Rationality and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

Abstract

Within the positivist tradition, natural scientific knowledge is the epitome of rationality. In philosophy, this view was fostered by the logical positivist Reichenbach's (1938) distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. To the former belong all the external determinants of the generation of scientific theoriespsychological, social, political, and historical. To the latter belongs only rational calculation on the basis of disinterested observations. The distinction between the two contexts promotes the view that however scientific theories are discovered, they are justified or rejected solely by precise reasoning about the available evidence-ideally by following the canons of deductive logic. In sociology, this positivist conception of scientific knowledge made it immune to sociological analysis. Although the sociologist might seek to explain the origin of theories or to examine the social consequences of science, scientific knowledge itself was self-explanatory.1 At the most, its internal logic could be scrutinized by analytic philosophers, but otherwise its probity could be entrusted to the democratic community of scientists, among whom truth and reason would prevail. In the positivist tradition, Reichenbach's analytic distinction is converted into a division of labor between disciplines. Natural scientists take care of scientific knowledge; philosophers act as no more than their handmaidens, helping to sort out logical muddles; while sociologists concern themselves only with deviations from the ideal: scientific errors, false beliefs, and the irrational resistance to theories. Sociological explanations of these deviations are to be found in the improper social locations of the offending scientists or in the inappropriate structures of the organizations within which they work, either of which allow personal, social, or other factors to distort knowledge. Sociologists focus on scientists and scientific institutions, not on scientific knowledge. In sum, in the positivist tradition, the paradigm of rationality is deductive logic, the model of science is rational calculation on the basis of facts, and the sociology of scientific knowledge is an oxymoron. The positivist hegemony-in particular the belief that the positivist reconstruction is the correct description of natural scientific knowledge-came under increasing challenge in the 1960s.2 The notion that scientific knowledge is underdetermined.by evidence and that it has an ineradicable conventional character gained widespread acceptance. This view made scientific knowledge amenable to sociological investigation: the epistemic barrier that positivists had erected around it was breached.3 No longer was scientific knowledge different from any other corpus of knowledge, such