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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
This paper represents an attempt to analyze the basis for the lack of interest and study in the sociology of science within American sociology and within American society. An attempt is first made to indicate the divergence between the meta-sociology of the sociologist of knowledge and contemporary American sociology; and in a derivative manner to indicate the way in which divergent meta-sociologies may lead to different claims about the relationship of science and society. Secondly, an attempt is made to show how the prestige position of the sociologist and the clarity of his status with regard to natural science may also be construed as grounds for the neglect of this field of inquiry.
I wish to express my gratitude to Professor William V. D'Antonio, University of Notre Dame, and Professor Robert C. Bealer, Pennsylvania State University, for a kind and critical reading of an earlier draft of this manuscript.
Now at the Mental Health Study Center, National Institute of Mental Health.
1 Bernard Barber, Science and the Social Order, (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952) p. xiii.
2 Cf., inter alia, Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957); Barber's “Sociology of Knowledge and Science, 1945–1955” in Hans Zetterberg (ed.) Sociology in the United States of America, (Paris: UNESCO, 1956); “Sociology of Science: A Trend Report and Bibliography,” Current Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 2, (Paris: UNESCO, 1957); and “The Sociology of Science” in Merton, et al., (eds.), Sociology Today, (New York: Basic Books, 1959); and Gerard DeGre, Science as a Social Institution, (New York: Doubleday and and Co., 1955).
3 Ibid., p. vii.
4 While some sociologists of knowledge would argue that this dichotomy of approaches to the sociology of science is a false one, the issue is here unimportant. (Cf. Franz Adler, “The Sociology of Knowledge Since 1918,” Midwest Sociologist 17: 3–13, 1955.) It should be made clear that this is a distinction being made by the present writer, and whether Barber or DeGre would subsume the social organization of science under the sociology of knowledge is not known.
5 Perhaps the most systematic survey of the problems confronting this area, as well as an excellent guide to the workers and works of the area, may be found in Kurt Wolff's “The Sociology of Knowledge and Sociological Theory,” in L. Gross (ed.), Symposium on Sociological Theory, (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson and Co., 1959).
6 Cf. Barber, Science and the Social Order, op. cit., passim.; Merton, op. cit., esp. pp. 439–485; and Wolff, op. cit.
7 DeGre, op. cit., p. 39.
8 Barber, op. cit., p. 73.
9 Ibid., p. 83.
10 Nikolai Semyonov, “Science and Society in the Atomic Age,” The Soviet Review: A Journal of Translations 2 (3): 34–48, 1961, pp. 40, 46. (Translated from Voprosy Filosofi, 1960, No. 7.
11 George Lundberg, “The Future of the Social Sciences,” Scientific Monthly 53: 356–359, 1941.
12 George Lundberg, Can Science Save Us? (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1947) pp. 45–46.
13 The underlying perspective which guides my analysis here is Nelson Foote's “Identification as the Basis for a Theory of Motivation,” American Sociological Review 16: 14–22, 1951.