For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of
disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally
and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions
were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional
Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and
sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently,
creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come
from the history of science, feminist criticism of science,
psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the
traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas,
Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science.After
discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to
truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific
rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and
truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that
the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little
epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of
science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the
locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism
but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she
illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and
twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the
traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by
individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding,
administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive
influence on scientific decision making through practical social
recommendations.
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