Sociologia da ciência: realismo, idealismo e construtivismo

Abstract

The neopragmatic turn, overwhelming criticism of the foundational role of knowledge self advocated by philosophy, radical as to include the analytic philosophy, where it originated, is inexorably the current frontier of philosophical knowledge. The coup given to the philosophy and to the reason for neopragmatic movement, however, must be reported as something positive. The reactions raised in defense of philosophy organized themselves around reduced number of conceptual matrix: strong naturalism (Quine,1969), weak naturalism (Habermas,2004), objective idealism (Hosle,1987), contextualism (Rorty,1994). Contributed unquestionably to this outcome, the historical and sociological studies of postKuhnian science, inspired by its philosophy of science. Inserting tangentially in this debate, the object of reflection in this study is to oppose the point of view of the sociology of science to the realism and to the idealism. Our aim is to demonstrate that constructivism featuring your model of inquiry does not denies, as naive or maliciously understand his critics, the decisive role of nature in the construction of science. The strength of our argument will arise from the analysis realized by the exponents of the strong program in the sociology of science, Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry (1996), in the book Scientific Knowledge: a sociological analysis, of a controversial case study of the history of physics: the experiments that the American physicist Robert Millikan conducted to establish the electron charge