Changing Axes: Response to Mermin

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 28, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 624-635

  Bloor, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992856479     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631298028004005     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (London: Athlone Press; Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996)
2. N. David Mermin, ‘The Science of Science: A Physicist Reads Barnes, Bloor and Henry’, Social Studies of Science.Vol. 28, No. 4 (August 1998), 603–23. In quoting from the latter, I will refer to it as (DM).
3. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957)
4. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1962). Although it may come as a surprise to Mermin, not everyone accepts his own (apparently) robust attitude towards the role of goals and interests. There has been much opposition to their employment: at least, there has been when these ideas are understood naturalistically and causally, rather than rationalistically and teleologically. Our critic is clearly baffled by some of our claims, and finds them trivial and self-evident. This may be because the background of hostility to these ideas to be found in the philosophical literature is not evident to him. He is, as it were, coming into the middle of a conversation that has been going on for some time. Perhaps we were at fault not to indicate this.
5. R.M. Sainsbury, Paradoxes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
6. There is actually no such thing as the agreed meaning of implication. It is a matter of continuing discussion among logicians. For some sociological reflections on this, see D. Bloor, Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1983), Section 6.4, ‘Intuitions of Validity’, 123–132.
7. A.N. Prior, ‘The Runabout Inference Ticket’, Analysis, Vol. 21 (1960), 38–39.
8. Kurt Gottfried and Kenneth G.Wilson, ‘Science as a Cultural Construct’, Nature,Vol. 386 (10 April 1997), 545–547.