The Case for an Explicit Normativity in Social Studies of Science and Belief: Lessons from STS

Scholars in the emerging field of social studies of science and belief (SSSB) have been reluctant to make explicit normative claims about how science, belief, and society should interact. This is despite the fact that scholarship in this emerging field has implicit normative commitments embedded within it. Resistance to making explicit normative commitments may be justified on methodological grounds. However, failure to foreground the normativity in SSSB scholarship allows for those beyond the field to impute normative motivations which may not accurately characterise the field, whilst also potentially ceding the floor to un-reflexive and less pro-social voices to set the normative agenda. This chapter will therefore set out the case for more explicit normativity in SSSB. By setting out a disciplinary history of the more established Science and Technology Studies (STS), and demonstrating the central role normativity has played in the development of the discipline, I will demonstrate how and why it would be beneficial both within SSSB, and to society more broadly, for social studies of science and belief scholars to delineate more explicitly their normative stance in their work. That is, a stance which allows us to describe how we believe relations between science, belief, and society should be arranged.