Constructivism And Social Construction Of Science

As a new programme of science studies,the sociology of scientific knowledge(SSK) has been a vigorous subdiscipline since the early 1980s,which has become increasingly influential both within the history and philosophy of science and in sociology and social science more generally. Attracted to European traditional sociologies of knowledge,the Strong Programme of the SSK states that even the most esoteric features of scientific knowledge can be understood as social construction,or existential determination,and claims that the actual cognitive content of the natural sciences,i.e. scientific knowledge,should be investigated and explained by sociologists. There has been much controversy in the West over the radical view of scientific knowledge of SSK,which distinguished from the standard view both within traditional sociologies of knowledge and science and customary philosophies of science. In China,very few scholars are interested in the SSK and little fruits has been produced. Based upon reading the main texts of the SSK under the context of history,philosophy,sociology,anthropology,and literary theory,some systematic investigation and representation about its practice in representation of science have been made in this dissertation.This dissertation paid more attention,firstly,to the research agenda of SSK in the 1970's,including the emergence of its foci of attention,the sources of its epistemological relativism and the demonstration of strong programme,with revisiting and reconstructing about the reasoning logic and the theoretic claims of the strong programme,especially about the social constructivism argued by SSK prectitioners. Secondly, this thesis focused on some main subprogrammes of constructivist SSK, such as the empirical programme of relativism,the anthropological programme of science,and the programme of discourse...