The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought, Eds.W. Outhwaite, T.

Bottomore,
1993

methodology (sf 379-381)

This notion, which describes the critical activity directed by scientists toward the procedures, theories,
concepts and/or findings produced by scientific research, should not be confused with 'technology',
that is, the activity of dealing with the techniques, devices and recipes used by scientific research.

Methodology is important for a simple reason: in the social and human sciences as well as in the
natural sciences, it represents an essential (though of course not exclusive) path through which
scientific progress is brought about. A better understanding of the world can be gained, in Karl Popper
fashion, by generating theories and trying to make them as compatible as possible with observational
data. But it can also be gained by a reflexive critical view addressed by the scientist toward his or her
own activity. Thus, the special theory of relativity was probably born in part from the failure of the
Michelson-Morley experiment, but also from Albert Einstein's critical analysis of the notion of
simultaneity. Whereas previously most people treated this notion as unproblematic, Einstein noted that
it is clear and unambiguous only as long as events do not occur on mobiles moving away from - or
towards - one another at a speed significant with regard to the speed of light. This critical analysis of a
familiar notion produced, as is well known, a revolution in our representation of the physical world.
Among classical sociologists, Max Weber as well as Emile Durkheim paid great attention to
methodology and devoted important writings to this field. P. Lazarsfeld among modern sociologists
insisted with particular force on the importance of methodology for the development of the social
sciences. In several publications and notably in the volume he co-edited with M. Rosenberg, The
Language of Social Research, he tried to illustrate and institutionalize methodology. Unfortunately, the
very notion of methodology is often misunderstood: this is readily confirmed by the fact that in many
places methodology courses are actually technology courses.

A few examples will show that methodology can effectively have an important impact in the social
sciences. Thus, the study of socioeconomic development took a new course when the meaning of
aggregate measures of the so-called national product was criticized and clarified and when it was
realized that the GNP of a country would increase tremendously, given the way this quantity is defined,
if each citizen would clean his neighbour's car rather than his own. In the same way, it has been shown
that income inequality can be measured in several ways and that there is no guarantee that all the
measures will lead to the same conclusion. While stick A will always be longer than stick B,
independently of the way the two sticks are measured, incomes can appear as more unequally
distributed in society A than in society B when a given index is used, while they appear as more
equally distributed in A with regard to another acceptable index. As long as this point is not realized,
many ill-grounded conclusions can be drawn from inequality measures (see Measurement).
One of the methodological points developed by Lazarsfeld has become particularly famous: that a
correlation between x and j>< can be spurious, that is, correspond to no causal influence between x
and y.

Several important studies can be mentioned, in fact, whose impact derives from the fact that they
demonstrated the spuriousness of correlations which had been interpreted in a causal fashion. Thus, the
post-Weberian controversy on The Protestant Ethic has shown that, while Weber saw a direct influence
of the puritan ethos on the development of the capitalist spirit, this correlation should rather be
interpreted as the product of a number of indirect effects. Writers such as H. Liithy and H. R. Trevor
Roper showed, for instance, that the countries which had been receptive to the new faith were also
more open to business. Weber himself had already recognized that the French Huguenots were active
in business because other professional opportunities, notably cultural or political, were closed to them,
officially or in practice.

As in the case of the notion of simultaneity in physics, methodology can often take the form of a
critical analysis of notions currently used in the social sciences. Thus Durkheim was not satisfied by
the notion of 'primitive mentality' used by Levy-Bruhl to explain the beliefs in magic, probably
because he detected in it an ad hoc and circular character. At any rate, he developed a theory of magic
of his own (close to Weber's) where he tried to show that magic could be explained by good reasons,
without supposing that the 'primitive' followed logical rules and mental procedures different from ours.
This criticism can be generalized: many contemporary authors are critical towards irrational, 'over-
socialized' views of men, of social actors and of social behaviour and have proposed, following in this
respect the Weberian tradition, to interpret behaviour and beliefs as inspired by reasons, at least so long
as no proof to the contrary can be given. Actually, the importance of Weber's sociology of religion is
above all methodological: its main innovation lies in the fact that it shows by many examples that even
beliefs that are apparently the most strange can be explained as inspired by reasons. Thus, the Roman
civil servants had good reasons for being attracted by the cult of Mithra: it included hierarchical values
close to the values of the Roman administration itself.
Methodology can take the form of a systematic criticism of the notions, concepts, inferences from
statistical or qualitative data, or models of behaviour proposed by the social sciences. It can also
discuss the very nature of explanation in the social sciences. Thus, to some writers, the social sciences
should consider themselves as interpretive rather than explanatory (see Verstehen). To others,
building or generating models is a major activity of the social as well as of the natural sciences and
defines the very notion of explanation.

Reading
Boudon, Raymond 1979: Generating models as a research strategy. In Qualitative and Quantitative
Social Research, ed. R. Merton et al.
Durkheim, Emile 1895 (1982): Let Regies de la mcthode sociologiquc.
Lazarsfeld, Paul and Rosenberg, Morris 1955: The Language of Social Research.
Pawson, Ray 1979: A Measure for Measures.
Pellicani, Luciano 1988: Weber and the myth of Calvinism. Telos no. 75 (Spring), 57-85.
Weber, Max 1922 (1968): Gesammelte Aufsatzt air Wisscnschaftslehre.

RAYMOND BOUDON

philosophy of science (sf 467-469)

This branch of enquiry encompasses questions about science in general (such as, are at least some
theoretical entities real?), about particular groups of sciences (such as, can social objects be studied in
the same way as natural ones? - the problem of Naturalism), and about individual sciences (such as,
what are the implications of relativity theory for our concepts of space and time?). It arose as a
discipline separate from the more general theory of knowledge in the mid-nineteenth century - at about
the time that distinct sciences bearing names such as 'physics', 'chemistry' and 'biology' were
becoming 'professionalized'. The leading figures of its first generation were Auguste Comte, the
inventor of the label 'positivism' (as well as 'sociology'), the ultra-empiricist J.S. Mill (who thought
that even mathematical propositions were empirical) and the Kantian historian of science, William
Whewell. Much of the subsequent history of the philosophy of science can be seen as a continuation of
the controversy between Mill and Comte, on the one hand, and Whewell, on the other, with the former
hegemonic until c. 1970. The dominant view of science has been squarely based on Humean
empiricism, epitomized in the claim of E. Mach (1894, p. 192) that natural laws were nothing but 'the
mimetic reproduction of facts in thought, the object of which is to replace and save the trouble of new
experience'. Thus the late nineteenth century saw such spectacular triumphs for the empiricist camp as
Benjamin Brodie's construction of a chemistry without atoms, which were widely held to be, in
Alexander Bain's words, merely 'representative fictions'.

The logical Positivism of the Vienna circle of the 1920s and 1930s married the epistemological
empiricism and reductionism of Mach, Pearson and Duhem with the logical innovations of Frege,
Russell and Wittgenstein to form the backbone of the dominant view of science in mid-century. Its
principle members were M. Schlick, R. Carnap, O. Neurath, F. Waismann and H. Reichenbach. C.G.
Hempel, E. Nagel and A.J. Ayer were intellectually close to it. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper
were on its periphery. Formalism and linguisticism were characteristic of the circle. It shared the latter
bias with the conventionalism that had grown up in France under the influence of H. Poincare and E.
Le Roy in the first decade of the century and which was to be radically historicized by G. Bachelard
and G. Canguilhem from the 1930s on. Against the grain, Whewell's legacy was taken up by N.R.
Campbell in the twenties, arguing for the necessity of models in science. Altogether outside the
mainstream were the biologically inspired cosmologies produced by H.L. Bergson, S. Alexander and
A.N. Whitehead at about the same time; and the dialectical materialism that was being systematically
codified and disseminated in the USSR under Stalin. The positivist vision of science pivoted on a
monistic theory of scientific development and a deductivist theory of scientific structure. The
former came under attack from three main sources. First, from Popper and (ex-)Popperians such as I.
Lakatos and P. Feyerabend. They argued that it was falsifiability, not verifiability, that was the
hallmark of science and that it was precisely in revolutionary breakthroughs such as those associated
with Galileo or Einstein that its epistemological significance lay. Second, from Kuhn and other
historians (such as A. Koyre) and sociologists (such as L. Fleck) of science. They drew scrupulous
attention to the real social processes involved in the reproduction and transformation of scientific
knowledge - in what has come to be called the transitive or epistemological or historical-sociological
dimension of the philosophy of science. Finally, from Wittgensteinians, such as N.R. Hanson, S.E.
Toulmin and W. Sellars, who latched on to the non-atomistic, theory-dependent and mutable
character of 'facts' in science.

One problem which arose in the early days of the debate about scientific change concerned the
possibility, and indeed according to people like Kuhn ► and Feyerabend the actuality, of meaning
variance as well as inconsistency in scientific change. Kuhn and Feyerabend suggested it might come
to pass that no meaning was shared in common between a theory and its successor. This seemed to
render problematic the idea of a rational choice between such 'incommensurable' theories, and even
encouraged (superidealist) scepticism about the existence of a theory-independent world. However, if
the relation between the theories is one of conflict rather than merely difference, this presupposes that
they are alternative accounts of the same world; and if one theory can explain more significant
phenomena in terms of its descriptions than the other can in terms of its, then there is a rational
criterion for theory choice, and a fortiori a possible sense to the idea of scientific development over
time.

The deductivist theory of scientific structure initially came under fire from Michael Scriven, Mary
Hesse and Rom Harre for the lack of sufficiency of Humean criteria for causality and law, Hempelian
criteria for explanation and Nagelian criteria for the reduction of one science to another more basic
one. Their critique was then generalized by Roy Bhaskar to incorporate the lack of necessity for them
also. Bhaskar argued that positivism could sustain neither the necessity nor the universality -and in
particular the transfactuality (in open and closed systems alike) - of laws; and for an ontology - in what
he characterized as the intransitive dimension of the philosophy of science- that did not identify the
domains of the real, the actual and the empirical. It is of some significance that the attack against
deductjvism was both initiated and carried through by philosophers with a strong interest in the human
sciences where what one writer has called the 'law-explanation orthodoxy' (Outhwaite, 1987b) was
never even remotely plausible (Donagan, 1966).

The linchpin of deductivism was the Popper-Hempel theory of explanation, according to which
explanation proceeded by deductive subsumption under universal laws (interpreted as empirical
regularities). It was pointed out, however, that deductive subsumption typically does not explain but
merely generalizes the problem (for instance, from 'why does this x <f>V to 'why do all x's <!>?').
What is required for a genuine explanation is, as Whewell and Campbell had insisted, the introduction
of new concepts not already contained in the explanandum, models, picturing plausible generative
mechanisms, and the like. But the new -critical or transcendental - realists broke with Campbell's
Kantianism by allowing that, under some conditions, these concepts or models could denote new and
deeper levels of reality; and science was seen as proceeding by a continuing and reiterated process of
movement from manifest phenomena, through creative modelling and experimentation, to the
identification of their generative causes, which now became the new phenomena to be explained. . . .
Moreover it was argued that the laws which science identified under experimentally closed conditions
continued to hold (but transfac-tually, not as empirical regularities) extra-experi-mentally, thus
providing a rationale for practical and applied explanatory, diagnostic, exploratory etc. work.

In the 1980s further arguments for scientific realism were adduced by I. Hacking, A. Chalmers and
others. But there was also a partial resurgence of positivism in B. van Fraassen's 'constructive
empiricism', which would once more restrict the ascription of reality to observables and in N.
Cartwright's actualism, on which the laws of physics, in so far as they are not empirically true, literally
lie. At the same time critical realists started to explore the question - in what was called the
'metacritical dimension' - of the conditions of the possibility of both positivism and Realism alike (for
example, the empirical identification permitted by twentieth-century technology of the novel enti-ties
and strata denoted by terms like 'atoms', 'electrons', 'radio stars', 'genes'). In this way they linked up
with the 'strong programme in the sociology of knowledge' associated with Barry Barnes, David Bloor
and the Edinburgh school. From here the century seems set to end, in the philosophy of science, on a
pluralist and ecumenical note, with (arguably) the great questions of realism and naturalism resolved
and perhaps more attention being given to the metacritical, metatheoretical and conceptual problems
posed by particular sciences.

Reading
Bhaskar, R. 1975 (1978): A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn.
Chalmers, A. 1982: What is this Thing called 'Science'?, 2nd edn.
Feyerabend, P. 1975: Against Method. Hacking, I. 1983: Representing and Intervening. Harre, Rom
and Madden, E. 1975: Causal Powers.
Kuhn, T.S. 1962 (1970): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn.
Nagel, E. 1961: The Structure of Science.
Popper, K.R. 1959: Conjectures and Refutations.

ROY BHASKAR
philosophy of social science (sf. 469-471)
The social sciences have always existed in closer relation to their metatheories or philosophies than the
natural sciences - that is to say, to invoke G. Bachelard's useful distinction, the diurnal philosophy of
the scientists here has been more steeped in the nocturnal philosophy produced by their philosophers.
Moreover each social science and each school within it has had ontological, epistemological,
methodological and conceptual problems peculiar to it. But a grand contrast can be drawn between a
naturalist positivism, strong in economics, psychology and sociology in the moulds of Emile
Durkheim and Talcott Parsons and prominent in the Anglophone countries, and an anti-naturalist
hermeneutics, strong in the more humanistically oriented social sciences and sociology in the vein of
Max Weber and prominent in the Germanic world. This contrast cuts across the Marxist/non-Marxist
divide. Thus traditional dialectical materialism of the sort of Friedrich Engels, G. Delia Volpe and
Louis Althusser may be ranged on one side, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Frankfurt school
on the other. Only relatively recently has a third alternative, a critical or qualified naturalism, based on
a non-positivist realist account of science come to the fore. This article will be mainly concerned with
some of the issues that have arisen in the philosophy of the social sciences in the twentieth century.

Explanation and prediction

The canonical positivist model of Explanation holds that to explain an event etc. is to deduce it from a
set of universal laws plus initial conditions. Unfortunately examples of explanations conforming to this
model are completely absent in the social sciences. This provides the strongest negative argument for
hermeneutics. The deductivist model posits a symmetry between explanation and Prediction but social
science, operating as it must in open systems, has a notoriously bad predictive record. And strangely
enough it was one of the leading exponents of the deductive-nomological model of explanation, Karl
Popper, who was most virulent in his attack on what he called historicism, that is, the making of
unconditional historical prophecies. Clearly the falsity of this does not imply that the social sciences
cannot make conditional predictions, subject to a ceteris paribus clause. But the absence of closed
systems means that decisive test situations are in principle impossible, so the social sciences must rely
on exclusively explanatory criteria for confirmation and falsification. As for explanation, the new
critical realists posit a distinction between theoretical and applied explanations. The former proceeds
by inscription of significant features, retroduction to possible causes, elimination of alternatives and
identification of the generative mechanism or causal structure at work (which now becomes the new
explanandum to be explained) (DREI); the latter by resolution of a complex event (etc.) into its
components, theoretical redescription of these components, retrodiction to possible antecedents and
elimination of alternative causes (RRRE).

Understanding

The strongest positive argument for hermeneutics is that since social phenomena are uniquely
meaningful or rule governed, social science must be precisely concerned with the elucidation of the
meaning of its subject matter - either by immersion in it as in the Wittgenstein-inspired account of P.
Winch or by the dialogical fusion of horizons or meaning frames as in the Heideggerian account of H.-
G. Gadamer. To this it can be objected that the conceptuality of social life can be recognized without
assuming:

1 that such conceptualizations exhaust the subject matter of social science (consider the social states
of famine, war or imprisonment or the psychological ones of anger, courage or isolation);
2 that such conceptualizations are incorrigible (rather we know since Marx and Freud that they may
mask, repress, mystify, rationalize, obscure or otherwise occlude the nature of the activities in which
they are implicated); or
3 that recognition of the conceptuality of social being rules out its scientific comprehension (at least
once the restrictive empiricist ontology of esse est percipi is abandoned).

The hermeneutical paradigm is, however, consistent with a realist metatheory of science. Moreover
critical realists typically insist that Verstehen must be the starting point for social enquiry.

Reasons and causes

The hermeneutical position is often buttressed by the argument that the human sciences are concerned
with the reasons for agents' behaviour and that such reasons cannot be analyzed as causes. For, first,
reasons are not logically independent of the behaviour they explain. Moreover, second, they operate at
a different language level (F. Waismann) or belong to a different language-game (Wittgenstein) from
causes. But natural events can likewise be redescribed in terms of their causes (for instance, toast as
burnt). •Furthermore unless reasons were causally efficacious in producing one rather than another
sequence of bodily movements, sounds or marks, it is difficult to see how there can be grounds for
preferring one reason explanation to another, and indeed eventually the whole practice of giving
reason-explanations must come to appear as without rationale (see also Materialism).

Structure and agency

Both positivism and hermeneutics have been coupled with each of individualism and collectivism or
holism; and positivists at least have accentuated either human agency or social structure. But the new
realists suggest a relational paradigm for, in particular, sociology; and a resolution of the antinomy of
structure and agency in the 'theory of structuration' (Anthony Giddens) or the 'transformational model
of social activity' (Roy Bhaskar). According to this, social structure is both the ever-present condition
and the continually reproduced outcome of intentional human agency. Thus people do not marry to
reproduce the nuclear family or work to sustain the capitalist economy. Yet it is the unintended
consequence (and inexorable result) of, as it is also a necessary condition for, their activity. Related to
this is the controversy about ideal types. For critical realists the ground for abstraction lies in the real
stratification (and ontological depth) of nature and society. They are not subjective classifications of an
undifferentiated empirical reality, but attempts to grasp (for example in real definitions of forms of
social life already understood in a pre-scientific way) precisely the generative mechanisms and causal
structures which account in all their complex and multiple determinations for the concrete phenomena
of human history. Qosely connected with this is a reassessment of Marx as, at least in Capital, a
scientific realist - contrary to preexisting Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations. In its wake, too, is a
reassessment of other founding figures in the social sciences (such as Durkheim and Weber) as
combining aspects of a realist and some or other non-realist method and ontology.

Facts and values

Positivism upholds an unbridgeable gulf between fact and value statements. But the value
impregnation of social-scientific factual discourse seems a patent fact. It is clearly bound up with the
value-impregnated character of the social reality the social sciences are seeking to describe and
explain. (Marx and Engels were just wrong not to see this.) Less obviously, it has been suggested by
Bhaskar that social science has value implications. In so far as we can explain this necessity for
systematically false consciousness (distorted communication and so on) about social phenomena then
we can move ceteris paribus to negative valuations on the objects which make that consciousness
necessary and to positive valuations on action rationally designed to transform them. Marx's 'critique
of political economy' is an obvious paradigm here. This conception of social science as explanatory,
and thence emancipatory, critique links up with Jürgen Habermas's early work on the 'emancipatory
cognitive interest'; and with his more recent project for a necessarily (cf. Outhwaite, 1987) realist
reconstructive science of communicative competence.

Naturalism

The new realists posit a series of ontological, epistemological, relational and critical differences
between the social and natural sciences (see Naturalism). The normal backcloth for this contrast has
been (standard conceptions of) physics and chemistry. But more recently a number of writers have
urged different disciplines for comparison -for instance, biology (Ted Benton), drama (Rom Harre and
P.F. Secord, following up on the work of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel). As the century draws
to a close there seems plenty to keep social scientists talking.

Reading
Benton, Ted 1977: Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies.
Bhaskar, Roy 1979 (1989): The Possibility of Naturalism, 2nd edn.
Giddens, Anthony 1984: The Constitution of Society.
Habermas, Jurgen 1968 (1971): Knowledge and Human Interests.
Harre, Rom 1979: Social Being. Keat, Russell and Urry, John 1975 (1981): Social Theory as Science.
Manicas, Peter 1987: A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
Outhwaite, William 1987: New Philosophies of Social Science.
Sayer, Derek 1979: Marx's Method.

ROY BHASKAR

explanation (sf. 217-8)

This involves relating what is to be explained (the explanandum) to something other (the explanans) -
but it is unlikely that even such a general definition as this can embrace the wide variety of
explanations we find acceptable in our everyday and scientific pursuits. In part, the variety arises from
alternative views about the nature of the explanans and the nature of the relation linking the explanans
and explanandum.
Views about the explanans fall broadly into two types. First, some articulate psychological
requirements, for example that the explanans be known or familiar or previously assented to by the
recipient of the explanation. What is common here is that the explanans is selected so as to remove
perplexity in the explanation's audience: explanatory success is relative to its recipients, who must see
the explanation before they can be considered to have it. Second, there are views about the explanans
that stress logical requirements, for example that the explanans includes an axiom or a self-evident
truth or an empirically true description of an invariable sequence of events. Here, the emphasis is on
the formal conditions for explanatory success and consequently recipients can be considered to have an
explanation even if they cannot see it.
Views about the relation linking the explanans and explanandum also include some that stress formal
requirements, for example, that the relation be one of entailment, where it would be self-contradictory
to accept the truth of the explanans but reject the truth of the explanandum. Others insist that the
relation be causal; this introduces further diversity into the notion of explanation because of the variety
of characterizations of causal connection (see Causality).
Twentieth-century attempts to analyse explanation have largely focused on the formal conditions to be
attached to the explanans and linking relation, especially when considering explanations in the natural
sciences, which have commanded attention because they seem especially authoritative. Hempel and
Oppenheim's (1948) deductive-nomological or covering law model has been particularly influential.
According to this, a phenomenon is explained when its description is deduced from an explanans
which contains the statement of a set of initial conditions together with a law or laws (nomos being
Greek for law). To use one of Hempel's (1965) examples, why the underwater part of a straight oar
appears bent upwards is explained by reference to the laws of refraction and the initial condition that
water is optically denser than air.
The deductive-nomological schema faces considerable criticism, of three types. First, internal
difficulties; for example, the laws in the explanans must be universal if they are to guarantee the
explanation, yet there are both practical and logical difficulties in establishing universal empirical
truths. Second, arguments that the schema cannot account for all types of explanation in the natural
sciences; for example, statistical explanations, where there is only a probability and not certainty that
the event described in the explanandum will occur, such as the likelihood that a very heavy smoker
will get lung cancer, and realist explanations where occurrences are explained by identifying the
underlying workings that are causally responsible for them, such as the movement of the hands around
the face of a clock being explained by revealing the spring and cogs that drive them (see Realism).
Third, criticisms that the schema cannot be extended to the social sciences and beyond, where
intentional explanations, which explain actions by appeal to the intentions, reasons, motives and so on
of the actors involved, are often more appropriate and where functional explanations, which explain
actions and institutions by identifying the part they play in maintaining the whole society, are also
important. Whether realist explanations can be extended from the natural to the social sciences, and
whether intentional and functionalist explanations are distinct from causal explanations continue to be
matters of dispute in the Philosophy of social science. Whether the deductive-nomological schema can
embrace causal, including realist, explanations continues to be a matter of debate in the Philosophy of
science.

Reading
Halfpenny, P. 1982: Positivism and Sociology: Explaining Social Lift.
Harre, R. 1970: The Principles of Scientific Thinking.
Taylor, C. 1954: The Explanation of Behaviour.
Van Panjs, P. 1981: Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences.
Wright, G.H. von 1971: Explanation and Understanding.

PETER HALFPENNY

sociology of science (sf. 639-640)

This branch of study explores the social character of science, with special reference to the social
production of scientific knowledge (see Sociology of knowledge). In present day society, the term
'science' has great potency. Not only is 'science' more or less equivalent to 'valid knowledge', but it also
merges with 'technology', that is, the useful application
of knowledge (see Scientific-technological revolution). Consequently, those people known as
'scientists' are widely regarded as the purveyors of a superior kind of knowledge which represents the
real world with a degree of precision and reliability that makes possible extensive control over its
natural processes. In such a context, to be deemed 'unscientific' is, in the realm of ideas, to be
dismissed as intellectually inept and also as irrelevant to the paramount world of practical affairs.
Sociology itself emerged and developed as one small part of the scientific movement in modern
society. Despite many reservations and differences of opinion among its practitioners, sociology has
largely adopted the conception of knowledge that has come to be associated with the 'advanced'
physical and biological sciences. As a result, the sociology of science necessarily has a self-referential
element; that is, the practice of sociology falls within its scope and its general conclusions concerning
the social process of knowledge production must be taken to apply also to sociology. The sociology of
science is a critical area of analysis, therefore, not only because it deals with the dominant form of
knowledge in our society, but also because its findings may have important implications for its own
discipline and for other realms of social investigation.

During the last two decades, sociologists have looked in ever greater depth at the social production,
and application, of scientific knowledge. They concentrated initially on the most advanced physical
sciences such as physics and radio astronomy. Subsequently, much attention has been given to the
biological sciences. These unequivocally scientific disciplines were chosen for study partly because
they appeared to be the least amenable to a fully fledged sociological analysis. It has, of course, long
been accepted that many aspects of science are obviously social in character: for instance, its form of
organization, its patterns of communication, its internal hierarchy and its allocation of symbolic
awards, with its emphasis on scientists' collective commitment to particular intellectual frameworks.
But sociologists' own acceptance of the belief that science is a privileged form of knowledge led them
to exempt the intellectual products of science from their investigations. When sociologists eventually
took up the challenge of attempting to give a sociological account of the content of scientific
knowledge, it seemed advisable to take what appeared to be the hardest cases first. For if the most
advanced sciences were to prove susceptible, all other disciplines would follow automatically.

The sociological analysis of scientific knowledge received much of its initial impetus from outside the
discipline. Thomas Kuhn's (1962) historical thesis concerning the occurrence of revolutionary
upheavals in science (see Merton, 1973) was particularly important in freeing sociologists from the
traditional assumption that scientific knowledge is largely independent of social influences. Kuhn's
analysis enabled sociologists to envisage the possibility of furnishing a social interpretation of
cognitive change in science. Furthermore, from the late 1960s onwards, there was an influx of
scientifically trained investigators into the discipline who were able to cope with the intellectually
demanding technical culture of science. These intellectual migrants contributed significantly to the
series of detailed studies of specific areas of natural science which were completed during the 1970s,
using interviews and documentary sources. These case studies were followed by a wave of
anthropological investigations of the minutiae of scientists' laboratory practices, based on extended
periods of participant observation.

As a result of this body of research, the traditional sociological model of scientific knowledge and of
the Methodology of science was radically revised. Scientific knowledge was seen to derive, not from
the impartial application of clear technical criteria of adequacy, but from such factors as practitioners'
rhetorical skills and from their socially negotiated allegiances. Careful observation of scientists at work
seemed to show that scientific knowledge is not an objective, detached representation of an
independent natural world, but an active, engaged creation of that world in the course of social
interaction. The conclusions of science are socially contingent formulations that have been deemed to
be adequate by specific groups in particular cultural and social situations.
By the 1980s, it had become clear that the previous failure to understand the social processes of
science was bound up with scientists' flexible use of language. In publicly accessible settings, scientists
tend to use forms of discourse that depict their actions and beliefs as a neutral medium through which
the realities of the world make themselves evident. In more private contexts, however, which have
only recently become visible, they often employ repertoires which allow them to furnish much more
socially and personally contingent accounts of the activities of science. In the last few years, some
authors have tried to explore the implications of such findings for the textual practice of sociology.
They have argued that the univocal texts of the social sciences, modelled on the conventional forms of
the scientific literature, are unsuitable for expressing the interpretative diversity of the social world.
They have maintained that the unitary language of sociological analysis hides away the social
contingency and contextual dependence of its own representations of the world; and that this kind of
textual subterfuge is inappropriate in a discipline committed to a fully sociological perspective. They
have begun to devise new, multivocal formats which are intended to give greater voice to the
interpretative multiplicity of the social world and to place sociologists in active dialogue with the
subjects of their studies. This new form of analysis is an attempt to find an alternative language with
which to escape from the restrictions of the dominant world-view of science in our approaches to the
social realm.

Reading
Ashmore, M. 1989: The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.
Knorr-Cetina, K.D. 1981: The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and
Contextual Nature of Science.
Latour, B. 1987: Science in Action.
Mulkay, M. 1985: The Word and the World: Explorations in the Form of Sociological Analysis.
Woolgar, S. ed. 1988: Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge.

MICHAEL MULKAY