First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Editorial preface to the fourth edition and modified translation -- The text of the Philosophische Untersuchungen -- Philosophische untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations -- Philosophie der psychologie, ein fragment = Philosophy of psychology, a fragment.

How much of history as we know it has been colored, or fictionalized, by the subjectivity and theoretical speculation of the recorder rather than stating simple facts that happened. Considering recent challenges to principles of truth and objectivity, historian Thomas Haskell calls upon historians to think deeply about the nature of historical explanation.

Like the latter, it unites into one and the same function the possibility of giving things a sign, of representing one thing by another, and the possibility of causing a sign to shift in relation to what it designates. The four functions that define the ...

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.

A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...) is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (shrink)

INTRODUCTION The career of Benjamin Lee Whorf might, on the one hand, be described as that of a businessman of specialized talents— one of those individuals ...

Bruno Latour was once asked : "Do you believe in reality?" This text is an attempt to answer this question.

Is science unified or disunified? This collection brings together contributions from prominent scholars in a variety of scientific disciplines to examine this important theoretical question. They examine whether the sciences are, or ever were, unified by a single theoretical view of nature or a methodological foundation and the implications this has for the relationship between scientific disciplines and between science and society.

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

Rhetoric of science is the study of how scientists persuade and dissuade each other and the rest of us about nature -- the study of how scientists argue in the making of knowledge. In fragmented form, it goes back as long as the two fields have existed, and it makes various appearances throughout the history of each. The studies in this volume are exemplars for rhetoric of science. They chart the field, exhibiting the governing themes of rhetorical criticism when its (...) eye turns to science -- suasive greatness, paradigmatic debates, public policy concerns, and composition issues. Starting at the top, the papers take as their main courses the two disciplines highest in the scientific food chain -- physics and biology -- with side orders of archaeology and experimental psychology. They employ a methodological tool-set largely inherited from Aristotle, but also draw pluralistically on related enterprises, such as pragmatics, ethology, and literary criticism. Engaging the ruling theoretical issues of the field, these studies are landmarks that define the field. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present (...) and future world. "By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia "[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all.... His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books. (shrink)

Chapter 1 FROM ORDER TO DISORDER 5 mins. John enters and goes into his office. He says something very quickly about having made a bad mistake. He had sent the review of a paper. . . . The rest of the sentence is inaudible. 5 mins.

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)

Scientific Discourse in Sociohistorical Context represents the intersection of knowledge and method, examined from the perspective of three distinct disciplines: linguistics, rhetoric-composition, and history. Herein, Dwight Atkinson describes the written language and rhetoric of the Royal Society of London, based on his analysis of its affiliated journal, The Philosophical Transactions, starting with the 17th century advent of modern empirical science through to the present day. Atkinson adopts two independent approaches to the analysis of written discourse--from the fields of linguistics and (...) rhetoric-composition--and then integrates and interprets his findings in light of the history of the Royal Society and British science. Atkinson's study provides the most complete and particular institutional account of a scientific journal, which in this case is a publication that stands as an icon of scientific publication. He supplies his readers with important material found nowhere else in the historical literature, including details about the operation of the journal and its relation to the society. The work embeds the history of the journal and its editors within the history of the Royal Society and other developments in science and society. The synthesis of historical, linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural analysis makes visible certain complex communicative dynamics that could not previously be seen from a single vantage point. The work presented here reinforces how deep historical examinations of linguistic and rhetorical practices have direct bearing on how and what scholars read and write now. Most significantly, this volume demonstrates how these historical activities need to inform current teaching of and thinking about language. (shrink)