Bourdieu's Distinction between Philosophical and Sociological Approaches to Science Studies *

1. Bourdieu's sociology: distinguishing philosophical from sociological approaches

Bourdieu sits within the social constructionist camp along with many other contemporary sociologists of science. He argues that the social sciences, at least partially, construct their objects of study in the process of studying them, that data is under-determined by theory and therefore the world appears differently depending upon one's interpretative framework. He has long opposed the logicist view of social action, for example in the structural functionalism of Merton, and praised the contributions of other sociologists who attacked the logicist vision in favour of an understanding of science as a social practice (Bourdieu, 2004: 4–31). However, Bourdieu differs from many of these perspectives in directing his analysis to a general critique of the ‘scholastic vision’ in social science. For Bourdieu, sociology must always aim at understanding the world as it appears to the actors in that world. In seeking to uncover the reality of social action as closely as possible, he differentiates academic interpretations of the world which deploy abstract, ‘scholastic’ reason, from the ‘practical’ reason of social actors' own ways of being and acting. It is the task of sociology to use the former to uncover the latter.

So, rather than undertaking an epistemological reflection upon the problems of metaphysics which would seek to uncover the foundations – or lack of them – underlying all particular epistemologies, Bourdieu articulates the social dimension of knowledge in the first instance. At its basis, he states that the grounds of knowledge lie in the social conditions of the possibility of philosophy (2000: 28). To understand philosophy and explain the sources and scope of its questions, we need to expose the social conditions which support scholastic reason, including the social logic of the philosophical field in order to clarify the socially constructed dispositions of philosophers which influence the direction of their research. The field is defined by the struggles of social actors to obtain symbolic capital. So, the object is to objectify sociologists of science to reveal how their ideas are influenced by the search for symbolic capital within a social field. That is, we can understand why philosophers have taken particular sides of an epistemological argument, at particular historical junctures, by linking these ideas to the social conditions of the time. However, this is not just an assertion of the sociological against the philosophical. Rather, he argues that this form of reflection upon the social is itself a thoroughly philosophical activity:

The question this raises is whether Bourdieu extends the idea too far in his attempt to ‘sociologize’ philosophy; that is, by redefining philosophy as the sociology of philosophy. We can see the extent of this emphasis on the social dimension in his writing on language. In his critique of the logicist vision of linguistics – a vision he says seeks to expunge action and power from language – Bourdieu emphasises how social positions and positioning are expressed through linguistic utterances (1991). He identifies how the abstract view of language has developed because of its links to class and power, cultivated through the state bureaucracy and the education system. In making this critique he gives to social positioning a key role in determining meaning itself: ‘Grammar defines meaning only very partially: it is in relation to a market [field] that the complete determination of the signification of discourse exists’ (1991: 38). In other words, objective meaning is primarily determined in the relations between the speakers in social space rather than through the language itself. Even more strongly, he argues that ‘Utterances receive their value (and their sense) only in their relation to a market [field], characterized by a particular law of price formation [our emphasis]’ (1991: 67). This seems to reduce sense entirely to social positioning, as though language itself is but a tool in this task and has no meaning-making function independently of it. Contrary to this, we note that he does acknowledge a social setting which might exist temporarily outside social situations, in which the forces of the field might be suspended and freer communication could take place (1991: 71). But if this is the case, then the sense of an utterance does not depend entirely upon social factors. We might agree with Bourdieu that social positioning is important in language, but he is inconsistent in this respect and the strong claim that sense derives solely or primarily from social positioning is unsustainable. Indeed, the best interpretation of his argument seems to be that both elements are important, but that the social positioning expressed in utterances is paramount. ¹

Whether one interprets him as overly sociologizing or not, in his writing on language, as on other subjects, what is most important for Bourdieu is to provide a sociological interpretation of intellectual endeavours – including sociology and philosophy – based upon the social logic of the field rather than upon the abstract, scholastic vision. For Bourdieu, the scholastic vision is itself a form of social practice, underpinned by the symbolic capital to be found in academia and its links to the power of the state and economy which support it. Hence, there is an ‘interestedness in disinterestedness’ in the academic enterprise, such that scholasticism is most importantly underpinned by and linked to social interests, even more so than any particular epistemological position (1988, 1998, 2000). For example, he sees the origins of the great disagreements of French thought since the 1960s as the product of each actor developing a view in terms of his/her taking a position within the academic field, either supporting succession or a revolutionary position against the status quo (2000: 38). But underneath these disagreements he finds an implicit agreement that philosophy – and not social science – was considered the thought of the highest rank. It is necessary for all sides tacitly to accept this invisible scholasticism in order to have their explicit disagreements within it. In another example, he finds in Rawls and Habermas an underlying agreement upon conceiving of politics as rational ethics, a scholastically grounded presupposition which allows them to dispute its specific forms (2000: 79). In yet another field, he points out that Baudelaire's contribution to literature is unappreciated by many scholars because the author's great break with the past has become normalized today, and those who criticize him on today's terms fail to interpret his work in relation to his historical contemporaries (2000: 86). Such reflections upon the academic enterprise make an important contribution to questioning the idea of universal knowledge by showing the social conditions of its construction. But should we accept the strong view in which sociology takes priority over philosophy? Can the social really be foundational and knowledge itself secondary? If we are able to question the social grounds of philosophy, does this not suggest that some form of knowledge is already given to us which permits us to do so, a knowledge which is itself independent of its social grounds? Even if philosophical knowledge is said to originate in the human practice of philosophizing, this does not preclude it from achieving results independently of those grounds. After all, this is precisely what Bourdieu seeks to explain about the natural sciences, which have discovered so much. It seems to us that whatever the importance of the socio-historical, Bourdieu is not able to dissolve such fundamental philosophical questions through an exercise of sociological reflection.

So, how should we understand his epistemological position? His general views on philosophy are expressed best in Pascalian Meditations. Here, he discusses the historicity of reason, noting that to historicize knowledge (for example, pointing out the influence of social factors upon knowledge construction) is to relativize it by introducing an element of contingency into intellectual systems which otherwise claim universal validity beyond social power and action (2000: 93). At the same time, his goal is to save knowledge from total arbitrariness and give some grounds to it. This is what marks him out as quite distinctive from both the rationalist view and from the more radical epistemological positions in science studies which stress relativization, for example poststructuralist approaches such as Actor-Network Theory. So, instead of analyzing Bourdieu in terms of his ontology or his epistemology, what we see is that he deals with both in terms of the social:

So, knowledge emerges through social grounds while becoming partly autonomous from them in expressing particular perspectives on the world. Here, Bourdieu does affirm a degree of autonomy to knowledge over and above social conditions. But, while knowledge systems can certainly be independent of social structures, they ‘are always partly dependent on the structures of their field and of the dispositions they favour. The epistemic unconscious is the history of the field’ (2000: 99). Here, he does not reduce knowledge entirely to social positioning, but certainly links the development of knowledge to it. The epistemic is then reflected in the academic and disciplinary habitus, so that new entrants to the field become attuned to an interest (illusio) in the oppositions which have become consecrated in the field (1988). He then argues that this does not condemn all thought to total relativization because reflective thought can provide us with a degree of freedom from its social grounds (2000: 106). By reflecting upon and understanding the social conditions of scholarly fields we become partly autonomous from their social logic, perhaps not in the ‘pure’ sense of an absolute knowledge which has a non-historical starting point, but at least insofar as we perceive the blindness of historically formed knowledge into which we are inculcated and which otherwise goes unreflected upon.

Bourdieu calls the process of uncovering the social conditions of scholarly inquiry, reflexivity. Reflexivity, for Bourdieu, refers to questioning the social conditions of one's thought, in contrast with simply studying the world as though one possessed a perfectly objective viewpoint (see, for example, perspectivism in art; 2000: 21–3). While this is a constructivist position, such reflexivity takes a particular form and has a particular purpose. Rather than reflexivity being a philosophical regression towards a metaphysical principle – which constructivists find to be fundamentally problematic, thereby revealing that all knowledge, including social science, is partial and contingent – it is a questioning of the social conditions of knowledge in order to avoid the error of imposing a ‘scholastic’ view upon the world which we objectify. Bourdieu says that the object of reflexive thought should not be to reduce all social reality to the relativism uncovered in the historicization of epistemology. Its object is to surpass the scholastic perspective which produces such relativism, ‘in order to liberate the social sciences from the reactive – not to say reactionary – critique that philosophy never ceases to make of them’ (2000: 29). Hence, reflexive sociology must involve a questioning of the social conditions of the field of sociology itself. This ‘objectification of the objectifying subject’ proposed by Bourdieu claims neither absolute truth nor perfect objectivity, but does aim to achieve a higher degree of freedom from the impact of social conditions upon academic thought.

In articulating scholarly thought as a process of detaching ourselves from the blindness of the social, Bourdieu argues for a sociology which is grounded and distinct from philosophy. This is the point at which we might usefully distinguish the sociological from the philosophical, and then apply this to Science Studies. Bourdieu grounds sociological reasoning sociologically, at least insofar as scholarly thought itself is the product of social conditions. We can gain a degree of freedom – if not ‘objectivity’ – from our social conditions by reflecting upon them. Once again, this is a different approach from philosophical reflection upon metaphysical foundations. Bourdieu's view is that we simply do not require a foundational metaphysical principle upon which to ground intellectual reflection because he transfers the question to social criteria. In so doing, he claims to have solved the dilemma of knowledge and historicity (2000). Again, we might question him about the epistemological status of such a claim (see, for example, Mialet, 2003). We could ask about the epistemological basis of his ideas, or his conception of the society/nature divide, or the validity of his division of the social world into fields. However, this would be to reintroduce questions which, he points out, have little to do with the practical logic of the social world itself. Such questions lie in rationalist philosophy and not within a sociological view of philosophy as a field of social activity.

Taking the particular case of Science Studies, it is on these grounds that we find Bourdieu's criticisms of some social constructionism and poststructuralism. Such approaches reflect extensively upon the contingency of knowledge, but in many instances their orientation is specifically philosophical, pointing to the lack of an abstract foundation and from this extrapolating a certain relativism to scientific knowledge as well. They hold up the intuition of scientific practice as an argument against scientificity, but the logic of this practice is also lost in the process, when in fact there is a practical rationality to scientific practice and the scientific knowledge which results from it does obtain a degree of autonomy from contingent social conditions. Even though radical social constructionism offers a powerful critique of the idealistic depiction of rational science, in promoting such a ‘view from everywhere’ Bourdieu sees this type of critique as an abstraction which fails to appreciate that ideas come from a firm social footing (2000: 108). Such abstract reasoning also uses philosophical contingency against social science itself, which is then cast as an authoritarian gesture no matter what form it takes (2000: 29), such that the primary task of social inquiry becomes to attack the scientificity of social science. He is particularly harsh on this internal critique of knowledge, describing it as a false radicalism which is dangerous in its acceptance of relativism and which permits the restoration of obscurantist criticisms of science (2000). Bourdieu argues that such epistemological oppositions are generated not primarily through theoretical disagreement but by the conditions of the academic field. The real origin of the opposition between logicist rationalism and postmodern radicalism lies in this social field which presupposes a philosophical and anti-sociological outlook common to both perspectives.

At this point, we could choose to embark on a philosophical analysis of Bourdieu's own epistemology as a constructionist theory of scientific objects. We could compare Bourdieu's view on the construction of reality with the critical realism of Bhaskar, for example, or with Latour's philosophy, as Schinkel does (2007). But we think this would be to miscast Bourdieu's entire approach to social inquiry. Indeed, his sociology rejects such epistemological reflections as non-sociological, scholastic reasoning which fails to ground itself in the social conditions underlying and supporting its own practice. Such scholasticism is normal only for academics, which is why it often remains hidden from us (Bourdieu, 1998). He argues that it is this harmony between scholasticism and the logic of the academic field which produces this blindness. In Pascalian Meditations he does not discuss the nature of reality nor pursue an epistemological discussion about the apprehension of the world, but rather he argues that such distinctions themselves arise from the scholastic fallacy. This informs his rationale for a reflexive sociology: his aim is to expose the ‘scholastic illusion’ in all its forms in order to liberate sociology from this obstacle. His intention is to make explicit the unseen, underlying social logic of the field, and thus to extricate scholarship from the illusio of scholasticism which produces false oppositions. He is not against scholastic reason itself, but opposes it insofar as transposing it on to the study of the social world leads to misconceptions. Indeed, he points out that reflexivity upon the social foundations of scholasticism is itself a scholastic operation. So, by articulating the sources of confusion between philosophy and sociology, in the form of scholastic reason and the scholastic inquiry into practical reason, we argue that Bourdieu provides a basis for understanding and disentangling some of the problems which have dogged Science Studies.

2. Science Studies as a social field

Over the last three decades sociological studies of the natural sciences have produced an enormous body of work. Contemporary research has generally been based on social constructionist epistemology, the key tenet of which is that scientific facts are underdetermined by theory. Following a broader trend in the philosophy of social science, social constructionist studies have pointed out that there is more to knowledge creation than the direct approximation of the laws of a human-independent universe because all scientific research, including the natural sciences, is partially determined by social factors. Social constructionists looked at science through their own underdetermined knowledge, arguing that to understand how scientific knowledge is produced we must understand the social conditions and processes of its production. Social constructionism was markedly distinguished from the established, more positivist philosophy of science which concentrated on understanding how the logic of scientific reason might deliver objective knowledge ‘untainted by social factors’. Philosophers of science conceive of science in terms of its knowledge more than the relationship between the practice of research and the knowledge produced by it (although in doing so, they encounter the difficult opposition between discovery and justification). Social constructionist studies of science thus posed a general challenge to the philosophy of science, from a sociological perspective. Until that time, philosophers had presented science in terms of a monolithic empiricist vision, producing true knowledge which was not at all determined by social processes. We should not underestimate the prior authority of this philosophical picture, an authority founded upon its presupposed view of rational science. In questioning the received view, social constructionism delivered a major challenge to the philosophy of science as it sought to reorient Science Studies towards sociology.

The most well known approaches in Science Studies are the British Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), laboratory studies, and the French-based Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The under-determination premise of these social constructionist perspectives made it legitimate to open up the ‘black box’ of scientific knowledge and everyday practice that hitherto were assumed to be locked away by the authority and autonomy of natural science. However, SSK and ANT have today broken away from a sociological framework and together represent both a ‘radicalization’ of the reflexive research agenda and a decidedly epistemological turn within Science Studies. While SSK is today the lesser known of these two developments, it was important and highly influential. It developed in Edinburgh and Bath from the 1970s through the 1980s as a radical new approach (see Barnes, 1974; Bloor, 1983; Collins, 1985). This ‘Strong Programme’ placed social constructionism at the heart of natural scientific knowledge, taking mathematics as its ultimate explanandum to be accounted for in terms of social factors. SSK's scholarly manifesto established its epistemological and methodological outlook, showing both philosophical and sociological lineage in aiming to establish a scientific approach to the study of science, i.e. studying natural sciences ‘in their own idiom’, consciously borrowing methods from the natural sciences to be used back upon them. This hybrid was an empirical, relativist research programme which prescribed methodological symmetry and epistemological reflexivity. Although SSK has now fallen out of favour, it helped spark many high-profile debates in Science Studies which still influence the direction of the field as a whole.

Arguably, the social constructionist perspective on science became firmly established with laboratory studies. Key works include Gilbert and Mulkay (1984), Knorr, Krohn, and Whitley (1980), Knorr-Cetina (1981), Latour (1983), and Latour and Woolgar (1979). These researchers employed social scientific methods, particularly ethnography, to examine how scientists actually did their work in practice. Laboratory studies broke with the undifferentiated visions of science, uncovering how scientific facts are produced in the everyday setting of scientific sites. They showed the messiness of science in practice, which is far from the passionless, objective and detached vision depicted in the philosophy of science. Research practice only appears rational because it is transmuted into orderly statements and publications via a process of social construction through language. While the under-determination thesis was a crucial element of laboratory studies, it is important to note that they were also highly empirical. It was only by revealing the day to day practice of science that they showed science was not pure rationality but a social practice which constructs scientific facts.

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is now very prominent not only in science studies but increasingly in sociology generally. ANT has grown from a radical science studies approach to becoming a larger strand of contemporary social theory, primarily driven by Latour and Callon (see for example, Callon, Law and Rip, 1986; Latour, 1987, 1999, 2005; Law and Hassard, 1999). ANT emerged from early laboratory studies via the influences of ethnography, semiotics and French post-structuralist thought to become the avant-garde, connecting the critique of metaphysics with the study of everyday technologies and networks. It takes apart basic sociological concepts so they can be put back together via a radically ‘symmetrizing’ approach which brings humans and non-humans into one post-humanist network of associations. This defines ANT as a-modern in its outlook, beating postmodernism at its own game. With ANT we find the most radical social constructionist position which largely post-dates the science wars.

How does Bourdieu interpret these developments? His views are primarily set out in his book The Science of Science of Reflexivity (2004), a reflection upon the sociology of science and his own place within it. He argues that many Science Studies scholars have misunderstood what distinguishes sociological inquiry from philosophy, and thereby the field has been sidetracked away from sociology into making misleading, highly relativist depictions of science. The errors arise, first, from competitive struggles within the field which led each new entrant to assert their new perspective against the old. Secondly, and related to this, they stem from the tendency to use radical philosophical arguments in taking such positions, with scholars becoming embroiled in philosophical debates rather than incrementally adding to sociological research. He offers reflexive sociology as a corrective, exemplified in his own ‘self-analysis’ in which he considers his disposition to separate the social sciences from the influence of philosophy (2004: 102). The point of him reflecting upon his own career in the final chapter of the book is to reveal the sociological origins of his position in his own ‘cleft habitus’ (2004: 111) which reflects the alternative he pursues in contrast to the field's dominant pattern of radical paradigmatic revolutions. As Gieryn (2006: 187) points out, Bourdieu has always borrowed from the tradition as much as he has innovated, walking a middle ground between the extremes of agency and structure.

Bourdieu finds that Science Studies is a field defined by continuous revolution, in which each new entrant seeks advancement in the field by proclaiming a radical ‘new start’ that claims to make the status quo redundant. This pattern is a result of power struggles within the academic field, a pattern which Bourdieu points out also influenced his own work and led him to make errors. He notes that as a young scholar he found himself in a field dominated by the work of Merton and structural functionalism and that he criticized Merton too harshly; ‘when one is young […] one is inclined to put oneself forward in opposition to established figures, and therefore to look critically at their work’ (Bourdieu, 2004: 13). From the viewpoint of an older scholar able to carry out a reflexive analysis of the field and the positions he took within it, Bourdieu finds that his own errors resulted from a lack of reflexivity. Instead, this reflexivity now provides him with analytic distance to draw selectively on the tradition rather than to attack it. For example, he argues against his own earlier criticisms of Merton, stating that he did, in fact, make an important and positive break with conventional American science by according a place to contingency in scientific practice (2004: 10). He also notes that Merton's sociology of science was also an integral part of a larger theory of society, a dimension lost in contemporary science studies in which analysis is often restricted to the micro-level of the laboratory (2004: 12). Had Merton had access to a reflexive sociology, he could have avoided the oversights of his theory which flowed from his status as an immigrant to the US and his consequent desire for recognition (2004: 12–13). Reflexive sociology permits the selective use of contributions such as Merton's, providing access to a critical treatment of past works, and one's relation to past works, which is both epistemological and sociological (2004: 13).

Bourdieu reviews other major developments in the field to explain how the break from philosophical logicism produced insights about the social foundations of scientific practice and, at the same time, to unfold how these advances were pursued through social contests for symbolic capital in the scholarly field. He praises Kuhn's introduction of a discontinuous element into Anglo-American philosophy by introducing the concept of paradigms, normal science, and scientific revolutions. With Kuhn, the institutional authority of science could be challenged because he depicted it as ‘an instituted episteme’, founded on epistemology, and therefore it could be attacked on the same grounds (Bourdieu, 2004: 18). Hence, the positive reception of Kuhn's ideas by radical students was not only because of the message itself but also because of its social impact in that it resonated with the anti-establishment mood of the times (2004: 17). Bourdieu explains that resistance to the followers of Kuhn came from the British ‘strong programme’ in SSK which drew on Wittgenstein to explain rationality, objectivity and truth as localized norms and conventions, noting their stress on the under-determination of theory by data (2004: 18). Here, Bourdieu praises Collins for emphasizing the interactionist dimension of science but criticizes him for staying within the laboratory and not seeing the broader structures and dispositions which inform social action (2004: 18–19). Similarly, he praises laboratory studies for their ‘undeniable contribution’ in breaking with the ‘distant and undifferentiated vision of science’ to move close to the site of scientific production (2004: 21). For example, he commends Knorr-Cetina for attending to science as a practice by studying the production of scientific papers instead of seeing them only as an end product. He also praises the work of Gilbert and Mulkay for identifying the rhetorics of scientific discourse (2004: 22).

In all this, Bourdieu's intent is to articulate the positive dimensions of social constructionism insofar as it distinguished the sociological view of science from the philosophical. As an overview of the field, it is far from sufficient. His critics are right when they point out that he does not do the field justice, is far from comprehensive in his analysis, and is overly dismissive in tone, which can leave the impression that his attacks are personal rather than analytical (Carroll, 2006; Mialet, 2003; Schatzki, 2006; Schinkel, 2007). But we emphasize his lauding of past scholarship to suggest that his analysis is indeed a considered one and not a personal attack. If his discussion of past research is limited, it is because the purpose of the book is not to review Science Studies scholarship, it is to uncover the logic of Science Studies as a social field. Importantly, Bourdieu does not criticize social constructionism per se, only the scholastic version of constructionism which he believes fallaciously attributes to social actors the mode of thinking practised by the academic observer (1998). Despite the theoretical gulf between them, he sees poststructuralist studies of science as one example of this, along with many other more conventional philosophical analyses of social phenomena.

Interpreting Bourdieu's criticisms of other studies as personal and lacking good reasons is a common interpretation of Bourdieu (possibly arising, in part, from the sometimes tangled nature of his reflexive style). For example, Schinkel (2007) has made a detailed comparison of Latour's and Bourdieu's perspectives on sociology, arguing that, in some respects, Latour's analysis has more explanatory power, and that Bourdieu's attacks on Latour are primarily ad hominem. However, this analysis neglects Bourdieu's key argument, his analysis of scholastic reason and its attribution as an error of thought which he attributes to Latour's later work on Actor-Network Theory. Bourdieu also criticizes functionalists for making a different error arising from the same underlying cause. He does not say that functionalism and radical sociology of science are the same, but he does say they both result from the same ‘scholastic fallacy’. So, we should not consider Bourdieu's ideas in terms of his epistemological differences with others regarding the question of the truth of scientific knowledge. What he criticizes are non-sociological theories of social practice. Indeed, as we noted above, he praises much of the past work in social constructionist studies of science for its ‘undeniable contribution’ (2004: 21–2). But his argument is that the field has since erred by moving too far towards philosophy, a move which resulted in Science Studies becoming embroiled in the ‘science wars’.

The year 2006 marked the tenth anniversary of the height of the ‘science wars’, a series of contentious debates between advocates of the social constructionist position on science, their scientist opponents, and philosophers of science. At its apex was the well-known Sokal publication in Social Text in which the physicist parodied a social constructionist study of science but was judged by the referees to have written a serious article worthy of publication. He disclosed his hoax soon afterwards in the journal Lingua Franca (Sokal, 1996), in particular criticizing the editors of Social Text for accepting the absurd statement that the external world does not exist and that even if it did science could have no real knowledge of it. These publications stoked the fires already building and the following years saw vigorous and extensive debate in the field, the controversy spreading to questions about postmodernist and post-structuralist thought in general.

The science wars became a public battle within and between disciplines over philosophical positions. As with most wars, the battle was hardly rational or fair. Opponents of social constructionism considered only a small proportion of Science Studies positions. Particularly contentious views were often taken to be the whole of social constructionism when in fact there were and still are many variants. We might agree with Sokal about the absurdity of the view that the external world does not exist and that if it does, science cannot know anything about it. However, we do not agree that social constructionism is only this position. His ire is directed more at postmodern theory, and particularly how he interprets its depiction of science as anything but rational. As a scholar on the political left, he also resented this theoretical strand's claim to be the latest in left-wing thought. So, the science wars became a battle between a loosely characterized pro-science academic left, a centrist or right-wing pro-science position, and a poststructuralist, relativist approach which was perceived as a threat to the legitimacy of science. Scientific knowledge was said to be arbitrary, historically and epistemologically relative, without any legitimate basis for its validity, in contrast to Sokal and others who saw the strength of the left coming from analysis and rational truth rather than mystification. Other scientists attacked social constructionism precisely because they rejected the left and took this as evidence of the pernicious influence of left-wing politics on rational thought. Still other scientists held on to the idea of science as finding the truth over and above all other forms of reason, particularly politics, a position which is problematic in even the more modest forms of social constructionism. Whatever the variants of the debate, the misunderstanding at the heart of the debate was that to adopt any social constructionist position amounts to saying that scientific knowledge is nothing but a construct. Extreme relativist and realist positions became the only views represented, with more moderate positions disappearing from view. The science wars degenerated into a fight between two caricatures, ultra-positivism versus ultra-relativism. Underneath all the fuss, the arguments were a philosophical debate about whether reality exists and what this means, which is described well by Cooper (1999) as an ‘anxiety over relativism’ in which the only positions worth taking are moderate ones in between the two extremes.

At a broader level the science wars were an expression of the sociological challenge to the philosophy of science. That is, they were a form of ‘disciplinary imperialism’ (Cooper, 1999). The extreme views were as much about asserting disciplinary territory over the object of study as they were about arguing epistemological positions, although, in some way, it brought focus to the debate – even if it was poisonous – enabling both philosophers and sociologists to have a discussion beyond their disparate approaches. However, we argue it was a false debate resulting from the failure to distinguish between two competing visions of social constructionism; i) relativist philosophy, and ii) interpretative sociology. Furthermore, both these visions drew upon philosophical ideas to make their points about science, hence the confusion and mislabelling which occurred on both sides. Philosophical perspectives came to dominate what had previously been a sociological enterprise (see, for example, Rouse, 1999). The confusion between the two was like a muddle of different languages without consensus on the terms of reference of the inquiry. In other words, the source of the problem was not complexity but disciplinary incoherence. We do not argue that the science wars did not deal with real issues, only that these issues do not have much to do with the social study of science. It was a misnomer, a misconstrual, yet another manifestation of the ‘two cultures’ problem. It was represented as such for strategic reasons linked to an underlying failure to differentiate alternative positions within social constructionist studies of science, along with underlying competing visions of philosophy and sociology. The field then lapsed into something of a theoretical and empirical impasse (Fuller, 1996).

That Science Studies has abandoned the sociological is not only Bourdieu's argument. Fuller, who always takes a deep synthesizing view, sums up the problems with the Science Studies radicals' position in recommending Collins and Yearley's caution that sociologists of science should not pursue method for its own sake and that they should always ‘return home’ to sociology:

According to Fuller, a key problem is that the radicals attempt to shrink the distance between scientists and themselves on philosophical terms and do not then return to sociology. We see this reflected in the change in title of Latour and Woolgar's (1979) seminal work, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. In its second edition, the term ‘Social’ is dropped from the title altogether. Latour has since denied that he ever intended to provide a social explanation of the natural sciences, concluding ‘It has become clear over the years that the existence of society is part of the problem and not of the solution’ (2000: 113). He advocates, along with Callon, an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to replace sociology. Callon argues that ANT enables us to ‘abandon the constricting framework of sociological analysis, with its pre-established social categories and its rigid social/nature divide’ (cited in Pickering, 1999: 373). This radical anti-sociology practices reflexivity by pursuing ever new internal, philosophical attacks on ‘the social’ and on sociology itself. Such radicalism can be understood when placed within a field which encourages participants to take radical epistemological stances as a way of distinguishing themselves in relation to other scholars and thus earning symbolic capital. Bourdieu's insistence that we must ‘encounter the social’ (2000: 50) marks him out as very different from such recent exhortations to ‘reassemble the social’.

So, while laboratory studies helped establish the validity of a constructionist outlook by using sociological concepts, subsequent followers have sought to eliminate sociological distinctions in favour of an epistemologically informed perspective which denies a distinct realm for the social. This anti-sociological direction is not typical of the field as a whole but it does underlie some more recent work. We can certainly understand why it was important to engage with the philosophy of science on its own terms. Social constructionist studies had to contest the logicist vision of science and the claim of philosophy to legitimate dominance of Science Studies. However, such debates only served the field to a point. Whatever the interesting nature of the debate between subjectivism and objectivism, they are two incommensurable epistemologies, both enclosed within a scholastic vision of the world. They are irreconcilable within philosophy and simply not relevant to social life as it exists for the participants, where these debates are of little consequence. We should concentrate on research which fills out the sociological picture of scientific practice in relation to other fields of social life. And to do this, we must be able to conceive of a research field which does not valorize radical epistemological jumps. Once we establish a sociological ground for the sociological study of science we need not be preoccupied with aporetic epistemological questions. We can then also secure the ground for empirical work to find answers to questions of the social construction of science in practice.

How should we situate our own research in relation to the Science Studies field? As new entrants to the field, we possess little scientific capital. Our main task is to acquire capital by publishing in scholarly journals, and Bourdieu provides us with a unique opportunity to do this because while his work is now mainstream in sociology he has been under-utilized in Science Studies. We can thus attempt to secure capital by using an uncommon approach which has not been claimed by others, a task made easier by the mainstream recognition of Bourdieu's sociology, his large volume of work, the translation of his work into English, and the secondary literature through which we can access commentary on his ideas. But reflexivity is necessary if we are to avoid the danger that we may use Bourdieu to gain symbolic capital by declaring ourselves the bearers of a new perspective, different from all the others, a strategy which Bourdieu himself identifies as having erroneously led the field to continually declare a ‘new start’ and to miss out on consolidating past gains. This would repeat the past pattern of new entrants seeking to make a mark on the field, working upon the opposition of ‘old/new’ and cutting ourselves off from other developments in the field in order to generate controversy. So, we should recognise this and adopt an integrative approach, not by holding to Bourdieu's line purely for the sake of a theoretical contest but by establishing the grounds for an empirical inquiry into the practical work of scientists, informed by a sociological perspective which does not open up a new front of attack in the science wars but rather uses sociological theory to build upon existing research.

3. Conclusion: studying science sociologically

Ultimately, the pattern of continuous revolution entrenched in the field of Science Studies creates problems, leading it towards philosophical radicalization rather than the accumulation of results and incremental progression of knowledge. If these problems result from a conflation of and confusion between science and social science, and between social science and philosophy of science, then reconsidering Science Studies in more consistently sociological terms can provide a way forward. Philosophical inquiry is obviously important and epistemological considerations enter into all social scientific inquiry, and we might certainly raise doubts as to whether Bourdieu really deals with important philosophical questions about reality. Indeed, Latour points out that Bourdieu is concerned mainly with scientists rather than our understanding of the natural world. But for Bourdieu, ANT and other radical perspectives can only attack the social by failing to see the social conditions underlying their own practice. Hence, they commit the scholastic fallacy, just like the logicist vision they did so much to reject. So, we should not abandon the positive features of social constructionism for philosophical relativism, but instead continue on a sociological path. A properly sociological social constructionist study of science demands both social constructionist epistemology and reflexive sociology, as Bourdieu's Science of Science and Reflexivity demonstrates.

Bourdieu has common interest with radical constructionists in the view that science is a human creation. He also shares the common position of seeing science as potentially dangerous in its authority and influence. But he diverges from them in setting the concept of field as the basis for inquiry, whereas the radicals see it as another erroneous sociological concept. We think Bourdieu is right to distinguish the two approaches: a more philosophical framework which deals with epistemological questions, and an empirically based and reflexive sociological approach to the study of science that his field theory represents. The latter serves as a useful point of departure for the sociology of science that has been mired in scholastic debates originating from the science wars. Some science radicals argue that postmodern visions of science such as ANT debunk the validity of scientific knowledge and will lead the lay public to question its findings and thereby help delegitimize science, weakening its social power. But a philosophical critique of science and social science will have little or no effect outside academia, since ordinary people are not bound up in the illusio of philosophy and the confines of the scholastic vision – they simply do not care about the epistemological basis of science. The social and political authority of science derive from other sources, which are themselves to be found in social conditions. To make an effective critique requires understanding the logic and power structures of different social fields, and how they interact. The danger present in science is not its internal belief in its own validity, but rather the potential for outside influence by capital and the state which might corrupt the autonomy of science, including its rigorous procedures of internal review, to serve interests engaged in power struggles in other fields. Bourdieu's idea for a liberating science is not to attack any and all epistemological grounds for knowledge and the universal, but to make the socially constructed approximation of the universal accessible to all; that is, to generalize the social conditions which make access to the universal possible, thus redressing unequal social power. His unique reflexive approach not only helps explain the sociological origins of Science Studies' difficulties, but also shows the way forward for putting social constructionism back on a sociological trajectory.