TINKERING TOWARD SUCCESS: Prelude to a Theory of Scientific Practice

Epistemology has traditionally taken on the task of justifying this knowledge by attributing to science a specific rationality, most often located in its method of inquiry.! But when this project itself needed justification following a series of challenges to its proposed criteria,2 history, sociology and psychology of science were pledged to carry on the struggle. By displaying the historical, social and psychological factors at work in science, recent studies of the area have helped to destroy what Mitroff called the "storybook image" of science. Since a certain amount of social arbitrariness has thereby been introduced into the notion of scientific enterprise, the question arises as to whether or not the cognitive character so readily attributed to science must remain as a basic presupposition. The logical systems reconstructed by epistemologists, the systems of belief posited by sociologists and historians, and the structures erected by the archaeologists of knowledge all have cognitive objectives. Each assumes that science has to do above all with ideas related through some sort of order. Critical rationalists when studying scientific theories link this order to falsificationism and criteria of cumulative progression; structuralists conceive of those ideas as regulated systems of arbitrary elements; students of Bourdieu postulate quasi-economical calcu-