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Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives
Angela N H Creager
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Description for Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives
Paperback. A comparison of the use of model systems and exemplary cases across fields in the natural and social sciences. Editor(s): Creager, Angela N. H.; Lunbeck, Elizabeth; Wise, M. Norton. Series: Science & Cultural Theory. Num Pages: 296 pages, 14 illustrations. BIC Classification: JHBA. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 235 x 155 x 19. Weight in Grams: 424.
Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects—such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes—or, as they are known in biology, “model systems.” Across the natural and social sciences, other disciplinary fields have developed canonical examples that have played a role comparable to that of biology’s model systems, serving not only as points of reference and illustrations of general principles or values but also as sites of continued investigation and reinterpretation. The essays in this collection assess the scope and function of model objects in domains as diverse as biology, geology, and history, attending to differences between fields as well as to epistemological commonalities.
Contributors examine the role of the fruit fly Drosophila and nematode worms in biology, troops of baboons in primatology, box and digital simulations of the movement of the earth’s crust in geology, and meteorological models in climatology. They analyze the intensive study of the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, ritual in anthropology, the individual case in psychoanalytic research, and Athenian democracy in political theory. The contributors illuminate the processes through which particular organisms, cases, materials, or narratives become foundational to their fields, and they examine how these foundational exemplars—from the fruit fly to Freud’s Dora—shape the knowledge produced within their disciplines.
Contributors
Rachel A. Ankeny
Angela N. H. Creager
Amy Dahan Dalmedico
John Forrester
Clifford Geertz
Carlo Ginzburg
E. Jane Albert Hubbard
Elizabeth Lunbeck
Mary S. Morgan
Josiah Ober
Naomi Oreskes
Susan Sperling
Marcel Weber
M. Norton Wise
Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2007
Publisher
Duke University Press United States
Number of pages
296
Condition
New
Series
Science & Cultural Theory
Number of Pages
296
Place of Publication
North Carolina, United States
ISBN
9780822340683
SKU
V9780822340683
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1
About Angela N H Creager
Angela N. H. Creager is Professor of History at Princeton University. She is the author of The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930–1965. Elizabeth Lunbeck is the Nelson Tyrone Jr. Professor of American History at Vanderbilt University. Her books include The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America. M. Norton Wise is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the editor of Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews for Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives
“Science without Laws inspires with its breathtaking scope. Delving from ethology to economics, molecular biology to microhistory, the authors illuminate crucial congruences in the way experts make their cases. Generations of scholars have taken physics as their model for right thinking, in science and beyond. This volume demonstrates that we are all biologists now.”—David Kaiser, author of Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics “Science without Laws is a superb book. It is a very strong collection, sharply defined yet impressive in scope and reach, rich in substance and deep in analysis.”—Arkady Plotnitsky, author of Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida “[Science without Laws] offers an interesting and eclectic set of essays. . . . Consciously self-reflexive, these essays are model studies of model studies and exemplary narratives of exemplary narratives. The book itself is an exemplary collection of model essays for historians and philosophers interested in model systems, and will be an engaging read for anyone interested in the vicissitudes of practices and reasoning strategies in science without laws.”
Jacob Stegenga
British Journal for the History of Science
“The range of scholarship represented here is vast, providing a valuable overview of models and cases (or what functions similarly, like exemplary narratives in history and psychoanalysis or ritual systems in anthropology) in a broad range of disciplines. . . . Sociology is not explicitly represented in this essays, but the implications for sociological knowledge are clear and significant, if also controversial. They merit serious consideration by all sociologists.”
Kathleen M. Blee
American Journal of Sociology
Jacob Stegenga
British Journal for the History of Science
“The range of scholarship represented here is vast, providing a valuable overview of models and cases (or what functions similarly, like exemplary narratives in history and psychoanalysis or ritual systems in anthropology) in a broad range of disciplines. . . . Sociology is not explicitly represented in this essays, but the implications for sociological knowledge are clear and significant, if also controversial. They merit serious consideration by all sociologists.”
Kathleen M. Blee
American Journal of Sociology