How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society.

This is an important book precisely because there is none other quite like it.

How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. Her work highlights the diversity of these cultures of knowing and, in its depiction of their differences--in the meaning of the empirical, the enactment of object relations, and the fashioning of social relations--challenges (...) the accepted view of a unified science. By many accounts, contemporary Western societies are becoming "knowledge societies"--which run on expert processes and expert systems epitomized by science and structured into all areas of social life. By looking at epistemic cultures in two sample cases, this book addresses pressing questions about how such expert systems and processes work, what principles inform their cognitive and procedural orientations, and whether their organization, structures, and operations can be extended to other forms of social order. The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society. (shrink)

The biomedical sciences employ race as a descriptive and analytic category. They use race to describe differences in rates of morbidity and mortality and to explain variations in drug sensitivity and metabolism. But there are problems with the use of race in medicine. This article identifies a number of the problems and assesses some solutions. The first three sections consider how race is defined and whether the racial data used in biomedical research are reliable and valid. The next three sections (...) explain why racial variation in disease, including genetic disease, is not evidence that race is biological. The final section explains how a proper understanding of the role of race in medicine bears on public policy. (shrink)

Real kinds or categories, according to conventional wisdom, enter into lawlike generalizations, while nominal kinds do not. Thus, gold but not jewelry is a real kind. However, by such a criterion, few if any kinds or systems of classification employed in the social science are real, for the social sciences offer, at best, only restricted generalizations. Thus, according to conventional wisdom, race and class are on a par with telephone area codes and postal zones; all are nominal rather than real. (...) I propose an account of real kinds that recognizes the current reality of race but not zip codes and shows how a kind can be both constructed and real. One virtue of such an understanding of realism is the light shed on our current practice of racial classification. Race is not a real biological kind but neither is race a myth or illusion. However, the question of whether a social kind is real is separate from whether the category is legitimate. W. E. B. Du Bois maintained that while there are no biological races, race is real and should be conserved. My aim, in this paper, is not to argue for the legitimacy or conservation of race but to defend Du Bois's idea that kinds of people can be both made up and real and provide an understanding of realism that does justice to the social sciences. (shrink)

Biological research on race has often been seen as motivated by or lending credence to underlying racist attitudes; in part for this reason, recently philosophers and biologists have gone through great pains to essentially deny the existence of biological human races. We argue that human races, in the biological sense of local populations adapted to particular environments, do in fact exist; such races are best understood through the common ecological concept of ecotypes. However, human ecotypic races do not in general (...) correspond with 'folk' racial categories, largely because many similar ecotypes have multiple independent origins. Consequently, while human natural races exist, they have little or nothing in common with 'folk' races. (shrink)

In cognitive psychology, concepts are those data structures that are stored in long-term memory and are used by default in human beings.

Race is a prominent category in medicine. Epidemiologists describe how rates of morbidity and mortality vary with race, and doctors consider the race of their patients when deciding whether to test them for sickle‐cell anemia or what drug to use to treat their hypertension. At the same time, critics of racial classification say that race is not real but only an illusion or that race is scientifically meaningless. In this paper, I explain how race is used in medicine as a (...) proxy for genes that encode drug metabolizing enzymes and how a proper understanding of race calls into doubt the practice of treating race as a marker of any medically relevant genetic trait. (shrink)

Increased attention paid to inter-group genetic variability following completion of the Human Genome Project has provoked debate about race as a category of classification in biomedicine and as a biological phenomenon at the level of the genome. Philosophers of science favor a metaphysical approach relying on natural kind theorizing, the underlying assumptions of which structure the questions asked. Limitations arise the more metaphysically invested and less attuned to scientific practice these questions are. Other questions—arguably, those that matter most socially and (...) politically—remain unasked, not merely overlooked but systematically ignored and even foreclosed. Race fails as a postulated natural kind because it fails to meet expectations that as a category of classification it furnish an authoritative taxonomy that by depicting fundamental divisions in nature is conducive to fulfilling far-ranging explanatory aims. Racial, ethnic, and other group designations may nonetheless be projectible insofar as they support inductive inferences in biomedicine, but this does not render them any less social. Indeed, the statistical, contingent, accidental, localized, and interest-relative bases of such inferences serve to undercut the dichotomizing of race as either biological reality or social construct and favor the adoption of a pragmatic approach. (shrink)

Current controversy over whether the Office of Management and Budget system of racial and ethnic classification should be used in pharmacogenetics research as suggested by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration has been couched in terms of realist-social constructionist debates on race. The assumptions both parties to these debates share instead need to be relinquished—specifically, dichotomies between the social and scientific and what is descriptive and evaluative/normative. This paper defends a pragmatic approach to the question of the appropriateness of the OMB (...) group categories in pharmacogenetics research, an approach that is local and context-specific rather than global, incorporates practical and ethical as well as theoretical dimensions, and recognizes intersections of the social and the biological in the constitution of group categories. (shrink)