Relativism (EPOR) from the Edinburgh and Bath Schools of the Strong Programme, otherwise known as

the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). This article, and Pinch’s work in general, can be seen as a
possible obligatory passage point (to borrow Latour’s term) for the entrance of ideas from British SSK
into the American field of Science and Technology Studies (S&TS or more often STS). Indeed, the term is
a critical one for Pinch, as the act of “opening the black box” has become a metaphorical stand-in for the
whole SCOT programme itself. In personal conversation, Pinch mentioned to me that the term “black
box” was frequently and casually bandied about in the British SSK circles–it was “in the air” if you will.
Through Pinch, the term was thus transferred to Cornell and the wider American academy. However a
second obligatory passage point appears to be Bruno Latour, who uses it extensively in Science in
Action, one of the programmatic texts of Actor Network Theory. Andrew Pickering, for example,
observed that Latour’s usage of the term (“one of his key terms of art” as Pickering puts it) is a reflection
of the influence of cybernetics on science studies.5 Pinch hypothesized that since Latour used to hang
around the British SSK circle a lot during the mid-1980s, he probably picked up the term by diffusion
without citing where he got it.6 I will show below that a close correspondence between Latour and
Pinch during that time was probably responsible for the transmission.

How does Pinch use the term, “black box”? It is the crucial theoretical device in the conclusion to his
Confronting Nature: The Sociology of Solar-Neutrino Detection7 . In applying the SSK programme, Pinch
is concerned with “the possibilities of change, openness and interpretive flexibility.”8 He is interested in
the process of closure of controversy in science, which he identifies occurring around instruments such
as the “solar-neutrino telescope.” When the use of the instrument becomes uncontroversial,
undisputed, and frozen, it becomes “black boxed” and data obtained from it is subsequently assumed to
be straightforward, speaking for Nature.9 However examining the debate around data obtained from
the instrument prior to such closure reveals the socially constructed nature of such consensus. “It is as if
the social struggle over a piece of knowledge has become embedded in a piece of apparatus. Black-
boxed instruments are the carriers of social relations.”10 Thus the black box is an enclosure–the crucial
idea it embodies in this usage is that of the closure of debate. This idea is developed more generally in
Pinch’s 1985 paper, published while he was working on Confronting Nature. The closure of a debate
results in the “fixing of a particular evidential context” for observational reports using certain
instruments. Like Harry Collins’ example of the TEA laser,11 the validity of the evidential context is
established simultaneously with the validity of the observational processes used toproduce the report.
Pinch calls this the “‘black-boxing’ of the process of observation. The observing process is now a ‘black-
boxed’ instrument (along with, of course, all the associated instrumental practices).” Such instruments
do not become evidential context for future reports, as they are now closed and uncontroversial, but
Pinch makes the historical point that they were once “open,” and that we can look at today’s open
boxes and look forward to a time when they will become black boxes. Pinch also stresses the fact that
the instruments, in becoming black boxes, contain their evidential contexts, and thus reproduce them
every time they are used in future labs far from the context in which they originated.12 Such contexts
contain social relations, which are thus also reproduced by the instruments. Here, Pinch draws upon
ideas from Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life.
It appears that the metaphor of the black box, and specifically its inputs and outputs, is widely
understood in economics. In a subsequent section, he uses it to refer to production: “It is one of the
cardinal merits of input-output analysis that it… breaks open the ‘black box’ in which the primary factors
of production, capital, and labor are somehow transformed into a flow of intermediate inputs.”36 In this
section, Rosenberg is trying to point out that inter-industry relationships among producers and
consumers of capital goods are highly affected by technological innovations. Focusing on only raw
materials as “primary inputs” and end-consumer final products, in other words, black boxing the
complete process of production, obscures the intermediate stages of production, whereby capital goods
are sold (and become inputs) to other industries producing final goods. Technological innovations often
intervene at these intermediate levels, modifying the types of capital goods produced and the
subsequent relationships between industries, and thus to understand the complex role of technological
change in production, the black box needs to be at least partially opened, in favor of a string of boxes
whose outputs are connected to other boxes’ inputs, each box representing an individual industry or
firm. Inputs and outputs seem like a natural metaphor in production, and this presumably widespread
understanding in economics is probably what Rosenberg is assuming in his use of the “black box.”

The metaphor appears again, in a subsequent chapter. This time, Rosenberg is critiquing models of
technological innovation that assume that they straightforwardly occur because market demand
stimulates their production. Other inputs to the “black box” include “relative factor prices” and
“scientific knowledge” to produce innovation as output. The problem with this “black box” model is the
deterministic connection between the inputs, especially demand, on the production of innovation. The
process of innovation is inherently uncertain and its consequences unanticipated, often yielding, as
Rosenberg mentioned in the earlier chapter, productivity improvements not in the firm or industry that
made the innovation but in dependent ones or in completely new ones. Thus, it can’t be said that there
was a clear market demand for an innovation when its usefulness wasn’t completely anticipated.
Moreover, “the ‘demand-pull’ approach to innovation reveals little about the specific timing and
direction of innovative output” as well as the possibility of failure, and even what criteria distinguishes
success from failure.37

In all, Rosenberg’s critique in both these chapters is the economic reductionism of technological
innovation to an exogenous variable in productivity growth, thus outside the bounds of economic
analysis. In the introduction to the second volume, he critiques a linear analysis of “expenditures on
R&D” through the use of science automatically resulting in growth according to the neoclassical model,
because firms do not have complete knowledge of the full economic value of an innovation before it
occurs.38 Yet by opening the “black box” and exploring the process of technological innovation from an
economic perspective, Rosenberg insists that economists need not be so humble with regards to
technology nor science.39 Economics shapes, directs and constrains science both because modern “big
science” is extremely costly to fund, and because it can yield large economic rewards.40 In other words,
technoscience should not be considered a black box to economics because its inputs and outputs are
money. At the end of the day, Rosenberg’s critique of economists’ treatment of science and
technological innovation is similar to Whitley’s critique of Mertonian sociologists’ treatment of science,
as an unknowable entity whose internals are beyond both the understanding and methodological scope
of the discipline, and thus irrelevant. Another scholar who uses the black box is one of Pinch’s fellow
social constructivists, Donald Mackenzie at Edinburgh. Yet Mackenzie does not use the black box
metaphorically, or at least much less so. He acknowledges the metaphorical usage in STS as a second
meaning, defined as “a technical artifact–or, more loosely, any process or program–that is regarded as
just performing its function, without any need for, orperhaps any possibility of, awareness of its internal
workings on the part of users.”41 This is his only reference to any usage similar to Pinch or Latour,
however, because Mackenzie is interested in a literal, not a metaphorical, black box: the inertial
guidance systems of ballistic missiles. This literal usage is familiar to us from airliner crashes, where
investigators examine an instrument called a “black box” to get data to diagnose the crash. In missile
guidance, the black box contains gyroscopes, accelerometers, and analog or digital computer systems to
guide the missile towards its target. Mackenzie, writing a history of the system, “opens” the box, but
since the internal gyros are known to the engineers, it is debatable whether it was really ever opaque in
that sense. He notes that “black-boxing is never a technical absolute” because inertial navigators require
extensive (and expensive) maintenance and spare parts.42 Literally it is opaque, and could be painted
black, although Mackenzie notes that gold paint was often preferred because as an expensive piece of
equipment, handlers would treat it better than if it had been painted black or gray.43 However, the
black box is opaque and closed in another sense: inertial guidance is “achieved without use of external
references…”44 Remote navigation by radio is not done, and star-sighting is only used as a supplement.
All primary navigation is achieved by plotting a trajectory from the missile’s launch point to its target,
using the gyroscopes and accelerometers in the black box to measure the missile’s acceleration and
direction at any point in time and making adjustments as necessary to keep the missile on target. The
system is thus almost completely closed to outside interference–once it is launched, it automatically
proceeds to its target with no chance for any human or external computer to redirect it or control it in
any way.

Conclusion and Future Directions In tracing the overall history of the metaphor of the “black box” from
electrical engineering and cybernetics to social studies of science and technology, with little side trips
through economics and philosophy of technology, a subtle transition has taken place. In the engineering
and cybernetic uses that I have examined, the black box is never a literal device, but rather a notational
and theoretical tool used as a convenient abstraction on circuit diagrams. This is not strictly
metaphorical, but is not a “piece of furniture” sitting in a room as Latour would describe it either. It is a
simplified mental and diagrammatical model whose only necessary details are its inputs and outputs.
Early uses such as by Bunge, Whitley, and Rosenberg retain these crucial details in their applications of
the metaphor, and the role of inputs and outputs (also important to the cybernetic notion of feedback)
is crucial to their models. In keeping with this usage, the critical feature of the black box is its opacity, to
be contrasted with the white box, or in later versions, transparent boxes or its variants. However the
metaphor undergoes a key transformation with Trevor Pinch. Instead of maintaining a focus on inputs
and outputs as his supervisor Whitley does, Pinch transposes the metaphor onto Latour and Woolgar’s
inscription devices. In the process, the meaning of the “black box” now becomes associated with the
closure of scientific controversies, ideas explored by Latour and Woolgar and by Harry Collins. Where
Collins uses a “ship in a bottle” and Schaffer uses a transparent looking glass, Pinch uses the black box.
The spatial model is de-emphasized over the temporal action of constructing it, thus exposing that the
box did not spontaneously appear fully formed. Once the meaning of the term has been shifted thus,
Pinch, in the process of applying the SSK methods to technology, is able to use the metaphor of
“opening the black box” as shorthand to refer to the SCOT programme in general. Anyone studying
technology aware of SCOT now thinks of black boxes as intrinsically associated with that approach; at
the same time, this prevalence gives Winner a substantial target for his critique. In any case, current STS
scholars are probably more likely to think of a black box as an object of closure rather than a model with
inputs and outputs. In addition of going from a spatial to a temporal meaning, the black box has also, in
some cases, transitioned from an ideational to a literal meaning. Although its original usage was in
theoretical diagrams, current SCOT often thinks of the black box as a technological metaphor, with a
literal, not an ideational, referent, an actual physical device. The metaphor actually materializes the
literal by focusing attention on it. Thus the discussion by some STS scholars such as Mackenzie of
physical artifacts, whether they be guidance systems, computers, or radios, as opposed to in engineering
where the black box would be a component in a diagram of the artifact (unless the diagram was a
system and the artifacts were mere components of the system.) Thus thinking of the black box as a
metaphor has actually facilitated its transition from a diagrammatic technique to a physical artifact. This
little meandering jaunt through the history of the “black box” from cybernetics to STS has ended up back
where we started, with Jordan and Lynch’s plasmid prep paper. From this point, where shall we go? I
began this enquiry by noticing that Jordan and Lynch’s discussion of Latour’s Eastman camera example
pointed out not only the potential indifference of users to what’s inside a black box, but also Latour’s
insight that the construction of the black box makes certain things possible that weren’t before. This
theme of Latour’s goes back to Laboratory Life and runs through Science in Action: scientific facts
become not only useful but powerful by becoming black boxed instruments. In the camera example, the
fact that the Kodak camera is preassembled and won’t work if taken apart becomes an advantage over
older cameras: while the power of access to tinker and tweak the camera by expert users is lost, the
automatic camera empowers many more users through its greater ease of use and portability. The
enrollment of the many parts into a single automaton acting as one results in greater power for the
user, in the same way scientific instruments allow the scientist to mobilize great numbers of long-settled
facts as allies. This greater empowerment for the individual results in an expansion of use beyond
experts to the masses. A similar example is present in Trevor Pinch’s discussion of the Minimoog
synthesizer.61 The hardwiring of the Minimoog compared to its ancestor, the modular Moog, reduced a
great number of options for the expert user, but it allowed many more musicians access to the device
due to its portability and greater ease of use. Such advantages also allowed new uses, such as in live
performance, greatly enhancing its popularity, whereas the modular Moog’s cumbersome size had
relegated it to studio recordings. Thus, in black-boxing or not black-boxing certain technologies, two
different avenues for the “democratization” of technology occur. Choosing to white-box a technology
provides greater access, control, and choices for the user, but the greater technical knowledge required
effectively limits use to experts. Black box technologies offer greater ease of use and other features such
as portability that allow use by a much wider range of users, often laypeople with little technical
knowledge. This offers greater access to technology in a very different way. My future interest lies in
how this applies to personal computers, in an explicit comparison between the design ideologies behind
the Macintosh and Linux. While the Macintosh is produced in a corporate, hierarchical power structure
with a “benevolent dictator” at the top, what is produced is a computer that can be ostensibly used by
“your grandma.” On the other hand, Linux professes a democratic and even socialist model of design,
where anybody can participate. However, as the “anybodies” still must be experts proficient in
computer programming, and there is little market incentive for experts donating their free time to make
the system easy to use for laypeople, what results is a system whose effective audience is the producers
themselves, and other experts willing to deploy the system for large corporate ends. Lay consumers are
effectively locked out unless they are willing to spend the time to become experts themselves. Thus, I
hope that studying choices of designers whether or not to construct “darker” or “clearer” technologies
may illumine some of the ideological values of the communities involved.