Episode 16 - Steven Shapin

Some years ago, philosopher Ian Hacking compiled a list of books whose titles used the term social construction. There were a great variety of such titles, Hacking found, but most used the expression with the same intent: to diminish the reality of the category that was said to be socially constructed. To say that knowledge is formed by a social process is still, very often, to say that that knowledge is compromised in some way. Something is either true or it’s socially constructed, but not both. Historian Steven Shapin thinks this is the wrong approach. He has argued in books like A Social History of Truth, and Science is Culture that science is social all the way, and that this in no way undermines its truth claims; truth also being, by nature, social. In this episode, Steven Shapin shares his thoughts on the history of science and the sociology of scientific knowledge.