The Social Organization of Scientific Knowledge

We can distinguish between two different ways of conceptualizing scientific knowledge. Traditional epistemology has been concerned with the epistemic conditions under which science can produce and as accurate accounts of For empiricist epistemology, signifies the intrinsic property of sentences that are not selected by a community of producers and validators but by reality itself. Scientists select hypotheses; reality selects or sufficiently corroborated propositions. epistemological notion of science conceives of true knowledge as a relation of correspondence between theory and something else that is not language: reality. postempiricist deconstruction of epistemology has discredited the philosophical notion of valid scientific as a Mirror of Nature (Rorty, 1979) and the search for transcendental justifications of truth. Postempiricism replaces the philosophy of by a sociology (or archaeology) of truth. Truth, then, no longer refers to an intrinsic quality of sentences that corresponds to nature. True sentences do not fit into nature; rather, they fit into the cultural possession of particular groups of professional producers. Like deviance or mental retardation, truth is a contingent label (an epistemological complement) we attach to practices and sentences that are conventionally shared and accepted by particular social groups. Scientific is not a system of intrinsically accurate and culturally privileged objective representations of reality; it is the cultural property of professional groups that control access to legitimate scientific production: The 'pure' universe of even the 'purest' science is a social field like any other, with its distributions of power and its monopolies, its struggles and strategies, interests and profits (Bourdieu, 1975, p. 19).'