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This course introduces students to science and technology studies (STS), an increasingly influential field that draws on sociological, anthropological, historical, and philosophical methods to analyze the relations and interactions between science, technology, and society. This course is structured into two sections. The first section reviews mainstream theories and critiques of STS. The second section explores the specificity of science as a social institution.
The purpose of this book is to represent the conception of scientific progress, the means by which scientific beliefs are produced, the scientific realism that says that science aims at truth and employs methods that achieve that aim, and the distinction between context of discovery and context of justification. The main idea of this book is that the pattern of scientific change exists in this way- normal science, crisis, extraordinary science, new phase of normal science. Normal science is built on and built by paradigms, which are exemplary instances of puzzle-solving in that discipline that provides a context and a model for future puzzle-solving. Extraordinary science is revolutionary.
This book analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. Part One examines feminist struggles over the modes of producing knowledge about, and the meanings of, the behavior and the social lives of monkeys and apes. Part Two explores contests for the power to determine stories about nature and experience. Part Three focuses on cyborg embodiment, the fate of various feminist concepts of gender, reappropriations of metaphors of vision for feminist ethical and epistemological purposes, and the immune system as a biopolitical map of the chief systems of difference in a postmodern world.
This book examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. While Boyle argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on, Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.
This book demonstrates that choices about the kinds of technical systems we build and use are actually choices about who we want to be and what kind of world we want to create—technical decisions are political decisions, and they involve profound choices about power, liberty, order, and justice. Part One is dedicated to developing a political philosophy of technology. Part Two explores a few modern social movements, noting the special opportunities and pitfalls that appear when technology is placed center stage. Part Three deals with the politics of language.
This book brings together a number of articles that have been of central significance in the development of the sociology of science, together with others which are representative of certain stages in that process. Part One delineates Merton’s continuing interest in the social of knowledge. Part Two focuses on the problematics of scientific knowledge. Part Three constitutes the core of Merton’s work on the ethos of science. Part Four discusses the powerful juxtaposition of the normative structure of science with its institutionally distinctive reward system. Part Five examines the ways in which additional variables may interact with factors identified in the paradigm.
This book examines these questions through a series of interrelated essays focused on Egypt in the twentieth century. These explore the way malaria, sugar cane, war, and nationalism interacted to produce the techno-politics of the modern Egyptian state; the forms of debt, discipline, and violence that founded the institution of private property; the methods of measurement, circulation, and exchange that produced the novel idea of a national "economy," yet made its accurate representation impossible; the stereotypes and plagiarisms that created the scholarly image of the Egyptian peasant; and the interaction of social logics, horticultural imperatives, powers of desire, and political forces that turned programs of economic reform in unanticipated directions.
This book brings together different approaches by philosophers, sociologists and historians of science to provide a lively and challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context and technical content are both essential to a proper understanding of scientific activity. Emphasizing that science can only be understood through its practice, the author examines science and technology in action: the role of scientific literature, the activities of laboratories, the institutional context of science in the modern world, and the means by which inventions and discoveries become accepted. From the study of scientific practice he develops an analysis of science as the building of networks.
本書不認為孔恩的《科學革命的結構》是導致STS誕生的關鍵原因，更企圖探討一個孔恩讓位後的SSK新視野：包括她的緣起，及她在哲學、人類學、科學史三個方向的多重建構，她的社會網絡與系譜關係。最後，回應那個批判的時代，本書討論了70年代初的孔恩，以及後來80年代SSK與科技史社群的「新當代批判意識」。本書從東亞與臺灣的STS觀點出發，主要關注英、美70年代以來第一、二代的SSK學者、人物、論戰、以及辛勤編織的重重論述。
This book collects twelve essays, exploring the interrelationships and development in modern history and daily life, which is crucial to the future of humanity and of the Earth. The authors examine the many tangled connections between climate and food supplies, demographic pressures and technological innovation, and the environment and social change, provide specific case studies of this ecological imperialism, the efforts of Western peoples to extend their empires and economies into non-Western environments, and focus on twentieth-century efforts to regulate the growing human impact on nature in both capitalist and socialist systems.
