SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC FACTS

Social Construction of Scientific Facts



Social Construction of Scientific Facts

Introduction

In the past few decades, laboratory experiments have gained popularity in a number of social science disciplines outside of psychology, including economics, political science, and sociology. In part, this is due to the usefulness of laboratory experiments for addressing questions about causality. One of a number of new research fields to emerge over the last four or five decades is Science and Technology Studies (STS). This paper attempts to identify the core contributions to this emerging field.

Sociology and Anthropology often analyze experiences at the level of the individual or group and connect them to larger social dynamics. The disciplines illustrate how matters that are often perceived as “private troubles” are actually consequences of social structures, including those that appear and feel natural and inevitable (Ludwik, 2001).

Thesis statement

The creation of social construction from scientific facts in a laboratory and its importance.

Discussion

Social Construction of Scientific Facts

This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way, as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literacy criticism, the author's study how the social world of laboratory produces papers and other “texts”, and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change.

Over the last few decades, numerous new research fields in the social and natural science have formed frequently at the interstices of established disciplines. Such fields often originate when researchers from neighboring disciplines realize they share a common interest, and then apply their different disciplinary perspectives to the common subject. Over time, however, they may develop their own conceptual, methodological and analytical frameworks, and move from publishing in journals of their 'parent' disciplines to establishing their own journals as well as, their own professional associations, specialized university departments or units (often with the name of the new field in their title), and PhD programmers to train their own researchers. Eventually some fields may acquire enough of these characteristics to achieve 'disciplinary' status (Harry, 2002).

The Beginning

American sociologists such as Barber (1952) and Merton (e.g. 1957) began to lay the groundwork for the integration of a sociological perspective into the history of science, but it was Thomas Kuhn's, that has successfully brought the three separate fields together “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

Thus, science was seen as a process that cumulatively discovers more about an inherently deterministic, law-governed order of the natural world. These laws are captured using 'the' scientific method that allows nature to decide between rival theories. However, with the result, that epistemology is particularly valued and the history of science is conceptualized as an internal process of little more than antiquarian interest. During which many routes can be taken to a single end-point where the structure of the universe is ultimately revealed. Because the context of discovery and the context of justification are distinct within this framework, streams of research on the history and sociology of science ...