Em busca da Sociologia não paroquial

Abstract

The article argues that the Wittgensteinian sociology of knowledge, which has been developed in the last thirty years, since Thomas Kuhn's seminal work, and has in such authors as David Bloor and Bruno Latour its main exponents, entails two untenable assumptions. First, that one can say something specially important about knowledge by investigating how people obtain (or fail to obtain) agreement on what one is justified in believing. Second, that the important thing regarding scientific theories is the fact that there are some people which are convinced of their validity. Such assumptions take one's attention away from the very important fact that scientific theories exhibit a trajectory in the course of time, which can be rationally reconstructed.