Controversy and the problems of parapsychology

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 2002 by Nancy L. Zingrone

The Constructivist Approach

The third approach to the study of scientific controversies, the constructivist approach, is the most misunderstood both by scientists and by the public at large. Born in the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s, and nurtured in various other centers of study including the University of Bath where the sociologist Harry Collins worked for many years, the constructivist approach has been at the center of an almost surreal debate (for a recent example, see Koertge, 1998; and in response, Edge, 1999). In popular parlance, this debate has become known as "The Science Wars" and the constructivist community has paradoxically been branded "Science Haters" (e.g., Leavitt 1999). On the surface, such a reaction to work of the science studies community would seem to be outrageous. When has an anthropologist ever been deemed a hater of indigenous cultures simply because she studies them, or a psychologist a hater of people and their minds and behaviors because his experiments are designed to te st them? It is not surprising then that science analysts generally find the charge that they are "science haters" to be ludicrous. Beneath the surface of the Science Wars are important methodological, disciplinary, and even temperamental issues that, once exposed, have provoked serious negotiation important both to the progress of science and to methodological refinement in science studies itself.

For our purposes here, however, it is sufficient to note that the constructivist approach to scientific controversy allows for the influence of a variety of social forces and processes on the development of scientific knowledge. This approach takes as a given that a natural world exists (Latour, 1999, especially pp. 1-23). Several of its main proponents maintain it has always done so. A careful reading of the canonical texts by Barry Barnes, David Edge, and others (e.g., Barnes & Edge, 1991; Barnes, Bloor, & Henry, 1996; Bloor, 1976/1991) will attest to this fact, although some second- and third-generation constructivist analysts do write as if they were naive idealists opposed to any kind of knowledge gathering that presumes the existence of a "real world." Still, the fundamental point here bears repeating: The classical constructivist position, in the main, believes that the world is real, that nature exists, but that the shape and movement of the natural world--its dimensions, its causes, its laws--can be interpreted imprecisely. Further, this imprecision arises, at least partly, from the state of the art of current-day science, that is, from present-day limitations in theory, method, mode of observation, and measurement. But--and this is the key point that the constructivist analyst makes--the imprecision also arises from the sometimes profound influence of social, political, and personal variables on the scientist herself or himself at the point of measurement and at the moment of interpretation (among other loci), that is, on scientific practice itself.