Sociology of science

Merton's Sociology of Science: The First and the Last Sociology of Science?

Merton the founder of the sociology of science Even his enemies admit that Merton is the founder of the sociology of science. When he published his classic Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Centiiry England in 1938. the sociology of science was not a recognized field. Fifty years later, an abundance of programs of instruction and centers of research in social studies of science an...

Sociology as a Population Science.

John Goldthorpe is one of Britain’s most eminent sociologists and a strong advocate of quantitative sociology. In this concise and accessible book, he provides a new rationale for recent developments in sociology which focus on establishing and explaining probabilistic regularities in human populations. Through these developments, Goldthorpe shows how sociology has become more securely placed w...

Sociology as a Strict Science

Sociology and philosophy seem to have this in common: in spite of notable progress in special fields, the discipline as a whole lacks unity and fails to accumulate knowledge. Both disciplines are split into separate schools between which there exist no clearly defined relations and no notable increase of insight. Thus after an auspicious beginning Pitirim Sorokin’s (1927, 1942, 1947) attempt to...

Evolutionary Epistemology and Sociology of Science

It is uncommon for philosophers to appeal to sociology in support of an epistemological theory, and it 1S even more uncommon for them to recognize and accept sociological findings when they are unsolicited. Recent sociology and anthropology of knowledge is a case in point: though some of us have on occasion found themselves embroiled in theoretical controversies with philosophers, we rarely suc...

Science and Sociology of Science: Beyond War and Peace