Changes

Some authors can be considered stereotypical “social constructivists” in arguing that a scientific community is strictly a specialized social process. For Ludwik Fleck, theories as they are passed down through generations, and between groups of scientists, and misunderstood, reshaped, and refined based on the fundamentally incommensurable nature of communication that arises from social organization.[[CiteRef::Sady (2016)]] Fleck argues that scientific thought is a highly specified kind of observation, socially constructed by the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next by a process of institutional induction through schools, churches, and so on.[[CiteRef::Cohen and Schnelle (Eds.) (1986)]] Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar likewise contend in Laboratory Life that the construction of scientific facts relies on an elaborate, ritualized, and almost tribe-like devotion to actions that are fundamentally social. Scientists take scientific claims and construct structures of institution and social support, which is what the acceptance of a fact in a communal context actually relies upon.[[CiteRef::Latour and Woolgar (1979)]]

}}

{{Acceptance Record