Identitatea disciplinară a sociologiei ştiinţei în lucrările lui Robert K. Merton
The disciplinary identity of the sociology of science in the works of Robert K. Merton

Summary/Abstract: As a minimal research programme, sociology of science was outlined in Robert Merton’s Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century, England, a historical study about the relation between the development of science and society, one of the first steps towards the so called external history of science. In a period of time when science was described as a realm of objectivity and epistemologists claims that social conditions have only a bad influence upon the content of theories because they can generate errors, Merton argued that the development of science is determined by the social context and that science itself is a social institution. In this article I argue that Merton has given a disciplinary identity to the sociology of science and that, in the same time, he used in sociology, at least implicitly, as presuppositions, some epistemological views about science.

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