Social constructivists aimed to undermine science’s single privileged perspective.
Evidence
As one might expect, there was a big clash when physicists, chemists, biologists, and their fellow scientists (who took themselves to be searching for the truth about reality by testing their theories against empirical evidence) came up against the “social constructivists” (who claimed that all of reality—including scientific theories about it—were socially created and that there was no such thing as objective truth). The “strong programme” of the sociology of science was not precisely the same as what people were doing in literary criticism and cultural studies over in the English Department, but they shared the idea that truth was perspectival and that all knowledge was socially constructed. In this way, the social constructivist movement was kin to postmodernism, and aimed to do for science what their counterparts had done to literature: namely, undermine the claim that there was a single privileged perspective. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 252
Categorization
- DEFINE: Distinguishes the strong programme’s stance from the weak hypothesis.
- XREF: connects to: Social constructivist critics described science’s methods as exploitative and even sexual violence — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 254; Neoliberals rejected the sociology of knowledge as hostile to scientific objectivity — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 87; Science studies arguments were co-opted by science deniers — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 287 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Social constructivist critics described science’s methods as exploitative and even sexual violence
#expands(0.84) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 254 - Neoliberals rejected the sociology of knowledge as hostile to scientific objectivity
#responds-to(0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 87 - Science studies arguments were co-opted by science deniers
#complicates(0.72) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 287 - Scientific rationalism becomes an instrument of social domination
#expands(0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 141