The Bath School and the Strong Programme

Collins, Harry ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2909-9035 2026. The Bath School and the Strong Programme. Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 63 (3) , pp. 22-32. 10.5840/eps202663337

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Abstract

I describe the origins of the ‘Bath School’ with its Empirical Programme of Relativism (EPOR) and its relationship to the Edinburgh Science Studies Unit and its Strong Programme. The Bath work arose independently and did not make contact with the Edinburgh Unit until around 1973. But it then benefitted enormously from the interaction. It is likely that without the Strong Program to ‘bounce off’ the Bath work would have remained an eccentric curiosity. Nevertheless, the two approaches remained different driven by a strong emphasis on empirical work at Bath, albeit set in a philosophical context, and, in the first instance, a more purely philosophy directed approach from Edinburgh. It is suggested that the apparently coincidental alignment of the approaches of the two groups arose because of the way British sociology had developed. The expansion of sociology in the 1960s drew heavily on the pioneering of the subject at the London School of Economics and that gave rise to a strong philosophical flavour in British sociology, not found in, say, the US. That is probably how both groups found themselves drawing on the later philosophy of Wittgenstein with his theory of meaning depending on use, with ‘forms of life’ being a precursor to Kuhnian paradigms. The differences between the two groups became less important as Latourian Actor/ant Network Theory came to dominate Science and Technology Studies followed by the determined democratisation of science associated with Jasanoff’s ‘coproduction’ idea, which brought ordinary citizens into the heartland of science. Neither Edinburgh nor Bath ever wanted to doubt the existence of elite scientific expertise even if they did remove science from its claims to certainty, allowing a modicum of social values into the truth finding process. The paper regrets the current state of STS, which appears to support a populism which makes science, not a continuation of politics by other means, but simply politics. The paper invites speculation about how things could have turned out differently.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education) Schools > School of Social and Spatial Sciences
Publisher:	Philosophy Documentation Center
ISSN:	1811-833X
Last Modified:	28 Oct 2026 15:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/190509

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