Sociological Studies and Philosophical Studies: Twenty Years of Controversy

Pickering (1992, p. 1) speaks of the field now commonly called sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) as "a new approach to thinking about science" that differentiated itself from contemporary philosophy and sociology of science in two ways: first, in that "scientific knowledge itself had to be understood as a social product"; and second, in that "SSK was determinedly empirical and naturalistic."2 In this paper I intend to explore the nature of the divergences between SSK and philosophy of science. This exploration intends to illuminate the relationship between the two, a relationship that, from the beginning, has been marked by an open and bitter controversy which has ignited more fire than illumination of key points.