In the last thirty years, the idea of scientific community
has gone from a convenient sociological label for those who happen to practice or are interested
in science, having now an almost definitional status: the claim that science is the scientific
community, no more or less, is deeply philosophical and historical. The strongest expression of
this late modern understanding of science is the scholarship of social constructivism, which first
emerged about thirty years ago as an explicit and integrated research program, and which has
developed today into a still-controversial but firmly entrenched approach to understanding what
science is and how it is done.