The Disappearance of “Discovery” as a Topic in Science and Technology Studies: An attempt at retrieval and ethnomethodological respecification

• In Event: The continued relevance of ethnomethodological studies of science and mathematics for STS

Abstract

by Jeff Coulter and Michael Lynch

The concept of discovery continues to be of interest in philosophy of science, but has largely disappeared as a prominent topic in STS. With the rise of social constructivism in the 1980s, individualistic and heroic narratives of discovery were deemed incompatible with the emphasis on collective agency in and around science. The concept of discovery may also have seemed part of the realist legacy, with the assumption that natural entities await their discovery in a world independent of human intervention. In addition, the sciences themselves (especially the biomedical sciences which preoccupy so much current STS research) recently have emphasized the manufactured (and thus patentable) properties of novel research objects, in contrast to the notion that such objects pre-exist human intervention.

This paper takes up the topic of discovery as a social phenomenon, while seeking to avoid any reversion to naïve realism or psychologistic individualism. Augustine Brannigan’s constructivist treatment of discovery provides a starting point for respecifying “discovery” as a vernacular concept that is used to claim and contest particular research products. Viewed in this way the status of a discovery is adjudicated in terms of conceptual grammars, and such grammars are subject to investigation. One particular area in which such grammars are investigable is patent law, particularly in terms of a distinction between “compositions of matter” (which are eligible for patents) and “products of nature” (which are not). This paper provides a grammatical treatment of “discovery” in several perspicuous cases.

Authors

• Jeff Coulter, Boston University

• Michael Lynch, Cornell Univ.