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Andrew Pickering’s point of departure is the Strong Programme, but he has gradually distanced himself from crucial elements in it. Pickering describes science as generated by a mangle of practice. This metaphor accentuates the practical or instrumental aspect of science: Science is an attempt to achieve “machinic capture” of nature’s agency by means of cultural tools and resources. In such capture,...
At the outset, Bruno Latour’s approach shared the Strong Programme’s ambition to explain scientific results, although the locus was shifted from macro-sociology to the micro-approach of anthropological fieldwork. Latour’s celebrated studies at the Salk laboratories in San Diego revealed science to be a matter of the “organization of persuasion through literary inscriptions”. At the macro-level, science...
The inception of Science Studies is traditionally attributed to the so-called Strong Programme, which was developed by David Bloor and other members of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh from the mid-1960s. In contrast to traditional “weak” sociology of science, the Edinburgh group endeavoured to explain the very contents of scientific theories. Explanations were to be causal,...
The Strong Programme is officially “inductively based”, i.e. warranted by its long list of alleged explanatory successes. The programme embodies an alternative, fall-back line of argument, however, which is purely philosophical. This is somewhat ironic in view of the school’s aim of getting rid of philosophy; still, this strategy has a strong weapon at its disposal, viz. Wittgenstein’s late philosophy...
Harry Collins’s project in the sociology of knowledge – the Empirical Programme of Relativism (EPOR) – is inspired by the Strong Programme. However, Collins rejects the idea that explanation should be causal, and eschews explanation of the genesis of theories: only their reception can be accounted for. EPOR is divided into three stages: (1) Demonstrating the “interpretative flexibility” of experimental...
Steve Fuller’s approach, named Social Epistemology, operates at a meta-level with respect to the rest of the main STS figures. Fuller undertakes a historico-critical survey of the development of STS itself and offers advice concerning its future development. Social Epistemology carries on the normative agenda of classical epistemology, which, according to Fuller, has been abandoned in orthodox STS...
The version of philosophical naturalism that Science Studies adopted as its foundation was formulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Like Quine’s naturalism, Wittgenstein’s version sprang from disaffection with Carnap’s philosophy of language. But while Quine’s model of language as a network of inferential connections could immediately be transformed into a picture of scientific knowledge, there is no Wittgensteinian...
In this book, I have tried to show how STS emerged at the intersection of two trends. One is the naturalization of philosophy, the other the search for a better accommodation between natural science and society, inspired by a widespread disaffection with science and its societal role in many Western countries. I argued that this critical stance towards science and the resulting anti-philosophical...
In Chapter 6, Latour’s theory of actants as the producers of science was mainly examined at a purely methodological level. However, Latour holds that an ontologically neutral vocabulary is not just a methodological convenience in analyzing natural science and technology, but actually captures reality in the most fundamental manner. He tries to bring this out by a critique of the traditional subject-object...
Naturalism is the view that reality is coextensive with nature and that, hence, human knowledge has no object beyond the natural realm. A trend towards naturalism has been a pervasive characteristic of European thought for two and a half millennia, a slow drift away from an original dualist mode in European thought towards an ever more stringent naturalistic monism. In Plato’s philosophy, the original...
This book approaches its subject matter in a way that combines a strong analytical and critical perspective with a historical and sociological framework for the understanding of the emergence of Science Studies. This is a novelty, since extant literature on this topic tends either to narrate the history of the field, with little criticism, or to criticize Science Studies from a philosophical platform...
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