Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T21:57:38.185Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Making Economic Knowledge: Reflections on Golinski's Constructivist History of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

E. Roy Weintraub
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708.

Extract

While most scientists and philosophers of science privilege scientific knowledge, and have sought demarcations of science from non-science to justify the privilege, sociologists of science, small numbers of philosophers of science, anthropologists, and some scientists themselves have been attracted to a new way of talking about science. Prefigured by Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979) and Gaston Bachelard (1934/1984), nurtured by the controversies over Thomas Kuhn's work, and instantiated in the Edinburgh School's Strong Program, the naturalistic turn portrays science as a human activity, part of the woof and warp of culture itself. Yet curiously historians of science have been less involved in this recent reconceptualization of both science and scientific knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bachelard, G. 1934. The New Scientific Spirit. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Backhouse, R. E. 1992. “How Should We Approach the History of Economic Thought: Fact, Fiction, or Moral Tale?Journal of the History of Economic Thought 14 (01): 1835.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biagioli, M., ed. 1999. The Science Studies Reader. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chadarevian, S. D. 1997. “Using Interviews to Write the History of Science.” In Söderqvist, T., ed., The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Fay, B., Pomper, P. et al. , eds. 1998. History and Theory: Contemporary Readings. Oxford, and Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Fish, S. 1995. Professional Correctness. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Fleck, L. 1935. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Golinski, J. 1998. Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kragh, H. 1987. An Introduction to the Historiography of Science. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mirowski, P. 1989. More Heat Than Light. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Novick, P. 1988. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, A. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, T. M. 1995. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Shapin, S. 1994. A Social History of Truth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S.. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, B. H. 1997. Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Söderqvist, T., ed. The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Weintraub, E. R. 1991. Stabilizing Dynamics. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, H. 1973. Metahistory. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
White, H. 1990. Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Wise, M. N., ed. 1995. The Values of Precision. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar