Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically

Engaging Science How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically Summarizing this century's major debates over realism and the rationality of scientific knowledge, Joseph Rouse believes that these disputes oversimplify the political and cultural significance of the sciences.\n\nHe provides an alternative understanding of science that focuses on practices rather than knowledge.Rouse first outlines the shared assumptions by ostensibly opposed interpretive stances toward science: scientific realism, social constructivism, empiricism, and postempiricist historical rationalism. He then advances cultural studies as an alternative approach, one that understands the sciences as ongoing patterns of situated activity whose material setting is part of practice. Cultural studies of science, theauthor suggests, take seriously their own participation in and engagement with the culture of science, rejecting the purported detachment of earlier philosophical or sociological standpoints. Rather, such studies offer specific, critical discussions of how and why science matters, and to whom, and how opportunites for meaningful understanding and action are transformed by scientific practices. Additional ISBNs 9780801431937Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically is written by Joseph Rouse and published by Cornell University Press. ISBNs for Engaging Science are 9781501718625, 1501718622 and the print ISBNs are 9780801482892, 0801482895. Additional ISBNs include 9780801431937.