Science and Society

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

"Science" has been increasingly treated by sociologists as an institutional area of study, in that sense resembling other institutional realms such as the family, religion, and politics. Sociologists can and do study each of these areas as a relatively separate--yet still socially "imbedded"--domain of activity that can be understood both in terms of its own internal patterns and dynamics and in terms of its dynamic relationships with the broader society. Such is the intent of this course: to examine science and the behavior of scientists in those internal and external social contexts. The course therefore will be a survey of systematic attempts to describe and understand science as an institution. After a brief survey of the sociology of knowledge, we will critically consider the relation of scientific activities to the other social identities of scientists, such as age, ethnicity, class, and other identities. We will pay especially close attention to gender-issues in science. We will then study the social and cultural organization of the scientific community itself, including the laboratory setting where science is done; the social organization of scientists into departments and "invisible colleges;" the cultural standards, rewards, and ambivalences of scientists; and the manner in which "scientific revolutions" occur (or not) in various fields. Finally, we will examine how the relations between science and the rest of the social order can nurture or inhibit its institutional advances, such as the interdependences (or not) between that field and the economy, the state, religion, and so forth. Especially in this latter section of the course, but not only here, we will draw on comparative or historical materials, not just studies of American science. (Detailed topical concerns are outlined below, at the beginning of the subsections of the syllabus.) All of these might reasonably be described as “classic” themes in the traditional sociology of science. The field that we study in this course has changed. Throughout most of the history of the Sociology of Science (fairly said to have been founded by Robert K. Merton in the 1930s), sociologists have tended to “black-box” scientific findings: they treat them as givens, as sound knowledge secured by methods that sociologists and others need not inspect (too) closely. Since the 1970s, there has arisen a “deeper” view, alternately termed the “Strong Program(me)” in the Sociology of Science or SSK (The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge). This viewpoint has both feminist and postmodern components, the latter often done by persons working out of a “cultural studies” perspective. In some of their more assertive writings, scientific knowledge is treated quite skeptically, at times viewed as nothing more than an “agreement constructed in a laboratory.” We will read several contributions from this literature (to which there are also responses from the classic sociology of science). But I think it only fair to give working scientists themselves a chance to answer such fundamental assertions about their disciplinary expertise, and hence we will read selections from a key work such as Higher Superstition, or related writings, where the scientists themselves read and respond to that literature, in many of its variants.