Larry Laudan’s Critiques Regarding Social Constructivism

Abstract

Social constructivism can be taken as a broad sociological-philosophical approach of science which is introduced as follows: i) an explanation of the acceptance of successful scientific achievements ought to be done through the use of epistemological criteria and social community factors; ii) the knowledge produced by successful scientific achievements cannot be taken as a representation of reality. The social constructivist approach has always been strongly criticized by traditional philosophical conceptions of science because 1) an explanation of the success of successful scientific theories should be made only through the use of epistemological criteria, and 2) the knowledge produced by successful scientific achievements matchs to reality. This paper deals with the first criticism, by means of an expanded analysis of the debate between a representative of social constructivism (David Bloor) and a critic (Larry Laudan), based on the hypothesis that, although Laudan has pointed out some important limits to the scope of the social constructivist approach, the argumentative core of his critique does not hold itself, except as a prescription about the tasks that a philosopher of science must do.