What is Good Science: Opening Pandora's Black Box
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"Opening Pandora's Black Box" (1987) is an Article by Bruno Latour that was published in Science in Action. How to follow scientists and engineers through society (ISBN 0674792912).
[edit] Summary
- Looking for a way in
- the word ‘black box’ comes from the field of cybernetics.
- within this field it is used whenever a set of commands or a piece of machinery becomes too complex for a certain issue at hand; thus it can be blanked out, for only the input and the output of this black box matter for the current process
- a closed black box and an opened black box are two utterly different objects
- only the opening of apparently fixed, certain, and unproblematic black boxes reveals the processes and progress which made the black box what it is in retrospect: human beings at work, decisions, uncertainty, theoretical and practical controversies, competition, etc.
- these two black boxes are as different as the two-fold expression of a Janus-face:
- ”Ready made Science” vs. “Science in the making”
- what for some persons is a simple and closed black box, can be a highly sensitive and problematic issue for people who were giving shape to it in the past.
- in certain cases black boxes cannot and should not be opened, for the sake of the current process and its progress
- however, in order to see how science works, the black boxes’ controversial content needs to be displayed; this is done by having a look at ‘science in the making’ where scientists at work, entailing particular social and technical circumstances, matter
- when working with closed black boxes there is a clear distinction between context in which knowledge is embedded (closed black boxes) and content, the knowledge itself (‘new’, future black boxes). This distinction disappears when looking back at the creation or the opening of already closed black boxes.
- When enough is never enough
- how do black boxes or controversies eventually close?
- Janus’ first dictum
- ”Just get the facts straight” vs. “Get rid of all the useless facts”
- the left expression is easy to follow when things are settled, but not as long as they remain controversial.
- Janus’ second dictum:
- ”Just get the most efficient machine” vs. “Decide on what efficiency should be”
- Janus’ third dictum:
- ”Once the machine works people will be convinced” vs. “The machine will work when all the relevant people are convinced”
- Janus’ fourth dictum:
- ”When things are true they hold” vs. “When things hold they start becoming true”
- it will never be certain and determined why and how an open controversy was settled; there is an unlimited amount of explanations and opinions dealing with the closure of a black box and if it is that ‘closed’ at all.
- there will always be the contradictory opposition of ‘science in the making’ and ‘ready made science’, with the former stating ‘enough is never enough’ and the latter commanding ‘do this, … do that..’.
- ‘ready made science’ considers facts and machines as determined enough and dealt with, whereas
- ‘science in the making’ considers them always to be under-determined since there is and will always be something missing to make the black box shut for once and for all (implies that it is, in this context, logically impossible to close it for all time)
- The first rule of method
- Latour’s general course is that of penetrating science from the outside, following controversies and following scientists up to the end, being slowly guided out of the field of ‘science in the making’
- Latour’s criticism: although this is a very interesting topic, there is still a huge academic gap in respect of this field; not great interest in ‘science in the making’, rather in the ‘content’ of science (which is nevertheless inseparable from ‘context’),
- for the reason that most people who are educated as scientists either decide to be an ‘insider’, or alternatively, to abandon science totally
- deductively, there is a link missing between scientific ‘outsiders’ explaining to ordinary outsiders, non-scientists, ordinary people, how science works and makes progress.
- however, there are some people who occupy themselves with the topic of ‘science in the making’
- Latour wants to summarise their method and sketch the grounds these different scholars all have in common.
- the purpose of this lies in Latour’s aim to overcome two of the limitations of ‘science, technology and society’ studies which is the scholars organisation by discipline and method
- Latour claims that the domain “science, technology society’ exists, for there is a core of common problems and methods, although he admits that it is not agreed upon what it actually designates.
[edit] Critique / Questions / Reflection / Comments
