Analytical categories of scientific cultures have typically been used both exclusively and universally. For instance, when styles of scientific research are employed in attempts to understand and narrate science, styles alone are usually employed. This article is a thought experiment in interweaving categories. What would happen if rather than employ a single category, we instead investigated several categories simultaneously? What would we learn about the practices and theories, the agents and materials, and the political-technological impact of science if we analyzed (...) and applied styles, paradigms, and models simultaneously? I address these questions in general and for a specific case study: a brief history of systematics. (shrink)

The continental drift controversy has been deeply analysed in terms of rationalist notions, which seem to find there a unique topic to describe the weight of evidence for reaching consensus. In that sense, many authors suggest that Alfred Wegener’s theory of the original supercontinent Pangea and the subsequent continental displacements finally reached a consensus when irrefutable evidence became available. Therefore, rationalist approaches suggest that evidence can be enough by itself to close scientific controversies. In this article I analyse continental drift (...) debates from a different perspective which is based on styles of thought. I’ll argue that continental drift debate took much longer than it was usually recognized with two styles of thought coexisting for hundreds of years. These were fixism and mobilism and they were always confronting their own evidence and interpretations and functioning as general frameworks for the acceptability of a specific theory. Therefore, this text aims to bring much broader sociological elements than usually involved in the analysis of the continental drift theory. (shrink)

ArgumentUsing the notion of styles of knowledge we refer to the ways diverse scientific communities claim to produce true knowledge, their understandings regarding the attitudes and values that scientists should have in order to grasp natural and social reality, and the practices and technologies developed within such styles. This paper analyzes scientific and medical enterprises that explored the relationship between environment, population, and society in Colombia between 1850 and 1920. We argue that similar styles of knowledge production were shared in (...) human geography, medical geography, and climatic physiology at the mid-nineteenth century; and that some physicians working in bacteriology and physiology since the 1880s established epistemic boundaries between their work and earlier scientific activities, while others found these distinctions irrelevant. However, the historical actors committed to any of the styles of knowledge production explored in this article agreed on the local specificity of their objects of inquiry, therefore questioning European science. These styles of knowledge production also shaped different ways of perceiving and addressing national problems. Hence, this article is a contribution to the recent literature on both historical epistemology and social and cultural history of science and medicine. (shrink)

This paper examines the very disparate positions that various actors have taken towards the argument of subversion from within in a set of related debates on group selection, altruism and the handicap principle. Using this set of debates as a case study, this paper argues that different applications of epistemic values were one of the factors behind the disagreements between John Maynard Smith and Amotz Zahavi over a number of important evolutionary issues. The paper also argues that these different applications (...) were connected to important epistemological differences related in part to their disciplinary background. Apart from conflicting evolutionary views concerning the theoretical feasibility of the handicap effect, these antagonists both differed in the confidence they ascribed to mathematical modeling and over the hereditary basis for altruistic behavior. (shrink)

Scientific inquiry has led to immense explanatory and technological successes, partly as a result of the pervasiveness of scientific theories. Relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and plate tectonics were, and continue to be, wildly successful families of theories within physics, biology, and geology. Other powerful theory clusters inhabit comparatively recent disciplines such as cognitive science, climate science, molecular biology, microeconomics, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). Effective scientific theories magnify understanding, help supply legitimate explanations, and assist in formulating predictions. Moving from their (...) knowledge-producing representational functions to their interventional roles (Hacking 1983), theories are integral to building technologies used within consumer, industrial, and scientific milieus. -/- This entry explores the structure of scientific theories from the perspective of the Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Views. Each of these views answers questions such as the following in unique ways. What is the best characterization of the composition and function of scientific theory? How is theory linked with world? Which philosophical tools can and should be employed in describing and reconstructing scientific theory? Is an understanding of practice and application necessary for a comprehension of the core structure of a scientific theory? How are these three views ultimately related? (shrink)