Restoring the Real: Rethinking Social Constructivist Theories of Science

Abstract

This essay offers a critical exposition of some of the most influential sociological and feminist theories that purport to see the natural world, experimental evidence, scientific facts and objectivity as social constructs. I will call constructivist any theory of science that includes in its purview 'the very content and nature of scientific knowledge...[and] not just the circumstances surrounding its production. While the earlier structural-functional tradition of Karl Mannheim and Robert Merton only studied the social conditioning of the agenda of science (the foci of interest and the rate of advance), the newer socio-cultural theories aim to explain the technical content of science in terms of social variables (class, gender and or professional interests, among other things). Although they differ in emphasis, the various schools within the constructivist stream adhere to three tenets. First, what makes a belief true is not correspondence with an element of reality, but its adoption and authentication by the relevant community of inquirers. Thus, there is no hard and fast philosophical difference between a society's fund of knowledge and the beliefs currently held and disseminated by certified authorities. Second, science is a socially located praxis that creates the reality it describes, rather than a detached description of a pre-existing reality external to its own practice. Science not just describes 'facts', but actually constructs them through the active, culturally and socially situated choices scientists make in the laboratory. Third, the constructivist theories examined here admit of no analytical distinctions between knowledge and society, the cognitive dimension and the socio-cultural dimension: people's knowledge of the world and their organization of life in the world constitute each other, the two are 'co-produced.' From the obviously true and undeniable premise that science is done in definite socially located institutions by socialized individuals, constructivist theorists tend to deny any meaningful distinction between what is inside and outside of science and between things natural and social.