Introduction: Why Science Wars?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Word Knowledge ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Science Wars ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
Knowledge Claims

While all definitions are stipulative by nature and reflect alternative usages, the meaning of the word “knowledge” is especially ambiguous. It carries profound consequences for what we mean by truth, reality, and rationality, but most importantly for our understanding of scientific knowledge claims. Rhetorically, knowledge trumps belief and opinion, but it is not clear that knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is essentially different from and superior to belief and opinion. As to the questions of what scientists know and how they know it, no answers have stood up to critical scrutiny in the history of modern science. Despite this uncertainty, modern science has claimed a hegemony in our society on the production of knowledge as superior to belief and opinion.

The history of science and the history of bureaucratic knowledge: Saxon mining, circa 1770

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Felten
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Ore Deposit ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Ranking Official ◽  
Knowledge Claims

This article looks into mining in central Germany in the late eighteenth century as one area of highly charged exchange between (specific manifestations of early modern) science and the (early modern) state. It describes bureaucratic knowledge as socially distributed cognition by following the steps of a high-ranking official that led him to discover a rich silver ore deposit. Although this involved hybridization of practical/artisanal and theoretical/scientific knowledge, and knowers, the focus of this article is on purification or boundary work that took place when actors in and around the mines consciously contributed to different circuits of knowledge production. For the sake of analysis, the article suggests a way of opposing bureaucratic versus scientific knowledge production, even when the sites, actors involved in, and practices of that knowledge production were the same or similar. Whereas the science of the time invoked consensus among equals to conflate competing knowledge claims, bureaucracies did so by applying a hierarchy among ranked individuals.

Science Wars

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Thomas Kuhn ◽  
Fourth Century Bce ◽  
Science Wars ◽  
History Of ◽  
Effective Science

What do scientists actually know and what do they know about? Answers to these questions are crucial not only for our understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, but also for the formulation of effective science-based public policies, from global warming and energy to biotechnology and nanoscience. There is a lack of convincing answers to these questions because of an illogical conflation within modern science of epistemology and ontology, seeking to transcend experience and produce knowledge of reality using experience itself. Attempts at explaining the nature of scientific knowledge from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries reveal that scientific reasoning has selectively employed deduction and induction, rationalism and empiricism, the universal and the particular, and necessity and contingency as if these opposites were compatible. As Thomas Kuhn showed, the history of science belies the definitive truth of ontological claims deduced from theories and, as a corollary, the definitive truth of theories themselves. Science Wars reviews the competing conceptions of scientific knowledge from Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century BCE to the “science wars” of the 1990s and provides thought-provoking analyses for understanding scientific thought in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Russian Archaeology in Palestine

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-64
Author(s):  
Леонид Беляев ◽  
Leonid Belyaev
Keyword(s):  
Field Study ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Scientific Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

The paper summarizes the findings of the historiographic and archaeological fieldwork focused on the preservation and development of the scientific heritage of the Russian scientists of the 19th — early 20th centuries in the area of the Syro-Palestinian region that most closely matches the concept of the “Holy Land”. The author identifies three core directions of development in the Russian archaeology: field study of the traces of the Russian pilgrims, scientists, representatives of the government and the Orthodox Church; study of antiquities in some Russian areas; insights into the heritage of the 19th — early 20th centuries as historical sources with its further inclusion in the system of modern scientific knowledge. The paper describes the findings obtained to date (including the interim results of excavations in Jericho, the scientific interpretation of a number of artefacts from the collection of Antonin Kapustin, the first catalogues of archaeological sites in the Russian areas). The author focuses on expanding fieldwork, classifying and attributing antiquities, launching them in circulation at the level of modern science, creating a monograph on the history of the Russian studies in the 19th — early 20th centuries.

scholarly journals The Early Royal Society and Visual Culture

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 350-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sachiko Kusukawa
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Production Processes ◽  
History Of

Recent studies have fruitfully examined the intersection between early modern science and visual culture by elucidating the functions of images in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge. Given its rich archival sources, it is possible to extend this line of research in the case of the Royal Society to an examination of attitudes towards images as artifacts—manufactured objects worth commissioning, collecting, and studying. Drawing on existing scholarship and material from the Royal Society Archives, I discuss Fellows’ interests in prints, drawings, varnishes, colorants, images made out of unusual materials, and methods of identifying the painter from a painting. Knowledge of production processes of images was important to members of the Royal Society, not only as connoisseurs and collectors, but also as those interested in a Baconian mastery of material processes, including a “history of trades.” Their antiquarian interests led to discussion of painters’ styles, and they gradually developed a visual memorial to an institution through portraits and other visual records.

Rhetorische Epistemologie der Wissenschaften

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-219
Author(s):  
Alexander Thumfart
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Successful Implementation ◽  
Science Culture ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Results

During the last three decades research in the rhetoric of natural science has established itself as a prominent topic in the history of science, culture, and society. Despite this overall success, the status, function and place of rhetoric in the process of knowledge production is still ambivalent and disputed. While some scholars place rhetoric right in the centre of the construction of scientific knowledge, others support the view that scientific knowledge is epistemologically privileged. Based on research done by the prominent sociologist, philosopher, and historian Bruno Latour, the article argues that rhetoric plays a minimal role in the production of knowledge but is crucial in the dissemination and (successful) implementation of scientific results.

Polemical conversation on the conception of internal truth

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Mamchur ◽  
Andrei Paramonov
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Effective Mechanism ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Synthesis Strategy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Concept Of Truth

The article discusses the problem of truth in scientific knowledge in a polemical form. The concept of internal truth, according to which truth in science is understood as the correspondence of a theory to its subject, is opposed to the concept of truth, which science strives for, as the knowledge of things in themselves. According to the latter, truth is always internal and in scientific constructions we never leave the boundaries of the language of theory. These concepts of truth are analyzed using examples from the history of science, where the synthesis strategy serves as an effective mechanism for resolving contradictions between different theoretical approaches. Questions of understanding the truth are also considered in the horizon of possible strategies for resolving contradictions between fundamental theories in modern science. The phenomenon of productive errors in science is touched upon.

scholarly journals Realism, perspectivism, and disagreement in science

Synthese ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michela Massimi
Keyword(s):  
Electric Charge ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Natural Unit ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Knowledge Claims ◽  
Associated Data

AbstractThis paper attends to two main tasks. First, I introduce the notion of perspectival disagreement in science. Second, I relate perspectival disagreement in science to the broader issue of realism about science: how to maintain realist ontological commitments in the face of perspectival disagreement among scientists? I argue that often enough perspectival disagreement is not at the level of the scientific knowledge claims but rather of the methodological and justificatory principles. I introduce and clarify the notion of ‘agreeing-whilst-perspectivally-disagreeing’ with an episode from the history of modern physics: namely, how we came to agree about the electric charge as a minimal natural unit despite different scientific perspectives and associated data-to-phenomena inferences available for it in the period 1897–1906.

Philosophcal review of h. white̕s tropological theory in the context of the new philosophy of history

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (152) ◽  
pp. 92-99
Author(s):  
S. M. Geiko ◽  
◽  
O. D. Lauta
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Text Organization ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Actual Material ◽  
The Common ◽  
Historical Nature ◽  
Selection Of

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the tropological theory of the history of H. White. The researcher claims that history is a specific kind of literature, and the historical works is the connection of a certain set of research and narrative operations. The first type of operation answers the question of why the event happened this way and not the other. The second operation is the social description, the narrative of events, the intellectual act of organizing the actual material. According to H. White, this is where the set of ideas and preferences of the researcher begin to work, mainly of a literary and historical nature. Explanations are the main mechanism that becomes the common thread of the narrative. The are implemented through using plot (romantic, satire, comic and tragic) and trope systems – the main stylistic forms of text organization (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony). The latter decisively influenced for result of the work historians. Historiographical style follows the tropological model, the selection of which is determined by the historian’s individual language practice. When the choice is made, the imagination is ready to create a narrative. Therefore, the historical understanding, according to H. White, can only be tropological. H. White proposes a new methodology for historical research. During the discourse, adequate speech is created to analyze historical phenomena, which the philosopher defines as prefigurative tropological movement. This is how history is revealed through the art of anthropology. Thus, H. White’s tropical history theory offers modern science f meaningful and metatheoretically significant. The structure of concepts on which the classification of historiographical styles can be based and the predictive function of philosophy regarding historical knowledge can be refined.

The Enlightenment Turns to China: The International Flow of Concepts and Their Geographic Dispersion

Cultura ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Chien-shou CHEN
Keyword(s):  
Joint Production ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
International Flow ◽  
Geographic Dispersion ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article attempts to strip away the Eurocentrism of the Enlightenment, to reconsider how this concept that originated in Europe was transmitted to China. This is thus an attempt to treat the Enlightenment in terms of its global, worldwide significance. Coming from this perspective, the Enlightenment can be viewed as a history of the exchange and interweaving of concepts, a history of translation and quotation, and thus a history of the joint production of knowledge. We must reconsider the dimensions of both time and space in examining the global Enlightenment project. As a concept, the Enlightenment for the most part has been molded by historical actors acting in local circumstances. It is not a concept shaped and brought into being solely from textual sources originating in Europe. As a concept, the Enlightenment enabled historical actors in specific localities to begin to engage in globalized thinking, and to find a place for their individual circumstances within the global setting. This article follows such a line of thought, to discuss the conceptual history of the Enlightenment in China, giving special emphasis to the processes of formation and translation of this concept within the overall flow of modern Chinese history.

Empiricisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Allen
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
William James ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Chinese Tradition ◽  
Experimental Practice ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
History Of

Empiricisms reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European philosophy and comparatively. It traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. A richly detailed account in Part I of history’s empiricisms establishes a context in Part II for reconsidering the work of the so-called radical empiricists—William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is “radical” about their work is to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began. Empiricisms also sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other. Empiricism is more multi-textured than philosophers tend to assume when we explain it to ourselves and to students. One purpose of Empiricisms is to recover the neglected context. A complementary purpose is to elucidate the value of experience and arrive at some idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism.

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