They Shoot Dead Horses,Don't They?: Philosophical Fear and Sociological Loathing in St Louis

Abstract

I argue that the success of Roth and Barrett's deconstruction of Pickering depends on the underdetermination thesis being interpreted as placing the burden of proof on the sociologist, to show what else (other than methodology) determines theory choice in science. By endorsing the underdetermination thesis, and thereby accepting this burden, the sociologists unwittingly play into Laudan's `arationality' assumption, which in turn cuts against their own `symmetry' thesis. I then argue that sociologists would be better off abandoning the underdetermination thesis (at least the Quine version), and thereby denying any explanatory role to methodology whatsoever. In defending this claim, I observe that Pickering's attempt to recover the `agency' of the scientist via phenomenology also plays too much to philosophical accounts. The corrective strategy I propose is to focus on the properties of the social relations which embody the scientists' conceptual structures, but which are independent of the reasons the scientists have for adopting those structures.