Sociology of Science

It is important to distinguish what assumptions it is appropriate to make in doing sociology from what assumptions it may be appropriate to make for other purposes, in particular, for the purposes of the philosophy of science.

Merton and others studied the values, organization, and reward systems of science. The reward system is peculiar to science: it is organized around assigning credit.

For the most part, sociology is descriptive, not evaluative, and not normative. Of course, sociology, like anything else, is not pure.

Bloor advocated the symmetry principle: One's explanation of why a group believes what it does should have nothing to do with whether or not the belief is true. That is a perfectly correct and useful point about the methodology of sociological studies of how people come to believe what they do. It is crazy assumption to make when trying to figure out whether what people believe is in fact true.

Practitioners of the strong program tend to focus on external social and political reasons why scientists believe what they do. It is obviously correct that external social and political factors are an important part of why scientists believe what they do, and practitioners of the strong program recognized that (in part because of universalism) those factor were largely unnoticed and unexplored.

MacKenzie's sociology of modern statistics analyzes the development of modern statistics in its connection with eugenics and the interests of the English middle class.

So far, I've made the positive case for the strong program in sociology. However, some advocates of the strong program took it to be, not a different subject from the philosophy of science, but a rival, or even a replacement, for the philosophy of science.

As a rival to philosophy of science, the strong program advocates the following sort of relativism: the question whether something is true is a question that makes sense only relative to a certain practice. The practice, for the sociologist, is one set up by a certain form of social structure. There is no further or deeper sense of truth than that.

Shapin and Shaffer and Latour

S and S wrote a book, Leviathan and the Air Pump about a debate between Hobbes and Boyle at the dawn of modern science. Boyle won. Disclaimer I'm going to simplify a lot.

Wittgenstein: Form of life and language game.

Hobbes emphasized, S and S would even say established, the distinction between society and nature. Boyle then took all questions people wanted to answer, and systematically mis- or re-interpreted them to make them seem to be questions about nature. He changed what people took to be interesting and the language in which people decided issues. He "constructed" a new reality. Aristotle argued that there could not be a perfect vacuum. Hobbes pointed out that Boyle's pump was useless for exploring that question.

That was influential in the sociology of science because it recognized that there were nontrivial evolving social structures and norms within science that influence how science goes.

Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life

Latour carried this to its extreme. Labs "manufacture facts" by taking inputs and separating them from the human interaction to which they are in fact subject.

He studied truth, objectivity, evidence, data as tokens in a social game. He looks at how these terms are used in the social process of getting labels attached to collections of words. There is no question that this is an interesting perspective from which to study the practice of science.

However, he fell into a trap analogous to the one the practitioners did: he claimed that that was all there was to science.

-- ShaughanLavine - 10 Oct 2005 - 08 Oct 2007