Dominique Pestre : Science, argent et politique: Un essai d’interprétation,Science, argent et politique: Un essai d’interprétation by Dominique  PestreReview by: rev. by Isabelle StengersIsis, Vol. 97, No. 3 (September 2006), pp. 595-596Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/510007 .

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BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 97 : 3 (2006) 595

held together by a common intersubjective com-municating community, divided in its labor be-tween the dubbers and the communicators. Thisindeed looks something like William Whewell’soriginal use of the term “natural kind,” where,for example, an initial dubbing gave a core ref-erent around which myriad theoretical beliefscould play freely. (That is how the British Mu-seum once solved its own problem of authorityin the nineteenth century.) But the causal theoryhad a little lump unpalatable to most historians(and sociologists) still proud of their methodo-logical pluralism and their indexicality. Thecausal theory still required an “essence” that wasdiscoveredto be true. Kripke and Putnam stilltalked of essences and of “progress.” Here recenthistorians resisted the Kripke/Putnam holygrail—the ultimate essence—and thought morealong Kuhnian lines. LaPorte is none too keenon abandoning essentialism outright, yet he hasno wish to return to either the positivist story orthe Kripke/Putnam countermeasures againstKuhn. LaPorte relies for his inspiration on somefine work done by historians of biology. In afamous pair of articles in the 1980s, my now–fellow Canadian John Beatty showed that Dar-win’s revolution could have gone either waywith respect to meaning and kinds: either ac-cepting the initial dubbing of species and chang-ing the meaning, or keeping the meaning anddrubbing the dubbing. LaPorte’s book acknowl-edges its debt to Beatty’s work and shows a wayout. LaPorte is unabashed and unorthodox: spe-cies are indeed natural kinds. Species have es-sences, but members do not essentially belongto a kind. His main thesis turns around this: thatspeakers’ entrenched judgments about what be-longs in the extension of a term are not subjectto empirical refutation. Rather, we witness a re-placement of an older, less precise, use of theword with a newer, more sophisticated, one.Hence progress. In several closely reasonedchapters, LaPorte dissects the various implica-tions and alternatives built on the Kripke/Putnammodel (alas, this part does read like a thesis),bringing a few case studies in the history of bi-ology to bear on his own view of precision inmeaning.Now, LaPorte’s view might be right, but it

will take a lot more historical work to decide ifthis is the case—or whether it can be expandedinto a general theory of reference and naturalkinds. LaPorte is generally better than some phi-losophers of biology when it comes to the his-tory. But we have to be careful. For example,LaPorte repeats the common notion that therewas a strict definitional meaning of the species

category (and related taxon) in the pre-Darwin-ian literature and that Darwin changed themean-ing of species. Recent historical research hasshown that this was not the case.Yet historians and philosophers will benefit

from LaPorte’s reasonable and measured re-moval of many of the horrors associated withthese terms “essence” and “natural kind.” Somebiologists might resist his overemphasis on evo-lutionary/historical explanations as the impliedtrue meaning of biology, although his pluralismand sliding scale of naturalness might strike achord. Historians of biology will still want for agood robust encounter with the history of “nat-ural kinds.” For it is in the life sciences that wefind the birth and historical development of thisterm.

GORDONMCOUAT

Dominique Pestre.Science, argent et politique:Un essai d’interpre´tation. 201 pp., bibl. Paris:INRA, 2003.

Dominique Pestre is a professional historian oftwentieth-century French physics and directorof the Centre Alexandre Koyre´ in Paris. ButScience, argent et politique: Un essaid’interpretation, historically informed as it is, isnot about the history of science but about whatmay today be happening as what Pestre calls the“ regime de savoir” that characterized the twen-tieth century is progressively dismantled.Pestre weaves together many threads. He puts

into historical perspective successiveregimes desavoir—that is, configurations of judgments asto what counts as science and as scientific, therole and social environment of scientists, and therole and functioning of sciences with regard topolitics and economics. He critiques the socio-logical model of the new mode of scientificknowledge production, a model associated withHelga Nowotny, Peter Scott, and Michael Gib-bons (Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and thePublic in an Age of Uncertainty[Polity, 2001]).Finally, he discusses why the contemporary sit-uation should be a matter for deep concern forus as citizens.Pestre’s criticism of the distinction proposed

by Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons between twomodes of the production of scientific knowledgeserves as a bridge between history and socialcommentary. Their characterization of the firstmode—centered on academics and valuing au-tonomy and peer evaluation—corresponds, Pes-tre charges, to an idealized image forged about1870. In this era, a newregime de savoirbegan;it was characterized by intense relations between

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596 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 97 : 3 (2006)

industrial production and the sciences thatchiefly promoted this image—physics andchemistry—and led to what may be called “tech-noscience.” Pestre describes this operation as arhetorical and intellectual screen: “pure science”was defined as the source of social and technicalprogress, but what was in fact happening was,rather, a national “mobilization” of sciences bymodern states, aided by a new type of specializedprofessional scientist who dismissed everythingthat did not contribute to the progress of his orher discipline.The characterization of the second mode of

production—science as flexible knowledge, ac-commodating uncertainty, building multipletransdisciplinary and participatory links, andcontributing to economic and social questionswith new norms of adaptability, accountability,openness, and responsibility—is equally ideal-ized, developed for the use of the representativesof the new policies of research. Pestre has nodoubt that the years between 1970 and 1980 sawthe emergence of a newregime de savoir, thistime centered on biology and biotechnology andengaged in new relations with industry, the busi-ness world, and public opinion. But this new sci-entific functioning ignores both the Realpolitikof what is now called the “(financialized) econ-omy of knowledge” and the deep public unrestregarding what may indeed appear as a privat-ization of scientific research. For Pestre, what isin the process of being destroyed is the equilib-rium between “open science” and “private sci-ence,” the former now defined as what should beincorporated in the service of the latter. A newmode of mobilization is in the process of beinginvented—a new mode of the appropriation andvalorization of knowledge that gives a newmeaning to the social role of science in “trans-forming the world.”Pestre presents a very well documented ac-

count. Some of its fascination derives from thefact that it is under tension: a tension betweenthe historian’s caution and sense of relativity andthe citizen’s concern. At the conclusion of hisbook Pestre urges those remaining scientific in-tellectuals who share his deep skepticism aboutthe pleasant prospect of science opening natu-rally to democratic accountability and socialrelevance, with business enterprises as their bestand natural partners, to invent a new role forthemselves that eschews the usual models: thoseof the disinterested scholar, the intellectual critic,or the expert—whatever the cause the last wouldserve. Instead, he suggests, they should act andwork as “scientific citizens,” drawing on theirresources as scientists and their personal concern

for the common future. Rather than merely de-nouncing the intentions of enterprises and stateagencies, social scientists, he proposes, shoulduse their craft in order to follow and verify howtheir studies are translated into actual policy. Itmay be said that Dominique Pestre’s lucid andenlightening book is a very interesting first stepin the direction he proposes.

ISABELLE STENGERS

S. L. Zabell.Symmetry and Its Discontents: Es-says on the History of Inductive Probability. xii� 279 pp., bibl., index. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005.

Sandy Zabell has had a lifelong interest in thehistorical development of probability theory.Over the last twenty years or so he has publisheda number of papers, which have appeared in awide variety of journals and edited works ofvarying accessibility, that explore fundamentalquestions in the foundations of probability the-ory. Symmetry and Its Discontentscollectseleven of these essays in a single volume thatanyone interested in studying the history ofprobability seriously will find well worth having.As the title of the collection indicates, Zabell ex-amines positions taken by significant thinkers onthe question of evaluating the probability of theunknown. Symmetry refers to the standard ax-iom that when nothing else is known, all possibleoutcomes are to be considered equally probable.This has been a contentious assumption from thevery beginning of thinking about probability andhas proved to be a stumbling block for theoriesof inductive inference. It lies at the heart of theraging debate between theepistemic, or degreeof belief, interpretation of probability and theempirical, or frequency, interpretation. This de-bate was particularly virulent in the late nine-teenth century, when it was closely aligned withContinental idealism versus British empiricism.The wider debate has been well discussed inworks by Ian Hacking, Theodore Porter, StephenStigler, and Lorraine Daston. Zabell digs downdeeper, to the crucial issue of the symmetry ax-iom, and follows that through as it surfaces inthe thinking of a variety of philosophers, math-ematicians, logicians, and statisticians from theeighteenth to the twentieth centuries, includingLaplace, Buffon, Hume, Bayes, Jevons, Ellis,Venn, De Morgan, W. E. Johnson, R. A. Fisher,de Finetti, and, surprisingly, Alan Turing.The symmetry axiom lies, either tacitly or ex-

plicitly, under all manner of reasoning about thephysical world where knowledge of the relevantfactors is incomplete and an assertion is possible

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