170.
Evidence for progress toward Collins’s
“third stage” comes from Michael Mulkay, Trevor
Pinch, and Malcolm Ashmore, “Colonizing the Mind:
Dilemmas in the Application of Social Science,” Social Studies of Science, 1987,
17:231—256; Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986); and Harry Collins, “Certainty and the Public
Understanding of Science: Science on Television,” Soc. Stud. Sci., 1987, 17:689-714.
14. Once this expansion is made, it becomes obvious that
sociologists of science have no monopoly on “constructivism.” Its central message is found, in differing
guise, throughout the social sciences. In anthropology, Clifford Geertz
writes, “Interpretive explanation... trains its attention on what institutions,
actions, images, utterances, events, customs, all the usual objects of
social-scientific interest, mean to those whose institutions, actions, customs
and so on they are”: Geertz, Local Knowledge (New
York: Basic, 1983), p. 22. In
psychology, Jerome Bruner writes, “If one is arguing [about social ‘realities’ like democracy or equity or even
gross national product, the reality is not the thing, not in the head, but in
the act of arguing and negotiating about the meaning of such concepts. Social realities are not bricks that we trip
over... ,but the meanings that we achieve by the
sharing of human cognitions”: Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), p. 122.
In cultural history, Robert Darnton “attempts
to show not merely what people thought but how they thought it - how they
construed the world, invested it with meaning, and infused it with emotion”: Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (New York: Basic,
1984), p. 3.
And in generic sociology, Anthony Giddens
writes, “For their part, lay actors are social theorists, whose theories help
to constitute the activities and institutions that are the object of study of
specialized social observers or social scientists”: Giddens,
The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. xxxiii.]
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588
of institutional construction focuses sociological
attention on actors’ construction of institutions like science, on what people
mean when they use the words science, scientist, or scientific. Interpretative flexibility still holds:
whatever “objective” features of science one might assume, the institution is
available for multiple and not always consistent descriptions and explanations.
With this new postulate,
institutional differentiation becomes a rhetorical accomplishment (with
consequences that go far beyond rhetoric) rather than a functional necessity or
inevitable structural attendant to modernization. Processes of differentiation are to be found
in actors’ discursive efforts to draw “maps” of their society that show
overlapping, contiguous, or distanced institutional territories - and in their
efforts to persuade others that this or that map is reality. In the next section I suggest that Merton’s
commitment to the postulate of institutional differentiation led him to
emphasize one such map drawn by seventeenth-century English scientists, a map
depicting overlapped territories of science and religion, and a map that
squares with Merton’s assumptions about the preinstitutionalized
state of science at the time. To
substitute the postulate of institutional construction - with its principled
concern for interpretative flexibility-creates the possibility that
relationships between science and religion assume various cartographic
forms and turns up a second map just as common in the rhetoric of
seventeenth-century scientists: a map that puts distance between the
institutions of science and religion.
An Ambivalent Border between Science
and Religion
In their constructivist
analysis of scientific discourse, G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay identify two interpretative repertoires used by
scientists to account for their action and belief. The “empiricist repertoire” “portrays
scientists’ actions and beliefs as following unproblematically
and inescapably from the empirical characteristics of an impersonal natural
world.” The “contingent repertoire”
“depicts professional actions and beliefs as being significantly influenced by
variable factors [i.e., social circumstances] outside the realm of empirical
[natural] phenomena.” [15] No matter that the two repertoires construct inconsistent or even
contradictory accounts of relations among nature, social circumstances, and the
actions or beliefs of scientists. The
sociological game is not to determine which repertoire is “definitively”
correct, but to watch when and where and how each repertoire is used by
scientists and their allies or opponents. Empiricist and
15. G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay,
Opening Pandora’s Box (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 56-57.
589
contingent repertoires coexist as rhetorical resources available
for accounts of scientific action and belief.
The coexistence of
competing or inconsistent repertoires is also the state of affairs when
scientists then or now provide accounts of “science” and its relationship to
other institutions in society. [16] In the seventeenth century, two logically incompatible repertoires are
prevalent in scientists’ interpretations of science. One is the repertoire of partial coincidence,
a map that shows science and religion sharing an overlapped territory that
holds common values and goals. This is
the map that Merton documents so thoroughly, with extracts such as this one
from Robert Boyle’s last will and testament: “Wishing [the Royal Society] a
happy success in their laudable Attempts, to discover the Nature of the Works
of God, and praying that they and all other Searchers into Physical Truths, may
Cordially refer their Attainments to the Glory of the Great Author of Nature,
and to the Comfort of Mankind.” [17] The many examples of the putative overlap of the
institutions of science and religion are taken by Merton as evidence for the preinstitutionalized state of science stipulated by the
postulate of institutional differentiation.
Evidence abounds as well,
in the same seventeenth-century sources, for a second repertoire - this one
mapping out science and religion as discrete institutional territories with
space or distance between them. Thomas
Sprat’s History of the Royal Society is as much a defense of science as
a chronicle, and the apology is obvious in a section that begins: “I will now
proceed to the weightiest, and most solemn part of my
whole undertaking; to make defense of the Royal Society, and this new
Experimental Learning, in respect of the Christian Faith. I am not ignorant in what a slippery place I
now stand.” Why “slippery”? The Royal Society was perched precariously at
the top of two slopes: to slide down one was to land in atheism and
materialism, to slide down the other, in sectarianism and enthusiasm. [18] Neither would be a salubrious ride for natural philosophers,
and they prevented it by rhetorically distancing science from selected elements
of religion, by creating an “intellectual space” for their work. [19]
If seventeenth-century
science grew in harmony with Puritan values of utility, reason, empiricism, and
the glory of God, it also grew by distancing its activities and goals from
other values or sentiments displayed by Puritanism: intolerance, dogmatism,
enthusiasm. [20] One need go no further than Sprat for the oft-heard idea
that sectarian squabbles forestall the advancement of knowledge:
16. Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the
Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional
Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review, 1983, 48:781-795;
Gieryn, George M. Bevins,
and Stephen C. Zehr, “Professionalization
of American Scientists: Public Science and the Creation/Evolution Trials,” Amer.
Sociol. Rev., 1985, 50:329-409; and Gieryn,
“Scientific Communication and National Security,” in Science off the
Pedestal: Social Perspectives on Science and Technology, ed. Daryl Chubin and Ellen Chu (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1989), forthcoming.
17. Quoted in Merton, Science, Technology (cit. n. 1), p. 88.
18. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), p.
345. This double bind is discussed at
length in Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century
England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1958), esp.
Ch. 7.
19. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan
and the Air-Pump (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), p. 332.
20. Following a quotation from Richard Baxter (written in 1675), Merton
notes, “This exaltation of reason and derogation of ‘enthusiasm’ - in the
original etymological sense of the term - is characteristic of the rationalistic
aspect of the Puritan teachings”: Merton, Science, Technology (cit. n.
1), p. [67. Others have suggested that Puritanism was
associated with enthusiasm: “In contemporary usage ‘Puritan’ was an expletive
that either had no precise meaning or implied the very opposite of moderation”:
Barbara Shapiro, John Wilkins, 1614-1672 (Berkeley: Univ. California
Press, 1969), p. 6.]
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590
And now there comes into our view another remarkable
occasion, of the hindrance of the growth of Experimental Philosophy... and that
is the great a-do which has been made, in raising and confirming, and refuting
to many different Sects, and opinions of the Christian Faith. For whatever other hurt or good comes, by such
holy speculative Warrs... yet certainly by this
means, the knowledge of Nature has been very much retarded.
That sentiment compelled leaders of the Royal Society
and its antecedents to exclude debates of theology and morality from their
proceedings. Sprat says that “the first
purpose” of the circle of natural philosophers that formed around John Wilkins
at Wadham College, Oxford, in 1645 “was no
more, than only the satisfaction of breathing a freer air and of conversing in
quiet one with another, without being ingag’d in the
passions, and madness of that dismal Age … [They] were invincible arm’d against all enchantments of Enthusiasm.” [21] Hooke’s 1663 “business and design of the Royal Society”
includes the famous injunction: “To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engynes and Inventions by Experiments - (not meddling with
Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politics, Grammar, Rhetorick or Logick).” Men of diverse beliefs were to be welcome in
the Royal Society, a tolerance not often extended by Puritans during the
Interregnum to those who challenged their faith: “It is to be noted that they
have freely admitted Men of different Religions, countries and Professions of
Life... For they openly profess not to lay the foundation of an
English, Scotch, Irish, Popish or Protestant Philosophy; but a
philosophy of Mankind.” [22]
The ethos associated with
Puritanism during the seventeenth century contained a variety of values and
sentiments, some helpful for bolstering the position of science
(utilitarianism, empiricism, rationalism), but others harmful (sectarianism,
enthusiasm, intolerance, dogmatism, authoritarianism). The rhetorical insertion of cultural space
between science and religion allowed natural philosophers and their advocates
to distinguish their activities from those potentials of religion that could
have been detrimental to their cause. “Spiritual
frensies” had no place, it was often said, in a
science that was set apart from any of the warring sects.
Distancing of science from
religion - but of a different sort - also occurs in discussions of the
relationship between reason and faith (or revelation). In the boundary-work described above,
scientists sought to keep selected elements of religion out of natural
philosophy; here, the rhetorical goal is to keep elements of science out of
religion. On the question of reason and
revelation, there is more diversity of opinion among the virtuosi (and their
publicists) when compared to their near-uniform denunciation of sectarian
intolerance. [23] Many would have agreed with Joseph Glanvill
that “Faith befriends Reason; and Reason serves
21. Sprat, History (cit. n. 18), pp. 25, 53.
22. Quoting Hooke from Charles R. Weld, A
History of the Royal Society (London, 1848), p. 146; and Sprat, History,
pp. 62-63.
23. Westfall, Science and Religion (cit. n. 18), pp. 106-145.
Reason was also used to distance right
religion from its enthusiastic perversions, as Westfall notes in a discussion
of Joseph Glanvill: ibid.,
p. 176.
591
Religion, and therefore they cannot clash. They are both certain, both the truths of God;
and one truth does not interfere with another.” But it is a good fence that makes these two
sources of knowledge good neighbors. Sprat
writes that “the Spiritual and Supernatural part of Christianity no Philosophy
can reach” and warns “that the Reason of men not be over-reached.” Glanvill lists the
“Principles of Pure Faith” that “are known only by Divine Testimony,” “the
Miraculous Conception, the Incarnation, and the Trinity,” and writes about
them: “But for… those of pure Revelation, Reason cannot prove them immediately;
nor is it to be expected that it should: For they are matters of Testimony; and
we are no more to look for immediate proof from Reason of those things.” Many of God’s mysteries are inaccessible to
the fallible human reason, as Robert Boyle suggests: “If revelation makes us
refuse the authority of philosophy ‘tis in such points where reason itself
tells us that philosophy ought to have no authority, unless about such points
revelation be silent.” [24]
The distanced and friendly
coexistence of reason and faith is also justified by arguments for their
functional differentiation: they work for different - albeit congruent - ends:
“It cannot therefore be suspected that the Church of England should look with
jealous eyes on this Attempt [efforts of the Royal Society], which makes no
change in the principles of men’s consciences, but chiefly aims at the increase
of Inventions about the works of their hands.” For Glanvill, the
functional differentiation of science and religion made it likely that science
would discover many things not made available in holy testimony: “Philosophy teacheth many things which are not revealed in Scripture;
for this was not intended to instruct men in the affairs of Nature, but its
design is, to direct Mankind, and even those of the plainest understanding, in
life and manners, and to propose to us the way of Happiness.” [25] The rhetorical differentiation of reason from faith seems
designed to protect both religion and science from their mutual interference,
perhaps dissuading those who would see science sliding inexorably toward
materialism or atheism.
These few selections from
seventeenth-century rhetoric suggest that religion (at least, identified bits
of it) was as much the foil for science as its legitimator.
Two questions remain. Why did seventeenth-century English scientists
(and publicists) rhetorically and cartographically distance or differentiate
science from religion while at the same time legitimating one by the
institutional values and goals of the other? And why did Merton make little mention of the
repertoire of distancing in Science, Technology and Society? Despite the prima facie incompatibility
of the two maps of science and religion, their rhetorical coexistence was
functional for efforts by scientists to promote their activities (as Latour would put it) by enlisting allies and quelling
enemies. To overlap science and religion
allowed scientists to enlist support from the many who placed God and faith at
the core of the social order. As Merton
notes, “Science, no less than literature and politics, was still, to some
extent, subject to approval by the clergy,” a conclusion that need not presume
that the virtuosi and their apologists were disingenuous or insincere in their
religious commitments. On the other
24. Joseph Glanvill, Defense of Reason in
the Affairs of Religion (1670), p. 207; Sprat, History, pp. 354,
359; Glanvill, Defense of Reason, pp. 171,
174; and Royal Society, Boyle Papers, Vol. I, fol. 37, as
quoted in Westfall, Science and Religion, p. 173.
25. Sprat, History (cit. n. 18), p. 371; and Joseph Glanvill, Philosophia pia (1671), p. 119.
592
hand, to distance science from religion allowed natural philosophers
to enlist support from those who feared or loathed potential correlates of
religious faith: sectarianism, enthusiasm, dogmatism, intolerance. [26] The coexisting maps may have alleviated the fear that
science would usurp the cultural authority of religion, by suggesting that the
two institutions pursued a common agenda but in complementary ways. Perhaps the growing prestige and practice of
science in seventeenth-century England was due as much to
rhetorical efforts that distanced science from religion as to rhetorical
efforts that linked the institutions through the values they shared. The coexistence of these logically
incompatible but ideologically effective interpretations may be the centerpiece
of a constructivist account of the rise of modern science (a conclusion that I
am far from the first to reach [27]).
Why, then, did Merton give
so little attention to efforts at distancing science from religion? My contention is neither that Merton ignored
the “meaning” of science in the seventeenth century [28] nor that the
meaning he discerns is inaccurate or unsubstantiated - rather, it is
incomplete. Merton emphasizes a
repertoire of institutional coincidence that is consistent with a Durkheimian vision of preinstitutionalized
science. Perhaps it was the postulate of
institutional differentiation that led Merton to set aside rhetorical
differentiations of science from religion as anomalous or premature
interpretations of two institutions that (for him) did not become detached
until well after the seventeenth century.
Relationships between
science and religion are open to interpretative flexibility, and this is as
much the case for the twentieth century as for the seventeenth. Whether science then or now
is institutionalized, whether science is dependent upon religion or autonomous,
is a matter for people to negotiate as sociologists watch. Although logicians might be bothered by the
apparent inconsistency in seventeenth-century interpretations of science - where
an injunction “to the Glory of the Great Author of Nature” coexists with an
injunction “not to intermeddle in Spiritual things” - sociologists can and
should refrain from the conclusion that only one interpretation describes how
things really were.
It is not always the case
that one sees farther by standing on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes one merely gets to look in a
different direction, but the shoulders still help a lot.
26. Merton, Science, Technology (cit. n. 1), p. 91. Those who feared the correlates came to be
known as “latitudinarians”; see Shapiro, John Wilkins (cit. n. 20).
27. “For Boyle and the Royal Society there was to be a strict
boundary between natural philosophy and political discussion... However, the
relationship stipulated between natural philosophy and theology was more
problematic. On the one hand,
theological discussions had a tendency to divide and corrode and should not, as
Sprat and others said, be meddled with.
On the other hand, the practice of natural philosophy was to be
subservient to the higher truths of proper Christian religion”: Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan (cit. n. 19), p. 153.
Cf. Shapiro, John Wilkins, pp.
52-53. Explicitly constructivist
examinations of science in seventeenth-century England include Peter W. G.
Wright, “On the Boundaries of Science in Seventeenth Century England,” in Sciences
and Cultures, ed. Everett Mendelsohn and Yehuda Elkana (Sociology of the
Sciences Yearbook, 1981) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981), pp. 77-100; and Mendelsohn,
“The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge,” in The Social Production
of Scientific Knowledge, ed. Mendelsohn, Peter Weingart, and Richard Whitley (Sociology of the Sciences
Yearbook, 1977) (Dordrecht: Reidel,
1977), pp. 3-26.
28. “It is possible to arrive at an understanding of
the values and sentiments which lent meaning to certain of the activities,
among them science and technology, of seventeenth century man”: Merton, Science,
Technology, p. 60.
593
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2003