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Some thoughts on Wade Hands' HES editorial. 
 
It would be helpful (and facinating) to get a good historical 
account of the roots of the SSK picture in 19th-century discussions 
of the problem of defining history, science, and social theory. 
My guess is that this history would show that SSK is part of a radical 
picture of science and history with roots in German neo-Kantian 
and neo-Hegelian thought, and French constructivism.  This history 
would support Ross Emmett's earlier reminder that different approaches 
to history come imbedded with different substantive pictures of the 
character of knowledge and social theory.  In this respect much of SSK 
work would inherently constitute a radical rival to other research 
approached and other pictures of social phenomena and history.  In other 
words, imbedded within the SSK approach is an inherent begging of the 
question about the explanatory strategy and logical status of social 
theory. 
 
Another problem of the SSK research effort, as least in some versions, 
is a research agenda that posits and attempts to impose a particular 
causal picture of social determination which has decided the matter in 
advance of as well as independently of the empirical & conceptual problems 
facing the scientist.  A paradigm example of this has been the account 
of the 'social determination' of the ideas of Charles Darwin -- which, as 
reported by Michael Ghiselin and others, has not held up well to detailed 
historical and theoretical examination of the particulars involved. 
 
On the begging of the question which much of SSK and its intellectual 
tradition represent in the context of economics, see: 
 
L. Mises, _Human Action_ 1966. 
 
F. Hayek, "The Facts of the Social Science", in _Individualism and 
Ecomics Order", 1948. 
 
-- 
 
The problematic character of the sociology of scientific 
knowledge (SSK) approach is particularly radical when applied 
to social theory, because it so radically provides a 
psychologistic and relativistic rival to universalistic and 
time- and place-independent pictures of the explanatory 
strategy and logical status of economics.  Much of SSK is 
implicitly a rival account that substitues a motivational or 
genetic 'unmasking' of an understanding of phenomena for an 
account that appeals to the supperior plausibility of rival causal 
pictures.  On these issues I'd particularly recommend: 
 
Karl Popper, _The Open Society and Its Enemies_, Princeton:  Princeton 
U. Press, 1945/1966. 
 
For someof the issues involved I'd also recommend 
P.M.S. Hacker, _Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century 
Analytic Philosophy_, Oxford:  Blackwell, 1996. 
 
For an SSK history of the background of these problems in 
German efforts to make sense of history, psychology, logic, and 
social theory, as well as value theory and ethics, see: 
 
Martin Kusch, _Psychologism_,  London:  Routledge, 1996. 
 
Greg Ransom 
Dept. of Philosophy 
UC-Riverside 
http://members.aol.com/gregransom/hayekpage.htm 
 
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