Is the true soluble in the social?

The grip of the real is a posthumous book, which offers a good introduction to the research program opened by Jean-Michel Berthelot in sociology of knowledge. A team of young sociologists, with whom Jean-Michel Berthelot had established friendly and intellectual ties, cultivated his inheritance, as evidenced by the beautiful publishing work carried out by Jean-Christophe Marcel. If it were to be summarized, this research program could present itself as the articulation between a sociology “ non -reductionist Knowledge, insisting on the dynamics of scientific ideas, and a social and historical reading of the transformations of the scientific world. Not content with reaffirming the strength of “ TRUE By opposing reductionism, Jean-Michel Berthelot wanted to characterize the extension of the norm of “ TRUE In social life.

This articulation upsets some usual considerations on science. Faced with the intensity of social relations which are woven between scientific activities and other types of activities, in particular economic and political, the sociology of science usually concludes that scientific spaces in the social world are usually. This opening is supposed to characterize science not only from the point of view of its social organization – open to transversal exchanges – but from the point of view of its very intellectual productions – permeable in the social, economic and political world to the point of their coextensive being. Starting from the same observations, Jean-Michel Berthelot draws a completely different conclusion: the intensity of relations between the scientific world and the social world does not reflect the opening of the scientific world in the social world but the grip of the scientific world on the social world. The main effect of this hold is the remarkable extension to all the activity spheres of the standards for the establishment of truth, characteristics of scientific work. The thesis of the grip, which is reminiscent of certain intuitions of the Frankfurt School, is strong and drew attention doubly. It leads first to reassess the status “ social “Scientific knowledge: the fact that they are” social »Does he imply that they escape the criterion of truth ? It also leads to reconsidering the relations between science and the social world, to wonder if science has been the subject of a great historical opening, bringing it closer to other social activities, not scientific, or if it has on the contrary extended its own jurisdiction and its own specificities to areas where the latter did not prevail until then. For Berthelot, science is not entirely reducible to its social ontology, and it tends to spread its own standards in society, rather than opening up to other standards, governing other types of activities.

To formulate this program, Jean-Michel Berthelot offers three sets of contributions. A first series of chapters (chapters 1 to 5) first criticizes the conclusions of empirical sociology of sciences, by challenging its most radical reductionist or relativistic conclusions. Of a programmatic nature, another set (chapter 6 and 7) specifies the principles of a method allowing to empirically study scientific activities without reducing them to their dimension “ social ». A third series of chapters finally strives to characterize the historical place of scientific activities – and through them that of the truths they produce – in social life in general, and in innovation and research systems in particular (chapters 8 to 11). This book will import researchers who work in sociology of knowledge, but it will also bring great clarity to readers who wonder about the relevance of the criterion of truth in a world now characterized, not only by the grip of sciences, but by “ The grip of the social sciences »: Far from leading to the erosion of the criterion of truth, to its reduction to social practices, sociology seems, under the pen of Jean-Michel Berthelot, to be able to seize with firmness the contemporary devices of production of the truth.

Conduct with rigor and uncompromising, the demonstration of Jean-Michel Berthelot is part of the line of previous criticisms of constructivism, formulated from the years ninety by sociologists like François Isambert or Raymond Boudon, and more recently, from different points of view, by Pierre Bourdieu, Dominique Raynaud or Terry Shinn. Extending these criticisms, Berthelot wisely articulates the points of view, a priori divergent. The exercise is often shining brilliant. However, it remains essentially formal, analytical and philosophical, rather than empirical. Only rare examples, borrowed from his own work on Lavoisier’s chemistry, tempered the formal nature of the subject. However, one of the main contributions of constructivism, as Berthelot precisely recognizes, lies in his ability to produce new images, new descriptions, new empirical research, rather than a fully satisfactory and coherent theory (whose constructivism would tend to undermine legitimacy, even the very possibility, rather than claiming the realization). Under these conditions, one may wonder if a real criticism of constructivism can be brought to the sole land of formal arguments, logic and analytical rigor, at the risk of aiming alongside, or if it can give rise to the empirical production of new images of scientific activity, alternative to those produced by constructivism. It would then be a question of showing – and not only of stating – how scientific work operates in the social world without reducing and dissolving there.

Well aware of this difficulty, Berthelot proposes-beyond the criticisms addressed to constructivism-to positively discern the specificity of scientific work. To do this, he uses what he calls the “ True standard “, Which he intends to describe the expressions. Familiar readers of sociology of the sciences will recognize under this name the aggregation of two familiar concepts, that of organized skepticism of Merton, when the standard of true is described from the point of view of its social manifestations, and that of the internal organization of scientific argumentation, dear to the most traditional epistemologists. The aggregation of the two analytical registers – which until the sixties characterized the coexistence between internalist and outsourcing works, respectively attentive to scientific content and to the social organization of science – is not enough to guarantee their articulation. The latter can probably only be produced in empirical terms, in a work going beyond efforts to specify in analytical terms the terms of the problem. In some classic respects, the perspective proposed by Jean-Michel Berthelot is not, however, without originality. By being both on the side of rationalism and sociology, the author calls for a “ alternative program “, Whose object would be to describe empirically” Social activity of knowledge production ». This sociological rationalism would study the procedures for establishing the true by increasing the rationalism of three main types of sociological elements: the “ prior social system of knowledge », From which scientists work ; the progressive and groping character of their work ; and finally the “ irreparably logical and social character Scientific validation (p. 200). The program opened by Jean-Michel Berthelot should lead to studying the social production of scientific knowledge in wider social spaces than the only scientific spaces, usually privileged by social studies on science. It should extend to social, economic and political spaces open to the grip of science, to its standards and practices, to its results and uncertainties.

With this reference work, Jean-Michel Berthelot offers a rigorous criticism of epistemological dead ends and empirical limits of constructivism. It proposes to reintegrate the principles of rationalism at the heart of the sociological survey, by drawing the ways of an original enterprise, through which subsequent research should shed light on the concrete articulations from which the true acquires consistency in social life.