Fr. William A. Wallace, O.P., The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 275-277, 279.

The Social Construction of Science

...rhetoric, the art or science of persuasive reasoning, is closely allied to dialectics. Within the Aristotelian tradition the difference between the two is that dialectics is concerned with the probable (probabile) whereas rhetoric is concerned with the persuasible (persuasibile). People are persuaded by logical probabilities, to the extent that they understand them, but they are also persuaded, and perhaps more readily, by other types of appeal, such as those to the emotions and to the character of the one persuading. For Aristotle both of these appeals are made through topics, though the appeals are made differently, as he explains first in the Topics and then in the Rhetoric, which he says is the counterpart (antistrophos) of dialectics (1354aI). Dialectics makes use of the syllogism and induction, whereas rhetoric makes use of the enthymeme and the example. Dialectical topics also have a greater range than rhetorical topics, since persuasibles always involve probabilities, whereas not all probabilities are persuasibles. And finally, dialectics is a general faculty for treating questions pertaining to any field of knowledge, whereas rhetoric is more restricted in its appeal, being more appropriate for addressing social and political issues. Within the Aristotelian corpus the “art of rhetoric” is generally seen as an adjunct to the Politics, where it can supply the techniques required to convince a group of people or a community to accept a position and then act on it one way or another.

Considering the emphasis placed by Kuhn and the others on the scientific community, the locus where paradigms and programs and research traditions are to be found, it is not surprising that sooner or later attention would be focused on the social dimension of science and the way social factors influence the acceptance of beliefs among scientists. An early focus was on the ways scientists use “rhetoric” when presenting the results of their research—not in the Aristotelian sense of rhetoric, but in the modern political sense of using deceptive language or illustrations to dress up their data and thus gloss over its shortcomings. This would surely be a case where science was being “socially constructed,” obviously to its great disadvantage. But then a more serious concern began to manifest itself. Is not knowledge basically a social phenomenon, and should not the sociology of knowledge be employed to cast light on the problems of scientific change? This, one might say, is the most recent development in the philosophy of science. In a way it pulls another support from under the traditional view that science is a perfect type of knowing that reaches necessary conclusions. Not only is science now at best probable, but its probability is affected by factors thus far unthought of, factors that have nothing to do with the reason and objectivity hitherto seen as essential attributes of the scientific enterprise.

One way of handling this “sociological turn” in the philosophy of science, as it has been called, is to invoke a distinction long recognized among historians, that, namely, between “internal history of science” and “external history of science.” Internal history studies the development of science in terms of its concepts, laws, theories, and methodologies, and thus it is intelligible only to those who have at least a basic grasp of physics, chemistry, biology, etc., depending on the field whose development they are studying. External history studies the institutions and associations, the social, political, and intellectual ambiences in which science has developed at different places and historical periods, using historiographical techniques that are known to all historians, whatever their specialization might be. It is commonly recognized, of course, that one cannot do history of science without doing both internal and external history. But it is in the latter aspect that the focus will be on matters that interest the sociologist and the political scientist, whereas in the former it will be on matters of interest to the logician and the philosopher.

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A fallible and revisable character first came to be attributed to science at the beginning of the twentieth century, when problems posed by quantum and relativity theories led to its logical reconstruction by members of the Vienna Circle and their followers. Then science’s historical reconstruction began shortly after mid-century with the work of Thomas Kuhn and those he inspires. And finally its social reconstruction is taking place toward the century’s end under the aegis of David Bloor and the Edinburgh School. Each reconstruction has managed to cut into science’s epistemic value, into the truth and certitude that were its hallmarks from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Can anything now be salvaged for science’s knowledge claims, or is probability, and an incalculable probability at that, the best that one can hope for after four centuries of modern science?

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Return to Lesson 13: The Role of Belief in Science