Is Science a Social Construct?

BIBLIOGRAPHY IS PINNED TO THE TOP OF THE COMMENTS SECTION.

The New Lysenkoists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k-kEhVBdnY

The Science Wars:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL969utfM58zhc8Xzo2byAjZkWlTQWUTYc
In this video, we’ll be reviewing, in some detail, what it is that social constructionists believe about science, and why you should be skeptical of their claims. Along the way, we’ll learn a bit about the philosophy of science and how it all works.
All networks were generated with MATLAB and were subsequently altered in MS Paint.

This was an extraordinarily difficult video to make, having been released a full two months after I’d intended to finish it. So please show some love and pass this around far and wide. It also wouldn’t hurt if you’d @neildegrassetyson about this video on Twitter ;)

[Note 1] This is why I disagree with the notion of incommensurability; it implies that old paradigms are incomprehensible in terms of the new ones, which I disagree with. Were that the case, however, one could reasonably argue (as some, like Feyerabend, did) that there is no such thing as scientific progress; we don’t really discover anything, but only find new ways to describe things.
Needless to say, I think that this is nonsense, and the superior predictive power of new paradigms, coupled to their ability to explain everything that the old paradigms could explain, is very strong evidence that scientific progress is NOT an illusion and (slightly more controversially) that scientific constructs do indeed represent something external to our minds.

In any event, here are a couple of links which demonstrate the derivations alluded to in the video:

From Einstein’s Field Equation to Poisson’s Equation for Gravity:
https://www.zweigmedia.com/diff_geom/Sec14.html

From the Schrodinger Equation to Newton’s 2nd Law:
www.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DOfg4tDmyVvM&usg=AOvVaw164vv0JzbXvLirV_JeuOU1

[Note 2] There is no dispute over whether social values have some influence over which sciences are pursued, and to what extent they are funded. The dispute is over whether there exist values and/or interests that are unique to particular demographics, which then play a role in theory selection and/or construction. That scientific theories are constructed is not what is presently under dispute; the question is whether they are constructed from facts in order to maximize their predictive power, or whether they are SOCIALLY constructed from both facts AND socially-specific values for the purpose of legitimating the social perspectives associated with those values.

[Note 3] This is called a Motte and Bailey. It’s a specific type of bait-and-switch style of argumentation that is endemic to social constructionists. I advise you to familiarize yourself with it:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

[Note 4] “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”
-Karl Marx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theses_on_Feuerbach

[Note 5] This webpage abuses the work of Kuhn in the exact same manner that social constructionists do; reading through it shall no doubt prove illuminating.
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1160

FURTHER READING:
http://sociology.iresearchnet.com/sociology-of-science/social-construction-of-science/

ERRATA
1) Footnote [51] is accidentally listed twice. The second one corresponds to footnote [52] in the bibliography.
2) Bruno Latour is mispronounced here as "Bruno Latoy." It is actually pronounced the way it's spelled.
3) In addition to the 3 proposed operational criteria (predictive accuracy, explanatory efficiency, and optimal flexibility) for aiding in the decision between competing underdetermined models, I would like to amend it with a fourth, long-overdue criterion: rational coherence, which is defined here as that property whereby the propositions which constitute a theory do not contradict one another.
4) (to be added if additional revisions are warranted)

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Видео Is Science a Social Construct? канала King Crocoduck