Bossoghan hat einen lesenwerten Aufsatz über “Soziale Konstruktionen” geschrieben. Neben einer überzeugenden Widerlegung der Theorie von “sozial konstruierten Gegenständen” behandelt er vier Auffassungen der weit verbreiteten Theorie der “sozialen Konstruktion von Werten”:
- Soziale Werte als Rechtfertigung: “(A) constructionist may hold that it is not the factual evidence that does the justifying, but precisely the background social values.” Die überzeugende Widerlegung: “(O)ne cannot hope to justify the fundamental laws of electromagnetism by appeal to one’s political convictions or career interests or anything else of a similar ilk.”
- Wir sind von sozialen Werten gesteuert: “(T)he second of our four options, would be to argue that, although social values do not justify our beliefs, we are not actually moved to belief by things that justify; we are only moved by our social interests.” Konkreter: “If we wish to explain why certain beliefs come to be accepted as knowledge at a given time, we must not bring to bear our views about which of those beliefs are true and which false. If we are trying to explain why they came to hold that some belief is true, it cannot be relevant that we know it not to be true.” Bossoghans begrenzte Zustimmung: “It is simply to insist that scientific belief is sometimes to be explained in terms of compelling evidence and that the history and sociology of science, properly conceived, need have no stake in denying that.”
- Soziale Werte sind zur Rechtfertigung unverzichtbar: “Social values might be indispensable for the justification of scientific belief.” Die Infragestellung am Beispiel des Telekops: “The idea, however, that in peering at the heavens through a telescope we are testing our theory of the telescope just as much as we are testing our astronomical views is absurd.”
- Das Rationale ist selbst konstitutiv sozial: “(T)he correct thought is not that the social must be brought in to fill a gap left by the rational, but simply that the rational itself is constitutively social. … (A) sharp separation between the rational and the social is illusory.” Die Widerlegung: “We cannot coherently think of ourselves as believing and assertinganything, if all reasons for belief and assertion are held to be inexorably tied to variable background perspective in the manner being proposed.”
