Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge

by Knorr Cetina

How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. Her work 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 a unified science.

By many accounts, contemporary Western societies are becoming "knowledge societies"--which run on expert processes and expert systems epitomized by science and structured into all areas of social life. By looking at epistemic cultures in two sample cases, this book addresses pressing 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.

The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Sociology, Nonfiction, Social Science, Anthropology, History Of Science

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Robinsky_]

Nicht komplett gelesen, aber total lesenswert.
Klassiker der deskriptiven (nicht normativen) Wissenschaftstheorie/philosophy of science i think & rightfully so.
Bin sehr neugierig wie dieses Werk rezipiert wurde und auch heute noch nachwirkt. Ist definitiv ein Themenbereich, den ich weiterhin verfolgen will, auch um zu wissen, wie ihre Gedanken weiterentwickelt wurden.

Vor allem Kapitel 6 zeigt gut vor Augen wie viel Verzerrung des wissenschaftlichen Prozesses im Paper-Schreiben drinsteckt. Noch ein Plädoyer für Open Science?

Kapitel 7 hat mich nicht so sehr mitgenommen, wie ich erhofft habe.

Kapitel 2-5 gar nicht gelesen oops, die Ausleihfrist war halt vorbei :/

Kontext des Lesens:
- Spontan in der Adlershofer Unibib entdeckt, weil es eine Neuauflage ist & es schien sehr passend, da ich das Modul Advanced Topics in Embodied Cognition nebenbei belegt habe; es hat also gut vom Hausarbeit schreiben abgelenkt

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very dense book. Very, very dense. Extremely dense. And then it gets denser... That said, it rewards hard work by offering intriguing insights into the relationship between scientific cultures and scientists' ways of understanding and interacting with the natural world.

Although Knorr Cetina focuses on two cultures -- molecular biology and high energy physics -- she argues that her findings are more broadly applicable to understanding the information culture most of us occupy today. Although I agree with that assessment, and although I am finding this book useful to my own developing understanding of the sociology of science, I don't recommend reading it after a heavy meal, late in the evening, or any other time one has less than full attention to give it. It is, well, rather dense.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not really going to review all of this book, just that bit that reminded me of my daughter’s PhD thesis that she abandoned before I was far enough into my own thesis to be of any real help to her – despite taking two weeks off from mine to help her prepare for her confirmation. Her thesis was on Japanese food ways. Claude Lévi-Strauss says essentially in his The Raw and The Cooked that we have a troubled relationship with food, or rather with meat. We rarely like to eat meat – particularly mammalian meat – unless it has first been elaborately transformed. This relates to the prohibition on cannibalism. It is also why, when people are forced to eat humans, they rarely eat the hands – as this cannot be transformed in a way that allows us to not see ourselves eating something human. And so, we cook meat, and even the meat we don’t cook – like Carpaccio has been pounded to such an extent it is impossible to say what it had previously been. This is less true with fish or even chicken. The only mammalian meat that, once cooked, looks much as it did when alive is perhaps suckling pig. But even this isn’t eaten whole, but sliced and eaten as portions are unrecognisable as being from the pig itself. Pig’s trotters probably are the closest thing to refuting this argument.

This book discusses the cultural differences of different groups of scientists in starkly different laboratory situations – one nuclear physicists and the other biologists. The physicists were working with atom smashers – but because they were seeking to find particles that, by definition, are impossible to see, their equipment needed to be calibrated with theory and essentially the process of ‘discovery’ was one of near total reliance upon the equipment and the inscriptions made by these devices. And the devices proved to be incredibly temperamental. So much so that the physicists humanised these machines. Whenever they spoke of them they almost invariably gave them personalities and human like intentions in their metaphors. This was quite different from the biologists where were seeking to find the DNA in the creatures they were analysing – and although this DNA was mostly invisible to them too, they needed to gain this by processing various animals – often mice that had been specifically bred for the purpose. I hadn’t realised that you couldn’t just use any old mouse for this task, but needed a kind of standardised mouse that would not have any complicating viruses that wild mice might have. Although they killed the mice themselves, they generally referred to these animals using mechanical metaphors. The need to distance the experiments from the living organisms being studied was seen in the machine-like metaphors the scientists used for them.

My daughter’s thesis was that the Japanese had kinds of rituals of respect for the animals that they killed and ate. This meant that it was almost disrespectful to eat them and not to attend to what it was that you were eating. And so, being presented by food that was clearly the animal itself was a way to acknowledge the respect owed to the animal you were eating. This was most evident when her Japanese boyfriend brought her to an expensive restaurant to eat fugu – the fish that can kill you if not prepared properly – although, this is mostly overstated. The problem was that the fish that arrived at the table had been filleted alive and so the filets were still moving when they arrived at the table. My daughter could not bring herself to eat this still moving flesh. But her boyfriend kept telling her what she was missing out on – how fresh it was. She later showed me a video of an octopus that had had his head cut open and the meat inside its head sliced. This was called ‘dancing rice’ – as when you poured soy sauce over it, its tentacles would wave about. Again, you ate the meat directly from the body of the octopus. Under the video there was both English and Japanese comments. The English comments invariably spoke of how disgusting they thought this was. The Japanese said things like ‘I wanted this for my 21st birthday, but it is so expensive’. I would be curious to know if Japanese biologists use mechanical metaphors to describe their experiments and if they use human metaphors to describe the machines they use when doing physics experiments.

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

What are scientists doing when they "do" science? From "practice" back to the cultural thinking/institutional arrangement logic that informs the practices. A lot of interesting comments that relate classic social anthropology (from Durkheim on symbolic classification or Radcliffe-Brown on joking relations) to the empirical phenomenon of the production of knowledge in particle physics/molecular biology. And it was written in 1999, by which time the author already did about two decades of work in this field, and had radically shifted away from her dissertation training. How amazing. And the conversations in the last chapter & notes seem to be building on real comments? It's quite fun to read them (although with positional contexts it would be far more interesting).

[Judd Street · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I left this book less persuaded than Cetina hoped I would be. The central thesis is clear: there are distinctive epistemic cultures in high energy physics and molecular bio. But, the essentializing of each culture left me wanting: beyond some high level differences, the claims about the 'nature' of each field seemed poorly supported. I can buy, for instance, that authorship lists are much more collaborative on HEP vs. MB, but the reading of particular interpersonal culture didn't seem well documented.

[Harry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and highly detailed account of the practices that create and warrant scientific knowledge. Not at all an easy read: the topics are already pretty difficult to meaningfully wrap your head around and much of the book is filled with jargon and technical language, especially in the chapters discussing particle physics (I found the ones on molecular biology much more straightforward).

I thought the interviews were well done and indicative of the epistemic cultures that Knorr-Cetina wants us to differentiate. Loved the section on gossip or "shop talk" and the play-by-play of the German PhD student dissecting a mouse and failing at every step. Worth reading.

[Zhenia Vasiliev · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely engaging comparison of epistemologies in two fields, experimental high energy physics and molecular biology that sheds light to many aspects of how knowledge is produced in and out of the lab. I quite like the sections written in the stlye of an interview, that provide some additional commentary on the author's methods.

[Arvind · Rating 3 out of 5]

important: knorr-cetina makes several interesting points about the nature of scientific knowledge, with an especially interesting set of stories about the mechanical, engineered nature of high-energy physics and what it entails for the kind of knowledge it produces. difficult to read, but worth it.

[astropixie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not representative of either molecular biology or high energy physics. Very disappointing. She idolized the physicists and demonized the biologists, failing to accurately portray either.