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Science of Science and Reflexivity
Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan—a public intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his.
Science of Science and Reflexivity will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology . In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research—that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit.
Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in Science of Science and Reflexivity are to identify the social conditions in which science develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing transhistorical truths; he presents an incisive critique of the main currents in the study of science throughout the past half century; and he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political and economic forces.
A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his own scientific journey, Science of Science and Reflexivity is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious careers in the field of sociology.
Science of Science and Reflexivity will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology . In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research—that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit.
Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in Science of Science and Reflexivity are to identify the social conditions in which science develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing transhistorical truths; he presents an incisive critique of the main currents in the study of science throughout the past half century; and he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political and economic forces.
A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his own scientific journey, Science of Science and Reflexivity is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious careers in the field of sociology.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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About the author
Pierre Bourdieu
353 books1,257 followersBourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
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July 3, 2020
This is a collection of Bourdieu's final cycle of lectures at the Collège de France, where he concerns himself with science, and with the appropriate way of conducting the sociology of science. In this particular discipline, despite Bourdieu's immense prestige, the book was rather poorly received, and it is easy to see why. The field is roughly divided between methodologists on the one hand (positivists, analytics, popperians, etc. who develop an a priori account of how science should rationally be done) and relativists on the other (that is Bourdieu's own hyperbole, by which he means strong program sociology, the 'social history of science' and especially his bête noire, ethnomethodology à la Latour). Bourdieu rejects both approaches, and calls upon his usual field theory to propose a third way, which he promise to both retain the special epistemological status of science, while acknowledging its historicity and social conditioning.
That is very ambitious and it seems no one was too happy with the result. The scientific field, for Bourdieu, has achieved a very high level of autonomy, which means that its specific rules are largely independent from the pressures of politics, economy or religion. This high autonomy is the warrant of its 'objectivity' and is in turn recognised by other fields, which does not stop them from trying to influence scientists. Such autonomy is mainly a consequence of the peculiar form of internal competition which defines the field: the rewards (positions, awards, credit, etc.) specific to the field are assigned to actors (scientists) who shine by following the rules specific to the field. This means that competition among the actors reinforces commitment to the field's autonomous values.
This is developed in considerable detail, using Bourdieu's own lovingly polished jargon, and opens up interesting vista regarding the topology of the field, explaining in particular the affinities between subaltern positions (i.e. pseudoscience) and heteronomous forces (i.e. political ideologies). However Bourdieu both rejects the ontological autonomy of science (for him its relative autonomy is achieved through social organisation, not through the perfect application of logic or mathematisation) and its political character (according to Bourdieu, from the scientist's pov, competition for resources takes the form of an actual pursuit of objectivity) - the end result is a somewhat bastardized theory, which does not pronounce itself too precisely on the key conflict between methodologists and sociologists, namely how much does material reality conditions the outcome of scientific production. It is unclear whether Bourdieu self-consciously avoid the subject because it would be too specific for lectures, or because it is out of his depth, or because he insists on treating social sciences and hard sciences together, or because he thinks it is just not all that important, perhaps because such material conditioning of science pales in the face of all the social conditioning.
No wonder then that he got the cold shoulder. Add to this that he induldges in an unsightly pummeling of Latour (there is room for a paper on Bourdieu's use of 'radical chic') and his customary theoretical nationalism (historical rationalism - meaning Bachelard, Canguilhem and Vuillemin, did it all before it was cool), and the book seem to spread Bourdieu's sociological marmelade rather thin.
However, perhaps less as an account of the actual functioning of the field, and more as a prescription of what science should be, it is very interesting. The core idea, that competition within an autonomous field tend to reinforce its autonomy, is very interesting. This is developed by Dick Pels in the more recent 'Unhastening Science,' on the basis of which more concrete prescriptions are made for the protection of scientific autonomy in the face of a changing status for research and for education. Bourdieu's book on its own is a disappointment, but with Pels he offers important insights.
That is very ambitious and it seems no one was too happy with the result. The scientific field, for Bourdieu, has achieved a very high level of autonomy, which means that its specific rules are largely independent from the pressures of politics, economy or religion. This high autonomy is the warrant of its 'objectivity' and is in turn recognised by other fields, which does not stop them from trying to influence scientists. Such autonomy is mainly a consequence of the peculiar form of internal competition which defines the field: the rewards (positions, awards, credit, etc.) specific to the field are assigned to actors (scientists) who shine by following the rules specific to the field. This means that competition among the actors reinforces commitment to the field's autonomous values.
This is developed in considerable detail, using Bourdieu's own lovingly polished jargon, and opens up interesting vista regarding the topology of the field, explaining in particular the affinities between subaltern positions (i.e. pseudoscience) and heteronomous forces (i.e. political ideologies). However Bourdieu both rejects the ontological autonomy of science (for him its relative autonomy is achieved through social organisation, not through the perfect application of logic or mathematisation) and its political character (according to Bourdieu, from the scientist's pov, competition for resources takes the form of an actual pursuit of objectivity) - the end result is a somewhat bastardized theory, which does not pronounce itself too precisely on the key conflict between methodologists and sociologists, namely how much does material reality conditions the outcome of scientific production. It is unclear whether Bourdieu self-consciously avoid the subject because it would be too specific for lectures, or because it is out of his depth, or because he insists on treating social sciences and hard sciences together, or because he thinks it is just not all that important, perhaps because such material conditioning of science pales in the face of all the social conditioning.
No wonder then that he got the cold shoulder. Add to this that he induldges in an unsightly pummeling of Latour (there is room for a paper on Bourdieu's use of 'radical chic') and his customary theoretical nationalism (historical rationalism - meaning Bachelard, Canguilhem and Vuillemin, did it all before it was cool), and the book seem to spread Bourdieu's sociological marmelade rather thin.
However, perhaps less as an account of the actual functioning of the field, and more as a prescription of what science should be, it is very interesting. The core idea, that competition within an autonomous field tend to reinforce its autonomy, is very interesting. This is developed by Dick Pels in the more recent 'Unhastening Science,' on the basis of which more concrete prescriptions are made for the protection of scientific autonomy in the face of a changing status for research and for education. Bourdieu's book on its own is a disappointment, but with Pels he offers important insights.
Read
July 16, 2008[very rough remarks, in progress as of 7/12]
To say the least, it's indicative. There's a reflexive (re)turn underway, so far largely unthematized, that separates us, at the beginning of the new century, from the virulent anti-dialecticism of the last one. It exceeds the institutional boundaries of philosophy at the same time that it serves as the engine, again unremarked, of the remarked-upon "return" of philosophy. To the extent that the disciplines philosophy spawned want to survive the transition to the new era, they are compelled, in becoming their own metadisciplines, to return, in part, to the status of philosophy. Today, the latter is the theory of reflexivity, which for good metalogical reasons cannot be, as Socrates already points out in Charmides, a discipline among others.
And here is another symptom and confirmation of the thesis of the reflexive turn from an unexpected quarter. To what does Pierre Bourdieu devote his final course at the Collège de France, his swan song as a lecturer and teacher? "[T]o the subject of science". And since it is always also a scientist, a sociologist, that Bourdieu aims to speak, this means, as his title openly acknowledges, that reflexivity itself must again become a theme. Once again, thought wrestles with the problematic identity of form and content posited and blocked by the act of reflection, this self-nominating, self-delimiting drive.
That this obligation is only partially discharged is understandable. The problem of what the "itself itself" might be, taxes Plato's intellect in Alcibiades and Charmides. (And he didn't have the dead weight of Aristotle's obfuscation of the problem to throw off.) Less understandable is that, seventy years after Godel, neither the full formal difficulty of the problem nor the concrete advances that have been made on it over the last century shine through clearly in Bourdieu's text. It makes the interview I had with the philosophy department's library liaison during the first week of grad school seem like comedic prophecy: "Bourdieu?" "Badiou." "You mean Pierre Bourdieu." "No, I mean Alain Badiou."
In contrast with Badiou - but troublingly very much like Quentin Meillassoux's recent release - the engagement with reflexivity remains frustratingly topical in this text. Perhaps we should have been warned by a second glance at the title: "science of science" is just a first approximation of what reflexivity might be. Perhaps this formula would better still be described as the essential negation of reflexivity, the one thing that we can be sure it isn't. Bourdieu skirts the main theoretical problem, though. He juxtaposes warnings, reminders, cautions, each of which performs a valuable moment, without clarifying the structure of reflexivity itself. This is not a failing because of some neo-Hegelian desire for totalization. It's a failing because without such clarification, we have no way of applying his various pronouncements to various moments of inquiry, that is, of knowing which is appropriate to which moment of inquiry. (E.g. Is this the moment to push on with the march of understanding, or is this the moment to "remember" that the sociologist is embedded in the object s/he objectifies?)
But let me break off the critical generalizing here, and engage instead in a little direct, if fictional, dialogue.
Bourdieu: In raising the problem of knowledge ... I have constantly been thinking of the social sciences, of which I have in the past denied the particularity. I did not do so out of some kind of positivistic scientism, as some may think or pretend to think, but because exaltation of the 'difference' of the social sciences is often no more than a way of decreeing he impossibility of a scientific understanding of their object. I am thinking for example of a book by Adolf Grunbaum (1984) which describes the attempts by some philosophers, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc., to set a priori limits to these sciences. (And this I find absolutely unjustifiable: why postulate that certain things are unknowable, and, moreover, do so a priori, before any experience?)
me: If this is indeed what they do then it is certainly unjustifiable. For one thing, the definiteness of a "certain thing" in the subject of the proposition is already in contradiction with the predicate of unknowability, even disregarding the additional contradiction that would take an unknowable, contra Kant, as an object of possible experience. I have to say that I don't recognize any serious philosophers in this hasty portrait. But I agree that your named opponents are to blame as well. Rather than allowing you a rational-empirical (first-order) science on the model of the "field", they've insisted on an equally hybrid - but still first-order - paradoxical science or non-science. And they are of course to blame if they misanalyze the metalogic of their own critique, taking the referent of the limit of science as a term, rather than a place. The latter tendency can be only illicit quantifier shift regarded metalogically, and culturally - religion.
Something that seems particularly backwards to me -
Bourdieu: [T]he more autonomous a science is, the more, as Bachelard observed, it tends to be nothing less than the site of a permanent revolution, but one which is increasingly devoid of political or religious implications.
me: This purity from social context, on which the truth of the thesis depends, could only be achieved in the case of pure mathematics, and it's precisely there that it's completely false. The purity functions in just the other way, as completely general ontology, as relevance itself. Not having done the work to bridge the gap between symbolisms that makes it look as though it's about "something else" is not the same as having earned the right to speak of incommensurable language games, or with more apparent modesty, of "fields", which inasmuch as they are fields of knowledge, still repeats the error of the Aristotelian epoch: placing the ontological pivot in the middle, between eidos and chora, immobilizing thought.
On a more upbeat note -
Bourdieu: It is worth reflecting on such use of the opposition old/new, which is doubtless one of the obstacles to the progress of science, especially social science: sociology suffers greatly from the fact that the pursuit of distinction at any price, which prevails in certain states of the literary field, encourages an artificial emphasis on differences and prevents or delays the initial accumulation in a common paradigm - everything endlessly restarts from zero - and the establishment of strong, stable models. This is seen in particular in the use made of Kuhn's concept of the paradigm: any sociologist who feels so inclined will declare himself the bearer of a 'new paradigm', a 'new' ultimate theory of the world.
me: Word.
In fine, I would sooner call Bourdieu's lectures a sketch of a "second-order" sociology, than a truly reflexive sociology, one that iterates the ontological commitments of the first-order theory, acknowledging the paradoxes of doing so, but providing no positive apparatus for displacing them. We recognize the situation from what gets called "second-order logic". It's to recognize the necessity of reflection, but to complete the reflection in an imaginary way, without inquiring (as metalogic already does) into what actually happens at the point of reflection (an inquiry, however, which has more to do with pure ontology, i.e., mathematics, than empiricism.)
Update in more accessible language? Basically, PB sees that there's a hole in sociological knowledge corresponding to the categories of sociological investigation. But instead of taking on the conceptual problem of the hole as such, and asking whether, e.g., it points to a different relation of theory and praxis, he ultimately just recommends plugging the hole with more data. His reflexive sociology would have metadata, but not a true metalogic.
To say the least, it's indicative. There's a reflexive (re)turn underway, so far largely unthematized, that separates us, at the beginning of the new century, from the virulent anti-dialecticism of the last one. It exceeds the institutional boundaries of philosophy at the same time that it serves as the engine, again unremarked, of the remarked-upon "return" of philosophy. To the extent that the disciplines philosophy spawned want to survive the transition to the new era, they are compelled, in becoming their own metadisciplines, to return, in part, to the status of philosophy. Today, the latter is the theory of reflexivity, which for good metalogical reasons cannot be, as Socrates already points out in Charmides, a discipline among others.
And here is another symptom and confirmation of the thesis of the reflexive turn from an unexpected quarter. To what does Pierre Bourdieu devote his final course at the Collège de France, his swan song as a lecturer and teacher? "[T]o the subject of science". And since it is always also a scientist, a sociologist, that Bourdieu aims to speak, this means, as his title openly acknowledges, that reflexivity itself must again become a theme. Once again, thought wrestles with the problematic identity of form and content posited and blocked by the act of reflection, this self-nominating, self-delimiting drive.
That this obligation is only partially discharged is understandable. The problem of what the "itself itself" might be, taxes Plato's intellect in Alcibiades and Charmides. (And he didn't have the dead weight of Aristotle's obfuscation of the problem to throw off.) Less understandable is that, seventy years after Godel, neither the full formal difficulty of the problem nor the concrete advances that have been made on it over the last century shine through clearly in Bourdieu's text. It makes the interview I had with the philosophy department's library liaison during the first week of grad school seem like comedic prophecy: "Bourdieu?" "Badiou." "You mean Pierre Bourdieu." "No, I mean Alain Badiou."
In contrast with Badiou - but troublingly very much like Quentin Meillassoux's recent release - the engagement with reflexivity remains frustratingly topical in this text. Perhaps we should have been warned by a second glance at the title: "science of science" is just a first approximation of what reflexivity might be. Perhaps this formula would better still be described as the essential negation of reflexivity, the one thing that we can be sure it isn't. Bourdieu skirts the main theoretical problem, though. He juxtaposes warnings, reminders, cautions, each of which performs a valuable moment, without clarifying the structure of reflexivity itself. This is not a failing because of some neo-Hegelian desire for totalization. It's a failing because without such clarification, we have no way of applying his various pronouncements to various moments of inquiry, that is, of knowing which is appropriate to which moment of inquiry. (E.g. Is this the moment to push on with the march of understanding, or is this the moment to "remember" that the sociologist is embedded in the object s/he objectifies?)
But let me break off the critical generalizing here, and engage instead in a little direct, if fictional, dialogue.
Bourdieu: In raising the problem of knowledge ... I have constantly been thinking of the social sciences, of which I have in the past denied the particularity. I did not do so out of some kind of positivistic scientism, as some may think or pretend to think, but because exaltation of the 'difference' of the social sciences is often no more than a way of decreeing he impossibility of a scientific understanding of their object. I am thinking for example of a book by Adolf Grunbaum (1984) which describes the attempts by some philosophers, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc., to set a priori limits to these sciences. (And this I find absolutely unjustifiable: why postulate that certain things are unknowable, and, moreover, do so a priori, before any experience?)
me: If this is indeed what they do then it is certainly unjustifiable. For one thing, the definiteness of a "certain thing" in the subject of the proposition is already in contradiction with the predicate of unknowability, even disregarding the additional contradiction that would take an unknowable, contra Kant, as an object of possible experience. I have to say that I don't recognize any serious philosophers in this hasty portrait. But I agree that your named opponents are to blame as well. Rather than allowing you a rational-empirical (first-order) science on the model of the "field", they've insisted on an equally hybrid - but still first-order - paradoxical science or non-science. And they are of course to blame if they misanalyze the metalogic of their own critique, taking the referent of the limit of science as a term, rather than a place. The latter tendency can be only illicit quantifier shift regarded metalogically, and culturally - religion.
Something that seems particularly backwards to me -
Bourdieu: [T]he more autonomous a science is, the more, as Bachelard observed, it tends to be nothing less than the site of a permanent revolution, but one which is increasingly devoid of political or religious implications.
me: This purity from social context, on which the truth of the thesis depends, could only be achieved in the case of pure mathematics, and it's precisely there that it's completely false. The purity functions in just the other way, as completely general ontology, as relevance itself. Not having done the work to bridge the gap between symbolisms that makes it look as though it's about "something else" is not the same as having earned the right to speak of incommensurable language games, or with more apparent modesty, of "fields", which inasmuch as they are fields of knowledge, still repeats the error of the Aristotelian epoch: placing the ontological pivot in the middle, between eidos and chora, immobilizing thought.
On a more upbeat note -
Bourdieu: It is worth reflecting on such use of the opposition old/new, which is doubtless one of the obstacles to the progress of science, especially social science: sociology suffers greatly from the fact that the pursuit of distinction at any price, which prevails in certain states of the literary field, encourages an artificial emphasis on differences and prevents or delays the initial accumulation in a common paradigm - everything endlessly restarts from zero - and the establishment of strong, stable models. This is seen in particular in the use made of Kuhn's concept of the paradigm: any sociologist who feels so inclined will declare himself the bearer of a 'new paradigm', a 'new' ultimate theory of the world.
me: Word.
In fine, I would sooner call Bourdieu's lectures a sketch of a "second-order" sociology, than a truly reflexive sociology, one that iterates the ontological commitments of the first-order theory, acknowledging the paradoxes of doing so, but providing no positive apparatus for displacing them. We recognize the situation from what gets called "second-order logic". It's to recognize the necessity of reflection, but to complete the reflection in an imaginary way, without inquiring (as metalogic already does) into what actually happens at the point of reflection (an inquiry, however, which has more to do with pure ontology, i.e., mathematics, than empiricism.)
Update in more accessible language? Basically, PB sees that there's a hole in sociological knowledge corresponding to the categories of sociological investigation. But instead of taking on the conceptual problem of the hole as such, and asking whether, e.g., it points to a different relation of theory and praxis, he ultimately just recommends plugging the hole with more data. His reflexive sociology would have metadata, but not a true metalogic.
Read
February 20, 2023Honestly, I feel like this would be a great intro book to Bourdieu, as he deigns to define his terms here in a way he often doesn't elsewhere. I cannot say, however, that this actually added much to my general understanding after six weeks of intensive BD-reading.
January 18, 2011
If you've read Bourdieu before, and found him to be useful or interesting, don't skip on this slim volume of lectures. To be sure, he's cranky here, but he also provides a wonderful overview of his own personal history in the larger history of sociology in France. Worth it for his discussion of his own "positionings" in his field in the last chapter. If you don't know what a "cleft habitus" is, you should.
Read
January 12, 2016Si, ahora reviso la fecha en la que comencé a leerlo y parece que se me hizo largo. Es un libro fascinante, por momentos me resultó complejo, fue lenta la lectura y hay capítulo que debí leer un par de veces, pero es atrapante, desde el inicio. Comienza presentando las preguntas que acompañan constantemente a las ciencias sociales y a la construcción teórica dentro de las mismas y realmente es denso pero muy estimulante.
June 21, 2008
Frink' complicated........T_T
His style is not easy to penetrate at all: what's worng with post-war french intellectual anyway???
p.s. Forget "Distinction". If you want to get to know Bourdieu, this book is quite an ideal. It shows how his central concept work (habitus, capital, field) and why his concerning on reflexivity and contextualisation is important.
His style is not easy to penetrate at all: what's worng with post-war french intellectual anyway???
p.s. Forget "Distinction". If you want to get to know Bourdieu, this book is quite an ideal. It shows how his central concept work (habitus, capital, field) and why his concerning on reflexivity and contextualisation is important.
April 22, 2014
I <3 Bourdieu tout court!
Une analyse intéressante de ce qui est le champ scientifique, l'habitus et le capital (social, symbolique et autre..)qui le structurent.
Une analyse intéressante de ce qui est le champ scientifique, l'habitus et le capital (social, symbolique et autre..)qui le structurent.
November 19, 2018
A tough read which I could only skim. Bourdieu seems preoccupied by, and certainly defensive, about social science as torn between a certain continental status, or lack of it, as the country bumpkin cousin of philosophy, or the insufficiently empirical pretender to the hallows of real science. Something of a bastard child, be seems to sigh, but one which may one day grow beefy and kick sand in the faces if those who bullied it. Not least nasty M. Foucault. But I may have formed the wrong impression.
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