Get The Scientific Imagination: Case Studies PDF

By Gerald Holton

ISBN-10: 0521217008

ISBN-13: 9780521217002

ISBN-10: 0674794885

ISBN-13: 9780674794887

New medical rules are subjected to an intensive means of assessment and validation via the medical group. until eventually the early Eighties, this means of validation was once considered ruled through aim standards, while the method during which person scientists gave start to new medical rules used to be considered as inaccessible to rational learn. during this publication Gerald Holton takes an opposing view, illuminating the ways that the mind's eye of the scientist capabilities early within the formation of a brand new perception or concept. In definite the most important situations, a scientist adopts an specific or implicit presupposition, or thema, that courses his paintings to luck or failure and is helping ensure no matter if the recent concept will draw acclaim or controversy. utilizing firsthand money owed gleaned from notebooks, interviews, and correspondence of such twentieth-century scientists as Einstein, Fermi, and Millikan, Holton indicates how the belief of the clinical mind's eye has useful implications for the heritage and philosophy of technology and the bigger figuring out of where of technology in our tradition. the hot creation, "How a systematic Discovery Is Made: The Case of High-Temperature Superconductivity," unearths the medical mind's eye at paintings in present technology, by means of disclosing the position of non-public motivations which are frequently hidden from clinical guides, and the teachings of the case for technology coverage this day.

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10 So Let’s Get Down to Work on Cases, Not Generalities Happily, the editors of the present book, reviewing an earlier version of this essay, suggested an instructive case to examine in detail. It offers a fabulous opportunity to look at how real people in a hotly contested problem area use the word ‘objectivity’. I do not claim that what follows will satisfy those who want to address not the word but what objectivity really is (G-d dammit). I say only the editors have pointed to ‘objectivity’ in a work site, where the men were probably in suit-and-tie, and the women in business attire, but were as good as in the “shirtsleeves” of Daston and Galison.

The word ‘objectivity’ occurs once, on page 89. Dr Richards is being crossexamined about an e-mail. C. 1 He is worried that she seems preoccupied by dealing with the press rather than directing science research. ” (Recall that this exchange is spoken dialogue, not polished prose. ” I have no idea how she might have responded. ), and that is important to maintain that perception. 2 She wants to know the extent to which 1 Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, the Fraser Riverkeeper Society, the Georgia Strait Alliance, Raincoast Conservation Foundation, Watershed Watch Salmon Society, Mr Otto Langer, and the David Suzuki Foundation.

As indicated earlier, starting off research from outside a discipline can enable the detection of those dominant values, interests, and assumptions that make widely prevalent ways of thinking appear reasonable and even natural. Of course one can never get completely outside one’s social location to float freely above one’s 3 Objectivity for Sciences from Below 41 culture and history, as the conventional philosophies of science have imagined to be possible. But finding or creating even just a little distance from prevailing social commitments can be sufficient to enable new critical perspectives to illuminate issues in new ways.

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The Scientific Imagination: Case Studies by Gerald Holton


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