editor, Administrators
2,020
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
=== Sociology of Scientific Knowledge ===
The field of sociology, the scientific study of human social structures, was founded by Robert Merton. In the 1940’s Merton began studying the sociology of scientific communities. However, his studies had little contact with epistemology or philosophy of science, except in the general sense of identifying the social conditions under which scientific inquiry is possible and fruitful. Merton assumed a view of scientific knowledge similar to that of the logical empiricists.[[CiteRef::Godfrey-Smith (2003)]] The philosophers John Stuart Mill, Charles Sanders PiercePeirce, and Karl Popper stressed the social dimension of scientific epistemology, but their view did not become the dominant one until after the publication of Kuhn’s ''Structure of Scientific Revolutions''.[[CiteRef::Longino (2015)]]
The ‘strong program’ of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) began in the 1970’s at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, under the leadership of sociologist Barry Barnes and philosopher David Bloor. Proponents of SSK view knowledge as a collective social product, and seek a naturalistic account of its production. In effect, they seek to use the methods of social science to study science itself.[[CiteRef::Godfrey-Smith (2003)]][[CiteRef::Barnes, Bloor, and Henry (1996)]] A central principle of the ‘strong program’ is the symmetry principle, in which normative epistemological concerns are ‘screened out’ for the sake of illuminating social interactions and relationships involved in the production of knowledge. Its value is most evident when considering knowledge processes far removed from our own by time and culture, such as when understanding how western astronomy disentangled itself from astrology in seventeenth century Europe.[[CiteRef::Golinski (1998)]] Social constructivism has sometimes been criticized as an attempt to “explain away” science as nothing but social power structures.[[CiteRef::Longino (2015)]] However, recent attempts to introduce cognitive science concepts into social epistemology hold much promise of naturalizing rationality, and thereby obviating such concerns.[[CiteRef::Giere and Moffatt (2003)]][[CiteRef::Giere (2002)]]
|History=The term ''scientonomy'' was adopted to denote an empirical descriptive ''science of science'' subsequent to the publication of [[Barseghyan (2015)|''The Laws of Scientific Change'']].[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)]]
