Science and Technology Studies

Phase 1: the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

Throughout the 1970s, a program of research was developed aimed at destabilizing the epistemological belief that scientists had special access—through the application of the proper use of the scientific method, empirical observation aimed at development of theory, and so on—to underlying and unquestionable truths. Conceiving of science as a social practice and building on the discipline of the history and philosophy of science, practitioners in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) sought to unravel the ways in which scientific “fact” and theory emerge out of various and multiple social processes. Rather than assume an a priori objectivity, in which scientific knowledge is presented as a mirror of external reality (i.e., nature), SSK developed a method and approach in which all knowledge claims were to be examined with equivalent and symmetrical skepticism and where the object of inquiry was to examine the conditions under which claims to knowledge came to be seen as legitimate and true. A “strong program” developed committed to a relativist and empirical program aimed at studying the microsocial dynamics of science through which scientific reality came to be socially constructed through laboratory study and experiment.

Perhaps not surprisingly, such an overt attack on the authority of science led to a concerted counterattack from many in the scientific establishment who tended to criticize such interventions as unjustified, premised on faulty logic, sloppy in scholarship, and even politically motivated. The so-called science wars, between “postmodernists” or social constructivists on one side and scientific realists on the other, raged especially throughout the 1990s in several largely unproductive and often acrimonious exchanges. One highly published event was the “Sokal affair,” arising from a paper written by the physicist Alan Sokal purportedly to argue that quantum physics supported constructivist criticisms of the objectivity of science. Following publication in the journal Social Text, Sokal revealed the paper to be a hoax and cited the publication as demonstrable evidence of the poor standards and dogma that existed in postmodernist circles.

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