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Contextualizing Science: From Science Studies to Cultural Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis*
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Extract

For once I find myself in the unusual position of disagreeing with Joe Rouse for I do not think that science studies can or should be simply “modeled’ after cultural studies as he has suggested. Instead I will argue for a stronger relationship between science studies and cultural studies that follows historically, if not logically from the progression from HPS to science studies and thence to the cultural study of scientific knowledge. The endpoint of the cultural study of scientific knowledge, at least as I will locate it in this paper and elsewhere, for it depends on how one locates the meaning of culture and its study, is a return to the perspective of the scientist having made roughly a 359 degree angle of departure; that one degree more or less gives the critical distance to “defamiliarize the familiar” perspective of the scientist and to “contextualize” scientific practice.

Type
Part XIII. Discourse, Practice, Context: From HPS to Interdisciplinary Science Studies
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 402 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I wish to thank N. Doran, M. Futch, R. Hampton, C. Koehler, G. Kroll, M. Lesney, G. Weisel and other students in the “Cultural Study/Cultural History of Scientific Knowledge” at the University of Florida. I wish also to acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation and the Division of Sponsored Research at the University of Florida. Support for the The New Contextualism: Science as Discourse and Culture was provided by the Dept. of History and the Humanities Council at the University of Florida; the Philosophy and English Departments provided additional sponsorship.

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