Bourdieu and the “Sociology of Scientific Knowledge”

In this article I try to demonstrate the contradictory nature of Boudieu’s sociology of science. Bourdieu’s intention is to reconcile the sociological description of science with a normative one, which is not possible in his framework. Although Bourdieu acknowledges the coming about and functioning of „truth” and science as historical and context-dependent, he thinks nevertheless that neither of them are relative, but rational. Furthermore, he asserts that the external conditions, which constitute a properly understood scientific field are equally the conditions of rationality and of „supra-historical scientific truth”. However, Bourdieu adopts a conception of rationality that we could call „procedural”, from which a realist standpoint concerning scientific results (which I attribute to Bourdieu) cannot be deduced. For these reasons, it could be said that Bourdieu’s sociology of science is a step backwards to early sociology of knowledge, which did not deal sociologically with scientific results, only with the context of the scientific enterprise.