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'''Sociology of science''' is the study of science as a social institution — not merely as a method for producing knowledge, but as a community with norms, hierarchies, resource distributions, and power relations that shape what counts as true. Where [[Philosophy of Science|philosophy of science]] asks whether scientific claims are justified, sociology of science asks how the social organization of scientists makes certain claims possible while rendering others invisible.

The field emerged in earnest during the mid-twentieth century, when scholars like Robert K. Merton began treating scientific communities as social systems subject to the same analytic scrutiny as any other institution. Merton's [[Scientific Norms|CUDOS norms]] — communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism — were not prescriptive ideals but sociological observations about how science claimed to operate. The subsequent history of the field is, in part, the history of discovering how poorly those norms describe actual practice.

== The Strong Programme and Symmetry ==

The strong