On the Inevitable Failure of Social Constructionism: The Transcendental Self-Contradiction of an Empty Concept

Abstract

The question of how sociality is related to the scientific conception of physical reality brings up a philosophical tension between the conception of science as an autonomous enterprise and the conception of science as one of the various cultural products of society. Basically, there have been two approaches in sociology of science to resolve this tension. On the one side, we encounter classical sociology of science, which defends the autonomy of science while denying any constitutive role to sociality in the formation of the content of scientific theories. On the other side, there is social constructionism, which criticizes traditional sociology of science and reduces the content of scientific theories simply to a function of social structures; to something which is caused, produced or realized directly by social phenomena. This paper aims to show that although social constructionism has a point in its critique of the classical conception of science, this point is never formulated and expressed in a sufficient conceptual rigor and clarity. It will be demonstrated that the basic concept of "social construction" as encountered in the key texts from social constructionism is actually an empty concept because it is transcendentally self-contradictory. Consequently, as the paper argues, the emptiness of the concept of construction leads to an inability in making a distinction between real cases of social construction -if there are any-and cases of politically coercive, brute social interference with science.