In this book Bruno Latour brings together these different approaches to provide a lively and challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context..

A number of writers have tackled the task of characterizing the differences between analytic and Continental philosophy.I suggest that these attempts have indeed captured the most important divergences between the two styles but have left the explanation of the differences mysterious.I argue that analytic philosophy is usefully seen as philosophy conducted within a paradigm, in Kuhn’s sense of the word, whereas Continental philosophy assumes much less in the way of shared presuppositions, problems, methods and approaches.This important opposition accounts for all (...) those features that have rightly been held to constitute the difference between the two traditions.I finish with some reflections on the relative superiority of each tradition and by highlighting the characteristic deficiencies of each. (shrink)

Philosophy of science is expanding via the introduction of new digital data and tools for their analysis. The data comprise digitized published books and journal articles, as well as heretofore unpublished material such as images, archival text, notebooks, meeting notes, and programs. The growth in available data is matched by the extensive development of automated analysis tools. The variety of data sources and tools can be overwhelming. In this article, we survey the state of digital work in the philosophy of (...) science, showing what kinds of questions can be answered and how one can go about answering them. (shrink)

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)

An analytical scheme that differentiates among the various types of cognitive and social functions of citations is used as the basis for an analysis of the results of a questionnaire designed to probe the citing behavior of a group of scientists who had cited one of four papers originating from a single biochemical laboratory. Even when papers fall within a relatively well-defined research area and are based on research conducted within a single lab, groups of scientists to which a given (...) paper is of relevance can have quite distinct internal structures. We argue that the scientists'subjective reasons for citing a given work do not correspond with the actual argumentative uses of cited articles in citing texts. Scientists appear to regard the papers they cite as having a rather generalized significance even if in their citations they refer to very specific claims made in the original texts. The consequences of these findings for a theory of citation and for the use of citations in science studies are discussed. (shrink)

This chapter focusses on the drivers for the advancement of mapping of science and the detection of topics as often applied in scientometrics. The chapter identifies three different drivers for this advancement: technological innovation resulting in increased computational power, the improved community detection approaches available today, and advancements in scientometrics itself with respect to the actual linking of documents through citations or lexical approaches. We will show that the main drivers are the first two, with the last one somewhat lagging (...) behind. Next, severe methodological issues have been identified in network science related to the application of these techniques for community detection. The resolution limit and the degeneracy problem are described. The last section shows how different approaches are taken to enable scientometricians to create global maps of science and how they come to comparable results at higher levels of granularity but that the validity of more fine-grained clusters and topics suffers strongly in the discussed problems, which raises serious questions with respect to the applicability of these global techniques with a strong local focus. (shrink)

The dissemination of experimental materials, instruments, and methods is central to the progress of research in genetics. In recent years, competition for research funding and intellectual property issues have increasingly presented barriers to the dissemination of this "research-related information. "Information gathered in interviews with experimental geneticists and analysis of acknowledgment patterns in published genetics research are used to construct a series of basic scenarios for the exchange of genetic materials and research methods. The discussion focuses on factors affecting individuals' behavior (...) and expectations as information requesters and information providers. (shrink)

How do scientific innovations spread within and across scientific communities? In this paper, we propose a general account of the diffusion of scientific innovations. This account acknowledges that novel ideas must be elaborated on and conceptually translated before they can be adopted and applied to field-specific problems. We motivate our account by examining an exemplary case of knowledge diffusion, namely, the early spread of theories of rational decision-making. These theories were grounded in a set of novel mathematical tools and concepts (...) that originated in John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and subsequently spread widely across the social and behavioral sciences. Introducing a network-based diffusion measure, we trace the spread of those tools and concepts into distinct research areas. We furthermore present an analytically tractable typology for classifying publications according to their roles in the diffusion process. The proposed framework allows for a systematic examination of the conditions under which scientific innovations spread within and across preexisting and newly emerging scientific communities. (shrink)