SCIENTIFIC CONTROVERSY

Scientific Controversy

Scientific Controversy

Q: Why should sociologists study scientific controversies, and what can we learn from them? Answer with reference to at least two case studies?

Ans: The sociology of scientific knowledge can be traced back to long-standing issues in the sociology of knowledge raised by Karl Mannheim (1936) and Max Scheler ([1925] 1960). Mannheim's work was particularly influential on Barry Barnes (1974) and David Bloor ([1976] 1991) and their formulation of the Strong Programme (see below). While Mannheim had stopped short of including the natural sciences within his sociology of knowledge, Barnes and Bloor argued that even the so-called hard sciences such as physics, biology, and mathematics should be explained sociologically. This opened up a new empirical space for SSK.

SSK is often associated with Thomas Kuhn's ([1962] 1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which compared scientific revolutions with political revolutions and gave room for social factors in the explanation of scientific change. Kuhn's work provoked much philosophical interest, including the famous Popper-Kuhn debate (Lakatos and Musgrave 1974). As stated in the foregoing, the Mertonian norms subsumed a particular version of scientific method and epistemology, and part of the challenge to the Mertonian approach has come from the breakdown of this “received view” (Mulkay 1979) within the philosophy of science (Hacking 1983; Hesse 1980; Sismondo 2003). In other words, the increased attention within philosophy of science to such issues as the theory-ladenness of observations, the Duhem-Quine thesis, and problems of theory choice coupled with the demise of the correspondence theory of truth further questioned the notion that scientists followed a set of methodological or epistemological procedures that guaranteed objective knowledge. If a set of such procedures existed, at the very least philosophers of science could not, and still cannot, agree as to what those procedures are.

David Bloor, studying what he termed the sociology of knowledge, developed the “Strong Programme” to describe the development, distribution, and maintenance of knowledge. Bloor defined something as “knowledge”if it was taken for granted, institutionalized, or invested with authority by a group of people. The four tenets of the Strong Programme are (a) causality, or what causes knowledge or beliefs to become more or less widely held; (b) impartiality, concerned with all beliefs, true or false; (c) symmetry, in that the same kinds of concepts can explain true or false beliefs; and (d) reflexivity, in that the patterns of explanation can be applied to sociology of science. Bloor argued that truth alone is insufficient to explain why a true belief comes to be held by scientists, but rather social factors play a role. Critics argue that there must be some objective ways to compare true and false beliefs that, while filtered through a social lens, nonetheless reflect an independent material world.

David Bloor has developed constructionist arguments further and attempted to show how different forms of mathematics and concepts of number were fitted to different societies. For example, he argued that moves to a more continuous notion of number were associated with an increasingly involvement of mathematicians with problems ...