Reading Recommendations for Rationalists

Here are a couple of somewhat congruent interactions between the deeply idealistic rationalist community and myself in the role of cynical old bastard.

(1) I was at a LessWrong event the other night where Ethan Dickinson spoke on social interactions and the problems that can arise and various ways of dealing with them. Here՚s the blurb:

Imagine a world where people cannot truly know each other. Miscommunication abounds. Well-intentioned remarks offend, while obvious truths are hidden or denied. Certain actions are deemed admirable by some, yet annoying or abhorrent by others. Entire communities enter into downward spirals of evaporative cooling, unproductive bickering, and bitter tribalized feuding.

This is the dystopian mindscape we find ourselves in when we fall prey to the biases and heuristics surrounding mental modeling and communication. What are these flaws in our understanding of each other? Is there a realistic path of self-improvement that can lead us to become better predictors and communicators? Can individual-level skills be parlayed into community-wide improvement?

My very immediate reaction to the first sentence was, wait, what other kind of world is there? Maybe the failure of imagination is mine, but I cannot imagine a world where we “truly know each other”, or even truly know ourselves for that matter. One thing you can say for humans, they are complex, and even for the people we know very well, there are always untapped depths.

But let՚s assume that we don՚t take “truly” overly literally. In fact, delete that sentence and I can՚t find anything objectionable at all. Still, I am not sure the idea of accurate representation of other people is the right model for human communication, any more than accurate physical cosmology is the right model for religion. Religion is about participating in ritual community; the truth of the words of a prayer have very little to do with it. And ordinary human communication also has a ritual quality to it, it is about expressing emotions; satisfying needs; finding, signalling, and reinforcing political/tribal realities; passing moral judgement; or simply enacting social roles. People interacting are only incidentally building more accurate models of each other; there is usually something else going on, and that something else has to be recognized and acknowledged.

My reading recommendation: All of Erving Goffman՚s work on strategic social interaction. Start with “On Cooling the Mark Out” and for more, see books like Interaction Ritual and Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.

(2) Here՚s Scott Alexander making a typically lengthy and tightly-written fret about the fact that people use all sorts of irrational techniques to reinforce their beliefs, that tribalism is both a cause and a consequence of all sorts of questionable kinds of reasoning, and that lot of what should be rational debate is actually just mindless cheerleading for your side or hatred of the other side.

I hate to argue with him because he is so accurate in his diagnoses and so high-minded in his solutions. But essentially he wants human nature to change, for everybody to put down their emotion-based alliances and think objectively, which in cases like these mean among other things being able to empathetically take the viewpoint of an opponent.

As in the first case, this seems like a great idea but in some respects it misses the point of political speech, which is not primarily about reasoned debate and more about forming coalitions of power.

My reading recommendation: All of Bruno Latour՚s work on the politics of knowledge, starting with Science in Action. Also his bit on Socrates and Callicles in the more recent Pandora՚s Hope.

(3) Both rationalists that I am riffing off of are disturbed by the negative effects of emotion and power in human affairs. Rationality is seen as a corrective, a way of thinking (and being) that is at least in part insulated from such destructive forces. As a goal, that seems hard to argue with. But it may be that emotion and power are too fundamental to human behavior to be papered over by the rather thin layer of rationality available to us.

One could make an argument that these authors are actually more in tune with a certain kind of rationalism than positing a more naive sort of default agreeability. After all, there is no a priori reason why one agent in a conversation or other social relation should have the same goals as any other agent. Presumably they are out for themselves, and if they can find common cause, that՚s wonderful, but it՚s an achievement that has to be accounted for. And in all likelihood not as stable an achievement as we might like. So a properly rich rationalism would treat human interaction as more goal-oriented than accuracy-oriented.

The authors I am recommending have something in common: they both, in quite different ways, try to deal with the reality that humans are power- and status-seeking creatures well before they are truth- and comity-seeking. And whatever success they have at the latter is built using the machinery developed for the former. Latour and Goffmann both have developed a rich set of methods for describing the relationship between power and knowledge: Goffman applies the vocabulary of drama to ordinary life, and Latour merrily dispenses with normal ontological distinctions so he can describe power alliances between people, ideas, machinery, and nature. Conflict is an essential part of their world-pictures: people and other things have their own interests, the world is a chaos of competing interests, not a well-behaved unity.

This point of view may seem superficially cynical. But the depth of these authors՚ intellectual humanism elevates their work above mere cynicism. It is clear that despite seeing the often dirty and ugly machinery that underlies cognition and society, they still retain fondness for humans and their complex processes. And my argument for reading them is not based on either cynicism or idealism, but realism. They add a layer of depth to our understanding of human social processes.

Argument as the basis for thought

So I finally got around to reading the Mercier & Sperber paper that was buzzing around the blogosphere recently, Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(02), 57-74. I love an argument and so would be predisposed to like a paper that tries to show that argumentation is the basis for human reasoning. And it turns out that Mercier is going to be one of the featured speakers at this conference I'm going to.

In some ways this is a glaringly obvious thesis to me, but only because I've been turning my thinking in this direction for quite awhile. It seems very similar to Latour, in some abstract way, although he's not cited (these guys are cognitivists, which means they think about what goes in inside the head, while Latour is a sociologist who things primarily about what goes on outside). But the emphasis on the agonistic nature of reasoning is the same; the idea that the purpose of representation and thinking is fundamentally to strengthen a position. Latour and M&S seem to be coming at the same insight from two rather different approaches. Latour is coming at it from a combination of sociology and advanced metaphysics; M&S muster tons of experimental evidence to show that people are better at shoring up existing beliefs with argument than coming up with objective truths.

What's odd to me is that this position seems like a very natural fit for computationalists, yet most AI people are stuck thinking that representations are mere symbols, that squat in the brain and have a magical rapport with things in the world. But the essence of computational thinking (in my version of it anyway) is to be acutely aware of the relationship between representations and the processes that use and generate them. So if there is an argument or other interested process behind thoughts, that should come as no surprise, but apparently it still is.

Agre & Chapman and others analyzed this problem and tried to fix it, ages ago, but it didn't seem to take. In fact I now recall that one of Agre's hacks was a dialectical situated action agent that would argue with itself about how to cook breakfast, or something like that. I wonder if it's time for another run at the problem?

Morlocks & Eloi

I spent a good chunk of Friday involved with two Latour-ian events -- one, where I was presenting a slice of my paper (with a hefty Latour section) to a seminar at work, to a bunch of straight techie types who were not very sympathetic, and two, where I went as a spectator to an event devoted to "speculative realism" and "object-oriented ontology" at the California Institute for Integral Studies. I felt roughly equally out-of-place at both -- well, no, not really, I am far closer to the hardnosed engineers at work than I am to the ethereal scholars of "philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness".

During the talks, I had to suppress my internal voice saying this was all nonsense, and appreciate that these people, like me, are just trying to frame an understanding of the world in which they find themselves, and if it suits them to do it through reference to dead Germans (Schelling) and live Frenchmen and Buddhism and Wordsworth and I don't know what all -- then it deserves to be appreciated for what it is.

But for a great deal of the program I could not for the life of my figure out what the fuck they were going on about, all this stuff about noumenon and phenomenon and withdrawal and primary vs secondary sense data and apodicity and on and on. I have spent some of my energy critiquing cognitive science and mechanistic theories of mind, but that's because I have internalized their ideas, which are built on science. These people seem to have not a clue or the slightest interest in, say, what's known about the physiology and computational structure of vision that could contribute to an understanding of what goes on when we perceive something, preferring instead to natter on about what Schelling thought about what Kant thought about what Plato thought "red" meant. Not only are they uninformed by science or mathematics, indeed, they seem to be deliberately avoiding it.

Another hint of what might separate me from these beautiful souls -- I sensed that all this philosophizing was based around a hidden assumption that the universe revolved around humanity and the human mind -- hence the attraction of idealist philosophy. The appeal of speculative realism, in fact, is that it starts to hint that the universe may just not be all about us. That's a good trend in philosophy, but my starting assumptions -- based on personality and training -- are quite the opposite, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that the universe is a soulless and uncaring machine that happens to have accidentally coughed up some self-regarding chunks of protoplasm out on the edge of an obscure solar system. Not these scholars of consciousness -- for them, the mind is more primal than anything else and the problem is reconciling the rest of the world with it. Hence the whole program seemed devoted to simply teetering on the brink of allowing that objects might have a reality in their own right, separate from the mind. Well, duh.

These humanists are no doubt nicer, better adjusted, perhaps saner people than me. Mechanism has some serious flaws; the image of the universe as a mindless machine is not really all that attractive or life-supporting, which is why I seem to be constantly looking for ways to modify or enhance it. The intent of the philosophies on display last night is to try to bridge the gap between mind and world, ideal and real. I want to do that too, these people are just coming at it from the opposite side.

Élan Vital

I find myself inexplicably drawn to the discredited theory of vitalism, all the more so since it's been my business for the last few years to build tools to help vitalism's murderer, mechanistic biology. Whatever draws me has got to be the same force that draws me towards religion, another area where I really ought to know better than to go. Not very surprising, I suppose, that I should feel some kind of connection between the animation of living matter and the animation of the cosmos as a whole.

Just as I have no truck with fundamentalist or literalist forms of religion, I don't think I'm interested in dumb literalist theories of vitalism, which posit some force or substance that is somehow beyond matter yet acts on it. Dumb vitalism died when the synthesis of urea from inorganic components was demonstrated, thus showing that there was no substantial quality that distinguished the living from the nonliving. So what remains? I'm not sure, just this unshakeable feeling that there is something alive that permeates the world, and that it is as real as anything else, and that it is somehow transcendent or at least orthogonal to the realm of unliving matter. "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower". Or something like that. Just as there are compatabilist versions of religion that can coexist peacably with science, there is perhaps room for a compatabilist vitalism, one that is does not argue against mechanism but lives with it, in it, on it, over it.

I cannot figure out what to do with this feeling. It doesn't really interfere with whatever work I do in support of ordinary science, but it doesn't help much either. Some of it crept into my PhD dissertation, where I looked at how metaphors of aliveness were used in the discourse of programming languages. This was not really ontological vitalism -- it was more of an epistemological treatment, based on the idea that we have different modes of understanding when we think about non-living, physical systems compared with how we think about those that are alive. It's not that living systems contain a magic substance; it's that we can't think about such systems without using concepts like goals, desires, and purposes, and other properties associated with being alive. Organisms may be machines, but they are machines on a level of complexity that we can't capture by comparing them to dishwashers and cars -- they are machines with goals, desires, purposes, and a degree of autonomy. (Of course since then Latour has taught me to see goals and purpose in everything).

I haven't really pursued the idea further since then, but it won't leave me alone.

Awhile back I stumbled on the book Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett whichs seems to be a post-Latourian philosophy of vitalism, or something like that. From there I learned about the concept of conatus, which means something like the innate tendency of all things to try and persist themselves. There's a whole modern vitalistic tradition that is apparently not dumb (as defined above) but it's not clear what it's implications are or whether it's truly worthwhile or a dead-end.

See also previous posts: Hylozoism, Proteus

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.

Loci of desire

I haven't yet read Kevin Kelly's new book What Technology Wants. I suspect I'll find it mostly annoying -- he has a habit of addressing issues I care and think about, in ways that are sort of like my own opinions, but taken too far or off in some quasi-theological direction that I find grating (OK, and the fact that he reaches orders of magnitude more readers than I do might also contribute to my annoyance). But I did pick it up in the bookstore and look in the index to find no mention of Bruno Latour, which was slightly surprising, since Latour has been talking about investing agency into non-humans for decades.

But then it occurred to me that there is something fundamentally different about Kelly's view and Latour's (disclaimer: I actually have no idea what Kelly's view is, I'm judging the book by its title which may not be fair). Latour grants agency to things, but I very much doubt he would ever imbue technology as a whole with desires, as Kelly does. Latour is interested in the politics of things and the networks that connect things and people; their alliances, their conflicts, their failures and triumphs. His project is to tease out and describe these networks -- for instance, how a mass spectrograph connects the researchers and engineers who developed it, the manufacturer, its purchasers and users, the inscriptions it generates, the actual sample being measured, and the theory it will hopefully support. Under the Latourian view humans and non-humans have ontologically equal status and are connected in networks as equals.

That is an intriguing if difficult idea, but it's very different from Kelly's, which posits some sort of overarching teleology. In Latour's world model, everything (technology included) is radically distributed and radically democratic. In Kelly's, technology is some external, autonomous, and presumably unstoppable force of nature rolling over humanity like a tidal wave of disruption.

I can actually see merits to both views; they can both be useful perspectives. But I think Latour's is subtler, richer, and ultimately more humanistic since it is all about how the desires of humans and technologies are connected.

Damn, now I guess I'll have to read Kelly's book to see if I'm being unfair to it.

The broader issue is one that has obsessed me for some time -- the fact that in the modern era nobody really knows what wants are or where they come from. A whole constellation of forces, from the Freudian unconscious and the Darwinian roots of behavior through the modern-day manipulation of the mass media -- all conspire to make it glaringly obvious that desire is never a simple act of an atomic self. So what is it, and how do we talk about it intelligently?

Here's another critique of Kelly's book, also unfair since it came out more than 30 years before he wrote his.

Hylozoism

[updated below]

is my vocabulary word for today (via). It's one of those things I feel I ought to have known many years ago. Wikipedia says:

Hylozoism is the philosophical conjecture that all or some material things possess life, or that all life is inseparable from matter.

I was unusually moved to make some Wikipedia edits, and added two of my favorite intellectual weirdos to the list of contemporary hylozoics:

Architect Christopher Alexander has put forth a theory of the living universe, where life is viewed as a pervasive patterning that extends to what is normally considered non-living things, notably buildings. He wrote a four-volume work called The Nature of Order which explicates this theory in detail.

Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, based in the sociology of science, treats non-living things as active agents and thus bears some resemblance to hylozoism. This work has spawned a movement called Object-oriented philosophy which promotes the idea of a "democracy of objects".

And I see animism has a homepage.

I find myself attracted and repelled by these ideas; partly out of intellectual naughtiness -- they are very much not in the spirit of the nerdy materialist culture I was educated in. On the other hand, they aren't that far apart either -- you can see both strands of thought (mechanistic AI style and squishy panpsychic California style) intermingle over the years, for instance at the historical Macy conferences.

And of course, I'm a victim of the same tendency I criticized in this post on the Singulatarians. For some reason, everybody thinks its very important to get metaphysics straight, to know for certain whether mind or matter or life or god or whatever is the ultimate foundation of reality. On my better days I know this is a dumb question, dumb because unanswerable, and the question itself is just a reflection of the limited metaphors we use to construct our models of the universe. Perhaps the real foundation of the universe is status, and the real reason we are so eager to fight for our particular metaphysics is so that the intellectual tribe we identify with (eg, physicists, anthropologists, theologians...) can thump its chest and declare itself more important than the rest.

[update: this earlier post is on related themes...which I realize now probably falls under the rubric scientific romanticism. Here's no less a light than Freeman Dyson:

Is it possible that we are now entering a new Romantic Age, extending over the first half of the twenty-first century, with the technological billionaires of today playing roles similar to the enlightened aristocrats of the eighteenth century? ... a new Age of Wonder would be a shift backward in the culture of science, from organizations to individuals, from professionals to amateurs, from programs of research to works of art...If the new Romantic Age is real, it will be centered on biology and computers, as the old one was centered on chemistry and poetry.

]

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) ]]