About Science, History and Sociology: an interview with Ilana Löwy

Abstract

Carvalho We thank you very much in the name of Cadernos de Saúde Pública for giving us this interview in spite of all the noise and all the problems we had to find a nice place to talk. Professor Löwy, can I call you Ilana? (...) Can you just give us a bit of your background and what, in general, you are involved with? Löwy I was initially trained as a biologist and have a PhD in immunology. I was also interested in history, and as an undergraduate student I studied history of art in addition to science. At some point I became fascinated by history of science and social studies of science. I started my talk at Fiocruz with a quotation from a pioneer of sociology of science, Ludwik Fleck. I discovered Fleck's thought through a colleague who was a philosopher of science. When I first read his work, my reaction was: "Ah, this guy really understood what science is about". Other philosophers of science spoke about very abstract issues, but Fleck, who was an immunologist, explained how the kind of scientific research I was familiar with worked. It was a great discovery for me. I retrained as a historian of science, although how exactly I am defined depends on the place where I am. Carvalho I understand that. Löwy In France, many historians of science came to this discipline from philosophy. I have no philosophical training, therefore I cannot be a traditional French historian of science. For scholars trained in the French tradition I am a sociologist, because sociologists are people who do not really know anything. Carvalho Or know bits of everything. Löwy Yes. But I'm also a bad sociologist, because I do not do quantitative research. In Germany, I Löwy Brazilian social scientists develop interesting research programs on Zika, but many of these programs are focused on well-defined questions, such as the patterns of coping of mothers of children with microcephaly. These are undoubtedly vital issues, but it may be also important to tackle "known unknowns": difficult or problematic research topics, sometimes hidden in plain sight. Carvalho Studies on problematic topics may be more difficult to publish, but it doesn't matter. If they are meaningful questions, you need to address them. The main problem is not publishing, it's looking for meaningful questions and solving them somehow. Löwy Just identifying such questions may be very important... Carvalho Just asking is half of the way. Löwy Half of the way, exactly. The historian Carlo Ginzburg said that a good researcher should work "against the grain", and become the devil's advocate. If you really feel good about your research, thinking "this is a great subject, I know exactly what should be done and how it should be done, and I am sure that this study will produce important results", maybe you have a problem. Carvalho Yes, probably. If you feel comfortable, it's not good science. Löwy The anthropologist Didier Fassin argued that, in social sciences, uneasiness is a precondition of the production of good research. Carvalho And in science in general. Yes, great. Well, clos...