Publishing House SB RAS:

Publishing House SB RAS:

Address of the Publishing House SB RAS:
Morskoy pr. 2, 630090 Novosibirsk, Russia



Advanced Search

Humanitarian sciences in Siberia

2006 year, number

Towards Social Epistemology of Science: from Social to Natural Science

Lapina T.V.
Keywords: social epistemology, ideology, philosophy of science, value system, scientific method, abduction, constructivism

Abstract

The emergence of social epistemology as a separate branch of the philosophy of science raises the problem of the interconnection between social factors and the internal logic of scientific development. The author believes that social epistemology is the successor to the teaching of ideology which, in turn, was a result of the methodological analysis of social sciences. The mechanisms of social conditionality of knowledge which function in social cognition as ideological presuppositions are also found in natural science. First of all, it is true of abductive inferences in which these mechanisms are the principles limiting the choice of hypotheses and theoretical schemes. However, in modern science the very same mechanisms are in force at a deeper level, when we speak about the construction of the objects under study which are defined by some system of agreements between natural scientists.