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
The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights, by William F. Schulz and Sushma Raman, from Harvard University Press

Recent News

From Our Blog

Jacket, What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War, by Sarah Wagner, from Harvard University Press

Remembering Our Veterans during a Pandemic

Social distancing will make this Memorial Day quite different from what we are used to. Sarah Wagner, author of What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War, shows the way she’s chosen to remember and honor veterans during these challenging times. Dispatch from DC: Memorial Day weekend in the nation’s capital will be different this year. No motorcycles rumbling around the Nati…

‘manifold glories of classical Greek and Latin’

The digital Loeb Classical Library (loebclassics.com) extends the founding mission of James Loeb with an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.