Table Of ContentThe Invention of
Modern Science
Isabelle Stengers
Translated by Daniel IV. Smith
Theory out of Bounds Volume 19
M
IN
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University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
This translation would not have been possible
without the support of a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship
in the School of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales,
whose generosity is gratefully acknowledged.
Copyright 2000 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Originally published as Llnvemion des sciences modemes (Paris: La Decouverte, 1993).
Copyright 1993 Gius. Laterz.a & Figli Spa, Roma-Bari. This book is a result of
the cooperation between Laterza Publishing House and Sigma Tau Foundation
in the “Lezioni Italiane” series. The English-language edition has been
arranged through the mediation of Eulama Literary Agency.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS C AT A LOG 1NTG-I N - PI B L1 C ATIO N DATA
Stengers, Isabelle.
[Invention des sciences modemes. English]
The invention of modern science / Isabelle Stengers ; translated by
Daniel W. Smith,
p. cm. — (Theory out of bounds ; v. 19)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3055-0 (he : acid-free paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3056-9 (pb :
acid-free paper)
1. Discoveries in science. 2. Science — Philosophy. I. Title.
II. Series.
Q180.55.D57 S7413 2000
501— dc21
00-008711
The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
For Felix Guattari and Bruno Latour,
in memory of an encounter that never took place.
Contents
PART I. Explorations l
Chapter 1. The Sciences and Their Interpreters 3
Scandals — Autonomy—A Destructive Science?—The Leibnizian Constraint
Chapter 2. Science and Nonscience 21
In the Name of Science — Break or Demarcation? — Popper’s Question —
The Unfindable Criterion — One Historical Tradition among Others?
Chapter 3. The Force of History 39
The Singularity of the History of the Sciences — The Three Worlds —
Clarifying the Paradigm
PART II. Construction 55
Chapter 4. Irony and Humor 57
Constructing a Difference — Great Divisions—The Political Invention of
the Sciences — On the Event
Chapter 5. Science under the Sign of the Event 71
In Search of a Recommencement — The Power of Fiction — A New Use of
Reason?—The Inclined Plane
Chapter 6. Making History 89
Negative Truth — Authors to Interest—Bringing into Existence — Mediators-
Political Questions
PART III. Propositions 109
Chapter 7. An Available World? 111
The Power in Histories — Mobilization — The Patron’s Job — The Politics
of Networks
Chapter 8. Subject and Object 131
What Singularity for the Sciences?—Mathematical Fictions — Darwin’s Heirs
Demoralizing History — “What Does He Want from Me?”
Chapter 9. Becomings 151
How to Resist? — Nomads of the Third World — The Production of Expertise
A Return to the Sophists
Notes 169
Index 179
I
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Explorations
T h e Sciences and__
Their Interpreters
Scandals
a d istu rb in g rumor has been spreading in the world of scientists. It seems that
there are some researchers — specialists in the human sciences, no less—who are
challenging the ideal of a pure science. A field is being constituted, born in England
some twenty years ago,1 prospering in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but now present
in France.2 This field, known under various names — “social studies in science,”
“sociology of the sciences,” “anthropology of the sciences” — puts in question any
separation between the sciences and society. The researchers it brings together
would dare to claim to study science as a social undertaking like any other, neither
more detached from the cares of the world nor more universal or rational than any
other practice. They no longer denounce the numerous infidelities committed by
scientists against their own norms of autonomy and objectivity, but consider these
very norms to be empty, as if every science were “impure” by nature and not be- 1<
cause of its deviation from an ideal.
The thinkers of science sharpen their weapons and rise to the
defense of a threatened cause. Some of them rely on the very classical argument of
retaliation [retorsion]. It has been useful, though it still keeps to old paths. In saying
that science is a social undertaking, doesn’t one subordinate it to the categories of
sociology? Now, sociology is a science, and in this case it is a science that is trying
to become a superscience, the science that explains all others. But how could it escape
the very disqualification it brings on the other sciences? Thus, sociology disqualifies
itself and cannot claim to impose its interpretive grid. Others play the card of real
ism: if everything is only a social bond, that is, conventional and arbitrary, how have
we been able to send men to the moon (and, one might add, to explode atom bombs)?
When the need arises, don’t sociologists of science, like everyone else, run to the doc
tor, who prescribes vaccines and antibiotics, which are products of science? Others
suggest that the putting in question of scientific objectivity be assimilated to the
justification of a brutal law of the strongest. Civilization is in danger!
The anxiety of the scientific world is strange, because it repeats,
as if in a delayed reaction, the anxiety that seized the small world of philosophers of
science when the historian Thomas Kuhn proposed, in 1962, the category of “normal
science.” No, asserted Kuhn, the practicing scientist of a given science is not the
glorious illustration of a critical mind and the lucid rationality, which these philoso
phers tried to characterize through the scientist. Scientists do what they have learned
to do. They treat the phenomena that seem to be the concern of their discipline in
accordance with a “paradigm”—which is both a practical and a theoretical model —
that seems obvious to them, and in relation to which they have very little distance.
Worse, since every paradigm determines the legitimate questions and the criteria
according to which responses can be recognized as acceptable, it is impossible to
construct a third position “outside the paradigm” from whence the philosopher would
be able to evaluate the respective merits of rival interpretations (thesis of noncom-
mensurability). Worse yet, the scientist’s subordination to the paradigm of his com
munity is not a fault. According to Kuhn, what we call “scientific progress”—the
cumulative process thanks to which ever more phenomena are becoming intelligible,
technologically controllable, and theoretically interpretable — depends on it. And he
describes in harsh terms the lucidity of scientists who belong to disciplines without
a paradigm: either they argue with each other, tear each other apart, accuse one an
other of ideological biases, or else they coexist in the indifference of schools sanc
tioned by the names of their founders. We speak of “Piagetian” psychology, “Saus-
surean” linguistics, “Levi-Straussian” ethnology, and the very adjective signals to
their happy colleagues that here science does not have the power to make scientists
agree. We do not speak of “Crickian” biology or “Heisenbergian” quantum mechan
ics, do we?
T he philosophers of science exhibited a considerable discontent.
Of course, they reverted to the argument of retaliation [retorsion]: Kuhn proposes
4 , 5
the idea of a “paradigm” to the historian and philosopher of science, and thus he
has no right, according to these very terms, to claim to describe the sciences “as
they really are.” They claimed that it was impossible to put an outmoded science,
like the one that thought of water as an element, on the same level as today’s science,
which water confirms by letting itself be ruthlessly synthesized and decomposed.
They denounced the tragedy for civilization entailed by reduction of science to mob
psychology, to a psychology of irrational crowds subject to the effects of fashion and
imitation.
The majority of scientists, however, did not have, the same reac
tion at all. They loved Kuhn’s “paradigms” enormously. They recognized in them a
pertinent description of their activity. The notion of a “paradigmatic revolution,” in
which one paradigm displaces another, was for them an appropriate way to describe
their discipline’s history. And the human sciences began to dream of a paradigm that
would one day bestow on them the progressive mode of their happy colleagues. “New
paradigms” began to flourish almost everywhere, from systems theory to anthropol
ogy or sociology.
Why did something that scandalized the philosophers satisfy so
many scientists? And why are they so scandalized now? Hadn’t Kuhn already stressed
the social dimension of the sciences by showing that the scientist must be described
as a member of a community and not as a rational and lucid individual? It is the
question of this curious delayed reaction that will be my point of departure.
Autonomy ' ■ '.L -.'a "’'■■f'XP ‘j > -■
We can, I believe, affirm that, from the viewpoint of scientists, Kuhn’s description!
preserves the essential thing: the autonomy of a scientific community in relation to
its political and social environment. This autonomy does more than simply preserve
the community; it institutes this community as the norm and as the condition of pos- 1
sibility for the fruitful exercise of a science, whether it is a question of the practice
of a normal science or the paradigmatic revolutions that rejuvenate it. Not only are
scientists not asked to give an account of their choices and research priorities, but it
is just and normal that they are unable to provide such an account. What makes the
paradigm so fruitful is its largely tacit character, transmitted by the pedagogical arti
fice of textbook examples and problems to resolve. Because they do not need to ef
fect a critical distancing, scientists can confront the most disconcerting phenomena
with confidence, deciphering them without vertigo, in the mode of resemblance to
their paradigmatic object. Moreover, this confidence also explains the fruitful scandal
The Sciences and Their Interpreters
that Kuhn associated with the notion of the “anomaly,” a stumbling point where a
difference is recognized as significant, putting in question not the scientist’s compe
tence, but the paradigm itself.
According to Kuhn, the paradigm thus explains not only the cu
mulative conquest, but also the invention of the new. The anomaly, both an agent
provocateur and a point of fixation, puts the scientist in a state of “tension”; he or she
becomes the vector of a creativity that perhaps would not have inspired a lucid — that
is, skeptical — attitude toward the power of theories. Correlatively, the indifference
of the community toward difficulties or incomprehensible results is justified. In itself,
no brute, abnormal “fact” has the power to be recognized as an anomaly. And no
anomaly gives the person who recognizes it the power to claim the attention of the
collectivity. The “paradigmatic crisis” becomes collective when the scientist has gained
the power to counterinterpret the results of his colleagues, when a new paradigm,
the bearer of a new type of intelligibility, imposes a choice. Lucidity is the result of
a crisis; it must be conquered and cannot be considered normal.
The reading proposed by Thomas Kuhn thus justifies a radical
differentiation between a scientific community, produced by its own his ton-, endowed
with instruments that inseparably integrate production (research) and reproduction
(the training of those authorized to participate in this research), and a milieu that, if
it wishes to benefit from the repercussions of this activity, must be content with
maintaining it without making it give an account of itself. With regard to the scien
tist at work, no one has to benefit from a relation of force that would allow him or her
, to impose questions that are not the “good” questions of the community. Every at-
: tack on the autonomy of a community working under the; paradigm amounts to
■ “killing the goose with the golden eggs,” to attacking the very condition of possibility
I of scientific progress.
In fact, Thomas Kuhn did not invent this argument, which pro
hibits one from asking scientists to give an account of their choices and priorities.
Tn 1958, the physicist Michael Polanyi had already linked the fruitfulness of scien
tific research to a “tacit knowledge,” which is very different from knowledge that
deals with the explicit or explainable contents of science. Polanyi’s scientist is similar
to a connoisseur, in the English sense of an “expert,” and his competence is insepa
rable from an engagement that implies intelligence, but also gestures, perception, pas
sion, belief.3
Polanyi emphasized the “phenomenological” description of the
scientist at work more than the way scientific communities ensure the transmission of
their mode of engagement. But for all that, his position was not devoid of any socio-
