- A Note on Transcription
- 1. Introduction
- 1.1. The Disunity of the Sciences
- 1.2. The Cultures of Knowledge Societies
- 1.3. Culture and Practice
- 1.4. The Structure of the Book
- 1.5. Physics Theory, and a First Look at the Field
- 1.6. Issues of Methodology, and More about the Field
- 2. What is a Laboratory?
- 2.1. Laboratories as Reconfigurations of Natural and Social Orders
- 2.2. From Laboratory to Experiment
- 2.3. Some Features of the Laboratory Reconsidered
- 3. Particle Physics and Negative Knowledge
- 3.1. The Analogy of the Closed Universe
- 3.2. A World of Signs and Secondary Appearances
- 3.3. The “Meaninglessness” of Measurement
- 3.4. The Structure of the Care of the Self
- 3.5. Negative Knowledge and the Liminal Approach
- 3.6. Moving in a Closed Universe: Unfolding, Framing, and Convoluting
- 4. Molecular Biology and Blind Variation
- 4.1. An Object-Oriented Epistemics
- 4.2. The Small-Science Style of Molecular Biology and the Genome Project
- 4.3. The Laboratory as a Two-Tier Structure
- 4.4. “Blind” Variation and Natural Selection
- 4.5. The Experiential Register
- 4.6. Blind Variation Reconsidered
- 5. From Machines to Organisms: Detectors as Behavioral and Social Beings
- 5.1. Primitive Classifications
- 5.2. Detector Agency and Physiology
- 5.3. Detectors as Moral and Social Individuals
- 5.4. Live Organism or Machine?
- 5.5. Are There Enemies?
- 5.6. Physicists as Symbionts
- 5.7. Taxonomies of Trust
- 5.8. Primitive Classifications Reconsidered
- 6. From Organisms to Machines: Laboratories as Factories of Transgenics
- 6.1. A Science of Life without Nature?
- 6.2. Organisms as Production Sites
- 6.3. Cellular Machines
- 6.4. Industrial Production versus Natural (Re)production
- 6.5. Biological Machines Reconsidered
- 7. HEP Experiments as Post-Traditional Communitarian Structures
- 7.1. Large Collaborations: A Brief History
- 7.2. The Erasure of the Individual as an Epistemic Subject
- 7.3. Management by Content
- 7.4. The Intersection of Management by Content and Communitarianism
- 7.5. Communitarian Time: Genealogical, Scheduled
- 8. The Multiple Ordering Frameworks of HEP Collaborations
- 8.1. The Birth Drama of an Experiment
- 8.2. Delaying the Choice, or Contests of Unfolding
- 8.3. Confidence Pathways and Gossip Circles
- 8.4. Other Ordering Frameworks
- 8.5. Reconfiguration Reconsidered
- 9. The Dual Organization of Molecular Biology Laboratories
- 9.1. Laboratories Structured as Individuated Units
- 9.2. Becoming a Laboratory Leader
- 9.3. The Two Levels of the Laboratory
- 9.4. The “Impossibility” of Cooperation in Molecular Biology
- 10. Toward an Understanding of Knowledge Societies: A Dialogue
- Notes
- References
- Index


Epistemic Cultures
How the Sciences Make Knowledge
Product Details
PAPERBACK
$43.50 • £34.95 • €39.00
ISBN 9780674258945
Publication Date: 05/01/1999
Related Subjects
Awards & Accolades
- 2001 Robert K. Merton Book Award, Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association
- 2001 Ludwik Fleck Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science