The Tension Between Scientific Representation And Social Construction

In the discussions about sociological methodology, there are many analytical categories such as positivist or interpretive approaches, individual or whole perspectives, macro-or micro-views, and the primacy of structure or action, which are known as dualistic frameworks. Accordingly, the major theme can be usually attributed to the interplay between individual and society in the discipline of sociology. However, the interaction between science (or the scientific) and society (or the social) functions effectively as one key issue in the development of sociology, especially as far as the disciplinary nature and methodological basis are concerned. Generally, it reveals the hard choice between two opposite orientations, representing objectively or constructing socially in the process of social research.Depending on different disciplinary backgrounds, the Science Wars might be portrayed as simply as battles happened between science and sociology which focus on the autonomy and the social nature of science. Scientists insist that scientific knowledge represent objective reality, and sociologists emphasize that scientific knowledge be a social construct. Therefore, scientific representation and social construction can be taken as a dual framework to understand sociological methodology.The origin of sociology was influenced by natural science. It regarded scientific representation as the core target of research in order to gain academic legitimacy, which had been eager to import the methods of natural science to the study of the social world. As science became the scale of knowledge and representation became the virtue of research, sociology advocated that the book of society should be written in mathematics and social facts should be taken as things. Only if these claims were fulfilled could the disciplinary justification be ensured.And yet, as a result of excessive pursuit of accuracy and certainty, the orientation of scientific representation was increasingly exposed to many difficulties. It could not explain the existence of ultimate reality convincingly and the contextual variables of truth. Sociology oriented towards scientific representation thus fell into crisis. Its imagination seemed to have dried up and its scientific hope had been destructed, and it was besieged by scientific failures. Disregarding of the social mission and the humanistic concern, sociology lost its critical thinking and the emancipatory potential, which made it fall into the crisis of authenticity, objectivity and precision.In the1970s, sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), which is also called social constructionism, inherited the ideas that all human knowledge except scientific knowledge were causally determined by various social factors from sociology of knowledge and sociology of science. But SSK applied the principles of sociology of knowledge to the field of scientific knowledge, and claimed that scientific knowledge was the product of social construction. This view triggered a quiet stir in academic circle and resulted in the rise of constructivist trends of thought. Social construction began to be valued high in methodological approaches.Social construction has been inherent in sociology and it is a unique perspective of sociology. It takes things as social facts and tries to see through the social causes of phenomenon. There are rich constructivist resources in the theoretical genealogy of sociology. The discovery of social construction made sociology out of crisis and realized self-salvation, which replaced social realism with social creationism, reification with socialization, mathematical representation with discursive expression. The achievement of autonomy of sociology made it to some extent counter the evil of scientific dystopia successfully.With the spread of social constructionism of science, social construction had become one influential orientation of methodology in the world of research such as sociology, politics, psychology, archaeology, and history. It possessed ethos of social criticism, preferred interests and power analysis, and considered that the social ghost was ubiquitous. In this way, the turn of social construction might be called the sociological turn in methodology.But it is keenly known that an increasing number of scholars begin to doubt the rationality of social constructionism and fight against its radicalness and extremity. Many philosophers of science criticize that social constructionism ignores the importance of reality and certainty in the production of scientific knowledge. In the SSK, some prestigious scholars, who transformed their insights from science as knowledge to science as practice, were called as post-SSK.With the decline of social constructionism, the methodological orientation of social construction has entered into dramatic predicaments. It denies natural objectivity and emphasizes social determinism, which makes it difficult to explain itself as a social construct. It neglects the necessity of certainty and stability in human life. The relativist epistemology leads it to plunge deeply into the chasm of self-refutation and methodological horror.As two different kinds of orientations, scientific representation and social construction once both played important roles in the development of sociology, but each of them also hindered the progress of social research. In fact, a good research should be not only scientific but also social, and its aims should include representation and construction. Therefore, they coexist in one field of research in the manner of ’representation-construction duality’. From dualism to duality, research activities approximately overcome the methodological difficulties from scientific representation or social construction.The practice turn in contemporary theory offers some beneficial inspirations to understand the correlation mechanism between scientific representation and social construction in research. The insights from the practical sociology and the practical constructionism of post-SSK make people realize that research activities can be one productive practice about knowledge. Following the route from problematization to scientificalization, to socialization and to objectivization, the practice pushes the development of knowledge forward.The process of problematization and socialization can be viewed as proliferative practice which focuses on the constructionization of representation, and the process of scientificalization and objectivization can be viewed as purificatory practice which concentrates on the representationization of construction. Beyond the methodological dualism, the production of knowledge works well in dynamic alternative recycling process of scientific representation and social construction.