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E-book Rivers of the Anthropocene

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Penilaian

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“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it” (Shapin 1996, 1). So began Stephen Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution, a work, con-cise and smart, that embodied an approach to the history of science termed “the social construction of science.” Shapin argued that if we are going to talk about a “scientific revolution,” then we need to see it not simply as a historical event, but as a product of trends in twentieth-century historical writing. Following a pattern laid down as early as the eighteenth century, much twentieth-century writing con-ceptualized the Scientific Revolution as the linear unfolding of reason—a process in which discovery built on discovery, inevitably ushering in the modern world. The Scientific Revolution, in this story, completely transformed the intellectual landscape and allowed people to imagine natural phenomena in fundamentally new ways. However, as Shapin countered, if there was a Scientific Revolution, it was not a single moment but a set of processes that took place over hundreds of years and unfolded unevenly across different fields of study. The changes in under-standing and practices that did take place were initially limited to a relatively small group in society, and these people needed to legitimate their claims within domi-nant intellectual and social frameworks. In fact, what they could claim as knowl-edge was hotly contested both within their various scientific communities and beyond. The Scientific Revolution was a powerful way for thinking about changes in early modern science, but it was neither so linear, complete, nor isolated from sociocultural concerns as moderns had been tempted to imagine.What Shapin was arguing was hardly iconoclastic when he wrote in 1996.1 In fact, his book was the product of decades of research that overturned triumpha-list accounts of the history of science (Feyerabend 1975; Bloor 1976; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Shapin and Schaffer 1986; Haraway 1988; Latour 1988; Daston and Galison 1992; Shapin 1995; Cetina 1999; Daston and Galison 2010). This schol-arship suggested that science was neither internally rational and objective nor removed from its historical context. Science was a sociocultural practice like any other. At its most general level, this approach to the history of science—sometimesreferred to as scientific constructivism—asks the question, how does something become deemed “true” or “false” in science?2 How are decisions made, problems constructed, experiments formulated, solutions articulated? Shapin and his scien-tific constructivist colleagues argue that no scientific knowledge exists in a vac-uum; the questions scientists ask, the methods they use, the claims they make are in fact social constructions. Consequently, science is a social practice always medi-ated by culture, social structures, economics, politics, and religion, which shape its production and consumption in the laboratory and beyond. Importantly, their analyses are not necessarily focused on the validity of truth claims but rather on the forces that drive the search for truths, determine interpretations, or influence reception.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

550 BEN r

Penerbit

USA : University of California Press., 2017

Deskripsi Fisik

244 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780520967939

Klasifikasi

550

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Earth Sciences

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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