At the most general level, Professor Shapin's project is a naturalistic inquiry into the grounds of credibility in science. It has, therefore, a general philosophical question at its core. But unlike most philosophical projects, it addresses the problem of credibility from the perspectives of the sociology of knowledge, work and organizations, and it uses detailed materials from a particular historical setting: the culture of observational and experimental natural science in seventeenth century England. Professor Shapin intends to display in his study the small-scale processes by which judgments of the truth or falsity of claims about the natural world were rendered. In the course of the inquiry, he argues for the irreducible role of trust and authority in the constitution of scientific knowledge and he advances a case for viewing knowledge and social order as produced together.
