good-practice-in-science-teaching-what-research-has-to-say

HOW SCIENCE WORKS 33
enables the user to make predictions and to find their way around. The most
contemporary articulation of critical realism is provided by Bhaskar (1989).
Relativists, in contrast, hold that the theory dependence of observation
makes our ideas about the world strongly dependent on the individual theories
and ideas that we bring to a problem or examination of the world. In
short, that there is no ‘God’s eye view of the world’ which is accessible to us
(Putnam, 1975). Relativists argue, instead, that there can be no absolute truths
but rather that truth is established by drawing on a particular frame of reference,
a language or a culture. Thus all human practices are socially embedded
and can only be understood by observing them at work and by looking at
how they seek to establish their claims to knowledge. In the case of science,
the best-known study that has taken this perspective is the ethnography conducted
by Latour and Woolgar (1986) of a laboratory engaged in conducting
work in neuroendocrinology between 1975 and 1977. In this very detailed
and thorough account, Latour and Woolgar looked at how scientists transform
their initial tentative hypotheses to ideas which ultimately may become
taken-for-granted facts. They argue that the scientific paper acts very much
as a rhetorical device where data are selectively used to support a particular
argument which will be acceptable to their peers and meet the social norms
and criteria established by the scientific community. The result, they suggest,
is that scientific activity is not ‘about nature’, but is a fierce fight to construct
reality. Consequently:
science is a form of fiction or discourse like any other, one effect of
which is the ‘truth effect’, which (like all literary effects) arises from
textual characteristics, such as the tense of verbs, the structure of
enunciation, modalities and so on.
(Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p. 184)
Further examples of such a stance can be found in the work of Collins and
Pinch (1993), Traweek (1988) and Pickering (1984). Such views are undoubtedly
radical and a challenge to many scientists. In the 1990s, there was a particularly
fierce set of debates between scientists and the sociologists of science
known as the ‘science wars’. These reached a pinnacle with the publication of
a hoax paper in a journal dedicated to the social studies of science (Sokal and
Bricmont, 1998).
The sociological turn
But what were sociologists, with no knowledge of science, doing studying how
scientific knowledge is produced Surely, it needs somebody who understands
the discipline deeply The explanation lies in the writings of Thomas Kuhn
and his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962). In
this book, Kuhn argued that science consisted of periods of ‘normal science’
interrupted by periods of ‘revolutionary science’. In periods of ‘normal science’