Lee Vinsel, Virginia Tech
The Social Aesthetics of Problem-Selection in Science and Technology
I dedicate this talk to the late historian and philosopher Ann Johnson, who I conversed deeply and imagined doing a collaborative project with about these themes and who I and many others miss dearly. The question of how scientists, engineers, and others choose the topics they do is one that runs throughout the history, sociology, and economics of science and technology, including classic works by Boris Hessen, Robert Merton, Thomas Kuhn, Thomas Hughes, and Ann Johnson. In this talk, I want to explore how problem-selection can be brought into a more recent literature on social aesthetics, primarily put forward by the sociologist John Levi Martin. Social aesthetics, which builds on lines of thinking from gestalt psychology, American pragmatism, Russian activity theory, and field theory, particularly Pierre Bourdieu’s book, Distinction, examines how and why objects become attractive or magnetic to individuals. It can also be thought of as a sociology of attention and judgment - including how problems and other social objects are judged to be sexy, hawt, bodacious, and so on. After thinking through the intellectual background and theoretical picture of the social aesthetics of problem-selection, I will, first, turn to examples including technology bubbles, independent inventors, and corporate R&D labs. And, second, I will bring the state in and make explicit a picture more implicit in my book, Moving Violations, about how governments shape fields and attention to problems through a variety of mechanisms, ranging from conferences to funding research, from procurement to technology-forcing regulations. I will end by outlining a project that Ann Johnson and I imagined together: Using the conference proceedings of the Society of Automotive Engineers to examine how technical-problems from “riding comfort” to horsepower wars to catalytic converters to computerization became attractive to the society’s members over time.