================= HES POSTING ================= 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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]