by David Kordahl

A few years ago, while writing about the Golem series by the sociologists Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, I bought their first coauthored book, Frames of Meaning: The social construction of extraordinary science. I did not read it. Unlike the Golem books, which examined ordinary scientific controversies, Frames of Meaning was at once more ambitious and less successful. Collins and Pinch hoped to witness the birth of a new science, to document a paradigm shift in real time, but ended up as de facto debunkers of the very science whose birth they had set out to observe.

I finally read Frames of Meaning last month. I should have been an ideally sympathetic reader. Like Collins and Pinch, I am an admirer of the physicist-turned-philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who introduced the idea of “paradigm shifts” to intellectuals. Kuhn discussed how difficult it is for historians to evaluate scientific works after a revolutionary rupture, since paradigm shifts alter assumptions about what is in or out of bounds for science, leaving pre- and post-revolutionary scientists with “incommensurable” worldviews.

As young sociologists in the 1970s, Collins and Pinch wanted to study a paradigm shift firsthand. They wondered if parapsychology faced a set of phenomena that would upend scientific norms. Of course, the hope that spooky subjects could yield scientific insights was not itself new. After its founding in the 1880s, the Society for Psychical Research included among its members many of Britain’s leading scientists. Even after physical scientists lost interest in the early twentieth century, psychologists and statisticians continued to collaborate on increasingly controlled experiments in telepathy and ESP. And in the 1970s, such topics seemed poised to reenter the scientific mainstream. Read more »