How not to explain the Great Divide

Abstract

Detailed micro-sociological in situ case studies of science in action construe the intellectual endeavour that goes on in a laboratory as an “external” iterative process of manipulation of materialized strings of symbols, known as immutable mobiles. This article accepts that a theory of thinking with “eyes and hands” represents a fundamental step forward in our description and explanation of any kind of intellectual undertaking. It does however want to challenge the way this idea has been used, in what is known as the autonomous communication theory (ACT), to deflate the problem of the Great Divide by construing the crucial difference between oral societies and Western knowledge-based society solely in terms of the kind of immutable mobiles that are available in these societies. A general outline of this theory is given and particular attention is paid to the alleged objectifying potentialities of writing and printing. It is argued that the explanatory structure of ACT is theoretically flawed and its empirical claims contradicted by both ethnographic and historiographic evidence. Whereas ACT construes literacy and printing as monolithic phenomena which can be understood in terms of some decontextualized technical characteristic, this article suggests that they are multifaceted and that their function crucially depends on the social practices in which they are embedded. Some implications of this theoretical insight for STS in general are explored briefly at the end of this article.