In A Social History of Truth, Shapin engages these universal questions through an elegant recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern science: ...

In this book van Fraassen develops an alternative to scientific realism by constructing and evaluating three mutually reinforcing theories.

Do the sciences aim to uncover the structure of nature, or are they ultimately a practical means of controlling our environment? In Instrumental Biology, or the Disunity of Science, Alexander Rosenberg argues that while physics and chemistry can develop laws that reveal the structure of natural phenomena, biology is fated to be a practical, instrumental discipline. Because of the complexity produced by natural selection, and because of the limits on human cognition, scientists are prevented from uncovering the basic structure of (...) biological phenomena. Consequently, biology and all of the disciplines that rest upon it--psychology and the other human sciences--must aim at most to provide practical tools for coping with the natural world rather than a complete theoretical understanding of it. (shrink)

This fascinating study in the sociology of science explores the way scientists conduct, and draw conclusions from, their experiments. The book is organized around three case studies: replication of the TEA-laser, detecting gravitational rotation, and some experiments in the paranormal. "In his superb book, Collins shows why the quest for certainty is disappointed. He shows that standards of replication are, of course, social, and that there is consequently no outside standard, no Archimedean point beyond society from which we can lever (...) the intellects of our fellows. "- -Donald M. McCloskey, Journal of Economic Psychology "Collins is one of the genuine innovators of the sociology of scientific knowledge.... Changing Order is a rich and entertaining book. "- - Isis "The book gives a vivid sense of the contingent nature of research and is generally a good read. "- -Augustine Brannigan, Nature "This provocative book is a review of [Collins's] work, and an attempt to explain how scientists fit experimental results into pictures of the world.... A promising start for new explorations of our image of science, too often presented as infallibly authoritative. "- -Jon Turney, New Scientist. (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)

This text provides a critique of the subjective Bayesian view of statistical inference, and proposes the author's own error-statistical approach as an alternative framework for the epistemology of experiment. It seeks to address the needs of researchers who work with statistical analysis.

1. MARIO BIAGIOLI--Introduction 2. KAREN BARAD--Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices 3. MARIO BIAGIOLI--Aporias of Scientific Authorship: Credit and Responsibility in Contemporary Biomedicine 4. PIERRE BOURDIEU--The Specificity of Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason 5. ROBERT M. BRAIN and M. NORTON WISE--Muscles and Engines: Indicator Diagrams and Helmholtz’s Graphical Methods 6. MICHEL CALLON--Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay 7. SANDE COHEN--Reading Science (...) Studies Writing 8. H. M. COLLINS--The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks 9. LORRAINE DASTON--Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective 10. ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON--Styles of Reasoning, Conceptual History, and the Emergence of Psychiatry 11. PETER GALISON--Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief 12. IAN HACKING--Making Up People 13. DONNA J. HARAWAY--Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective 14. ROGER HART--On the Problem of Chinese Science 15. THOMAS P. HUGHES--The Evolution of Large Technological Systems 16. LILY E. KAY--In the Beginning Was the Word?: The Genetic Code and the Book of Life 17. EVELYN FOX KELLER--The Gender/Science System: or, Is Sex to Gender as Nature Is to Science? 18. ROBERT E. KOHLER--Moral Economy, Material Culture, and Community in Drosophila Genetics 19. BRUNO LATOUR--Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World 20. BRUNO LATOUR--One More Turn After the Social Turn... 21. TIMOTHY LENOIR--Was the Last Turn the Right Turn?: The Semiotic Turn and A. J. Greimas 22. GEOFFREY LLOYD--Science in Antiquity: The Greek and Chinese Cases and Their Relevance to the Problems of Culture and Cognition 23. MICHAEL LYNCH and JOHN LAW--Pictures, Texts, and Objects: The Literary Language Game of Bird-Watching 24. DONALD MACKENZIE--Nuclear Missile Testing and the Social Construction of Accuracy 25. EMILY MARTIN--Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State 26. ANDREW PICKERING--The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science 27. THEODORE M. PORTER--Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science 28. PAUL RABINOW--Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality 29. HANS-JORG RHEINBERGER--Experimental Systems: Historiality, Narration and Deconstruction 30. BRIAN ROTMAN--Thinking Dia-Grams: Mathematics, Writing, and Virtual Reality 31. JOSEPH ROUSE--Understanding Scientific Practices: Cultural Studies of Science as a Philosophical Program 32. SIMON SCHAFFER--Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms 33. STEVEN SHAPIN--The House of Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England 34. SUSAN LEIGH STAR and JAMES R. GRIESEMER--Institutional Ecology, "Translation," and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39 35. SHARON TRAWEEK--Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told during a Life in Physics 36. SHERRY TURKLE--What Are We Thinking about When We Are Thinking about Computers? 37. ALISON WYLIE--The Engendering of Archaeology: Refiguring Feminist Science Studies. (shrink)

In this powerful work of conceptual and analytical originality, the author argues for the primacy of the material arrangements of the laboratory in the dynamics of modern molecular biology. In a post-Kuhnian move away from the hegemony of theory, he develops a new epistemology of experimentation in which research is treated as a process for producing epistemic things. A central concern of the book is the basic question of how novelty is generated in the empirical sciences. In addressing this question, (...) the author brings French poststructuralist thinking—notably Jacques Derrida’s concepts of “différance” and “historiality”—to bear on the construction of epistemic things. Historiographical perspective shifts from the actors’ minds to their objects of manipulation. These epistemological and historical issues are illuminated in a detailed case study of a particular laboratory, that of the oncologist and biochemist Paul C. Zamecnik and his colleagues, located in a specific setting—the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital of Harvard University at the Massachusetts General Hospital of Boston. The author traces how, between 1945 and 1965, this group developed an experimental system for synthesizing proteins in the test tube that put Zamecnik’s research team at the forefront of those who led biochemistry into the era of molecular biology. (shrink)

A word of warning concerning the aims of this volume is in order. Other wise some readers might be unpleasantly surprised by the fact that two of the chapters of an ostensibly historical book are largely topical rather than historical. They are Chapters 7 and 9, respectively entitled 'Are Logical Truths Analytic?' and 'A Priori Truths and Things-In-Them selves'. Moreover, the history dealt with in Chapter 11 is so recent as to have more critical than antiquarian interest. This mixture of (...) materials may seem all the more surprising as I shall myself criticize (in Chapter I) too facile assimilations of earlier thinkers' concepts and problems to later ones. There is no inconsistency here, it seems to me. The aims of the present volume are historical, and for that very purpose, for the purpose of understanding and evaluating earlier thinkers it is vital to know the conceptual landscape in which they were moving. A crude analogy may be helpful here. No military historian can afford to neglect the topo graphy of the battles he is studying. If he does not know in some detail what kind of pass Thermopylae is or on what sort of ridge the battle of Bussaco was fought, he has no business of discussing these battles, even if this topographical information alone does not yet amount to historical knowledge. (shrink)

Earlier in this century, many philosophers of science (for example, Rudolf Carnap) drew a fairly sharp distinction between theory and observation, between theoretical terms like 'mass' and 'electron', and observation terms like 'measures three meters in length' and 'is _2° Celsius'. By simply looking at our instruments we can ascertain what numbers our measurements yield. Creatures like mass are different: we determine mass by calculation; we never directly observe a mass. Nor an electron: this term is introduced in order to (...) explain what we observe. This (once standard) distinction between theory and observation was eventually found to be wanting. First, if the distinction holds, it is difficult to see what can characterize the relationship between theory :md observation. How can theoretical terms explain that which is itself in no way theorized? The second point leads out of the first: are not the instruments that provide us with observational material themselves creatures of theory? Is it really possible to have an observation language that is entirely barren of theory? The theory-Iadenness of observation languages is now an accept ed feature of the logic of science. Many regard such dependence of observation on theory as a virtue. If our instruments of observation do not derive their meaning from theories, whence comes that meaning? Surely - in science - we have nothing else but theories to tell us what to try to observe. (shrink)

... the topic of 'meaning' is the one topic discussed in philosophy in which there is literally nothing but 'theory' - literally nothing that can be labelled or even ridiculed as the 'common sense view'. Putnam, 'The Meaning of Meaning' This book explores some truths behind the truism that experimentation is a hallmark of scientific activity. Scientists' descriptions of nature result from two sorts of encounter: they interact with each other and with nature. Philosophy of science has, by and large, (...) failed to give an account of either sort of interaction. Philosophers typically imagine that scientists observe, theorize and experiment in order to produce general knowledge of natural laws, knowledge which can be applied to generate new theories and technologies. This view bifurcates the scientist's world into an empirical world of pre-articulate experience and know how and another world of talk, thought and argument. Most received philosophies of science focus so exclusively on the literary world of representations that they cannot begin to address the philosophical problems arising from the interaction of these worlds: empirical access as a source of knowledge, meaning and reference, and of course, realism. This has placed the epistemological burden entirely on the predictive role of experiment because, it is argued, testing predictions is all that could show that scientists' theorizing is constrained by nature. Here a purely literary approach contributes to its own demise. The epistemological significance of experiment turns out to be a theoretical matter: cruciality depends on argument, not experiment. (shrink)

History of science, it has been argued, has benefited philosophers of science primarily by forcing them into greater contact with "real science." In this paper I argue that additional major benefits arise from the importance of specifically historical considerations within philosophy of science. Loci for specifically historical investigations include: (1) making and evaluating rational reconstructions of particular theories and explanations, (2) estimating the degree of support earned by particular theories and theoretical claims, and (3) evaluating proposed philosophical norms for the (...) evaluation of the degree of support for theories and the worth of explanations. More generally, I argue that theories develop and change structure with time, that (like biological species) they are historical entities. Accordingly, both the identification and the evaluation of theories are essentially historical in character. (shrink)

The more unknowns there are and the newer a field of research is, the less well defined are the experiments. Once a field has been sufficiently worked over so that the possible conclusions are more or less limited to existence or nonexistence, and perhaps to quantitative determination, the experiments will become increasingly better defined. But they will no longer be independent, because they are carried along by a system of earlier experiments and decisions, which is generally the situation in physics (...) and chemistry today. Such a system will then become self-evident know-how itself. We will no longer be aware of its application and effect (Fleck 1935 (1980), p. 114, translation slightly altered from Fleck 1979, p. 86, original emphasis). (shrink)