Epistemic cultures

Harvard University Press

1999

XIII, 329 p.

9780674258938

1. Introduction. The Disunity of the Sciences ; The Cultures of Knowledge Societies ; Culture and Practice ; The Structure of the Book ; Physics Theory, and a First Look at the Field ; Issues of Methodology, and More about the Field --2. What Is a Laboratory? Laboratories as Reconfigurations of Natural and Social Orders ; From Laboratory to Experiment ; Some Features of the Laboratory Reconsidered --3. Particle Physics and Negative Knowledge. The Analogy of the Closed Universe ; A World of Signs and Secondary Appearances ; The "Meaninglessness" of Measurement ; The Structure of the Care of the Self ; Negative Knowledge and the Liminal Approach ; Moving in a Closed Universe: Unfolding, Framing, and Convoluting --4. Molecular Biology and Blind Variation. An Object-Oriented Epistemics ; The Small-Science Style of Molecular Biology and the Genome Project ; The Laboratory as a Two-Tier Structure ; "Blind" Variation and Natural Selection ; The Experiential Register ; Blind Variation Reconsidered --5. From Machines to Organisms: Detectors as Behavioral and Social Beings. Primitive Classifications ; Detector Agency and Physiology ; Detectors as Moral and Social Individuals ; Live Organism or Machine? ; Are There Enemies? ; Physicists as Symbionts ; Taxonomies of Trust ; Primitive Classifications Reconsidered --6. From Organisms to Machines : Laboratories as Factories of Transgenics. A Science of Life without Nature? ; Organisms as Production Sites ; Cellular Machines ; Industrial Production versus Natural (Re)production ; Biological Machines Reconsidered --7. HEP Experiments as Post-Traditional Communitarian Structures. Large Collaborations : A Brief History ; The Erasure of the Individual as an Epistemic Subject ; Management by Content ; The Intersection of Management by Content and Communitarianism ; Communitarian Time : Genealogical, Scheduled --8. The Multiple Ordering Framework of HEP Collaborations. The Birth Drama of an Experiment ; Delaying the Choice, or Contests of Unfolding ; Confidence Pathways and Gossip Circles ; Other Ordering Frameworks ; Reconfiguration Reconsidered --10. Toward an Understanding of Knowledge Societies : A Dialogue.

Английский