A New Way of Thinking about Social Location in Science

The Durkheimian concept of the density of social relationships may prove more fruitful than the historical materialist notion of a social hierarchy for thinking about the social location of epistemic agents in science. To define a scientist’s social location in terms of the density of her professional relationships with other scientists permits us to give a more precise characterization of marginalization and thus to formulate more testable hypotheses about marginalized groups in science. The notion of social density helps to explain not only how some individual scientists are more likely than others to get a hearing for their ideas, but also how scientific inquiry flourishes more in some societies than in others.

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Warren SchmausEmail:

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Warren Schmaus   is Professor of Philosophy at Illinois Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, and he is the author of Rethinking Durkheim and His Tradition (Cambridge, 2004) and Durkheim’s Philosophy of Science and the Sociology of Knowledge (Chicago, 1994). He received his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh.