Daniel Little
Here is an interesting and important scientific question: where is high-energy physics going? What future discoveries are possible in the field? And what strategies are most likely to bring these breakthroughs about? HEP is the field of physics that studies sub-atomic particles -- muons, quarks, neutrinos, bosons, as well as now-familiar larger particles like neutrons, …
Continue reading "Advancing high-energy physics in the United States"
It seems that there is a kind of inverse Malthusian structure to scientific research and knowledge. Topics for research and investigation multiply geometrically, while actual research and the creation of knowledge can only proceed in a selective and linear way. This is true in every field -- natural science, biology, social science, poetry. Take Darwin. …
Continue reading "The Malthusian problem for scientific research"
After there was the sociology of knowledge (link), before there was a new sociology of knowledge (link), and more or less simultaneous with science and technology studies (link), there was Paul Rabinow's excellent ethnography of the invention of the key tool in recombinant DNA research -- PCR (polymerase chain reaction). Rabinow's monograph Making PCR: A …
Continue reading "Social construction of technical knowledge"
The sociology of knowledge has received a new burst of energy in the past few years, with quite a bit of encouragement and innovation coming from Science, Technology and Society studies (STS). (STS overlaps substantially with the SSK research tradition described briefly in an earlier post.) Charles Camic and Neil Gross have made very substantial contributions in …
Continue reading "Sociology of knowledge: Camic, Gross and Lamont"
The organized study of "science" as an epistemic practice and a knowledge product has taken at least three major forms in the past century: the philosophy of science, the history of science, and the sociology of science. Philosophers have been primarily interested in the logic of scientific inquiry and the rational force of scientific knowledge. …
Philosophers of science sometimes define the idea of a natural kind as "a group of things that share a fundamental set of causal properties." Examples might be "gold," "metal," and "protein molecule." And some philosophers assume that scientific realism means being realist about natural kinds. Do the typical concepts used in the social sciences succeed …
Social science methods and historical explanation seem to come together in several different ways; what can we say about the differences of approach between “history using the tools of the social sciences” and “social science research that pays close attention to history”? E. P. Thompson treats the making of the English working class. His work …
Continue reading "Social science history and historical social science"
In the idealized version of science, the enterprise of scientific knowledge discovery follows its own logic without extraneous non-cognitive or non-rational influences. But this is unrealistic. Science is a social activity, conditioned by institutions, governments, and other social forces. So it is worth considering how politics influences the course of science and how these influences …
Understanding Society 