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Science as Practice and Culture

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.


482 pages | 20 line drawings, 2 tables | 6 x 9 | © 1992

Culture Studies

Philosophy of Science

Rhetoric and Communication

Sociology: Theory and Sociology of Knowledge

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

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