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mburnamfink's review against another edition
5.0
Hess wrote this book at the closing of the Science Wars, a fraught period when physicist-philosophers tried to book post-modernist jackdaw studiers of science out of the academy entirely. He realized, with some alarm, that despite decades of work STS lacked a single graduate level overview of the field, and so wrote a short advanced introduction.
Despite being twenty years old, this book remains a treasure. The major chapters cover philosophy of science through the lens of theory choice, how should scientists distinguish between alternative theories; institutional sociology examining stratification and organization of scientists, the sociology of scientific knowledge, which pries open the black box to examine how scientists actually do their work; and closes with feminist and Foucauldian critiques of science. Hess has a careful sense of the graduations of the phrases "constructivist" and "relativist", and carefully teases out a productive areas for "realist" studies of science, which empower factual evidence of the real world, while still leaving space for change and the weird, for example his own anthropological work on spiritist cults in Brazil.
While some of the terms of the debate have changed, and Hess is not the final authority on every author or idea presented, this is a sweeping and comprehensives literature review. It never hurts to return to the fundamentals.
Despite being twenty years old, this book remains a treasure. The major chapters cover philosophy of science through the lens of theory choice, how should scientists distinguish between alternative theories; institutional sociology examining stratification and organization of scientists, the sociology of scientific knowledge, which pries open the black box to examine how scientists actually do their work; and closes with feminist and Foucauldian critiques of science. Hess has a careful sense of the graduations of the phrases "constructivist" and "relativist", and carefully teases out a productive areas for "realist" studies of science, which empower factual evidence of the real world, while still leaving space for change and the weird, for example his own anthropological work on spiritist cults in Brazil.
While some of the terms of the debate have changed, and Hess is not the final authority on every author or idea presented, this is a sweeping and comprehensives literature review. It never hurts to return to the fundamentals.
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