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.

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9780801431937

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Reviews

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, author of Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism 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, author of Michael Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason 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

Author Information

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.

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