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Interpreting Scientific and Engineering Practices: Integrating the cognitive, social, and cultural dimensions

Cognitive studies of science and technology (“cognitive studies”) participate in two interdisciplinary fields: cognitive science and science and technology studies (STS). My analysis starts from issues about how cognitive studies are situated with respect to the social and cultural research programs in STS. As we will see, these issues have implications for how cognitive studies are situated within cognitive science as well. Within STS there is a perceived divide between cognitive accounts and social and cultural (“socio-cultural”) accounts of knowledge construction, evaluation, and transmission. Socio-cultural accounts are dominant, and have tended to claim that cognitive factors are inconsequential to interpreting these practices. Scientists are seen as having interests and motivations and as being members of cultures, but cognition remains, in effect, “black boxed.” Cognitive studies accounts, for their part, have payed deference to the importance of the social and cultural dimensions of practice, but have not, by and large, made these dimensions an integral part of their analysis. The situation has fostered a perception of incompatibility between cognitive and socio-cultural accounts. One clear indication of this perception is the now-expired infamous “ten-year moratorium” on cognitive explanations issued first in 1986 by Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar (Latour and Woolgar 1986, p. 280; Latour 1987, p. 247), by which time they claimed, all pertinent aspects of science would be explained in terms of socio-cultural factors. Perceptions to the contrary, any such divide is artificial. Producing scientific knowledge requires the kind of sophisticated cognition that only rich social, cultural, and material environments can enable. Thus, the major challenge for interpreting scientific and engineering knowledge-producing practices is to develop accounts that capture the fusion of the social cognitive cultural dimensions in these. I will argue that the perception stems not from a fundamental incompatibility between cognitive and socio-cultural accounts of science and technology, but rather that integration has been hampered by implicit and explicit notions of ‘cognition’ employed on both sides of the perceived divide. Implicit echoes of Cartesian dualism underlie the anti-cognitive stance in socio-