Reassessing the Righteousness of Kuhn's Criticism of the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge

Abstract

In his later works, Thomas Kuhn sharply attacks the so-called strong programme in the sociology of knowledge and disavows it thoroughly. This is curious due to the fact that the representatives of the strong programme, by contrast, openly endorse Kuhn and substantially draw on his work. They perceive in it a set of key ideas, which imply the possibility of a sociological analysis of scientific knowledge. The aim of the paper is to reassess Kuhn's criticism of the strong programme and to evaluate its righteousness. For this purpose, the paper first of all reconstructs Kuhn's account of the strong programme, which is compared afterwards with the works of its founders David Bloor and Barry Barnes, where it is theoretically developed. In the following section, Kuhn's arguments against the strong programme are confronted with a historical paper, where it is applied in practice. The third section compares Kuhn's own approach to science with the strong programme in those very aspects, which Kuhn criticises.