Visible strings

I saw Avenue Q over the weekend, which was pretty fun. It's a basically a Sesame Street parody where puppets and humans play a bunch of characters living in an outer borough of New York and having real-world problems like shitty jobs, not getting laid, etc. The puppet characters are controlled by on-stage puppeteers who dress in black and enact their puppet's voice, singing and facial gestures alongside the puppet, which creates a strange doubling effect. It's not immediately obvious to my overly rational mind why you need puppets for something like this, but not quite getting it is part of the fun. Some great songs too, I think Schadenfreude and Everyone's a Little Bit Racist were the standouts.



Anyway, by an amazing coincidence I just came across this passage in What is Iconoclash? by Bruno Latour, an introduction to an exhibit he curated and which has just been reprinted in On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods:

Is this made or is this real? You have to choose! What has rendered constructivism impossible in the Western tradition? It is a tradiion that, on the other hand, has constructed and deconstructed so much, but without being able to confess how it managed to do it. If westerners had really believed they had to choose between construction and reality...they would never have had religion, art, science, or politics. Mediations are necessary everywhere. If you forbid them, you may become mad, fanatic, but there is no way to obey the command and choose between the two polar opposites: either it is made or it is real. That is a structural impossibility, and impasse, a double bind, a frenzy. It is as impossible as to request a Bunraku player to have to choose, from now on, either to show his puppet or show himself on the stage.

Latour's project in this exhbit is to conflate the role of mediating representations in religion, sciecnce, and art, and attack the despised role of icons that's been part of Westend culture since the second commandment's prohibition of graven images. Latour wants to rehabilitate icons, fetishes, and other items which are both constructed by humans and yet are channels of something greater -- divinities, or truth.

That reminded me of album cover, which my parents had and made an impression on me at an early age:


Which in turn reminded me of how Gerry Sussman dedicated his doctoral thesis in artificial intelligence to Rabbi Löwe of Prague (of golem fame), because he was the first to recognize that "God created man in his own image" is recursive.

And as it happens, Latour opens his latest book with a cousin of the Pygmalion story, about a sculptor who creates a statue of Jupiter so convincing that he trembles before it. His point is that this is a mocking fable, and in reality the people who build fetishes -- figures that are then worshipped -- are not so naive, they know exactly what they are doing, they are not fools. Rather it's the act of construction that makes feteshes authentic receptacles of the divine. Moderns, on the other hand, want to split the world into what is constructed and what is natural, and deny that anything constructed can be godlike. It is one thing for god to make man, but allowing man to make god is firmly disallowed. Latour's world picture is more networklike, construction does not move strictly in one direction from god to man to puppet, but is something more pervasive. Recursion does not emanate downwards from a single point, but is the active process by which all things reflect one another.

Hm, in my attempt to mirror Latour's style I'm getting far too fancy for myself. Really, what he's up to is very simple, and intersects directly with what I do for a living. He wants to expose the machinery of construction that underlies science (and in this new book, religion). But where he and other constructivists are misunderstood is that this exposure is not meant to destroy or undermine science, but to ground it more firmly in reality. Reality and construction are not enemies, and examining the machinery of construction won't ruin science any more than seeing the puppeteers on stage ruins the show.

Under construction

Construction is one of those intriguing ideas that seems to some people (including me, some of the time) to be so strong that it has the potential to remake one's entire worldview. The idea that ideas are constructed appears in various confusingly overlapping schools of thought: constructivism, (Piaget, Vygotysky), constructionism (Papert), and social construction (Latour and assorted philosophers). Here's a paper that untangles some of these differences, but here I'm interested in their common thread -- the idea that knowledge, ideas, mental stuff in general is built rather than found.

Constructivism is usually applied to things like people learning mathematics or object permanence, but the thing that most people spend most of their energy constructing is themselves -- their social roles, their internal sense of self, their own narratives. But then who is doing the building? The term "autopoeisis" was coined by Maturana and Varela to name systems that constructed themselves, but naming is not explaining and as far as I know the school of thought they founded belongs in the same category as some of the other ideas I've mentioned recently -- which is to say, not necessarily wrong, but it has not been nearly as productive of science as more boring mechanistic approaches. It's fringy.


There's a vast literature on self-construction in anthropology, psychology, and related fields most of which I'm unfamiliar with, and I've never been able to quite get into it when I tried. How do you study something so elusive and amorphous? There are no instruments for selves, and studying social interaction (which seems the best entry into the subject) just gives you the traces, not the phenomena itself. But that's a reflection of my intellectual limitations, or rather, how my own self is constructed.

It occurred to me today that one of the main functions of religion is to construct selves. Theistic religions construct a person who runs the universe and provides rules and techniques for the individual person to relate to it. Such relations obviously mirror the relations between actual human persons, and vice-versa. Consider the historical construction of human selfhood, religions function as a kind of cultural scaffolding for individuals to create and interpret themselves.

Religions create persons in very different ways and, so as a result create very different kinds of selves. Someone who believes they are at the core an immortal being who is only temporarily and incidentally wearing a body as a kind of fleshly envelope just has/is a very different kind of self than I do/am. Yet this song still moves me, so maybe the differences are merely superficial and our spiritual core is the same.



Buddhists seem to be deconstructionists of the self -- they talk about this process critically. They talk about how people are constantly trying to make themselves appear to be solid, permanent, real things when in fact they aren't. And this process of delusion is at the root of suffering. But my own dabbling in meditation (Buddhism ultra-lite at this point) suggests the opposite -- it seems to be about constructing an additional layer of self, one that can stand somewhat outside and monitor all the other self-construction going on. I may be doing it wrong.

During the Yom Kippur service, the Ashamnu prayer has the congregation chanting together:

Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, deebarnu dofee. Heeveenu, v' heershanu, zadnu, chamasnu, tafalnu shaker. Yaatznu ra, keezavnu, latznu, maradnu, neeatznu. Sarar'nu, aveenu, pashanu, tsarar'nu, keesheenu oref. Rashanu, sheechatnu, teeavnu, taeenu, teetanu.

Who are we? We are God's image and truth and infinite wisdom, eternal goodness. Yet we've abused, we've betrayed, we've been cruel, yes we've destroyed...we have missed the mark.

The "infinite wisdom and eternal goodness" seems to be a recent addition to this particular translation, and it's a bit too treacly a sentiment for me. But the idea that sin is an error, a case of "missing the mark", I can get behind. (Here's a good present-day interpretation). The most striking feature of the Hebrew is that it is a litany of words suffixed with -nu, the first person plural possessive ("our"), which emphasizes that all these faults are faults of the community and not solely of individuals. Consider not so much content of this prayer, but the fact that here's a community of people who get together, at some expense of time, money, and attention, and jointly declare a view of their nature. Isn't that odd? It seems almost to be a performative linguistic act, not as explicit as a marriage vow, but still functioning to bind together.

So the self under construction in this world is a social self, a self inherently part of a community doing things together and taking a collective responsible for itself and the world. Maybe this is an unremarkable thing to most people; after all Jews and others have been doing it for thousands of years; if it's so fundamental to human nature then it usually operates without thinking about it. I may be more consciously and intellectually aware of these sorts of commonplace phenomena because with me they don't generally work all that well.

Speaking for Nature

Awhile back I made the point that social construction is not arbitrary -- that is, when people talk about the social construction of knowledge, they don't generally mean that in such a way as to imply that knowledge can be just anything at all -- a point which seems to elude many participants in the science wars. Also, I commented on the Climategate affair, noting that it was a pretty good example of the Latourian view of science -- exposing the messy human processes by which scientific knowledge is made. Well, I have Bruno Latour right here and he agrees with me on both counts:

What I found so ironic in the hysterical reactions of scientists and the press [to Climategate] was the almost complete agreement of opponents and proponents of the anthropogenic origin of climate change. They all seem to share the same idealistic view of Science (capital S): "If it slowly composed, it cannot be true" said the skeptics; "If we reveal how it is composed, said the proponents, it will be discussed, thus disputable, thus it cannot be true either!". After about thirty years of work in science studies, it is more than embarrassing to see that scientists had no better epistemology to rebut their adversaries. They kept using the old opposition between what is constructed and what is not constructed, instead of the slight but crucial difference between what is well and what is badly constructed (or composed).

from An attempt at writing a "Compositionist Manifesto" (pdf)

And, in the first chapter of his book Pandora's Hope, he pokes fun at those who seem to doubt that he believes in reality:

Has reality truly become something that people have to believe in, I wondered, the answer to a serious question asked in a hushed and embarrased tone? Is reality something like God, the topic of a confession reached after a long and initimate discussion? Are there people on earth who don't believe in reality? ... I could not get over the strangeness of the question...If science studies has achieved anything, I thought, surely it has added reality to science, not withdrawn any from it. Instead of the stuffed scientists hanging on the walls of the armchair philosophers of science of the past, we have portrayed lively characters, immersed in their laboratories, full of passion, loaded with instruments, steeped in know-how, closely connected to a larger and more vibrant milieu.

I am kind of smitten with Latour lately, not sure why. He seems to have gone from anthropological studies of science that gleefully undermined naive notions of realism, to philosophizing on a much grander scale, where he attempts to undo the whole structure of modernity and undo mistakes that he traces all the way back to Socrates. And for a French philosopher, he's engaging, and usually quite comprehensible, although sometimes the abstractions veer off into the ether. Unlike many cultural theorists, it seems like he's trying to be clear rather than obfuscatory; he even includes a helpful glossary of his technical terms in the back pages of Pandora's Hope. But I can't quite figure out if he is useful, if these radical reconceptualizations have any implications or applications to how science and/or democracy is done.

One of his goals (as far as I understand it) is extending politics all the way down to the supposedly inanimate world of objects. Or more precisely (and this is exactly the kind of subtlety that confuses his critics), he wants to reveal the existing politics that inhere in our view of nature and society and the relations between them. Science, as it is while it is being constructed, is a set of networks that connect people, institutions, representations, and objects. These networks are often in political contention until one emerges as the victor and we now have Sicentific Knowledge with a capital letter. The connection to objects (aka "nature" or "reality") is crucial, of course, and it distinguishes science from mere politics. Social construction of science is not culture making up arbitrary stories; it's a way to let nature speak, to enter into discourse and society.

But Latour goes beyond this. He's not willing to let science take the role of spokesman for nature (which reduces nature itself to an inarticulate and lifeless thing), but wants nature and objects to not only speak for themselves, but act for themselves. Hence his idea of actants to describe the various human and non-human entities that form networks of knowledge and influence. The BRAF gene (eg) is just as much an actor, with goals and interests of its own, as the scientists to work to uncover its functions.

This sounds a bit crazy, but less so on reflection. From the strict materialist viewpoint, there are no actors and actions, just a seamless web of strictly deterministic causality. The stories we tell about each other involving selves, beliefs, intentions, choices, and actions, are just so many useful fictions imposed over this clockwork reality. Given that, why is it any less legitimate to extend these stories to what we normally think of as the inanimate?

For the record, these issues have been obsessing me for awhile. A section of my long-ago dissertation (ostensibly about educational programming environments) dealt with the conceptual underpinnings of animacy and its role in computation. I've moved on professionally to other things but the ideas won't leave me alone, hence this blog.

The Social Construction of Scientific Sausage

[updated below]

Bruno Latour is a sociologist of science best known for his insistence that scientific facts are constructed rather than discovered. He's widely reviled by scientists and critics of postmodernity; I rather like his work myself and feel that it's usually misinterpreted. Anyway, my guess is he's laughing his Gallic ass off right now at the so-called Climategate affair, which seems like a perfect test case for his point of view.

Thanks to the acts of some hackers, we got to see some politicized science construction in action. The scientific consensus around climate change is revealed to be the result of an ongoing human process, involving a variety of academic politics and a few somewhat shady-sounding practices, including:

• applying pressure to journals to keep conflicting articles out of press
• instructing people to delete emails, possibly in violation of the law
• applying fudge factors to data to make it conform to theory

It appears that at least in this case the making of science is like the making of laws or sausage: not for the squeamish. The import of any of this stuff is up for contention. Is it improper? Unusual, or just normal behind-the-scenes stuff? Does it imply anything at all about the physical facts of the matter? After a couple of hours of scanning the web and looking at some of the email and code that was stolen, I don't know. I have a couple of insights which I may post about later; for now I'm just interested in the sociology.

One thing is clear -- it's pretty clear that even a relatively science-literate layperson can't hope to have a reasonable opinion on this stuff which relies only on raw data and not its suspect interpretations. I suppose if I spent 2-3 months on this stuff I might understand it well enough to be useful, but without that much time to spend I am stuck relying on the judgement of others. And given that, my most important decision is deciding which others to trust. There have been some self-proclaimed experts diving into the material and proclaiming fraud; my impression is that while there is some suspicious stuff there it is impossible to tell exactly what they mean at this stage.

It's somewhat amazing to me how closely the opinions on AGW line up with people's political sensibilities, considering that this is presumably over a physical question which has a matter-of-fact answer (unlike, say, the definition of "conservatism"). But the climate of the past is something that cannot be measured directly, so there is plenty of room for variant interpretation (I suppose a proper sociologist of science would say that nothing is "measured directly"). Almost all the global warming sceptics I come across are also libertarians or right-wing cranks of one stripe or another, who have a vested ideological interest in the denial that there is a vast collective action problem to be solved. And of course, the scientists who support AGW have a vested interest in climate being a significant social problem because it affects their funding. There seems to be no light between the politics and the science, which of course is one of Latour's points.

There have been calls as a result of this for greater openness and transparency in the process of science. The Open Notebook Science movement is already on this. At first glance this seems like a great idea, but I'm somewhat sceptical about the workability, because science is no different than any other field in being a staged performance requiring a backstage zone where the performers can work on the non-public parts of the show (that's a link to Erwin Goffman, another favorite sociologist).

So, channeling my inelegant, Americanized version of Bruno Latour again: here's a situation where there is presumably a physical matter of fact (the actual state of the earth's climate in the past, and the various proxy measurements like tree-rings that we hope reflect it). There are scientists, journals, computer programs, datasets, and funding agencies which are all being deployed to construct competing theories. Only one gets to win, and the battle is enjoined on many levels with little regard for the supposedly neutral gentlemanly rules of combat that the Whig version of science history gives us. That's what the social construction of science is, only now it will occasionally get spread out all over the Internet for all to see. The rubes are shocked; scientists and sociologists are not.

Extras:

Full 61M of released materials.

A bunch of podcasts with a variety of philosophers of science.

Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics is a really interesting-sounding project by a bunch of European labs (including Latour's) to do just what it says.

[[update: I called Latour's attitude fairly accurately:

What I found so ironic in the hysterical reactions of scientists and the press was the almost complete agreement of opponents and proponents of the anthropogenic origin of climate change. They all seem to share the same idealistic view of Science (capital S): "If it slowly composed, it cannot be true" said the skeptics; "If we reveal how it is composed, said the proponents, it will be discussed, thus disputable, thus it cannot be true either!". After about thirty years of work in science studies, it is more than embarrassing to see that scientists had no better epistemology to rebut their adversaries. They kept using the old opposition between what is constructed and what is not constructed, instead of the slight but crucial difference between what is well and what is badly constructed (or composed).

from An attempt at writing a "œCompositionist Manifesto" (pdf) ]]

Social construction is not arbitrary

In a rather stupid discussion on tggp's blog I managed to articulate a point about social construction that I have not previously seen made in any reasonable and concise form, so I'm pulling the thought out and expanding on it here, for the edification of the world.

The point I was trying to make is that while many things are socially constructed, that doesn't imply that they are 100% arbitrary. We make the world but we do not make it just as we please. Whatever is constructed must conform to the structure of physical reality and of human cognition. So, for instance, while religion is a paradigmatic example of a socially constructed system, with different cultures having very different religions, they all have some broad similarities based on the cognitive and cultural role of religion (eg, to use one of Boyer's examples, all religions posit supernatural agents that care about human action -- there is no religion that has indifferent supernatural beings).

When it comes to the social construction of science, there is a great deal more confusion, which I'm not going to clear up in a blog post. Without going into the details, suffice it to say that even the most radical of constructionists of science (like Bruno Latour) don't believe that scientists can just make science anything they want to.

The subject of the original discussion was the ontological status of mental illness, which seems like a great example -- it's clearly a socially constructed category, since what counts as a mental illness varies greatly over time (homosexuality used to be, now it's not, for instance). Yet it's also quite clear that in at least some forms of mental illness there is something objectively physical going wrong, although we don't know what it is. So our categories for them, as detailed in the DSM-IV, are quite obviously made up but also reflect something going on in reality. People like Thomas Szasz argue that it's entirely made up and therefore illegitimate, but anyone who has had to deal with a genuinely disturbed person is not likely to buy into his view.

Anyway, here's the interesting parts of the earlier discussion, initiated and provoked by the sort of rampaging halfwit-convinced-of-their-own-genius that one finds on the internet.

melendwyr:

Do you believe agents of the Party can fly around the room if they so will?

me:

Saying something is socially constructed does not meant that it is wholly arbitrary. This is a common confusion.

The quote about “agents of the Party” is funny and telling. You assume that society is some oppressive outside force. It isn’t. You’re soaking in it. You make it and it makes you.

And, to back off a little bit — not everything is a social construct. Reality is what it is (an instantiation of the Schrödinger equation, let’s say). Some concepts are biologically innate (color, objects, up vs down). But everything interesting that we talk about is a sociocultural construct. Not arbitrary, because it all rests on the other layers, but highly malleable and subject to all sorts of primate politics

This produced some sputtering insults from melendwyr that I won't bother to reproduce. Me again:

Let’s see. You said that social construction implies that people can fly at will. I pointed out that that is not, in general, what social constructionists believe. To repeat, Saying something is socially constructed does not meant that it is wholly arbitrary. You haven’t produced anything that supports your position over mine.

...There should be no doubt that some things are socially constructed. Institutions like the US Government or Microsoft are built out of people’s social practices, and obviously could be constructed differently than they are — but not arbitrarily (it would be hard, for instance, to have a government with sovereignty over left-handed people rather than over a particular geographic area).

To take a more challenging example, take Newton’s laws of motion. Are these social constructs? Well, sort of — that’s why we attribute them to Newton, and he himself admitted to standing on the shoulders of giants who presumably were also part of society. Also, the fact that we call them “laws” — an implied and imperfect metaphor based on human law is significant, as is the fact that they are an imperfect approximation to the actual regularities of the physical world. But, that doesn’t mean that Newton pulled them out of his ass, or that he could have just as easily come up with an inverse-linear or inverse-cube law of gravity.