Small Henry
SciTech Strategies Inc., Bala Cynwyd, PA, United States.
Front Res Metr Anal. 2023 Aug 2;8:1214512. doi: 10.3389/frma.2023.1214512. eCollection 2023.
In the book Latour and Woolgar present an account of how scientific "facts" are formed through a process of microsocial interactions among individuals and "inscription devices" in the lab initially described as social construction. The process moves through a series of steps during which the details and nature of the object become more and more certain until all qualifications are dropped, and the "fact" emerges as secure scientific knowledge. An alternative to this account is described based on a Bayesian probabilistic framework which arrives at the same end point. The motive force for the constructivist approach appears to involve social processes of convincing colleagues while the Bayesian approach relies on the consistency of theory and evidence as judged by the participants. The role of social processes is discussed in Bayesian terms, the acquisition and asymmetry of information, and its analogy to puzzle solving. Some parallels between the Bayesian and constructivist accounts are noted especially in relation to information theory.
在《实验室生活：科学事实的社会建构》一书中，拉图尔和伍尔加描述了科学“事实”是如何通过个体之间的微观社会互动过程以及实验室中的“铭刻装置”形成的，最初这一过程被描述为社会建构。这个过程经历一系列步骤，在此期间，对象的细节和性质变得越来越确定，直到所有限定条件都被去除，“事实”作为可靠的科学知识出现。基于贝叶斯概率框架描述了一种替代解释，它也能得出相同的结果。建构主义方法的驱动力似乎涉及说服同行的社会过程，而贝叶斯方法则依赖于参与者判断的理论与证据的一致性。从贝叶斯的角度讨论了社会过程的作用、信息的获取与不对称性，以及它与解谜的类比。特别指出了贝叶斯解释与建构主义解释之间的一些相似之处，尤其是在信息论方面。
