Sociology Of Scientific Knowledge Research Articles

Prising open the 'black box': An epistemological critique of discursive constructions of scaling up the provision of mental health care in Africa.

Global mental health research is increasingly highlighting the high levels of untreated mental illness in Africa and calling for the scaling-up of services in order to redress this situation. A particular model of care is being strongly advocated for such scale-up, and a recent explosion of research is providing guidelines for its implementation. This article seeks to open up the 'black box' of international research on scaling up the provision of mental health care in Africa, unearthing the hidden assumptions and power dynamics underpinning the knowledge produced. It insists that gaining a better understanding of care provision demands that we not only fill the gaps in knowledge but also problematize the assumptions upon which existing knowledge is based. This article demonstrates how two interrelated paradigms are strongly mediating research in this area - those of 'scientific evidence' and 'human rights'. Drawing on recent research within the sociology of scientific knowledge, and strands of postcolonial thought, it demonstrates how these paradigms are both underpinned by several contentious epistemological assumptions, assumptions which are deeply inserted within the epistemological order of Western modernity. The main argument is that through their shared ideological undertones of 'objectivity', 'universalism' and 'rationalism', these paradigms are potentially marginalizing other possibly important ways of thinking about care in Africa, ways which might not originate from modernist forms of consciousness. This article makes a plea for a more inclusive and plural archive of knowledge on scaling up mental health care in Africa, one which is more hospitable to diverse epistemological politics and moral landscapes.

A agenda do professor-pesquisador em Administração: uma análise baseada na sociologia da ciência

A Administração é considerada uma ciência nova, caso seja comparada às ciências tradicionais. O Ensino Superior em Administração no Brasil teve início na década de 1950, importando metodologias americanas de ensino. A partir da formação de professores e pesquisadores, a pesquisa científica nacional em Administração passa a ser desenvolvida e a ser parte essencial para a formulação de teorias e metodologias adequadas à realidade brasileira. Nesse contexto, a sociologia da ciência surge como perspectiva essencial para a compreensão do saber científico, colocando no centro da investigação o pesquisador, ator do campo científico, bem como suas relações dentro do campo. Com o objetivo de aprofundar a compreensão sobre o conteúdo do trabalho do professor-pesquisador em Administração, tendo em vista a necessidade dos integrantes desse campo de compreendê-lo melhor e de maneira sistematizada, este artigo visa a responder a seguinte questão: "Qual é o conteúdo do trabalho do professor-pesquisador, quais são seus objetivos e as atividades que compõem sua agenda?". Por meio deste estudo, predominantemente qualitativo, aprofundou-se o conhecimento sobre as atividades com as quais os professores-pesquisadores em Administração estão envolvidos e seus objetivos quando entraram no campo e seus objetivos atuais, assim como se estruturou a agenda do professor-pesquisador com base na agenda dos entrevistados. Percebeu-se que a carga de trabalho desse profissional excede as 50 horas semanais e que as atividades de pesquisa, as predominantes em relação ao objetivo atual desses profissionais, são desprivilegiadas na semana, sendo deixadas para o final de semana em 47% dos casos.

Symmetry, Forced Asymmetry, Direct Apprehension, and Elective Modernism

Crazily, Christopher Norris seems to think sociology is at war with philosophy; it is not. I respond to his hostile comments on the sociology of scientific knowledge, which was inspired by Wittgenstein, by explaining the need for symmetry in the explanation of scientific knowledge, methodological relativism, elective modernism and a number of other issues.

Contingency, Nature and Hermeneutics in History of Science

When, as historians, we want to explain developments in the history of natural science, how are we to do justice to the role of the natural world – the thing scientists investigate – in our explanations? The idea that the structure of the natural world renders the development of science inevitable seems to be inadequate, but so does the idea that we should explain the history of science without any reference to nature, as if what scientists study made no difference at all to what they believe. Is ‘nature’ even a feasible category, however? To what extent is it a problem that in referring to the result of scientific development in our explanation of scientific development, we are assuming the authority of science? Does this undermine the possibility of critical and independent historiography? This article deals with several possible solutions to these problems, and outlines an alternative to rationalism as well as to the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and Latour’s Actor-Network Theory.

Immanuel Velikovsky and the return of the fringe

Many of us who worked in the early sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) cut our teeth on fringe science (e.g., Shapin 1975; Wallis 1979; Collins and Pinch 1982). It was important in arguments with philosophers of science to show that their demarcation criteria for separating the wheat of science from the chaff of error were untenable. Later, what Harry Collins termed the ‘‘hard case’’ for SSK (physics) took priority over the ‘‘marginal case.’’ The SSK research program was to make progress against the head winds coming from philosophy of science by tacking between the most credible science, such as physics, (which was hard to show as social) and the fringe sciences, such as parapsychology, which philosophers considered could only be social because they were in error. With the battle against the philosophers of science won by the mid-1980s, the issue of demarcation was largely left behind. Michael Gordin, a historian of science, in this important book on Immanuel Velikovsky returns us once more to the fringe. You know you are in good hands when the opening sentence begins, ‘‘No one in the history of the world has ever selfidentified as a pseudoscientist. There is no person who wakes up in the morning and thinks to himself, ‘I’ll just head into my pseudolaboratory and perform some pseudoexperiments to try to confirm my pseudotheories with pseudofacts.’’’ (1) Quite! Gordin rightly takes up from where SSK left off 30 years ago and makes it the point of his investigation to find out why some sorts of activities, which to all intents and purposes look like the real thing, get labeled and demonized as not the real thing. As we shall see, he advances our understanding of fringe science by making an important new historical argument about this demarcation process. He not only covers the original controversy over the 1950 publication of Worlds in Collision, in which Velikovsky first posited his cosmic catastrophic history of the Earth and its close encounters with the planet Venus, but also sets Velikovsky and his dismissal in the context of postwar science and follows him and his loyal

What Strong Sociologists can Learn from Critical Realism

This essay presents a long, detailed, in many ways critical but also appreciative account, of David Bloor’s recent book The Enigma of the Aerofoil. I take that work as the crowning statement of ideas and principles developed over the past four decades by Bloor and other exponents of the ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of scientific knowledge. It therefore offers both a test-case of that approach and a welcome opportunity to review, clarify and extend some of the arguments brought against it by critical realists. This purpose is particularly well served by Bloor’s having here assembled such a wealth of scientific, historical, political and socio-cultural data concerning one specific, very crucial period of research into theories of aerodynamic lift. His book thus provides an exceptionally useful point of engagement for anyone seeking to adjudicate these issues from a critically angled but engaged and constructive standpoint.

Victimology and the sociology of new disciplines

Focusing on the literature on the sociology of scientific knowledge, the purpose of the present article is to explore the extent to which its conceptual frameworks may be applicable to the field of victimology, thus providing new perspectives for the enhancement of our understanding of the manner in which this field has been developing and related ontological issues. The theoretical discussion is supplemented by initial explorations towards a quantitative analysis of the subject matter of victimology, based on a topical search using the EBSCO Criminal Justice Abstracts database. This analysis may serve to assist in identifying various characteristics pertaining to the publications, such as their academic focus and disciplinary framework, and in exploring the relationship between the journal publications, the literature on developing fields, and the historical development of victimology. The article seeks to promote a research agenda deriving from the linkage of the field of victimology to the literature on the sociology of scientific knowledge, thereby stimulating new ways of critiquing this field.

Smooth Effects: The Erasure of Labour and Production of Police as Experts through Augmented Objects

Smooth Effects: The Erasure of Labour and Production of Police as Experts through Augmented Objects

Michael Polanyi and the politics of science studies

Tacit knowledge is today a key concept in history and sociology of science and, primarily because of the significance of this concept, Michael Polanyi is regarded, alongside other figures such as Ludwig Fleck, Karl Mannheim, Robert K. Merton, and Thomas Kuhn as a forerunner of contemporary social studies of science. And yet, Polanyi’s major book, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958), with its invocation of St. Augustine’s idea of knowledge as a ‘‘gift of grace,’’ its Christian existentialism, its conservative moralism, and its often tortuously complex style of reasoning is much less accessible and amenable to increasingly specialized academics than Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Much of Personal Knowledge seems tangential to today’s social studies of science: for example, its moralistic anti-Communism and teleological conception of the evolution of human intelligence as the ‘‘awakening of the world’’ (Polanyi 1962: 405). A view of Polanyi as contributing to the idea of the social construction of science is paradoxical because of his outright opposition to the sociology of knowledge, which he expressed in correspondence with Mannheim. He paradoxically combined an emphasis on embodied scientific practice with absolute opposition to materialism. He also saw sociology as more generally pernicious, writing disapprovingly in Personal Knowledge that the public is ‘‘taught by the sociologist to distrust its traditional morality’’ (Polanyi 1962: 234; see also Nye: 279). Polanyi’s philosophy of science opposed justifications of scientific truth by logical positivist notions of scientific method and pointed toward a sociological view of the trust-dependence, presupposition-laden, and inherently communal character of scientific practice, themes developed in the sociology of scientific knowledge (Shapin 1994; Collins 1992). But can these aspects of Polanyi’s work be extracted from the overall framework of his thought or do they carry with them

Editorial Introduction: Collins and Tacit Knowledge

Introduction Harry Collins is internationally recognized as a distinguished sociologist of science who writes creatively on a substantial number of varied subjects. He is acknowledged as one of the prominent specialists on the topic of tacit knowledge and has played an important role in the introduction of this topic into science studies. He has investigated the topic extensively, most famously through several case studies of physics [Collins 1974, 1984, 1985, 1990, 2001a,b, 2004], [Collins &...

“Writing in Letters of Blood”: Manners in Scientific Dispute in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the German Lands

'The essence of the spirit, the British morphologist Thomas Huxley claimed in 1880, criticism. He continued: tells us that to whatever doctrine claiming our assent we should reply: take it if you can compel it. The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.2 The image Huxley evokes here is a familiar one. It is the image of a science driven by the clash of ideas - a science getting ever closer to uncovering the truth by exploring conflicting arguments to the fullest.The importance of (intellectual) conflict for the process, stressed by Huxley, has often been endorsed by philosophers of science, particularly since the Second World War. Intellectual confrontations have been central in philosophies of science ranging from Karl Popper's Conjectures and refutations to Marcelo Dascal's inquiries into the role of controversy for the shaping of knowledge.3 At the same time, it is clear that the idea of an inherent conflict in science has not always and universally been acknowledged. Historically, discussion, and controversy have received negative as well as positive associations among scientists, and the way in which men of science have actually dealt with disagreements has been regulated by historically and geographically contingent values.The rise of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) in the 1970s and 1980s has sharpened our eye for the question of how the social embedment of science has epistemological consequences, or, to paraphrase David Bloor, how ideas of knowledge interact with social images. The focus of SSK has triggered a strong historical interest in controversies, and, at least for some time, also in the cultural rules that have moderated these.4 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have famously addressed the latter question in Leviathan and the air-pump. There, they have shown that, in the 1660s, Robert Boyle developed a set of rules - or in their words: in dispute - that regulated how natural philosophers should deal with disagreement. Although several of Boyle's rules of conduct would reappear in one form or the other in the following centuries, Shapin and Schaffer make clear that they also bore the mark of the time and place in which they were developed. Boyle, so they indicate, tried to create a calm public space that would earn the experimental philosophers credit in a society torn apart by the violence of the Civil War.5 Since the publication of Leviathan and the air-pump, the changing cultures of of other seventeenth-century contexts have received detailed scholarly attention. This research has, amongst others, focused on the courtly etiquette that moderated discussion in the Italian states, and the courtesy rules that shaped the correspondence of French mathematicians.6 Overall, these studies have emphasized the importance of virtue (whether of gentlemen or courtiers) in discussions on natural philosophy.7In this article I will shift attention to the nineteenth century - a period described by the contemporary mathematician Charles Babbage as the age of discussion.8 The rise of new disciplines, the advent of science as a career, the development of a secular culture, and the infusion of liberal values in science are only a few of the characteristics which are generally cited to discern the social context of nineteenthcentury science from that of the scientific revolution.9 It might be fair to say with John Pickstone that Science in the nineteenth-century sense was a game with rules that were radically different from natural philosophy in the previous centuries.10 In this article it will be explored how this shift in rules left its traces in the etiquette of disagreement.The topic of nineteenth-century manners in has not been without its historians. …

Evolution in pharmacologic thinking around the natural analgesic palmitoylethanolamide: from nonspecific resistance to PPAR-α agonist and effective nutraceutical

The history of development of new concepts in pharmacology is a highly interesting topic. This review discusses scientific insights related to palmitoylethanolamide (PEA) and its progression over a period of six decades, especially in light of the work of the science sociologists, Ludwig Fleck and Thomas Kuhn. The discovery of the cannabis receptors and the nuclear peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors was the beginning of a completely new understanding of many important homeostatic physiologic mechanisms in the human body. These discoveries were necessary for us to understand the analgesic and anti-inflammatory activity of PEA, a body-own fatty amide. PEA is a nutrient known already for more than 50 years. PEA is synthesized and metabolized in animal cells via a number of enzymes and has a multitude of physiologic functions related to metabolic homeostasis. PEA was identified in the 1950s as a therapeutic principle with potent anti-inflammatory properties. Since 1975, its analgesic properties have been noted and explored in a variety of chronic pain states. Since 2008, PEA has been available as a nutraceutical under the brand names Normast® and PeaPure®. A literature search on PEA meanwhile has yielded over 350 papers, all referenced in PubMed, describing the physiologic properties of this endogenous modulator and its pharmacologic and therapeutic profile. This review describes the emergence of concepts related to the pharmacologic profile of PEA, with an emphasis on the search into its mechanism of action and the impact of failing to identify such mechanism in the period 1957–1993, on the acceptance of PEA as an anti-inflammatory and analgesic compound.

The Broken Boundaries between Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Sociology: Introduction to an Interview with Trevor Pinch

The article introduces and comments upon the themes developed in the interview with the sociologist of science and technology Trevor Pinch in this issue of Cultural Sociology. The paper outlines the trajectory of his work since the late 1970s, from the birth of Science and Technology Studies (STS), until his current interest in the relationship between music, technologies, and society. The paper focuses on the growth of the field of STS, pointing out the many interconnections between STS and the wide intellectual universe involving cultural studies, cultural sociology and symbolic interactionism. The paper also considers the leading role Trevor Pinch has played in the shaping of the field of ‘sound studies’, an interdisciplinary field focused on the study of the sonic dimensions of societies, tracing the initial development of this area and how it represents a new set of interconnections between STS and the sociological study of culture.

Why airplanes fly: The Strong Programme and the theory of lift

When the Wright brothers made their first controlled flight in 1903, no scientific theory could explain why their airplane should fly. In technical terms, the phenomena that needed explanation was lift, the upward vertical forces on an airplane in steady flight. Existing theories of fluid motion either predicted no lift at all or values for lift that were far lower than those achieved in practice. This scientific anomaly became an embarrassment after 1908, when the Wright brothers demonstrated their improved Flyer throughout Europe. With the Wrights’ demonstrations and Louis Bleriot’s 1909 flight across the English Channel, European militaries began investing heavily in aviation research and experimentation, highlighting the inadequacy of existing theories of lift. This is the ‘‘enigma of the airfoil’’ that Bloor seeks to explain in his book. To do so he gives his readers a detailed technical history of the development of airfoil theory, a central achievement of modern aerodynamics. But the enigma he seeks to explain goes beyond the theory of lift itself. Bloor also provides a careful comparative analysis of the two main schools of aerodynamic theory in the early 20th century, one British and the other German. The puzzle he examines here is well known in the history of aerodynamics, the British ‘‘failure’’ to embrace the circulation theory of lift pioneered by German-speaking academic engineers. As a founder of the Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge, Bloor rejects using social factors to explain only the British failure and not the German success. In doing so, he provides penetrating insights into different modes of reasoning involved in the application of mathematical theory to technological practice.

Neoliberalism and the History of STS Theory: Toward a Reflexive Sociology

In the sociology of science and sociology of scientific knowledge, the decline of functionalism during the 1970s opened the field to a wide range of theoretical possibilities. However, a Marxist-influenced alternative to functionalism, interests analysis, quickly disappeared, and feminist-multicultural frameworks failed to achieved a dominant position in the field. Instead, functionalism was replaced by a variety of agency-based frameworks that focused on constructive or performative processes. The shift in the sociology of science from Mertonian functionalism to the poststrong program, agency-based sociology of scientific knowledge has parallels with the broader shift in political ideologies from social liberalism to neoliberalism. The argument is made in a way that is cognizant of the criticisms raised against interests analysis and avoids the “short circuit” of class imputation. Instead, the approach defends the potential for a more integrated approach to the structure-agency-meaning triangle in STS via the use of field sociology.

Normativity without normativism

Stephen Turner’s book Explaining the Normative (Polity, Oxford, 2010) constitutes a powerful onslaught against one of the main intellectual havens where the thesis of something like a transcendental foundation for rationality is still alive and flourishing. During the two last centuries, naturalism has been conquering one territory after another, but there was a portion of philosophical land where it seemed that ordinary scientific research would necessarily be insufficient to offer us an account of what happened there. This thesis has often been expressed as the ‘irreducibility of normativity’ (see Parfit 2011 for a recent exposition), and Turner’s book aims at showing that the arguments supporting this thesis are not defensible. I am absolutely sympathetic to the claim that the normative is just an ordinary citizen of the natural world, though probably more complex than other vulgar things like neutron stars, hurricanes or lizards, but my own impression reading the book has been that Turner tries perhaps to go a little bit farther than where I would be happy to take company with him, and I shall try here to explain the slight differences I see in our ways of understanding the question, albeit running the risk of misinterpreting some of his claims of course. I have to make a confession to begin with. A large part of my own work in analytical philosophy of science has been inspired by the idea that, besides analysing the ‘internal’ structure and dynamics of ‘purely epistemic states’ (i.e., what makes of something a theory, or a case of empirical confirmation, or a case of approximation to the truth, etc.), it was convenient to look at ‘scientific objects’ as the result of the decisions of human agents (i.e., scientists), and those decisions would not only be guided by ‘epistemic interest’, but also by ‘social’ ones. Most of the work done in the sociology of scientific knowledge in the last quarter of the past century tended to interpret the ‘epistemic’ and the ‘social’ as not only different, but usually conflicting aspects and forces within the possible motivations of scientists, with an increasingly smaller space left to the former as we approached the more radical, relativistic brands within the discipline. Looking for some approach in which the ‘epistemic’ and the ‘social’ could be conceived as coherent, complementary, and even interdependent elements of the process of scientific research, I came across Robert Brandom’s breathtaking theoretical fabric as disclosed in his book Making it Explicit, and found in his notions of commitment, entitlement and scorekeeping a particularly apt methodological tool to represent the dynamics of scientific research in terms of a ‘conversation’ governed by a system of inferential rules. These are rules that

“The last possible resort”: A forgotten prod and the in situ standardization of Stanley Milgram’s voice-feedback condition.

This article uses previously unpublished data from Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments to draw attention to a hitherto neglected procedural innovation of the voice-feedback condition. In 3 experimental sessions in this condition, the experimenter responded to a participant's attempted defiance by leaving the room, apparently to speak to the learner, before returning to assure the participant that the learner was willing or able to continue. This article documents the use of this tactic during the voice-feedback condition and highlights the negotiation surrounding the use of the tactic between Milgram and his confederate John Williams, who played the role of the experimenter. It is shown that the subsequent use of this tactic did not conform to the conditions for its use agreed by Milgram and Williams. Moreover, the tactic seems to have been dropped from both subsequent experimental conditions and Milgram's published accounts of his work. These observations are discussed in relation to historical work on experimentation in social psychology, research on standardization in the sociology of scientific knowledge, and in terms of their implications for theory and research on dis/obedience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

Bibliographic Databases: Some Critical Points

Bibliographic Databases: Some Critical Points

Validar a guerra: a construção do regime de Expertise estratégica

O presente artigo interroga os mecanismos do pensamento estratégico que contribuíram para tornar a guerra moderna uma prática social julgada tecnicamente viável e, assim, legítima para os militares. Para tal, a análise proposta inscreve-se nos campos da sociologia pragmática (inspirando-se em autores como Luc Boltanski, Nicolas Dodier e Francis Chateauraynaud) e da sociologia da ciência (apoiando-se fundamentalmente nos trabalhos de Bruno Latour). Por um lado, a sociologia da ciência desenvolveu uma problemática muito fértil acerca da construção dos fatos científicos que servirá de inspiração para este estudo. Por outro lado, a sociologia pragmática elaborou um quadro analítico das ações coletivas que se articula à pesquisa sobre a construção social dos fatos. A partir dessas abordagens, propõe-se investigar a formação de um regime de expertise estratégica que sustenta a legitimidade técnica do uso da força militar. Juntas, a sociologia da ciência e a sociologia pragmática lançam luz sobre elementos particularmente importantes acerca da questão da guerra.

Expertise, fluency and social realism about professional knowledge

In recent years, the sociology of education has seen a renewed interest in realist accounts of knowledge and its place in education. Inspired by ‘social realist’ thinking, a body of work has emerged that criticises the dominance of generic and process-based thinking about (especially) professional education and advocates instead a revaluation of discipline-based and theoretical knowledge. In this paper, I discuss the role of the concept of expertise in professional education. Following Winch, I situate the dominant theories of expertise in the field today as ‘fluency’ accounts of expertise – such theories focus more on the fluency or automaticity with which the expert acts than on the content of what the expert can do. As an alternative, I investigate Collins and Evans’s recent work on expertise in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Similar to what Collins and Evans suggests for science studies, I hold that education would benefit from consideration of the developing ‘third wave’ of thinking about the nature of expertise and I sketch the main features of a social realist view of the nature of expertise for professional education.