Toward an Epistemologically-Relevant Sociology of Science

Abstract

Donald Campbell: I would have liked to have presented here, for your critical comments, a welldeveloped social theory of how science works when science is successfully improving scientific beliefs. I will refer to such a theory as an epistemologicallyrelevant sociology of science, even though no such theory is available. The people who are most assiduously studying the sociology of science are reluctant to add this policy-relevant domain to their task, primarily because they, along with most historians of science, refuse to concede that science does, in fact, progress. While that agnosticism flies in the face of both my intuition and my experience, I do join contemporary sociologists and historians in seeing belief change as a thoroughly social process, guided but never compelled by logic or scientific facts established with certainty. For understanding current thinking about scientific progress in the sociology and history of science, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' remains essential. I accept Kuhn's emphasis on both the social process of discretionary judgment (as opposed to empirical or logical proof) in scientific theory choice, and also on the theory-ladenness of scientific facts. I also share his emphasis upon the social and political processes within science, while not denying the influence of the larger society. The social processes he describes are primarily ones of conformity, producing conservatism and resistance to innovation, in sharp contrast with the ideology of science which emphasizes individuality and nonconformity. These social processes need to be supplemented with an analysis of the social and psychological motivations for radical innovation such as Merton2 emphasizes which, while essential for progress, most frequently produce pseudo-innovations. Kuhn seems, to many readers, to limit scientific progress to within periods of what he calls normal For him, revolutionary changes of paradigm are not interpretable as progress because such changes overthrow the framework by which judgments of progress could be made. I disagree with this. His emphasis on the Gestalt-switch conversion that some scientists experience in adopting a radically new theory may be correct; but his overall thesis of radical discontinuity in scientific revolutions grossly understresses the continued trust on the part of scientific communities in 99% of the accumulated prerevolutionary facts, even though some such recognition can be found in his emphasis on anomalies as provoking scientific revolutions. Current scholarship in the sociology of science, it seems to me, pays too little attention to the importance of facts and to the role of experiment, demonstration, and observation (fallible though these be) in the social process of belief change in science. Why do we need an epistemologically-relevant sociology of science? As a social scientist who has spent a good deal of his career pondering the problem of why the social sciences have been considerably less successful in progressing (judged according to their own internal, largely intuitive criteria) than the physical and biological sciences have been, I believe we need such a fully-developed theory if we are to understand what steps the social sciences have to take in order to become more successful. We social scientists have been heavily preoccupied with the philosophy of science