26
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
|Description=When changes in the scientific mosaic occur due to forces outside of what a mosaic considers to be “intellectual,” those sources of change are referred to as “sociocultural factors.” Sociocultural factors can include individual and group interests, power, religion, politics, economics, etc. As the demarcation between science and non-science is currently understood to be a local distinction, we are unable to explicate generally applicable descriptions for what should be considered sociocultural factors, and which are intellectual. Identifying any of the above influences (political, religious, etc.) as either “sociocultural” or “intellectual” can only be done with regards to a particular mosaic.
Currently, it is understood that the laws of scientific change allow for the influence of sociocultural factors.[Laws [CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 239]] Sociocultural factors can affect scientific change in one of two different ways, as the process of scientific change is broken down into two elements.
The two questions concerning the role of sociocultural factors in scientific change are stated as follows:
At this stage, Scientonomy will not be addressing the question of what role sociocultural factors play in theory construction.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 234]]
|Formulated Year=2016
|Prehistory=In the Aristotelian-Medieval mosaic, the Cartesian mosaic, and much of the Newtonian mosaic, scientists were for the most part strictly rationalist — a view which dictates that scientific beliefs are a consequence only of reason and evidence.[[CiteRef::Brown (2001)|p. 150]],[[CiteRef::Shapere (1986)|p. 4]] The distinction between intellectual and sociocultural influences in science were not clearly defined, as there were not yet disciplinary boundaries within the sciences. Many factors that influenced scientific change that we now consider to be “sociocultural” organically fell under the rationalist umbrella within this highly holistic enterprise of knowledge-seeking.[[CiteRef::Shapere (1986)|p. 4]]
In his article ''External and Internal Factors in the Development of Science'', Dudley Shapere argues for the formation of disciplinary boundaries within the sciences as a necessary prerequisite for a distinction between intellectual and sociocultural factors. He argues that first, the knowledge-seeking enterprise of science was broken up into a multitude of small specialized disciplines, each smaller discipline with its own laws that dictated the behaviour of particular phenomena. Following from here, scientists in the nineteenth-century began to unify the multitude of smaller disciplines under general laws or “Grand-Unified Theories,” which were all conceptually and logically compatible with each other. Once scientific sub-disciplines were able to be demarcated as either scientific or non-scientific. Once an idea of what constituted as “science” was formed, it was possible for scientists to label all other disciplines that had not made the "internal" cut as "external" to the scientific enterprise.[[CiteRef::Shapere (1986)]]
The logical positivists were the first to distinguish influences derived from propositions within the sciences as “internal” factors, and all other influences originating in the realm of society as “external” factors.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 233]] Karl Popper also used the terms “external” and “internal” when discussing sociocultural factors, and mainly discussed the role of the external factors on theory construction.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 233]] In 1970, Imre Lakotos suggested that what constitutes as “external” and what is “internal” is defined by the methodology of the time.
“External history either provides non-rational explanation of the speed, locality, selectiveness etc. of historic events as interpreted in terms of internal history,” Lakotos writes in History of Science and its Rational Reconstruction, “or, when history differs from its rational reconstruction, it provides an empirical explanation of why it differs. But the rational as- pect of scientific growth is fully accounted for by one's logic of scientific discovery.”[[CiteRef::Lakotos (1971a)|pp. 105-106]]
Barseghyan agrees with Lakotos in The Laws of Scientific Change that the study of different methodologies across history of science can reveal which factors are internal to science and which external.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 234]] However, if we define all sociocultural factors as being “external” to science, then according to the laws of scientific change, those factors would not be able to have an influence over science. It is due to this that the Scientonomic community abandoned the use of the terms “internal” and “external” to describe intellectual and sociocultural factors.
|Current View=The term is only loosely described in ''The Laws of Scientific Change'' as encompassing political, religious, economic, and social factors, as well as group and individual interests.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 233-234]] A more precise definition is needed.
|Related Topics=Role of Sociocultural Factors in Method Employment, Role of Sociocultural Factors in Scientific Change, Role of Sociocultural Factors in Theory Acceptance,
