Social philosophy of science

Philosophy of Science investigates questions about what distinguishes science from all the other methods of exploring the world, what is it about science that gives its enterprise a unique status concerning collection and preservation of the knowledge about the world around us. Traditionally, philosophers of science where trying to provide definitions about the unique structure of science in terms of its logical / mathematical tools for knowledge acquisition, strict methodologies and rules for evidence gathering that scientists apply in their work, etc. In other words, science was considered to be the most objective source of gathering knowledge and truths about the world around us, elaborated with an empiristic picture of scientist who observes and comments parts of the world and draws hypotheses and conclusions about it.

What we might define as the Social Philosophy of Science emerged from the critique of this traditional picture of science. According to this approach, what distinguishes science from all the other methods of exploring the world is, among other things, its unique social structure without which science cannot be defined.

There are two general ideas behind the Social Philosophy of Science. First is the change concerning the scope of the field, namely, broadening the traditional discussions within Philosophy of Science with accounts from social epistemology, sociobiology, sociology of science, political philosophy and ethical theory. Second, the former prompted the need to reconsider the core questions in philosophy of science by taking into account real scientific practice. This opened the field for debates about the role of values in scientific practice, science policies, feminist and ecological critique, the interdisciplinarity and diversity of science considering the changes that occurred in the scientific practice and sciences themselves. Therefore, two major changes within traditional philosophical debates about science concern asserting that science is a social enterprise and that scientific results affect the society and vice versa, meaning that we cannot ignore issues about the organization of scientific labor and science policy.

There are many questions that were neglected in the analytical debates about science; the diversity of the sciences, value-ladenness of scientific practice, distribution of scientific labor, scientific consensus, reward and recognition systems in science etc. These questions deal with the content of the sciences but also with the contexts in which scientific work is done and present some of the core issues within Social Philosophy of Science.

Historically, this endeavor to take into account socially relevant issues in defining science was already present in the work of philosophers like Hempel, Carnap, Reichenbach, and further elaborated in the work of philosophers like Kuhn, Popper, Merton, Hull etc. This shows that, although there is much more work to be done in clarifying all the theoretical agendas, the issues that opened within Social Philosophy of Science are, not only inevitable but also essential for introducing a philosophical picture of science as a social enterprise.