The Semantic Finitism of Scientific Concepts as the Basis for the Semantics of the Concept of Science

Abstract

The authors examine the foundations of the “Strong Program” (SP) in the sociology of knowledge, developed by David Bloor, and demonstrate that its four principles (causality, impartiality, symmetry, reflexivity) do not constitute its exclusive basis, since all of them, either explicitly or implicitly, had already appeared in “soft” sociological concepts, for instance, in those of Robert Merton and Max Weber. The main innovative element of the SP is considered to be the rejection of the teleology of truth: the researcher of science eliminates truth from the set of explanatory factors, treating knowledge as a contingent outcome of joint activity. The paper resolves the self-referential paradox of the SP, which is related to the search for an external social cause of its emergence. It is argued that such an external cause is the doctrine of semantic finitism – a linguistic agreement on the impossibility of definitively determining the scope of scientific terms. This doctrine makes it possible to reconsider science as a fluid practice in which the content of concepts is constantly subjected to social revision, transforming an epistemological question into a question of sociolinguistic institutional conventions.