STS200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Natural Science, Imre Lakatos, Empiricism
29 Mar 2017
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Objective: social construction denies na ve realism and favors contingent, nominalist and empiricist accounts of science, which may or may not end in radical relativism about scientific authority and/or truth. Can social construction enhance our ability to tell the truth: social constructionism is compatible with sociologically sophisticated notions of reality, objectivity and truth. Postmodernism has not undermined our own capacities to tell the truth but rather enhanced them even while complicating them. restivo & croissant: contextual constructivism: Used to appear neutral about the claims that science makes about the world. Some social constructions are better than others: Chemists can make and test all hypothesis (claims have predictive value) as opposed to a theory about ufo"s. Certain contexts may permit temporary ontological gerrymandering in order to achieve disinterested and objective discovery (of facts: sticking point 1: contingency (vs. Something that people fundamentally disagree about. hacking. Contingent = natural science did not have to progress in the way that it actually did.
