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

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Pickering, Andrew.
Imprint:Chicago : University of Chicago Press, ©1995.
Description:1 online resource (281 pages) : illustrations
Language:English
Subject:
Format: E-Resource Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11244805
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780226668253
0226668258
0226668029
9780226668024
0226668037
9780226668031
Notes:Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-273) and index.
Print version record.
Summary:This ambitious book by one of the most original and provocative thinkers in science studies offers a sophisticated new understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical, and engineering practice and the production of scientific knowledge. Andrew Pickering offers a new approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the extraordinary number of factors--social, technological, conceptual, and natural--that interact to affect the creation of scientific knowledge. In his view, machines, instruments, facts, theories, conceptual and mathematical structures, discipli.
Other form:Print version: Pickering, Andrew. Mangle of practice. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, ©1995 0226668029
Review by Choice Review

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.

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review