A Nice Derangement of Epistemes

A Nice Derangement of Epistemes PDF Author: John H. Zammito
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226978613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Since the 1950s, many philosophers of science have attacked positivism—the theory that scientific knowledge is grounded in objective reality. Reconstructing the history of these critiques, John H. Zammito argues that while so-called postpositivist theories of science are very often invoked, they actually provide little support for fashionable postmodern approaches to science studies. Zammito shows how problems that Quine and Kuhn saw in the philosophy of the natural sciences inspired a turn to the philosophy of language for resolution. This linguistic turn led to claims that science needs to be situated in both historical and social contexts, but the claims of recent "science studies" only deepened the philosophical quandary. In essence, Zammito argues that none of the problems with positivism provides the slightest justification for denigrating empirical inquiry and scientific practice, delivering quite a blow to the "discipline" postmodern science studies. Filling a gap in scholarship to date, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes will appeal to historians, philosophers, philosophers of science, and the broader scientific community.

A Nice Derangement of Epistemes

A Nice Derangement of Epistemes PDF Author: John H. Zammito
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226978613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the 1950s, many philosophers of science have attacked positivism—the theory that scientific knowledge is grounded in objective reality. Reconstructing the history of these critiques, John H. Zammito argues that while so-called postpositivist theories of science are very often invoked, they actually provide little support for fashionable postmodern approaches to science studies. Zammito shows how problems that Quine and Kuhn saw in the philosophy of the natural sciences inspired a turn to the philosophy of language for resolution. This linguistic turn led to claims that science needs to be situated in both historical and social contexts, but the claims of recent "science studies" only deepened the philosophical quandary. In essence, Zammito argues that none of the problems with positivism provides the slightest justification for denigrating empirical inquiry and scientific practice, delivering quite a blow to the "discipline" postmodern science studies. Filling a gap in scholarship to date, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes will appeal to historians, philosophers, philosophers of science, and the broader scientific community.

A Nice Derangement of Epistemes

A Nice Derangement of Epistemes PDF Author: John H. Zammito
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226978611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Since the 1950s, many philosophers of science have attacked positivism—the theory that scientific knowledge is grounded in objective reality. Reconstructing the history of these critiques, John H. Zammito argues that while so-called postpositivist theories of science are very often invoked, they actually provide little support for fashionable postmodern approaches to science studies. Zammito shows how problems that Quine and Kuhn saw in the philosophy of the natural sciences inspired a turn to the philosophy of language for resolution. This linguistic turn led to claims that science needs to be situated in both historical and social contexts, but the claims of recent "science studies" only deepened the philosophical quandary. In essence, Zammito argues that none of the problems with positivism provides the slightest justification for denigrating empirical inquiry and scientific practice, delivering quite a blow to the "discipline" postmodern science studies. Filling a gap in scholarship to date, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes will appeal to historians, philosophers, philosophers of science, and the broader scientific community.

Beyond Writing Culture

Beyond Writing Culture PDF Author: Karsten Kumoll
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845456757
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Two decades after the publication of Clifford and Marcus' volume Writing Culture, this collection provides a fresh and diverse reassessment of the debates that this pioneering volume unleashed. At the same time, Beyond Writing Culture moves the debate on by embracing the more fundamental challenge as to how to conceptualise the intricate relationship between epistemology and representational practices rather than maintaining the original narrow focus on textual analysis. It thus offers a thought-provoking tapestry of new ideas relevant for scholars not only concerned with 'the ethnographic Other', but with representation in general.

Scandalous Knowledge

Scandalous Knowledge PDF Author: Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748626344
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book explores the radical reconceptions of knowledge and science emerging from constructivist epistemology, social studies of science, and contemporary cognitive science. Smith reviews the key issues involved in the twentieth-century critiques of traditional views of human knowledge and scientific truth and gives an extensively informed explanation of the alternative accounts developed by Fleck, Kuhn, Foucault, Latour, and others. She also addresses the various anxieties (e.g., over 'relativism') and 'wars' occasioned by these developments, placing them in their historical contexts and arguing that they are largely misplaced or spurious. Smith then examines the currently perplexed relations between the natural and human sciences, the grandiose claims and dubious methods of evolutionary psychology, and the complex play of naturalist, humanist, and posthumanist ideologies in contemporary views of the relation between humans and animals.

Debating Contemporary Approaches to the History of Science

Debating Contemporary Approaches to the History of Science PDF Author: Lukas M. Verburgt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350326232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Debating Contemporary Approaches to the History of Science explores the main themes, problems and challenges currently at the top of the discipline's methodological agenda. In its chapters, established and emerging scholars introduce and discuss new approaches to the history of science and revisit older perspectives which remain crucial. Each chapter is followed by a critical commentary from another scholar in the field and the author's response. The volume looks at such topics as the importance of the 'global', 'digital', 'environmental', and 'posthumanist' turns for the history of science, and the possibilities for the field of moving beyond a focus on ideas and texts towards active engagement with materials and practices. It also addresses important issues about the relationship between history of science, on the one hand, and philosophy of science, history of knowledge and ignorance studies, on the other. With its innovative format, this volume provides an up-to-date, authoritative overview of the field, and also explores how and why the history of science is practiced. It is essential reading for students and scholars eager to keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening in the history of science today, and to contribute to where it might go next.

Are Science and Mathematics Socially Constructed?

Are Science and Mathematics Socially Constructed? PDF Author: Richard C. Brown
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9812835253
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book is a history, analysis, and criticism of what the author calls OC postmodern interpretations of scienceOCO (PIS) and the closely related OC sociology of scientific knowledgeOCO (SSK). This movement traces its origin to Thomas Kuhn''s revolutionary work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), but is more extreme. It believes that science is a OC social constructionOCO, having little to do with nature, and is determined by contextual forces such as the race, class, gender of the scientist, laboratory politics, or the needs of the military industrial complex.

Interpersonal Communication

Interpersonal Communication PDF Author: Charles R. Berger
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110373874
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 630

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Book Description
Interpersonal communication has been studied in terms of both communication functions and specialized contexts. This handbook comprehensively covers the field including research on processes of social influence, the role of communication in the development, maintenance and decline of close personal relationships, nonverbal communication, cognitive approaches, communication and conflict, bargaining and negotiation, health communication, organizational socialization and supervisor-subordinate communication, social networks, and technologically-mediated interpersonal communication. Two chapters are dedicated to research methods in the field. The handbook includes chapters by widely recognized and respected scholars in the field.

Love, Order, and Progress

Love, Order, and Progress PDF Author: Michel Bourdeau
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822983419
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Auguste Comte's doctrine of positivism was both a philosophy of science and a political philosophy designed to organize a new, secular, stable society based on positive or scientific, ideas, rather than the theological dogmas and metaphysical speculations associated with the ancien regime. This volume offers the most comprehensive English-language overview of Auguste Comte's philosophy, the relation of his work to the sciences of his day, and the extensive, continuing impact of his thinking on philosophy and especially secular political movements in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Contributors consider Comte’s reasons for establishing a Religion of Humanity as well as his views on domestic life and the arts in his positivist utopia. The volume further details Comte's attempt to apply his "positive method," first to social science and then to politics and morality, thereby defending the continuity of his career while also critically examining the limits of his approach.

Kant's Observations and Remarks

Kant's Observations and Remarks PDF Author: Susan Meld Shell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107376882
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Kant's Observations of 1764 and Remarks of 1764–5 (a set of fragments written in the margins of his copy of the Observations) document a crucial turning point in his life and thought. Both reveal the growing importance for him of ethics, anthropology and politics, but with an important difference. The Observations attempts to observe human nature directly. The Remarks, by contrast, reveals a revolution in Kant's thinking, largely inspired by Rousseau, who 'turned him around' by disclosing to Kant the idea of a 'state of freedom' (modelled on the state of nature) as a touchstone for his thinking. This and related thoughts anticipate such famous later doctrines as the categorical imperative. This collection of essays by leading Kant scholars illuminates the many and varied topics within these two rich works, including the emerging relations between theory and practice, ethics and anthropology, men and women, philosophy, history and the 'rights of man'.

The New Politics of Materialism

The New Politics of Materialism PDF Author: Sarah Ellenzweig
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351976141
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
New materialism challenges the mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive and inert. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: agency, vitalism, complexity, contingency, and self-organization. This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature, and science, is the first to ask what is "new" about the new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary perspective. Against current theories of new materialism it argues for a deeper engagement with materialism's history, questions whether matter can be "lively," and asks whether new materialism's wish to revitalize politics and the political lives up to its promise. Contributors: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Sarah Ellenzweig, Christian J. Emden, N. Katherine Hayles, Jess Keiser, Mogens Laerke, Ian Lowrie, Lenny Moss, Angela Willey, Catherine Wilson, Charles T. Wolfe, Derek Woods, and John H. Zammito.