Sociology of scientific knowledge and science education part 2: Laboratory life under the microscope

This article is the second of two that examine some of the claims of contemporary sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and the bearing of these claims upon the rationale and practice of science teaching. In the present article the celebrated work Laboratory Life of Latour and Woolgar is critically examined. Its radical, iconoclastic view of science is shown to be not merely without foundation but an extravagant deconstructionist nihilism according to which all science is fiction and the world is said to be socially constructed by negotiation. On this view, the success of a theory is not due to its intellectual merits or explanatory plausibility but to the capacity of its proponents to “extract compliance” from others. If warranted, such views pose a revolutionary challenge to the entire Western tradition of science and the goals of science education which must be misguided and unrealizable in principle. Fortunately, there is little reason to take these views seriously, though their widespread popularity is cause for concern among science educators.