The controversial climate surrounding SSK has existed since the beginning because of both external rejection and/or resistance and internal divergences and ambiguities. In the course of this paper, I intended to make a reconstruction of some of what appear as key points of what SSK protagonists share (until divergences are explicitly invoked to make different points), as well as what separates them from their chief opponents, the philosophers. In this reconstruction, the key issue for SSK could be summed up under the slogan, a role for sociology in an interdisciplinary naturalized study of science. With this demand, sociologists would attempt to join scholars of other disciplines that have already been integrated, such as cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and the history of science. Why should sociological investigations not be able to complement other understandings of scientific knowledge? Indeed, it reveals that science and knowing are by nature collective activities. As such, science should not be differentiated from other collective human activities; it would be just another cultural activity. So the distinctiveness of science would reside not in a difference regarding its nature, but regarding its specific aim, the production of reliable knowledge. The search for the nature of this distinctive activity would rely on the empirical analysis of what it really is: what it produces, how it is produced, the resources needed for this, the places where this production occurs, and the contexts (proximate and remote) that affect both the activity and its results. It is from a precise empirical investigation of this kind that one ought, a posteriori, to decide what the nature and distinctive traits of science really are. It is, as a matter of fact, this kind of investigation that makes it necessary to overcome old distinctions and dichotomies.

Given the program with which philosophers first began to work in this century, the strong philosophical reaction against SSK could appear to be both expected and reasonable. For the basic theses of that program were foundationalist normativism, justificationism, demarcationism, internalism, rationalism, and realism at an observational or theoretical level (or both). Compared to this program, SSK's program appears as an irreconcilable alternative by rejecting dichotomies, dissolving distinctions, and reversing the order of priority. It seems almost designed to violate each one of these philosophical theses. Born as a naturalistic program, it must necessarily focus on its own subject matter, the social basis of knowledge making. With this starting point, it is committed to being first, anti-internalistic, and, then, antidichotomistic, antidemarcationistic, relativistic, and constructivist.

The strength of philosophers' reactions would still be reasonable today if philosophy of science had remained the same as it was some decades ago. In such a case, the integration of sociological and philosophical studies would appear quite unrealizable, given that it would require radical changes in some of the studies. But many changes have taken place, recently and independently, within philosophy itself. There exists, for example, a general philosophical consensus around naturalization and the interdisciplinarity of science studies, and the hard edges of dichotomies have been softened, and demarcation lines have faded. So one could expect a new receptivity towards SSK. But this has not happened.

The issue demanding an integration of SSK within the naturalized study of science (within a naturalization that philosophy itself has promoted) is not a question of mere disciplinary boundaries, nor of defending interdisciplinarity. SSK makes interesting proposals both about how studies of science must be approached and about what its working agenda must include. Yet, regarding the possible impact of all this on the global image of science an impact that sociologists have hurried to proclaim while philosophers have rejected it we have a question that can only reasonably be answered a posteriori, never a priori. It is a matter of better elaborations of theoretical arguments and better development of empirical investigations. And these elaborations and developments demand an intellectual climate that one could hardly say has existed before today. With this paper, I hope to have collaborated in the creation of such a climate.