vehicles is that it provides concrete reference points for the movement’s activities, continually reminding the movement’s members - especially those who have not had the relevant sensitizing experiences - that it is heading the entire society in the right direction.  However, a movement that is exclusively focused in this way easily falls victim to its own success, as the movement’s ability to adapt to the mainstream gets mistaken for its ability to bend the mainstream to its will.  In short, the movement becomes captive to its immediate context.

Thus, the dynamic credibility of movements depends on creatively resolving the tension between cultishness and co-optation.  Of course, this is easier said than done.  Most contemporary movements display both tendencies at once.  The sharp divide in the strategy and tactics of so-called “radical” and “liberal” feminism within the women’s movement may be the clearest contemporary exemplar of the difference between European and North American styles of movement thinking.  Many radical feminists ground the distinctive consciousness of women in their biological differences from men, whereas liberal feminists regard gender as a one of several sociohistorical markers of inequities in a system that aims to eliminate all such inequities.  The history of black activism in the United States has reproduced the difference between the European and North American styles in successive generations, but each time in a new register: consider W. E. B. Du Bois versus Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King, and Molefi Asante versus Cornel West.  To be sure, the specific terms of each disagreement were strongly colored by the major political issues of its day, but not so as to obscure the fundamental difference

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between the European and North American styles of movement thinking in each case.

When it comes to sustaining a movement’s dynamic credibility, the tension in need of resolution is rather different from Kuhn’s “essential tension” of tradition and innovation, referred to in the title of his collected essays, which defines a paradigm’s form of knowledge.  According to Kuhn, for the latest generation of scientists to remain motivated, they must be led to believe that even a revolutionary theory that came from “left field,” such as Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection or Einstein’s theory of special relativity, could have just as easily come from establishment science.  This leads to the double truth that distinguishes the historical consciousness of historians and scientists.  In contrast, the essential tension defining movement knowledge involves showing that the disparate historical origins of various interest groups in fact converge in common cause.  On the one hand, the goal is to keep an already existing community intact by homogenizing the more disparate features of its history; on the other, it is also to enlarge the community’s constituency by integrating its disparate strands into one trajectory.  The way to meet both goals at once is to recruit the larger society, so that differences within the movement become the terms in which those outside the movement define themselves.  This is the ultimate trick for the public intellectual to turn.

Movements are especially effective in this regard during periods of socio-economic dislocation, when the old social categories fail to capture emerging political realignments.  Regardless of what people think of a movement on its own terms, the movement’s discourse may nevertheless provide the only publicly accessible framework for understanding the full range of on-going changes.  A good case in point is the legacy of socialism, no small part of which was that factory owners came to think of themselves as a “class” in systemic opposition to the class represented by their employees.

Of course, the factory owners did not become card-carrying socialists once they started to think in terms of class.  However, by accepting this movement-inspired designation as their own, they unwittingly opened themselves to certain ways of describing and explaining existing divisions in society that eventually made it easier to justify the intervention of the state in economic affairs.  Wealth that would have appeared, early in the nineteenth century, to be the result of the factory owner’s individual initiative was more commonly seen, by the end of the century, as the product of some sort of exploitation.  This transition enabled the taxation of factory owners and the protection of workers to be regarded as reciprocal policy measures in the emerging welfare state.  Thus, owners have increasingly had to shoulder the burden of showing that they are entitled to keep all

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the wealth produced under their name.  In short, the discourse community created by a social movement can be politically effective simply by altering the “spin” that different social groups give to one another’s activities, which in turn opens new spaces for action, especially by third-party regulatory agencies.

Considered in light of Kuhn’s overriding concern for consensus formation in science, a striking feature of the trajectory common to Wuthnow’s three movements is that the peak of their influence corresponded to a high level of internal division.  In each case, opinion was divided over an abstract philosophical question in ways that had clear implications for the parameters of legitimate collective action.  The Protestant Reformers disputed interpretations of the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers.  The Enlightenment wits argued about humanity’s capacity for self-governance.  Socialists vied over whether industrial capitalism and parliamentary democracy were preconditions or impediments to the ideal society.  Rather unlike the professional posture of a Kuhnian paradigm, the parties to these three movements did not presume that concerted practical action had to await resolution of these fundamental questions.  On the contrary, the more the movements increased their transformative capacity, the wider the circle of people who felt that their interests were somehow implicated in the swirl of opposing discourses.

Here it is worth recalling Wuthnow’s own roots in the sociology of religion, which, following Max Weber, has regarded institutionalization - the formation of doctrinal consensus and its ritualized reinforcement - as sapping the spirit that marked a religion’s charismatic origins. ⁴⁸  Under the Weberian gaze, established churches appear as the domestication of more ecstatic forms of religious experience.  Similarly, the kind of divisiveness that eventually diminished the impact of the movements that Wuthnow studied was that of sectarian withdrawal, often under the guise of “purity”: that is, either a refusal to argue with doctrinal opponents or a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of any existing authority. ⁴⁹ Indeed, it would not be far-fetched to think of consensus-based normal science as a strategic retreat from the spirit of inquiry in just this sense, especially if “inquiry” is conceived in the Popperian sense of a sustained willingness to challenge the status quo and to entertain opposing arguments: “permanent revolution,” as he put it in a bit of anti-Kuhnian pique. ⁵⁰  In that case, what Kuhn regarded as a mark of collective self-discipline on the part of the founders

48. An excellent recent attempt to put Weber’s perspective in the context of fin de siècle fears of degeneration is Herman 1997, esp. 128.

49. For contemporary corroboration of this point, see Frey, Dietz, and Kalof 1992.

50. See esp. Popper 1975.

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of the Royal Society to exclude politics, religion, and morals from their purview would come to be seen as an institutionalized failure of nerve.  And this is precisely the image that I wish to promote.

The Reformation, the Enlightenment, and socialism each left the state stronger, not because the intellectuals supported the status quo (often they did not) but because their disputes reinforced the idea that there was a single, albeit elusive, source of authority, control over which could be determined by publicly contestable means. ⁵¹  In theory the ultimate source may have been Truth, but in practice the state turned out to be the unintended beneficiary of each movement’s relentlessly critical inquiry.  Despite the ambiguous lessons contained in this conclusion, the fact that the beneficiary was the state - and not a private sector of society - offers a ray of hope of movements contributing to the revival of the public sphere.

The unique sociological success of science in the twentieth century has been its ability to dictate to the state the terms of its preservation.  In effect, the scientific community has required that the state adopt its leading theories as a civil religion in return for providing authoritative means for organizing and mobilizing the populace. ⁵²  An unusual feature of this process is that whereas religion is typically integrated into the daily lives of people who can provide religiously sanctioned justifications for their practices (e.g., food intake in terms of dietary laws), science maintains its hold on society largely through public accounting procedures - such as examinations of mental and physical competence - that still have relatively little connection to people’s lives, as reflected in their persistent ignorance of what informs those procedures.

This helps explain the current crisis in the “public understanding of science” in the English-speaking world, the analogue of which would be difficult to imagine in the case of religion - not because people are more secure in their religious beliefs but because those who reject religion have a better grasp of what they are rejecting than those who reject science. ⁵³  Since science was embraced by state agencies before it gained much grassroots support in the general public, it has continued to appear an artificial feature of contemporary societies, with the Enlightenment ideal of the “citizen scientist” who can think for herself proving increasingly elusive.

51. See Wuthnow 1989, 577.  The idea of the state as the repository of Truth is, of course, a feature of Hegel’s philosophy of history.

52. We discussed the origins of this process in chapter 2, section 7, when examining the long-term implications of Planck’s victory over Mach.

53. See Fuller 1997d, esp. chaps. 1and 4.

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4. High and Low Church Secularizations of Science

The process by which Christendom came to be secularized may prove a useful guide to what lies ahead for science.  As the European states secularized, they refused to grant any religion a monopoly over political and economic resources, while protecting the rights of any religion to profess its creed within state borders.  The immediate cause of secularization was the destabilizing effect of religious wars on the emerging nation-states of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  The decoupling of political legitimation from religious affiliation was just as much the product of Machiavellian survival instincts as of any interest in ensuring maximum freedom of expression.  And while the institutional ascendancy of the natural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century is often regarded as a major vehicle of secularization, we may have reached a point at the end of the twentieth century - given the concentration of state resources on scientific research - that calls for the secularization of science itself. ⁵⁴  To paraphrase the Enlightenment critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the true test of science as a form of knowledge may be whether it can command believers even after state support has been removed.

If the secularization model is an apt one, we may speak of two “waves” in the critique of the social dimensions of science and technology, akin to the waves of secularization in the history of modern Christianity.  I have called the two waves, Low Church, which resembles the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and High Church, which is akin to the radical hermeneutics of the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which I discussed in chapters 1 and 2 under the rubric of “critical-historical theology.”  In terms of the “essential tension” in Western epistemology raised in the previous section, the Low Church is belief oriented, while the High Church is justification oriented. ⁵⁵

54. Among major mainstream economists, the idea that, by the second half of the twentieth century, science had become “the secular religion of materialistic society,” has been most clearly observed in Johnson 1965, esp. 141.

55. I was inspired to draw the Low/High Church distinction in STS in response to Juan Ilerbaig, a Spaniard studying in the United States who was concerned that the field was becoming a victim of its own academic success by increasing the incestuousness of its theoretical debates.  Consequently, the original Low Church concern with a reform of the functions of science and technology in society at large was at risk of being completely lost.  See Fuller 1992d; also Fuller 1993b, xiii.  As of this writing, the only STS textbook that clearly grounds the origins of the field in Low Church movement-oriented concerns is in Spanish: Gonzalez Garcia, Lopez Cerezo, and Luján 1996.  To avoid confusion, I must observe that Gonzalez Garcia, Lopez Cerezo, and Lujan draw a distinction between “European” and “North American” STS that reverses the most natural reading of “European” and “North American” approaches to social movements I discussed in the previous section.  This reversal makes sense, [once we keep in mind that Gonzalez Garcia, LOpez Cerezo, and Luján are talking about the location of STSers (the Europeans tending to be High Church, and the North Americans Low Church), whereas I was referring to the location of social movement researchers, i.e., the people who would study STS as a social movement.  Needless to say, the reason for this reversal in location between the studiers and studied would be worth pursuing.

In the United States, Low Church members tend to affiliate with the National Association for Science and Technology in Society (NASTS), whereas the High Church is associated with the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).  I first publicly presented this schism in STS at a conference in Copenhagen in October 1992, to which Bruno Latour responded that he had not realized that a branch of STS was rooted in the social activism of the 1960s (and then went on to speak disdainfully about the 1960s, for reasons that may reflect the French experience detailed in chapter 7, section 6).

HHC: [bracketed] displayed on page 410 of original.

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In the first wave, just as Luther, Calvin, and their associates called for the Church to recover its spiritual roots from corrupt material involvements, the 1960s witnessed the rise of scientists who “conscientiously objected” to their colleagues’ complicity with the state in escalating the Cold War.  A secularized science would never have given us the nuclear arms race, just as a Protestantized Christianity in the Middle Ages would not have been able to mobilize the material and spiritual resources needed to field a series of Crusades against Islam.  Indeed, these insider critics of science were more likely to speak in terms of programs in “Science, Technology, and Society,” in which courses in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science were part of the core of the science curriculum, not merely enrichment courses taught outside science departments - let alone in autonomous science and technology studies graduate programs that award doctorates for research that shadow the activities of scientists without ever coming to terms with their normative implications. ⁵⁶  In this context, the late epistemological anarchist Paul Feyerabend appears as the purest of Protestants in calling for the complete divestiture of state support for science as the best way of retrieving the spirit of critical inquiry from Big Science’s inhibiting financial and institutional arrangements.  Extending the Protestant analogy would involve including the recent charges of scientific misconduct, which have precedent in the personal corruption of Church officials that made the calls for reform most vivid for the average devout Christian.

The second wave of secularization occurred once the Enlightenment transformed the intellectual orientation of academic theology from the professional training of clerics to a form of critical inquiry conducted independently of religious authorities.  The last and most accomplished generation

56. For this phase of STS history, see Cutcliffe 1989.  Among the science critics were, in the United Kingdom, the husband-and-wife team of brain scientist Steven and sociologist Hilary Rose, and, in the United States, materials scientist Rustum Roy, marine biologist Rachel Carson, and botanist Barry Commoner.  These latter-day descendants of the Protestant Reformers had little to do with the establishment of the science and technology studies departments.

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of these theologians constituted the Young Hegelians under whose spell Karl Marx fell during his student years.  David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity were the texts from this period (the 1830s) that have had the longest impact.  Much in the spirit of post-Strong Programme sociologists of science who have subjected the laboratory to ethnographic scrutiny, these theologians applied the latest techniques of literary archaeology and naturalistic social theory to demystify the Scriptures.  Far from blaspheming God, they believed their demystified readings of early Church history liberated genuine spirituality from the superstition and idolatry that remained the primary means by which the pastoral clergy kept believers in line.  However, the ironic style of these authors put them seriously at odds with both political and religious authorities, causing many of them to lose their professorships and preventing others - such as Marx himself - from ever pursuing academic careers.

The young Karl Marx wrote The German Ideology as a series of didactic reflections on how it was possible for the Young Hegelians, despite the attention they paid to the material conditions of Christianity, to be so oblivious to the material conditions of their own times, and hence be caught off guard by those who accused them of sacrilege. ⁵⁷  Perhaps a similar book is now in order, given the surprise that STS practitioners have expressed about the reception that the scientific community has given their work, which has culminated in the recent Science Wars, as recounted in chapter 7, section 5.  It would seem that today’s science secularizers have underestimated the extent to which threatening the transcendental rhetoric of science threatens science itself.

So far, in terms of political effectiveness, the High Church would seem to suffer in comparison with the Low Church.  However, in retrospect, some Low Church attacks on the scientific establishment may also have been misdirected, at least insofar as they imputed much more power to the sheer possession of scientific knowledge than to the social conditions that enable science to have its momentous consequences.  The most extreme version of this sentiment is a scientific version of Luddism that argues that it would have been better never to have developed atomic physics because of the key role it later played in the development of nuclear weapons. ⁵⁸  In the face of these extreme sentiments, the High Church tendency to reduce science to a language game has been helpful.  It draws attention to the fact that when it comes to the sciences’ social disposition, what matters is not

57. Marx 1970.  On The German Ideology as an attempt to propel the hermeneutical differences among the Young Hegelians into a political context, see Meister 1991, esp. 86 ff.

58. This viewpoint is by no means limited to the Low Church.  Consider the stand taken by the Oxford metaphysician, Michael Dummett, as recounted above in chapter 2, note 106.

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the set of statements and equations most closely associated with a science’s cognitive dimension, but whether these tokens in the scientific language game are made of “glass beads” (as in the Hermann Hesse novel by that name) or money and people.  In short, the High and Low Church may ultimately compensate for each other’s deficiencies.

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5. Reinventing the University by Rediscovering the Contexts of Discovery and Justification

Apropos the Low Church tendency to conflate the propositional content of scientific knowledge with the social conditions that enable it to possess worldly power, a great advantage of characterizing the history of science under the rubric of movement rather than paradigm is that it draws attention to the alignment of words and deeds – “ideology” and “technology,” as Alvin Gouldner would have put it - that determines the precise social form that science takes:  Is it a Platonic academic cult insulated from the material world or the technoscientific infrastructure through which the material world transpires?  The historic site for resolving that tension has been the university.

Until quite recently, the folk ontology of the university has been that of a relatively staid and stable institution, reflecting its dual role in extending the frontiers of knowledge in research, while reproducing the existing social order in education. ⁵⁹  In chapter  5, section 3, we saw that already by the mid-1960s, Structure bolstered this dual process in the face of student revolts by legitimating academic disciplines, as institutionalized in the department structure of universities.  But as was equally shown in chapter 2, section 7, the duality of research and teaching, especially as pursued by paradigm-driven sciences, has been increasingly in tension over the course of the twentieth century.  Indeed, truth be told, stability has rarely been the hallmark of university life.  At various points in history, especially in late thirteenth-century Paris and early nineteenth-century Germany, the university was quite explicitly the crucible in which social change was forged - more a home for movements than paradigms.  These were periods of considerable socioeconomic dislocation and political unrest, which forced people to seek new categories for understanding their new life situations.  As guardians of society’s reproduction process, educators were in an especially good position to influence the character of the changes.  Back then the universities controlled “the means of analysis.”  Today they are controlled by think tanks

59.Fuller 1999b, pt. 2, elaborates this thesis.

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Alasdair Maclntyre has argued that academics were at the peak of their collective public influence in thirteenth-century Paris. ⁶⁰  He tells of how the Parisian doctors were worried that the early universities were devolving into mere training centers for legal, medical, and theological practitioners: the graduates would be masters in certain strategic forms of reasoning but unskilled in the general use of reason to criticize their own practices and to pursue non-self-interested inquiry.  The solution was to subsume all the faculties under a single “universe of discourse” - a Christianized Aristotelian idiom - within which criticism (“dialectic” in the classical curriculum) would be explicitly encouraged.  A doctor’s initial submission to this discourse would be sufficient to certify his faith.  Everything he argued after that - however radical or skeptical his conclusions - would be treated as devout inquiry.  According to Maclntyre, the Enlightenment seriously erred in targeting the Church-dominated universities as opponents to free inquiry.  The result (again according to Maclntyre) has been the fragmented and socially inert institution we have today: many autonomous faculties that politely ignore each other and collectively have little effect on society as a whole.

Maclntyre is clearly indulging in revisionist history, especially when he claims that the Enlightenment destroyed, rather than promoted, the public sphere by being a little too hostile to Christianity and a little too friendly to autonomy.  However, his account serves to remind us of the historically important role that the university has played as a vortex for general social change. ⁶⁰  The one Enlightenment philosopher who remained an academician all his life, Immanuel Kant, recaptured Maclntyre’s lost image in his last book, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), which helped cause the resurgence of academic inquiry as a political force that characterized the German idealists and Hegel and his followers, most notably Marx.

However, the history of the university over the last 150 years has been, for the most part, a transformation of “academic freedom” into a jealously guarded guild right.  Instead of providing the models for public debate, academicians have made a point of discouraging public-minded attitudes and actions among themselves.  The benefit has been to shield the university from direct political interference; the cost has been to disable the university from functioning in any political capacity, especially one of its own initia-

60. Maclntyre 1990.

61. One aspect of this situation that we cannot explore here is the role of the thirteenth-century university in laying the groundwork for the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, a favorite thesis of Pierre Duhem.  Even those who refuse to trace Galileo’s discoveries back to Scholastic speculations in Paris and Oxford generally admit the university’s uniqueness in incubating revolutionary ideas.  One recent learned defense of this thesis is Huff 1993.  See also Fuller 1997d, chap. 4; Fuller 1999b, chap. 3.

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tive.  Consequently, most of the drive to change the structure of the university today has come from the outside, often from corporate sponsors who want to blur hallowed distinctions between basic and applied research, not to mention between academic and vocational training.

Rather than seizing these external socioeconomic changes as opportunities for the university to take control of the forces of social change, both liberal and conservative academics have too often recoiled from the challenge, treating it entirely as a threat to the university’s integrity - again, presupposing a stability to the institution that it has lacked when at its best in the past.  A notable exception to this tendency is feminism, which arguably has done more to dynamize the structure of the Western university - to put administrators and faculty more in the mind-set of a social movement - than any school of thought since the original Humboldtian call to Enlightenment as the mission of the university in early nineteenth-century Prussia.

In particular, feminism has drawn systematic attention to the ways in which disciplinary divisions obscure both complex problems and alternative forms of life.  Over the course of this century, Marxism has attempted a similar emancipatory mission in the universities.  However, feminism is unique in that the movement’s theorists truly embody their own theories.  Instead of upper-middle-class white males just talking about the revolution in their classrooms, the female professoriat actually live it.  This has opened the door to more diverse elements of society entering university life, a development that generally falls under the rubric of multiculturalism, much of which challenges residual elitist elements in even Marxist and even Western feminist thinking. ⁶²

The maxim that the Gospel should not be spread before the ink on the last page is dried is a familiar trope from the history of disciplinization, and indeed has been a useful way of demarcating the pure academic fields from the liberal professions. ⁶³  Pure academics believe that practical action - be it policy advice or political activism - is only as good as the quality of

62. On the development of feminism and multiculturalism in the contemporary academy, see Fuller 1999b, chap. 4.  Sandra Harding has been probably the most prominent feminist to have developed this point.  See Harding 1991, 1993.  However, there are also signs that even feminism is suffering from paradigmitis - admittedly of a most peculiar kind.  A good example is Nicholson 1994.  This book is a collection of exchanges among four of contemporary feminism’s leading theorists: Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. As Fraser herself points out (158), they unwittingly reproduce the positions already staked out by, respectively, Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty.

63. A full-blown theory of disciplines based on this perspective is Abbott 1988.  The perennially vexed status of “psychology” as both a therapeutic and a research practice is perhaps the paradigm case of this kind of boundary work.

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the knowledge on which it is based.  If there is room for doubt, then that may be enough for the action to do more harm than good.  Yet these High Church tenets are little more than superstitions that presuppose the very sort of epistemological foundationalism that STS researchers have been keen to reject on the basis of constructivist scruples.  If the practical lessons of STS research were reduced to two maxims, it would be these: that you do not need to be an expert to understand expertise, and, moreover, that the experts themselves may not live up to their own standards.  Thus, the possibility that we may be wrong or change our minds is taken as not merely given but unavoidable.  What we need, then, is an ethic of accountability for the knowledge claims we decide to make, in light of such a fallibilist epistemology.  This may mean making it institutionally easier to admit error and change one’s mind in public, as well as to compensate those who have been wronged by the actions we have taken. ⁶⁴  The overall result would be to make a general reluctance to participate in politics unjustifiable on a purely epistemological basis.

Taken together, the radical lessons contained in High and Low Church STS provide the core ideas for reversing the embushelment of Western intellectual life, which, as we saw in chapter 1, section 6, reached the university’s doors in the 1830s with William Whewell’s coinage of “scientist” as the name of a profession. ⁶⁵  Closely associated with this coinage is the distinction in the contexts of discovery and justification in scientific research.  In chapter 1, section 7, we witnessed the initial deconstruction of that distinction by Kuhn and other historicist philosophers of science.  Sociologists of science then dealt the final blows in the 1980s.  Common to the

64. For a defense of the need to preserve what I have called “the right to be wrong,” see Fuller 1999b, esp. chaps. 1, 8.  It was also instrumental in the original modern debates concerning the “public sphere” in Germany.  See Broman 1998.

65. The rest of this section retraces ground covered in Fuller 1999b, chap. 6, sec. 3.  The key difference between what is said there and here turns on the role assigned to republicanism in that book versus that of social movements in this one.  (On the provenance of republicanism, see chapter 1, section 2, above.)  To be sure, they are not the same but they share a concern for the material conditions under which knowledge can have empowering consequences for those who would lay claim to it.  In republican societies, those who engage in public debate need not worry about the consequences of their knowledge claims on their own well-being: staking an idea is kept separate from staking a life.  In that sense, one can err with impunity.  For this reason, property ownership was often made a requirement for political participation.

Social movements adopt a rather opposed strategy but to similar effect: instead of assigned well-defined “inalienable” (property) rights to individuals, movements “deindividuate” their members, such that each individual can count on the rest of the collective to compensate for whatever problems she runs into as they all strive toward realizing the movement’s ideals.  Were scientific inquiry conceptualized as a movement in this sense, then the fact that a discovery originally emerged from a particular research program would be taken not as an achievement warranting the reinforcement of that program, but rather a problem that is redressed only by making that discovery available to as many other research programs as possible.

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historicists and sociologists has been the view that a research tradition justifies its continuation by the number of robust discoveries that are made under its auspices.  In effect, a research tradition enjoys intellectual property rights over the knowledge claims it originates.  Thus, if a scientist working in, say, the Newtonian or Darwinian research tradition happens to make an important finding, then the finding counts as a reason for promoting the tradition, and soon the impression is given - especially in textbooks - that the finding could have been be made only by someone working in that tradition.  In other words, priority quickly becomes grounds for necessity.

This view presupposes a highly competitive model of scientific inquiry that gravitates toward the dominance of a single paradigm in any given field.  It does not entertain cases in which knowledge claims originating in one research tradition have been adapted to the needs and aims of others.  One important reason is that ultimately the historicists and sociologists believe that alternative research traditions are little more than ways of dividing up the labor in pursuit of some common goals of inquiry, such as explanatory truth or predictive reliability.  Thus, they presume that there is some automatic sense in which a discovery made by one tradition is “always already” the property of all - though access to this supposedly common terrain requires that one exchange allegiances first.

Consider the treatment of Darwinian evolution and Creation science as mutually exclusive options in the U.S. public school curriculum.  Although two-thirds of Americans who believe in evolution also believe that it reflects divine intelligence, such compatibility has yet to be seen as a philosophically respectable option, and consequently has no legal import. 66  But what exactly would be wrong with teachers trying to render biological findings compatible with the Creationist commitments of most of their students?  One common answer is that the presupposition of a divine intelligence or teleology has retarded biological inquiry in the past and has not contributed to evolutionary theory since the time of Darwin’s original formulation.  Yet the contrary presuppositions of mechanistic reduction and random genetic variation are also likely to have led to error. ⁶⁷

66. Carter 1993, 156-82.

67. For more on the broad church of maverick biologists who advance this line of argument, see the interviews with Brian Goodwin, Lynn Margulis, Stuart Kauffman, and Stephen Jay Gould in Horgan 1996, 114-42.  These biologists are attracted, to differing degrees, to holistic, preformationist, and even quasi-teleological accounts of evolution.  Typically, they justify their revision of the Darwinian canon by widening the scope of evidence and reasoning taken to be relevant to a comprehensive explanation for the development of life on Earth.  Here it is worth observing that one of the founders of the neo-Darwinian synthesis was himself a Russian Orthodox Christian who made a valiant attempt to reconcile his own research in genetics with contemporary existential theology: Dobzhansky 1967.

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Here arises the social responsibility of the science educator, either a professional scientist or a philosopher or sociologist of science: Should students be forced to accept the current scientific canon in the spirit of a Kuhnian paradigm - that is, as a total ideology that would deny the legitimacy of whatever larger belief systems they bring to the classroom?  Or should students learn how to integrate science into their belief systems, recognizing points of compatibility, contradiction, and possible directions for personal and collective intellectual growth?  If we favor the latter movement-based perspective over the former paradigm-based one, then we need to reinvent to discovery/justification distinction.  According to the old distinction, an ideally justified discovery would show how anyone with the same background knowledge and evidence would have made the same discovery.  The role of justification was thus to focus and even homogenize the scientific enterprise through a common “logic of scientific inference.”  In practice, however, “the same background knowledge and evidence” was an understatement of what was actually needed for people to draw the same conclusions, namely, involvement in a particular research tradition.

In contrast, the new distinction I propose conceptualizes scientific justification as removing the idiosyncratic character of scientific discovery in a deeper sense than the old distinction pursued - not simply the fact that a discovery was first reached by a given individual in a given lab, but the fact that it was reached by a particular research tradition in a given culture.  In other words, the goal of scientific justification would be to eliminate whatever advantage a particular research tradition or culture has gained by having made the discovery first.  Its overall import would be to remove the objectionable, exclusionary features associated with “scientific progress” without erasing the undeniable insights that have been achieved under that rubric.

This project would safeguard scientific inquiry from devolving into a form of expertise whereby, say, one would have to be a card-carrying Darwinian before having anything credible to say about biology.  It would also have the opposite effect of the old distinction, in that it would aim to render a discovery compatible with as many different background assumptions as possible, so as to empower as many different sorts of people.  Models for this activity can be found in both the natural and the social sciences.  In the natural sciences, there are “closed theories” (e.g., Newtonian mechanics) and “dead sciences” (e.g., chemistry), which can be learned as self-contained technologies without the learner first having to commit to a particular metaphysical, axiological, or perhaps even disciplinary orientation.  Perhaps the historically most interesting models of this renovated sense of discovery/justification at work are the hybrid forms of inquiry

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that emerged originally as a defensive response to Western colonial expansion in the nineteenth century, which have reappeared in late twentieth-century non-Western resistance to “postmodern” approaches of science studies. ⁶⁸

In the social sciences, conceptual and technical innovations originating in one tradition are typically picked up and refashioned by other traditions, so as to convey an overall sense of history as multiple partially intersecting trajectories.  Indeed, just this cross-fertilization has historically given the social sciences the appearance of a field fraught with unresolvable ideological differences.  However, from the social movement approach to knowledge production I advocate, this is a good thing. ⁶⁹  It means that the universal value represented by “science” starts to resemble that of “democracy,” in that both may flourish in a variety of social settings but, at the same time, must be actively maintained and renewed because of the ease with which the ideal can turn corrupt, especially as particular sciences or particular democracies become victims of their own success: e.g., governments whose mass popularity renders them authoritarian, sciences whose consensuality renders them dogmatic.

In Table 16, I contrast my vision of movement-driven “citizen science” with that of a paradigm-driven “professional science” in terms of alternative ways of articulating the discovery/justification distinction.  The relationship of discoveries to their scientific justification has been traditionally compared with tributaries leading to a major river.  Sticking with the fluvial metaphor, I counter with the image of a major river opening up into a delta in which multiple traditions can make use of a body of knowledge that

68. In Fuller 1997d, chap. 6, I considered the cases of modern Islam and Japan, where the instrumental power of the natural sciences has been neither denied nor anathematized, but rather systematically reinterpreted so that these sciences become a medium for realizing the normative potentials of their respective cultures.  Along the way, some telling critiques of the historicist perspective on science are made.  Basically, Islam criticized the West for not anticipating the destructive and despiritualizing consequences of its “science for its own sake” mentality, whereas Japan lodged the reverse charge that the West superstitiously clings to the stages undergone by its own history as a global blueprint for the advancement of science.  In Fuller 1999e, I bring the story up to date, as I report on the first global cyberconference on “public understanding of science,” which I organized in February 1998.  Here the non-Western participants questioned the postmodern tendency to lump science and technology together as “technoscience,” while cultures are seen as autonomous entities.  On the contrary, these interlocutors argued that the balance between the West and non-West will be redressed only once technology is divested from an ideological sense of “science” that presupposes the adoption of a certain cultural or theoretical perspective before making full use of the technology in question.

69. In this respect, I do not share the misgivings occasionally expressed in Deutsch, Markovits, and Platt 1986, which documents the tradition-jumping tendency of innovation in the social sciences.

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