Automating Air Pumps: An Empirical and Conceptual Analysis

摘要

The first stage of closure in any scientific debate is likely to be active closure. That is, our machines, detectors, and other apparatuses are kept closed by the constant skilled activity of "repair." An apparatus that is maintained by active closure requires constant skilled attention and ingenuity to maintain its place in the world. Mechanization is a separate process which is difficult to explain in the light of social theories of science. The theory of mechanization developed here is still a social theory, in that it shows that what can and cannot be mechanized is a matter of the way humans attend to the world. One can mechanize that to which one has become indifferent in a certain way. A common mistake is to think that closure of debate gives rise to a mechanized world. To someone like our imagined Boyle, this might appear to be the case. That is, once he has beaten the imagined Hobbes he can treat his laboratory and its associated "technicians" as a black box (or ship-in-bottle), the inside of which need no longer concern him. He merely orders up a vacuum whenever he wants one. But this black box is an action cascade stuffed full of human skills—it is very far from being an automaton. This difference is utterly clear to those who try to mechanize black boxes prematurely. A mechanized world is crucially different to, say, a bureaucracy, where rigid order is usually maintained through everyone's understanding and active interpretation of their place in a social hierarchy. A mechanized world does not need social understandings; it encompasses no polimorphic actions or socially situated choices. Where a mechanized world contains human beings, they have made themselves like cogs in the mechanism. Such arrangements are rare; they are a small subset of even the most rigid social hierarchies. We have tried to show how these ideas work out in the history of the mechanization of devices.