The sociology of science comprises a broad church of approaches concerned to discern the nature and consequences of the social relations associated with the practice and culture of science. Since the early 1970s the sociology of science has acquired a special significance arising from its particular attention to the content of scientific knowledge. By contrast with earlier modes of sociological analysis of science (such as those championed by Merton 1973), the more recent variants have not only examined the sets of institutional and other social relations between those who happen to be scientists, but also attempted to articulate the consequences of these relations for the nature, direction, content and truth status of scientific knowledge itself. The shift in focus from the social relations between those who just happened to be scientists to the character of the knowledge itself marked a significant metamorphosis in the field. The sociology of science (which was more exactly a sociology of scientists) became the ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’ (SSK).
The claim that the truth value of the content of scientific knowledge is dependent on (or, less strongly, associated with) the social circumstances of its production is of course highly controversial. This form of relativist claim is most famously associated with the ‘strong programme in the sociology of knowledge’ (Bloor 1976). Under this rubric sociologists were enjoined to adopt a symmetrical approach to explaining the emergence of scientific knowledge: the occurrence of both true and false scientific knowledge, it was suggested, could be explained by invoking the same kinds of sociological factors. Moreover, the strong programme argued that this sociological approach could be extended to the heartland of rationality, namely to logic and mathematics. Whereas true scientific and mathematical knowledge is traditionally defined in terms of the absence of social factors, this approach argues that science is constitutively social. Unsurprisingly, this and the related work of other British sociologists of science engendered considerable debate between sociologists and philosophers of science throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Sociology was intruding upon philosophers’ turf: philosophers were no longer the (sole) arbiters of which standards and practices could ensure reliable scientific knowledge.
The work of this period both contributed to and derived from earlier debates in the history of science about the relative merits of internalist and externalist explanations of the genesis of scientific knowledge. In particular, the arguments of SSK resonated with the more radical interpretations of Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) general description of the dynamics of scientific change, although these were subsequently largely disavowed by their author.
Until this point, SSK was largely based on detailed historical case studies of specific episodes in science: famous experiments; controversies over the interpretation of observations, and so on. Social studies of science depended largely on interviews with scientists who were themselves public spokesmen on behalf of science. In line with Kuhn’s adage about the problems of rational reconstruction in the history of science, the accounts resulting from this work often embodied confusions between historical and logical accuracy. In the context of injunctions that sociology should take the ‘content’ of scientific argument into account, a further formidable barrier to understanding the social basis of science was the fact that its practitioners enjoyed lengthy and intensive specialized technical training. The move by sociologists to study science ‘naturalistically’ turned this barrier to advantage. Science was studied ‘ethnographically’: sociologists adopted the stance of an anthropologist joining a strange tribe, engaging in prolonged participant observation of the day-to-day activities of the scientific laboratory (Knorr-Cetina 1981; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Lynch 1985). This afforded the possibility of being deliberately sceptical about just those knowledge claims which seemed most evident and obvious to members of the tribe.
It was evident from the first moment that sociology of science embraced a form of relativism, that significant questions of reflexivity were implicated: in its simplest form, if the claim of sociology of science was that knowledge depended on social factors, then this also applied to the claims of the sociology of science. Many philosophers (incorrectly) seized upon this argument from reflexivity as the basis for the charge that relativistic sociology of science is inconsistent and self-refuting. But, of course, refutation follows only if the presence of social factors entails falsehood and distortion, and it was just this asymmetric approach to the sociology of science which its proponents were at pains to disavow. The point they insisted upon was that social circumstances were implicated in the genesis of scientific knowledge whether it subsequently be designated true or false.
Since the 1980s the sociology of science has both derived from and contributed to several parallel intellectual movements, including post-structuralism, constructivism, feminism, discourse analysis, ethnomethodology and post-modernism. Against this background the further significance of the sociology of science has become evident. The strategic value of SSK is that in demonstrating the relativist basis of scientific knowledge—a particularly hard case of knowledge production—it makes more plausible arguments for the social basis of other forms of knowledge (Collins 1985). However, over and above its epistemologically contentious claims about the social basis for scientific knowledge, the sociology of science (and technology) has relevance for broader questions in social theory. This arises directly from the growing emphasis on ‘epistemic’ questions, from its attention to the reflexive implications of arguments about the social basis of explanatory adequacy, and from the basic point that ‘science’ is conventionally defined in opposition to the ‘social’. As a result, sociology of science is no longer concerned merely to convey substantive findings about the nature of science, but instead finds itself involved in attempts to respecify key notions such as ‘social’, ‘society’ and ‘agency’. One example of the last derives from the movement known as ‘actor network theory’ or the ‘sociology of translation’ (Callon 1986; Latour 1987; 1991; Law 1991).
Actor network theory posits a description of scientific (and technological) process whereby an array of heterogeneous elements are defined, identified and aligned into a network. In this view successful scientists are those able to enrol the best and most elements into a network. In particular, successful scientists are no longer necessarily those who follow (or, as recommended by Feyerabend, deliberately flout) the rules of scientific method prescribed by philosophers. Instead, in this view, scientists strive to provide effective representation—in a way which conflates the epistemological and political meanings of the term—of an endless variety of esoteric elements: electrons, microbes, scallops and so on. The fidelity of these allies is what holds the network together; the strength of the network is the direct correlate of the robustness of the scientific fact. Scientific and technical facts are not, in this view, derived from adherence to special or superior methodology. The ‘hardness’ of a fact is a reflection of subsequent usage rather than of its correspondence to a pre-existing nature; hardness is simply a measure of the work required to unpack and dissolve the network. People are not convinced because something is a fact; rather, a claim becomes a fact in virtue of the conviction of sufficient numbers of allies.
Developments like actor network theory suggest that sociology of science is an important source of new ideas for social theory. Given the basic premise of liberal intellectual enquiry that ‘it could be otherwise’, sociology of science explores the possibility and problems of a form of relativist enquiry which urges a reconsideration of the nature and scope of social theory. In particular, it provokes an examination of a form of social theory which includes non-human elements as part of an extended conceptualization of the social. What would a social theory look like which attempts to revise basic preconceptions about the nature of ‘social’ and of ‘agency’ (Woolgar 1995)?
Whereas the sociology of science in the 1970s and 1980s exhibited considerable solidarity in its antipathy to ‘realist’ and ‘objectivist’ philosophies of science, controversy over the later developments has exposed significant fissions in the post-Kuhnian relativist bloc. For example, there is debate over the ways in which Wittgensteinian philosophy can be used as a progenitor of a sceptical sociological programme of enquiry (Lynch 1993); about the extent to which reflexivity and actor network theory take relativism too far (see contributions to Picketing 1992); about whether and to what extent SSK’s engagement with relativism and constructivism prevents it from having relevance for moral, political and policy questions.
These questions both underscore the pertinence of sociology of science for theoretical issues beyond the substantive focus upon science, and promise increasing engagement with related intellectual movements—constructivism, feminism, post-modernism, and so on. Over a relatively short space of time sociology of science has undergone several major transformations. This trajectory has involved the successive questioning of a series of asymmetric assumptions about the nature of scientific knowledge and the scope of social study: Merton (1973) problematized the asymmetric notion that science could not be understood as a social institution on a par with others; the strong programme criticized the assumption that truth and false knowledge could not be treated symmetrically; the reflexive project purveys symmetrical treatments of author and object; and actor network theory attempts to redress asymmetries between human and non-human objects.
It is entirely consistent with its relativist commitment that no one of these trends in the brief history of the sociology of science can claim to be the ultimate social perspective on science. Rather, the value of the endeavour is constantly to provoke, re-energize and question accepted views.
Steve Woolgar
Brunel University
References
Bloor, D. (1976) Knowledge and Social Imagery, London.
Kuhn, T.S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago.
Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action, Milton Keynes.
——(1991) ‘Technology is society made durable’ in J.Law (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters, London.
Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton, NJ.
Law, J. (ed.) (1991) A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, London.
Lynch, M. (1985) Art and Artefact in Laboratory Science: a study of shop work and shop talk in a research laboratory, London.
——(1993) Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science, Cambridge, UK.
Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. (eds) (1990) Representation in Scientific Practice, Cambridge, MA.
Merton, R.K. (1973) The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago.
Pickering, A. (ed.) (1992) Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago.
Woolgar, S. (1995) ‘Science and technology studies and the renewal of social theory’, in S.Turner (ed.) Social Theory at the End of the Century, Oxford.
Further reading
Woolgar, S. (1988) Science: The Very Idea, London.
