The Edge Of Objectivity

Author : Charles Coulston Gillispie
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 600 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2016-08-23
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781400883585

Get Book

The Edge of Objectivity by Charles Coulston Gillispie Pdf

Originally published in 1960, The Edge of Objectivity helped to establish the history of science as a full-fledged academic discipline. In the mid-1950s, a young professor at Princeton named Charles Gillispie began teaching Humanities 304, one of the first undergraduate courses offered anywhere in the world on the history of science. From Galileo's analysis of motion to theories of evolution and relativity, Gillispie introduces key concepts, individuals, and themes. The Edge of Objectivity arose out of this course. It must have been a lively class. The Edge of Objectivity is pointed, opinionated, and selective. Even at six hundred pages, the book is, as the title suggests, an essay. Gillispie is unafraid to rate Mendel higher than Darwin, Maxwell above Faraday. Full of wry turns of phrase, the book effectively captures people and places. And throughout the book, Gillispie pushes an argument. He views science as the progressive development of more objective, detached, mathematical ways of viewing the world, and he orchestrates his characters and ideas around this theme. This edition of Charles Coulston Gillispie’s landmark book introduces a new generation of readers to his provocative and enlightening account of the advancement of scientific thought over the course of four centuries. Since the original publication of The Edge of Objectivity, historians of science have focused increasingly on the social context of science rather than its internal dynamics, and they have frequently viewed science more as a threatening instance of power than as an accumulation of knowledge. Nevertheless, Gillispie’s book remains a sophisticated, fast-moving, idiosyncratic account of the development of scientific ideas over four hundred years, by one of the founding intellects in the history of science. Featuring a new foreword by Theodore Porter, who places the work in its intellectual context and the development of the field, this edition of The Edge of Objectivity is a monumental work by one of the founding intellects of the history of science.

Author : Charles Coulston Gillispie
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 562 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0691079528

Get Book

The Edge of Objectivity by Charles Coulston Gillispie Pdf

Author : Charles Coulston Gillispie
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 591 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1960
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780691023502

Get Book

The Edge of Objectivity by Charles Coulston Gillispie Pdf

Full circle -- Art, life, and experiment -- The new philosophy -- Newton with his prism and silent face -- Science and the Enlightenment -- The rationalization of matter -- The history of nature -- Biology comes of age -- Early energetics -- Field physics -- Epilogue.

Author : Charles Coulston Gillispie
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 596 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 1960
Category : Science
ISBN : 0691023506

Get Book

The Edge of Objectivity by Charles Coulston Gillispie Pdf

Full circle -- Art, life, and experiment -- The new philosophy -- Newton with his prism and silent face -- Science and the Enlightenment -- The rationalization of matter -- The history of nature -- Biology comes of age -- Early energetics -- Field physics -- Epilogue.

Author : Lorraine Daston,Peter Galison
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2021-02-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781942130611

Get Book

Objectivity by Lorraine Daston,Peter Galison Pdf

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences — and show how the concept differs from alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences — from anatomy to crystallography — are those featured in scientific atlases: the compendia that teach practitioners of a discipline what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Atlas images define the working objects of the sciences of the eye: snowflakes, galaxies, skeletons, even elementary particles. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity — or truth-to-nature or trained judgment — is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to any one interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity — and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.

Author : Theodore M. Porter
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2020-08-18
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780691210544

Get Book

Trust in Numbers by Theodore M. Porter Pdf

A foundational work on historical and social studies of quantification What accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is desirable in social investigation as a result of its successes in science. Trust in Numbers questions whether such success in the study of stars, molecules, or cells should be an attractive model for research on human societies, and examines why the natural sciences are highly quantitative in the first place. Theodore Porter argues that a better understanding of the attractions of quantification in business, government, and social research brings a fresh perspective to its role in psychology, physics, and medicine. Quantitative rigor is not inherent in science but arises from political and social pressures, and objectivity derives its impetus from cultural contexts. In a new preface, the author sheds light on the current infatuation with quantitative methods, particularly at the intersection of science and bureaucracy.

Author : Charles Coulston Gillispie
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2018-06-05
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780691187983

Get Book

Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749-1827 by Charles Coulston Gillispie Pdf

Pierre-Simon Laplace was among the most influential scientists in history. Often referred to as the lawgiver of French science, he is known for his technical contributions to exact science, for the philosophical point of view he developed in the presentation of his work, and for the leading part he took in forming the modern discipline of mathematical physics. His two most famous treatises were the five-volume Traité de mécanique céleste (1799-1825) and Théorie analytique des probabilités (1812). In the former he demonstrated mathematically the stability of the solar system in service to the universal Newtonian law of gravity. In the latter he developed probability from a set of miscellaneous problems concerning games, averages, mortality, and insurance risks into the branch of mathematics that permitted the quantification of estimates of error and the drawing of statistical inferences, wherever data warranted, in social, medical, and juridical matters, as well as in the physical sciences. This book traces the development of Laplace's research program and of his participation in the Academy of Science during the last decades of the Old Regime into the early years of the French Revolution. A scientific biography by Charles Gillispie comprises the major portion of the book. Robert Fox contributes an account of Laplace's attempt to form a school of young physicists who would extend the Newtonian model from astronomy to physics, and Ivor Grattan-Guinness summarizes the history of the scientist's most important single mathematical contribution, the Laplace Transform.

Author : Michael Strevens
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-13
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781631491382

Get Book

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens Pdf

“The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex A paradigm-shifting work, The Knowledge Machine revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. • Why is science so powerful? • Why did it take so long—two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics—for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe? In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument. Like such classic works as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature. “With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style” (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science’s history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational—and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth. Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.

Author : John G McEvoy
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2015-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781317324010

Get Book

The Historiography of the Chemical Revolution by John G McEvoy Pdf

This study offers a critical survey of past and present interpretations of the Chemical Revolution designed to lend clarity and direction to the current ferment of views.

Author : Douglas A. Kysar
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2010-06-22
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780300163308

Get Book

Regulating from Nowhere by Douglas A. Kysar Pdf

Drawing insight from a diverse array of sources -- including moral philosophy, political theory, cognitive psychology, ecology, and science and technology studies -- Douglas Kysar offers a new theoretical basis for understanding environmental law and policy. He exposes a critical flaw in the dominant policy paradigm of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, which asks policymakers to, in essence, "regulate from nowhere." As Kysar shows, such an objectivist stance fails to adequately motivate ethical engagement with the most pressing and challenging aspects of environmental law and policy, which concern how we relate to future generations, foreign nations, and other forms of life. Indeed, world governments struggle to address climate change and other pressing environmental issues in large part because dominant methods of policy analysis obscure the central reasons for acting to ensure environmental sustainability. To compensate for these shortcomings, Kysar first offers a novel defense of the precautionary principle and other commonly misunderstood features of environmental law and policy. He then concludes by advocating a movement toward environmental constitutionalism in which the ability of life to flourish is always regarded as a luxury we "can" afford.

Author : John Horgan
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2015-04-14
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780465050857

Get Book

The End Of Science by John Horgan Pdf

As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts? In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, "are rarely so human . . . so at there mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge."This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final "theory of everything" that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories? Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx's view of progress, Kuhn's view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindless Horgan's smart, contrarian argument for "endism" with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise. Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike. As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls "ironic science." Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world's leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.

Author : Charles Coulston Gillispie
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 615 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2009-01-10
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781400824618

Get Book

Science and Polity in France by Charles Coulston Gillispie Pdf

By the end of the eighteenth century, the French dominated the world of science. And although science and politics had little to do with each other directly, there were increasingly frequent intersections. This is a study of those transactions between science and state, knowledge and power--on the eve of the French Revolution. Charles Gillispie explores how the links between science and polity in France were related to governmental reform, modernization of the economy, and professionalization of science and engineering.

Author : J. Kuukkanen
Publisher : Springer
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2015-05-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9781137409874

Get Book

Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography by J. Kuukkanen Pdf

Narrativism has made important contributions to the theory and philosophy of historiography but it is now time to move beyond it to postnarrativism. Kuukkanen shows how it is possible to reject the absolutist truth-functional evaluation of interpretations in historiography and yet accept that historiography can be evaluated by rational standards.

Author : Milton E. Harvey,Brian P. Holly
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2014-03-18
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317752325

Get Book

Themes in Geographic Thought (Routledge Revivals) by Milton E. Harvey,Brian P. Holly Pdf

Themes in Geographic Thought, first published in 1981, explores in breadth and depth the interrelationships among the history of Geography, geographic thought, and methodology, specifically focusing on the interactions between geographical research and various contemporary philosophical schools: positivism, pragmatism, functionalism, phenomenology, existentialism, idealism, realism and Marxism. An attempt is made to synthesise Geography’s historically rich tradition with the current diversity in approaches to the discipline, based on the belief that ‘geographic thought’, at any point in time, is a manifestation of the mutual influence between the prevailing philosophical viewpoints and the major methodological approaches in vogue. Each chapter presents an overview of the concrete ideas of a particular school of philosophy and stresses its relevance and impact on various aspects of Geography.

Author : Bernard Barber
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 1990-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1412834546

Get Book

Social Studies of Science by Bernard Barber Pdf

One of the first and premier specialists in the sociology of science presents seventeen published and unpublished essays in Social Studies of Science. This rich volume is introduced by a long essay, "The Multiple, Diverse, and Unexpected Origins of the Sociology of Science," a sociological analysis of the fifty years of development of what has finally become the fully realized field of the sociology of science. Barber's personal connection with this development makes this analytical essay a vivid contribution to the history of sociology.