Field Theory as a Vehicular Theory of Science

The huge literature in philosophy and sociology of science during the last four decades amply attests that no conclusive proof or disproof of a scientific theory is possible and science is therefore subject to the social and political influences as any other cultural practices. Pierre Bourdieu has been no exception and argues that scientific practice, if it is to be understood properly, must be subject to a thoroughgoing sociological analysis. In this article, I shall be concerned with showing that Bourdieu’s sociology of science chimes with the post-positivist philosophy of science propagated largely through the writings of Kuhn, Hesse, Toulmin and others in that it stresses the “embodied” rather than disembodied and transcendental nature of scientific knowledge. By clarifying the ways in which scientific knowledge is affected by the social characteristics of the vehicle in which it is embodied, I shall show how Bourdieu makes a dialectical synthesis of the relativist and the positivist view of scientific practice through his field theory of science. To support the above arguments, I shall make use of a historicalsociological study of scientific change that best illustrates Bourdieu’s approach to scientific practice.