comments:
A few things to note: I'm now quite a few years out of my unfinished dissertation, so I'm not necessarily up to date on the most recent of recent philosophy of science. That said, you didn't see that much discussion of social construction, as such, in the literature that I recall. There was quiet a lot written by contemporaries of Hacking on the "social nature" of science and knowledge, taken in very different ways. I'm thinking here of stuff like Philip Kitcher's "Science, Truth, and Democracy" and Helen Longino's Science as Social Knowledge and The Fate of Knowledge, as well as pretty much any feminist epistemology or philosophy of science in general. Those are some of the big name bits though, and they are largely responding to or in conversation with (explicitly in Longino's case) then recent trends in History of Science, Sociology of Science, and Science & Technology Studies. The non-philosophers from those disciplines, I think, talk a bit more straighforwardly about social construction than philosophers typically do. Laboratory LIfe by Latour and Woogar is a seminal example and foundational to sociology of science. (It's subtitle is "The Social Construction of Scientific Facts".) Other things in that general conversation though are (maybe less obviously) Hasok Chang's Inventing Temperature, the work of David Bloor and Henry Barnes and their "Strong Programme" in Sociology of Science, and Harry Collins who worked in similar areas and then turned towards studying something like the social construction of Expertise, even if not set out in exactly those terms. I think maybe the reason it hasn't been discussed quite so much in more recent philosophy is that, disagreement about some of their specific theses aside, it's generally accepted now that these folks were basically right. So, the "Social Turn" in philosophy of science from the end of the 20th century sort of gave way to the "Practice Turn" in the early 21st century, where folks tended to start looking more closely at science as it is actually practiced and to theorizing about practices (the social doings that construct all our social constructions) rather than talking much more about whether science or its facts are socially constructed. Edited to add that the Social Turn and Practice turn aren't necessarily really distinct, but that sort of sequencing is a good story about the direction of research. In terms of theorizing about practices Joseph Rouse's book How Scientific Practices Matter was a really great. And you can probably find a lot of interesting stuff just by google scholar searches involving "The Social Turn" or "The Practice Turn" and "Philosophy of Science". Edited again to add that you can also see elements of the social construction discussion leading into the more contemporary discussions of the nature and role of values in science. Once you recognize science as this socially mediated practice and its facts/knowledge as socially constructed, there are a lot of questions about how our values do and should fit in there. Big names here are Heather Douglas and Kevin Elliot, but its a pretty active area of research (or at least was 5 or so years ago).