In Ways of Knowing, John V. Pickstone provides a new and accessible framework for understanding science, technology, and medicine (STM) in the West from the Renaissance to the present. Pickstone's approach has four key features. First, he synthesizes the long-term histories and philosophies of disciplines that are normally studied separately. Second, he dissects STM into specific ways of knowing—natural history, analysis, and experimentalism—with separate but interlinked elements. Third, he explores these ways of knowing as forms of work related to our various technologies for making, mending, and destroying. And finally, he relates scientific and technical knowledges to popular understandings and to politics.
Covering an incredibly wide range of subjects, from minerals and machines to patients and pharmaceuticals, and from experimental physics to genetic engineering, Pickstone's Ways of Knowing challenges the reader to reexamine traditional conceptualizations of the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, technology, and medicine.
A note to the reader
1. Ways of knowing: an introduction
An outline of the method
Missions for this book
An outline of the story
2. World-readings: the meanings of nature and of science
Variety in modern Western medicine
Meanings and readings
Renaissance cosmologies
Disenchantment?
Natural theology and natural diseases
Revolution, respectability and evolution
Science, progress and the State
Modernist human-natures
Nature and culture
3. Natural history
'Historia' and representation
New worlds, new properties and new creators
Natures for pedigree people
Natural empires
Popular natural history
Displays of technology, new and old
'Natural history' now
4. Analysis and the rationalisation of production
Rationalisation and identities
Production and analytical sciences
5. The elements of bodies, earth and society
Medical analysis: corpse and patient
Analysing plants and animals
Sciences of the earth
Analysing the social
Reflections on the institutions of analysis
6. Experimentalism and invention
Meanings of experiment
Experimental histories
Experimentation and the age of analysis
Synthesis in chemistry
Experimentation in biomedical sciences
Experimentation in physical sciences
On clouds, dust and control
Experimentalism and hierarchies of knowledge
Experiment and invention
7. Industries, universities and the technoscientific complexes
Analysis and established technologies
Electrical analysis and synthesis
Electrotechnics and industrial laboratories
Dyestuffs and pharmaceuticals
Remedies for/from microbes
Science and industry in and after the First World War
Technosciences in and after the Second World War
Coda
8. Technoscience and public understandings: the British case c.2000
'No one understands us'
Science back in business
The study of 'public understanding of science'
The politics of technoscience
Understanding public science
Analysis and the bounds of 'science'
Publics and natural histories
Public understandings and world-readings
Science, values and history
1. Ways of knowing: an introduction
An outline of the method
Missions for this book
An outline of the story
2. World-readings: the meanings of nature and of science
Variety in modern Western medicine
Meanings and readings
Renaissance cosmologies
Disenchantment?
Natural theology and natural diseases
Revolution, respectability and evolution
Science, progress and the State
Modernist human-natures
Nature and culture
3. Natural history
'Historia' and representation
New worlds, new properties and new creators
Natures for pedigree people
Natural empires
Popular natural history
Displays of technology, new and old
'Natural history' now
4. Analysis and the rationalisation of production
Rationalisation and identities
Production and analytical sciences
5. The elements of bodies, earth and society
Medical analysis: corpse and patient
Analysing plants and animals
Sciences of the earth
Analysing the social
Reflections on the institutions of analysis
6. Experimentalism and invention
Meanings of experiment
Experimental histories
Experimentation and the age of analysis
Synthesis in chemistry
Experimentation in biomedical sciences
Experimentation in physical sciences
On clouds, dust and control
Experimentalism and hierarchies of knowledge
Experiment and invention
7. Industries, universities and the technoscientific complexes
Analysis and established technologies
Electrical analysis and synthesis
Electrotechnics and industrial laboratories
Dyestuffs and pharmaceuticals
Remedies for/from microbes
Science and industry in and after the First World War
Technosciences in and after the Second World War
Coda
8. Technoscience and public understandings: the British case c.2000
'No one understands us'
Science back in business
The study of 'public understanding of science'
The politics of technoscience
Understanding public science
Analysis and the bounds of 'science'
Publics and natural histories
Public understandings and world-readings
Science, values and history
