Download or read book The Cultural Authority of Science written by Martin Bauer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural authority of science is the authority that is granted to science in any particular context. This authority is as much a matter of image and perceived legitimacy as of statutory guarantee. However, while authority can be charismatic, based on tradition or based on competence, we would assume that science aims to be an authority of competence. To what extent does science have the last word, or stand above opinion on public issues? This Indo-European led collaboration aims to map the cultural authority of science, and to construct a system of indicators to observe this ‘science culture’ based on artefacts (science news analysis) and espoused beliefs and evaluations (public attitude data). Indeed, through a series of studies the authors examine the cultural authority of science in light of the challenges posed by European, Asian, African and American developments and debates. In particular, two main ideas are examined: the ‘Lighthouse’ model, whereby science is shining into a stormy sea of ignorance and mistrust; and the ‘Bungee Jump’ model, which demonstrates how science occasionally experiences a rough ride against a backdrop of goodwill. Presenting expertise in discourse analysis, computer-assisted text analysis and largescale survey analysis, The Cultural Authority of Science will be of interest to a global audience concerned with the standing of science in society. In particular, it may appeal to scholars and students of fields such as sociology of science, science communication, science studies, scientometrics, innovation studies and social psychology.
Download or read book Cultural Boundaries of Science written by Thomas F. Gieryn and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-01-15 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text argues that an explanation for the cultural authority of science lies where scientific claims leave laboratories and enter boardrooms and living rooms. Here, one uses "maps" to decide who to believe - cultural maps demarcating "science" from pseudoscience, ideology, faith, or nonsense.
Download or read book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2008-10-23 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners. The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development—-and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.
Download or read book Science under Fire written by Andrew Jewett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have long been suspicious of experts and elites. This new history explains why so many have believed that science has the power to corrupt American culture. Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that “tenured radicals” have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some progressives, especially in the universities, worry that science’s celebration of objectivity and neutrality masks its attachment to Eurocentric and patriarchal values. As we grapple with the implications of climate change and revolutions in fields from biotechnology to robotics to computing, it is crucial to understand how scientific authority functions—and where it has run up against political and cultural barriers. Science under Fire reconstructs a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. Andrew Jewett reveals a persistent current of criticism which maintains that scientists have injected faulty social philosophies into the nation’s bloodstream under the cover of neutrality. This charge of corruption has taken many forms and appeared among critics with a wide range of social, political, and theological views, but common to all is the argument that an ideologically compromised science has produced an array of social ills. Jewett shows that this suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture by tracking its development, varied expressions, and potent consequences since the 1920s. Looking at today’s battles over science, Jewett argues that citizens and leaders must steer a course between, on the one hand, the naïve image of science as a pristine, value-neutral form of knowledge, and, on the other, the assumption that scientists’ claims are merely ideologies masquerading as truths.
Download or read book Conjuring Science written by Christopher P. Toumey and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toumey focuses on the ways in which the symbols of science are employed to signify scientific authority in a variety of cases, from the selling of medical products to the making of public policy about AIDS/HIV--a practice he calls "conjuring" science. It is this "conjuring" of the images and symbols of scientific authority that troubles Toumey and leads him to reflect on the history of public understanding and perceptions of science in the United States.
Download or read book An Introduction to Science Studies written by John M. Ziman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987-07-23 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to give a coherent account of the different perspectives on science and technology that are normally studied under various disciplinary heads such as philosophy of science, sociology of science and science policy. It is intended for students embarking on courses in these subjects and assumes no special knowledge of any science. It is written in a direct and simple style, and technical language is introduced very sparingly. As various perspectives are sketched out in this book, the reader moves towards a consistent conception of contemporary science as a rapidly changing social institution that has already grown out of its traditional forms and plays a central role in society at large. It will appeal to students in a wide range of scientific disciplines and complement well Professor Ziman's earlier books.
Download or read book The Two Cultures written by C. P. Snow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-26 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.
Download or read book Is Science Racist written by Jonathan Marks and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every arena of science has its own flash-point issues—chemistry and poison gas, physics and the atom bomb—and genetics has had a troubled history with race. As Jonathan Marks reveals, this dangerous relationship rumbles on to this day, still leaving plenty of leeway for a belief in the basic natural inequality of races. The eugenic science of the early twentieth century and the commodified genomic science of today are unified by the mistaken belief that human races are naturalistic categories. Yet their boundaries are founded neither in biology nor in genetics and, not being a formal scientific concept, race is largely not accessible to the scientist. As Marks argues, race can only be grasped through the humanities: historically, experientially, politically. This wise, witty essay explores the persistence and legacy of scientific racism, which misappropriates the authority of science and undermines it by converting it into a social weapon.
Download or read book Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins written by Denis R. Alexander and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and death camps—all in an attempt to support notions of racial superiority. By investigating the past, the contributors to Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future. Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers bring together fourteen experts to examine the varied ways science has been used and abused for nonscientific purposes from the fifteenth century to the present day. Featuring an essay on eugenics from Edward J. Larson and an examination of the progress of evolution by Michael J. Ruse, Biology and Ideology examines uses both benign and sinister, ultimately reminding us that ideological extrapolation continues today. An accessible survey, this collection will enlighten historians of science, their students, practicing scientists, and anyone interested in the relationship between science and culture.
Download or read book Science Policy and the Value Free Ideal written by Heather E. Douglas and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2009-07-15 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of science in policymaking has gained unprecedented stature in the United States, raising questions about the place of science and scientific expertise in the democratic process. Some scientists have been given considerable epistemic authority in shaping policy on issues of great moral and cultural significance, and the politicizing of these issues has become highly contentious. Since World War II, most philosophers of science have purported the concept that science should be "value-free." In Science, Policy and the Value-Free Ideal, Heather E. Douglas argues that such an ideal is neither adequate nor desirable for science. She contends that the moral responsibilities of scientists require the consideration of values even at the heart of science. She lobbies for a new ideal in which values serve an essential function throughout scientific inquiry, but where the role values play is constrained at key points, thus protecting the integrity and objectivity of science. In this vein, Douglas outlines a system for the application of values to guide scientists through points of uncertainty fraught with moral valence.Following a philosophical analysis of the historical background of science advising and the value-free ideal, Douglas defines how values should-and should not-function in science. She discusses the distinctive direct and indirect roles for values in reasoning, and outlines seven senses of objectivity, showing how each can be employed to determine the reliability of scientific claims. Douglas then uses these philosophical insights to clarify the distinction between junk science and sound science to be used in policymaking. In conclusion, she calls for greater openness on the values utilized in policymaking, and more public participation in the policymaking process, by suggesting various models for effective use of both the public and experts in key risk assessments.
Download or read book Contesting Cultural Authority written by Frank M. Turner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-04-08 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A volume of essays which constitutes a major overview of the Victorian intellectual enterprise.
Download or read book Instituting Science written by Timothy Lenoir and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early practitioners of the social studies of science turned their attention away from questions of institutionalization, which had tended to emphasize macrolevel explanations, and attended instead to microstudies of laboratory practice. Though sympathetic to this approach--as the microstudies included in this book attest--the author is interested in re-investigating certain aspects of institution formation, notably the formation of scientific, medical, and engineering disciplines. He emphasizes the manner in which science as cultural practice is imbricated with other forms of social, political, and even aesthetic practices. This book offers case studies that reexamine certain critical junctures in the traditional historical picture of the evolution of the role of the scientist in modern Western society. It focuses especially on the establishment of new disciplines within German research universities in the nineteenth century, the problematic relationship that emerged between science, industry, and the state at the turn of the twentieth century, and post-World War II developments in science and technology. After an Introduction and two chapters dealing with science and technology as cultural production and the struggles of disciplines to achieve legitimation and authority, the author considers the following topics: the organic physics of 1847; the innovative research program of Carl Ludwig as a model for institutionalizing science-based medicine; optics, painting, and ideology in Germany, 1845-95; Paul Ehrlich's "magic bullet"; the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia; and the introduction of nuclear magnetic resonance instrumentation into the practice of organic chemistry.
Download or read book Science Faith and Society written by Michael Polanyi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its concern with science as an essentially human enterprise, Science, Faith and Society makes an original and challenging contribution to the philosophy of science. On its appearance in 1946 the book quickly became the focus of controversy. Polanyi aims to show that science must be understood as a community of inquirers held together by a common faith; science, he argues, is not the use of "scientific method" but rather consists in a discipline imposed by scientists on themselves in the interests of discovering an objective, impersonal truth. That such truth exists and can be found is part of the scientists' faith. Polanyi maintains that both authoritarianism and scepticism, attacking this faith, are attacking science itself.
Download or read book Scientific Pluralism written by Stephen H. Kellert and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific pluralism is an issue at the forefront of philosophy of science. This landmark work addresses the question, Can pluralism be advanced as a general, philosophical interpretation of science? Scientific Pluralism demonstrates the viability of the view that some phenomena require multiple accounts. Pluralists observe that scientists present various—sometimes even incompatible—models of the world and argue that this is due to the complexity of the world and representational limitations. Including investigations in biology, physics, economics, psychology, and mathematics, this work provides an empirical basis for a consistent stance on pluralism and makes the case that it should change the ways that philosophers, historians, and social scientists analyze scientific knowledge. Contributors: John Bell, U of Western Ontario; Michael Dickson, U of South Carolina; Carla Fehr, Iowa State U; Ronald N. Giere, U of Minnesota; Geoffrey Hellman, U of Minnesota; Alan Richardson, U of British Columbia; C. Wade Savage, U of Minnesota; Esther-Mirjam Sent, U of Nijmegen. Stephen H. Kellert is professor of philosophy at Hamline University and a fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. Helen E. Longino is professor of philosophy at Stanford University. C. Kenneth Waters is associate professor of philosophy and director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.
Download or read book From Nature to Experience written by Roger Lundin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is Volume Two, the second of two volumes which describe techniques for the inspection of railroad track in the United States. Track inspection is described from the personal perspective of a retired railroad and Federal Railroad Administration track inspector. This volume covers rail flaws, crossties, continuous welded rail, and other structural conditions. Volume Two ends with a chapter on new automated inspection systems. The book is recommended for new and experienced railroad track inspectors and anyone interested in railroad track safety.
Download or read book Engaging Science written by Joseph Rouse and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summarizing this century's major debates over realism and the rationality of scientific knowledge, Joseph Rouse believes that these disputes oversimplify the political and cultural significance of the sciences. He provides an alternative understanding of science that focuses on practices rather than knowledge. Rouse first outlines the shared assumptions by ostensibly opposed interpretive stances toward science: scientific realism, social constructivism, empiricism, and postempiricist historical rationalism. He then advances cultural studies as an alternative approach, one that understands the sciences as ongoing patterns of situated activity whose material setting is part of practice. Cultural studies of science, the author suggests, take seriously their own participation in and engagement with the culture of science, rejecting the purported detachment of earlier philosophical or sociological standpoints. Rather, such studies offer specific, critical discussions of how and why science matters, and to whom, and how opportunites for meaningful understanding and action are transformed by scientific practices.
Download or read book Cultural Boundaries of Science written by Thomas F. Gieryn and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-01-15 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is science so credible? Usual answers center on scientists' objective methods or their powerful instruments. In his new book, Thomas Gieryn argues that a better explanation for the cultural authority of science lies downstream, when scientific claims leave laboratories and enter courtrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms. On such occasions, we use "maps" to decide who to believe—cultural maps demarcating "science" from pseudoscience, ideology, faith, or nonsense. Gieryn looks at episodes of boundary-work: Was phrenology good science? How about cold fusion? Is social science really scientific? Is organic farming? After centuries of disputes like these, Gieryn finds no stable criteria that absolutely distinguish science from non-science. Science remains a pliable cultural space, flexibly reshaped to claim credibility for some beliefs while denying it to others. In a timely epilogue, Gieryn finds this same controversy at the heart of the raging "science wars."
