Permanenceand Change was written and first published in the depths of the Great Depression. Attitudes Toward History followed it two years later. These were revolutionary texts in the theory of communication, and, as classics, they retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, whereas Attitudes Towards History characterizes tactics and patterns of conflict typical of actual human associations. It is in Permanence and Change that Burke establishes in path-breaking fashion that form permeates (...) society just as it does poetry and the arts. Hence, his master idea that forms of art are not exclusively aesthetic: the cycles of a storm, the gradations of a sunrise, the stages of an epidemic, the undoing of Prince Hamlet are all instances of progressive form.This new Edition of Permanence and Change reprints Hugh Dalziel Duncan's long sociological introduction and includes a substantial new afterward in which Burke reexamines his early ideas in light of subsequent developments in his own thinking and in social theory.". (shrink)

(This insularity was further promoted by the guileless duplicity of scholars in other fields, who were all too prepared to bequeath "the problem of ...

The sociological dimension of science is studied using the discovery of the Wasserman reaction and its accidental application as a test for syphilis as a basis, ...

The first edition of this book profoundly challenged and divided students of philosophy, sociology, and the history of science when it was published in 1976. In this second edition, Bloor responds in a substantial new Afterword to the heated debates engendered by his book.

Examines modern science, looks at scientific literature, and discusses the growth of science, invisible colleges, and the process of discovery.

Inviting a reappraisal of the status of scientific knowledge, Andrew Pickering suggests that scientists are not mere passive observers and reporters of nature.

The anthropological approach is the central focus of this study. Laboratories are looked upon with the innocent eye of the traveller in exotic lands, and the societies found in these places are observed with the objective yet compassionate eye of the visitor from a quite other cultural milieu. There are many surprises that await us if we enter a laboratory in this frame of mind... This study is a realistic enterprise, an attempt to truly represent the social order of life (...) in laboratories and institutes of research, just as they are. By bringing the philosophical issues to the surface as matters not of prejudgement but as matters of concern, Karin Knorr-Cetina has developed the first really positive challenge to the philosophy of science since the days of paradigms and internal definitions of meanings. (shrink)