Strong Programme

[Mark O'Leary]

Quoting myself (ahem):

"Until the late 1970s, it was believed that social factors played a minimal
role in shaping scientific knowledge. Sociologists examined the lives of
scientists but did not analyse science itself – a ‘weak programme’ in
current terminology. Developed principally by David Bloor and Barry Barnes
(and colleagues such as Edge, Kusch, MacKenzie, and Shapin), the research
group in Edinburgh developed what came to be called the Strong Programme in
the late 1970s. It grew out of Kuhn’s work on the history of science, and
sought to offer a causal account for the content of scientific theories
through methodological relativism. In this, it was a reaction against both
the prevalent sociology of science of Merton and others and an empiricist
philosophy of science (derived from the logical positivism of the Vienna
Circle). 

At the heart of the Strong Programme was a tolerant theory of natural
rationality drawn from Hesse’s Structure of Scientific Inference. Natural
rationality is claimed to be a model of the underlying processes of thought
rather than “a culturally mediated normative model of rationality” . Under
this view, a natural inductive propensity common to all cultures is mediated
by the pre-existing concepts and beliefs of the particular prevailing
culture (and which cannot themselves be explained by naturally rational
processes). Our reasoning behaviour is always associated with these
extra-scientific interests, social factors that are not biases which distort
scientific reasoning but rather form an essential part of the process. This
implies that beliefs identified as irrational from a differing cultural
perspective arise only from cultural variation: “once all
beliefs/knowledge-claims are deemed to have the same rationality status then
our second order explanation of their first order evaluation would no longer
require rational and irrational categories and, hence, all explanation in
that respect will be symmetrical. The principal objective of this
theorization is to render all knowledge-claims epistemologically equivalent
with respect to their rationality status” .

In his influential book, Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976), Bloor set out
four basic tenets for the Strong programme - causality, impartiality,
symmetry and reflexivity – that added up to what has been termed an
“epistemological agnosticism”. He proposed that SSK should be causal to the
extent that it concerns itself with the conditions, social or otherwise,
that bring about belief or states of knowledge; impartial in requiring an
explanation for both true and false beliefs, whether perceived a priori as
rational and irrational (in effect, regarding all beliefs as naturally
rational); symmetrical in deploying the same kinds of explanatory causes for
both true and false beliefs; and reflexive in that it should seek to explain
sociology itself. Barnes re-examined the process of discovery in his work
T.S. Kuhn and Social Science (1982), adding to the Strong programme the idea
that discovery was a process of conceptual reorientation (a change of
gestalt, using Kuhn’s terms) rather than the earlier empiricist picture of
discovery as a unique event or encounter. This reformulation underlined the
role of social conditions (educational bias, economic factors, conventions
etc) in creating an environment conducive to such a change in perception.

It is the symmetry requirement that is most controversial among scientists:
“one cannot assign a purely rationalist cause for a ‘true’ belief (accepted
theory) and a sociological cause for a ‘false’ (rejected) one, because truth
and falsity of an explanation are determined by hindsight […], it suggests
that these sociologists think of scientific knowledge as just another belief
system - as though no rational judgment and empirical verification enter
into the selection of what is taken to be true” . Strong Programme advocates
defend it as an instance of the scientific approach in itself, and state
that they are not anti-science, but anti-rationalist philosophy as
propounded by Popper and others."

M.

--
Mark O'Leary, COS-NetSys, Manchester Computing.
"Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced."

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