Science as Practice and Culture ranges over the present and past of the physical and biological sciences and mathematics. It establishes scientific practice as a fascinating topic for inquiry in its own right, for the new perspectives that emerge on the traditional questions of the objectivity, relativity, and historicity of scientific knowledge, and for its challenge to existing disciplinary modes of scholarship. As they converge with strands of postmodern thought elsewhere in the human sciences, studies of science-as-practice undermine conventional disciplinary boundaries, reductions, and rationales in science studies. At the same time, coming from departments of history, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, the contributions to this volume point to a new and genuine antidisciplinary synthesis in science studies.
Andrew Pickering takes into account the extraordinary number of elements—social, technological, conceptual, metaphysical—that come together in the practice of science. He describes science as a zone of encounter where machines, instruments, facts, theories, disciplined human practices, and social relations are intertwined—engaged in a ceaseless and open-ended interaction he calls “the mangle of practice.”
The core of the book consists of extended case studies that show how the concept of the mangle advances our understanding of scientific work both past and present. Pickering discusses in detail the building of the bubble chamber, the search for the quark, the construction of the quaternion system in mathematics, and the introduction of computer-controlled machine tools in the industrial workplace, demonstrating how the contours and powers of the human, material, and social worlds have shaped one another in specific situations. Taken together, these studies illuminate the most fundamental aspects of scientific practice—the development of experimental apparatus, the production of facts, the creation of theory, and the interrelation of machines and social organization.
The Mangle of Practice continues the work of Pickering’s groundbreaking Constructing Quarks, challenging accepted ideas about the practice of science, the role of the scientist, and the nature of scientific truth. Deepening our understanding of the relations among science, technology, and society, this book is accessible to anyone interested in the issues it takes on, and essential reading for sociologists, historians, and philosophers of science.
The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering argues, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering suggests, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.
