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Role of Sociocultural Factors in Theory Acceptance (view source)
Revision as of 17:54, 8 March 2017
, 17:54, 8 March 2017no edit summary
|Authors List=Hakob Barseghyan,
|Formulated Year=2015
|Prehistory=The question of the influence of sociocultural factors in theory acceptance is generally a question that emerged in the 20th century, and is certainly not unique to Barseghyan’s Laws of Scientific Change.
Ludwik Fleck was one of the first scholars to describe science not as a system of logical method evaluation, but as something rooted in social processes. Fleck makes no reference to “method” in the traditional sense, but attests that scientific facts are discovered rather than tested,[[CiteRef::Fleck (1979)]] only insofar as permitted by the “thought-style” of a community, which is its manner of perception. In this way, the discovery of facts is a socially constrained process for Fleck, and furthermore, the advancement and refinement of facts is developed only as a series of misunderstandings between individual scientists, scientists and the public, and old and new generations of scientists.[[CiteRef::Sady (2016)]] Thus, Fleck seems to claim that the acceptance of new “facts” is inherently a social process.
Thomas Kuhn attempted to address the threat to a static method from history. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he notes that science from other time periods and other cultures seem to arrive at very different theories despite all being sufficiently “scientific” or rigorous, which can appear to be a social process. Kuhn proposed that between different communities, which are internally rational and consistent, revolutionary periods produce “incommensurable” ways of viewing the world. Moves from one incommensurable paradigm to another, says Kuhn, will be determined by socio-political factors, but science otherwise follows a method between two revolutions.[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962)]]
David Bloor known for advocating for the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. This programme proposed that no form of rationality was beyond the realm of cultural influence and norms.[[CiteRef::Goldman and Blanchard (2016)]] Paul Forman wrote perhaps the seminal example from SSK, demonstrating that a link can be drawn between the anti-traditionalist and anti-rationalist culture of Weimar Germany, and the acceptance of a Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, for its seemingly mystic properties.[[CiteRef::Forman (1971)]] SSK purports that socio-political norms, across all times, are fundamental to theory evaluation and acceptance.[[CiteRef::Godfrey-Smith (2003)]]
Bruno Latour is the major proponent of Actor-Network Theory, which he presents in ‘Reassembling the Social’ as contrasted to previous sociological approaches. ANT rejects the idea that there are rational human processes, such as a static scientific method, and then hypothesizing about “external” sociocultural factors, but presupposes that any network of person-to-person or person-to-object interaction is responsible for the construction of social reality.[[CiteRef::Latour (2005)]] In Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life, this method of approaching the social is demonstrated, by meticulously describing the way social constraints act to produce a specific scientific fact. This does not occur in a vacuum of data, but in a network of scientists who act more like a “strange tribe” following specific rituals with expensive laboratory equipment.[[CiteRef::Latour and Woolgar (1979)]]
|Related Topics=Mechanism of Theory Acceptance, Role of Sociocultural Factors in Method Employment,
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