Strong Programme - Characteristics

Characteristics

As formulated by David Bloor in Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976), the strong programme has four indispensable components:

1. Causality: it examines the conditions (psychological, social, and cultural) that bring about claims to a certain kind of knowledge.
2. Impartiality: it examines successful as well as unsuccessful knowledge claims.
3. Symmetry: the same types of explanations are used for successful and unsuccessful knowledge claims alike.
4. Reflexivity: it must be applicable to sociology itself.