Epistemology as a “Reflection of Social Ideology”: On the 50th Anniversary of D. Bloor’s “Strong Programme”

Abstract

The article argues that knowledge is shaped not only by objective regularities and formal logical possibilities but also by a wide range of factors external to theory – social, cultural, and ideological. The author claims that the conceptions of scientific method, rationality, and professional virtues of the scientist, developed by the philosophy of science, actually serve the function of politically promoting science as the most legitimate way of knowing. This means that philosophers of science are inevitably involved in ideological work, which, however, is not the result of conscious ill intent but is rooted in their belonging to a broader intellectual culture with its implicit metaphysical, anthropological, and practical assumptions. The work employs the distinction between two styles of thinking drawn by K. Mannheim and D. Bloor. One of them (“liberal”) is oriented toward the search for universal, timeless principles of judgment and relies on deductive strategies, atomism, mechanism, and quantitative methods. The other (“conservative”), by contrast, emphasizes concreteness, variability, qualitative distinctiveness of phenomena, inductive and holistic modes of reasoning. The author shows that this opposition manifests itself not only in academic discussions about the nature of scientific knowledge but also in the practices of science’s interaction with society – in particular, in attempts to explain why some people reject the scientific consensus. The prevalent deficit approach, which links anti-scientific attitudes to a lack of knowledge or intellectual skills, itself reproduces the logic of the liberal style of thinking – namely, the belief that, given sufficient information, an individual is capable of independently arriving at correct conclusions.