My strategy to cast some light on the controversy between philosophers and sociologists consists of reconstructing some of the basic ideas stressed by SSK, with the aim of comparing both metascientific programs: the sociological and the philosophical. I intend to show that a major point of confrontation, in the first place, has to do, not with what they say about science, but rather with what they say about the proper way to study science: the aim of science studies; what to prioritize to reach this goal; what path to follow, what to avoid; what its analytical tools are and what its working agenda is.

Sociological Naturalization

As Giere (1988) acknowledges, SSK presents itself from the beginning, not only implicitly but militantly, as a naturalistic program.20 SoBloor (1991) claims: "The sociologist is concerned with knowledge, including scientific knowledge, purely as a natural phenomenon." His concern must be, then, the identification of the regularities and general principles that govern the field of cognitive phenomena, and, consequently with his naturalistic commitment, he will use the same causal language used in the research of other fields of natural phenomena.21 This is, precisely, the content of the first principle of Bloor's program: the principle of causality.22 Since causal accounts of knowledge have achieved philosophical status, thanks to the naturalization of epistemology, the interesting point here is to identify what differentiates sociological from philosophical naturalization. Thanks to the latter, epistemology "without a knowing subject" became the epistemology whose philosophical thesis relies on the sciences whose subject matter is precisely the cognitive subject, namely, cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology.

Now, with SSK, sociology wants to enter the scene. It would incorporate the study of the "social" dimension of knowledge. Yet the problem of understanding what, precisely, its contribution would be resides in the ambiguity of the term "social."23 A first clarification comes from regarding it as referring to the fact that the unity of knowledge making i.e., its genesis, evaluation, transmission and change is not the work of the isolated individual, but a collective activity. Science would be, then, an enterprise and knowing an activity collective by nature. So Bloor (1991) asks: "How much of man's knowledge, and how much of his science is built up by the individual relying simply on the interaction of the world with his animal capacities?" In his view: "Probably very little."

But this view is not now among the most prevalent. Indeed, the most widely accepted tradition concerning epistemological matters is whatBloor calls "individualistic empiricism," and Barnes calls "individualistic rationalism." In the conclusion of Shapin's (1982) well-known paper, he claims that historians of ideas routinely study knowledge as a base of cultural change, and they acknowledge that cultural heritage is socially transmitted; yet, he complains, "Many historians of ideas still treat contributions to culture as if they were generated in vacuo by atomistic individuals, and some of them continue to view the source of cultural material of science as a matter of moral concerns."25 Collins'swork relies on case studies in which the collective making of scientific consensus is the key point. As in the case of so-called laboratory studies, the key point of the collective making of scientific facts and literature is given such importance as to be the first of the six principles that summarize the approach (Latour, 1987).

It would, of course, be a very deflationist approach to reduce the meaning of "social" to "collective making." Yet it is an interesting starting point for the understanding of what the meaning and specific contribution of sociological naturalization would be. For if it is true that cognitive activity is constitutively and interestingly social in the above mentioned sense then SSK would focus on something largely neglected in epistemology. So SSK would complement naturalized epistemology by claiming that the investigation of the nature of scientific knowledge can be reduced neither to that of the cognitive capacities of individuals nor to their evolutionary history. It turns out that humans would also be social beings, also have a cultural history, which would also determine the nature of their behavior including their cognitive behavior. In this way, SSK would open the agenda of science studies to a series of new issues neglected until now. Now if science is an enterprise and knowing an activity collective by nature, it would be reasonable to integrate sociology within the interdisciplinary field that is now the study of science promoted by philosophy itself as, in fact happened first with history of science, and later with psychology and biology. But why did this not happen? Why has there been no affirmative answer to SSK's call for "a naturalist understanding of knowledge in which sociology plays a role?"26 The answer to this question leads to the first of a series of distinctions and dichotomies that have marked our philosophical culture about science; these, in turn, could be an important part of the reason behind the misunderstanding and resistance towards SSK.