Showing papers on "Science studies published in 1999"

Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies

Abstract: "Do You Believe in Reality?" News from the Trenches of the Science Wars Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest Science's Blood Flow: An Example from Joliot's Scientific Intelligence From Fabrication to Reality: Pasteur and His Lactic Acid Ferment The Historicity of Things: Where Were Microbes before Pasteur? A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans: Following Daedalus's Labyrinth The Invention of the Science Wars: The Settlement of Socrates and Callicles A Politics Freed from Science: The Body Cosmopolitic The Slight Surprise of Action: Facts, Fetishes, Factishes Conclusion: What Contrivance Will Free Pandora's Hope? Glossary Bibliography Index

The science studies reader

Abstract: The Reader focuses on the practices of modern and contemporary science and technology located in different national and institutional settings, with some attention to non- Western contexts. By mapping some of the open questions and points of tension likely to occupy the field for years to come, the essays in the Readercast fresh light on what "science" means at the end of the twentieth century.

Science and Social Science: An Introduction

Abstract: Is social science really a science at all, and if so in what sense? This is the first question that any course on the philosophy of the social sciences must tackle. In this brief introduction, Malcolm Williams gives students the grounding that will enable them to discuss the issues involved with confidence. He looks at: * The historical development of natural science and its distinctive methodology * the case in favour of an objective science of the social which follows the same rules * The arguments of social constructionists, interpretative sociologists and others against objectivity and even science itself * recent developments in natural science - for instance the rise of complexity theory and the increased questioning of positivism - which bring it closer to some of the key arguments of social science. Throughout, the book is illustrated with short clear examples taken from the actual practice of social science research and from popular works of natural science which will illuminate the debate for all students whatever their background.

Kuhn in the Classroom, Lakatos in the Lab: Science Educators Confront the Nature-of-Science Debate.

Abstract: Programs for the reform of K-12 science teaching today usually insist that science teachers must introduce their students to the nature of science, as well as to scientific content. The academic field of science studies, however, evinces no consensus about what the nature of science really is. This article examines how science educators and educational researchers have drawn on the fragmented teachings of science studies about the nature of science, and how they have used those teachings as a resource in their own projects. It identifies three competing movements for the reform of science teaching that owe a particular debt to science studies: history and philosophy of science (HPS), science, technology, and society (STS), and constructivist pedagogy. The article analyzes some of the deep assumptions about the relationships between research science, school science, and children’s learning that pervade the educational literature.

Science as a Free Market: A Reflexivity Test in an Economics of Economics

Abstract: One prominent aspect of recent developments in science studies has been the increasing employment of economic concepts and models in the depiction of science, including the notion of a free market for scientific ideas. This gives rise to the issue of the adequacy of the conceptual resources of economics for this purpose. This paper suggests an adequacy test by putting a version of free market economics to a self-referential scrutiny. The outcome is that either free market economics is self-defeating, or else there must be two different concepts of free market, one for the ordinary economy, the other for science. Both conclusions will impose limits on the applicability of the ordinary economic concept of the market to the study of science.

A History of Science in The Netherlands. Survey, themes and reference

Abstract: Introduction: The History of Science in the Netherlands 1. Science and Mathematics 2. Science and Medicine 3. Science and Philosophy 4. Science and Technology 5. The Instruments of Science 6. Science and Belief 7. The Historiography of Science: A Bibliography 8. Science in Secondary Schools 9. Dutch Science Abroad 10. Science in the Former Dutch Colonies Biographies General Bibliography

Can Gender Ideologies Influence the Practice of the Physical Sciences

Abstract: As a response to the critics of feminist science studies I argue that it is possible to formulate empirical hypotheses about gender ideology in the practice of the physical sciences without (1) reinforcing stereotypes about women and mathematical sciences or (2) assuming at the outset that the area of physics under investigation is methodologically suspect. I will then critically evaluate two case studies of gender ideology in the practice of the physical sciences. The case studies fail to show that gender ideologies have influenced the practice of the physical sciences in a profound way—not because it is impossible to conceive how gender ideologies could influence the practice of the physical sciences even in a profound way—but because they do not provide the right kind of evidence. This, however, leaves open the possibility that future studies might provide such evidence.

On the hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research

Abstract: The paper provides an overview of the hermeneutic and phenomenological context from which the idea of a “constitutional analysis” of science originated. It analyzes why the approach to “hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research” requires to transcend the distinction between the context of justification and the context of discovery. By incorporating this approach into an integral “postmetaphysical philosophy of science”, I argue that one can avoid the radical empiricism of recent science studies, while also preventing the analysis of science's discursive practices from collapsing into the frames of radical anti-epistemological critique mandated by some hermeneutic philosophers.

Acceptance: Science Studies and the Empirical Understanding of Science:

Abstract: It has been an honor and a pleasure to be invited to address the Society for the Social Studies of Science conference, but also a deeply interesting experi ence. I have watched this field of study grow from small beginnings. It is very striking how many people now gather together from such diverse fields, how many different themes they discuss, and in what detail. The meeting is remarkable for its richness and diversity, which is, of course, precisely as it should be. If we want to convey the character of contemporary science with all its variety and heterogeneity, and its rapid rate of change at every level, then we ourselves must bring a diversity of resources to its study. Scientists today work in a great variety of institutional settings and carry a similarly varied range of skills and bodies of knowledge. In every respect, science is now a Protean phenomenon. Indeed, it may be an oversimplification to speak of science even in this way. We need to remain open to the thought that science is not one thing at all, however complex; that it is actually many different things, all needing to be described and understood in different ways, and perhaps to be evaluated very differently. This should lead to the reflection that scholarly attitudes to science today, insofar as such things are products of experience at all, must depend on experience of some very small, and almost by necessity atypical, part of it. Those of you who have read my own work will know that it involves an explicitly pro-scientific bias, and perhaps that it is sometimes criticized as scientistic. In the light of my biography, this is scarcely surprising. My own experience of the natural sciences, through initial education, work in a faculty of natural sciences, the teaching of natural science students, and indeed per sonal and informal relations, has been and continues to be almost entirely favorable. I suspect that in some profound way this experience of particular

The Constructivists' Tool Kit

Abstract: Jan Golinski wrote this book to show how the analytical methods devised by "constructivist" sociologists and philosophers in the last twenty years can be (and have been) used by historians of science. The book is not, as he says, a comprehensive survey of the theoretical and historical literature but an extended historiographical essay. Golinski writes for an audience of graduate students and senior undergraduates in science studies, academics in other disciplines (he mentions history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies but not the natural sciences), and historians of science who desire to look about and reflect on where they have been and what to do next. On the whole, Golinski succeeds admirably. His book is well organized and fluently written. Basic ideas are clearly explained, and his style is blessedly free of the jargon and posturing that make a great deal of the science studies literature a penance to read. Equally happy for his readers' mental health is Golinski's temperate and pragmatic treatment of a field that is notoriously riven by sectarian faction. He declines to polemicize or take sides with any one school of thought. "Constructivism" for Golinski is not a set of formal principles but an approach or point of view, one that sees science as a form of cultural practice constructed in particular local contexts out of available cultural and material resources. Golinski spurns both radical relativists and their radically empiricist critics. His tone is neither demeaning of science nor celebratory, and his perspective is ecumenical. He insists only that we not privilege scientists' knowledge claims but analyze them in the same way we would any other such claims: by revealing how the rules of the game are established, where, and by whom. He also insists that we can best understand science by examining how it is actually practiced. The book is organized thematically. An introductory chapter lays out a history of the constructivist movement from Thomas Kuhn through the "Strong Program" of the Edinburgh school to the Parisian "actor network" school and other contenders. Golinski then takes up in turn the themes of discipline and identity, places of production (laboratories,

Deconstructing social constructionism : A review of The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking and of Pandora's Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies by Bruno Latour

Abstract: Presentation et commentaire de deux ouvrages, respectivement de Ian Hacking et de Bruno Latour, qui font suite a l'affaire Sokal, et qui explorent les relations entre sciences sociales et sciences dures. Si l'analyse reflexive de la science, et des modes de production de la connaissance scientifique, est essentielle pour la comprehension de la societe contemporaine, se pose alors la question de la contribution de l'anthropologie, en tant que discipline, a l'histoire et a l'epistemologie des sciences. Selon l'A., ces deux ouvrages ouvrent des voies nouvelles pour la collaboration entre l'anthropologie et les etudes sur les sciences.

Scientists' rhetoric in the science wars

Abstract: The Truth of Science and Intellectual Impostures are both physicists’ interventions in the socalled “Science Wars” and, whilst deploying very different strategies, the books have much in common. Newton’s The Truth of Science (hereafter N) can be located in the long tradition of metaphysical musings by the elder statesmen of theoretical physics. The works within this tradition are largely concerned with the epistemological issues raised by the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Newton is similarly concerned with such issues, but he adds a contemporary twist by directing his conclusions against what he sees as the epistemological, or even ontological, threat posed by the newly emerging discipline of science studies. Sokal and Bricmont (SB) share the perception of the science studies threat. But their work has a quite different heritage. Intellectual Impostures arises directly out of the now famous Sokal hoax, in which Alan Sokal wrote a spoof cultural studies article about physics which was published in all seriousness by the journal Social Text. The article was essentially a pastiche of quotes from a variety of authors. In their book, SB again deploy extensive quotes from the works of contemporary French intellectuals, but they are now explicit about their positioning within the Science Wars. In the Science Wars, which are in part a response to analyses from the science studies community, scientists (and often journalists) have engaged over issues such as the epistemological status of science, its value and its authority. As the militaristic tag indicates, these responses tend to be aggressive polemics in which science studies is characterized as either trivial or plain wrong, but always dangerous. What is unique about the present two books is that, whilst sharing the agenda of the Science Warriors, (and in the case of SB representing a key event within the Science Wars) they eschew outright polemic for alternative strategies. In this essay, I wish to examine these strategies to reveal how these authors perpetuate the positions of the Science Wars.

Microdynamics of Incommensurability: Philosophy of Science Meets Science Studies

Abstract: If the theme of this volume—“Einstein meets Magritte”—evokes the possibility of an intersection or convergence of ideas between parties who never meet empirically, then the topic of the present essay can be seen as the reverse: that is, the possibility of a failure of convergence, intersection, or even engagement of ideas between parties who not only encounter each other in empirical space but repeatedly converse there. It is the structure and dynamics of such failed meetings, especially as they occur between traditional philosophers of science and theorists, historians, and sociologists working in the relatively new field of “science studies,” that I mean primarily to explore here. I am also concerned, however, with the more general theme and issue of in/commensurability, which figures centrally and by no means incidentally in the debates that divide them.

Authorizing Science Studies and Anthropology

Abstract: My "Authorizing Knowledge in Science and Anthropology" (AA 100:347-360, June 1998) has inspired Steve Fuller to write about his concerns. However, his concerns are not the objects of discussion in my article. Indeed, in reading my article, Fuller superimposes his concerns over mine. His "objections" to "my" arguments in the article are actually objections to statements I did not make and positions I do not hold. He has mistakenly read these problems and concerns onto my article. In my original paper I discussed questions of knowledge production in the context of a nineteenth-century scientific war over Euclid's Fifth Postulate and then compared it with current science wars. My goal was to demonstrate that the weapons rhetorical strategies and institutional assaults used in the current battle are not new and have unfortunately been used through history in battles over what gets to be awarded the status of "knowledge" and who gets to be awarded the status of authority over knowledge production. My hope was that this historical comparison and analysis of the rhetorical strategies would help us to look beyond them to what is at stake: the authority to determine what constitutes knowledge and knowledge production in academia. In this effort, I discussed how "anti-science" becomes an effective political weapon wielded against work that goes against the accepted knowledge of the day. The article demonstrates that "anti-science" has been used as such a weapon in battles "within" mathematics, physics, and anthropology, as well as "between" arenas generally designated as "the sciences" and "the humanities."

Disciplinary Hybridity in Shelley's Adonais

Abstract: Research programs in science studies - as well as more general programs in women's studies and cultural studies - have for the past two decades testified to a dissatisfaction with traditional disciplinary boundaries in the academy. At the same time, negative reactions to these interdisciplinary forays, most notoriously in Paul Gross's and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition (1994), indicate the intense significance of such boundaries from the standpoint of many scientists. Included on Gross's and Levitt's enemies list is anthropologist of science Bruno Latour who has analyzed the nearly imperturbable cultural architecture supporting the ideal of scientific purity, that is, the conception of science as purged of cultural bias, a condition built into our very notion of science. Latour sees disciplinary purity as part of the deep structure of modernity, built into the pulse of modern common sense. But he points out more emphatically that this purity comes under increasing pressure from the mixture of disciplinary activities that constitutes everyday life, despite the effacement of this mixture from the way that we consider either science on the one hand, or the humanities on the other. Latour is significant among interdisciplinary advocates because he communicates the simultaneous power of assumptions maintaining disciplinary purity and the quotidian frequency of disciplinary crossover, of disciplinary hybridity. This approach to modern culture as double-visioned, although it depicts science as a social practice rather than the accumulation of truths about reality (a perspective eliciting the wrath of Higher Superstition), also properly emphasizes the extraordinarily agile intransigence of seemingly contradictory activities. As Latour sees it, the ideal of scientific objectivity, and more generally, the purifying processes of modernity itself, is too deeply rooted in the way we think for us simply to imagine ourselves out of them. If we are to alter modern disciplinary formation, we must understand modernity as a capacity to live two lives without combining them, to think in disciplinarily purified terms and yet act in terms of disciplinary hybridity at the same moment. Hybridity is hidden in plain sight, in the very extremity of disciplinarity. In a similar way, I will argue, Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley came closest to an interdisciplinary poetry - a scientific literature in the fullest oxymoronic sense - from within poetry, specifically in one of his most hyperbolically literary works, his elegy on John Keats, Adonais (1821). My focus on this poem derives in part from the fact that it is an elegy, that is, that it treats death, the site of the most extreme divergence between scientific and humanistic understanding. In this essay, I will first elaborate Latour's notion of disciplinarity, introduce some recent interdisciplinary developments from within science that might contribute to undermining modernity's double vision, and then present a deliberately anachronistic reading of Adonais, a reading, I argue, that takes up the spirit of Shelley's struggle in the poem to overcome the modern disciplinary categories by which he was imprisoned. My interpretation is anachronistic insofar as it is a reading that could not have existed for Shelley himself. Adonais, however, invites this interpretive license: Shelley incites us to assemble new cultural formations where human and natural significance can be thought together, a synthesis of what we now call science and the humanities. Possibly only now can we read Adonais as "anti-modern," because we live in the twilight of modernity, and linger on the verge of a "posthumanism." The fact that such phrases have meaning in the humanities but as yet no scientific value, testifies to a barrier uncrossed. True interdisciplinary thought remains impossible, and attempts at it unearth only a fractured logic. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour sketches an example of such fracture in the peculiar asymmetry found in the definition of "modern": Modernity is often defined in terms of humanism, either as a way of saluting the birth of"man" or as a way of announcing his death. …

Reproduction of the Scientific Potential of the Social Disciplines and Humanities

Abstract: In recent years, broad segments of the public and in particular the scientific community have been increasingly alarmed over the continuing destruction of the potential of this country's science, the fact that it is regularly underfinanced, and, as a consequence, the exodus of young science associates in the institutes and instructors in higher educational institutions into other spheres of employment. The question as to ways to preserve and multiply the potential of this country's science has been the object of study by specialists in various fields—economists, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, experts in science studies, and others. Mention might be made of the works of D. Gvishiani, V. Kelle, S. Kugel' [1], A. Kul'kin, G. Lakhtin, E. Mirskaia, I. Timofeev, and B. Iudin [2], whose studies have been based both on an integrated approach and on materials from specific sciences.

Accomplishing Translation: The Notion of Evidence in the Discipline of the History of Science

Abstract: It has taken some time, but the history of science has finally come to be viewed as something more than the repository for “anecdote or chronology” that Thomas Kuhn described, with some frustration, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions thirty-one years ago.1 Indeed, the history of science is now rightly recognized as essential to the understanding of science. Good history enriches the conceptual repertoire available for understanding science — it reveals forgotten styles of theorizing and kinds of scientific theory, standards of evidence and theory choice, modes of scientific practice, and realms of methodological debate. In the philosophical research program developed by Larry Laudan, episodes drawn from the history of science serve as data against which debates about science — concerning, for example, scientific realism, standards of theory choice, or the aims of science — are tested, if not settled.2 And perhaps most importantly, the history of science is now appreciated for its capacity to provide an understanding of science which emphasizes the historical contingency in its theories, aims, methods, and place in society. The undermining of the notion that there is an ‘essence’ of science, accomplished largely by the examination of the history of science, is perhaps most directly responsible for the emergence of science studies in the United States; no such effect could be attributed to a mere repository for “anecdote or chronology.”3