Ways of Knowing

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

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

Bibliography

Index

和《佛陀的美麗新世界》一起，装在梁文道先生的口袋里，作为日常读物。