Author: Ursula Klein
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804743594
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
In the early nineteenth century, chemistry emerged in Europe as a truly experimental discipline. What set this process in motion, and how did it evolve? Experimentalization in chemistry was driven by a seemingly innocuous tool: the sign system of chemical formulas invented by the Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius. By tracing the history of this “paper tool,” the author reveals how chemistry quickly lost its orientation to natural history and became a major productive force in industrial society. These formulas were not merely a convenient shorthand, but productive tools for creating order amid the chaos of early nineteenth-century organic chemistry. With these formulas, chemists could create a multifaceted world on paper, which they then correlated with experiments and the traces produced in test tubes and flasks. The author’s semiotic approach to the formulas allows her to show in detail how their particular semantic and representational qualities made them especially useful as paper tools for productive application.
Author: Ursula Klein
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781503619838
Category : SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
In the early nineteenth century, chemistry emerged in Europe as a truly experimental discipline. What set this process in motion, and how did it evolve? Experimentalization in chemistry was driven by a seemingly innocuous tool: the sign system of chemical formulas invented by the Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius. By tracing the history of this "paper tool," the author reveals how chemistry quickly lost its orientation to natural history and became a major productive force in industrial society. These formulas were not merely a convenient shorthand, but productive tools for creating order amid the chaos of early nineteenth-century organic chemistry. With these formulas, chemists could create a multifaceted world on paper, which they then correlated with experiments and the traces produced in test tubes and flasks. The author's semiotic approach to the formulas allows her to show in detail how their particular semantic and representational qualities made them especially useful as paper tools for productive application.
Author: Astrid Schwarz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317317912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Traditionally experimentation has been understood as an activity performed within the laboratory, but in the twenty-first century this view is being challenged. Schwarz uses ecological and environmental case studies to show how scientific experiments can transcend the laboratory.
Author: Mary S. Morgan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521655712
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
Edited collection examining the ways in which models are used in modern science.
Author: Mary S. Morgan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139560417
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes and analyses that change - both historically and philosophically - using a series of case studies to illuminate the nature and the implications of these changes. It is not a technical book; it is written for the intelligent person who wants to understand how economics works from the inside out. This book will be of interest to economists and science studies scholars (historians, sociologists and philosophers of science). But it also aims at a wider readership in the public intellectual sphere, building on the current interest in all things economic and on the recent failure of the so-called economic model, which has shaped our beliefs and the world we live in.
Author: Bernard Lightman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119121140
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 629
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Book Description
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the History of Science is a single volume companion that discusses the history of science as it is done today, providing a survey of the debates and issues that dominate current scholarly discussion, with contributions from leading international scholars. Provides a single-volume overview of current scholarship in the history of science edited by one of the leading figures in the field Features forty essays by leading international scholars providing an overview of the key debates and developments in the history of science Reflects the shift towards deeper historical contextualization within the field Helps communicate and integrate perspectives from the history of science with other areas of historical inquiry Includes discussion of non-Western themes which are integrated throughout the chapters Divided into four sections based on key analytic categories that reflect new approaches in the field
Author: Henk W. de Regt
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822971240
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
To most scientists, and to those interested in the sciences, understanding is the ultimate aim of scientific endeavor. In spite of this, understanding, and how it is achieved, has received little attention in recent philosophy of science. Scientific Understanding seeks to reverse this trend by providing original and in-depth accounts of the concept of understanding and its essential role in the scientific process. To this end, the chapters in this volume explore and develop three key topics: understanding and explanation, understanding and models, and understanding in scientific practice. Earlier philosophers, such as Carl Hempel, dismissed understanding as subjective and pragmatic. They believed that the essence of science was to be found in scientific theories and explanations. In Scientific Understanding, the contributors maintain that we must also consider the relation between explanations and the scientists who construct and use them. They focus on understanding as the cognitive state that is a goal of explanation and on the understanding of theories and models as a means to this end. The chapters in this book highlight the multifaceted nature of the process of scientific research. The contributors examine current uses of theory, models, simulations, and experiments to evaluate the degree to which these elements contribute to understanding. Their analyses pay due attention to the roles of intelligibility, tacit knowledge, and feelings of understanding. Furthermore, they investigate how understanding is obtained within diverse scientific disciplines and examine how the acquisition of understanding depends on specific contexts, the objects of study, and the stated aims of research.
Author: David R. Olson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139476319
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 603
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Book Description
This handbook marks the transformation of the topic of literacy from the narrower concerns with learning to read and write to an interdisciplinary enquiry into the various roles of writing and reading in the full range of social and psychological functions in both modern and developing societies. It does so by exploring the nature and development of writing systems, the relations between speech and writing, the history of the social uses of writing, the evolution of conventions of reading, the social and developmental dimensions of acquiring literate competencies, and, more generally, the conceptual and cognitive dimensions of literacy as a set of social practices. Contributors to the volume are leading scholars drawn from such disciplines as linguistics, literature, history, anthropology, psychology, the neurosciences, cultural psychology, and education.
Author: Maria Carla Galavotti
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0306481235
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
This volume is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the distinction between a ‘context of justification’ and a ‘context of discovery’. It is meant for researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science, and for natural and social scientists interested in foundational topics. Spanning a wide range of disciplines, it combines the viewpoint of philosophers and scientists and casts a new interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of observation and experimentation.
Author: Catherine M. Jackson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262545543
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 461
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Book Description
A compelling and innovative account that reshapes our view of nineteenth-century chemistry, explaining a critical period in chemistry’s quest to understand and manipulate organic nature. According to existing histories, theory drove chemistry’s remarkable nineteenth-century development. In Molecular World, Catherine M. Jackson shows instead how novel experimental approaches combined with what she calls “laboratory reasoning” enabled chemists to bridge wet chemistry and abstract concepts and, in so doing, create the molecular world. Jackson introduces a series of practice-based breakthroughs that include chemistry’s move into lampworked glassware, the field’s turn to synthesis and subsequent struggles to characterize and differentiate the products of synthesis, and the gradual development of institutional chemical laboratories, an advance accelerated by synthesis and the dangers it introduced. Jackson’s historical reassessment emerges from the investigation of alkaloids by German chemists Justus Liebig, August Wilhelm Hofmann, and Albert Ladenburg. Stymied in his own research, Liebig steered his student Hofmann into pioneering synthesis as a new investigative method. Hofmann’s practice-based laboratory reasoning produced a major theoretical advance, but he failed to make alkaloids. That landmark fell to Ladenburg, who turned to cutting-edge theory only after his successful synthesis. In telling the story of these scientists and their peers, Jackson reveals organic synthesis as the ground chemists stood upon to forge a new relationship between experiment and theory—with far-reaching consequences for chemistry as a discipline.
