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AbstractSome significant insights in relation to science and its claims emerged in early sociology. However, sociologies of knowledge and science remained separate until the late 1960s. Questioning scientific knowledge raised questions about career interests, language, interaction, class and gender in shaping scientific claims. Offering insights, this new sociology tended towards 'epistemological polarisation'. New waves further distanced themselves from the validity claims of 'scientists'. Insulating within a self‐referential field of peers, journals, conferences and subdisciplinary norms, epistemological polarisation, emulated natural sciences, but had a marginalising effect. Attention to symmetry in the social study of scientific beliefs, such that social causation of belief is not said to invalidate such belief, was often ignored, and the sociology of scientific knowledge tended towards debunking. This article challenges this spiral and suggests a 'reflexive epistemological diversity' that recognises the value of many forms of explanation, promoting interaction between different explanations, at different levels of causation, and across the divide between natural and social sciences. Recent feminist science studies go furthest in developing this trend. In line with recent developments in the natural sciences, such an approach does not suggest that 'anything goes', yet opens up explanation beyond narrow conceptions of expertise, reductionism and relativism.

Abstract
Sociology is a science with specificities and which can potentially offer a more rigorous knowledge about reality. The goal of this position paper is, by means of a thorough literature review, to contribute to demonstrating the urgency of using a sociological stance in a more complete understanding of the social, as well as of Sociology itself as a science. It is concluded that Sociology, a multi-paradigmatic science, seeks to articulate macro-social dynamics with local processes, allowing to connect the subjective significances with the practices, and which focus on the articulations between systems and actors, between structures and practices, between the reality of the social conditions of existence, and the social construction of reality. As an implication, Sociology as a scientific representation and practice of the social, can be cumbersome by helping to dismantle commonly shared preconceived ideas about the instituted social order.

Originally published in 1974. Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory centres on the problem of explaining the manifest variety and contrast in the beliefs about nature held in different groups and societies. It maintains that the sociologist should treat all beliefs symmetrically and must investigate and account for allegedly ""correct"" or ""scientific"" beliefs just as he would ""incorrect"" or ""unscientific"" ones. From this basic position a study of scientific beliefs is constructed. The sociological interest of such beliefs is illustrated and a sociological perspec

Abstract
This paper critically revisits traditional perspectives on technology within academic and scientific writing
studies. It aims to comprehend the intricate, emerging, and dynamic sociotechnical configurations that underlie contemporary
scientific practices. These practices increasingly involve language, text, and literacy practices, seen as products of the
collaboration between humans and machines. The paper draws on empirical research on influential institutional metadiscourses in
high-impact scientific writing produced and/or disseminated by public universities and a research institute in the State of São
Paulo (Brazil), whose local policies of globalization are driven by international university rankings. I use a qualitative content
analysis approach grounded in socio-anthropological, socio-semiotic, and pragmatic studies of linguistic ideologies to shed light
on how ideological and socio-semiotic processes support the metapragmatics of scientific writing in university policy documents.
This metapragmatics is utterly alien to the role of performative sociotechnical infrastructures in the production, distribution,
and hierarchization of scientific texts. Additionally, these documents do not account for the diverse conditions and restrictions
that shape the production and circulation of academic knowledge in geopolitically marginal and equally diverse regions within the
country, including those within São Paulo.

This book discusses the question of whether legal interpretation is a scientific activity. The law's dependency on language, at least for the usual communication purposes, not only makes legal interpretation the main task performed by those whose work involves the law, but also an unavoidable step in the process of resolving a legal case. This task of decoding the words and sentences used by normative authorities while enacting norms, carried out in compliance with the principles and rules of the natural language adopted, is prone to all of the difficulties stemming from the uncertainty intrinsic to all linguistic conventions. In this context, seeking to determine whether legal interpretation can be scientific or, in other words, can comply with the requirements for scientific knowledge, becomes a central question. In fact, the coherent application of the law depends on a knowledge regarding the meaning of normative sentences that can be classified (at least) as being structured, systematically organized and tendentially objective. Accordingly, this book focuses on analyzing precisely these problems; its respective contributions offer a range of revealing perspectives on both the problems and their ramifications