Informing Science (IS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS): The University as Decision Center (DC) for Teaching Interdisciplinary Research

Introduction My experience teaching courses in history and philosophy of science in the Arts & Humanities and the Science & Mathematics Divisions has been that undergraduate students start out as either naive robust realists or naive relativists in relation to science and technology. The first group absorbs from freshmen science courses and society at large stereotypical models of scientific and technological progress and change. Some of their conservative beliefs are the neutrality of scientific observation, that science is strictly rational, value free and a-historical, that technology is neutral in relation to politics, that science and technology are impervious to ideology, that science and religion are antagonistic forces, and that Western science emerged independently from cultures. To them, science and technology are always epistemologically privileged areas of human inquiry. Since, according to this pseudo-positivistic view, social forces are absent from the production of science and technology itself, history and sociology of science and technology are valuable only in so far as they deconstruct instances of human error or misconduct. But naive scientific realism coupled with everyday use of technological artifacts does not parallel knowledge of scientific and technological practices themselves or reflect understanding of their historical, philosophical, and sociological underpinnings. A second group includes students who, coming from the arts and the humanities, not only are, just as the first, awed by the thought processes, technical methodologies, and work ethic involved in the practice of science and technology but are naive relativists in relation to their epistemological warrant. Informed by the post-modernist vision predominant in literary criticism courses, as well as in courses in anthropology, feminism and other standpoint epistemologies, and by the proliferation of cultural studies, they assume that science and technology are instruments of oppression. To them, their emergence in the West was arbitrarily brought about by those who set out to destroy other epistemologically legitimate views of reality. These two groups are almost college-level analogs to C.P. Snow's "two cultures" dichotomy. But they both share a characteristic blindness toward the importance of conflict and competition in the production of new science and technology and, therefore, a deterministic and skeptic outlook regarding public policy. Thinking that not much can be done to change the direction of science and technology by actively participating in their development or social outcomes is evidenced by students' acceptance of the inevitability of scientific and technological processes. These are reflected in the disciplinary boundaries found in college, the internalism inherent to freshmen science and technology courses, and the institutional gap between experts and nonexperts. As sociologist of science Sal Restivo said in a different context, science and technology are taken as "givens" rather than as "problems"(Restivo in Chubin & Chu, 1989). The University has the role of Decision Center (DC) for diffusion and producer of information not only in respect to agreed upon standards of science and technology legitimacy, but also on the historical, epistemological, social, and political mechanisms involved in their production (Lawless & Castelao, 2001). We argue that a transformation of vision can be achieved in science and technology studies (STS) courses. Only interdisciplinary research offers a diversity of angles from which undergraduate students approach scientific and technological practices. Here the focus is primarily on history and philosophy of science. Lectures, class readings, research projects, and background bibliography, however, include parts of other fields in STS such as sociology of science, science policy, and philosophy and sociology of technology. History From its inception in Europe during the Middle Ages until the present, Universities have been at one time mirrors and producers of perceptions of science and technology as much as initiators of social change. …