Thomas Gieryn’s Criticism of Post-Mertonian Science Studies March 20, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Harry Collins, Karin Knorr Cetina, Michael Mulkay, Nigel Gilbert, Robert K. Merton, Roger Krohn, Thomas Gieryn, Thomas Kuhn
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This post is about: Thomas Gieryn, “Relativist/Constructivist Programmes in the Sociology of Science: Redundance and Retreat” Social Studies of Science 12 (1982): 279-297.
The richness, honesty, and critical depth of many of the debates in the social studies of science in the late ’70s and early ’80s continues to surprise me, since their full contours were not very well preserved in later rehearsals. In this blog’s most recent swing through this history, we noted Harry Collins’s early-’80s articulation of a “methodological relativism” which sought to develop a pure sociology of scientific knowledge unburdened by epistemological baggage. This program contrasted with Karin Knorr Cetina’s belief that the pursuit of general sociological knowledge was unlikely to turn up much, and that the way forward was in localized ethnographic studies.
Now, I have always just assumed that the sociologist Thomas Gieryn identified with such radical (if divergent) postures. Gieryn pretty much initiated the still-popular strategy of analyzing “boundaries” in science studies. And, in the 1983 article in which he did so, he made explicit use of Michael Mulkay’s argument that science’s Mertonian “norms” were mainly rhetoric that scientists used to establish an “ideology” around themselves. Although I did not suppose Gieryn so radical as Mulkay, I did not expect what I found in Gieryn 1982 — an energetic criticism of Collins’s “relativism”, of Knorr Cetina’s “constructivism”, and of any pretensions that sociology was making a radical escape from the program of Robert Merton.
Sociology, History, Normativity, and Theodicy August 9, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in History as Anti-Philosophy, Methods.Tags: Bruno Latour, Joseph Ben-David, Larry Laudan, Martin Kusch, Michael Mulkay, Nigel Gilbert, Rupert Hall, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin
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“For my part I see no danger of ‘the history of science losing its science’, but much literature in the social history of science has less of a connection with the sociology of knowledge than many apparently traditional exercises in the history of ideas.”
“Finally, there is a marked lack of rigour in much social history of science; work is often thought to be completed when it can be concluded that ‘science is not autonomous’, or that ‘science is an integral part of culture’, or even that there are interesting parallels or homologies between scientific thought and social structures. But these are not conclusions; they are starting points for more searching analyses of scientific knowledge as a social product.”
—Steven Shapin, 1982
To my mind, Shapin’s “History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions,” (History of Science 20 (1982): 157-211) is perhaps one of the best articulations of how sociological methodology could augment historiography. It is a manifesto for the sociology of knowledge program against critics (Joseph Ben-David, Rupert Hall, and Larry Laudan are specified). It’s also an argument against more sterile sociology-based historiographical methods—the “social history of science”. As pointed out in the quotes above, these methods draw no substantive connections between sociology and the intellectual production of knowledge: society is simply something that imprints itself on scientific institution-building, practice, and claims.
To put it another way, Shapin ought to be understood as an epistemological sociologist, one who in 1982 was apparently fighting against many of the same problems that bedevil us today. No one, to my mind, better articulated how integral things like proper institution-building and proper etiquette have always been (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 