The phrase "science studies" is sometimes used as an umbrella term referring to work in history of science, philosophy of science, research ethics, and so on. But it can also designate a new interdisciplinary approach to the study of science, technology, and society, one that challenges traditional views about the epistemic basis of scientific knowledge and the proper role of science in society. It is this intellectual movement called Science and Technology Studies (STS) that will be discussed here.

Science Studies in the STS sense discards almost all of the distinctions common in traditional philosophy of science, such as the demarcation between the context of discovery and the context of justification, prescriptions versus descriptions, and theory versus observation. Instead, it looks at science as a social activity that cannot be usefully understood in isolation from either technology or society at large. More important than analysis is...