David Bloor and the Strong Programme

Abstract

The inception of Science Studies is traditionally attributed to the so-called Strong Programme, which was developed by David Bloor and other members of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh from the mid-1960s. In contrast to traditional “weak” sociology of science, the Edinburgh group endeavoured to explain the very contents of scientific theories. Explanations were to be causal, and neutral (or “symmetrical”) in their way of handling scientific results we consider false and methodologically unsound, and those we consider true. The explanations would be couched in social categories, and the determining forces would be social interests. Surprisingly, no explicit analysis of explanation is provided in the Strong Programme; an implicit position may however be reconstructed that turns out to be closely similar to Hempel’s model. Based upon this model, it can be shown that explanation of the contents of scientific theories would call for impossibly strong sociological theories. This conclusion is not refuted by STS’s long list of acclaimed explanatory successes, which upon closer scrutiny turn out to accomplish rather less than is claimed for them. Unfortunately for the Strong Programme, retraction from the stringent Hempelian notion of explanation is not possible, since a weaker mode would no longer exclude explanations in the philosophers’ favoured terms and would thus forfeit the aim to naturalize the philosophy of science. Another major problem for the Strong Programme is that application of its favoured methods to the programme itself would seem to rob it of its scientific credentials.