Why the Study of Pseudoscience Should Be Included in Nature of Science Studies

2011 ◽  
pp. 97-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Good
Keyword(s):  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Science Studies

Engineering Heterotopia

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-569
Author(s):  
Shehab Fakhry Ismail
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Mutual Engagement ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Nature

My starting point is the present—certainly a critical and loaded moment for scholars of the modern Middle East. It is incumbent upon us to take a step back and to rethink how to create new concepts, new narratives, new explanatory schemes, new historicities, and new visions of the future. An engagement with science studies, understood broadly, is one possible way to begin such critical rethinking. It is an exercise that could also be mutually illuminating, as scholars of science studies have been debating the global nature of science and technology for the last decade, undoubtedly in reaction to the once European-dominated narrative of the history of science. The field of science studies has moved well beyond “diffusion” and “core-periphery” models toward more eclectic examinations of various processes of epistemic encounters, translations, mediations, and conflicts that shaped societies. These processes also shaped science and technology. Here, I would like to provide a brief outline of one mutual engagement inspired by the injunction to follow scientists, doctors, and engineers and to probe what was at stake in the knowledge they produced and how they “made society.”

scholarly journals Epistemology of Science, Science Literacy, and the Demarcation Criterion: The Nature of Science (NOS) and Informing Science (IS) in Context

10.28945/2457 ◽  
2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Castelao-Lawless
Keyword(s):  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Demarcation Criterion ◽  
Scientific Objectivity ◽  
Epistemology Of Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post Modernism ◽  
The Media ◽  
Course Format

The result of misunderstanding science by students is their inability as future citizens to impact science public policies. The solution argued last year included creating courses in science studies serving two purposes: destroy students’ stereotypical certainties about science and help them become “historical realists” in regard to scientific practices. But we also speculated that dismissing the myth of scientific objectivity and teaching the historical and sociological underpinnings of science might lead to turning students into epistemological relativists. We now have a solution to the social-constructivist trap stemming from studies of science. This paper inquires into American contexts such as scientific illiteracy, post-modernism in high schools and colleges, and the media, all of which help produce a generalized inability to demarcate science from pseudoscience. Science studies courses guide students into both making epistemological distinctions and understanding the nature of science. Informing methodologies, course format, and bibliography follow.

scholarly journals Science Education in Post-Truth Age: Metaphysical Reflections from Bruno Latour’s Science Studies

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-224
Author(s):  
Nathan Willig Lima ◽  
Pedro Antônio Viana Vazata ◽  
Fernanda Ostermann ◽  
Claudio José de Holanda Cavalcanti ◽  
Andreia Guerra
Keyword(s):  
Science Education ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Critical Position ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Oxford Dictionary ◽  
Integrative Therapies ◽  
Modernist Discourse

The term post truth was chosen as the word of the year by the Oxford dictionary in 2016. Today we see the proliferation of the term fake news as well as the dissemination of alternative views to science, such as “flat Earth”, integrative therapies, and anthropogenic global warming denial. Usually, postmodernism is blamed for subsidizing such movements theoretically. In the present article, we defend the thesis that both, the official discourse of science (modernist discourse) and its main criticisms (including postmodernism) seem to be propositions that sustain the contemporary scenarios of production and proliferation of post-truths. From Bruno Latour’s Science Studies, we reflect on the metaphysical basis of such perspectives and present an explanation to the formation of the “post-truth” through two different mechanisms, i.e, the presentation of a reduced vision of nature of science and the erasure of the network that sustains scientific propositions. We also defend that Science Education can adopt an alternative metaphysical basis, developed by Latour and collaborators in dialogue with different philosophical and sociological currents, contributing to the formation of citizens able to have a critical position in the contemporary socioscientific scenario.

Application of electron holography to material science studies on magnetic domain states of small particles

1993 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 1028-1029
Author(s):  
T. Hirayama ◽  
Q. Ru ◽  
T. Tanji ◽  
A. Tonomura
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Field ◽  
Material Science ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Phase Distribution ◽  
Carbon Film ◽  
Objective Lens ◽  
Electron Holography ◽  
Transform Method ◽  
Transmission Electron ◽  
Thin Carbon

The observation of small magnetic materials is one of the most important applications of electron holography to material science, because interferometry by means of electron holography can directly visualize magnetic flux lines in a very small area. To observe magnetic structures by transmission electron microscopy it is important to control the magnetic field applied to the specimen in order to prevent it from changing its magnetic state. The easiest method is tuming off the objective lens current and focusing with the first intermediate lens. The other method is using a low magnetic-field lens, where the specimen is set above the lens gap.Figure 1 shows an interference micrograph of an isolated particle of barium ferrite on a thin carbon film observed from approximately [111]. A hologram of this particle was recorded by the transmission electron microscope, Hitachi HF-2000, equipped with an electron biprism. The phase distribution of the object electron wave was reconstructed digitally by the Fourier transform method and converted to the interference micrograph Fig 1.

Faeries, Aliens, and Leviathans: Science and Fantasy in Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-303
Author(s):  
Richard Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Unexplored Area ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Movement

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

Troubling Figures

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Logan Natalie O'Laughlin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Environmental Toxicants ◽  
Environmental Racism ◽  
Feminist Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Do So

This essay examines the figure of the pesticide-exposed intersex frog, a canary in the coal mine for public endocrinological health. Through feminist science studies and critical discourse analysis, I explore the fields that bring this figure into being (endocrinology, toxicology, and pest science) and the colonial and racial logics that shape these fields. In so doing, I attend to the multiple nonhuman actors shaping this figure, including the pesky weeds and insects who prompt pesticides’ very existence, “male” frogs who function as test subjects, and systemic environmental racism that disproportionately exposes people of color to environmental toxicants. I encourage careful examination of galvanizing environmental figures like this toxic intersex frog and I offer a method to do so.

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