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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- $37.99
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- $37.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
According to a Gallup Poll, while most Americans acknowledge the importance of science and technology, fewer than half believe in the theory of evolution. In this interesting collection of essays, Shapin (Leviathan and the Air Pump), Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, suggests that this is not necessarily contradictory. He examines the cultural role of science as it evolved from the early days of the Royal Society of London, to its recent fragmentation into varying fields of expertise. In 1662, Robert Hooke was appointed to the position of Curator of Experiments by the Society. One of his responsibilities was to organize public demonstrations of experiments in order to generate peer group support. These were "not trials but shows and discourses," and it was Hook's job as curator "to prepare these performances for the society's deliberation, instruction and entertainment." In 1950s America, talented young scientists and engineers were recruited from the Academy to join industrial and government laboratories where they would work as part of a team. In this interesting if dense account, Shapin argues that a confusion of experts has made it harder to establish scientific authority.
