A Study Of Barnes’ Sociology Of Scientific Knowledge:the Inheritance And Development Of Kuhn’s Relativism

Barry Barnes’s thought about sociology of scientific knowledge, is after critically inherited what represented by Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge and represented by Merton’s sociology of science, Originally proposed his new theory. As far as Barnes was concerned, scientific knowledge is basically the product of social construction professionalization of science not only change the distribution of knowledge, but also it improves the social role of knowledge. Meanwhile, Barnes pointed out that scientific knowledge which bring about uncertainty and contingency in the process of production affected by both internal factors as well as social factors, therefore it can not be standard measured by the completely identical scientific methods, in essence scientific knowledge is a collection of sub-culture. That Barnes analyses the process of forming scientific knowledge by using sociology is to some extent reasonable, it deconstructs the traditional epistemological framework,changes and effects our understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, what’s more, it deepens our comprehension of the complexity of science. His ideas on other areas at home and abroad have played a different degree of influence, in the Western cultural, scientific sociology of knowledge constitutes a theoretical basis for feminism, post-colonialism and other emerging thoughts. Present, when the scientific world outlook has become the mainstream culture in the domestic situation, the sociology of scientific knowledge on how we rationally treat the scientific plays an important role and it even help us understand the nature of scienceBasically, Barnes’ scientific knowledge of social constructivism view is a relative ideology which is directly originated Kuhn’s philosophy of science about the interpretation of incommensurability thesis between different paradigms. This article aims at the more in-depth study on Barnes’ sociology of scientific knowledge, on the premise of elaborating Barnes’ inheritances and developments of Kuhn’s thought attempting to strive to understand the sociology of scientific knowledge from another dimension.The controversy about relativism thesis has never stopped since ancient times, despite the relative ideology itself exists the difficulty which can not be overcome, we still need to use a dialectical perspective to analyze the tendencies about sociology of scientific knowledge, I myself try to prove the presence of relativism in Barnes’ sociologist of scientific knowledge is logically self-consistent...