PHI 2394 B00 · exam 1 · draft

Cheat sheet

Two things only, as asked: who argued what and in what order, then every term the course uses with a plain definition.

Download the two-page Word version, laid out for double-sided A4, or print the same layout from the browser. Week 4 is left off it, and the map and the glossary take one side each.

The map

Eleven stops in order. Each one gives the question the person was answering, what they actually claimed, and who they were arguing with. The line between two cards says how the first leads to the second. The three cards with a green edge are the modern writers who look back at everything above them and give their own account of it.

Plato

428 to 348 BCE

What is actually real, and how would we find out?

His claim: The real things are the Forms, perfect originals in a realm outside this one. Everything you can see is a copy. The senses show you shadows on a cave wall, so they cannot be the route to knowledge.
The method: Dialectic: question and answer until opinion has been separated from knowledge.
Education: Not pouring knowledge into an empty soul. Turning the soul around so it faces the light. The eyes already work; they are pointed the wrong way.
Politics: Whoever has turned should rule. The Kalliopolis, the beautiful city, run by philosopher kings educated in geometry and astronomy.
How to picture it: In Raphael's School of Athens he is the one pointing straight up. What is real is elsewhere, so look away from here.

His own student keeps the word form and moves it out of that other realm.

Aristotle

384 to 322 BCE

What makes things move, and where do they come from?

His claim: Form is in the thing itself, and every thing also has a telos, an end it is growing toward. An acorn is heading for oak. Know the end and you know the thing.
Consequence: Because form is here in the world, you can go and cut animals open and learn something. She called him the first biologist. Plato's theory points away from the physical world and produces no zoology.
Against: Plato's separate realm of Forms.
How to picture it: In the same painting he stands beside Plato with his hand held flat over the ground. What is real is here, so look at it.
Attacked later by: Bacon, over telos. Copernicus, over his earth-centred cosmos. Kuhn uses telos as the thing foundationalism is not like.

His cosmos then holds for two thousand years, so the next break is a large one.

The Middle Ages

read by Lynn White Jr.

Why did Western Europe build the technology it built?

His claim: The religious picture drives the technology.
The chain: God is a creator and an architect. Man is made in his image and told to rule the world as a creative cooperator. Christian history runs in one direction toward a goal, so there is no time to lose. Therefore manual work becomes a form of worship.
By 1300: Deism: God as a clockmaker who set the world going and stepped back. Once the world is a mechanism, taking it apart to see how it runs becomes a pious act.
Against: The view that economic need drives technology and religion follows behind.

That is the setting. Now the Greek picture itself starts to come apart, first in its content.

Copernicus

1473 to 1543

How do the planets actually move?

His claim: The sun stands still at the centre and the earth moves around it.
Her framing, and she called it the important one: He put the sun at the centre so that circular motion would work. He wanted to keep an old Greek commitment to perfect circles, and moving the sun to the middle was how he kept it. No new observation had forced anything.
Against: Aristotle's earth-centred cosmos, which was also the Church's.
Used later by: Kuhn, as his worked case of a revolution.

The content of the Greek picture has broken. Next the method breaks.

Bacon

1561 to 1626 · first of two appearances

How should anyone find anything out?

His claim: Empiricism: the senses are the original source of knowledge. And you do not wait for nature to reveal itself. You go and make it answer, by experiment.
The slogan: Knowledge is power. He means power over the physical world, and he means it as a promise. It is the advertisement for the new science.
Ant, spider, bee: The alchemists are ants: they pile material up and do nothing with it. The Aristotelians are spiders: they spin systems out of themselves with no material coming in. The proper natural philosopher is a bee, who gathers and then digests.
Against: Aristotle's telos. If every thing already contains its purpose, the world reveals itself to a patient observer and your job is to receive it. Bacon wants you to go and take it.
His expectation: That a method anyone can follow will level the differences in intellectual ability, so genius becomes unnecessary. Week 4 tests this against the real distribution of output, and it fails.

Not everyone is pleased about the new confidence in progress.

Rousseau

1712 to 1778

Has progress in the sciences and arts actually made us better people?

His claim: No. Learning advanced and morals did not. He wants a return to Greek values in education.
His line: Barbarous people are those who lack virtue. So a society is measured by the virtue of its people, and great learning with no virtue is still barbarous.
Why he is here: And virtue comes from education, so education is the only route to real progress. He is the counter-current inside the Enlightenment: a man of the age of progress doubting the thing it was proudest of.

Meanwhile the practical question of how to run institutions is being answered by arithmetic.

Bentham

1748 to 1832

How should an institution be arranged?

His claim: Utilitarianism: the right action is whichever produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number. That is what he was famous for in his lifetime.
Applied: He spent much of his life on prison reform and designed the panopticon as the humane replacement for hanging, transportation and filthy gaols. It was never built in Britain.
The design: A ring of cells round a central tower. Two windows per cell so light crosses it and the occupant shows as a silhouette. His three words: visibility, unverifiability, and external power becoming non-corporeal, meaning it stops needing a body in the tower.
Read against him later by: Foucault, who takes the humane design and shows what it does.

Bacon's confidence in method, meanwhile, hardens into a doctrine about what counts as knowledge at all.

Positivism

Enlightenment onward, Comte and the Vienna Circle

What counts as real knowledge?

The claim: Only what can be observed and measured. Anything else does not count as knowledge. Positive here has nothing to do with good.
Her description: Three demands on method. Non-contextual: the result cannot depend on who ran it, or where, or when. Standardised: anyone following the same procedure gets the same result. Analytic: isolate one variable and hold the rest still.
Attacked by: Kuhn, and the first of those three is the one he destroys.

Which brings the course to its hinge.

Kuhn

1922 to 1996 · The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Does science really accumulate steadily toward the truth?

His stand: No. Science alternates between long stable stretches and revisionary breaks. He is against positivism and against the steady-progress story.
His pieces: Paradigm. The shared picture a field works from, with the instruments, standards and assumptions that come with it. Her examples: Newton's mechanics, Lavoisier's chemistry, Mendel's genetics.

Normal science. Solving puzzles where the final picture is already agreed, and every piece you place leads toward it. A puzzle has a guaranteed answer, so failing one counts against you. The picture stays where it is.

Anomaly. A result the field cannot make fit, however hard it tries. They pile up.

Revolution. The shared picture gets replaced, and the result that would not fit is finally explained.

Incommensurability. Afterwards there may be no shared unit for measuring the old picture against the new one. Three reasons: the meanings of terms change, indoctrination, and historical context changes.
On history: He rejects Whig history, which builds the past into steps leading to us. Events must follow their causes, so a sequence cannot be explained by the fact that it ended up here.
On progress: Normal science visibly accumulates. A revolution is not progress, because it builds and destroys paradigms at the same time, so there is no single direction to measure.
Her conclusion: Science is ad hoc and disunified, held together the way Wittgenstein said games are, and it works anyway. So the course's title question has an answer: there is no one scientific method.

If the shape of a science can shift like that, the next question is who benefits from the shape it has.

Foucault

1926 to 1984

What are modern institutions actually doing to people?

History of Madness, 1961: The claimed scientific neutrality of modern psychiatry covers for controlling challenges to conventional bourgeois morality. Her examples: homosexuality and hysteria, both diagnoses attached to broken social rules.
Discipline and Punish, 1975: A genealogy, meaning a study of how a practice came to be without assuming it was an improvement. His puzzle: punishment really did get gentler, so what is the gentler method doing that the old one could not?
Three techniques: Hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, the examination. Watch, rank, record. The examination is where the first two meet: it watches you and writes a verdict about you in one act.
The goal: Normalization. A norm is set and everyone is measured against it, which produces systems sorting citizens into normal and abnormal. Her examples are all places nobody is being punished: standardized education, medical practice, industrial production.
Bacon, second appearance: Power-knowledge. Foucault keeps Bacon's equation and changes two things. Bacon's power is over nature; this power is over people. Bacon is making a promise; this is an accusation. His gloss: the development of force and the establishment of truth, one act with two outputs. A file written about a prisoner becomes the truth about him and decides whether he goes home.
Docile bodies: Discipline makes bodies useful and easier to control: prisoners, soldiers, workers, schoolchildren. The body is broken into segments, analysed, and recomposed for maximum effect.

Kuhn says the content of science could have gone differently. Foucault says knowing has a politics. Put those together and you get the last stop.

Social construction

Sismondo, and Hacking 1999

In what sense is a scientific fact made?

Hacking's claim: Any given theory is not the only one that could have been established, so the success of a theory is not by itself evidence for it. It could have gone another way and still worked.
How something gets to be real: Institutions exist because enough people act as though they exist, so they cannot be wished away. Her example is politeness: no law requires it, no building houses it, and it constrains everybody.
The test for reality: Causal power. Gender is real because it is hard not to take account of it, and because treating people as gendered produces gendered people. Having effects is the best sign of reality we have.
Contingently real: Knowledge, methods, epistemologies, disciplinary boundaries and styles of work are all real and none of them had to be this way.
Kinds: A kind is a category: gold, planet, ADHD. Realists: the world comes already divided and we find the lines. Nominalists: we draw the lines, and the world is continuous, so the division lives in our heads and our language. A weed is a plant nobody wants, and there is nothing in the plant. Her test case was ADHD.
The sting in the tail: After an hour arguing that laboratories shut nature out, she ends by saying laboratories and technology contribute to objectivity. The construction claim describes how objective knowledge gets made. It leaves alone whether such knowledge exists.

Who turns up twice

Three names appear in more than one week, in different roles. These are the ones that catch people out, because the same person is a hero in one lecture and a target in the next.

Baconthree times: Week 2, as the founder. Empiricism, experiment, and knowledge is power as a promise about nature. Week 3, inside Foucault. The same three words become power-knowledge: same equation, power now over people, and the verdict reversed from boast to charge. Week 4, as a prediction that failed. He expected method to level intellectual ability. Ten per cent of authors produce half of all papers.
Aristotlethree times: Week 2, in his own right. Form in the thing, plus telos. Week 2 again, as Bacon's target. Telos is precisely what Bacon objects to. Week 3, as the cosmos Copernicus overthrows, and as the contrast Kuhn draws for foundationalism: telos pulls from ahead, a foundation pushes from below.
Platotwice: Week 2, for the cave and for education as turning around. Week 3, beside Foucault, because she wrote on her own slide that his panoptic utopia should make you think of Plato, the Republic, the Kalliopolis. One perfectly ordered city described twice, once admiringly and once as a warning.

Glossary

Fifty-five terms, grouped by where they come from. Each one is written to make sense read on its own.

General words

Ad hoc: Put together for the one case in hand, with no general rule behind it. Why it matters here. Her conclusion about science was that it is an ad hoc system, disunified, and successful anyway. She attached that to Wittgenstein, whose example is games. What do all games have in common? Competition? Solitaire has none. Winning and losing? Ring-a-ring-a-roses has none. Skill? Snakes and ladders is pure luck. Two players? Solitaire again. Fun? Not professional sport. No single feature is present in every game. What there is instead is a web of overlaps: chess and poker share competition, poker and solitaire share cards, solitaire and patience share a single player. He called that a family resemblance, because relatives look alike with no one feature running through all of them. Her claim is that physics, taxonomy, epidemiology and geology are like that, and the whole thing works. So the course title gets an answer: there is no scientific method, singular, and that is survivable.
Contingent: It could have been otherwise, and nothing made it necessary. Contingently real means a thing is genuinely real and could still have been built differently. Week 4 says that of knowledge, methods, disciplinary boundaries and styles of work.
Epistemology: A view about what counts as knowledge and how you are allowed to get it.
Metaphysics: The study of what exists, and of what things fundamentally are. The name is a filing accident. Compilers put Aristotle's book after his Physics.
Dualism: A split of one thing into two. Schadewaldt's complaint is that modern thought split nature from spirit, thought from extension, and subject from object, where the Greeks had held them together.

The Greeks

Homereighth century BCE: The earliest writer the course reaches back to. The Odyssey relies on a cosmos with an order and a place for everything in it. That assumption is the ground everybody later argues on.
Heraclitussixth century BCE: Nature is in harmony. Sound thinking is man's greatest power, and his highest aptitude is being able to say what is and fashion creatively by hearkening to nature. Hearkening means listening, so the quotation assumes there is an order out there to listen to.
Aristotle384 to 322 BCE: Born in Stagira, never an Athenian citizen, studied under Plato, tutored Alexander the Great. Called the first biologist. The non-citizenship is why he had to leave Athens at the end of his life.
GeocentrismAristotle: The earth at the centre of the universe, with everything else turning round it. Nobody had to assume it. It falls out of the telos doctrine. Earth's natural place is the centre, which is why a dropped rock falls, and by the same reasoning the earth itself sits at the centre. The heavens are a different stuff that moves in perfect circles forever, because that is what that stuff is for. Copernicus and then Galileo broke it.
The dialoguesPlato: Twenty-six of them, and Plato never speaks in his own voice. Socrates is almost always the speaker. He was a real person, and the Socrates in the dialogues is Plato's. So no line can be quoted as Plato's own opinion. The one set here is the Republic, and the cave is in book seven.
The AcademyPlato: His school in Athens, where the English word academy comes from. Aristocratic women are known to have attended it.
The School of AthensRaphael, 1509 to 1511: Plato points straight up, Aristotle holds his hand flat over the ground. A fresco in the Vatican, and the single best mnemonic for the week 2 disagreement. Plato's raised finger: the Forms are in a realm outside this one, so the direction of inquiry is away from the visible world. He carries the Timaeus, his book about the cosmos. Aristotle's flat palm: form is in the thing, so the direction of inquiry is at the world you are standing in. He carries the Ethics, a book about how to live in this life.
The cavePlato: Prisoners chained facing a wall, taking the shadows on it for the real things. The journey. Out of the sensible world, meaning what the senses reach, and up into the intelligible realm, meaning what only thought reaches. Plato calls the climb the journey of the soul. Being freed is painful and the prisoner has to be compelled. The returner is laughed at, and anyone who tries to unchain the others would be killed. What it is for: how we know what is true, how we check a fact, how we know where our information came from, and what methods of inquiry to use. Which makes it a text about method.
physisSchadewaldt: Nature, meaning the source everything grows out of. It carries movement inside it, which is why the Greeks used it to answer what makes things move.
techneSchadewaldt: Skill at making or doing something. A person has to be involved, so it is never a part of nature on its own.
epistemeSchadewaldt: Knowledge of what never changes. Ranked above techne, which works on things still in the middle of becoming.
empeiriaSchadewaldt: Plain experience: you can do the thing and cannot say why it works.
atechniaSchadewaldt: Making something confidently out of a false idea of how it works. His word for a blunder. It can be elaborate and productive and still be one.
telosAristotle: The end a thing is growing toward. An acorn is heading for oak. To know a thing is to know its end. The root of the English teleology.
FormPlato and Aristotle: What makes a thing the kind of thing it is. Plato puts the Forms in a realm outside this one and makes everything here a copy. Aristotle puts form inside the thing, together with its end. That is why Aristotle could do biology and Plato could not.
DialecticPlato: Question and answer until opinion has been sorted out from knowledge.
KalliopolisPlato: His beautiful city, run by philosopher kings, where the right education is what holds it together. She wrote on her own slide that Foucault's perfectly governed city should make you think of it.
Philosopher kingsPlato: The rulers of his ideal city, described as awake while everyone else dreams. Their education needs geometry and astronomy, because mathematics is his route to what you cannot touch.

Method and knowledge

EmpiricismBacon: The view that the senses are where knowledge starts. From the Greek empeiria, experience. Its opposite is the view that reason alone gets you there, which is Plato.
Induction: Reasoning up from the cases you have seen to a law covering all of them. A thousand swans, every one white, so all swans are white. The law covers every swan there is and you looked at a thousand, so the cases never make it safe. Europeans held that one until 1697, when a Dutch expedition found black swans in Western Australia.
Foundationalism: Every claim rests on a claim below it, down to a bottom layer that needs nothing under it. Why will the kettle boil at 100? Because water does. Why believe that? Because every measurement came out that way. There the chain is meant to stop. The problem is that the bottom layer is laid by induction. The tracing runs down through reasons. Tracing back through time is a separate idea, called Whig history.
Knowledge is powerBacon: Know how a thing works and you can make it do what you want. He means power over the physical world, and he means it as a promise. Foucault later keeps the equation and turns it into an accusation.
Ant, spider, beeBacon: Three ways of working, two of them wrong. The alchemists are ants: they pile material up and do nothing with it. The Aristotelians are spiders: they spin systems out of themselves with no material coming in. The proper natural philosopher is a bee, who gathers and then digests. Novum Organum I.95.
Lynn White Jr.: Religious worldviews decide which technologies get built. His chain, in order. God is a creator and an architect. Man is made in his image and told to rule the world as a creative cooperator. Judaeo-Christian history runs in one direction toward a goal, where most religions had time going round in a circle. So there is no time to lose, and manual work becomes an essential and pressing form of worship. The position he is arguing against is that economic need drives technology and religion follows along behind.
DeismLynn White: God as a clockmaker who set the world going and stepped back. Developing around 1300. Once the world is a mechanism, taking it apart to see how it runs becomes a pious act.
Comte's three states: Explanation passes through three stages over history: theological, then metaphysical, then positive. Gods explain things, then abstract essences and forces explain them, then only what can be observed and measured counts. The third stage is where the word positivism comes from. Note that this is a progress story, which puts Comte on the opposite side from Kuhn.
The Vienna Circle1920s and 1930s: Philosophers and scientists holding that a statement means something only if it can be checked against experience. Logical positivism, with Moritz Schlick at the centre. The hardest and most organised version of the doctrine Kuhn's book breaks with.
Descartes: Split the world into thinking substance and extended substance. Extension means taking up space. Mind on one side, everything physical on the other. This is the dualism Schadewaldt wants undone, because it puts the observer outside what is observed.
Galileo1564 to 1642: Found by looking that the planets revolve around the sun. The counter-example to Aristotle's patient observer waiting for the world to reveal its purposes. He went and got the answer.
Positivism: The doctrine that real knowledge comes only from what you can observe and measure. Three demands on method follow. Non-contextual: the result cannot depend on who ran it, or where, or when. Standardised: anyone following the same procedure gets the same result. Analytic: isolate one variable and hold the rest still. Kuhn attacks the first, since a paradigm is a context. Positive here has nothing to do with good.
Realism: There is one way the world is, and we can find it out and describe it accurately. Truths depend mostly on the natural world and only slightly on the people stating them.
Instrumentalism: A theory is a tool that works, with no claim attached about what is really there. The opposite of realism.

Kuhn

Normal science: Solving puzzles where the final picture is already agreed, and every piece you place leads toward it. A puzzle has a guaranteed answer, so failing one counts against you. The picture stays where it is. That asymmetry is what lets a field carry on through years of bad results.
Paradigm: The shared picture a field works from, with the instruments, standards and assumptions that come with it. Her examples: Newton's mechanics, Lavoisier's chemistry, Mendel's genetics. Note how wide it is, because that width is what makes incommensurability possible.
Disciplinary matrix: Kuhn's later and more careful word for a paradigm.
Anomaly: A result the field cannot make fit, however hard it tries. They pile up, and a pile of them is what eventually breaks a paradigm.
Revolution: The shared picture gets replaced, and the result that would not fit is finally explained. Not progress, because it builds and destroys at the same time, so there is no single direction left to measure.
Incommensurability: No shared unit for measuring two paradigms against each other. From geometry: a square's side and its diagonal have no common unit that fits both exactly.

The case to carry. In Newton, mass is a fixed property of an object, the same whatever the object is doing. In Einstein it changes with velocity. Same word, two different things, so "mass is conserved" is true in one theory and false in the other.

His three reasons: the meanings of terms change, indoctrination, and historical context changes. Her counter-example: particle detectors stayed in use unchanged across a theory change, so something survived that both sides trust.
Whig history: Telling the past as a line of steps leading up to us. Kuhn's objection is logical: events have to follow their causes, so a sequence cannot be explained by the fact that it ended up here.
Copernicus1473 to 1543: He put the sun at the centre and set the earth moving. Her framing, and she called it the important one: he needed the sun at the centre for circular motion to work. He was keeping an old Greek commitment to perfect circles, with no new data behind the move.

Foucault

PanopticonBentham: A ring of cells round a central tower, where the inmate is always visible and can never check whether anyone is watching. Two windows per cell, so light crosses it and the occupant shows as a silhouette. The architecture does the watching, which is why one person can replace many.
Bentham's three words: Visibility, unverifiability, and external power becoming non-corporeal. Non-corporeal means the power stops needing a body in the tower. Nobody has to be up there, so it costs almost nothing to run.
UtilitarianismBentham: The right action is whichever produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number. What he was actually famous for in his lifetime, ahead of the panopticon. He also spent much of his life on prison reform.
Three techniques of control: Hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. Watch, rank, record. Hierarchical observation is watching arranged in ranks. Normalizing judgment measures you against a norm. The examination is where the two meet: it watches you and writes a verdict about you in one act.
Power-knowledge: Knowing someone and controlling them turn out to be a single act. His gloss: the development of force and the establishment of truth. A file written about a prisoner becomes the truth about him and decides whether he goes home. Built on Bacon's knowledge is power, with the verdict reversed.
Normalization: A norm gets set and everyone is measured against it, so people sort into normal and abnormal. She called it the goal of disciplinary power. Her examples are all places nobody is being punished: standardized education, medical practice, industrial production.
Docile bodies: Bodies made useful and easier to control by discipline. Prisoners, soldiers, workers, schoolchildren. The body is broken into segments, analysed in detail, and recomposed for maximum effect.
Genealogy: Studying how a practice came to be, without assuming it was an improvement. The method of Discipline and Punish, 1975. His puzzle: punishment really did get gentler, so what is the gentler method doing that the old one could not?
The plague town: How Panopticism opens: the plague is met with Order. Sorting the disease, separating bodies, sorting evil, which increases fear and death. Its political dream is strict division and regulation reaching into the smallest details of daily life.
History of Madness1961: Psychiatry's claimed neutrality covers for controlling people who break social rules. Her examples: homosexuality and hysteria. What was presented as objective discovery came out of questionable social and ethical commitments.

Week 4

Stratification: A field layering into a small advantaged group and everyone else. Ten per cent of authors produce half of all papers. Eighty per cent of citations go to twenty per cent of papers.
Cumulative advantage: Success breeds success, so an early lead compounds into a large one. A good first post means a bigger lab, more results, a stronger grant, a bigger lab again. Nobody does anything unfair and the gap widens anyway.
Meritocracy: A system where who gets ahead tracks how good they are. Her conclusion was that science looks much more like a boys' club than one of these.
Zuckerman 1977: 34 of the 55 US Nobel laureates in 1963 had worked with a previous winner. Those who had won at an average age of 44, against 53 for the others.
Rossiter: A field's status drops as women enter it and rises as men do. Women were pushed into the invisible sciences, such as home economics and nutritional science. In 1982 men perceived their own work as less masculine because women were present.
Wenneras and Wold 2001: A woman needed about three extra Nature papers to be scored as competent as a man. Or twenty extra in a good specialist journal. At the Swedish Medical Research Council, in peer review, which is the mechanism science uses to be fair.
Fox 1983: The portrait of a productive scientist. Driven, strong ego, acts autonomously, plays with ideas, tolerates ambiguity, at home with abstractions, detached from non-scientific social relations, reserves mornings for writing, works on routinised problems, relatively young, prestigious graduate school, prestigious mentor, prestigious employer, free to choose problems, a history of success. Half of it is a personality and half of it is a situation.
Hermanowicz 2006: The same thing as behavioural categories, in order of importance. Persistent, smart, civil, creative, entrepreneurial, aggressive, tasteful, confident, adaptable. Persistence outranks intelligence and civility comes third.
Cole and Cole: Funding goes to the most influential, and to institutions trusted largely for having been around a long time. So funding opportunities feed stratification.
Cole and Singer 1991: Small irritants compound. Each difference looks trivial and gets shrugged off. Where competition is strong and advantage accumulates, trivial differences at the start produce large gaps later.
Barbercheck 2001: The words in advertisements in the journal Science. Simple and easy go with pictures of women. Fast, reliable and accurate go with pictures of men. Men are also more likely to be shown as heroes, as nonconformists, and at play.
Etzkowitz 2000: Exclusion from the informal networks where technical knowledge moves. A female doctoral student: her colleagues went to parties with her, and it never crossed their minds to ask her which drying agent to use. Nobody refused her anything.
The pipeline: A pipe with leaks at every joint along its span. A high-pressure surge of young women at the source and a trickle at the spigot. No single point of failure, so no single fix. Getting in, staying in, getting on.
Gilligan and Keller1982 and 1985: Women tend to think in more concrete terms, so are better served by problem-centred learning. A live proposal about learning styles, from inside feminism as well as outside it. Keep it apart from the maths gene claim, which is rejected.
The maths geneBenbow and Stanley, and Summers in 2005: The claim that boys have an inborn advantage in mathematics. Rejected on two grounds. Genes only ever act in environments, so a claim about genes alone is a claim about nothing. And boys' and girls' scores have been converging, while genes do not change in thirty years.
Social construction: Facts, theories and technologies get built by people, and are not simply found lying there. Truth, rationality and the material world have limited value without interpretation or rhetorical work.
ConstructivismHacking 1999: We build our categories, the way a committee builds a job title. Any given theory is not the only one that could have been established, so a theory's success is not by itself evidence for it.
How a thing gets to be real: Enough people act as though it exists, so it cannot be wished away. Her example is politeness: no law requires it, no building houses it, and it constrains everybody. The test offered for reality is causal power. Gender is real because treating people as gendered produces gendered people.
Kinds: realist against nominalist: A kind is a category: gold, planet, ADHD. Do we find these divisions, or draw them?. Realist: the world comes already divided and we find the lines. Gold is one thing and silver another because of something in them, with nothing to do with us. Nominalist: we draw the lines. The world is continuous and we cut it where it suits us, so the division lives in our heads and our language. A weed is a plant nobody wants, and there is nothing in the plant. Test case, ADHD: a real condition we found, or a line drawn round behaviour that inconveniences a classroom?
Knorr Cetina: Nature is not to be found in the laboratory. To an outside observer it is a site of action from which nature is as much as possible excluded: a space of prepared materials, intentionally shaped.
Heterogeneous engineeringLaw 1987: Building the device and the world it can work in at the same time. Enrolling materials, skills, knowledge, capital and people who may not fit together. No one piece of the network decides the shape of the whole.
Co-production: Scientific knowledge and social arrangements make each other. Researchers need funding to study climate change, and the science then justifies the policy. ADHD can be framed as a disorder or as extreme procrastination.