In the first of this series, we met what a science-oriented approach to development might look like in broad outlines. In the second, I expanded upon the discussion of sociotechnologies found in the first paper. In this, the third paper of four, I discuss one particular sociotechnology, that of science and technology policy itself. (For my reasons for this categorization, see the second paper.)
In this paper I will discuss five aspects relevant to this topic.
What is science and technology policy?
Broadly speaking, a science and technology (S&T) policy - or more correctly system of policies forming a larger policy, in many cases - is the system of resources, individuals, social systems, etc. devoted to scientific research, technological research, technological diffusion, and so forth within a given social system. (What the social system is to be is the subject of the third section of this paper.)
It might include state subsidies of various kinds, maintenance of state corporations or universities, awards for scholars and students pursuing education and research in science or technology, import quotas or tariffs on artefacts manufactured or designed abroad, etc.
Given what I said last time about sociotechnologies, matters of normative economics are also strongly related to S&T policy. Environmental policy, industrial policy, welfare systems, and much else also interact strongly with such policies - or their absence.
Why do we need a science and technology policy?
It is precisely because the S&T policy a social system sets is so omnipresent - if often invisible - that we need to consider them carefully when planning our futures. If we value pragmatism, we might favour a policy that gives little or no support for those doing research with no foreseen non-cultural value - say, in abstract algebra, metallo-boron chemistry, or the history of totem poles in the Pacific Northwest.
Because these latter fields (to take some of many examples) aren't of economic or political benefit directly, and instead are pursued out of purely cultural interest, our attitude towards them reflects our attitude to culture in general.
We have to decide where to obtain our technology from (including, from nowhere, if we really wish to take one extreme option), where to employ people interested in cultural pursuits, etc. and so even the smallest or poorest country (for example) cannot afford not to at least consider such matters.
What is the scope of "we" in the previous section?
The scope of "we" is difficult to determine. In Canada, there are two levels of support (the federal and various provincial governments) for the most part for science and technology generally, with a third available at the level of industry or universities in many cases. Thus at least in principle it is the people of Canada who decide such matters, albeit, as is in the case with most macrosocial decisions, via proxies.
Some people think that the "we" should be closer to home, for example, that people near a proposed nuclear power plant should get to debate its merits, etc. I am all for increased transparency of technology both industrial and state-run. How one should do this of course a difficult question. Certainly external ethics committees are part of the solution, as are public records of financial involvement, the rights of non-affiliated researchers to study the proposal on their own, etc. Because, as I stressed in the last paper, technology by nature includes plans, these plans must be scrutinizable, revisable and so on.
A countrywide science and technology policy is thus compatible with individual technological proposals being debatable at a more "grass-roots" level. Of course, this does not yet address the important issue of funding. Our current research system is very geared towards "getting results", which most scientists and even technologists will tell you is backwards. There are more scholarships, grants and professorial salaries available in medicine, engineering and management, even discounting private industry - which of course is also in many countries subsidized as well. This is backwards, as technological products - artefacts - are precisely what makes money, can be exchanged for other goods, etc. It seems then that "we" of whatever scope should decide to fund this sort of research less and the basic research more, as that is not profitable.
This brings me to my last point of this section. People have called for greater scrutiny of what scientists are working on. Even the eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher has a recent book where he defends this thesis. I am wary - I am all for making sure that scientists use appropriate means - but this does not entail that their research topic be subject to public censure either. Even something apparently nasty as how humans react to electric shocks is dual-edged - as can be seen by using the "rule based on law" principle from the previous paper. I am also for encouraging scientists to explain their work to the public, and to encourage the public to keep abreast of the study of parts of the world that might interest them. This will both let the public appreciate the fun and interest of pure research and hence support it on that grounds, as well as letting the scientists realize their cultural products are "in the service" of everyone. This latter deserves a subpoint of its own. A science and technology policy that does not recognize that the "we" of the ownership of basic research is in fact everyone (and I mean everyone, the world around) is probably going to stunt one's country's intellectual and technological growth. Some pharmaceutical chemists have recently realized there is insufficient basic research to ground new technological research at this point - and hence new drugs are going to be hard to come by and expensive.
Relations between other aspects of society and S&T policy
S&T policy, as intimated above interacts strongly with five other areas of social policy. I shall talk about:
- S&T policy and education
- S&T policy and economic policy
- S&T policy and environmental policy
- S&T policy and local development
- S&T policy and the universalistic attitude
Education
It should almost go without saying that in order to evaluate (never mind create) science and technology requires some degree of education. It follows from this that if S&T are to be considered as partially matters of public policy at all, that one's educational policy should reflect this. A science policy that leaves the public ignorant of what science is about (which is in my view is more important than any particular finding of science) is dangerous for it makes those strange guys who ask people survey questions or those women in lab coats or whatever else look mysterious. But reflection on science is also important - and so education in what is broadly speaking the philosophy of science is also valuable. It is not too far from here that we can quickly truck in the rest of the humanities. Technology works similarly: we might even bring in the fine arts in this latter capacity as art often is employed in technology (for example in the computers made by Apple) or art often is opposed to technology - for good and bad reasons.
Education itself of course requires a large social infrastructure - public or otherwise - even if it is to be narrow in scope. S&T policy via educational policy quickly shows how considering one aspect of social life quickly balloons out into other considerations. (Some of these ties are weaker or stronger than others and so the world is a system, not a block - but nor is it a heap of unrelated items, as the description above makes clear.)
If we value industry and "high technology" our education system will reflect this. If we do not value technology or culture as a whole we might find that our education system is underdeveloped or largely non-existent.
Economic policy
An economic policy that does not find money for basic research in a particular domain will very quickly find that it is lacking in it, and even the corresponding technologies will be hard to come by. (As I noted above, this applies even in the case of pharmaceuticals at the time of writing.) Social science is usually particularly hard hit when an economic policy neglects research - though economics is usually spared, probably because its researchers often are instead doing normative economics of a kind that flatters those who control the purse strings.
In the case of foreign economic policy, one's technology policy affects and is affected by trade tariffs, patent legislation, and protectionistic mechanisms of all sorts. A social system (usually in this case, a country) has to decide what to develop locally and what to develop based on what is available on world markets, and what to simply purchase outright. The same applies to pure knowledge, though that knowledge is not exactly for sale. Not exactly, because we can make our universities a welcoming place for foreign scholars, or close them up and make it difficult for outsiders to share their perspectives on the universe. This is where the economic policy, the educational policy and the S&T policy all intersect. (Recall my first paper in this series - this point illustrates the systematicity inherent in social problems.)
Of course, there are other matters to consider, when a country or region is less affluent. Research is not the end of life, even for those of us who enjoy it and wish to pursue it as much as possible. But this paper should remind us that ignoring it is also fraught with risks.
Environmental policy
Similarly, S&T policy affects environmental policy. Not only do we have to decide how industry and hence technology are allowed to affect the environment, we decide also whether the environment is worth studying - for whatever purpose. An environmental policy uninformed by scientific research seems to be as dangerous as not having one. Once again, it stands to reason that we should use the best available means to understand the environment and so a S&T policy should reflect that.
It is important to realize that the two parts of a S&T policy, namely the science part and the technology part, must be carefully kept apart in the case of environmental policy as well. Moreover, one should be careful that one's biases do not infect the science portion - as should be obvious from the nature of scientific research. That this is sometimes forgotten (e.g. by the US government at the time of writing) should be a lesson from S&T policy in general as well.
Should we mine for minerals on our soil? This is an environmental policy question, because runoff from the mine might affect fishes in a local stream, or uproot trees in a nearby forest, etc. But it is also a technology policy question, as we must decide how (if we are to mine at any rate) to minimize this damage (if at all), how to best perform extraction of minerals, how to manage the mine's employees, etc. Some of this may of course be left to private enterprise - but that in itself is a public technology policy decision. And then of course the firms in question will decide based on their own technology policy what to do. (Most firms wouldn't dare use a craft for at least the extraction process, but in principle crafts are usable by corporations and what not as well.)
(None of this should suggest that I am ignoring the value components to an environmental policy - in fact by the previous paper there is a technological and hence ethical component to EP as well. Of course, this applies even if one's environmental policy is non-existent or uses a craft approach. There is no escape from ethics when it comes to plans and procedures.)
Local development
Any policy has a local scope - even international aid, as it requires local funding and often, local volunteers or workers to perform it. It is not surprising then that S&T has local components - sometimes very local. A university or a think-tank can change the entire character of a town. Ithaca is said to double in population when Cornell is in session, for example.
But the knowledge produced as outcome of the S&T policies will also reflect local interests and abilities even if they are findings of pure research. For example, at McGill there is an institute for the study of Canada - the social science there is local in some sense. Similarly, Dalhousie has an oceanography department - a department that would be somewhat harder to find at the University of Alberta or Manitoba no doubt.
Similarly for the technological component; for example, in Japan the Super Nintendo was positioned more in the "home computer" market than it was in Canada and the United States, where it was regarded more as a toy (or the sui generis market of "entertainment systems" or something of the sort). This localization of artefacts and their positioning applies at all levels of the technological enterprise. Merely selecting materials can be important technological policy choices. If one wants to make waterproof clothing for fishermen, it makes some sort of sense to find materials available reasonably locally. This is not only advantageous from the perspective of cost; it is also likely to attract local interest due to one might call "visibility".
Universalistic attitude
Science (and to a lesser extent technology) also stress a universalistic attitude in its practice. (This is an interesting complement to the local components discussed above.) Newton's laws of motion apply (to the extent that they do) independent of whether we know them or not. The same applies to social laws (objective patterns of being and becoming). Moreover, since it makes no sense to own the Pythagorean theorem or the finding that three quarks make up protons and neutrons, science is universal in that scope as well - recent developments are dangerously close to ending this sort of thing, and that's terrible for this reason. This universalistic attitude is illustrated well by the case of Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg. These two (and another) shared the Nobel Prize for physics in the 1970s. Salam is a believing Muslim from Pakistan; Weinberg is a secular American. Yet the piece of the world they explored united them and indeed all peoples.
Unfortunately, policies can affect this attitude that Salam and Weinberg share. The US government recently - until forced to back down by the American Chemical Society, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and other professional groups - regarded the collaboration between Americans and their scientific colleagues abroad as violating various trade embargoes. Iran, particularly, with its large population of engineers, was hard hit. Individual scientists may of course be as racist or ununiversalistic as the next guy; but the way the scientific method works promotes a certain kind of shared spirit of collaboration. Examining the mottos and policies of the science Olympiads shows this hope as well. A S&T policy thus can connect the people of one area to the world, if they so wish. This is double edged, which I will attend to now.
Local people and their knowledge traditions
Some people want to remain isolated in some respect or other - the universalism of science is either regarded as false or just undesirable. Recently it has been claimed that science is not universal in the way I have claimed; that is in fact colonial, sexist, or homophobic. It is of course true that individual scientists have been racist or whatever else; it is also true that what we call science originated in some respect only in Western Europe. But it does not follow from this that the practice is irredeemably such. That sometimes what is claimed for X has not been, in fact X, does not establish anything about either whether there has been any X, or whether X is desirable. (Claiming otherwise is what philosopher Susan Haack calls the "passes for" fallacy.)
That said, there is a role for locally developed knowledge. The philosopher Karl Popper is said to have remarked that the kindest thing you can do for someone's ideas is attempt to show them to be false. While I wouldn't go so far as this, I think there is merit to this aphorism. Some local knowledge - that which coheres best with what we know, for example - is ripe for testing and integration into science. Usually this happens by extending it or modifying it in some way. This should not be a cause for alarm; after all bodies of knowledge change - why not do our best to make sure it proceeds as rationally and as equitably as possible?
Thus I suggest we adopt a middle ground between unabashed praise and adoption of local knowledge - as often local knowledge is, as Meera Nanda (Indian microbiologist and philosopher of science) points out, merely prejudice - or rejecting it all as hogwash or "savage nonsense." A recent book on the cognitive basis of science discusses how hunter-gatherers are as intelligent as industrial city dwellers like me - and so they are bound to be right a fair bit of the time, particularly about their local situation. But again - we owe it to them to investigate what they say they know, not merely take it at face value - and, better still, to help them to help themselves to do the same.
I shall continue this discussion of "local knowledge" in the fourth paper in this series, where I discuss specific areas of potential interest: medicine and climate.
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