Perusing the UW School of Medicine bookstore this morning, I discovered this helpful study aid intended for aspiring doctors (the “real” kind, not the fake variety that I hope to become). I could not pass this up. Plus, I do not fear or recognize copyright laws.
P.S. I especially like the color-scheme.
What follows is a brief except from Explaining Science, Ronald N. Giere, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1988, pg 4.
Versions of this subheading now appear regularly on the covers of books in the sociology, or the sociological history, of science (Latour and Woolgar 1979; MacKenzie 1981). Science, like the law, is pictured as a thoroughly social construct. Experimental data, in this view, are just one resourse among many used in social negotiations over what the content of acceptable theory will be. So are the traditional scientific virtues like simplicity. In place of the philosopher’s principles of rationality one finds only the clash of competing social and profesional interests.
The philosopher’s charge that any such view leads to reletivism is welcomed with open arms. Our scientific beliefs about the world are held to be no different in principle from Azande beliefs about witches. There is said to be no basis other than ethnocentric prejudice for our claims that we are right and the Azande are wrong. Indeed, the science of the paranormal could, in different social circumstances, be normal science (Collins and Pinch 1982).
The sociological picture of science at least has the virtue of explaining the almost universal existence of disagreement at the research frontier. Disagreement in science is as natural as disagreement in the halls of Parliament; in this view, the nature of local disagreements, and background agreement, is fundamentally the same in both science and politics.
The section goes on to refute the above claim. The author argues that science is obviously more substantial than a mere social construction simply because it works–modern technology provides overwhelming evidence. He continues “no amount of social organizing…could produce insulin in the laboratory or send instrument-packed rockets to photograph Uranus.”
I agree with both the “science is a social construct” claim and the author’s refutation. Though, the more I mature as a scientist, the more I realize that success in science depends more on rank, reputation and flash than it does integrity, ingenuity and substance of one’s findings as they contribute to new knowledge. It has become clear to me that pursuing a career as a scientific researcher will leave me bitter and unfulfilled.
Sad as I should be about this, I feel, oddly, free.