Download Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science

Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
CHSS 32000 ANTH 32305 SOCI 40137 HIST 56800
Autumn 2011
An Introduction to Science Studies
Adrian Johns
Karin Knorr-Cetina
Social Sciences 505
Social Sciences 424
773.702.2334;
[email protected]
773. 834-3312;
[email protected]
Office Hours: Fri. 10:00-12:00
Office hours: Tues. 2:00-4:00
The Course
This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and
technology. During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and
anthropologists raised original, interesting, and consequential questions about the
sciences. Often their work drew on and responded to each other, and, taken together, their
various approaches came to constitute a field, "science studies." The course furnishes an initial
guide to this field. Students will not only encounter some of its principal concepts, approaches,
and findings, but will also get a chance to apply science-studies perspectives themselves by
performing a fieldwork project. Among the topics we may examine are: the sociology of
scientific knowledge and its applications; actor-network theories of science; constructivism and
the history of science; and efforts to apply science-studies approaches beyond the sciences
themselves.
Required Readings
Members are expected to provide themselves with the following texts, which should be available
at the Seminary Co-op:
Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action.
Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic cultures: how the sciences make knowledge.
Other readings are listed below. Those with a double asterisk (**) are compulsory; others are
helpful but not absolutely required. These readings should be available via the web, either on ereserve or in the ‘Course Documents’ section of our Chalk site (until September 6,
http://chalk9.uchicago.edu; after that, http:/chalk.uchicago.edu).
Course Requirements
DISCUSSIONS AND QUESTIONS
Meetings take place every week on Wednesdays, 9:30-12:20, in Social Sciences 401.
Students are expected to read and reflect on the assigned readings before class, to attend each
class, and to participate in class discussion. Students are also required to develop a short, one- to
two-paragraph document proposing one or more discussion questions before each class. They
will email this to both instructors by 9pm on the Tuesday evening prior to each Wednesday
session. This document should pose and briefly motivate a question or questions, often through
the development of a specific puzzle or problem in the text. It should not summarize the text’s
own argument except in so far as this is necessary to convey the student’s point.
For example, a question might look like this:
In “The Normative Structure of Science,” Merton states that “The ethos of science is
that affectively toned complex of values and norms which is held to be binding on the
man of science. The norms are expressed in the form of prescriptions, proscriptions,
preferences, and permissions. They are legitimized in terms of institutional
values. These imperatives, transmitted by precept and example and reinforced by
sanctions are in varying degrees internalized by the scientist, thus fashioning his scientific
conscience or, if one prefers the latter-day phrase, his super-ego.” These values
supposedly “derive from the goal and the methods” of science—“the extension of
certified knowledge” through logically consistency and empirical confirmation. But what
exactly does this mean—what is the ontology and etiology of the four norms that Merton
goes on to develop in this paper (and the other he adds in his article on priorities)—what
are they and where do they come from? Specifically, are norms attitudes, morals, rules or
means; are they held by every scientist, “average” scientists, exemplary scientists, or only
those who share “the goal and the methods” of science Merton describes? Do they
differ from the norms of comparable nonscientists (e.g., engineers, lawyers,
plumbers)? And did they result from a rational social contract to further preexisting
goals and practices of science, did they coevolve as homologues, or do science’s shared
goals, practices and norms simply coexist as epiphenomena of some deeper, “Western”
ethos of progress.
TERM PAPER
Students will be expected to produce a 20-page research paper that engages with issues raised by
the course, and which includes an empirical component. The empirical component might
include observation of a research or discourse setting; interviews; the shadowing of a particular
researcher; or an archival project. Instructors will help devise possible research tropics. By
November 3, students must turn in a 600-word (one page, single-spaced) “pitch” that describes
1) their research site, the data they will undertake to gather there, and a brief description of
preliminary data already gathered; and 2) the broad arguments they expect to make. On
November 17, students will briefly present their early projects in class, involving a rendition of
their questions/arguments, the significance of these in the context of course readings, and the
data they mean to use to address them. Final papers must be turned in no later than December
15. We understand that this is past the conventional grading deadline, but want students to have
time to develop their papers after course readings have been completed. They may, of course,
be turned in earlier.
Final grades are constituted as follows:
Class participation and reading questions
20%
Term paper
80%
Calendar of Lecture and Discussion Topics and Reading
Assignments
Sep 28. Introduction
Course syllabus
Oct. 5. The beginnings of the modern sociology of Science
**Merton, Robert K. 1973 [1942]. “The Normative Structure of Science,” in Norman Storer
(ed.), The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago
Press, pp. 267-278.
**Merton. 1973 [1957]. “Priorities in Scientific Discovery,” in The Sociology of Science, pp. 286-324.
Zilsel, Edgar. 1942. “The Sociological Roots of Science.” American Journal of Sociology 47, pp.
544-562.
Bucchi, M. 2004. Science in Society. An Introduction to Social Studies of Science. London,
Routledge, ch. 1: “The Development of Modern Science and the Birth of the
Sociology of Science,” 7-23.
Oct. 12. The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
**Bloor, David. 1976/1991. Knowledge and social imagery. University of Chicago Press, pp. 3-23,
131-56 (chs. 1, 7).
**Collins, Harry. 1975. “The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the
Replication of Experiments in Physics,” Sociology 9, pp. 205-224.
Fleck, Ludwig. 1979 [1935]. Genesis and development of a scientific fact. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp.38-51, 82-125.
Pickering, Andrew. 1981. “The hunting of the quark.” Isis 72, pp.216-36.
MacKenzie, D. 1978. "Statistical Theory and Social Interest: A Case Study." Social Studies
of Science 8: 35-83.
Oct 19. Places and thesholds: the laboratory
** Latour, Science in Action, 63-100, 215-257.
** Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures, 26-45.
**Latour, Bruno. 1983. “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” in K. Knorr-Cetina
and M. Mulkay (eds.), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science. London: Sage,
pp. 141–70.
Hirschauer, S. 1991. "The Manufacture of Bodies in Surgery." Social Studies of Science 21:
279-319.
Shapin, S. 1988. The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England. Isis 79:373404.
Oct 26. Actors, networks, boundaries, and translations
** Latour, Science In Action, pp. 103-44, 179-213, 215-57 (chs. 3, 5, 6)
** Star, S. L. and J. Griesemer. 1989. "Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary
Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley´s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 190739." Social Studies of Science 19: 387-420.
Galison, P. 1997. Image and Logic. A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago, The
University of Chicago Press. Ch. 9, pp. 781-844.
Latour, B. and S. Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts.
Beverly Hills, Sage, ch. 5: Cycles of Credit, 187-233.
Nov. 2. Virtue and credit
** NB: 600 word research “pitch” due in class **
** Shapin, S. and Simon J. Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the
Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 22-79, 110-54.
Shapin, Steven. 1994. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in 17th Century England.
University of Chicago Press, pp. 3-41, 243-309, 409-17.
Shapin, S. 2008. The Scientific life: a moral history of a late modern vocation. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. 165-208.
Nov. 9. Gender and Knowledge
**Martin, E. (1991). "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance
Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 16(3): 485-501.
Harding, S. 1986. From the Woman Question to the Science Question. The Science Question
in Feminism. Ithaca, Cornell University Press: 15-29.
Haraway, D. 1988. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14(3): 575-599.
Schiebinger, Londa. 2000. “Has Feminism Changed Science?” Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, Special issue: Feminisms at the Millennium 25:1171-6
Fox Keller, E. 1987. The Gender/Science System: or, Is Sex to Gender as Nature Is to
Science? Hypatia 2:3, 37-49.
Harding, S. G. (1998). Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and
Epistemologies. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Nov. 16. Expert and lay knowledge: Public and popular science
** NB: presentations of student topics **
**Gieryn, T. F. 1999. Epilogue: Home to Roost: Science Wars as Boundary Work. Cultural
Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago, University of Chicago Press:
336-363.
** S. Pumfrey and R. Cooter. 1994. “Separate spheres and public places: reflections on the
history of science popularization and science in popular culture,” history of
science 32: 237-67.
Johns, A. 2010. “Experimenting with print.” Piracy: the intellectual property wars from
Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (In “Course documents”
section of the Chalk site.)
Johns, A. 2003. “Print and public science.” R. Porter, ed., The Cambridge History of
Science. Vol. 4: Eighteenth-century science. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 536-60.
Hilgartner, S. 1990. "The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political
Uses." Social Studies of Science 20: 519-539.
Jasanoff, S. 1998. "The Eye of Everyman: Witnessing DNA in the Simpson Trial." Social
Studies of Science 28(5-6): 713-740.
Lynch, M. and S. Jasanoff. 1998. "Contested Identities: Science, Law and Forensic Practice."
Social Studies of Science 28(5-6): 675-686.
Epstein, S. 1996. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge: University
of California Press.
Shinn, T. and R. Whitley. 1985. Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularisation.
Dordrecht, Boston
A. Secord, “Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-century Lancashire,”
History of science 32 (1994), 269-315.
Nov. 23. No meeting – Thanksgiving week
Nov. 30. Information and Economic Knowledge
**Geertz, C. 1978. "The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing."
American Economic Review 68: 28-32.
**Callon, M. and F. Muniesa. 2005. "Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices."
Organization Studies 26(8): 1229-1250.
Callon, M. 1998. Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economies. The
Laws of the Markets. Oxford, Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers/Sociological
Review: 1-57.
Carruthers, B. and W. Espenland. 1991. "Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry
Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality." American Journal of
Sociology 97(1): 31-69.
Knorr Cetina, K. 2009. “The Architecture of Information in Financial Markets." To appear as
Chapter 6 in Maverick Markets: Cultural Structures of a Global Financial Form.
MacKenzie, D. and M. Yuval 2003. "Constructing Markets, Performing Theory: The
Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange." American Journal of
Sociology 109(1): 107-145.
MacKenzie, Donald. 2001. “Physics and Finance: S-Terms and Modern Finance as a Topic for
Science Studies,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 26: 115-144.