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John Ziman's great contribution to sociology of science is the establishment of a serious, working physicist's view of science as a collective enterprise. Fleck, according to Ziman, objects to "complete inadequacy of epistemologi-cal individualism". Ziman recognizes in Fleck a kindred spirit. Fleck, like Ziman himself, was a distinguished and creative scientist and they both belong "to 'science" and 'society" as an active person". But for Ziman these two worlds of science and society are kept apart. Not only does Ziman accept the external/internal dichotomy of studying the scientific process but he even makes use of the sophisticated notion of internal against external sociology of the scientific community. The Mertonian norms of communalism, univer-salism, disinterestedness and organized scepticism are thus internal sociology. The external sociology of science deals with the "actual change in the social relations of the scientist within and outside science". This is the central theme of Ziman's paper; and is, according to Ziman, also Fleck's main preoccupation. We learn much about the constraints that organized research imposes on the autonomy of science as regards problem-choice, methods, career-course, and validation. It is convincingly shown that conventional academic science and scientific ideology clash with the collectivized science of the 1980's and the normative penumbra of what Ziman brings before us is that since the science of the 1980's has brought with it great progress, there is not that much wrong with it, and we must study its departure from its earlier course, and tune ourselves to its new character: in other words conservative modernism has the imprimatur of a leading physicist.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-4498-5_16

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