Sociology Of Science And Society

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HSS-1 Technology and Society Reading – 8: THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF FACTS AND ARTEFACTS By TREVOR J. PINCH & WIEBE E. BIJKER The article by Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts” talks about the “separation of science from technology” and how the study of science and technology can benefit each other. The authors draw attention to three bodies of literature in science and technology studies: Sociology of science, the science-technology relationship, and technology studies. The first i.e. sociology of science explains views of different people; specifically scientists and researchers and they say that there are many theories and explanations for everything to be the true or false in science. Science and technology are interlinked with each other; they are separated by a thin line which makes it difficult to differentiate between them. Science is about discovering the truth and technology is about applying that truth. Pg (19) thirdly the Technology studies are very methodical and systematical. It is been divided into 3 categories, namely innovation studies, history of technology, and sociology of technology. Technology was considered as a ‘black box’ whose general behavior and attributes were considered to be common knowledge. The authors give a very good example of making of Bakelite by the use of waste material of war supplies, which gains importance after people discover how Bakelite can be extracted. The authors then describe two approaches which explain the social construction of science and technology i.e. EPOR (The Empirical Programme of Relativism) and SCOT (Social Construction of Technology).The aims of EPOR can be explained in three stages. First stage suggests that there can... ... middle of paper ... ...ilieu, it scores more in respect to EPOR. Thus it can be seen that both EPOR and SCOT are very similar but SCOT has been developed recently and so it is more effective in solving real world problems in comparison to EPOR which has a very theoretical approach to solve a problem. Even though the sociology of technology is very much under-developed, still there is scope for substantial expansion in this field. The research will definitely bear good results when sociology of science and sociology of technology are studied together extensively. In the end I will say that I do not agree with the view of the authors. As the initial view of the author that technology and science are separate fields of study is quite wrong. The study of science requires technology and technology is based on study of sciences. Basically they depend on each other. Sanchit Gupta 2013088

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