Post-Modern Perespectives Of Science:the Comparative Study Of The Thoughts Between PoKoFeyerabend And BoLatour

It can be said that, assisted by the instrumental rationality of science and technology, World War I and World War â…¡ had brought to the human civilization a misery black time at the first half of 20 century. In the modernization process of the socialized great-production, science & technology develop more and more rapidly and their two-edged effect show out more obviously. Since then, the sacred image of science has been greatly damaged among many people of us, who are now living in a threat from chaotic culture circumstances in the future. People began to doubt the meaningfulness of the development of science to our mankind and to raise a question on its root in the soil of human culture. At this time, the outlook on science came to a turn into humanistic concern emphatically. Post-modern perspectives of science came into being in such an environment. It is an output of thinking over the societal realities, basing its main ideas on the famous "Snow Thesis" radically. Post modern perspectives of science in nature are developed from modernist insight on science while holding a criticizing view of it. This new observation reflects the logical route about the philosophical thoughts of the western world, which is shown in its ideas against the ideal targets of Enlightenment, Fundamentalism, Essentialism, and Universalism.With "resort to the history of science" as its slogan, historicism of the philosophy of science found a totally new method in studying historical cases of science, known as Anti-Whiggish History. Contextual and psychological ideas were introduced into the philosophical studies of science, which demonstrates a devastation of the modern outlook on science whose representative theories were logic-empiricism and critical-rationalism. One of its major representatives, Feyerabend, the flag holder and drum player, made his great efforts succeeding in wide-spreading the main thoughts of historicism on science. It came to a new stage of development as he attained the extreme irrationalism from the weak irrationalism (or quasi-rationalism) of Kuhn's theory. Feyerabend is not only the spokesman of historicism on science philosophy but one of the main representatives of the post-modernism for his great anti-viewpoints in extreme relativism and anti-scientism. Historicism of science philosophy was developed to its full and end by Feyerabend. Alas, his idea about "Anything goes" became a classic war-cry for the post-modernists. His brave and eloquent speech against Chauvinism on science and Doctrinarism on scientific methodology proved to be a very strong force in pushing the development of the post-modernism in the later period. On the basis of classic sociology of knowledge and traditional sociology of science, sociology of science and knowledge (SSK), holding a new and radical look at historicism of science philosophy, pushed forward the post-modern views of science to its extremity. During the movement of STS, SSK, especially its social constructivism, became a leading role in the growth of post-modern perspectives of science. The new generation of these scholars, with Latour as its most important figure, applied the concepts about their anthropological methodology to all the other scientific studies. They, with knowledge of the newly born post-modern perspectives of science, through the field investigation on daily scientific activities, carried the social constructivism into a deeper and more complicated field of research and developed a completely new studying way of SSK. They are generally regarded as the second generation of SSK. Latour became one of the primary representatives in the "Science Wars", and was later universally acknowledged as the spokesman of the post-modernism for his extreme idealism and radical relativism. SSK, a succession of historicism, developed historicism by means of a wider range of societal-cultural research methods. Latour's radical viewpoints on science, at some extent, showed its similarity with Feyerabend's and therefore, suffered a most severe criticism fr...