This article asks whether an interdisciplinary "critical science studies" (CSS) is possible between a critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition, with its commitment to universal standards of reason, and relativistic sociologies of scientific knowledge (e.g., David Bloor's strong programme). It is argued that CSS is possible if its practitioners adopt the epistemological equivalent of Rawls's method of avoidance. A discriminating, public policy–relevant critique of science can then proceed on the basis of an argumentation theory (...) that employs an immanent standard of relevance, which is illustrated by drawing on Helen Longino's critique of behavioral theory. (shrink)

Doctoral programs at U.S. universities play a critical role in the development of human resources both in the United States and abroad. This volume reports the results of an extensive study of U.S. research-doctorate programs in five broad fields: physical sciences and mathematics, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, biological sciences, and the humanities. Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States documents changes that have taken place in the size, structure, and quality of doctoral education since the widely used 1982 editions. (...) This update provides selected information on nearly 4,000 doctoral programs in 41 subdisciplines at 274 doctorate-granting institutions. This volume also reports the results of the National Survey of Graduate Faculty, which polled a sample of faculty for their views on the scholarly quality of program faculty and the effectiveness of doctoral programs in preparing research scholars/scientists. This much-anticipated update of such an essential reference will be useful to education administrators, university faculty, and students seeking authoritative information on doctoral programs. (shrink)

Research in Science and Technology Studies (STS) tends to presume that intellectual and political radicalism go hand in hand. One would therefore expect that the most intellectually radical movement in the field relates critically to its social conditions. However, this is not the case, as demonstrated by the trajectory of the Parisian School of STS spearheaded by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. Their position, "actor-network theory," turns out to be little more than a strategic adaptation to the democratization (...) of expertise and the decline of the strong nation-state in France over the past 25 years. This article provides a prehistory of this client-driven, contract-based research culture in U.S. sociology of the 1960s, followed by specific features of French philosophical and political culture that have bred the distinctive tenets of actor-network theory. Insofar as actor-network theory has become the main paradigm for contemporary STS research, it reflects a field that dodges normative commitments in order to maintain a user-friendly presence. (shrink)

In the last two centuries, our world would have been a safer place if philosophers such as Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche had not given intellectual encouragement to the radical ideologies of Jacobins, Stalinists, and fascists. Maybe the world would have been better off, from the standpoint of sound practice, if philosophers had engaged in only modest, decent theory, as did John Stuart Mill. Yet, as Ronald Beiner contends, the point of theory is not to think safe thoughts; the point is (...) to open intellectual horizons. In Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, Beiner reflects on the dualism of theory and practice. The purpose of the theorist is not to offer sensible guidance on the conduct of social life but to test the boundaries of our vision of social order. Whereas the liberal citizen should embody the practical virtues of prudence and moderation, the theorist should be radical, probing, and immoderate. Looking back at the liberal-communitarian debate of the 1980s, Beiner recognizes that the antidote to our spiritless times lies neither in the embrace of community over individualism nor of individualism over community: both individual and community need to be submitted to radical questioning. It is by exposing ourselves to the challenge of fearless thinking encountered at the philosophical extremities that we are most likely to understand our own world at a deeper level. In this collection of essays and reviews, Ronald Beiner helps us to think critically about the thought-worlds of our foremost contemporary thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, J¦rgen Habermas, Will Kymlicka, Christopher Lasch, Richard Rorty, Judith Shklar, Leo Strauss, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer. (shrink)

The concept of “critical science literacy” advanced by Susanna Priest is significant to how citizens approach scientific knowledge, but the concept is also relevant to undergraduate students majoring in the sciences, who are not necessarily becoming “critically literate” in their own disciplines. That is, future scientists are not learning how arguments are structured, meaning is made, and facts are agreed upon—specifically through communicative practices—both within and outside of the scientific community. This gap in the curriculum can be addressed (...) through collaborative efforts between rhetoricians and sociologists of science. Drawing from three major disciplinary traditions—writing studies, the rhetoric of science, and science communication—this article posits that a pedagogical intervention is necessary to improve science communication with nonexpert publics. A science writing and communication course that is grounded in the rhetoric of science and that also has sociological, philosophical, and historical components can provide science students with a critical awareness of how their discipline operates in society and teach them how to become more responsible and effective communicators. (shrink)

In the past ten years, work by K€olbel, MacFarlane, Richard and others has rekindled old debates on relativism. In this important contribution to those debates, the authors defend a ‘mainstream’ view about the contents of thought and talk that they call Simplicity against the assaults from such ‘analytic relativists’.

In recent years, many qualitative sociologists, anthropologists, and social theorists have critiqued the use of algorithms and other automated processes involved in data science on both epistemological and political grounds. Yet, it has proven difficult to bring these important insights into the practice of data science itself. We suggest that part of this problem has to do with under-examined or unacknowledged assumptions about the relationship between the two fields—ideas about how data science and its critics can and (...) should relate. Inspired by recent work in Science and Technology Studies on interventions, we attempted to stage an encounter in which practicing data scientists were asked to analyze a corpus of critical social science literature about their work, using tools of textual analysis such as co-word and topic modelling. The idea was to provoke discussion both about the content of these texts and the possible limits of such analyses. In this commentary, we reflect on the planning stages of the experiment and how responses to the exercise, from both data scientists and qualitative social scientists, revealed some of the tensions and interactions between the normative positions of the different fields. We argue for further studies which can help us understand what these interdisciplinary tensions turn on—which do not paper over them but also do not take them as given. (shrink)

In a symposium built around a critical reassessment by Nicholas Gaskill of Richard Rorty's pragmatism, this contribution examines the provocative question of whether Rorty's rhetoric hinders Rortian aims. When reconsidering him in company with “the philosophical wing of science studies” (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway), Gaskill finds that Rorty's persistent assumption of nature/culture and word/world dichotomies is politically dangerous and prevents his comprehending both distributed agency and the complexity of human entanglements with the nonhuman. Gaskill's (...) Rorty lacks a sustained and coherent positive project, but a fuller picture, outlined in this article, reveals not only greater alignment of Rorty with science studies and agential realism but also key Rortian contributions to those fields that are particularly of moment in our “post-truth” condition. (shrink)

This paper examines the conclusions that one must draw from the finding that there are values in science. The value-ladenness of scientific claims puts the nature and role of empirical evidence into question, as seen in recent discussions in the philosophy of medicine regarding evidence-based medicine and feminist science studies, which maintains the normativity of its feminist claims. Within the critical literature and debates surrounding evidence-based medicine (EBM), one finds a championing of the lessons learned from (...) post-positivist science studies: the evidence-based effort to ground medical decision-making in the most rigorous sources of scientific evidence obscures the social values that necessarily enter into all decision-making contexts, the complex social context of clinical practice being no exception. The critics of EBM claim that to try to derive a formal methodology governed by pre-established rules, guidelines, and hierarchies of information misplaces the contextual and social features of biomedical knowledge and practice, thereby obscuring the power interests that so problematically dictate large factions of biomedical research and practice. Yet possible relativist implications follow from this finding, and we find that the EBM critics amply criticize EBM’s tacit theory of evidence, but then fail to formulate a constructive alternative theory of evidence within this fact-value interplay. After overviewing some such criticisms of evidence-based medicine, I turn to contemporary critical science studies, especially the feminist empiricism of Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Helen Longino, for workable alternative theories of evidence within a framework of normative scientific claims. I will suggest these theories fail to guide medical decision-making because of some undesirable consequences of Quinean fact-value holism: the denial that our values have logical content and are therefore not empirically examinable relativises even these nuanced conceptions of evidence. A naturalized look at how facts and values actually interact in medical decision-making suggests that this fact/value holism is not realistic. I provide an illustrative example of a physician devising a treatment recommendation for a patient to demonstrate that in practice, facts and values intermingle in the decision-making process without indeterminacy and subsequent appeals to moral and political frameworks, as feminist empiricism suggests. In the end, value-laden evidence can retain its adjudicative force and normativity. (shrink)

This article examines two approaches to the analysis and critical assessment of scientific argumentation. The first approach employs the discourse theory that Jurgen Habermas has developed on the basis of his theory of communicative action and applied to the areas of politics and law. Using his analysis of law and democracy in his Between Facts and Norms as a kind of template, I sketch the main steps in a Habermasian discourse theory of science. Difficulties in his approach motivate (...) my proposal of an alternative approach that starts not with a theory of communicative action but with some broad categories drawn from argumentation theory. Using these categories, one can survey the various conceptions of scientific argumentation that have already emerged in the multi-disciplinary field of science studies. The more flexible, open-ended theoretic categories put one in a better position to'develop cooperative interdisciplinary studies that can inform the critical assessment of scientific argumentation. (shrink)

Science studies has often been against the normative dimension of epistemology, which made a naturalistic study of science impossible. But this is not to say that a new type of normativity cannot be detected at work inscience studies. This is especially true in the second wave of studies dealing with the body, which has aimed at criticizing the physicalization of the body without falling into the various traps of a phenomenology simply added to a physical (...) substrate. This article explores the work of Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret in that respect, and shows how it can be used to rethink the articulation between the various levels that make up a body. (shrink)

Science and Technology Studies has attained a strong international profile in recent decades. Science Studies incorporates work in the History and Philosophy of Science, but emphasizes the social, cultural, and political implications of developments in the natural sciences, mathematics, engineering, and medicine. The Sociology of Science remains a vital part of Science Studies, but many other key contributors in the field identify more strongly with core disciplines such as Anthropology, Political Science, (...) and Communication Studies. Edited by a leading scholar in the field, this new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together classic work and the very best contemporary and cutting-edge scholarship. It provides researchersâe"and advanced studentsâe"with easy access to the key items of scholarly literature, material that is otherwise inaccessible or scattered throughout a variety of specialist journals and books. In particular, the collection enables users to gain a deep understanding of the current controversies surrounding science. The materials gathered exemplify important arguments, empirical studies, perspectives, and controversies (such as âe~the science warsâe(tm) of the 1990s). The collection also includes a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. Science and Technology Studies is an essential work of reference and will be welcomed as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that mechanistic explanations are causal explanations. Many prominent new mechanists endorse interventionism as the correct analysis of explanatory causal models in biology and other fields. This article argues that interventionism is not entirely satisfactory in this regard. A case study of Jacob and Monod’s operon model shows that at least some important mechanistic explanations in biology present significant contrasts with the interventionist account. This result motivates a more inclusive approach to mechanistic explanation, allowing for noncausal aspects.

El presente ensayo examina los cms en términos de su potencial transformador respecto al mundo del trabajo. A tal efecto, se brinda una caracterización de este enfoque y un repaso de su desarrollo histórico. Se argumenta que los cms no se agotan en su versión británica, disciplinariamente limitada a escuelas de negocios, y que su objeto ha sido también abordado por académicos de diversos países con afiliaciones institucionales en ciencias sociales distintas a la administración. Finalmente, se concluye que la pluralidad (...) disciplinaria de los cms y el tipo de preocupación intelectual que los motiva permite identificar un rol transformador más afín a disciplinas como la sociología que al campo de la administración. Más que agentes de cambio organizacional, los académicos que trabajan dentro del ámbito de los cms, podrían convertirse en intelectuales públicos comprometidos con la denuncia de las ideologías gerenciales y económicas dominantes.This essay examines Critical Management Studies (cms) in terms of their transformative potential regarding the world of work. To this end, I briefly characterize cms and review their historical development in the uk. I argue that the main theoretical concerns of cms are not the exclusive purview of its British version, but that they have also been addressed by scholars from other countries and institutional affiliations in social sciences other than management. Finally, I conclude that the disciplinary plurality of cms and the intellectual concerns that drive them are clearly aligned with a transformative role more akin to fields like sociology than to management and organization studies. More than organizational change agents, cms scholars could become public intellectuals committed to unmasking the dominant economic and managerial ideologies. (shrink)

This article argues that phenomenological sociology has great potential to provide a strong theoretical support to the Sociocognitive Approach in Critical Discourse Studies. SCA is interested in the interconnections between knowledge, discourse and society while placing subjectivity in the centre of its framework. It looks into the correlative relationship between personal- and socially shared knowledge, and the significance of these correlations to discourse production and interpretation. Analogously, phenomenological sociology explores the interrelated structures of subjectivity, knowledge and the social (...) world. It systematically analyses the conditions and forms of intersubjective understanding and the mutually constitutive relationship between subjective- and objective knowledge. Given the considerable overlap between the subject matter of phenomenological sociology and that of SCA, the purpose of the article is to draw the attention of critical discourse analysts to a neglected but extremely resourceful field. Following a brief introduction to SCA, the article will address some of SCA’s key concepts in conjunction with the phenomenological-sociological insight. (shrink)

Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies gather scholarship on improvisation from an immense range of perspectives, with contributions from more than sixty scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, (...) ethnomusicology, film, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others. (shrink)

Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies gather scholarship on improvisation from an immense range of perspectives, with contributions from more than sixty scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, (...) ethnomusicology, film, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others. (shrink)

In cultural as well as social science studies of discourses (e.g. of discourses on climate change), the concept of narrative is used in a very broad sense – as an umbrella term that lacks analytical accuracy. From the perspective of linguistics, it seems obvious to acknowledge five elementary generic patterns. In addition to narration, linguists differentiate between argumentation, description, explication and instruction. Each of these patterns fulfils a different basic pragmatic function. This article tries to make clear and (...) justify why it is important, both theoretically and practically, to make a distinction between these five generic patterns. It is argued and shown that narrativization tends to go hand in hand with a relief of action, historicization, potential fictionalization, subjectivization and relativization. With respect to discourses on the climate crisis, these prototypical characteristics of narratives undermine both scientific attempts to justify claims of truth relating to the existence, causes and consequences of global warming as well as practical attempts to motivate people to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle. (shrink)

Research often characterized as “new materialist” has staged a return/turn to nature in social and critical theory by bringing “matter” into the purview of our research. While this growing impetus to take nature seriously fosters new types of interdisciplinarity and thus new resources for knowing our nature-cultural worlds, its capacity to deal with power’s imbrication in how we understand “nature” is curtailed by its failures to engage substantively with the epistemological interventions of postcolonial feminist science studies. The (...) citational practices of many new materialist thinkers eschew the existence of what Sandra Harding has called “a world of sciences.” I argue that the “science” privileged and often conflated with matter in new materialist storytelling is the same science destabilized by postcolonial feminist science studies. This does not mean that new materialist feminisms and postcolonial feminist science studies are necessarily at odds, as new materialist storytelling and prevailing conceptualizations of the postcolonial seem to suggest. On the contrary, I suggest that thinking creatively, capaciously, pluralistically, and thus irreverently with respect to the rules of science––about the boundaries and meanings of matter, “life,” and “humanness”––could be understood as a central project for a postcolonial feminist science studies. (shrink)

If feminists argue for the irreducibility of the social dimensions of science, then they ought to embrace the idea that feminist and non-feminist scientists are not in collaboration, but in fact defend different interests. Instead, however, contemporary feminist science studies literature argues that feminist research improves particular, existing scientific enterprises, both epistemically (truer claims) and politically (more democratic methodologies and applications). I argue that the concepts of empirical success and democracy at work in this literature from Longino (...) (1994) and Harding (1996), to Longino (2002), Gilbert and Rader (2001), and Keller (2001) are not sufficiently critical, and fail to do justice to the truly revolutionary work done by feminist scientists. I offer the beginnings of an epistemology of dissensus (as opposed to consensus), using the work of Haraway (1978), Lyotard (1984), and Ziarek (2001). How would such an epistemology relate to feminist discussions of the possibility of democratic, responsible knowledge? (shrink)

First published in 1953. This title provides an exposition and discussion on Hippolyte Taine, the leader of the Naturalist movement in French criticism. The book examines his theories and some of his practice, as a critic of literature and art. A more general consideration of the chief issues raised by his central problem is also given, namely the attempt to approach the analysis and judgement of works of art historically, and thus to provide an objective basis of criticism. This title (...) will be of interest to students of art history and philosophy. (shrink)

This article examines various positions within science studies on scientific hegemony. After discussing the work of Stephan Fuchs and the “ epistemological chicken” debate, it proceeds to take issue with the claim that science is both locally accomplished and hegemonic. It offers the suggestion that critical accounts would better reconsider the ethos of their audience rather than simply worry about the objectivism of their own representations of science.

This article examines adaptive resource management as it has been applied to the US horseshoe crab fishery over the past decade. As a critical yet constructive exercise, I have three goals: to suggest how adaptive management, for all its promise, can still be improved; to add a nuanced case study to the literatures on the quantification of nature and environmental decision-making; and to use the example of ARM to make certain temporal aspects of contemporary natural resource management more salient (...) to science and technology studies scholars—that is, to show the ways in which time matters in environmental science, policy, and the analysis thereof. I draw attention to the time-related aspects of adaptive management by developing the notions of temporal orientation and chronological accountability. Temporal orientation refers to the time-based perspectives and epistemological commitments—that is, past-facing empiricism versus future-oriented modeling—that scientists of different types bring to bear on environmental problems. Chronological accountability refers to the missing link in adaptive forms of environmental governance: firm time lines and commitments to reflexively revisit management decisions. The time-related aspects of natural resource management deserve greater attention among both environmental managers and analysts of environmental policy. (shrink)

Are scientific enquiries directly relevant to epistemological issues? That is the question which links together the four studies comprising this work. Professor Mandelbaum answers the question in the affirmative. On the basis of this answer he rejects all phenomenalist or subjectivist notions: that we know only our states of mind or ideas. He rejects likewise any epistemology of a naïvely realist kind, which asserts that things are just as they appear to be. In their room he defends the epistemological (...) doctrine which he calls ‘critical realism’. A critical realist acknowledges that physical objects exist independently of our perception of them but insists, on the strength of scientific testimony, that not all the qualities which physical objects appear to possess are really possessed by them. On this count, Locke was a pioneer critical realist when he denied, on what he supposed to be scientific evidence, that secondary qualities inhere in objects. Mandelbaum is not committed precisely to Locke’s form of critical realism, but he believes that Locke was following the right general lines. (shrink)

Robert E. Myers has assembled a collection of essays which explore aspects of the relationship between science fiction and philosophy. Contributing authors focus on significant issues, questions, and ideas that penetrate to the center of our individual and social conceptions of human existence, and affect the ways in which we attempt to comprehend our world, ourselves, and others. The authors bring to this study the insights of diverse disciplines: philosophy, social science, poetry, linguistics, future studies, medical humanities, (...) and literature. Dealing exclusively with topics relating to science fiction and philosophy they offer an initial exploration of the philosophical problems within science fiction and their implications. (shrink)

In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions (...) and approaches of science, but what did it really teach us? What does it mean to study scientific practices? What are the general lessons, implications, and new challenges? This volume explores questions about the practice turn using both case studies and theoretical analysis. The case studies examine empirical and mathematical sciences, including the engineering sciences. The volume promotes interactions between acknowledged experts from different, often thought of as conflicting, orientations. It presents contributions in conjunction with critical commentaries that put the theses and assumptions of the former in perspective. Overall, the book offers a unique and diverse range of perspectives on the meanings, methods, lessons, and challenges associated with the practice turn. (shrink)