Over the past twenty years, the domi-nant trend in science studies has been to emphasize the social dimensions of science: that research is performed in socially organized settings, that individual initiative and curiosity are focused and mediated by the concerns of the sponsors and consumers of scientific work, and that scientific claims are established as scientific knowledge through socially constituted processes of negotiation and consensus. This has been a useful corrective to earlier work in philosophy of science, which had produced a falsely individualistic and idealized view of scientific practices and the establish-ment of scientific knowledge.
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