Concept
Sociology of scientific knowledge
Overview
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." The sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI) is complementary to the sociology of scientific knowledge. 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. Scientists have criticized sociological theories of scientific knowledge for ignoring the objective reality of nature when trying to explain how such knowledge is created.
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). 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.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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This general Science of Society, as distinguished from the separate departments of the science (each of which asserts its conclusions only conditionally, subject to the paramount control of the laws of the general science) now remains to be characterized. And as will be shown presently, nothing of a really scientific character is here possible, except by the inverse deductive method.
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Sociology of scientific knowledge is.
There are of KNOWLEDGE two kinds; whereof one is Knowledge Of Fact: the other Knowledge Of The Consequence Of One Affirmation To Another. The former is nothing else, but Sense and Memory, and is Absolute Knowledge; as when we see a Fact doing, or remember it done: And this is the Knowledge required in a Witnesse. The later is called Science; and is Conditionall; as when we know, that, If The Figure Showne Be A…
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
States what Sociology of scientific knowledge is.
It might as well be something about Mars or about some fanciful country unless it fructifies in the individual's own life. At the time when scholastic method developed, it had relevancy to social conditions. It was a method for systematizing and lending rational sanction to material accepted on authority. This subject matter meant so much that it vitalized the defining and systematizing brought to bear upon it.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Sociology of scientific knowledge is.
Philosophers who discussed Sociology of scientific knowledge
Related ideas
- Eugene Wigner
- History
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Sociology
- Mathematics
- Culture
- Anthropocentrism
- Social constructionism
- Oswald Spengler
- Physics
- Politics
- Robert K. Merton
- University of Edinburgh
- Postmodernism
- Knowledge
- Thomas Kuhn
- Science
- United Kingdom
- The Decline of the West
- Bruno Latour
- Cambridge
- Imre Lakatos
- Science and technology studies
- Critical theory
Place in the tradition
Part of Knowledge.
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