Those sorts of assumptions that we make about the pursuit of science, certainly in the physical sciences, comes from this idea of getting into the mind of God.

In a world that's increasingly shaped by science and technology, how do we actually determine what constitutes truth? In this episode with a renowned colleague and friend, Steve Fuller, we're going to engage in a thought provoking conversation. He's a sociologist of science who challenges conventional wisdom, who invites us to critically examine the complex interplay between science, society, and the pursuit of knowledge. And he's fearless. Steve, how are you, my friend?

I'm doing fine, Brian. Thanks for having me on.

So today we're going to talk about a lot of things, but I think more than anything, my audience will probably be unfamiliar with your research. So I would say first, what you should do is what. We usually judge books by their covers. You've written books, but we're not going to discuss them necessarily in great detail today. But we are going to talk about the kind of connections that you've had in science policy and social and legal policy. And I wonder if you could just give us your origin story. As a cosmologist, I'm always fascinated by origin stories. So start with that.

What is your origin story? How'd you get to where you are? Because you don't have a British accent and yet you've been ensconced in British luxury for years now. So take it away, Steve. Introduce yourself to the audience of the into the Impossible podcast.

Okay, well, first of all, my name is Steve Fuller. I was born in New York City and I went to this Jesuit high school, which in a way, kind of, in a sense, set me on the path that I'm in, because I realized that having access to the best minds is actually the most important way to exercise power in society. And so that set me on the track to be an academic. And one of the things that's kind of interesting is the commencement speaker of my high school graduating class was none other than Anthony Fauci, who's also a graduate of my high school.

Wow.

Yeah. This is like 1976. He was already chief medical examiner in New York. But in any case, I went to Columbia University on scholarship one year early and I graduated one year early, and I got a fellowship to go to Cambridge, which is where I did my master's degree. But my undergraduate degree was in history and sociology. My master's degree and my PhD are both in history and philosophy of science. After Cambridge, I came back to America, did my PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, which is probably the leading place in the history and philosophy of science in the United States. And then I started on this academic career that I'm on.

In 1994 I was offered a chair in sociology at the University of Durham in the uk and that's when I moved to the uk. What turned out to be permanently, it wasn't intended to be that way, but that's how it's turned out to be over the last 30 years. So, years. So that, that and what I'm known for, I'm known for lots of things, often notorious for a lot of things. And I'm sure some of this is going to come up in the conversation. But the thing that I guess I'm most known for is, is this idea of social epistemology. And I wrote the first book and I founded the journal by that name in 1987, so, and it's still in existence today. And social epistemology is simply the study of the social foundations of knowledge, which sounds like a pretty straightforward thing, but it, it has at least two aspects to it.

One of them has to do with how knowledge is actually produced in a social setting because the kind, you know, the kind of knowledge that, that we generally consider the most important, the one that authorizes things in society, is socially created. And we think about science and the academic disciplines as being the primary sites in which social knowledge in that sense is created. And that's kind of where my own interest be, comes, comes from and why I've been so active in various debates having to do with the nature of science and society. And epistemology is the theory of knowledge generally. And the theory of knowledge, however, isn't just about how science is actually produced or how knowledge is actually produced, but it's also about how knowledge ought to be produced. And of course, as the demands and the constituents of society change, the nature of knowledge itself changes. And, and, and that is a, you know, a very interesting and controversial sort of topic, but it's one that I think is quite familiar to anyone who' science policy or education policy or anything of that kind. And social epistemology is very much, you might say, the meta theory of all of that stuff.

And so in a nutshell, that's kind of my starting point. So it's history, philosophy, sociology of science leading to this field of social epistemology, which is what I consider myself practicing these days.