On the role of personal epistemology in the study of Science, Technology and Society

ABSTRACT : The study of the social influence on the scientific praxis is an important branch of social sciences. This branch, however, has focused mostly on large scale phenomena or otherwise individual ethics. In this work we propose a way to approach this topic from individual psychological constructs using the cognitiveframe of personal epistemology. In particular, we show that the insertion of psychological variables to account for the self-control over personal epistemology is a useful tool facing the modern tendencies of the scientific work. The pertinence of this approach for a complete analysis of the science agents is discussed in several perspectives. We recall that, even when socio-scientific dynamics is not reducible to its constituents, it is precisely within the individuals that many important clues can be found to understend complex collective
behaviors.
KEYWORDS : Personal epistemology, interdisciplinary research, cognitive processes, social sciences