Controversy as a explanatory category in scientific metatheory: an argument & an illustration

Abstract

The focus of our analysis so far has been to demonstrate that the history of the science of science has been marked by a gradual broadening of its concerns. Initially, the exclusive attention of positivism to the logic immanent in scientific growth was modified-first by rationalist reconstructionists, and later by sociologists. This broadening of scope enabled metascientists to give due importance to the cognitive content, temporal processes, and community participation associated with the growth of science. There is no category like scientific controversy that significantly encompasses all these factors. Hence, we argue in favor of using this category to explain the dynamics of scientific progress. We devote the next chapter to a detailed treatment of the concept of controversy in science. McMullin's non-positivist historiography provides an adequate framework for analyzing the role of controversies in scientific growth. McMullin’s framework is composite and avoids all forms of apriorism, both rational and social. This approach is especially suitable because controversies in science are complex human events that cannot be reduced to any single explanatory strategy. As McMullin (1984) puts it: "Somewhere between the extremes of PSR (Presumption of Standard Rationality) and PUS (Principle of Unrestricted Sociality), the working historian will continue to ply his trade, taking each case as it comes and ignoring the prescriptions of philosophers and sociologists... what is needed is a detailed and historically sensitive analysis of reasons and motives, in which the status of neither the rational nor the social is ever taken for granted." (p.159; emphasis added) We now present an illustrative case study of a controversy in biosciences. In the course of this study, we show how a controversy arises from a conflict between two sets of beliefs-one paradigm-preserving and the other paradigm-challenging. In the next and concluding chapter, we present a heuristic analysis of the structure of the controversy using McMullin’s framework. We also demonstrate the relevance of studying scientific controversy to our understanding of the nature and growth of scientific knowledge.