David Bloor

David Bloor is the director of the 'Science Studies Unit' at the University of Edinburgh (see Edinburgh School).

He started his academic career in philosophy and psychology. In the 1970s he and Barry Barnes were major figure of the strong programme, which put forward queries against scientific positivism. David Bloor's book Knowledge and Social Imagery (Routledge, 1976) is one of the key texts of the strong programme.

Bloor wrote extensively on the Kuhn/Popper debate, and is a representative figure of the sociology of scientific knowledge. In the 1980s when French scholars like Bruno Latour developed the actor-network theory (partially based on the strong programme), David Bloor strongly disagreed with the ANT camp when they argued that human and non-humans should be treated in an equivalent manner, going so far as to write an article entitled "Anti-Latour".

In the late 1990s David Bloor turned his interest to Wittgenstein's philosophy, and published Wittgenstein: rules and institutions (Routledge, 1997). Currently, he is Professor of Sociology of Science in the Science Studies Unit, Univ. of Edinburgh

Noteworthy Publications

 * Knowledge and Social Imagery (Routledge, 1976; 2nd edition Chicago University Press, 1991)
 * Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge (Macmillan and Columbia, 1983)
 * Wittgenstein: Rules and Institutions (Routledge, 1997).
 * "Sociology of Scientific Knowledge", in I. Niiniluoto, et al. (eds.) Handbook of Epistemology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), pp. 919-962.