Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-23T13:02:34.337Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Boundary Work and the Science Wars: James Robert Brown's Who Rules in Science?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

Sergio Sismondo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The Science Wars have not involved any violence, nor even threats of violence. Thus the label “wars” for this series of discussions, mostly one-sided and mostly located within the academy, is something of an overblown metaphor. Nonetheless, I will suggest that there are some respects in which the metaphor is appropriate. The Science Wars involve territory, albeit a metaphorical kind of territory. They inspire work that can be best interpreted as ideological, a result of disciplinary interests. Moreover, fellow participants in the wars and others reward that ideological work.

My goal in this is to display efforts to maintain a discipline's epistemic authority, the recognition that members of that discipline have legitimate claims to knowledge on a subject. The central section of the paper takes the form of a discussion of one recent contribution to the Science Wars, James Robert Brown's Who Rules in Science? My argument is at least somewhat generalizable beyond this book, and it therefore points to interesting phenomena related to epistemic authority.

Type
Research Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , February 2005 , pp. 235 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aronowitz, Stanley (1996). “The Politics of the Science Wars.” Social Text 14: 177–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Behe, Michael J (2004). Review of Brown 2001. First Things 145: 75–79.Google Scholar
Bloor, David (1991). Knowledge and Social Imagery, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1975). “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason.” Social Science Information 14: 19–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, James Robert (2001). Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callon, Michel & Latour, Bruno (1992). “Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley.” In Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Pickering, Andrew. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 343–368.Google Scholar
Collins, H.M. (1996). “In Praise of Futile Gestures: How Scientific is the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge?” Social Studies of Science 26: 229–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Randall (1998). The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Farley, John & Geison, Gerald (1974). “Science, politics and spontaneous generation in nineteenth-century France: The Pasteur-Pouchet debate.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48: 161–198.Google ScholarPubMed
Forman, Paul (1971). “Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3: 1–115.Google Scholar
Fuller, Steve (2003). Review of Labinger and Collins, The One Culture?, and of Brown 2001, British Journal for the History of Science 36: 125–127.Google Scholar
Gieryn, Thomas (1999). Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gieryn, Thomas & Figert, Anne (1986). “Scientists Protect their Cognitive Authority: The Status Degradation Ceremony of Sir Cyril Burt.” In The Knowledge Society: The Growing Impact of Scientific Knowledge on Social Relations, ed. Bohme, Gernot and Stehr, Nico. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 67–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harding, Sandra (1991). Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Kitcher, Philip (2001). Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitcher, Philip (2002). “The Third Way: Reflections on Helen Longino's The Fate of Knowledge.” Philosophy of Science 69: 549–59.Google Scholar
Koertge, Noretta ed. (1998). A House Built on Sand. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kleinman, Daniel Lee & Kinchy, Abby (2003). “Organizing Credibility: Structural Considerations on the Borders of Ecology and Politics.” Social Studies of Science 33: 869–896.Google Scholar
Labinger, Jay & Collins, Harry, eds. (2001). The One Culture? A Conversation about Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lakatos, Imre & Feyerabend, Paul (1999). For and Against Method, Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence. Motterlini, Matteo, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno (1988). The Pasteurization of France. Sheridan, Alan and Law, John, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno (1990). “The Force and the Reason of Experiment.” In LeGrand, H.E., ed. Experimental Inquiries. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 49–80.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno & Woolgar, Steve (1979). Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno & Woolgar, Steve (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Law, John & Hassard, John, eds. (1999). Actor-Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Levitt, Norman (1999). Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Longino, Helen (2001). The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Longino, Helen (2002). “Science and the Common Good: Thoughts on Philip Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy.” Philosophy of Science 69: 560–68.Google Scholar
Mellor, Felicity (2003). “Between Fact and Fiction: Demarcating Science from Non-Science in Popular Physics Books.” Social Studies of Science 33: 509–538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parsons, Keith (2001). Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Parsons, Keith (2002). “Scientific Civilization and Its Discontents: Further Reflections on the Science Wars.” Philosophy of Science 69: 645–51.Google Scholar
Parsons, Keith, Long, Rebecca & Sofka, Michael, eds. (2002). The Science Wars: Debating Scientific Knowledge and Technology. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002.Google Scholar
Rouse, Joseph (2003). Review of Brown 2001. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science.Google Scholar
Sismondo, Sergio (2004). An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sokal, Alan (2003). Review of Brown 2001. Science & Society 67: 111–113.Google Scholar
Solomon, Miriam (2002). Review of Brown 2001. Isis 93: 542–3.Google Scholar
Turner, Steve (2003). “The Third Science War.” Review of Brown 2001 and Kitcher 2001. Social Studies of Science 33: 581–612.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woolgar, Steve (1981). “Interests and Explanation in the Social Study of Science.” Social Studies of Science 11: 365–94.Google Scholar
Wray, K. Brad (2003) Review of Brown 2001. Philosophy in Review 23: 84–86.Google Scholar