Steven Shapin

Steven Shapin (born 1943) is an American historian and sociologist of science. He is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is considered one of the earliest scholars on the sociology of scientific knowledge, and is credited with creating new approaches. He has won many awards, including the 2014 George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society for career contributions to the field.

Career
Shapin was trained as a biologist at Reed College and did graduate work in genetics at the University of Wisconsin before taking a Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.

From 1972 to 1989, he was Lecturer, then Reader, at the Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh, and, from 1989 to 2003, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, before taking up an appointment at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. He has taught for brief periods at Columbia University, Tel-Aviv University, and at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. In 2012, he was the S. T. Lee Visiting Professorial Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

He has written broadly on the history and sociology of science. Among his concerns are scientists, their ethical choices, and the basis of scientific credibility. He revisioned the role of experiment by examining where experiments took place and who performed them. He is credited with restructuring the field's approach to “big issues” in science such as truth, trust, scientific identity, and moral authority.

""The practice of science, both conceptually and instrumentally, is seen to be full of social assumptions. Crucial to their work is the idea that science is based on the public's faith in it. This is why it is important to keep explaining how sound knowledge is generated, how the process works, who takes part in the process and how.""

His books on 17th-century science include the "classic book" Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985, with Simon Schaffer); his "path-breaking book" A Social History of Truth (1994), The Scientific Revolution (1996, now translated into 18 languages), and, on modern entrepreneurial science, The Scientific Life (2008). A collection of his essays is Never Pure (2010). His current research interests include the history of dietetics and the history and sociology of taste and subjective judgment, especially in relation to food and wine.

He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and he has written for Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker.

Awards
His honors include the John Desmond Bernal Prize (2001) and the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science (1996), the Robert K. Merton Prize of the American Sociological Association, the Herbert Dingle Prize of the British Society for the History of Science (1999), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979), the Derek Price Prize of the History of Science Society (1990), a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1996–97), and, with Simon Schaffer, the Erasmus Prize (2005). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014, he received the George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society for career contributions to the field. In 2020 he was nominated to be a fellow at Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.