---
title: "Science studies"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:09.263367+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Science studies  is an interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts. It uses various methods to analyze the production, representation and reception of scientific knowledge and its epistemic and semiotic role.
Similarly to cultural studies, science studies are defined by the subject of their research and encompass a large range of different theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. The interdisciplinary approach may include and borrow methods from the humanities, natural and formal sciences, from scientometrics to ethnomethodology or cognitive science. 
Science studies have a certain importance for evaluation and science policy. Overlapping with the field of science, technology and society, practitioners study the relationship between science and technology, and the interaction of expert and lay knowledge in the public realm.

== Scope ==
The field started with a tendency toward navel-gazing: it was extremely self-conscious in its genesis and applications. From early concerns with scientific discourse, practitioners soon started to deal with the relation of scientific expertise to politics and lay people. Practical examples include bioethics, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), pollution, global warming, biomedical sciences, physical sciences, natural hazard predictions, the (alleged) impact of the Chernobyl disaster in the UK, generation and review of science policy and risk governance and its historical and geographic contexts. While staying a discipline with multiple metanarratives, the fundamental concern is about the role of the perceived expert in providing governments and local authorities with information from which they can make decisions.
The approach poses various important questions about what makes an expert and how experts and their authority are to be distinguished from the lay population and interacts with the values and policy making process in liberal democratic societies.
Practitioners examine the forces within and through which scientists investigate specific phenomena such as

technological milieus, epistemic instruments and cultures and laboratory life (compare Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger)
science and technology (e.g. Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Thomas P. Hughes)
science, technology and society (e.g. Peter Weingart, Ulrike Felt, Helga Nowotny and Reiner Grundmann)
language and  rhetoric of science (e.g. Charles Bazerman, Alan G. Gross, Greg Myers)
aesthetics of science and visual culture in science (u.a. Peter Geimer), the role of aesthetic criteria in scientific practice (compare mathematical beauty) and the relation between emotion, cognition and rationality in the development of science.
semiotic studies of creative processes, as in the discovery, conceptualization, and realization of new ideas. or the interaction and management of different forms of knowledge in cooperative research.
large-scale research and research institutions, e.g. particle colliders (Sharon Traweek)
research ethics, science policy, and the role of the university.

== History of the field ==
In 1935, in a celebrated paper, the Polish sociologist couple Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski proposed the founding of a "science of science" to study the scientific enterprise, its practitioners, and the factors influencing their work. Earlier, in 1923, the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki had made a similar proposal. 
Fifty years before Znaniecki, in 1873, Aleksander Głowacki, better known in Poland by his pen name "Bolesław Prus", had delivered a public lecture – later published as a booklet – On Discoveries and Inventions, in which he said: