What is actually found to be true can play an important role in understand past attempts. Imagine one sends a group of ships on exploration with each ship given a partial and inaccurate map. One can use an accurate map (along with the ship maps) to understand how the various ships meet difficulties and have to change course(not finding expected land in the inaccurate map). Sociology of the decisions in the ships would be incomplete without an accurate map as success/failure affects the social process in the ship and this success depends on accuracy of ship map as well as the social forces (like two conflicting groups in the ship, some who want to get gold, some who are more inclined towards safety).
See an old article posted here on discovery of an explanation for scurvy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174912. Note that a correct explanation can help us to understand the partial success of past theories and also why they dont work fully. It is also important to understand the dynamics of the social groups and who is more likely to succeed.
Your link is a good post, but "does deny" is too strong, a better expression of the attitude is "bracketing/setting-aside the issue itself and studying the social processes involved in both sides of the argument, how it influences which arguments are accepted". Note that scientists and programmers often make these types of arguments as well. For instance, a scientist can say that funding committees are biased as they represent the old guard. "Worse is Better" is an argument which uses sociology kind of arguments to explain popularity of programming languages, though a sociologist probably wouldn't get into objective assessments like the popular languages are worse.
BTW, I dont agree with the main post that philosophy is bunk. Also, I think that there is construction in science, but one has to be clear at what level the construction happens. There are strong internal constraints which dont allow one to arbitarily use a different Periodic Table for instance.
See an old article posted here on discovery of an explanation for scurvy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174912. Note that a correct explanation can help us to understand the partial success of past theories and also why they dont work fully. It is also important to understand the dynamics of the social groups and who is more likely to succeed.
Your link is a good post, but "does deny" is too strong, a better expression of the attitude is "bracketing/setting-aside the issue itself and studying the social processes involved in both sides of the argument, how it influences which arguments are accepted". Note that scientists and programmers often make these types of arguments as well. For instance, a scientist can say that funding committees are biased as they represent the old guard. "Worse is Better" is an argument which uses sociology kind of arguments to explain popularity of programming languages, though a sociologist probably wouldn't get into objective assessments like the popular languages are worse.
BTW, I dont agree with the main post that philosophy is bunk. Also, I think that there is construction in science, but one has to be clear at what level the construction happens. There are strong internal constraints which dont allow one to arbitarily use a different Periodic Table for instance.