Cover: Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, from Harvard University PressCover: Epistemic Cultures in PAPERBACK

Epistemic Cultures

How the Sciences Make Knowledge

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Product Details

PAPERBACK

$41.00 • £32.95 • €37.00

ISBN 9780674258945

Publication Date: 05/01/1999

Short

352 pages

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

1 halftone, 11 line illustrations

World

Related Subjects

  • 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

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
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