The “strong programme” and the crisis of science from the 1970s to the 1990s

The 1960s and 1970s were marked by a serious crisis of science. The pacifist, feminist, ecologist and decolonial movements questioned the emancipating power of knowledge. Scientists participated in this critique of science, questioning, in particular, its ideological porosity. The Science and Technology Studies that emerged concurrently were nourished by this contestation of science, but quickly abandoned the most salient political features of the critique. The “strong programme”, ushered in by the Edinburgh Science Studies Unit, aimed in particular at symmetrizing the explanations of true and false statements. If its main leaders discussed, in the 1970s, the relationship between science and ideology (thus testifying to their anchorage in the critical science movement), they soon abandoned this theme to concentrate on the defence of relativism, as a means of legitimizing a position that was more epistemological than political.