This is a book about what science is, how it is made and how it is represented in society and culture. We have a range of resources available to us to make sense of science, such as journals, histories of science, popular science books and magazines, social science accounts of science and science fiction novels and films. This book examines these resources and their interconnections to help to understand what science is, how we can define science and why science matters in contemporary society. Science is fabricated from language and discourse, actions and practices, representations and material cultures. However, where many social science accounts see science as being confined to laboratories and other designated sites of scientific production, this book sees science spread through our society and culture, unfolding in multiple domains and in multiple forms. Science is a social construction, but all of society is involved in constructing science, not just scientists.

Science and technology studies (STS) has emerged as a diverse discipline that sees scientific knowledge and technological artefacts as being constructions. By this STS means that the knowledge that emerges from scientific situations – laboratories, observatories and so on – and the technologies that emerge from scientific knowledge are constructed and contingent on when and where they were made. On this view scientific knowledge is not discovered, uncovered or found, but is actively made through the actions and interactions of scientists and engineers using the resources that surround them. It therefore opposes a longstanding view of scientific knowledge as ‘out there’ waiting to be ‘discovered’ or ‘uncovered’ by talented individuals. From the STS perspective science and technology are social activities that reflect the social conditions of their production and the social conditions of those involved in their production. This book is, in part, an examination of the roots and current status of these ways of understanding science and technology.

However, there are a number of issues that arise from the STS position. The first is that many, or even most people who are involved in producing scientific knowledge and new technologies do not subscribe to the story that STS tells. For them, science is a progressive, neutral activity that produces true knowledge and facts about the natural world through applying a standard method. Most scientists do not think that the knowledge they produce is contingent on social factors or conditions, only that it is constrained by the limits of scientific possibility, material and technical resources or funding. The understanding of what science is from inside scientific institutions is often very different from that of STS scholars. In this book I have attempted to produce accounts of science that scientists themselves might recognize.

Secondly, understanding that science and technology are socially constructed tells us little about how and why science has a particular status in our society. In fact, it probably does the opposite. The commonly held view in Western industrial societies is that science is a form of knowledge that produces results that are more concrete, ‘better’ and more factual than other ways of making sense of the world. Our societies are filled with representations of science as a more precise way of understanding, of science as a solution to problems in the world, of science as a prop to shore up political ideologies, of science as creating a better future for us. The dominant story of science in society, scientism, tells us that science is a form of knowledge and a method of investigation that is separate, bounded and superior to other knowledge and ways of investigating. Social studies of science have long since debunked this myth, but it is very persistent in societal understandings and expectations of science.

A further point needs to be faced at the outset. Whilst many public images of, and attitudes towards, science are positive, a number are negative. Contemporary scientific activities that are in the public eye sometimes meet with resistance. Science’s roles in genetic modification of organisms, human cloning, production of improved weaponry, or failure to warn of the dangers of food and other health scares, for instance, are obvious examples. Sometimes public representations of science confront the idea that science is always the right way forward. This contested status of scientific knowledge challenges the widely held public view of science as a ‘good’ thing.

These short descriptions of perspectives on science in society show that science is not a single thing but a complex social phenomenon that appears in many places in a number of different forms. By taking this as a starting point this book differs from many STS approaches. Whilst it may be the case, as STS holds, that scientific knowledge is socially constructed by those involved in its production, this book will argue that science as a whole, the science of our societies, is itself a social construct, which the whole of society is involved in creating. The process of social construction of science results not in a unitary and essential object, but in a complex, contested and contestable family-resemblance concept that holds a range of different meanings according to where it is being deployed, and by whom.

Our societies are so permeated by science, scientific knowledge and the products of scientific endeavour such as technology that all of us, at some level or other, consume representations of science and incorporate them into our everyday understandings. This happens in many different ways, through education, the media and culture, but also through scientific and medical interventions into our bodies, through working in scientific environments or being subject to scientific work regimes, through being included or excluded by formal scientific institutions, through the consumption of technologies. We constantly and continuously construct what science is in our language, actions and interactions, through deploying meanings and through having other meanings presented to us. Given the dominance of scientism in our society, we often don’t have much choice in this.

This continuous social construction of science is based upon a range of resources that are available at any given time. This book investigates what these resources are and looks at the interrelations between them. A key one is what in this book is called ‘formal science’, the science that is done in laboratories and other scientific institutions. At the heart of formal science is the production of scientific knowledge through the work of scientists. Examining just how such knowledge emerges is instructive not least in revealing the complexity and difficulty of much formal scientific work. Formal science is an important topic for this analysis as it is the substrate that a number of other resources consume to construct their own versions of science. Yet the reverse is also the case: professional scientists working in scientific locations are constructing scientific knowledge, but are doing so with reference to the same external resources that the public are using. This book is able to look at a small range of these: histories of science, popular science texts and science fiction narratives. External accounts of science represent different understandings of what science ‘is’, and such representations serve both to reinforce a dominant story of science and to obscure aspects of the operation of formal science.

This book investigates the tensions between internal and external accounts, between esoteric and exoteric. The central argument of this book is that the social construction of science is a two-way street between the esoteric communities of which formal scientists are members and the exoteric, public communities to which we all belong. This frame of reference, based on the work of Ludwik Fleck and Ludwig Wittgenstein, is outlined in more detail in chapter 1. Subsequent chapters use this perspective to examine, firstly, the production and understanding of formal science knowledge in laboratories (chapter 2) and in philosophy and sociology of science (chapter 3) before going on to look at histories of science (chapter 4), scientific communities (chapter 5), popular science representations (chapter 6) and science fiction texts as a resource for the social construction of science (chapter 7). The book closes with an examination of climate change science and societal responses to this (chapter 8). We only know about climate change because of the activities of climate change scientists – knowledge emerged from their esoteric thought communities into wider, exoteric domains. This knowledge is understood and interpreted in exoteric domains in conflicting and contestable ways, and the societal response to climate change reflects both ambivalence towards science and scientism’s advocacy of scientific solutions to social problems. Climate change science provides a clear example of how exoteric and esoteric communities are connected.

Many social accounts of science have argued that to understand science we need to understand society and its workings. Whilst this book supports that position it also argues the reverse: to understand society we need an understanding of science. To achieve that, we need to understand what formal science in scientific institutions is, and how scholars have made sense of it over the years. But we also have to recognize how society actively attaches meanings to science, making sense of science through using the resources at hand. We need to see the cultural resources that are used in this process and understand the relationship between science, culture and society if we are to be able to get to grips with what science is, why it is so important and why our society is inextricably implicated in it.