Social Studies of Science

The Strong Programme and SSK

SSK developed in the early 1970s and was strongly influenced by the writings of Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and other influential critics of positivist and logical empiricist philosophies of science. Several members of the Edinburgh University Science Studies Unit (which was founded in the 1960s) had a leading role in a successful effort to reorient the sociology of knowledge to engage the material practices and contents of the sciences. Leading figures in the Edinburgh School (also known as the “Strong Programme” in the sociology of knowledge) included David Bloor, Barry Barnes, David Edge, Steven Shapin, and Donald MacKenzie, who published a series of programmatic arguments and social-historical case studies starting in the early 1970s. In 1970, Edge and Roy MacLeod cofounded the journal Science Studies (renamed Social Studies of Science after a few years), which provided an outlet for the new approach and became the leading journal in the field.

The “strength” of the Strong Programme lay in its proposal to extend the sociology of knowledge to cover even the most robust mathematical procedures, physical laws, and scientific facts. Conceived in the early twentieth century, the sociology of knowledge was an empirical research program that aimed to explain the historical formation and social distribution of collective beliefs and ideologies. Instead of evaluating the truth or rationality of beliefs, sociologists of knowledge endeavored to explain the connections between particular beliefs and the characteristics of the social groups that held them. Persons promoting a doctrine typically emphasize its intrinsic truth and rationality, but a sociologist of knowledge attempts to be noncommittal about inherent truth of a belief, while examining the history, socialization practices, and collective interests in the community of believers. Karl Mannheim, an early exponent of the sociology of knowledge, endowed the perspective with broad scope to cover religious and metaphysical systems, political ideologies of all kinds, and controversial scientific theories. However, Mannheim made an exception for the most robust, generally accepted scientific and mathematical knowledge. Mannheim held that because such knowledge no longer bears the imprint of the cultural and historical conditions of its emergence, the sociology of knowledge had no basis for explaining it as a function of particular traditions and practices. He recognized that modern science and mathematics were historically and culturally “conditioned,” but he argued that “existential factors” were “merely of peripheral significance” for explaining the status of such knowledge (Mannheim 1936:271). Proponents of the Strong Programme refused to accept the idea that selected facts, laws, and procedures, which are currently accepted as invariant, rational, and true, should be exempted from social and cultural explanation. To set up the possibility of such explanation, Bloor, Barnes, and other adherents to the Strong Programme recruited philosophical arguments about the conventionality of mathematical practices, the theory ladenness of observation, the tacit underpinnings of experimental method, the incommensurability of competing paradigms, and the underdetermination of theory choice by empirical evidence. Such philosophical arguments were used to suggest that the resolution of controversies and the formation of consensus in scientific communities was not due to evidence alone. Empirical study of particular cases would then be used to identify historical conditions, social interests, and collective alignments that may have had some influence on the relevant scientific communities.

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