No Easy Answers: Science and the Pursuit of Knowledge , Allan Franklin , U. of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2005. $29.95 (258 pp.). ISBN 0-8229-4250-X
In the past 30 years the so-called constructivist sociology of science has produced a large number of studies on consensus building in science. Many of the analyses look at physics as a test case to show that controversies are more frequent than what philosophers and scientists often suggest. Building consensus in science involves negotiating what constitutes a fact in a given scientific community. Constructivist and relativist sociologists insist that the contingent aspects of the negotiations are important. By contrast, rationalist philosophers focus on the role of empirical tests and logical coherence as objective grounds for believing in the physical reality of phenomena and the explanatory value of theories.
The relativist conception of science, which minimizes the role of reason in science, has been criticized by many historians and philosophers of science. Allan Franklin is certainly among the most active critics of relativism. As a professor of physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he has published many important books on the role experiments and instrumentation have played in science. Titles such as The Neglect of Experiment (Cambridge U. Press, 1986), Experiment, Right or Wrong (Cambridge U. Press, 1990), and Are There Really Neutrinos? An Evidential History (Perseus Books, 2000) are technical contributions to the epistemology and history of modern physics and are written for professional scientists and historians and philosophers of science.
In No Easy Answers: Science and the Pursuit of Knowledge, Franklin wishes to present “an accurate picture of science,” as he states in the preface, to both general readers and their colleagues who are in the humanities and social sciences and have no physics background. For their benefit, Franklin revisits, in a less technical manner, many of the case studies analyzed in his previous books. The picture he proposes is presented in contrast to the relativist’s view largely diffused in such books as Harry Collins’s Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (Sage, 1985) and Andrew Pickering’s Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (U. of Chicago Press, 1984). Franklin discusses Collins’s book in chapter 13, which deals with the early search for gravitational waves; he takes up Pickering’s book in chapter 14, which focuses on the history of the experiments on atomic parity violation.
Personally, I prefer those two chapters over the others because Franklin explicitly confronts previous interpretations of the events with his own. Four other chapters are devoted to the history of the neutrino; but curiously, the author does not contrast his narrative with the standard constructivist neutrino history provided by Trevor Pinch in Confronting Nature: The Sociology of Solar-Neutrino Detection (D. Reidel, 1986). Franklin’s chosen cases are descriptive, with few extended analytical or philosophical discussions. Readers not familiar with the literature will learn through Franklin’s book a great deal about the history of the electron, the neutrino, the magnetic monopole, and much else. Franklin also uses the well-known case of Robert Millikan’s biased selection of data in his calculation of the electron’s charge to raise the ethical question of the selection of data points in the analysis of experiments. He rightly distinguishes between “wrong” and “bad” physics: The former is part of normal science whereas the latter goes against the implicit, moral norms of the scientific community.
Franklin wisely selects his case studies to illuminate the influence that experiments have had in science. In addition to their obvious use in testing theories, experiments suggest new theories by uncovering new phenomena or by providing evidence for the existence of new entities like the electron or the neutrino. Also, experiments can have a life of their own independent of theory and can be devised simply to measure some constants of nature.
Franklin concludes that scientists had good reasons, “based on valid empirical evidence and reasoned and critical discussion,” to assess, accept, or reject results as they did (page 227). For him, the cognitive aspects of science dominate any contingent social, or even psychological, factors. An important point rarely stressed in relativists’ analyses is the fact that “there is very little instant rationality in science” (page 229): It took about eight years for scientists to clarify the validity of Enrico Fermi’s theory of beta decay, and 30 years elapsed between the first reports of the solar neutrino anomaly and the solution of the discrepancy between theory and observation by confirming the existence of neutrino oscillations.
No Easy Answers is probably too technical for the general reader. Yet physicists will find in it a useful epitome of Franklin’s past contributions and will be reassured of the legitimacy of their rationalist conception of science.
