Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically

Joseph Rouse

Published by Cornell University Press 1996

Engaging Science

How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically

Joseph Rouse

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501718625

Overview
Contents

About this book

Summarizing this century's major debates over realism and the rationality of scientific knowledge, Joseph Rouse believes that these disputes oversimplify the political and cultural significance of the sciences. He provides an alternative understanding of science that focuses on practices rather than knowledge.

Rouse first outlines the shared assumptions by ostensibly opposed interpretive stances toward science: scientific realism, social constructivism, empiricism, and postempiricist historical rationalism. He then advances cultural studies as an alternative approach, one that understands the sciences as ongoing patterns of situated activity whose material setting is part of practice. Cultural studies of science, the
author suggests, take seriously their own participation in and engagement with the culture of science, rejecting the purported detachment of earlier philosophical or sociological standpoints. Rather, such studies offer specific, critical discussions of how and why science matters, and to whom, and how opportunites for meaningful understanding and action are transformed by scientific practices.

Author / Editor information

Joseph Rouse is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Science in Society Program at Wesleyan University and the author of Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science, from Cornell.

Reviews

Lynn Hankinson Nelson, author of Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism:

Rouse argues for a new, interdisciplinary model of science studies and a reconceptualization of philosophy, sociology, and history of science on the grounds that there is a need for more philosophically adequate understandings of science than current approaches allow. Rouse's vision is compelling, moving beyond dichotomies entrenched in the relevant literatures.

Gary Gutting, author of Michael Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason:

Rouse makes an important contribution to our understanding of the current state of science studies. His book's greatest strength is its overall argument that a wide range of apparently diverse approaches to science can be persuasively read as constituting a new and fruitful alternative to the legitimation project.

An ambitious attempt to outline an alternative to the dominant philosophical and social constructivist efforts to make sense of science.... [Rouse] extends his examination of practice, local knowledge, and the politics of science into a full-fledged conception of philosophy of science as cultural studies.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I RETHINKING THE TRADITIONS: POSITIVISM, SCIENTIFIC REALISM, HISTORICAL RATIONALISM, AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM
1. Philosophy of Science and the Persistent Narratives of Modernity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
2. The Politics of Postmodern Philosophy of Science Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	68
3. Arguing for the Natural Ontological Attitude Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	90
4. Should Philosophy of Science Be Postpositivist Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101
Part II RECONSTRUCTING PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: PRACTICES AND THE DYNAMICS OF KNOWING
5. The Significance of Scientific Practices Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
6. Narrative Reconstruction, Epistemic Significance, and the Temporality of Scientific Practices Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	158
7. The Dynamics of Scientific Knowing: Understanding Science without Reifying Knowledge Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
8. Against Representation: Davidsonian Semantics and Cultural Studies of Science Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
9. What Are Cultural Studies of Science? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 280
Keywords: General Science; History Of Science

eBook

Published: October 18, 2018
ISBN: 9781501718625