Engaging Science : : How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically / / Joseph Rouse.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Rouse, Joseph,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©1996
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (280 p.)

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, theauthor 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I RETHINKING THE TRADITIONS: POSITIVISM, SCIENTIFIC REALISM, HISTORICAL RATIONALISM, AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM -- 1. Philosophy of Science and the Persistent Narratives of Modernity -- 2. The Politics of Postmodern Philosophy of Science -- 3. Arguing for the Natural Ontological Attitude -- 4. Should Philosophy of Science Be Postpositivist -- Part II RECONSTRUCTING PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: PRACTICES AND THE DYNAMICS OF KNOWING -- 5. The Significance of Scientific Practices -- 6. Narrative Reconstruction, Epistemic Significance, and the Temporality of Scientific Practices -- 7. The Dynamics of Scientific Knowing: Understanding Science without Reifying Knowledge -- 8. Against Representation: Davidsonian Semantics and Cultural Studies of Science -- 9. What Are Cultural Studies of Science? -- References -- Index