Philosophy of Science - Sociology, Anthropology and Economics of Science

Sociology, Anthropology and Economics of Science

In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn argues that the process of observation and evaluation take place within a paradigm. 'A paradigm is what the members of a community of scientists share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm'. On this account, science can be done only as a part of a community, and is inherently a communal activity.

For Kuhn, the fundamental difference between science and other disciplines is in the way in which the communities function. Others, especially Feyerabend and some post-modernist thinkers, have argued that there is insufficient difference between social practices in science and other disciplines to maintain this distinction. It is apparent that social factors play an important and direct role in scientific method, but that they do not serve to differentiate science from other disciplines. Furthermore, although on this account science is socially constructed, it does not follow that reality is a social construct. (See Science studies and the links there.) Kuhn's ideas are equally applicable to both realist and anti-realist ontologies.

There are, however, those who maintain that scientific reality is indeed a social construct, to quote Quine:

Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits

A major development in recent decades has been the study of the formation, structure, and evolution of scientific communities by sociologists and anthropologists including Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, John Law, Anselm Strauss, Lucy Suchman, and others. Some of their work has been previously loosely gathered in actor network theory. Here the approach to the philosophy of science is to study how scientific communities actually operate.

Concepts and methods from economic science (as rational choice, social choice or game theory) have also been applied for understanding the efficiency of scientific communities in the production of epistemic outputs. (Main entry 'Economics of scientific knowledge').