Social Epistemology at Work: from Philosophical Theory to Policy Advice

Abstract

The Twentieth century witnessed the raise of several academic disciplines targeting science as a research object. History of science and philosophy of science were the first to get institutionalized in the university system, with the birth of the journal Isis by George Sarton in 1912 and the diffusion of Neo-positivist philosophy of science in U.S. universities by emigrated members of the Vienna Circle. Sociology of science soon followed, with the establishment of the institutional sociology of science school lead by Robert Merton in the Fifties. The publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 set a landmark in the history of the study of science, fueling the raise of new approaches in all the three mentioned disciplines. The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) advanced by Edinburgh School and the emergence of the galaxy of Science and Technology Studies (STS) would not have been possible without Kuhn’s work. The Sixties saw also the birth of the quantitative study of science, with the creation of the Science Citation Index by Eugene Garfield in 1964. From the Eighties onward, the academic research targeting science has flourished enormously, addressing its research object from a wide range of methods and disciplinary perspectives (from cultural anthropology to economics, from philosophy to bibliometrics). Even if it these different studies of science have not coalesced into a unified and coherent picture of science, still it is right to say that today we know more and better how scientific inquiry works, at different levels and in different contexts. The second half of the century was marked not only by the flourishing of academic metadiscourses on science, but also by the increasing interaction of science and society at large. The Manhattan project was the first occurrence of so-called “Big Science”, i.e. a huge techno-scientific project involving thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians, and funded by massive amount of public money. Science, the Endless frontier, the report delivered by Vannevar Bush to President Roosevelt in 1945, marked the dawn of science policy as a strategic issue in the United States. National Science Foundation (NSF) was soon created and categories like “basic” and “applied” research started rapidly to shape policy discussion about the organization and the funding of scientific research. The main tenet of Fifties and Sixties science policy was the clear separation between scientific community