Culture of Science

Module 2
Course Intended Learning Outcome
•Interrogate the significance and implications of science
and technology on various social issues both locally
and globally
oAnalyze the beginnings of Science and Technology and its
role in the society in the context of current social issues
oCritique the roles of Science and Technology on the society
and the role of society in Science and Technology
Contents
• Birth of Fact : What is a fact
• Society and culture
❑Society
❑Culture
❑Role of Science to society
• Worldviews
• Social Construction / Social
constructivism
• Feminism/Gender in Sciences
• Perceptions on innovations
and inventions
• Theory making
• Mind and Society
• Numbers and Sociology (Sociology
of Mathematics)
• Science and Technology as Social
Institutions
• Intersections of Science and
Technology, magic and religion
• Truths
The Birth of fact
What is fact?
➢Stands as s symbol of the ability of science to give us true facts
▪What is true? What is false

▪ Science gives the people (society) what is fact

▪ Society expects science to provide the description what the
fact is, accurately
▪ This is a premise to the significance of the role of STS for
analyses
➢An idea or concept that everyone (or at least a community)
accepts as true
➢ Acceptance of fact goes like in a circular way
▪ And those who do not accept the fact is excluded in the community

➢Facts are stable but their acceptance is established over some

period of time

➢Facts are practiced and shared by a community

▪ Approved by the community
▪ Conformity of the community to the fact
▪ Is named by the community, accepted by the community, practiced by the community
➢Facts originate at the level of social networks and get expressed through
persons
➢Behind this practice, is a criteria set for the acceptability of a fact from
authorized people

➢Case : Is Pluto a planet or not?

✓ Who said it is not?
✓ Who said it is ?

✓What were the debates that lead to the this debate ?

✓What were the considerations to the changes and

✓The next debates and set of changes?
✓1930 vs 2006
✓IAU stand on Pluto
•Facts have histories
•Facts are embedded in practices
•Thus lead us to who practice these facts

People!
Society and Culture
Society and Culture

•Society
o people
o A society, or a human society, is a group of people involved
with each other through persistent relations, or a large social
grouping sharing the same geographical or social territory,
typically subject to the same political authority and dominant
cultural expectations (https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/society.htm)
o ways in which cultural group organizes and locates itself, and
includes the cultural explanations for that social order
Culture

oConstituted of people who hold each other mutually

accountable according to the terms of a moral order
oCommon practices
o totality of a group’s ways of living, knowing and
believing
o bounded with territories (location), traditionally
• Later geographical boundaries of territories did not define
cultures which brought the third cultures, lateralizations
and super cultures (third cultural system)
• Example : banking system, air transportation system

• Science can be a third culture with its scientific methods,

common language, professional societies, peer review, etc.
o that is why we say, in UST as a community we would say, we want to
promote a culture of research
Role of Science
•Reinforcement, maintenance and reproduction of some
prejudices in history (culture) in terms of myths, stories and
histories docuementing these prejudices
• Ex. Craniometry – was a way to rank the differences between races and
sexes in Europe and in the US
• This dictated that white males were more superior than females, therefore, white men have
larger brains
• Ex. Sigmund Freud’s theory on psychosexual development, that girls had
penis envy

Can you think of any other scientific finding that became something that
the society followed?
 Worldviews
• Ways of seeing and interpreting the world from a
cultural perspective that provide tools to categorize
and classify the world

•How you review or comment on something would be

influenced by worldview to which you are coming from, which
culture where you are coming from
• Ex. Movies that you watch – as a disciple of technology , how do you
view it?
• Ex. Vaccines that are developed – as a scientist, how would you
comment on that?
•Categories are usually in binary / dualities / dichotomy
• Which originate from experiences
• An exaggeration result in semblance of order → labels →
common culture, common experiences, common interpretations of
events, ideas, people = WORLDVIEW
→When something is out of place, it is called dirt
→There has been a transgression in the boundary or classification from the label

→Thus from the attention that we give to these labels and worldview and the dirt ,
insights spring which the social science works on.
Therefore, when people accept or reject technology, we understand the role of
technology in the community, then we analyze, contextualize, understand and alter
our relationships to science and technology – historically, culturally and socially
The Social Construction Conjecture

https://www.pinoyathletics.info/nancy-navalta/

https://www.pep.ph/guide/movies/1996/now-showing-sa-pagdapo-ng-mariposa-a-journey-of-self-discovery
The Social Construction Conjecture

• Challenges rationalist and realist accounts of science that claim logic and evidence are the
primary determinants of validity and theory choice in science
• What does a scientist do in making science?

• This makes us aware of the relationships between scientific knowledge and centers of power

• Brings us to the social processes and contexts in which scientists organize and give meaning
to their observations
The Social Construction Conjecture

Trends in Social Construction

1. Humanistic trend
• acknowledges the importance of real human beings in the
making of science
• Recognizes the human actor is emotional, experiences
conflicts, expresses inconsistencies, and sits as a mediator
between science and the wider socio-cultural and political
economic contexts of scientific practice and scientific
institutions
The Social Construction Conjecture

2. Relativistic trend
•arise from recognizing, for example, that when we observe
science as a historical unfolding, scientific theories and even
scientific facts or truths appear to be relative to specific
historical and cultural contexts
• Ex. The case of Pluto as a planet or not
3. Rhetorical pathos
•Growing awareness of problems inherent in the language of
both science and science studies
• Ex. Use of language in communicating scientific terms in disaster
• Yolanda case in Visayas - storm surge was not understood, because of it is
technicality, a local term should have been used to be understood by the
locals in order to respond to the threat of the typhoon
 Social constructivism
• It is a tool to scrutinize modern science as it produce and reproduce
the scientific culture
• Contrary to relativism
• Relativism
• A relativist believes that the situation or representations cannot be “sorted
out” without an outside arbitrator, but there are no universal arbitrators not
themselves grounded in a specific historical and intellectual position.
• Realism
• A realist believes that there is an independent arbitrator called Nature that
exists outside of humans, that facts are distinct from human thought and
practice

Relativism was not meant to oppose realism but rather to oppose absolutism.
Social Construction
✓ a matter of applying the know and successful methods and theories
of the sciences to science itself
✓It is a multipurpose tool that allows for the possibility of
asking different questions and observing differently, one
that can be used by different people with different
backgrounds, cultures and socio-political positions whose
voices and views on the nature of science might have been
silenced or ignored in the past.
• This allows for a change in perspective
• This allows for science to be seen as a discourse where we do not only ask what questions but
different sort of questions

• If science is a discourse whose status as privileged inquiry within the social

formation is historically rather than naturally constituted, its autonomy is
always mediated and therefore relative to its position within the social
formation of which it is a part. Its place is constantly renegotiated with
other power centers, and the degree of its “freedom” is always understood
in context. (Aronowitz 1988, 300)
Feminism/Gender in Sciences
https://www.oecd-forum.org/posts/26282-women-in-science-technology-and-innovation-old-stereotypes-and-new-
realities
Feminism/Gender in Sciences

• Feminism is contributing to science studies by providing clear

examples of social constructivism, by demonstrating the use of power,
domination and language in science, and by creating and applying
new methodologies for the study of science.
• The predominant theoretical framework feminists engage to study or
critique science is social construction and related inquiry into the
social context of science (Rose 1994).
• By studying networks of actors, their practices and the construction
of scientific facts, feminists are demonstrating sexist and racist bias in
science and exploring the relationship between culture, difference,
and science
•History of feminism and women’s
movement
•1950s, 1960s, 1970s
•Misconceptions on women who study
• Examples
 Feminism/Gender in Sciences
• Contributions in the study of sexist and racist
biases in science and gendered cultural
contexts
• Debates have been on :
1. whether sex differences are socially or
biologically grounded or
2. On equity and equality issues
Feminism/Gender in Sciences

1. Social constructivist framework has been used to

reveal the sexist biases in science’s explanation on
reproductive theory, sexual differences and medicine
Example : Biology is destiny; reproductive functions
of women
• disputes that natural differences is grounded to the
natural laws setting the differences between men and
women thus brought inequalities bringing division of
power and privilege to men and women
Feminism/Gender in Sciences

2. Address the issues of power, domination and

politics
➢Who does it, who pays for it, who is asking the questions
The people in power are the ones who determine
the type of knowledge created!
Case in point: Practice of modern reproductive medicine

•Use of amniocentesis

•Modern science has little tolerance for or ability to cope with

cultural difference because it has no way to make it fit with
the assumption of universalism.

•Feminists have also raised questions about “neutral” science

policy and the not-so-neutral implication for the “other”
• Case of AIDS/HIV on men
Feminists in science:
• have paid attention to the Use of Language and metaphors in Science
• Politically correct terminologies – gender neutral words
▪ is this good or bad?
• Cultural constructions of objectivity
• is not based upon domination
• is multifaceted with its awareness of difference, power relations,
domination, language, and the need to create new methodologies.
Perceptions on innovations and inventions
Technological diffusion
is the process by which a new artifact or process, an invention,
moves into use.
Innovation
✓An innovation is an invention that has become integrated into society.
✓Innovations solve problems and meet needs (whether at the level of basic
survival or manufactured ones as society grows and expands) and often have
unanticipated consequences
Invention
✓Sometimes inventions are the result of planned
innovation, deliberate searches for new products or
solutions to problems, and sometimes of serendipity
✓most inventions are the product of simultaneous
discoveries and collaborative activities.
• Case in point: HIV/AIDS
• Case in point: bicycle and the invention of other modes of
transportation

• Closure
• Standardization
• Desirability of the product invented/innovated
• consumer
Theory Making

• Theory
➢The aim of theory is to grasp significant truths about the world (Bloor, 1991)
➢to explain and regulate the general principles at work in our world.

➢Theory is preferable when understanding is required beyond the confines of a common sense
interpretation.

➢Theories help to explain the unfamiliar and make it familiar. Western culture relies on the familiar as the
“impersonal idiom” to explain the unknown, while traditional culture uses the “personal idiom” to
understand the unfamiliar
•Western Theories vs. Non- Western Theories
• African theories vs. Western Theories
• Which is inferior? Why is the other superior
• Is traditional theory inferior?

•Our intention here is not to declare a general superiority but

to explore avenues overlooked, erased, or hidden, in the
hopes of not replicating the mistakes found in the earlier
literature.
Sociology of Mathematics

• traditionally the arbiter of the limits of the sociology of knowledge.

• “Hard case”

• Case in point : Pain

• According to John Searle –
• scientific perspective of pain – biological causes of the sensation of pain
• just features of the brain (and perhaps the rest of the central nervous
system
• According to Durkheim – culturological conjecture on pain:
• the extent to which a person feels pain depends in part on the kind of
culture s/he is a product of,
• and in particular the nature and levels of social solidarity in the social groups
s/he belongs to
Social construction is the only way we have of
manufacturing our cultures, our truths, our
falsehoods. It is not social construction that
realists have to fear, but rather absolutism,
universalism, imperialism, and colonialism and
other “isms” representing barriers to inquiry