Interpreting Scientific and Engineering Practices

Cognitive studies of science and technology (“cognitive studies”) participate in two interdisciplinary fields: (a) cognitive science and (b) 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 (“sociocultural” ¹ ) accounts of knowledge construction, evaluation, and transmission. Sociocultural 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 paid 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 analyses. The situation has fostered a perception of incompatibility between cognitive and sociocultural 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 (1986, p. 280; Latour, 1987, p. 247), by which time, they claimed, all pertinent aspects of science would be explained in terms of sociocultural 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.