Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar - Laboratory Life ... - Pedro P. Ferreira

some redress of an imbalance: not enough attention is thought to have been paid to the"technical." For example, Whitley has argued that sociological interest in science is in dangerof turning into a sociology of scientists rather than a fully fledged sociology of science:a separation of the study of producers of certain cultured artifacts, that is of science, withoutreference to the form and substance of science itself is mistaken (Whitley, 1972:61).A fourth source of criticism addresses analyses inspired by Merton's portrayal of thenormative structure of science. Many of these analyses exemplify sociologists' separation of"social" from "technical." Much criticism concerns the lack of empirical basis for the ethos ofmodern science which these analyses outline. It has, for example, been cogently argued thatMerton's norms simply do not govern the behaviour of scientists in the way he suggests(Mulkay, 1969). More recently, it has been pointed out that the existence of both norms andcounternorms in science (Mitroff, 1974) derives from the insufficiently critical appraisal bysociologists of scientists' statements to outsiders about their work (Mulkay, 1976). Moreimportant than this criticism of the empirical basis for scientists' norms, however, is the pointthat such sociological analyses ignore the technical substance of science. Even if the norms hespecified were found to be correct, the sociologist might as well be describing a community ofexpert fishermen, for all he tells us about the nature or substance of their activity.In an effort to pay more attention to the "technical" rather than the "social," Mulkay (1969)argues that the body of established knowledge and the associated "cognitive and technicalnorms" are a more realistic constraint on scientists' behaviour than are social norms.Consequently (Mulkay, 1972), scientists are known to be working within a system largelyconsistent with Kuhn's (1970) description of paradigm-bound research. The argument that"technical" factors merit treatment in the same fashion and to the same extent as do "social"factors has led to research which emphasises the investigation of parallels between social andintellectual development. It is thus axiomatic to several contributions in this area that anexamination of cognitive developments should proceed in conjunction with an under-((25))standing of "concomitant" social developments. Perhaps the most obvious example of thisformulation is in the work of Mullins (1972; 1973a; 1973b). Here social processes (forexample, the emergence of "social organisation leaders") are seen to occur in tandem withdevelopments on the "intellectual side" (for example, a shift between "defining a position"and "doing studies"). The discussion of social processes is presented quite separately from thetreatment of intellectual developments. In a similar way, models of scientific growth have