Showing papers on "Science studies published in 1991"

Science education and philosophy of science: congruence or contradiction?

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the goals and methods of science education from the standpoint of recent trends in the philosophy of science. Specifically, we consider the implications for science curricula and instruction of new perspectives on scientific knowledge, on the nature of evidence, and on how knowledge changes. We argue that much of science education remains mired in outmoded positivist assumptions, and suggest specific ways in which science instruction can promote a more appropriate epistemological attitude and provide a more accurate sense of the scientific enterprise.

Integrating the history and nature of science and technology in science and social studies curriculum

Abstract: The decade of the 1980s was a period of pressure for and movement towards educational reform. During the early 1980s, numerous reports focused attention on the failure of education in general, and science and mathematics education in particular, to prepare American students for the 21st century. These efforts, in turn, influenced calls for reform in the fields of science and social studies education. Several trends have particular relevance for the teaching of the history and nature of science and technology. First, there is a push for the general improvement of scientific literacy. Second, there is a resurgence of interest in history instruction. And third, the trend toward the integration of sciencetechnology-society themes into contemporary school programs. Authors such as Bertrand Russell and C. P. Snow addressed the importance of understanding science and society connections in their books The Impact of Science on Society (Russell, 1951) and The Two Cultures (Snow, 1962). These insights, however, had little influence on school programs. The situation in which individuals neither perceive nor understand connections between science and society is partially due to the fact that we do not teach about those connections. Presenting students with the historical influences of science on society and society on science could help fulfill the goal of citizenship.

The Impact of Science Studies on Political Philosophy

Abstract: The development of science studies has an important message for political theory. This message has not yet been fully articulated. It seems that the science studies field is often considered as the extension of politics to science. In reality, case studies show that it is a redefinition of politics that we are witnessing in the laboratories. To the political representatives (elected by humans) should be added the scientific representatives (spokespersons of nonhumans). Thanks to a book by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, it is possible to reconstruct the origin of this divide between the two sets of representatives. A definition of modernism is offered. Then the article explains how to interpret the shift to "nonmodernism, " that is, a historical period when the two branches of politics get together again.

History of science in the National Science Curriculum: a critical review of resources and their aims

Abstract: Following a surprisingly radical government initiative, schools in England and Wales will lead Europe in the integration of history of science into a National Curriculum for science itself. Few pupils are involved as yet, few resources are available, and there is some controversy about what historical materials can usefully accomplish. This review discusses, from the perspective of a professional historian with some experience of secondary science teaching, the background to (and probable reasons behind) the initiative; some methodological implications; and finally some of the available resources.

Policing knowledge: Disembodied policy for embodied knowledge

Abstract: Steve Fuller's Social Epistemology offers a constructive program for integrating philosophy and sociology of science as normative knowledge policy, constrained by the linguistic, psychological, social, and political embodiment of knowledge. I endorse and elaborate upon Fuller's insistence that science studies should take seriously the embodiment of knowledge, but criticize his conception of knowledge policy on three grounds. Knowledge policy as Fuller conceives it seems committed to an untenable conception of a value‐free or politically neutral social science. Knowledge policy studies are also self‐defeating, since they provide good reasons to ignore the recommendations of the knowledge‐policy expert, and to prevent the successful development of a predictively adequate policy science. Finally, knowledge‐policy studies cannot adequately respond to political conflict over knowledge production and dissemination.

Philosophy Naturalized a Bit

Abstract: Ronald Giere (RG) was once a philosopher of science of the traditional logical-empiricist type. As a good logical empiricist, he took it as his job to explicate the philosophical that is, logical foundations of science. But then he saw the light. As he tells us in the preface to Explaining Science (ES), in the early 1980s 'I began to lose my faith in the general program. My skepticism progressed to the point that I now believe there are no special philosophical foundations to any science' (xvi). Accordingly, like not a few of his colleagues, RG decided to bale out. Instead of explaining science philosophically, he concluded that explanation must be 'naturalistic' (xvii) meaning, I take it, that one should try to explain how science is actually done in laboratories, offices, seminar rooms, and so on, without reducing one's account to any pre-given base like logic. The explanatory framework should be developed hand-in-hand with empirical research. This is music to our ears in science studies, where it goes without saying that the way to develop a systematic understanding of science is actually to look at it, examine it, think about it all the obvious things that traditional philosophy of science has been reluctant to do. So we should welcome RG's defection from philosophy and applaud his naturalizing impulse. But that does not mean that we have to accept the particular naturalized account of science that RG offers. Indeed, the question of what to make of ES is pressing, since in it RG

What is "Anthropological" About the Anthropology of Science?

Abstract: Social studies of science (sometimes called "science studies" or "science and technology studies") are a burgeoning area of multidisciplinary research, comprising predominantly sociology, history, and the philosophy of science (with increasing inputs from anthropology, economics, and psychology). Although the sociology of science has a pedigree dating back (at least) to Merton's original contributions, recent work takes its main intellectual impetus from the post-Kuhnian reevaluation of traditional conceptions of science. In particular, this reevaluation concerns the epistemological status of science: it is axiomatic to work in social studies of science that the very content of scientific knowledge is the upshot of social process. This general slogan subsumes a variety of emphases: discoveries and experimental findings are better understood as social constructions than as reflections of the character of the natural world; matters of "social" and "scientific/technical" concern can no longer be considered distinct; scientists do not in fact follow the canons of rationality, reason, and method prescribed in the accounts of objectivist philosophy of science; the facticity of a knowledge claim is the product, rather than the cause, of agreement within a scientific community. The past 20 years have seen the energetic elaboration of this relativist-constructivist paradigm, making it one of the most exciting and controversial areas of contemporary social research (for a recent overview see Woolgar I988; for recent collections see Lynch and Woolgar I990, Pickering I 99 I). Social studies of science not only tell us about the institution of science-for example, by providing critical assessments of science policies that assume that particular forms of research organisation (and evaluation) generate reliable knowledge-but also offer a radical deconstruction of traditionally conceived foundations of scientific knowledge that casts doubt on all fields of scholarship with scientific pretensions. In the first flush of post-Kuhnian social studies of science, practitioners were united against a common enemy. Much mileage was to be had in contesting prevailing philosophical views about the nature of scientific method. After 20 years, however, the appeal of this particular approach has waned somewhat. There has been a noticeable shift in the attitudes of historians and philosophers of science, who increasingly incorporate constructivist sentiments in their analyses. Consequently, social studies of science are now at something of a crossroads. Practitioners are starting to reappraise the strategic significance of social studies of science. What exactly is the relationship of these constructivist analyses of scientific knowledge to the broader currents of postmodernism? What will the next (post-Kuhnian) revolution in scholarship about science look like? What are the implications of the deconstruction of scientific knowledge for social science? Read against these current questions, Charlesworth et al.'s Life among the Scientists seems oddly out of date. The book concerns the community of scientists associated with the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Science in Melbourne. It describes the history, background, institutional setting, and culture of the institute's work in immunology and immunoparasitology. Particular emphasis is given the emergence of molecular biology and biotechnology and the quest for a malaria vaccine. The book also provides information about the situation of the Hall Institute within an international community, its funding base, its social structure (particularly the position of the support staff), professionalisation, gender, and ethics. The authors certainly repair some of the descriptive inadequacies of earlier "laboratory studies"-participant observer and "ethnographic" studies of scientific laboratories (Knorr-Cetina 198I, Latour and Woolgar I986 [I9791, Lynch I985, Traweek i988). For example, they give much greater context to the laboratory at the centre of their study. But beyond their admirably full description, it is not clear that much theoretical pur-

World views and scientific discipline formation : science studies in the German Democratic Republic : papers from a German-American Summer Institute, 1988

Abstract: I: Introduction.- World Views and Scientific Discipline Formation: How East German Science Studies Contributed to the Fall of the Cultural Wall.- On the Origin and Nature of Scientific Disciplines.- II: Ideas and Institutions.- Relating Evolutionary Theory to the Natural Sciences.- Dialectical Understanding of the Unity of Scientific Knowledge.- History of Science in the GDR: Institutions and Programmatic Positions.- III: Mathematics in a Socio-Political Context.- Historiography of Mathematics: Aims, Methods, Tasks.- The Berlin' society for Scientific Philosophy' as Organizational Form of Philosophizing in the Medium of Natural Science.- Mathematics and Ideology in Fascist Germany.- IV: Psychology Constructs its Subject Matter.- Imageless Thought or Stimulus Error? The Social Construction of Private Experience.- The Berlin Psychological Tradition: Between Experiment and Quasi-Experimental Design, 1850-1990.- Move over Darwin: The Ontogenetic Sources of William Preyer's Developmental Psychology.- On the Interdisciplinary Genesis of Experimental Methods in Nineteenth-Century German Psychology.- V: Physics in the Context of Philosophy and Theory Of Science.- From Boltzmann to Planck: On Continuity in Scientific Revolutions.- Walther Nernst and Quantum Theory.- Historical Explanations in Modern Physics: The Lesson of Modern Quantum Mechanics.- Fritz London and the Community of Quantum Physicists.- VI: Theory as Method.- The Middle Ages: Darkness in the Sciences.- to the Basic Concepts of Communication-Oriented Science Studies.- Philosophical Problems of Modern Psychology.- VII: Discipline Formation of Philosophy.- Neo-Kantianism and Epistemology: On the Formation of a Philosophical Discipline in Nineteenth-Century Germany.- The Transformation of German Philosophy in the Context of Scientific Research in the Nineteenth Century.- Reform Efforts of Logic at Mid-Nineteenth Century in Germany.- VIII: Biological Evolution in the Mirror of Theories of Evolution.- August Weismann: One of the First Synthetic Theorists of Evolutionary Biology.- Darwin and the German Theologians.- Two Faces of Biologism: Some Reflections on a Difficult Period in the History of Biology in Germany.- What Keeps a Species Together.- IX: Teachers and Students: Chemistry Laboratories and Dissertations.- The Training in Germany of English-Speaking Chemists in the Nineteenth Century and its Profound Influence in America and Britain.- Science and Practice in German Agriculture: Justus von Liebig, Hermann von Liebig, and the Agricultural Experiment Stations.- Things Are Seldom What They Seem: The Story of Non-Phosphorylating Glycolysis.- X: Natural Science and Naturphilosophie.- Goethe's Morphology of Stones: Between Natural History and Historical Geology.- The Philosophy of Living Things: Schilling's Naturphilosophie as a Transition to the Philosophy of Identity 339.- A New Correspondence of the Philosopher F. W. J. Schelling.- The Influence of Jakob Friedrich Fries on Matthias Schleiden.- XI: Science and Society.- The Geographical Vision and the Popular Order of Disciplines, 1848-1870.- Knowledge Transfer in the Nineteenth Century: Young, Navier, Roebling, and the Brooklyn Bridge.- Soviet-German Scientific Relations before World War II: Fruitful Cooperation in Different Social Orders.- XII: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge.- Bourgeois Berlin Salons: Meeting Places for Culture and the Sciences.- Max Delbruck: A Physicist in Biology.- 'Nobody Can Become a Real Engineer Who Has Not Already Become a Whole Person'.- Summer Institute Program 1988.- About the Authors.- Name Index.

World Views and Scientific Discipline Formation: How East German Science Studies Contributed to the Fall of the Cultural Wall

Abstract: The history of scientific discipline formation in Germany played a special role in the fall of the wall, intellectually and institutionally. It emanated from philosophy departments in social science faculties in the German Democratic Republic, a relatively small “niche” as they say there, where one could do work around the edges of those fields of Marxist-Leninist scholarship that mattered most to the power elite. From this niche proliferated students and students of students, fanning out from Berlin in the 1960s to Greifswald, Rostock, Jena, Erfurt, Leipzig, and elsewhere. A separate line of science studies descended in the Academy of Sciences from the unit for Science, Theory and Organization, and it too emerged on the edges of the economic, political, and philosophical power structures. The section headings here are meant to suggest that “science studies” (Wissenschaftsforschung) in this socialist regime had investigated similar categories of discipline formation as in our Western regimes: institutions, theory of science, theories of method, epistemology, evolution, laboratories, Naturphilosophie, society, and social construction. Our thesis is that science studies in socialist and capitalist culture were less far apart than many thought.1

Introduction to the Basic Concepts of Communication-Oriented Science Studies

Abstract: Internationally, science studies are faced with the task of explaining the complex phenomenon of the development of science. As things stand now, science studies constitute a multidisciplinary ensemble, predominantly composed of the philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics, and historiography of the sciences, and of attempts to apply natural-scientific and systems-theoretical models to sciences. To date there has been no integrative theory of the development of the sciences (Krober and Kruger, 1987). In my view, the method of communication-oriented studies is a promising interdisciplinary approach to integrating research on science. Rommetveit has summarized major tendencies of the more recent research on communication, but only with regard to social sciences (1987). Communication is also a matter of great importance in the natural and technical sciences, as in the theory of bio- or animal communication (Tembrock, 1971, 1980). By now, work on questions of communication has begun in all disciplines of science studies.