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The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

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If you want a book the explores the radical implications of the paradoxes of self-reference for the social production of scientific knowledge, look no further. Ashmore's work is funny, infuriating, deep and unyielding in it's exploration of some of the fundamental dilemmas involved in investigating scientific knowledge with--scientific tools. While it is a substantive critique of the philosophical questions of realism and relativism, Ashmore takes great care to use the critique to open a "conceptual space", as it were, beyond the tired juxtapositions of realism/idealism and absolutism/relativism, all the while making critical comments on just what is wrong and right in attempting to look at both the history and historiography of science and epistemology in post-Kuhnian ways. At the same time, he nests the various themes of the book inside one another like Russian dolls and/or Onions, never passing up the opportunity to explore self-reflexiveness in all it's richness. Realists have yet to come up with an adequate rejoinder to Ashmore's exploratory work on meta-epistemology. If you're fascinated by self-reference in all it's guises, this is a must read.