Abstract

Philosophers of science have often noted that naturalism in science arose out of the struggle to free science or natural philosophy from its origin within a religious understanding of the world. The point of naturalism is to replace philosophical speculation with empirical research, and thus to use science to carry out philosophical work. Simultaneous with the rise of naturalism in the philosophy of science was an awareness and broader recognition of the influence of society on scientific inquiry. This chapter will examine the tension between naturalism and the tenets of the sociology of science – that is, the cultural view of science, which is partly if not wholly antinaturalist – in order to determine to what extent, if any, the two are compatible.