Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make KnowledgeHow does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. Her work highlights the diversity of these cultures of knowing and, in its depiction of their differences--in the meaning of the empirical, the enactment of object relations, and the fashioning of social relations--challenges the accepted view of a unified science. By many accounts, contemporary Western societies are becoming knowledge societies--which run on expert processes and expert systems epitomized by science and structured into all areas of social life. By looking at epistemic cultures in two sample cases, this book addresses pressing questions about how such expert systems and processes work, what principles inform their cognitive and procedural orientations, and whether their organization, structures, and operations can be extended to other forms of social order. The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society. |
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Contents
XXXIII | 110 |
XXXIV | 115 |
XXXV | 118 |
XXXVII | 124 |
XXXVIII | 129 |
XXXIX | 133 |
XL | 135 |
XLI | 139 |
X | 22 |
XI | 33 |
XII | 36 |
XIV | 38 |
XV | 42 |
XVI | 42 |
XVII | 45 |
XVIII | 51 |
XIX | 59 |
XXI | 61 |
XXII | 64 |
XXIII | 68 |
XXIV | 73 |
XXV | 88 |
XXVI | 91 |
XXVIII | 93 |
XXIX | 96 |
XXX | 100 |
XXXI | 103 |
XXXII | 106 |
XLII | 146 |
XLIII | 151 |
XLIV | 159 |
XLV | 166 |
XLVI | 172 |
XLVII | 173 |
XLVIII | 176 |
XLIX | 181 |
L | 188 |
LI | 192 |
LII | 194 |
LIII | 199 |
LIV | 202 |
LV | 212 |
LVI | 219 |
LVII | 241 |
LVIII | 277 |
LIX | 299 |
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Common terms and phrases
analysis ATLAS background behavior Big Science biologists blastocysts Blind Variation bosons calorimeter cell CERN chapter collaboration collider experiments communitarian components create detector discourse electron entities EPISTEMIC CULTURES epistemic subjects example experimental high energy field functions Galison genetic gossip groups HEP experiments Higgs mechanism high energy physics human Human Genome Project individual interaction interest involved kind Knorr Cetina knowledge society laboratory leader Large Hadron Collider lifeworld machines materials means measure ments mice molecular biology laboratories mouse natural Negative Knowledge Nonetheless notion objects observed ontology organisms participants Particle Physics physicists plasmids postdoc practice problem procedures processes production reconfigurations refers relevant response schedules scientific scientists Section sense signal signs simulation sister experiments social Sociology strategy structure studied subdetectors symbolic talk technical theory things tion top quark University Press Z boson
Popular passages
Page 10 - I can see, any unusual ambiguity: it denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.
Page 69 - Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1989.
Page 1 - This book is about epistemic cultures: those amalgams of arrangements and mechanisms — bonded through affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence — which, in a given field, make up how we know what we know. Epistemic cultures are cultures that create and warrant knowledge, and the premier knowledge institution throughout the world is, still, science.
Page 17 - Second, it does not need to accommodate the natural object where it is, anchored in a natural environment; laboratory sciences bring objects 'home' and manipulate them 'on their own terms,
Page 5 - The proliferation of concepts such as that of a 'technological society' (eg, Berger et al. 1974), an 'information society' (eg, Lyotard 1984; Beniger 1986), a 'knowledge society' (Bell 1973; Drucker 1993; Stehr 1994), a 'risk society' or 'experimental society' (Beck 1992; Krohn and Weyer 1994) embodies this understanding. The recent source of this awareness is Daniel Bell (1973), for whom the immediate impact of knowledge was on the economy, where it resulted in such widespread changes as shifts...
Page 19 - ... reconfigured" scientists who become workable (feasible) in relation to these objects. In the laboratory, it is not the scientist who is the counterpart of these objects. Rather it is agents enhanced in various ways so as to fit a particular emerging order of self-other-things, a particular ethnomethodology of a phenomenal field.
Page 5 - risk society' or 'experimental society' (Beck 1992; Krohn and Weyer 1994) embodies this understanding. The recent source of this awareness is Daniel Bell (1973), for whom the immediate impact of knowledge was on the economy, where it resulted in such widespread changes as shifts in the division of labor, the development of specialized occupations, the emergence of new enterprises and sustained growth. Bell and later commentators (eg, Stehr 1994) also offer a great many statistics on the expansion...
Page 46 - It has lifted the zone of unsavory blemishes of an experiment into the spotlight, and studies these features. It cultivates a kind of negative knowledge. Negative knowledge is not nonknowledge, but knowledge of the limits of knowing, of the mistakes we make in trying to know, of the things that interfere with our knowing, of what we are not interested in and do not really want to know. We have already encountered some forces of this kind in the background, the underlying event, the noise, and the...
Page 55 - Phosphors," with kind permission from Elsevier Science-NL, Sara Burgerhartstraat 25, 1055 KV Amsterdam, The Netherlands...
Page 6 - ... organizational structure and management practices, and Beck (1992) depicts transformations of the political sphere through corporate bodies of scientists. Finally Giddens, arguing that we live in a world of increased reflexivity mediated by expert systems, extends the argument to the self, pointing out that today's individuals engage with the wider environment and with themselves through information produced by specialists which they routinely interpret and act on in everyday life (eg, 1990)....