---
title: "Steve Fuller (sociologist)"
chunk: 1/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fuller_(sociologist)"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:26.979527+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Steve William Fuller (born July 12, 1959) is an American social philosopher and philosopher of science in the field of science and technology studies. He is the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. He served as the president of the British Science Association's sociology division from 2008 to 2009. He has published in the areas of social epistemology, academic freedom, and in support of intelligent design and transhumanism.

== Early life and education ==
Fuller was born on July 12, 1959, in New York City. He attended Regis High School in Manhattan. After high school, Fuller graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University with a B.A. in history and sociology in 1979. As an undergraduate at Columbia College, he was a John Jay Scholar.
After graduation, Fuller was awarded a Kellett Fellowship to complete graduate studies in England at the University of Cambridge, where he earned an  M.Phil. in the history of science and philosophy of science in 1981. He then earned his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985, where he was an Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow. Fuller's doctoral dissertation, "Bounded Rationality in Law and Science", explored the implications of the views of Herbert A. Simon for political theory and philosophy of science.

== Career ==
Fuller held assistant and associate professorships at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Virginia Tech and the University of Pittsburgh. In 1994, he was appointed to the chair in sociology and social policy at the University of Durham, England. He moved in 1999 to the University of Warwick, England. In July 2007 Fuller was awarded a D. Litt. by Warwick in recognition of "published work or papers which demonstrate a high standard of important original work forming a major contribution to a subject". In 2008, Fuller served as President of the Sociology section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In that capacity, he staged a play, "Lincoln and Darwin—Live for One Night Only!", at the BA's annual Festival of Science in Liverpool. The play was later produced as a podcast in Australia.
Fuller has been a visiting professor in Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden (where he held a Fulbright Professorship in 1995 at Gothenburg University), and the United States (UCLA).
In 2010, Fuller became a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas. In 2011, the University of Warwick appointed him to the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology. In 2011, Fuller was appointed a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. In 2012, he was appointed to an Honorary Professorship at Dalian University of Technology, China. In 2012, he was made a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Division I (Humanities).

== Work ==
Fuller is most closely associated with social epistemology as an interdisciplinary research program. Social epistemology is a normative discipline that addresses philosophical problems of knowledge using the tools of history and the social sciences. Fuller founded the first journal (1987) and wrote the first book (1988) devoted to this topic. The most obvious feature of Fuller's approach, already present in his 1988 book, is that he rejects out of hand the Cartesian problem of skepticism.
Along with 21 books, Fuller has written 65 book chapters, 155 academic articles and many minor pieces. He has given many distinguished lectures and plenary addresses, and has presented to academic and non-academic audiences throughout the world, including over 100 media interviews. His works have been translated into fifteen languages. 23 academic symposia have been published on his work. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1994, the year he organized a conference in Durham on "Science's Social Standing".
Since moving to the UK, Fuller has increasingly oriented himself towards public intellectual expression, including television, radio and internet, which he interprets as a natural outgrowth of his version of social epistemology. Two of his books have been recognized in this regard. Kuhn vs. Popper was Book of the Month for February 2005 in the US mass circulation magazine, Popular Science. However, Rupert Read wrote: "I did not have to read far into this book in order to conclude that it is worthless. ... In sum: this book offers only a cartoon opposition of a fake 'Popper' to a fake 'Kuhn.'" Fuller responded, coining the word "Kuhnenstein" (Kuhn + Wittgenstein) to capture Read's view of Kuhn, which Fuller calls a "figment of Read's – and other's – fertile imagination." The Intellectual was selected as a Book of the Year in 2005 by the UK liberal-left magazine, New Statesman. He periodically contributes a column to the Project Syndicate, associated with George Soros' Open Society project, which appears in several languages in newspapers across the world. In 2006 he also taught a course on the epistemology of journalism at an international summer school at the University of Lund, Sweden.

=== Academic freedom ===
Fuller believes (modeled on what he takes to be the German model) that academic freedom is a freedom reserved for academics, not a special case of freedom of speech. This includes the right to "cause reasoned offence", if within the terms of reason and evidence appropriate to the academic profession. He believes it important for academics to be able to express intellectual opinions for further debate which can result in progress. He also argues that students are equally entitled to academic freedom.