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Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged, primarily out of Enlightenment thought, as a positivist science of society shortly after the French Revolution.Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge, arising in reaction to such issues as modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization and imperialism.
The sociology of science involves the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing "with the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity." [149] Important theorists in the sociology of science include Robert K. Merton and Bruno Latour.
Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine, neuropsychology, biocultural anthropology, and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences.
The sociology of the history of science—related to sociology and philosophy of science, as well as the entire field of science studies—has in the 20th century been occupied with the question of large-scale patterns and trends in the development of science, and asking questions about how science "works" both in a philosophical and practical sense.
With the third and final stage, the positive stage, Comte takes a stand on the question, "how should the relations among philosophy of science, history of science, and sociology of science be seen." [ 22 ] He says that sociology and history are not mutually exclusive, but that history is the method of sociology, thus he calls sociology the ...
The sociology of scientific knowledge in its Anglophone versions emerged in the 1970s in self-conscious opposition to the sociology of science associated with the American Robert K. Merton, generally considered one of the seminal authors in the sociology of science. Merton's was a kind of "sociology of scientists," which left the cognitive ...
The sociology of knowledge has a subclass and a complement. Its subclass is sociology of scientific knowledge. Its complement is the sociology of ignorance. [2] [3] The sociology of knowledge was pioneered primarily by the sociologist Émile Durkheim at the beginning of the 20th century. His work deals directly with how conceptual thought ...
The history of science is often seen as a linear story of progress [27] but historians have come to see the story as more complex. [28] [29] [30] Alfred Edward Taylor has characterised lean periods in the advance of scientific discovery as "periodical bankruptcies of science". [31] Science is a human activity, and scientific contributions have ...