Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
This book represents emerging alternative perspectives to the "constructivist" orthodoxy that currently dominates the field of science and technology studies. Various contributions from distinguished Americans and Europeans in the field, provide arguments and evidence that it is not enough simply to say that science is "socially situated." Controversial Science focuses on important political, ethical, and broadly normative considerations that have yet to be given their due, but which point to a more realistic and critical perspective on science policy.
"I think that the whole notion of 'controversy' is a good handle to start with for a critical assessment of the field. Controversy is now seen as not only normal but also a way of framing a research site for looking at the field of scientific endeavor. The editors have also brought together a group of very well-known scholars.
"Until 1970 most studies of science were hagiographic, paeans to science. We generally not only accorded scientists exceptionally high status, but took their point of view as correct and appropriate. But today we've had second thoughts about positivism and scientists as truth-tellers, and view them as imbedded in a cultural matrix, like everyone else. It is not a new viewpoint, but is the prevailing one in the field today, a highly critical one." — Gerald Markle, Western Michigan University
Preface
Introduction
PART I. CONTENTS: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES AND THEORETICAL PROPOSALS
The Feminist Challenge to Social Studies of Science
Julia Loughlin
Science, Sociology of Science, and the Anarchist Tradition
Sal Restivo
Counteranalysis: Toward Social and Normative Restraints on the Production and Use of Scientific and Technological Knowledge
Frans Birrer
Bringing the Scientist Back In: The Need for an Alternative Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
Ullica Segerstrale
Biotechnology and Ethics
Henk Verhoog
A Strategy for Making Science Studies Policy Relevant
Steve Fuller
Science as the Continuation of Politics by Other Means
Aant Elzinga
Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Science and the Context of Relevance
Peter Weingart
PART II. CONTENTIONS: EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF CONTROVERSIES
Reasons for Studying Scientific and Science-Based Controversies
Thomas Brante
Comparing "Tool Controveries": Science, Contexts, Institutional Power, and the Development of Medical Controversies
Sune Sunesson
Causal Stories, Scientific Information, and the Ozone Depletion Controversy: Intrusive Scenarios in the Policy Process
Andrew Weiss
Value Communities in Science: The Recombinant DNA Case
Tibor Szanto
The Image of Man in Sociobiology
Margarita Jeliazkova
Cultural Bias and Regulating Risky Technologies: The Dutch Debate on Regulating LPG-Related Activities
Rob Hoppe and Rob Pranger
Ethical Controversies of Science and Society: A Relation Between Two Spheres of Social Conflict
Randall Collins
Contributors
Index