Science as Practice and Culture

edited by Andrew Pickering

University of Chicago Press, 1992
Cloth: 978-0-226-66800-0 | Paper: 978-0-226-66801-7 | Electronic: 978-0-226-66820-8
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226668208.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

Preface

From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice

Part 1: Positions

The Self-vindication of the Laboratory Sciences

Putting Agency Back into Experiment

The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory: On the Relationship between Experiment and Laboratory in Science

Constructing Quaternions: On the Analysis of Conceptual Practice

Crafting Science: Standardized Packages, Boundary Objects, and "Translation"

Part 2: Arguments

Extending Wittgenstein: The Pivotal Move from Epistemology to the Sociology of Science

Left and Right Wittgensteinians

From the "Will to Theory" to the Discursive Collage: A Reply to Bloor's "Left and Right Wittgensteinians"

Epistemological Chicken

Some Remarks About Positionism: A Reply to Collins and Yearley

Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley

Journey into Space

Social Epistemology and the Research Agenda of Science Studies

Border Crossings: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies and among Physicists in Tsukuba Science City, Japan

Contributors

Index