Sunday, February 3, 2008

How to Think About Science

 
One of my colleagues send me a link to a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio series about How to Think About Science. You can download podcasts of all 10 episodes.
If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it?

Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study.
A "new field of study"? I didn't know that.

I recognize the names of some of the people who were interviewed and I'm more than a little skeptical. What do you think? Are these the leading lights of a new way of looking at epistemology? Or, is this just a subtle version of new-age psychobabble?

Episode 1 - November 14 - Simon Schaffer
Episode 2 - November 21 - Lorraine Daston
Episode 3 - November 28 - Margaret Lock
Episode 4 - December 5 - Ian Hacking and Andrew Pickering
Episode 5 - December 12 - Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour
Episode 6 - January 2 - James Lovelock
Episode 7 - January 9 - Arthur Zajonc
Episode 8 - January 16 - Wendell Berry
Episode 9 - January 23 - Rupert Sheldrake
Episode 10 - January 30 - Brian Wynne


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