Blackwell Reference Online

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The Strong Program is a programmatic statement that calls upon social scientists to examine the social content and underpinnings of scientific knowledge. It played an important part in the wider development of the field of sociology of scientific knowledge. The Strong Program originated from the so called Edinburgh school in the mid-1970s and was most famously set out by David Bloor in his 1976 book, Knowledge and Social Imagery . Bloor was part of a group of sociologists and historians based in the University of Edinburgh who proposed that social scientists should treat and analyze scientific knowledge claims as they would any other type of knowledge claims: as knowledge constructed and located in a specific societal framework. The Strong Program was inspired by Wittgenstein's argument about rules, which states that to apply a rule, or a taxonomy, or a term, a judgment of similarity or difference is needed. The Edinburgh group introduced the concept of finitism to argue for why the content of scientific knowledge could not, and should not, be exempt from sociological analysis. No two cases or events are ever “the same,” or “not the same,” without a human decision about similarity or difference. Scientific knowledge claims had hitherto been excluded from sociological analysis – it was considered to be a unique type of knowledge derived by special means. The way in which scientists ... log in or subscribe to read full text