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

Epistemic Cultures

How the Sciences Make Knowledge

Add to Cart

Product Details

PAPERBACK

$42.00 • £33.95 • €38.00

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
Voice, Choice, and Action: The Potential of Young Citizens to Heal Democracy, by Felton Earls and Mary Carlson, from Harvard University Press

Recent News

Black lives matter. Black voices matter. A statement from HUP »

From Our Blog

Jacket: Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, by James L. Nolan, Jr., from Harvard University Press

Remembering Hiroshima

On this day 75 years ago, the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. James L. Nolan Jr.’s grandfather was a doctor who participated in the Manhattan Project, and he writes about him in Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, an unflinching examination of the moral and professional dilemmas faced by physicians who took part in the project. Below, please find the introduction to Nolan’s book. On the morning of June 17, 1945, Captain James F. Nolan, MD, boarded a plane…