Kuhn and the sociological revolution

Configurations

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 21-32

  Barker, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750869015     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.1998.0001     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
2. Peter Barker, "Review of Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions," Isis 85 (1994): 193-195.
3. Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions (above, n. 1), p. 122 and n. 282.
4. Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978);
5. Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
6. Larry Laudan, Science and Values (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
7. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976).
8. David Bloor, Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), esp. pp. 46-49.
9. For references, see Steven Shapin, "History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions," History of Science 20 (1982): 157-211.
10. Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
11. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
12. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, "Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So," in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Towards an Integration of Micro- and Macro-sociologies, ed. K. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 277-303.
13. Bruno Latour, Nous n'avons jamais été modernes: Essai d'anthropologie symétrique (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1991);
14. Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
15. Shapin, Social History, p. xxvi.
16. Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions (above, n. 1), p. 124.
17. Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions Ibid., p. 125.
18. Harry M. Collins and Steven Yearly, "Epistemological Chicken," in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. A. Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 301-326; quotation on p. 301.
19. Harry M. Collins and Steven Yearly, Science as Practice and Culture, Ibid., p. 308.
20. Jan Golinski, "The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory: Sociological Approaches to the History of Science," Isis 81 (1990): 492-505.
21. Barry Barnes, "How Not to Do the Sociology of Knowledge," in Rethinking Objectivity, ed. A. Megill (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 21-35; the quotation collects material from pp. 31 and 33, remarks 6.2 and 6.8.
22. Thomas S. Kuhn, "Second Thoughts on Paradigms," in The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. F. Suppe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 459-482.
23. For the sequel see Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions (above, n. 1) esp. sect. 3.6.
24. This is especially clear for objects we would never recognize without scientific training, including instruments uniquely connected to particular exemplar clusters - for example, Atwood's machine in Newtonian mechanics.
25. Much more could be said on the order in which local wholes are acquired. It is apparent that some form preconditions for acquiring others, and that there are various consequences of learning several local wholes. To borrow an idea from wave optics, the extreme cases correspond to reinforcement and cancellation. For further details, see Peter Barker, "Wittgenstein and the Historicist Project in the Philosophy of Science," in Philosophy and Natural Science: Borderline Questions. Reports of the 13th International Wittgenstein Symposium, ed. P. Weingartner and G. Schurz (Vienna: Holdner - Pichler - Tempsky, 1989), pp. 243-246;
26. Peter Barker, idem, "Wittgenstein and the Authority of Science," in The Tasks of Contemporary Philosophy. Proceedings of the 10th International Wittgenstein Symposium, ed. W. Leinfellner and F. M. Wuketits (Vienna: Holdner - Pichler - Tempsky, 1986), pp. 265-267.
27. Thomas S. Kuhn, "The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science," Robert and Maurine Rothschild Distinguished Lecture, 19 November 1991 (Cambridge, Mass.: Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, 1992), p. 20.
28. Thus, for example, in Leviathan (above, n. 10) Shapin and Schaffer claim to account not just for the outcome of a particular scientific episode in England, but for the origin of all of modern experimental science, and a similarly sweeping claim based on the separation of the social and the natural is now made by Shapin and Latour (see above, n. 12). Another symptom is the exclusionary character of much sociology of scientific knowledge: the early insistence of the Strong Program that philosophy of science has nothing to say, and Latour's notorious "moratorium on the cognitive." I think Latour's suggestion may be read as a joke, but imperialistic sociologists of knowledge read it with a completely straight face.
29. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolger, "Postscript to the Second Edition (1986)," in idem, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 273-286, esp. p. 280.
30. There is a surprising disjunction between historical studies in the philosophy and sociology of science. The former features the Copernican revolution, the chemical revolution, the Einsteinian revolution, and the origins of quantum theory. The latter considers the Boyle-Hobbes controversy on experiment, Pasteur's introduction of the bacterial theory of disease, modern particle physics, and modern biochemistry. Both groups offer treatments of the history of geology.