A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Constructivist Studies of Science and Technology

The phrase “social construction” was first used by Berger and Luckmann (1966) in their “treatise in the sociology of knowledge.” Building on the phenomenological tradition, and particularly on the work of Alfred Schutz, they argue that reality is socially constructed and that these processes of social construction should be the object of the sociology of knowledge. Berger and Luckmann focus on the social construction of ordinary knowledge of the sort that we use to make our way about society. Other scholarship developed around such themes as the social construction of mental illness, deviance, gender, law and class. Similarly, in the 1970s the social construction of scientific facts developed, followed in the 1980s by the social construction of artifacts.

Constructivist studies of science and technology come in a wide variety of mild and radical (Sismondo 1993). The mild versions merely stress the importance of including the social context when describing the development of science and technology. The radical versions argue that the content of science and technology is socially constructed. In other words, the truth of scientific statements and the technical working of machines cannot be explained as being derived from nature but as constituted in social processes. Radical constructivist studies of science and technology share the same background, have similar aims, and are even being carried out by partly the same researchers. The ...