Who's a Captive? Who's a Victim? Response to Collins's Method Talk

Abstract

We are grateful to Harry Collins for clarifying his own assumptions about science and social science. He argues for neutrality as a methodological prescription. It was precisely our aim to argue against this. We begin here by specifying three difficulties with the prescription of methodological neutrality for controversy studies: interaction with the debate, selection and deployment of methods, and social influences on methods. The latter two difficulties apply also to methods used in natural science, as we will illustrate. Then we turn to Collins's claims about the greater legitimacy to be gained from an appearance of methodological neutrality. In the first place, we have argued that one's method affects one's interactions with partisans in the controversy. Adopting a stance of symmetry means that it is much easier to obtain information-including documents, interviews, and insider perspectives-from opponents of orthodoxy. A preplanned symmetrical approach of interviewing people on both sides may not work in practice because of suspicions, polarization, or the impact of prior researchers (Scott, Richards, and Martin 1990). In our view, the possibility of methodological neutrality in social studies of scientific controversies should be just as much a matter for empirical study as the alleged neutral method of the natural sciences. We studied it in our cases of the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, fluoridation, and vitamin C and cancer and found that the methodological prescription of neutral social analysis was as impossible in practice as the prescribed neutrality of the scientist's method. Since the publication of our article, another empirical self-study that supports our conclusions has been drawn to our attention (Kroll-Smith and Couch 1990).