Epistemic Cultures

by Cetina, Karin Knorr

• ISBN13: 9780674258945
• ISBN10: 0674258940
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-05-01
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. Her work highlights the diversity of these cultures of knowing and, in its depiction of their differences--in the meaning of the empirical, the enactment of object relations, and the fashioning of social relations--challenges the accepted view of a unified science. By many accounts, contemporary Western societies are becoming "knowledge societies"--which run on expert processes and expert systems epitomized by science and structured into all areas of social life. By looking at epistemic cultures in two sample cases, this book addresses pressing questions about how such expert systems and processes work, what principles inform their cognitive and procedural orientations, and whether their organization, structures, and operations can be extended to other forms of social order. The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society.

Author Biography

Karin Knorr Cetina is Professor of Sociology and Science and Technology Studies. University of Bielefeld, Germany.

Table of Contents

A Note on Transcription	xv
Introduction	1	(25)
The Disunity of the Sciences	2	(3)
The Cultures of Knowledge Societies	5	(3)
Culture and Practice	8	(3)
The Structure of the Book	11	(3)
Physics Theory, and a First Look at the Field	14	(3)
Issues of Methodology, and More about the Field	17	(9)
What Is a Laboratory?	26	(20)
Laboratories as Reconfigurations of Natural and Social Orders	26	(6)
From Laboratory to Experiment	32	(11)
Some Features of the Laboratory Reconsidered	43	(3)
Particle Physics and Negative Knowledge	46	(33)
The Analogy of the Closed Universe	46	(2)
A World of Signs and Secondary Appearances	48	(4)
The ``Meaninglessness'' of Measurement	52	(3)
The Structure of the Care of the Self	55	(8)
Negative Knowledge and the Liminal Approach	63	(8)
Moving in a Closed Universe: Unfolding, Framing, and Convoluting	71	(8)
Molecular Biology and Blind Variation	79	(32)
An Object-Oriented Epistemics	79	(2)
The Small-Science Style of Molecular Biology and the Genome Project	81	(3)
The Laboratory as a Two-Tier Structure	84	(4)
``Blind'' Variation and Natural Selection	88	(5)
The Experiential Register	93	(15)
Blind Variation Reconsidered	108	(3)
From Machines to Organisms: Detectors as Behavioral and Social Beings	111	(27)
Primitive Classifications	111	(2)
Detector Agency and Physiology	113	(3)
Detectors as Moral and Social Individuals	116	(4)
Live Organism or Machine?	120	(3)
Are There Enemies?	123	(3)
Physicists as Symbionts	126	(4)
Taxonomies of Trust	130	(5)
Primitive Classifications Reconsidered	135	(3)
From Organisms to Machines: Laboratories as Factories of Transgenics	138	(21)
A Science of Life without Nature?	138	(6)
Organisms as Production Sites	144	(5)
Cellular Machines	149	(4)
Industrial Production versus Natural (Re)production	153	(2)
Biological Machines Reconsidered	155	(4)
HEP Experiments as Post-Traditional Communitarian Structures	159	(33)
Large Collaborations: A Brief History	159	(7)
The Erasure of the Individual as an Epistemic Subject	166	(5)
Management by Content	171	(8)
The Intersection of Management by Content and Communitarianism	179	(7)
Communitarian Time: Genealogical, Scheduled	186	(6)
The Multiple Ordering Frameworks of HEP Collaborations	192	(24)
The Birth Drama of an Experiment	193	(3)
Delaying the Choice, or Contests of Unfolding	196	(5)
Confidence Pathways and Gossip Circles	201	(9)
Other Ordering Frameworks	210	(4)
Reconfiguration Reconsidered	214	(2)
The Dual Organization of Molecular Biology Laboratories	216	(25)
Laboratories Structured as Individuated Units	216	(5)
Becoming a Laboratory Leader	221	(3)
The Two Levels of the Laboratory	224	(10)
The ``Impossibility'' of Cooperation in Molecular Biology	234	(7)
Toward an Understanding of Knowledge Societies: A Dialogue	241	(22)
Notes	263	(36)
References	299	(22)
Index	321