如何认识科学(十九):科学与社会系统--大卫·凯里对露丝·哈伯德的访谈

How to Think about Science (ⅪⅩ) : Science and the Social System

露丝·哈伯德认为,科学并不总是好的,它导致了武器、化学物质、毒气等诸多的危害,科学造成了科学是社会制度一部分的事实。过去的科学遵循它自身的议程,明显没有社会的或政治的议程推动这项工作,但随着时间的推移,情况正在被改变,科学家所发现的东西时常是他们想要去寻找的东西。社会结构至少以两个主要方式影响科学:首先它粉饰了我们对自然界的感知——将我们对社会安排的理解映射到自然界中;其次它影响占据首要地位的科学——从社会认为值得做的意义上——的选择问题。基因交换在殖民地和实验室中大规模地做到了,基因学家依照好像他们能预言结果和预知其是否有益的方式行事。科学与社会的相互作用变成现实。新技术已被迅速和不加鉴别地应用,这相当于在人身上做实验。从某种意义上看,基因技术的发展不是为了公众利益,而是为了私人利益;生物学已变成大企业追逐利益的场所。科学不可避免地成为社会的一个创造物。科学与作为一个整体的社会系统有关,它是政治;作为一个科学家,你真的无法摆脱它。

Ruth Hubbard thinks that science isn't always good. Science has done plenty of harm: weapons, chemistry, gas, and so on. It just became imperative that science is part of the social structure. In the past, science followed its own agenda, without any obvious social or political agenda driving it. Over the time, situation is changed that things found by scientists find are always what they set out to look for. Social structure affects science by at least two main ways. Firstly, it can gloss over our perception to the nature by reading our understandings of social arrangements onto the nature world. Secondly, it influences the question that science takes up in the first place-what it considers worth doing. Genes were being exchanged in colonies and in laboratories on a large scale. Geneticists act as if they could foretell the outcome and predict whether it would be benefit or not. The interplay of science and society has become true. New technologies have been adopted so quickly and so uncritically which are amount to gigantic experiments on people. In some ways, gene technology is developed for private profit. Biology has become the business which can bring benefits for big businessmen. Science must inevitably be a creature of its society. Science is the politics because that it is related with social system as a whole. As a scientist, you cannot shake off it.