Science and the sociology of knowledge

The Fleck–Kuhn account of scientific change (§7.5) suggests a more radical approach to our whole subject. Instead of starting with a philosophical perspective (chapters 2 and 3), which emphasizes the cognitive aspects of science, we should perhaps have taken a sociological point of view from the beginning. In the past decade, academic metascience has been greatly influenced by a research programme which looks on science as primarily a social institution. This programme stems from the more general discipline of the sociology of knowledge, which used to be concerned mainly with the place of social-science knowledge in the culture of a particular type of society, but which is now being turned on the natural sciences and their associated technologies.

A programme of this kind is clearly implicit in what has already been said in previous chapters. The historical course of development in any field of science has a significant social component. The rate of scientific change, for example, is strongly influenced by the disciplinary structure of the scientific community, and not simply by the scientific ideas that happen to be current.