Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini
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… They learn more science – meaning research – and it just happens that, without even noticing it, they learn also more law, economics, sociology, ethics, psychology, science policy and so on, since all those features are associated with the piece of science they have chosen to follow. (“From the two cultures debate to cosmopolitics” contribution to a special symposium in Zeit, available online at www.bruno-latour.fr).
In the following pages, we will discuss three incentives for embarking on controversy mapping: (1) controversies allow the observation of scientific paradigms and technological infrastructures in the making; (2) they reveal the intended and unintended consequences of these paradigms and infrastructures; and (3) they help in taking more inclusive and reflexive decisions about these consequences.
Mapping as a way to study science and technology in the making
The most immediate reason for engaging with controversies is that they provide a vantage point from which to observe science and technology in action. One of the main challenges facing the study of technoscience is the self-evidence which shrouds its object of study ex post facto. Most of the time, we simply appropriate scientific facts and technological artifacts without caring about how they work or how they were made. This opacity is obviously convenient. Life would be very complicated if we had to think about Archimedean fluid mechanics and Roman aqueduct building every time we poured a glass of water. For every theorem that we learn to prove in school, there are thousands of others that we just believe or use without even knowing it. Most of the time, all we need to understand about a technology is what it takes as input and what it generates as output.
The downside of this “black boxing” is that scholars interested in the social study of science and technology are faced with the problem that their objects of study are opaque in the sense that they offer few clues about the circumstances under which they came to be. Harry Collins (1975) illustrates this difficulty through the metaphor of ship models in glass bottles. If we were only able to observe the models once inside their bottles, we would have a hard time imagining how they passed through the bottleneck and thus conclude that these ships had always existed within their bottled universes:
It is as though epistemologists are concerned with the characteristics of ships (knowledge) in bottles (validity) while living in a world where all ships are already in bottles with the glue dried and the strings cut. A ship within a bottle is a natural object in this world, and because there is no way to reverse the process, it is not easy to accept that the ship was ever just a bundle of sticks. (Collins, 1975, p. 205)
“Black boxing” refers to the process by which technoscientific work is made invisible by its own success. When something works – a machine, a technology, a theory, a method – it is no longer questioned. Or rather: the fact that it is no longer questioned is the hallmark of its success. The construction is complete, the builders have left the site, and the ultimate testimony to their skill is to make us forget they were ever there. All of which is perfectly fine, as long as we just want to profit from the utility of technoscientific black boxes, but what if we are interested in knowing how they were put together or, even more poignantly, what if we need to know it?
This is where controversy becomes a methodological opportunity. To come back to Collins’ metaphor, it is not easy to learn the art of ship-bottling because ship-bottlers put considerable effort into safekeeping the tricks of the trade. There are, as we discovered while writing these pages, two main techniques to put ships in bottles. The first consists in building the ship outside the bottle; attaching the mast and the sails to the hull with a system of hinges; then inserting the ship in the bottle with the reclined mast; and finally lifting the mast by pulling on the hidden string. The second technique consists in building the ship directly inside the bottle with specially designed, long-handled tools. The reason why we can know about these differences is because ship-bottlers disagree on which method is best. Those who build the ships directly in the bottle accuse the others of cheating, and those who “cheat” reply that the ships of their opponents are just ugly. Because of their disagreement, both camps willingly explain their techniques as a way to justify their position.
Something similar is true in science. In order to convince their peers, scientists are forced to make the details of their work explicit. They must publish their datasets, spell out their methods, describe their samples, document their algorithms, cite their predecessors, acknowledge their assumptions, declare their sources of funding. Consider how much we, as outsiders, have been able to learn about GMOs because opponents of those technologies have nitpicked every risk involved, forcing transparency on every detail of transgenesis. Consider how much we have learned about the physics of nuclear fission or the technology of reactors every time a proposal for a new plant has been contested or a referendum on nuclear energy has been announced (Nelkin, 1971; Callon et al., 2009). Or consider how intricate epidemiological discussions about herd immunity or curve flattening have become public knowledge during the Covid-19 pandemic (Munk, 2020).
When we said that we did not have to bother about hydraulics when pouring a glass of water, we were of course excluding cases where disputes about water management (and more recently shale gas extraction) force us to consider the delicate mechanisms connecting aquifers to our kitchen tap. When everything goes well, technoscientific constructions are invisible, so to observe their inner workings, we need to seek out the situations where these constructions fail and controversies becomes the “can-openers” (Law, 2010) of science and technology:
Most of the time, most of us take our technologies for granted. These work more or less adequately, so we don’t inquire about why or how it is they work. We don’t inquire about the design decisions that shape our artifacts. We don’t think very much about the ways in which professional, political, or economic factors may have given form to those designs … the costs of technology tend to become obvious only at the moments of catastrophic failure – when we suddenly realize that, somewhere along the line, there was something lethally wrong with a technology that we were used to taking for granted. (Bijker & Law, 1992, pp. 1, 2)
The use of controversies as research instruments has a long pedigree, dating back to ethnomethodology. Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments are perhaps the best-known ancestors. In his experiments, Garfinkel would ask students to purposely contravene some basic social norms in order to “sustain bewilderment, consternation, and confusion; to produce the socially structured affects of anxiety, shame, guilt, and indignation; and to produce disorganized interaction that should tell us something about how the structures of everyday activities are ordinarily and routinely produced and maintained” (1967, p. 38). Here is an example:
The victim waved his hand cheerily.
(S) How are you?
(E) How am I in regard to what? My health, my finances, my school work, my peace of mind, my …?
(S} (Red in the face and suddenly out of control) Look! I was just trying to be polite. Frankly, I don’t give a damn how you are. (p. 44)
These field experiments make social norms and background expectations visible through the disruption of commonplace situations. The method was later adopted by social psychology through the work of Stanley Milgram who developed a more systematic protocol to break and thus reveal the unwritten rules of queuing or riding the subway (Milgram & Sabini, 1978). In a similar way, controversies offer a sort of breaching experiment for technoscientific phenomena.
In a classic example of how the breaching power of controversy can enable the study of science and technology, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) analyzed the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle. Shapin and Schaffer wanted to know why scientists conduct experiments, which is difficult to answer now that the experimental method has become the standard by which natural scientists readily swear. To overcome this self-evidence, Shapin and Schaffer displaced their inquiry to a time when experimental science was still controversial and its protagonists had to defend it explicitly against its critics.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, Boyle and Hobbes were the protagonists in a clash