Questioning science: how knowledge is socially constructed.
This paper argues that 'science' does not tell us 'the truth' but is simply one explanatory framework (of potentially many explanations) for understanding the world. Scientific fact is not a given, located somewhere 'out there' waiting to be discovered. Rather as a set of ideas, which offer to explain the world, scientific knowledge is produced by people and does not exist separately from them. 'Science' cannot pre-exist the social world in which it is produced. It follows that 'scientific research' is equally a product of social forces and cannot be epistemologically separate and 'objective' either. However, the concept of 'scientific research' as 'objective' is so taken for granted in the discipline of dentistry (and elsewhere) that those involved barely see it as a process at all. This paper seeks to make apparent these processes and the values implicit in them.
Thorogood
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Unit of Dental Public Health, UMDS, London.
D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D012586:Science / Q000379:methods; D012945:Social Values; D012961:Sociology