L9 Sociology of Scientific Knowledge Flashcards
What is the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) concerned with?
Concerned with exploring the sorts of social processes that are involved in determining what counts as true or false scientific belief.
What is the Constructionist Theories of Science?
Scientific inquiry considered not to be an objective pursuit of truth, but rather a social institution, which actively and systematically produces specific versions of reality and truth.
What is knowledge according to SSK?
Knowledge is a local product that is contingent upon the historical, social and cultural features of its place of production.
If science isn’t objective, what does SSK believe is happening instead?
Scientists negotiating (arguing, debating) about what is considered ‘true’ or ‘factual’ in science
This is why there are constantly different views of what is true in science.
What is SSK mean by Ethnography?
Description from the point of view of the people under study.
Who were Latour and Woolgar?
What were they interested in?
Two social constructionists who looked at the Salk Institute scientists to see how they actually came to their conclusions.
They were interested in how scientists act and how they use procedures and how ‘organized’ they actually are.
What were Latour and Woolgar’s 5 ethnographic findings?
- There is extreme disorder and messiness in laboratory practice.
- Scientists didn’t seem to be guided by well-defined rules of procedure.
- Attitudes of most scientists were highly pragmatic.
- Scientists didn’t investigate actual objects, or phenomena, or things in themselves. They worked with ‘literary inscriptions’ of objects.
- Scientific papers were written in such a way that they typically lacked any trace of authorship. (scientific statements lacked modality)
Latour and Woolgar main argument about what science is?
Science is more of a literary and interpretive activity than objective science.
Not about doing an experiment, checking something and making a hypothesis, as much as its about writing, interpreting, representing etc.
What is Woolgar trying to show in this example?
That science is a human enterprise.
The first example is how it is actually written, but it could be written in all the other ways. We tend to see science as purely objective but there is always a person behind the data interpreting it in certain ways.
What is Discourse Analysis of Science?
A move away from the traditional sociological
objective of using scientists’ talk as a means
of establishing how scientists really act, or
how they come to accept certain beliefs
about the natural world.
What is the focus in Discourse Analysis of Science?
Understanding how scientists’ talk is
organized to convey different conceptions
of what science is and how it is done
on different occasions and in different
contexts.
More interested in talk and writing, their discorse
What was significant about ‘Opening Pandora’s Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientists’ Discourse’ by Nigel Gilbert and Mike Mulkay (1984)?
They identified two different repertoire’s (how you talk about the world) about scientists account of science
The Empiricist Repertoire vs the Contingent Repertoire
They noticed that scientists moved flexibly between the two when speaking, although they appear to be incompatible.
According to Mulkay and Gilbert
How did scientists use language to display their research findings as true and rational?
They would use Empiricist Repertoire rather than Contingent Repertoire.
According to Mulkay and Gilbert
How did scientists account for truth and error?
Scientists would use empiricist repertoire when representing what they thought was the truth
but draw on contingent repertoire to describe error or false belief.
According to Mulkay and Gilbert
What does the Empiricist Repertoire consist of?
Experimental data is given priority.
The involvement of the author is almost never referred to
Laboratory work is characterized as following from rules which are clear-cut and universally effective.
