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After Representation: Science Studies in the Performative Idiom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Andy Pickering
Andy Pickering*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Extract

Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’ pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.

This essay is about science studies: history, philosophy and sociology of science, etc. My interest is in where the field is now and where I would like it go. Taking my cue from actor-network theory, my central theme is agency—questions of who acts? who does what to whom, how and why? And to develop this theme I contrast two different idioms for thinking about science—two different metaphysics—which I call the representational and the performative idioms.

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. 413 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to participants in a workshop on ‘The New “Contextualism:” Science as Discourse and Culture,’ University of Florida, Gainesville, 11-13 March 1994, for their reactions to an earlier presentation of these ideas, and to Stefan Timmermans, Geof Bowker and Bert Kögler for comments on an earlier version of this essay.

References

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