The social character of knowledge is the focus of much philosophy and history of science since the early 1970s. Catalyzed by Kuhn's concept of 'incommensurability' associated with scientific paradigm shifts, other 'sociologists of science' soon began devoping more detailed accounts of science's social character. Among these, David Bloor's Strong Prgamme in the Sociology of Knowledge was formulated early-on. The basic contention found in various forms is that knowledge is a social construction or achievement, hence such work often comes under the label of ‘constructivism’. It is important to note that this does not necessarily challenge the efficacy, technical success or ‘reality’ of knowledge, although the issues of relativism are involved. The primary contention of the sociological approach has more fundamental implications for the natural sciences: if social and cultural contexts inform not just how explanation is justified and accepted as provisionally 'true', but also what phenomena and questions are investigated - a conclusion drawn from Kuhn's incommensurable paradigms - then it follows that
'truth' no longer has the epistemological significance of denoting correspondence to reality. For if it is assumed that the primary criterion of 'truth' signifies a one-to-one corresponcence to a singular Reality, then affirming that there may be various 'truths' depending upon socio-cultural context dislodges this criterion and/or posits multiple realities. The unsettling reverberations of constructivist philosophy have lead to much new thinking in
Philosophy of Science with regard to re-justifying a correspondence theory underlying scientific practice, or to developing programmes - such as H. Putnam's 'Transcendental Nominalism' or Rorty's neo-analytic Pragmatism - which radically espouse non-correspondence theories of truth.
Postprocessual archaeologies often emphasise the constructed character of archaeological knowledges of the past, while earlier (and current) 'new archaeology' explicitly aligned itself with the nuanced realism of a unified science.
References
Bloor, D., 1976:
Knowledge and Social Imagery, London.
