Sociological Challenges to Scientific Knowledge,and Their Proposed Solutions

The present article explains the epistemological foundations of the experimental science, and examines some of the epistemic challenges of the positivist philosophy of science. Such challenges are highlighted under new titles such as cultural, social, or feminist studies. This is the result of a salient reception of Thomas Kuhn’s “scientific paradigms” on the one hand, and the acceptance of the role of social factors on the content, as well as the direction of scientific knowledge by the sociologists of knowledge, on the other. The author argues that a new generation of the philosophers of science is trying to come up with a crisscross paradigm of the social facets of scientific knowledge. By doing so, they want to elevate this discipline in a way that takes the concerns of the sociologists of knowledge into consideration, and at the same time, takes some theoretical measures to maintain the epistemic reliability of scientific propositions.