Overview

How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity and historical coincidence, determine how people know and what they know. This text compares two epistemic cultures, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. It 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 unified science. Comtemporary Western societies are becoming ""knowledge societies"", which run on expert processes and systems epitomized by science and structured into all areas of social life. This work addresses 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.

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[Karin Cetina] has studied the behavior and practices of physicists in the process of trying to acquire knowledge of the basic components of the universe, and of biologists seeking empirical knowledge of natural objects. According to Cetina, the way the two groups go about their business is fundamentally different, and this difference has something to tell us about how we know what we know...A thorough and thoughtful examination of the epistemic underpinning of a knowledge society. -- M. H. Chaplin Choice

[Karin Cetina] has studied the behavior and practices of physicists in the process of trying to acquire knowledge of the basic components of the universe, and of biologists seeking empirical knowledge of natural objects. According to Cetina, the way the two groups go about their business is fundamentally different, and this difference has something to tell us about how we know what we know...A thorough and thoughtful examination of the epistemic underpinning of a knowledge society.--M. H. Chaplin Choice

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