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"Shapin, Steven, author"
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The Scientific Life
Who are scientists? What kind of people are they? What capacities and virtues are thought to stand behind their considerable authority? They are experts - indeed, highly respected experts - authorized to describe and interpret the natural world and widely trusted to help transform knowledge into power and profit. But are they morally different from other people? The book is the author's story about who scientists are, who we think they are, and why our sensibilities about such things matter. Conventional wisdom has long held that scientists are neither better nor worse than anyone else, that personal virtue does not necessarily accompany technical expertise, and that scientific practice is profoundly impersonal. Shapin, however, here shows how the uncertainties attending scientific research make the virtues of individual researchers intrinsic to scientific work. From the early twentieth-century origins of corporate research laboratories to the high-flying scientific entrepreneurship of the present, Shapin argues that the radical uncertainties of much contemporary science have made personal virtues more central to its practice than ever before, and he also reveals how radically novel aspects of late modern science have unexpectedly deep historical roots. Contents: 1. Knowledge and Virtue: The Way We Live Now. - 2. From Calling to Job: Nature, Truth, Method, and Vocation from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries. - 3. The Moral Equivalence of the Scientist: A History of the Very Idea. - 4. Who Is the Industrial Scientist? The View from the Tower. - 5. Who Is the Industrial Scientist? The View from the Managers. - 6. The Scientist and the Civic Virtues: The Moral Life of Organized Science. - 7. The Scientific Entrepreneur: Money, Motives, and the Place of Virtue. - 8. Visions of the Future: Uncertainty and Virtue in the World of High-Tech and Venture Capital. - The Way We Live Now: Epilogue. (HoF/text adopted).
eBook
Leviathan and the air-pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life
\"Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.\" -- Amazon.com.
Book