Sociology of science

Debates among historians about the relative weight of “intellectual” and “social” factors seem “rather silly” to Steven Shapin. What’s needed, he argues in The Scientific Revolution (science.culture) is a sociology of scientific knowledge “to display knowledge making and knowledge holding as social processes” (p. 9).

He thinks too that the notion that social factors exert “external” pressure on science is also misleading (p. 10): “There is as much society inside the scientist’s laboratory, and internal to the development of scientific knowledge, as there is outside.” In fact, “the very distinction between the social and the political, on the one hand, and ‘scientific truth,’ on the other, is partly cultural product” of the period we know as the scientific revolution. Instead of “treating the distinction between the social and the scientific as a resource in telling a historical story,” Shapin wants to know where the distinction comes from: “How and why did we come to think that such a distinction is a matter of course ?”

One of his answers to that question is to examine the way knowledge about the natural world, and means of acquiring knowledge, changed in the early modern period. Among the key changes he identifies are “the depersonalization of natural knowledge” and “the attempted mechanization of knowledge making,” which he defines as “the proposed deployment of explicitly formulated rules of method aimed at disciplining the production of knowledge by managing or eliminating the effects of human passions and interest” (p. 13). This is a historically contingent shift in what we mean by “scientific knowledge,” and it is one that makes the distinction of “social” and “scientific” seem perfectly natural.