Tilting at Imaginary Windmills: A Comment on Tyfield

Abstract

in the inaugural issue of the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, David Tyfield (2008) used some recent discussions about "meaning finitism" to conclude that the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is an intellectually hopeless basis on which to erect an intelligible study of science. In contrast, the authors show that Tyfield's argument rests on some profound misunderstandings of the sociology of scientific knowledge. They show that his mischaracterization of SSK is in fact systematic and is based on lines of argument that themselves are at best incoherent.