Assess the sociological explanation of science and ideology of belief system? Essay

Sociologists argue that wisdom and political theory can both be vox populi systems. In the eighteenth century was the era of the enlightenment. People started to think and enquiry was there more than than honourable a God and thats where attainment was introduced. People started to drug abuse rational bearings of thinking to explain things that happened. Science has been used to bourgeon different parts in society such(prenominal) as medication and technology that we use in everyday life. But it has alike caused problems such as pollution and global warming. Science has cognitive power, it can consent to us to explain, predict and control the military man. According to Popper intelligence is an open conception system where every scientists theories atomic number 18 open to scrutiny, criticised and tested by others. He says that science is governed by the principle of falsificationism.This is whereby scientists set egress to soften and falsify existing theories, deliberately playking enjoin that would disprove them. such as the detail that the big bang is a possible action that everyone acknowledges unless there is much more that scientists do not know and more needed to be found therefore it could be mistaken. It argues that there invariably can be more and more evidence for every theory that has ever been made and be. Then when disproving these knowledge claims aloneows scientific world to grow. It is cumulative, whereby it builds on achievements of previous scientists. This explanation shows that science can be a belief system as nothing can ever be proven 100% as there will always be both(prenominal)thing or someone that will disprove a theory with other evidence and therefore people belief what they take a leak been told.This is much like organized religion in a way by the occurrence that religion cannot be proven it is something that people belief in. If popper is correct then it still leaves the question of why science has grown over the last few centuries. Merton argues that science can only thrive as a major kindly institution if it receives support from other institutions and values. He argues that this occurred in England as a result of the values and attitudes created by the protestant reformation especially Puritanism. The beliefs that they had to understand nature led appreciation of Gods works, encouraged them to experiment.They dysphoric cordial welf ar and were attracted to the fact that science could fuck off technological inventions to remedy the conditions of life. Like Popper, Merton argues that science as an institution or organised social activity needs ethos that cast off scientists work in a way that serves the goal of increasing scientific knowledge. He identifies four such norms, collectivism because scientific knowledge is not private property and they must carry on their findings with the scientific community.Universalism, the lawfulness or falsity of scientific know ledge is judged by universal, objective criteria and not by the busy race or rouse of the scientist who produces it. Disinterestedness, the instrument world committed to discovering knowledge for its own sake by publishing their findings for others to check their claims. Organised scepticism, the fact that no knowledge dollar is sacred. Every idea is open to questioning, criticism and objective investigation. By limit despite Poppers pick up of science as an open and critical, some others argue that science itself can be moderaten as a self-sufficient or unsympathetic system of beliefs. For model, Polanyi argues that all belief systems reject important challenges to their knowledge claims science is no different, as the skid of Dr Velikovsky indicates. One deterrent example for scientists refusal even to consider such challenges comes from a historian of science.Kuhn argues that a mature science such as geology, biology or indwelling philosophy is based on a set of sh argond assumptions that he calls a paradigm. This tells the scientist what reliableity is like, the problems to study, and what methods and equipment to use. Scientific education and training is a process of being socialised into faith in the truth of the paradigm, and a successful rush depends on on the job(p) within paradigms. For these reasons, any scientist who challenges the fundamental assumptions of the paradigms. Others in the scientific community will no longer get a line him or her as a scientist at all. The only exceptions to this are during one of the rare periods that Kuhn describes as a scientific revolution, when faith in the truth of the paradigm has already been undermined by an accumulation of anomalies, the results that the paradigm cannot account for.Only then do scientists become open to radically new values. Interpretivist sociologists have developed Kuhns ideas further. They argue that all knowledge including scientific knowledge is socially constructed. T hat is quite a than being objective truth it is created by social classifys using the resources lendable to them. In this case of science, scientific fact- those things that scientists take to be true and real are the product of shared theories or paradigms that tell them what they should expect to command, and of the special(prenominal) instruments they use.Therefore Karin Knorr- Cetina argues that the invention of new instruments, such as telescopes or microscopes, permitsscientists to make mew observations and construct or fabricate new facts. Similarly she horizontal surfaces let out that what scientists study in the laboratory is highly constructed and far removed from the natural world that they are supposedly studying. According to the ethnomethodologist Woolgar, scientists are engaged in the same process of making sense or interpreting the world as everyone else. With the evidence from experiments they have to decide what it means. They do so by devising and applying theories or explanations, but they then have to persuade others to accept their interpretations.An example of this is in the case of the discovery of pulsar. The scientists initially annotated the patterns shown on their printouts from the radio telescope as LGM1. Recognising that this was an unacceptable interpretation from the view point of the scientific community they eventually settled on the notion that the patterns represent the signals from a type of star which is unknown to science. There is still a debate about what the signals really meant. As Woolgar notes a scientific fact is simply a social construction or belief that scientists are able to persuade their colleagues to share. This therefore shows that science can be a cogitate system as science is socially constructed and people believe in what they are told even if it true or not. There are excessively other critical perspectives such as Marxism and feminism which see scientific knowledge as far from pure truth. In stead they regard it as serving the interests of dominant groups, the ruling dissever in the case of Marxists and men for feminists.Therefore many advances in supposedly pure science have been driven by the need of capitalism for certain types of knowledge. For example biological ideas have been used to justify both male subordination and colonial expansion. In this respect science can be seen as a form of ideology. In a different sense postmodernists also reject the knowledge claim of science to have the truth. In the view of Lyotard for example science is one of a number of Meta narratives that falsely claims to accept the truth. In Lyotards view science falsely claims to offer the truth about how the world works as a means of get up to a better society, whereas in reality he argues science is just one more one way of thinking that is used to overshadow people.Sociologists have come up with a definition for ideology which is a worldview or a set of ideas and values, which is basically a belief system. Although ideology is used in many ways these are a distorted, false ormistaken ideas about the work, ideas that conceal the interests of a particular groups, ideas that stop changes by misleading people, and a self- sustaining belief system that is irrational and closed to criticism. here are a number of theories of ideology one of which is Marxists that see society as divided into two opposed classes, them that own the means of take and control the state, and a majority working class who are property less and therefore forced to sell their labour to the capitalist. They see the ruling class to not only control the means of production but ideas through institutions. In a result it produces the ruling class ideology, ideas that legitimate or justify the status quo. The dominant ideas are them or the ruling class and they function to prevent change by creating a false sense among workers. However despite these ideological barriers, Marx believes that ulti mately the working class will develop a true class consciousness and unite the overthrow capitalism.This shows that ideology is a belief system as in Marxisms case it uses the ruling class believes to stop the suffering from becoming successful. Feminists see gender inequality as the fundamental department and patriarchal ideology as playing a key role in legitimating it. Because a gender difference is a feature of all societies there exists many different ideologies to justify it. For example how ideas from science have been used to justify excluding women from education. In addition to patriarchal ideologies is science, those embodied in religious beliefs and practices have also been used to define women as inferior. This also shows that ideology can be a belief system in terms of beliefs and ideas about women and how inferior they are to men. Mannheim sees all belief systems as a partial or sided view worldview.Their one sidedness results from being the rack of one particular group or class and its interests. This leads him to distinguish between to board types of belief system or worldview. They are ideological thought which justifies keeping things as they are and utopian thought which justifies social change. Mannheim sees these worldviews as creations of groups of intellectuals who attach themselves to particular classes or social groups. However because these intellectuals represent the interests of particular groups and not society as a whole they only produce partial views of reality.The belief system of each class or group only gives us a partial truth about the world. In conclusion there is evidence to showthat both science and ideology can be a belief system. This is shown by using things such as science as an open and close belief system. The fact that science can never be objective because theories and experiments are carried out by humans which have feelings and therefore subjective. Science also seen as being socially constructed. The fact that Marxists and feminists see science also as a belief system that serves the interests of dominant groups. The idea that ideology is a belief system is seen as true as this is how sociologists define ideology.