STS200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Richard Dawkins, Social Constructionism, Tabula Rasa
Document Summary
Social construcion denies na ve realism and favours coningent, nominalist, and empiricist accounts of science which ay or may not end in radical relaivism about scieniic authority and/or truth. *this class: can social construcion enhance our ability to tell the truth: Social construcionism is compaible with sociologically sophisicated noions of reality, objecivity, and truth. People should be neutral, and thus should objecively follow the scieniic method to get closer to the truth. Ex sts scholars want to approach science with a blank slate mentality, where they don"t look at the outcome irst, and whether that is good or bad. They use social construcivism to scieniically describe scienists. We don"t want to just assume that scienists are always right. In the context of a class like this, we won"t even pose the quesion whether science is true or false: relaion between social construcionism and ani-vaxers/ani-gmo etc: plenty of know-nothings and scieniic quote from the reading.