Never Pure

Steven Shapin argues that science, for all its immense authority and power, is and always has been a human endeavor, subject to human capacities and limits. Put simply, science has never been pure. To be human is to err, and we understand science better when we recognize it as the laborious achievement of fallible, imperfect, and historically situated human beings. Shapin's es...

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Steven Shapin argues that science, for all its immense authority and power, is and always has been a human endeavor, subject to human capacities and limits. Put simply, science has never been pure. To be human is to err, and we understand science better when we recognize it as the laborious achievement of fallible, imperfect, and historically situated human beings. Shapin's essays collected here include reflections on the historical relationships between science and common sense, between science and modernity, and between science and the moral order. They explore the relevance of physical and social settings in the making of scientific knowledge, the methods appropriate to understanding science historically, dietetics as a compelling site for historical inquiry, the identity of those who have made scientific knowledge, and the means by which science has acquired credibility and authority. This wide-ranging and intensely interdisciplinary collection by one of the most distinguished historians and sociologists of science represents some of the leading edges of change in the scholarly understanding of science over the past several decades.

Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, and his books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, and The Scientific Revolution. He has written for the New Yorker and writes regularly for the London...

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Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, and his books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, and The Scientific Revolution. He has written for the New Yorker and writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

Preface
1. Lowering the Tone in the History of Science: A Noble Calling
Part I: Methods and Maxims
2. Cordelia's Love: Credibility and the Social Studies of Science
3. How to Be Antiscientific
4. Science and Prejudice in Historical Perspective
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Preface
1. Lowering the Tone in the History of Science: A Noble Calling
Part I: Methods and Maxims
2. Cordelia's Love: Credibility and the Social Studies of Science
3. How to Be Antiscientific
4. Science and Prejudice in Historical Perspective
Part II: Places and Practices
5. The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-century England
6. Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology
Part III: The Scientific Person
7. "The Mind Is Its Own Place": Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-century England
8. "A Scholar and a Gentleman": The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Seventeenth-century England
9. Who Was Robert Hooke?
10. Who Is the Industrial Scientist? Commentary from Academic Sociology and from the Shop Floor in the United States, ca. 1900–ca. 1970
Part IV: The Body of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Body
11. The Philosopher and the Chicken: On the Dietetics of Disembodied Knowledge
12. How to Eat Like a Gentleman: Dietetics and Ethics in Early Modern England
Part V: The World of Science and the World of Common Sense
13. Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common Sense, and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-century Dietetic Medicine
14. Proverbial Economies: How an Understanding of Some Linguistic and Social Features of Common Sense Can Throw Light on More Prestigious Bodies of Knowledge, Science for Example
15. Descartes the Doctor: Rationalism and Its Therapies
Part VI: Science and Modernity
16. Science and the Modern World
Notes
Index
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