Owens B Robert
J Hist Behav Sci. 2014 Summer;50(3):302-20. doi: 10.1002/jhbs.21667. Epub 2014 Jun 9.
This paper examines one aspect of early twentieth century debates over the meaning of scientific methodology and epistemology within the social sciences: the tendency of sociologists to invoke "laboratory" as a multivalent concept and in reference to diverse institutions and sites of exploration. The aspiration to designate or create laboratories as spaces of sociological knowledge production was broadly unifying in early American sociology (1890-1930), even though there was no general agreement about what "laboratory" meant, nor any explicit acknowledgment of that lack of consensus. The persistence of laboratory talk in sociology over decades reflects the power of "laboratory" as a productively ambiguous, legitimizing ideal for sociologists aspiring to make their discipline rigorously scientific.
本文探讨了20世纪初社会科学领域关于科学方法论和认识论意义的争论的一个方面：社会学家倾向于将“实验室”作为一个多义概念，并将其用于指代各种不同的探索机构和场所。在美国早期社会学（1890 - 1930年）中，将实验室指定或创建为社会学知识生产空间的愿望具有广泛的统一性，尽管对于“实验室”的含义没有达成普遍共识，也没有对这种缺乏共识的情况有任何明确承认。几十年来社会学中关于实验室的讨论持续存在，这反映了“实验室”作为一种对渴望使本学科严格科学化的社会学家来说具有生产性模糊性且能赋予合法性的理想的力量。
