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Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Social science is the branch of science devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the century. In addition to sociology, it now encompasses a wide array of academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, human geography, linguistics, mathematics, management science, media studies, political science, psychology, and history.
Social epistemology refers to a broad set of approaches that can be taken in epistemology that construes human knowledge as a collective achievement. Another way of characterizing social epistemology is as the evaluation of the social dimensions of knowledge or information.
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies, the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to as "social criticism" or "social commentary", or "cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing.
Science studies is an interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts. It uses various methods to analyze the production, representation and reception of scientific knowledge and its epistemic and semiotic role.
Bruno Latour is a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. He is especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). After teaching at the École des Mines de Paris from 1982 to 2006, he became Professor at Sciences Po Paris (2006–2017), where he was the scientific director of the Sciences Po Medialab. He retired from several university activities in 2017. He was also a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.
Science and technology studies or science, technology and society studies (STS) are the study of how society, politics, and culture affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these, in turn, affect society, politics and culture.
In information science and information retrieval, relevance denotes how well a retrieved document or set of documents meets the information need of the user. Relevance may include concerns such as timeliness, authority or novelty of the result.
Pascal Robert Boyer is a French-American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, with Jack Goody, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature.
In common usage, technoscience refers to the entire long-standing global human activity of technology combined with the relatively recent scientific method that occurred primarily in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. Technoscience is the study of how humans interact with technology using the scientific method. Technoscience thus comprises the history of human application of technology and modern scientific methods, ranging from the early development of basic technologies for hunting, agriculture, or husbandry and all the way through atomic applications, biotechnology, robotics, and computer sciences. This more common and comprehensive usage of the term technoscience can be found in general textbooks and lectures concerning the history of science.
Public awareness of science (PAwS), public understanding of science (PUS), or more recently, public engagement with science and technology (PEST) are terms relating to the attitudes, behaviours, opinions, and activities that comprise the relations between the general public or lay society as a whole to scientific knowledge and organisation. It is a comparatively new approach to the task of exploring the multitude of relations and linkages science, technology, and innovation have among the general public. While earlier work in the discipline had focused on augmenting public knowledge of scientific topics, in line with the information deficit model of science communication, the discrediting of the model has led to an increased emphasis on how the public chooses to use scientific knowledge and on the development of interfaces to mediate between expert and lay understandings of an issue.
Helen Elizabeth Longino is an American philosopher of science who has argued for the significance of values and social interactions to scientific inquiry. She has written about the role of women in science and is a central figure in feminist epistemology and social epistemology. She is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. In 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; relevance theory; the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest.
The double hermeneutic is the theory, expounded by sociologist Anthony Giddens, that everyday "lay" concepts and those from the social sciences have a two-way relationship. A common example is the idea of social class, a social-scientific category that has entered into wide use in society. Since the 1970s, held to be a distinguishing feature of the social sciences, the double hermeneutic has become a criterion for demarcating the human/social from the natural sciences.
Public Understanding of Science is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal that was established in 1992 and is published by SAGE Publications. It covers topics in the popular perception of science, the role of science in society, philosophy of science, science education, and science in public policy. The editor-in-chief is Hans-Peter Peters.
Science communication is the practice of informing, educating, raising awareness of science-related topics, and increasing the sense of wonder about scientific discoveries and arguments. Science communicators and audiences are ambiguously defined and the expertise and level of science knowledge varies with each group. Two types of defined science communication are science outreach and science "inreach". An example of inreach is scholarly communication and publication in scientific journals.
Critical reading is a form of language analysis that does not take the given text at face value, but involves a deeper examination of the claims put forth as well as the supporting points and possible counterarguments. The ability to reinterpret and reconstruct for improved clarity and readability is also a component of critical reading. The identification of possible ambiguities and flaws in the author's reasoning, in addition to the ability to address them comprehensively, are essential to this process. Critical reading, much like academic writing, requires the linkage of evidential points to corresponding arguments.
The Rules of Sociological Method is a book by Émile Durkheim, first published in 1895. It is recognized as being the direct result of Durkheim's own project of establishing sociology as a positivist social science. Durkheim is seen as one of the fathers of sociology, and this work, his manifesto of sociology. Durkheim distinguishes sociology from other sciences and justifies his rationale. Sociology is the science of social facts. Durkheim suggests two central theses, without which sociology would not be a science:
- It must have a specific object of study. Unlike philosophy or psychology, sociology's proper object of study are social facts.
- It must respect and apply a recognized objective scientific method, bringing it as close as possible to the other exact sciences. This method must at all cost avoid prejudice and subjective judgment.
Criticism of science addresses problems within science in order to improve science as a whole and its role in society. Criticisms come from philosophy, from social movements like feminism, and from within science itself.
Massimiano Bucchi is an Italian sociologist, writer and a scholar of the relationships among science, technology and society.
References
- ↑ Bucchi, Massimiano (2004). Science In Society: An Introduction to Social Studies of Science. Routledge. p. 168. ISBN 0415321999.
- ↑ Morrell, Peter (2005). "Book Review - Science in Society: an Introduction to Social Studies of Science" (PDF). Electronic Journal of Sociology . ISSN 1198-3655.