Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems in the Location of Science

Over the past two decades broadly geographical sensibilities have become prominent in the academic study of science. An account is given of tensions in science studies between transcendentalist conceptions of truth and emerging localist perspectives on the making, meaning and evaluation of scientific knowledge. The efficient spread of scientific knowledge is not a phenomenon that argues against the applicability of geographical sensibilities towards science but actually calls for an even more vigorous project in the geography of knowledge.

show that locality and spatial situation needed to be attended to in order to understand how scientific knowledge was made, how it secured credibility, how it travelled. A pluralist sensibility towards the nature of science flowed from the work of Thomas Kuhn, as developed by sociologists of science whose work Kuhn subsequently d i~o w n e d .~ -Science was not one thing conceptually and methodologically unified, as the seventeenth-century moderns and their followers proclaimed; it was a variety of practices whose conceptual identities were the outcomes of local patterns of training and ~ocialization.~ One could no more hope to become a competent member of the relevant scientific community by reading its texts and methodological pronouncements than one could learn to be an English gentleman by reading a book of manners. And that was one reason why sociologists of science turned from the questionnaire and the armchair to participant observation in the laboratory. If understanding was the aim, then there was no alternative to being there, being where knowledge was made.9 Kuhnian pluralism about scientific knowledge, and about how science was made, maintained and transmitted, was therefore an important way of opening up the possibility of geographical sensibilities. The extent to which these sensibilities have flourished in science studies is amply represented in historical and sociological writing from the 1980s. An issue of the journal Science in Context in 1991 was devoted to 'The place of knowledge'; the proceedings of a 1993 conference on 'Territorial themes in the history of science' will soon be published; there is already one collection of essays on the laboratory setting and another is in the works.1° Some of the contributors to these volumes find inspiration in the work of Scandinavian and British geographers, sociological theoristsnotably Anthony Giddenswho have taken on board aspects of this geographical work, and architectural theorists of the built environment and its consequences for social interaction." Others have been taken with Foucault's encouragement to understand knowledge/power conjunctions as inscribed in space: Once knowledge can be analysed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to capture the processes by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power."

Steven Shapin
Much of this work in science studies has been beautifully summarized by David Livingstone in a recent issue of Society and Space.13 Students of science owe much to geographers and it is flattering to learn that Livingstone thinks that historians of geography might possibly learn something from us. If so, it is mainly through showing some of the possibilities inherent in geographical work.

Geography and the travels of knowledge
I want briefly to describe a few of the themes represented in recent science studies work, to note how such work deploys geographical perspectives and how it confronts problems of its own making, problems which may seem to show the limits of spatial and localist sensibilities but which, I think, identify a plausible way forward. Out of a possibly much greater range of topics, I want to select just two, which I will call travel and meaning. The first, I will have to deal with schematically; the second, I will illustrate with a story.
Suppose one simply took for grantedas many philosophers and even some sociologists of science do nota whole body of recent empirical and theoretical work showing the local, situated and embedded nature of science. That is to say, suppose one regarded it as established beyond doubt that science is indelibly marked by the local and the spatial circumstances of its making; that scientific knowledge is embodied, residing in people and in such material objects as books and instruments, and nowhere else; and, finally, that scientific knowledge is made by and through mundaneand locally varyingmodes of social and cultural interaction. If one granted all this, one would be treating the 'localist' or 'geographical' turn in science studies as a great accomplishmenttelling us a series of important things about science which previous understandings have systematically ignored or denied.
I agree with this judgement and I do think that such workindebted as it is to formal and informal appropriations of geographical resourcesis a considerable achievement.14 And yet I also want to say that it is still incomplete and that it is in danger of missing something very important about science. The problem here is not that the geographical sensibility has been taken too far but that it has not been taken far enough. We need to understand not only how knowledge is made in Placing the view from nowhere specific places but also how transactions occur between places.
The point to which I want to draw attention concerns the issue of tmvel. If science is indeed a local product, how does itor rather some versions of ittravel with what seems to be unique efficiency? How does a proposition or a procedure produced in one place come to spread across the world? One appeal of the grand modernist narratives of reason, reality and method was the table-thumping response they offered to potential questions about the travel of science. Such knowledge spreads so robustly across the world because it is true and/or because it travels along the channels carved out by unambiguous and automatically transferable methodical practices. Knowledge which is not true, or which is not so methodically grounded, does not spread. What more do you need to know?
You can, I think, plausibly reject these modernist answers to questions about travel but you cannot plausibly reject the phenomena to which they offered an explanatory response. Science is locally produced but it does travel with very great efficiency. How does it do that? If you are sceptical of the modernist responses, what interesting accounts can you give of scientific travel? And how do spatial sensibilities figure in such accounts?
The work of Bruno Latour and his followers has opened up one particularly significant line of thinking about scientific travel.'%nowledge and technique travel insofar as they are institutionalized and standardized. The graph, the map and the book represent one set of vehicles for the efficient translation of relatively unmodified knowledge from place to place; the thermometer represents another. When knowledge of the wide world can be reduced to the scale of a table-top and when mechanically produced and virtually identical copies can be placed on table-tops everywhere, then all can (potentially and in principle) know the same world in the same ways.16 And when the thermometer becomes simply necessary for work of a range of practical communities, then the physical knowledge embodied in it becomes durable and, ultimately, incontestable. If you want to understand the robustness and the speed of scientific knowledge, you want to understand how itand the things in which it is embodied -are distributed and held stable. That is one justification for the militaristic and imperialistic language that is so characteristic of Latour's work: he wants to draw attention to the ways in which patterns of military domination, colonialism and worldwide trade have established channels which integrate the world and which standardize its knowledge and its practices. The suggestion is that the wide distribution of scientific knowledge flows from the success of certain cultures in creating and spreading standardized contexts for making and applying that knowledge. Trace how the thermometer and its uses travelled across the world. Track how the European-style schoolroom travelled across the world. Domination, drilling and disciplining are said to be the keys to understanding how technoscientific knowledge spreads from the local to the global.
However, the 'dog' thatso to speak -'doesn't bark' in Latour's picture of scientific travel is a conception of normative order. The Latourian account appears all natural fact and no moral fact. And for that reason, I suspect that it is at best an incomplete response to questions about the travel of scientific knowledge. Domination, drilling and disciplining are, I think, powerful means for effecting the spread of knowledge but they are quite costly means. Nor does attention to such processes pick up some much more routine and pervasive means for transferring knowledge from person to person and from place to place.
Recent science studies work on trustincluding some of my ownalso proceeds from a point of view on science systematically rejected by the modernist tradition going back to the seventeenth century.17 Where such moderns as Bacon, Descartes and Locke proclaimed that reliance upon human testimony was an obstacle to achieving proper knowledge of the natural world, more recent tendencies have followed Michael Polanyi in appreciating both the fact and the necessity of such reliance in securing and making sense of empirical knowledge." That seventeenth-century English natural philosophers knew that there were such things as icebergs and polar bears was on no other basis than what they were told by those who had seen these things, for few, if any, of them had seen them for themselves. The same goes for the phenomena produced by Boyle's air-pump in the 1660s, for only a small fraction of those who knew such facts knew them at first-hand. And the same too for the knowledge a typical modern zoologist has of the vast number of animals which constitute that discipline's factual knowledge. It is proper usage to say that Robert Boyle knew there were icebergs and it is proper usage to say that the typical modern zoologist knows the strange reproductive behaviour of the marine worm Urechis caupo, even though both fail to satisfy modernist criteria of direct witness. They know these things as securely as they know anything else in their domains and they know themas it wereby courtesy.
Accordingly, a trust relationship is central to the very idea of empirical scientific knowledge. That relationship is inscribed in space: those who have not seen these things know them by trusting those who have, or by trusting those who have trusted those who have. The capacity of scientists to know what they do about the world is conditional upon finding means to bring distant things near. They can know the contents of the wide world -in space and in timeif, and only if, they have practical solvents to scepticism. Whom to trust? Answers to such a question will vary from place to place and from culture to culture but, if there is indeed to be such a thing as a body of knowledge about the wide world, there must be some answer.
The work I have been doing recently on seventeenth-century English science has pointed to the gentleman and gentlemanly identity as one very powerful answer to the question 'whom to trust?'. Many (and, in some contexts, most) scientists in the early modern period were gentlemen and their codes of scientific conduct were adapted from those circulating in gentlemanly society. Appreciations of gentle integrity, honour and free action were available to warrant belief in what these people said about the world, including the natural world to which they had access and to which others did not. Gentlemanly identity in such cultures provided adequate grounds of trust.
Late twentieth-century scientists are not gentlemen: most are not gentle and many are not men. Our late modern solutions to questions about the grounds of trust appear to be different: they seem to point towards expertise and the institutions that produce and vouch for expertise. But modern science is no less trust-dependent than science in the past or than other forms of modern culture. And arguably it is more so. The condition of scientists knowing their discipline's knowledge, and of the laity knowing what scientists know, is a massively important solutionor series of solutionsto problems of trust. That solutionand it has yet adequately to be characterizedis at the same time a solution to questions about scientific Steven Shapin travel that have been raised by the geographical s e n~i b i l i t~. '~

Geography and the meanings of knowledge
Finally, I would like to tell a little story. It is a story about a short walk I took several years ago in London, a story about small-scale geography and a story about meaning and some of the sensibilities that historians of ideas might employbut almost never doin their inquiries about the meanings of texts.
When Robert Boyle lived in London from the late 1660s, he produced a number of moral as well as natural philosophical tracts. Some of these tracts identified immoral tendencies in his society and offered philosophical remedies for those tendencies. He did not, in fact, clearly specify just which circles he had in mind but recent historical studies have filled in the gaps. Boyle, it is said, was specially concerned by the radical sectarian groups that flourished during the interregnum and civil wars: Diggers, Ranters, Levellers and the like.20 Although these groups were quite effectively crushed by the Restoration in 1660, they remained paramount in Boyle's consciousnessand, indeed, in that of other Restoration moralists. They remained, so it is claimed, a potent symbol of threats to proper Christian religion and proper moral order.
That is a plausible story about the meaning of Boyle's texts and nothing I found out during my little walk counts against its plausibility. However, that walk presented me with another, quite different, plausible story about the meaning of those texts. While the first story depends upon Boyle's reaction to tendencies and behaviour with which he did not have direct familiarity (so far as we know he never met a Ranter in his life), the second story proceeds from his own day-to-day lived experience. It is about the neighbours.
I knew that Boyle's house no longer existed but I knew that it was in Pall Mall, on the south side, almost opposite St James's Square. (Strictly speaking, this was the house of his sister Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, but Boyle lived there from 1668 to his death in 1691.) I set out to find it, expecting to see a blue and white plaque commemorating his residence there for almost a quarter of a century. The site is now occupied by the western wing of the RACthis is now, of course gentlemen's club-landbut there was no plaque. Walking a little further to the west, there was a plaque: it commemorated not Boyle but Nell Gwyn, one of Charles 11' s many mistresses. A little further on lived two other royal mistresses, the Duchess of Cleveland and the Countess of Portland, and, at the western end of Pall Mall, St James's Palace itself, where the King l i~e d .~' These were Boyle's neighbours, whose comings and goings helped form the texture of his daily experience during the years he was composing, revising and publishing some of his moral tracts.
What went on in Nell Gwyn's houseand to a lesser extent in St James's Park and the King's private garden round the back of Boyle's housez2is well-known. This was one of the most louche and licentious sites of Restoration debaucheryand at the very highest social levels. Nell's parties orgies actuallyincluded not only the King and selected courtiers but also such Restoration wits and libertines as the notorious Earl of Rochester. There is also solid evidence that occasional guests included Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren and other distinguished Fellows of the Royal Society, an organization which Boyle helped to found and of which he was a leading intellectual inspiration.'" That is, the dens of iniquity of which Boyle had the most direct and vivid experience were not those at the bottom of the social scale but those which festered at the very top, practically next door. The neighbours' goings-on may always and everywhere be a problem but these were very special neighbours. And about these neighbours you did not complain. Or, if you did, only so circumspectly or obliquely thatas the CIA used to put it -'maximum achievable deniability' could be sustained. Boyle did not complain about the neighbours' behaviour but there are good reasons why he might not have done so while offering general indictments of immoral tendencies in his society. That kind of obliqueness was, after all, a pervasive feature of Restoration social and political commentary.
I do not necessarily offer this as a true story about the meaning of some of Boyle's moral texts but only as a plausible one. More to the point, I submit the story as a token of a possibly general approach to meaning in the history of ideas. The condition of even offering the story is an inquiry intoin this case, a walk inthe local setting of knowledge-making. And the possibility that it is a true story about meaning arises from a theory about human affections best articulated by Edmund Burke in 1790: To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is a first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.24 And the same applies where the issue is not affection but disaffection.
Burke's sensibility would suggest that we are importantly attracted to, or repelled by, ideas as they are embodied in familiar otherskin, teachers, colleagues, neighbours. That sensibility is, in my opinion, basically correct. It offers a constructive framework for empirical inquiries into the local production of meaning. Such inquiries, I think, can never be too local, and in just that sense the localist turn in science studies has a long way still to go. The phrase comes from Nagel T 1986 The uiezo from nowhere Oxford University Press, Oxford. For the analogy between contemporary appreciations of science and nineteenth-century views of religion, see Bloor D 1988 Rationalism, supernaturalism, and the sociology of knowledge in Hronsky I Feher M and Dajka B eds Scientific knozoledge socialized Akademiai Kiado, Budapest 59-74; Bloor D 1991 Kizoulledge and social irrlagery 2nd edn University of Chicago Press, Chicago especially 50-3. In talking of 'truth' as pervasively 'the view from nowhere', I mean here to pick out traditional philosophical and theological conceptions of Tmth as necessarily transcendent. It is by no means clear that robustly pragmatic everyday conceptions of 'what is the case' trade in notions of transcendence, nor that such mundane conceptions of truth are not central to some of our society's most consequential institutions and their practical judgments; consider the workings of the law, the military and medicine. 4 Among students of science there has been a loose equation between what count as geographical resources and a stress on locale and the particularities of place in knowledge-makinga circumstance which clearly arises from a desire to reject transcendentalist conceptions of scientific knowledge.