Science studies

In academics, science studies (sometimes seen as science and technology studies) is an umbrella term encompassing the disciplines known separately as history of science, sociology of science, philosophy of science, sociology of scientific knowledge, and more rarely scientific method. Science studies scholars also include anthropologists. The success of science at generating useful and reliable understandings about the world has attracted curiosity from diverse perspectives, including curiosities oriented toward culture, politics and epistemology. An overarching goal that applies to many science studies research projects is to learn how scientific understanding progresses.

Technology studies is a field that has mushroomed in recent decades. In addition to the disciplines mentioned above, it attracts attention from economists (e.g. on costs of R&D), geographers (e.g. on division of labour over space in innovation and use of technologies), and ethicists (bioethics) and legal studies (e.g. information technology law, internet regulation). There has emerged a very active field of "innovation studies" in which many of these disciplines cooperate. This field covers not only invention and innovation, but also the diffusion, implementation, consumption, reinvention, and representation of technologies. (Innovation studies also cover non-technological innovations, though there has been much less effort here.)

Technology studies deal with human products whose utility is a matter of whether or not they "work" in effecting transformations of the material world. Science studies deal with knowledge claims, but these are often interpreted as claims to truth; many students of science studies have preferred to skate around the question of veracity (and some treat all scientific approaches as being in effect of equal truth value), and say that science "works" to the extent that relevant communities believe in its claims. Michel Foucault adressed the issue of truth by positing that each society has a regime of truth that operates to determine which knowledge claims are considered true.

See also

Related Topics

• History of science and technology
• Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
• List of topics (scientific method)
• Philosophy of science
• List of academic disciplines
• Scientific method

Related People

• Bruno Latour
• Michel Foucault
• Donna Haraway
• C. P. Snow

References

General Science Studies

• Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge; New York: 1993.
• Latour, Bruno. "The Last Critique," Harper's Magazine, April 2004, pp. 15-20.
• Latour, Bruno. "Do You Believe in Reality: News from the Trenches of the Science Wars," in Pandora's Hope (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Objectivity and Truth

• Haraway, Donna J. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 183-201. (availablie online)
• Foucault, Michel. "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), pp. 109-133.
• Porter, Theodore M. "Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science," Social Studies of Science, 22 (1992), pp. 633-652.

Medicine and Biology

• Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1997). (website)
• Martin, Emily. "Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State," in The Science Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 358-371.