JSTOR

OVER THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, the use of the category “science popularization” for historical studies has become a matter for debate. Roger Cooter and Steven Pumfrey argued that the notion was no longer relevant because it implies a demarcation between the production of science and its consumption, thus illegitimately separating history of science from the history of science popularization. In the conclusion of historiographical reflections presented in 2004, James Secord argued that science popularization should no longer be a separate focus of study and suggested the paradigm of communication as most relevant for dealing with the history of science and its popularization. More recently, Jonathan Topham also argued that studies of the two intertwined histories should be reunited and that science should be considered as a form of communicative action.1

Generally, two decades of intense scholarship in the history of science popularization has led to the recognition that science popularization is not a neutral entity. The term “science popularization” itself is a recent invention when compared to the longue durée of history of science. It was first used in the nineteenth century, when science became a professional activity.2 Because the term was invented to describe science communication in specific circumstances, it may be seen as anachronistic to use it to describe a varied assortment of science communications. Science popularization is just one among many configurations of the relations between science and society at large. Moreover, the emergence of this configuration in the nineteenth century was a long and contingent process. In many places, popularization had to compete with a variety of alternative science practices, sometimes labeled as “popular science.” In most cases, the term “science popularization” was used to reflect the hegemony of the professional practice of science and, by association, to legitimate the authority of experts.

I therefore fully sympathize with Topham's urging that we reconceptualize the issue of popular science. But is communication the most adequate framework? Scientific research is not split into two neat phases consisting of the production of knowledge and its communication. There is a continuum between the two, and, to an extent, the material means of communication shape the message.3 As Topham argues, popular writings have been used in many cases to advance professional research, as they proved an efficient tool to prompt paradigm changes.4 Still, recognizing that the process of producing scientific results and the process of communicating them are indistinguishable does not mean that science is fully understood when we consider it as a communicative action. The heuristic power of the actor/network model notwithstanding, it does not necessarily lead to the identification of science as a form of communication.5 In my view, it rather invites historians to try to grasp what is specific to science among other forms of communication. Considering science as a form of communication has had the merit of shifting the focus of attention from the source of scientific knowledge (scientists and laboratories) to its audiences (students and consumers of popular books). Another great benefit of this approach has been to focus historians' attention on the material vehicles of science communication, such as journals, books, conferences, and museums.6 Still, while the histories of the press, books, movies, and teaching undoubtedly shed new light on the history of science, they should not lead us to forget that science is more than the production and communication of factual data. Science is a normative activity that generates universal standards and strong values that in turn shape society at large. We are thus faced with a tension between the need to provide a larger conceptual framework in pursuing historical studies of science and the ambition to focus on what is unique in science communication and what is specific to each historical period and each science (the concepts used for popular astronomy do not necessarily work to communicate biotechnology).

In this essay I advocate an approach to the history of science and popular science based on two methodological principles: reflexivity and symmetry. Why do we feel uncomfortable with the category of popular science? This is the first question to raise if we are to adopt a reflective attitude. The first section therefore examines the model of legitimate science that is emerging today, because it determines the way science is spread within society at large. The second section emphasizes the recent shift from the traditional practice of science communication in the name of science to new practices of interaction in the name of democracy. This political turn suggests that we should consider symmetrically not only how science and its public face are socially constructed but also how the notion of a lay public has been constructed by scientific practices. Finally, I suggest that historical studies should focus on how the notions of science and the public have been mutually configured and reconfigured over the longue durée.

FROM THE DEFICIT MODEL TO THE PARTICIPATORY MODEL

Reflexivity is a major methodological imperative for all historians, and we have to be aware that history is always written in accordance with present perspectives. As Lucien Febvre, the founder of the École des Annales, put it in his vivid personal style: “Man does not remember the past; rather, he always reconstructs it. Isolated man [is] an abstraction. Man in [a] group [is] a reality. He does not keep the past in his memory, as the Northern ices keep thousand‐year‐old mammoths frozen. He starts from the present, and it is through the present that he knows the past.” Lack of awareness that present norms and values were being projected onto descriptions of the past even led, Febvre declared, to a “deification of the present through the past.”7 This said, historians can use the present as a filter to shed new light on the past, thus generating more complex and richer perspectives on our history. Cooter and Pumfrey rightly noted that science popularization was a reflection of the model of authorized science that dominated in the twentieth century. The new model of legitimate science that tends to prevail in our societies—often called “technoscience”—leads to the de facto reconceptualization of the issue of popularization.

The contrast between the former model and the emerging model is striking. The numerous sociological and historical studies of practices in science popularization suggest the following summary of the former model, which features three basic assumptions. First, there is an increasing gap between scientists and the public, due to the unavoidable specialization of scientific investigation and the formalization of scientific discourses.8 Contemporary actors and witnesses have often related the perceived radical gap between the scientists' worldview and common sense to the emergence of a new physics—relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Second, the alleged gulf between the scientific elite and the lay public calls for mediators, or popularizers, whose task is to bridge the ever‐expanding gap in order to gain public support for scientific research. In their attempt to “translate” the language of experts for laypeople, mediators have tended to consider the public as a passive audience, made up of consumers of science and technology (the diffusionist model). Third, popularization was a one‐way process; it involved speaking “in the name of science,” without attention to public concerns.9 The public, characterized by its lack of knowledge, was seen as a mere recipient of scientific advances (the deficit model). It was also assumed that increasing public understanding of science would automatically generate more favorable attitudes toward science. In reality, however, popularization has contributed to isolating scientists from the rest of the world and to turning science into a sacred, all‐powerful deity—thus increasing, rather than decreasing, the alleged gap.

Over the past two decades, technosciences such as information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology have developed in parallel with the urge to refocus science on social concerns. “Dialogue” and “public engagement” in science have become fashionable watchwords. Meanwhile, a spectrum of procedures designed to involve the public, from opinion polls to public hearings, consensus conferences, citizen juries, focus groups, and hybrid forums, have undoubtedly changed both scientific practices and the public itself.10 On the one hand, the once widely held view that the scientific elite is homogeneous and speaks with a single voice has been seriously challenged. Instead, science is increasingly viewed as an archipelago of scattered islands populated by experts in increasingly narrow fields. In this landscape, experts do not necessarily hold the same views on the scientific issues that the public is concerned with. As scientific controversies between experts have become increasingly commonplace—on issues such as genetically modified crops and climate change, for example—a plurality of expert opinions has had to be recognized.11 Recent controversies have revealed the social dimension of technoscientific issues, and new actors, including policy makers as well as representatives of the private sector, user groups, consumer associations, environmental activists, trade unions, and nongovernmental organizations, have been called to the front of the stage. On the other hand, in this new context of participatory science, the public is no longer viewed as a passive audience. Even the generic term “the public,” often used to describe an undifferentiated mass of passive consumers, has been superseded by the political term “citizens,” which suggests a variety of motivated individuals or informed groups, acting as responsible actors and members of civil society.

The changing vocabulary suggests a shift from the practice of science communication in the name of science to new practices of interactions in the name of democracy. This political turn ascribes two distinct roles to citizens, as assessors of technology and as co‐producers of knowledge. In the first case, they are asked to give their opinions about research programs or the impact of technoscientific innovations. When invited to participate upstream, in the R&D phase, rather than downstream, when innovations enter the market, assessors may prompt decisions about science policy and their input may lead to new regulations. In the second case, citizens are invited to cooperate in the construction of technoscientific knowledge.12 For instance, the free and open‐source software movement contributes to the advancement of knowledge in information technology, thus reviving the ideal of the enlightened amateur. Citizens are mobilized, not only as individuals who volunteer to improve technology or to augment knowledge, but also on the basis of political activism. A number of NGOs, environmentalist movements, and patient and consumer associations have set up their own laboratories and research facilities, which allow them to produce their own independent expertise on specific issues such as medical research, radioactive contamination, or genetic adulteration.13 These cases in which knowledge was co‐produced by citizens and scientists have fueled the growing demand to bring science and technology back into the public arena.

Knowledge co‐productions also reflect a dramatic change in epistemic culture. Clearly, the co‐production of scientific knowledge by citizens and scientists could not have been envisioned during, say, the golden age of nuclear physics, when knowledge was generated in confined laboratories using high‐precision experiments and instruments. Co‐production is made possible by the increasing prevalence of computers and computer‐based modeling, which has reoriented scientific investigation toward the collection of massive amounts of data rather than the search for universal laws of nature. The revival of the Baconian empiricist ideal of data collection, made possible by computer technology, converges with the growing political demand to realign technoscientific decisions with democratic values, such as transparency and the public good.

THE POLITICAL TURN

It would be naive to think that a handful of hybrid forums and citizen panels by themselves will be able to find quick solutions to the big technoscientific challenges of our time. It is, indeed, too early to evaluate their impact on technological advancement and society. Enthusiastic advocates of public participation have boldly announced the advent of a “technological democracy,” characterized by the end of the age of experts and the emergence of a distributed collective intelligence. Yet such prophecies seem unlikely to become reality for quite some time, because public participation remains confined to a very limited set of technoscientific issues, citizens' intervention in the process of decision making has so far been limited in its scope, and democratic debate is an open‐ended process that favors continuing controversy rather than rapid decisions.

However, these new forms of public involvement may gradually bring about dramatic changes in the practice of both science and politics, provided their philosophical implications are considered seriously. In particular, the assumption underlying participative experiences is that science constitutes just a fraction of the knowledge capital in a society. Another assumption is that science has a tendency to develop independently of societal concerns—to ignore other sources of knowledge—and therefore must be regulated by external powers. Both assumptions have a subversive potential that could dramatically affect the criteria now used to evaluate science. Scientific achievements are currently evaluated according to the criteria of effectiveness and excellence, with an arsenal of “dispositifs” such as bibliometrics, benchmarking, and ranking lists. Those criteria, which respond to a technocratic vision of science as a key for success in a context of global competition for power, may gradually be replaced by new criteria—for example, the intensity of cooperation among different actors, as suggested by Massimiano Bucchi and Federico Neresini.14

In fact, as Bucchi and Neresini convincingly argue, the process of co‐production is a matter of interest not only for scientific knowledge but for democratic society as well. “Democracy, like science, cannot be taken as given. Just as the latter is transformed by the entry of citizens into research laboratories, so the former is transformed when, for instance, scientists protest in public or propose a ‘compromise’ on the public funding of stem cell research.”15 Democratic societies are being reshaped by their technological choices, and they redefine their identity through their science policy. In the near future, the top priority may be the creation of research collectives rather than the production of new materials or new medicines. In this respect, the open‐endedness of public participation dispositifs should no longer be viewed as a major shortcoming. A new form of democracy is gradually emerging through such participatory experiences. No longer defined as a majority voting system with elected representatives of the people, it is instead coming to be redefined as a system of participation in which each individual citizen or group of interests should be given a voice. The participants tend to be redefined as “stakeholders,” partners in technoscientific ventures.

Symmetrically, new criteria that may someday be taken into account in evaluating the advancement of knowledge are emerging. Pressures to change the rules of the game are building from a number of sponsors of scientific research. Scientific excellence may gradually come to require reflection and interaction with the public. Applications to science programs in the European Union are already evaluated by experts in ethics and law as a matter of course. In terms of the evaluation of scientific performance, a number of diverse options that could become indicators of excellence—in addition to the number of publications in top journals or the number of patents to one's credit—are being devised and explored. Similarly, instead of prioritizing a single optimized solution in science policy and disqualifying alternative research pathways, the emerging configuration could promote attention to a variety of options and opinions and, consequently, lead to the exploration of a wide spectrum of possibilities. Right now this scenario sounds a bit futuristic; but it is not merely utopian. A number of think tanks—for example, Demos in the United Kingdom—are moving in this direction.16 Sponsors of scientific research are also looking toward the co‐production of technoscience and society. For instance, in 2004 the European Union issued a report on research and development in converging technologies—biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science—that clearly responded to the U.S. report on the same topic published in 2002. According to the rapporteur, Alfred Nordmann, the European program for converging technologies was a testing ground for European identity in the aftermath of the failed attempt to construct a political entity by the various national votes to approve a European constitution.17 In other words, technoscientific choices provide a site for a grand experiment in building up European democracy and reinforcing European values and ideals.

The new configuration of relations between scientific elites and laypeople generated by contemporary technoscience reveals the political dimension of the issue of popularization. This does not mean that the interaction between science and politics is an exclusive feature of the technoscientific era. Rather, I would suggest that it should prompt historians to investigate the role of science in the development of the Western notion of democracy. Strikingly, the classic reference work by Jürgen Habermas, describing the emergence of the public sphere in the cafés and newspapers of the Enlightenment, overlooked the role of provincial and national academies and the “Republic of Letters.”18 Historians of science have thoroughly investigated the socioconstruction of science. It is time now to examine the technoscientific construction of societies. To this end, the space formerly occupied by science popularization is a good terrain for investigation.

THE MUTUAL CONSTRUCTION OF SCIENCE AND ITS PUBLIC

How might we reconceptualize the issue of science popularization? Given that the notion of “popularization” and related notions such as “lay public” and “science mediators” are historical constructions rather than stable categories, a pluralistic historiography that would not separate legitimate science from alternative popular knowledge is called for. As Ralph O'Connor's essay in this Focus section suggests, marginalized practices require more attention. Historical studies should seek a better understanding of how the demarcation between what is viewed as legitimate science and nonlegitimate knowledge has been generated and how it is endlessly renegotiated. Bearing in mind that science is a normative activity, in competition with other forms of knowledge, we should focus on the various processes of marginalization, exclusion, and disqualification. As I have argued elsewhere, from the beginnings of Western science in ancient Greece a clear border has been drawn between science and common knowledge, between epistemê and doxa.19 The demarcation line is not a by‐product of scientific activity; it is, rather, a foundational gesture. The involvement or the exclusion of laypeople is a key ingredient that shapes not only valid scientific methods but also the goals of scientific endeavors. In other words, if we want to understand the changing identities of science, we have to take into account the changing configurations of its “others”: the lay public, amateur practitioners, charlatans, pseudoscientists, and the like. The history of science should no longer be isolated from the history of the public's attitude toward science. The public is not a passive spectator of scientific advances, it is volens nolens the partner of scientific enterprise. Most historians of science do not even suspect that the notion of “the public” has its own intricate history that intertwines political and commercial as well as cultural and scientific dimensions. We should consider the co‐production of science and its “others” in the longue durée. Historical epistemology requires historical “doxology” (the historical study of opinions and popular knowledge) as a counterpart.

Their complementarities may be illustrated here by the case of alchemy. To make a long story short, let us remember that the medieval alchemists who attempted to make gold in their laboratories and developed philosophical frameworks for interpreting their experiments were never integrated into the universities (which nevertheless included a number of liberal arts). Alchemical work was in conflict with one major claim of the dominant scholastic culture—namely, the idea that art can only imitate nature.20 Alchemical fire and recipes could not produce genuine gold; their products only looked like gold. Following Avicenna's attack, alchemists were condemned either as charlatans or as magicians. The ambient suspicion and hostile attitude of the dominant culture nevertheless contributed to shape alchemy and to advance knowledge. In response to these attacks, alchemists soon developed experimental tests (such as cupellation and cementation) to guarantee the authenticity of their gold; they also invented experimental demonstrations to convince their critics that the products of their art did not differ from the naturally occurring substances they used to decompose and then recombine their metallic compounds. Later on, when the art/nature objection had been superseded in an academic culture more favorable to the arts, eighteenth‐century natural philosophers who sought to promote chemistry invented the demarcation between alchemy and chemistry in order to dignify their science.21 The face of chemistry—both its methods and its status—has been deeply influenced by public attitudes toward its achievements. Symmetrically, Western culture has been deeply transformed by the alchemists' enthusiastic support for efforts to make artificial substitutes for natural products.

Chemistry is not an isolated case. The interaction between the role assigned to the public and the advancement of science could be studied for other sciences as well. Experimental physics, for instance, grew up as part of the culture of curiosities—not only as a branch of academic culture. In the eighteenth century it developed through spectacular experiments—involving optical magic chambers, Leyden jars, and all sorts of automata—performed in aristocratic salons, in shops, and at fairs. Nevertheless, itinerant lecturers who performed spectacular or recreational experiments were gradually discredited and condemned as illegitimate practitioners.22