Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically / Edition 1

by Joseph Rouse

Overview

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, the
author 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801482892
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	02/15/1996
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Joseph Rouse is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Science in Society Program at Wesleyan University and the author of Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science, from Cornell.

What People are Saying About This

Gary Gutting

Rouse makes an important contribution to our understanding of the current state of science studies. His book's greatest strength is its overall argument that a wide range of apparently diverse approaches to science can be persuasively read as constituting a new and fruitful alternative to the legitimation project.

Lynn Hankinson Nelson

Rouse argues for a new, interdisciplinary model of science studies and a reconceptualization of philosophy, sociology, and history of science on the grounds that there is a need for more philosophically adequate understandings of science than current approaches allow. Rouse's vision is compelling, moving beyond dichotomies entrenched in the relevant literatures.

Editorial Reviews

An ambitious attempt to outline an alternative to the dominant philosophical and social constructivist efforts to make sense of science.... [Rouse] extends his examination of practice, local knowledge, and the politics of science into a full-fledged conception of philosophy of science as cultural studies.

Isis

An ambitious attempt to outline an alternative to the dominant philosophical and social constructivist efforts to make sense of science.... [Rouse] extends his examination of practice, local knowledge, and the politics of science into a full-fledged conception of philosophy of science as cultural studies.

-- "Isis"

From the Publisher

Critiques the four main philosophical and sociological interpretations of science current in the 20th century--positivism, scientific realism, historical rationalism, and social constructivism--and the themes and issues they share, then proposes the beginnings of an alternative approach. Discusses the narrative reconstruction, epistemic significance, and temporality of scientific practices; the dynamics of scientific knowing; and Davidsonian semantics and cultural studies of science. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"Rouse argues for a new, interdisciplinary model of science studies and a reconceptualization of philosophy, sociology, and history of science on the grounds that there is a need for more philosophically adequate understandings of science than current approaches allow. Rouse's vision is compelling, moving beyond dichotomies entrenched in the relevant literatures."

Lynn Hankinson Nelson

"Rouse makes an important contribution to our understanding of the current state of science studies. His book's greatest strength is its overall argument that a wide range of apparently diverse approaches to science can be persuasively read as constituting a new and fruitful alternative to the legitimation project."

Gary Gutting