ABSTRACT

The thesis of the primacy of the social involves two interwoven research directives. They include to find the social in and as those technical details and, to rediscover the social, interactional settings of proving, physical experimentation, and playing checkers as the primordial and sustaining grounds of mathematics, physics, and checkers. Although the topics of disciplinary sociology seem to concern social phenomena, what "the social" actually is always lies on the horizon of disciplinary sociological research. For a sociology of the witnessable order to make any sense, it must begin and end with the observable work of the ordinary society. For sociologists of the hidden social order, the difficulty of such descriptions of social action and reasoning doesn't lie in the fact that the phenomena being described aren't intrinsically social. The sociology of science and, particularly, constructionist versions of the sociology of scientific knowledge provide a dramatic illustration.