ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Extending Integrated HPS through New and Old Controversies

• In Event: HPS Across Borders

English Abstract

Controversy studies have borne much fruit for historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science, from insights on scientific knowledge-making to concepts of symmetry and closure. The controversy is a nearly canonical tool for critiquing scientific fact creation, although the genre has somewhat stagnated: case studies can present formulaically, staging the actors involved and the sides of the debate. Yet, as Christoph Hoffmann recently pointed out, one aspect remains critically underexamined: what causes one topic to attain the epistemic status of a controversy over others?
      This paper examines the epistemic qualities of controversy formation alongside its uncertain and overlapping siblings, conspiracy, doubt, hesitancy, and equipoise. Central here is the question of how topics become problematized. By tracing the socio-epistemic trajectory of these claims, this paper analyzes the mechanisms that permit labeling one set of debates a “controversy,” another a “conspiracy,” and a third “doubt” or “hesitancy.”
      I pursue this inquiry through four decades of public, activist, scientific, and humanistic discourse on the origins of AIDS. AIDS is uniquely suited for this study because what was once called conspiracy—the African origins of AIDS—has been scientific controversy, then consensus, then social scientific conspiracy, requiring differential problematizations of AIDS by multiple communities.
      Tracing these evolving problematizations over time demonstrates how integrated HPS can widen its approaches. Extending Hasok Chang’s cyclical model of HPS methodology, I illustrate how other disciplines model analogously the philosophical abstract and the historical concrete, focusing on tools from sociology, anthropology, public health studies, and biomedicine. These disciplines, I argue, also offer language and strategies beneficial for contemporary endeavors in science and medicine, addressing a key limitation of disciplinarily-narrow conceptions of HPS.

Author

• Jonathan Kuo, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine