Science as Practice and Culture / Edition 2

by Andrew Pickering

Overview

Science as Practice and Culture explores one of the newest and most controversial developments within the rapidly changing field of science studies: the move toward studying scientific practice--the work of doing science--and the associated move toward studying scientific culture, understood as the field of resources that practice operates in and on.

Andrew Pickering has invited leading historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists of science to prepare original essays for this volume. The essays range over the physical and biological sciences and mathematics, and are divided into two parts. In part I, the contributors map out a coherent set of perspectives on scientific practice and culture, and relate their analyses to central topics in the philosophy of science such as realism, relativism, and incommensurability. The essays in part II seek to delineate the study of science as practice in arguments across its borders with the sociology of scientific knowledge, social epistemology, and reflexive ethnography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226668017
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/01/1992
Edition description:	1
Pages:	482
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Andrew Pickering is professor in the Department of Sociology and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice
Andrew Pickering
Part 1 - Positions
2. The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences
Ian Hacking
3. Putting Agency Back into Experiment
David Gooding
4. The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory: On the Relationship between Experiment and Laboratory in Science
Karin Knorr Cetina
5. Constructing Quaternions: On the Analysis of Conceptual Practice
Andrew Pickering and Adam Stephanides
6. Crafting Science: Standardized Packages, Boundary Objects, and "Translation"
Joan H. Fujimura
Part 2 - Arguments
7. Extending Wittgenstein: The Pivotal Move from Epistemology to the Sociology of Science
Michael Lynch
8. Left and Right Wittgensteinians
David Bloor
9. From the "Will to Theory" to the Discursive Collage: A Reply to Bloor's "Left and Right Wittgensteinians"
Michael Lynch
10. Epistemological Chicken
H. M. Collins and Steven Yearley
11. Some Remarks About Positionism: A Reply to Collins and Yearley
Steve Woolgar
12. Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley
Michel Callon and Bruno Latour
13. Journey into Space
H. M. Collins and Steven Yearley
14. Social Epistemology and the Research Agenda of Science Studies
Steve Fuller
15. Border Crossings: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies and among Physicists in Tsukuba Science City, Japan
Sharon Traweek
Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

Pickering (sociology, U. of Illinois) invited the authors he was already discussing in his advanced undergraduate-graduate seminars on the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) to contribute to this volume of original essays. The five essays in part one, "Positions," are self-contained pieces that represent individual perspectives on that part of SSK that is concerned with scientific practice rather than with scientific knowledge per se. The nine essays in part two, "Arguments," address the question of whether studies of science as practice should be seen as a genuine and viable departure from classical SSK, and if so, whether this departure is a step forward or backward. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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