Never pure : historical studies of science as if it was produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority

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Never pure : historical studies of science as if it was produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority

Steven Shapin

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

  • : pbk
  • : hardcover

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Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

: hardcover ISBN 9780801894206

Description

Steven Shapin argues that science, for all its immense authority and power, is and always has been a human endeavor, subject to human capacities and limits. Put simply, science has never been pure. To be human is to err, and we understand science better when we recognize it as the laborious achievement of fallible, imperfect, and historically situated human beings. Shapin's essays collected here include reflections on the historical relationships between science and common sense, between science and modernity, and between science and the moral order. They explore the relevance of physical and social settings in the making of scientific knowledge, the methods appropriate to understanding science historically, dietetics as a compelling site for historical inquiry, the identity of those who have made scientific knowledge, and the means by which science has acquired credibility and authority. This wide-ranging and intensely interdisciplinary collection by one of the most distinguished historians and sociologists of science represents some of the leading edges of change in the scholarly understanding of science over the past several decades.

Table of Contents

Preface 1. Lowering the Tone in the History of Science: A Noble Calling Part I: Methods and Maxims 2. Cordelia's Love: Credibility and the Social Studies of Science 3. How to Be Antiscientific 4. Science and Prejudice in Historical Perspective Part II: Places and Practices 5. The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-century England 6. Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology Part III: The Scientific Person 7. "The Mind Is Its Own Place": Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-century England 8. "A Scholar and a Gentleman": The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Seventeenth-century England 9. Who Was Robert Hooke? 10. Who Is the Industrial Scientist? Commentary from Academic Sociology and from the Shop Floor in the United States, ca. 1900-ca. 1970 Part IV: The Body of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Body 11. The Philosopher and the Chicken: On the Dietetics of Disembodied Knowledge 12. How to Eat Like a Gentleman: Dietetics and Ethics in Early Modern England Part V: The World of Science and the World of Common Sense 13. Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common Sense, and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-century Dietetic Medicine 14. Proverbial Economies: How an Understanding of Some Linguistic and Social Features of Common Sense Can Throw Light on More Prestigious Bodies of Knowledge, Science for Example 15. Descartes the Doctor: Rationalism and Its Therapies Part VI: Science and Modernity 16. Science and the Modern World Notes Index
Volume

: pbk ISBN 9780801894213

Description

Steven Shapin argues that science, for all its immense authority and power, is and always has been a human endeavor, subject to human capacities and limits. Put simply, science has never been pure. To be human is to err, and we understand science better when we recognize it as the laborious achievement of fallible, imperfect, and historically situated human beings. Shapin's essays collected here include reflections on the historical relationships between science and common sense, between science and modernity, and between science and the moral order. They explore the relevance of physical and social settings in the making of scientific knowledge, the methods appropriate to understanding science historically, dietetics as a compelling site for historical inquiry, the identity of those who have made scientific knowledge, and the means by which science has acquired credibility and authority. This wide-ranging and intensely interdisciplinary collection by one of the most distinguished historians and sociologists of science represents some of the leading edges of change in the scholarly understanding of science over the past several decades.

Table of Contents

Preface 1. Lowering the Tone in the History of Science: A Noble Calling Part I: Methods and Maxims 2. Cordelia's Love: Credibility and the Social Studies of Science 3. How to Be Antiscientific 4. Science and Prejudice in Historical Perspective Part II: Places and Practices 5. The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-century England 6. Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology Part III: The Scientific Person 7. "The Mind Is Its Own Place": Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-century England 8. "A Scholar and a Gentleman": The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Seventeenth-century England 9. Who Was Robert Hooke? 10. Who Is the Industrial Scientist? Commentary from Academic Sociology and from the Shop Floor in the United States, ca. 1900–ca. 1970 Part IV: The Body of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Body 11. The Philosopher and the Chicken: On the Dietetics of Disembodied Knowledge 12. How to Eat Like a Gentleman: Dietetics and Ethics in Early Modern England Part V: The World of Science and the World of Common Sense 13. Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common Sense, and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-century Dietetic Medicine 14. Proverbial Economies: How an Understanding of Some Linguistic and Social Features of Common Sense Can Throw Light on More Prestigious Bodies of Knowledge, Science for Example 15. Descartes the Doctor: Rationalism and Its Therapies Part VI: Science and Modernity 16. Science and the Modern World Notes Index

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