This essay makes the point that Science Studies needs to be disinterested, by which the author means 'not interested in the scientific truth of the matter under study'. If the researcher used normal scientific methodology in order to study his subject, he'd be introducing an 'interest' that could bias the results.
But the problem with this is that the scientific truth of the matter at hand is relevant to the study of science, to the history of science, and why certain theories are accepted while others are not.
In Science Fiction, the reader is asked to suspend disbelief over a few technical issues in order to provide the setting and backdrop against which the story takes place. This, by way of analogy, is like Dear's disinterest. But there is a major problem with this type of disinterest and suspension of disbelief: it's one thing to think about Warp Drives and allow them to exist in order to be entertained and educated by the stories in Star Trek, it's quite another thing to actually go around believing that, yes, Warp Drive does exist. While that belief might seem insane to most people, there is a tendency amoung Trekkies to in fact believe that the Science of Star Trek is real science, or a likely and reasonable projection of what science will be like in the future; it's not science today, so we need to suspend our disbelief in that sense, but one day it will most likely come to fruition, it's believable.
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| A Star Trek Technical Manual, yes, that's "a" manual, there are several and they'll explain the physics and engineering challenges involved in incorporating the Bussard Ramscoop into the Warp Nacelle, or that a Nanocochrane is a billionth of a Cochrane, itself a measure of the subspace field stress. |
Given that this tendency or trend exists (and competes with a similar trend to realize that Star Trek is not about real science), what is the better way to analyze and critique Star Trek? Based on it's literary value or on it's scientific accuracy? Surely most would agree that literary criticism of Star Trek is more sensible than Scientific criticism. And so, by analogy, it might seem that criticism/evaluation/analysis of science should "stand-off" from the truth, that scientific accuracy shouldn't be a criteria through which we analyze the social development of a scientific research program.
But that's wrong, the analogy fails, because Star Trek is literature, it's not the truth and doesn't claim to be scientific. The truth of scientific correctness of a research program or theory is very much a part of the how and why it's successful. The truth of a sci-fi story is not, in fact in a way it's explicitly not, a part of why the story is successful.
Scientists don't just happen to stumble on the truth, the scientific enterprise (see what I did there) builds upon previous successes in order to achieve more success: science progresses. Maybe not in straight lines, and certainly not inevitably, science does form columns and march right into progress, but, nonetheless, it does progress. So it's grossly inadequate to evaluate science from a sociological perspective without taking into account the scientific correctness of the theory, research program, or even researcher, under study.
Clearly there are other influences. Going back to the Sci-Fi analogy, IF you ask the audience to suspend disbelief too much, then at the very least you cross genres and end up in Science Fantasy Land, where hobbits have ray guns, and that's just plain stupid.
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| No Comment on either. |
In the sociology of science, there is a tendency to reject experiment and empiricism, largely because of conventionalism: explaining experimental failures through auxiliary theories that represent an ad hoc defense of the core theory. Philosophers of science like Karl Popper insist that we make a "bold" decision to refrain from conventionalism (and also to design experiments that test our theories where they'd be the weakest, to try to disprove our theories rather than merely confirm them). This has a parallel in science fiction. The science of Star Trek has been laid out in books and articles and is moderately well established; you can argue about the results of hypothetical actions in the Star Trek universe, and arrive at canonically consistent results (whereas you can't do this in the Dr. Who universe, because time is merely all wibbly wobbly). Star Trek Conventionalists can criticize a Star Trek story if, say, it involves ship speeds greater than Warp 10. If there's a story where this happens, we know that this is not allowed by the fictionalized science, and so some other explanation has to be offered, or instead we could say that a story must stay within the conventions of Star Trek (not to be confused with Star Trek Conventions of course). Popper wants us to avoid that kind of conventionalism and to make what's arguably a quantum leap: that a theory which hasn't technically been completely falsified, should nonetheless be discarded, and we should move on to another. If you do that in Star Trek, what you get are arguable disasters like Enterprise or Andromeda (as far beyond Star Trek as Trek was beyond Today).
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Actor Scott Bakula, playing Dr. Sam
Beckett playing Capt Jonathan Archer,
who's hoping that his next leap will
be his leap home.
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In Science, researchers are supposed to,of course, be disinterested; they're supposed to not be interested in one particular theory over another because it's more popular; it's what their lab director has a research program in; or because it's what the government is providing funding for--a literary critic of Star Trek isn't supposed to be interested in, say, the Romulans coming out on top, and if that doesn't happen well dammit the story was flawed! A science fiction critic is supposed to be interested in the story. A scientific researcher is not supposed to be disinterested in the truth.
