On the motives for the new sociology of science

Abstract

To believe what one reads about the recent public exchanges between scientists and sociologists (starting with, say, Irwin, 1994), one would think that the sociology of science is primarily a research programme designed to put an end to science as we know it. Without denying that some sociologists may privately harbour such aspirations, nevertheless such a characterization badly distorts the motives behind the creation and promotion of our field. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the early classics in the new sociology of science emerged from educational contexts where it was felt that students needed to understand the increasingly important and changing face of science in the Cold War era. All of the parties to these developments were clearly ’pro-science ’ but they also had come to believe that science was discordant with the rest of society. However, the American and British cases are essentially mirror images of each other, the former stressing science for non-scientists and the latter non-science for scientists. On the one hand, American interest was focused mainly on teaching future non-scientific decision-makers how to recognize ’good science ’ when they see it. This was the motive for the General Education in Science programme, initiated by Harvard University president, and atomic bomb administrator, James Bryant Conant shortly after the end of the Second World War. The original staff of this programme included freshly minted PhDs who would go on to found the history of science profession in the United States. Many of them, including one Thomas Kuhn, held their final degrees in a science, not history, yet their facility in science was primarily in the kind of ’table-top ’ experiments that prevailed in science before military and industrial factors converted it into the scaled-up enterprise we associate it with today. Not surprisingly, the last experiments covered in Conant’s courses were Pasteur’s. Themselves professionally ill-equipped and

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