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Possibility of Scientonomy - The Argument from Social Construction (view source)
Revision as of 00:03, 5 December 2018
, 00:03, 5 December 2018no edit summary
In The Social Construction of What (1999), Ian Hacking posits that the idea that Science is a social construct can be argued through the Contingency thesis and the Nominalist thesis [[CiteRef::Hacking (1999)|p. 89]].
The Contingency thesis argues that Science cannot be said to be deterministic as the evolution of scientific mosaic is not contingent. This claim implies that the scientific mosaic could develop in ways that we cannot predict (as any change to the mosaic if fundamentally not inevitable). As such, no general laws or theories of scientific change can be devised through inspection of the evolution of Science[[CiteRef::Hacking (1999)|pp. 78-80]].
The Nominalist Thesis posits that the scientific mosaic is not reflective of the inner structure of the world. This means that our scientific theories can describe our experiences and can serve as important instruments, but they do not ultimately reveal to us any truth about the external world. This is because the external world does not have any inherent structure, or at least as far as we know. Hence, one cannot predict the evolution of Science in the future or devise any such laws to describe them[[CiteRef::Hacking (1999)|p. 84]].
Another Social Constructivist thesis that undermines the possibility of scientific change is the Reducibility thesis. In The Laws of Scientific (2015), Barsegyhan discusses that the Reducibility thesis can be construed in three distinct forms.