A plague on both your houses: Beyond recidivism in the sociological theory debates.

The author enter this most recent round of the debate over the status of sociological theory as a philosopher of science who practices social epistemology which is the normative wing of the emerging interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS). STS can offer a distinctive slant on this debate by functioning as a reflexive sociology of science. Social epistemology then focuses the characteristic findings of STS into a self-imposed normative challenge. Positivists want sociological theory to look like Newtonian mechanics, with the most disparate phenomena explained by the fewest principles and some well-specified boundary conditions. Most positivists, especially positivist Gerhard Lenski, believe that the Newtonian turn would be a discipline, strengthening move precisely because it would put sociology on a more secure scientific footing. A positivistically unified social science would call into question the need for a distinct science of sociology. Positivist Joseph M. Bryant himself realizes as much, and consequently he casts himself as protecting sociology from scientific incursions, or, as he gingerly puts it, "the analytic procedures of alien disciplines." A unified social science would probably undermine the autonomy of sociology by showing that the explanatory concepts on which sociologists have traditionally drawn apply only to a limited range of phenomena, corresponding ever so neatly with sociologists' favorite topics of empirical inquiry.