The mangle of practice : time, agency, and science /

Pickering is well known, especially through his influential Constructing Quarks (CH, May'85), for advancing the current discourses in science studies in a direction of a hybrid of philosophy, history, and sociology. Here he furthers the agenda by articulating a notion of scientific practice, "the mangle," a "dialectic of resistance and accommodation." This practice is "open-ended" (rather than theory-driven), and the "resistance" arises from Pickering's philosophy of "pragmatic realism," i.e., "nature" will seldom submit to the manipulations originally conceived by an investigator, thus requiring a (dialectic) accommodation. This work locates his arguments within the current discourse (particularly the sociology of knowledge) and illustrates them with intelligent reconstructions of experiments (Morpurgo's search for a bare quark, Joule's measurements), instruments (Glaser's bubble chamber), "concepts" (a particularly stunning account of Hamilton's construction of quaternions), and technology (automata). An essential acquisition. Undergraduate through faculty.