......................................................................................................Course Developed by Dr. Sambit Mallick

Communism norm: Scientists openly share new findings with colleagues.

Secrecy counter norm: Scientists protect their newest findings to ensure priority in publishing, patenting, or applications.

Universalism norm: Scientists evaluate research only on its merit, i.e., according to accepted standards of the field.

Particularism counter norm: Scientists assess new knowledge and its applications based on the reputation and past productivity of the individual or research group.

Disinterestedness norm: Scientists are motivated by the desire for knowledge and discovery, and not by the possibility of personal gain.

Self-interestedness counter norm: Scientists compete with others in the same field for funding and recognition of their achievements.

Organized skepticism norm: Scientists consider all new evidence, hypotheses, theories, and innovations, even those that challenge or contradict their own work..

Organized dogmatism counter norm: Scientists invest their careers in promoting their own most important findings, theories, or innovations.

The Alternative Definition of Social Studies of Science

The Mertonian conception of sociology is a pure, coherent, but exclusionary conception. It is based on the deployment of important sociological concepts (social structure, function, norm, value, social actor, social role, anomie, and the like) as defined by the classic studies of the field. These concepts are tools for classifying social relations and mechanisms of integration or disintegration. They go hand in hand with a set of predominantly “quantitative” methods that suitably support these concepts. Yet in choosing this paradigm, sociology had proposed a division of labor with other disciplines – for example, with history, linguistics, ethnography, or philosophy. The cognitive content, discourse, cosmology, and ontology of modern institutions were left to these fields. Stimulated by Kuhn, the new studies of knowledge proposed a more inclusionary definition. They rejected the special epistemic status of science and came to believe that cognition, discourse, cosmologies, and ontologies are also socially constituted. The inclusionary definition mirrors developments in sociology in general, where such subfields as ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, and micromethods, formerly left to historians and anthropologists, have taken hold.