Sociology of scientific knowledge - Wikipedia Sociology of scientific knowledge From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search Study of science as a social activity Part of a series on Sociology History Outline Index Theories Conflict theory Structural functionalism Symbolic interactionism Critical theory Positivism Social change Social constructionism Social movement theory Methods Quantitative Qualitative Comparative Computational Ethnographic Conversation analysis Historical Interview Mathematical Network analysis Survey Subfields Criminology Culture Demography Development Deviance Economic Education Environmental Family Feminist Gender Health Immigration Industrial Knowledge Law Literature Medical Military Organizational Political Race and ethnicity Religion Rural Science Social anthropology Social psychology in sociology Sociolinguistics Stratification Technology Terrorism Urban People Émile Durkheim Herbert Spencer Max Weber Friedrich Engels Auguste Comte George Herbert Mead Georg Simmel W.E.B. Du Bois Roland Barthes Ernest Burgess Michel Foucault Erving Goffman Antonio Gramsci Jürgen Habermas Thorstein Veblen Ferdinand Tönnies William Graham Sumner Lists Bibliography Terminology Journals Organizations People Timeline By country  Society portal v t e Part of a series on Science Overview History Literature Method Philosophy Branches Formal Natural Physical Life Social Applied Engineering Medical Interdisciplinary Society Communication Education Funding Pseudoscience Policy Sociology Outline Portal Category v t e The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing with "the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity."[1] The sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI) is complementary to the sociology of scientific knowledge.[2][3] For comparison, the sociology of knowledge studies the impact of human knowledge and the prevailing ideas on societies and relations between knowledge and the social context within which it arises. Sociologists of scientific knowledge study the development of a scientific field and attempt to identify points of contingency or interpretative flexibility where ambiguities are present. Such variations may be linked to a variety of political, historical, cultural or economic factors. Crucially, the field does not set out to promote relativism or to attack the scientific project; the objective of the researcher is to explain why one interpretation rather than another succeeds due to external social and historical circumstances. The field emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s and at first was an almost exclusively British practice. Other early centers for the development of the field were in France, Germany, and the United States (notably at Cornell University).[4] Major theorists include Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Sal Restivo, Randall Collins, Gaston Bachelard, Harry Collins, Karin Knorr Cetina, Paul Feyerabend, Steve Fuller, Martin Kusch, Bruno Latour, Mike Mulkay, Derek J. de Solla Price, Lucy Suchman and Anselm Strauss. Contents 1 Programmes and schools 2 The sociology of mathematical knowledge 3 Criticism 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links Programmes and schools[edit] The sociology of scientific knowledge in its Anglophone versions emerged in the 1970s in self-conscious opposition to the sociology of science associated with the American Robert K. Merton, generally considered one of the seminal authors in the sociology of science. Merton's was a kind of "sociology of scientists," which left the cognitive content of science out of sociological account; SSK by contrast aimed at providing sociological explanations of scientific ideas themselves, taking its lead from aspects of the work of Thomas S. Kuhn, but especially from established traditions in cultural anthropology (Durkheim, Mauss) as well as the late Wittgenstein. David Bloor, one of SSK's early champions, has contrasted the so-called 'weak programme' (or 'program'—either spelling is used) which merely gives social explanations for erroneous beliefs, with what he called the 'strong programme', which considers sociological factors as influencing all beliefs. The weak programme is more of a description of an approach than an organised movement. The term is applied to historians, sociologists and philosophers of science who merely cite sociological factors as being responsible for those beliefs that went wrong. Imre Lakatos and (in some moods) Thomas S. Kuhn might be said to adhere to it. The strong programme is particularly associated with the work of two groups: the 'Edinburgh School' (David Bloor, Barry Barnes, and their colleagues at the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh) in the 1970s and '80s, and the 'Bath School' (Harry Collins and others at the University of Bath) in the same period. "Edinburgh sociologists" and "Bath sociologists" promoted, respectively, the Strong Programme and Empirical Programme of Relativism (EPOR). Also associated with SSK in the 1980s was discourse analysis as applied to science (associated with Michael Mulkay at the University of York), as well as a concern with issues of reflexivity arising from paradoxes relating to SSK's relativist stance towards science and the status of its own knowledge-claims (Steve Woolgar, Malcolm Ashmore).[citation needed] The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) has major international networks through its principal associations, 4S and EASST, with recently established groups in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Latin America. It has made major contributions in recent years to a critical analysis of the biosciences and informatics. The sociology of mathematical knowledge[edit] Studies of mathematical practice and quasi-empiricism in mathematics are also rightly part of the sociology of knowledge since they focus on the community of those who practice mathematics and their common assumptions. Since Eugene Wigner raised the issue in 1960 and Hilary Putnam made it more rigorous in 1975, the question of why fields such as physics and mathematics should agree so well has been debated. Proposed solutions point out that the fundamental constituents of mathematical thought, space, form-structure, and number-proportion are also the fundamental constituents of physics. It is also worthwhile to note that physics is nothing but modeling of reality, and seeing causal relationships governing repeatable observed phenomena, and much of mathematics, especially in relation to the growth of the calculus, has been developed precisely for the goal of developing these models in a rigorous fashion. Another approach is to suggest that there is no deep problem, that the division of human scientific thinking through using words such as 'mathematics' and 'physics' is only useful in their practical everyday function to categorize and distinguish. Fundamental contributions to the sociology of mathematical knowledge have been made by Sal Restivo and David Bloor. Restivo draws upon the work of scholars such as Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West, 1918), Raymond Louis Wilder and Leslie Alvin White, as well as contemporary sociologists of knowledge and science studies scholars. David Bloor draws upon Ludwig Wittgenstein and other contemporary thinkers. They both claim that mathematical knowledge is socially constructed and has irreducible contingent and historical factors woven into it. More recently Paul Ernest has proposed a social constructivist account of mathematical knowledge, drawing on the works of both of these sociologists. Criticism[edit] SSK has received criticism from theorists of the actor-network theory (ANT) school of science and technology studies. These theorists criticise SSK for sociological reductionism and a human centered universe. SSK, they say, relies too heavily on human actors and social rules and conventions settling scientific controversies. The debate is discussed in an article Epistemological Chicken.[5] See also[edit] Academic careerism Cliodynamics – Mathematical modeling of historical processes Economics of scientific knowledge Historiography of science Paradigm shift – Fundamental change in concepts Philosophy of social science Public awareness of science Science studies – interdisciplinarity research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts Science and technology studies – Academic field Scientific community metaphor Social constructionism – Theory that shared understandings of the world create shared assumptions about reality Sociology of knowledge Sociology of scientific ignorance – Study of ignorance in science Sociology of the history of science Disputes: Bogdanov affair – French academic dispute Sokal affair – 1996 scholarly publishing sting accepted by an academic journal Notes[edit] ^ Ben-David, Joseph; Teresa A. Sullivan (1975). "Sociology of Science". Annual Review of Sociology. 1 (1): 203–222. doi:10.1146/annurev.so.01.080175.001223. Retrieved 2006-11-29. ^ Stocking, Holly (1998). "On Drawing Attention to Ignorance". Science Communication. 20 (1): 165–178. doi:10.1177/1075547098020001019. S2CID 145791904. ^ Wehling, Peter (2001). "Beyond knowledge? Scientific ignorance from a sociological point of view". Zeitschrift für Soziologie [de]. 30 (6): 465–484. Retrieved 2013-01-19. ^ "Recently Added Articles | Questia Online Research Library". Archived from the original on 2012-07-01. Retrieved 2017-09-12. ^ Collins, H. M. and S. Yearley (1992). "Epistemological Chicken". In A. Pickering (Ed.) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago, Chicago University Press: 301-326. Referenced at ANT resource list University of Lancaster, with the summary "Argues against the generalised symmetry of actor-network, preferring in the interpretive sociology tradition to treat humans as ontologically distinct language carriers". Website accessed 8 February 2011. References[edit] Kusch, Martin (1998). "Sociology of scientific knowledge – research guide". Retrieved February 23, 2012. Further reading[edit] Baez, John (2010). "The Bogdanoff Affair". Bloor, David (1976) Knowledge and social imagery. London: Routledge. Bloor, David (1999) "Anti-Latour". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A Volume 30, Issue 1, March 1999, Pages 81–112. Chu, Dominique (2013), The Science Myth---God, society, the self and what we will never know, ISBN 1782790470 Collins, H.M. (1975) The seven sexes: A study in the sociology of a phenomenon, or the replication of experiments in physics, Sociology, 9, 205-24. Collins, H.M. (1985). Changing order: Replication and induction in scientific practice. London: Sage. Collins, Harry and Steven Yearley. (1992). "Epistemological Chicken" in Science as Practice and Culture, A. Pickering (ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 301-326. Edwards, D., Ashmore, M. & Potter, J. (1995). Death and furniture: The rhetoric, politics, and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism. History of the Human Sciences, 8, 25-49. Gilbert, G. N. & Mulkay, M. (1984). Opening Pandora's box: A sociological analysis of scientists' discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, B. & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. 2nd Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (not an SSK-book, but has a similar approach to science studies) Latour, B. (1987). Science in action : how to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (not an SSK-book, but has a similar approach to science studies) Pickering, A. (1984). Constructing Quarks: A sociological history of particle physics. Chicago; University of Chicago Press. Schantz, Richard and Markus Seidel (2011). The Problem of Relativism in the Sociology of (Scientific) Knowledge. Frankfurt: ontos. Shapin, S. & Schaffer, S. (1985). Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Williams, R. & Edge, D. (1996). The Social Shaping of Technology. Research Policy, vol. 25, pp. 856–899 [1] Willard, Charles Arthur. (1996). Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy, University of Chicago Press. Jasanoff, S. Markle, G. Pinch T. & Petersen, J. (Eds)(2002), Handbook of science, technology and society, Rev Ed.. London: Sage. Other relevant materials Becker, Ernest (1968). The structure of evil; an essay on the unification of the science of man. New York: G. Braziller. Shapin, Steven (1995). "Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge" (PDF). Annual Review of Sociology. Annual Reviews. 21: 289–321. doi:10.1146/annurev.so.21.080195.001445. Historical sociologist Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin are interviewed on SSK The Sociology of Ignorance website featuring the sociology of scientific ignorance External links[edit] Sociology of Science at PhilPapers v t e Philosophy of science Concepts Analysis Analytic–synthetic distinction A priori and a posteriori Causality Commensurability Consilience Construct Creative synthesis Demarcation problem Empirical evidence Explanatory power Fact Falsifiability Feminist method Functional contextualism Ignoramus et ignorabimus Inductive reasoning Intertheoretic reduction Inquiry Nature Objectivity Observation Paradigm Problem of induction Scientific law Scientific method Scientific revolution Scientific theory Testability Theory choice Theory-ladenness Underdetermination Unity of science Metatheory of science Coherentism Confirmation holism Constructive empiricism Constructive realism Constructivist epistemology Contextualism Conventionalism Deductive-nomological model Hypothetico-deductive model Inductionism Epistemological anarchism Evolutionism Fallibilism Foundationalism Instrumentalism Pragmatism Model-dependent realism Naturalism Physicalism Positivism / Reductionism / Determinism Rationalism / Empiricism Received view / Semantic view of theories Scientific realism / Anti-realism Scientific essentialism Scientific formalism Scientific skepticism Scientism Structuralism Uniformitarianism Vitalism Philosophy of Physics thermal and statistical Motion Chemistry Biology Geography Social science Technology Engineering Artificial intelligence Computer science Information Mind Psychiatry Psychology Perception Space and time Related topics Alchemy Criticism of science Descriptive science Epistemology Faith and rationality Hard and soft science History and philosophy of science History of science History of evolutionary thought Logic Metaphysics Normative science Pseudoscience Relationship between religion and science Rhetoric of science Science studies Sociology of scientific knowledge Sociology of scientific ignorance Philosophers of science by era Ancient Plato Aristotle Stoicism Epicureans Medieval Averroes Avicenna Roger Bacon William of Ockham Hugh of Saint Victor Dominicus Gundissalinus Robert Kilwardby Early modern Francis Bacon Thomas Hobbes René Descartes Galileo Galilei Pierre Gassendi Isaac Newton David Hume Late modern Immanuel Kant Friedrich Schelling William Whewell Auguste Comte John Stuart Mill Herbert Spencer Wilhelm Wundt Charles Sanders Peirce Wilhelm Windelband Henri Poincaré Pierre Duhem Rudolf Steiner Karl Pearson Contemporary Alfred North Whitehead Bertrand Russell Albert Einstein Otto Neurath C. D. Broad Michael Polanyi Hans Reichenbach Rudolf Carnap Karl Popper Carl Gustav Hempel W. V. O. Quine Thomas Kuhn Imre Lakatos Paul Feyerabend Jürgen Habermas Ian Hacking Bas van Fraassen Larry Laudan Daniel Dennett Category  Philosophy portal  Science portal v t e Science and technology studies Economics Economics of science Economics of scientific knowledge History History and philosophy of science History of science and technology History of technology Philosophy Anthropocene Antipositivism Empiricism Fuzzy logic Neo-Luddism Philosophy of science Philosophy of social science Philosophy of technology Positivism Postpositivism Religion and science Scientism Social constructivism Social epistemology Transhumanism Sociology Actor–network theory Social construction of technology shaping of technology Sociology of knowledge scientific Sociology of scientific ignorance Sociology of the history of science Sociotechnology Strong programme Science studies Antiscience Bibliometrics Boundary-work Consilience Criticism of science Demarcation problem Double hermeneutic Logology Mapping controversies Metascience Paradigm shift black swan events Pseudoscience Psychology of science Science citizen communication education normal post-normal rhetoric wars Scientific community consensus controversy dissent enterprise literacy method misconduct priority skepticism Scientocracy Scientometrics Team science Traditional knowledge ecological Unity of science Women in science STEM Technology studies Co-production Cyborg anthropology Dematerialization Digital anthropology Digital media use and mental health Early adopter Hype cycle Innovation diffusion disruptive linear model system user Leapfrogging Normalization process theory Reverse salient Skunkworks project Sociotechnical system Technical change Technocracy Technoscience feminist Technological change convergence determinism revolution transitions Technology and society criticism of dynamics theories of transfer Engineering studies Women in engineering Financial technology Policy Academic freedom Digital divide Evidence-based policy Factor 10 Funding of science Science policy history of science of Politicization of science Regulation of science Research ethics Right to science Socio-scientific issues Technology assessment Technology policy Transition management Portals Science History of science Technology Category Associations Journals Scholars Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sociology_of_scientific_knowledge&oldid=999112242" Categories: Sociology of scientific knowledge Social constructionism Sociology of science Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from January 2021 Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version Languages العربية Català Čeština Español فارسی Français 한국어 עברית Português Русский Српски / srpski Українська 中文 Edit links This page was last edited on 8 January 2021, at 15:19 (UTC). Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers Contact Wikipedia Mobile view Developers Statistics Cookie statement