How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. Her work highlights the diversity of these cultures of knowing and, in its depiction of their differences--in the meaning of the empirical, the enactment of object relations, and the fashioning (...) of social relations--challenges the accepted view of a unified science. By many accounts, contemporary Western societies are becoming "knowledge societies"--which run on expert processes and expert systems epitomized by science and structured into all areas of social life. By looking at epistemic cultures in two sample cases, this book addresses pressing questions about how such expert systems and processes work, what principles inform their cognitive and procedural orientations, and whether their organization, structures, and operations can be extended to other forms of social order. The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society. (shrink)

How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society.

_Dislocating Cultures_ takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas. Drawing attention to the political forces that have spawned, shaped, and perpetuated these misrepresentations since colonial times, Uma Narayan inspects the underlying problems which "culture" poses for the respect of difference and cross-cultural understanding. Questioning the problematic roles assigned to Third World subjects within multiculturalism, Narayan examines ways in which the (...) flow of information across national contexts affects our understanding of issues. _Dislocating Cultures_ contributes a philosophical perspective on areas of ongoing interest such as nationalism, post-colonial studies, and the cultural politics of debates over tradition and "westernization" in Third World contexts. (shrink)

If cultures are always in the making, this book catches one kind of culture on the make. Academics will be familiar with audit in the form of research and teaching assessments - they may not be aware how pervasive practices of 'accountability' are or of the diversity of political regimes under which they flourish. Twelve social anthropologists from across Europe and the Commonwealth chart an influential and controversial cultural phenomenon.

This collection presents significant contributions from an international network project on mathematical cultures, including essays from leading scholars in the history and philosophy of mathematics and mathematics education.​ Mathematics has universal standards of validity. Nevertheless, there are local styles in mathematical research and teaching, and great variation in the place of mathematics in the larger cultures that mathematical practitioners belong to. The reflections on mathematical cultures collected in this book are of interest to mathematicians, philosophers, historians, sociologists, (...) cognitive scientists and mathematics educators. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 42, Issue 4, Page 281-289, December 2019.

Interaction between humans and cats in urban environments is subject to dynamic change. Based on the frequency and quality of relations with humans, we can distinguish several populations of domestic cats : pedigree, pet, semi-feral, feral, and pseudo-wild. Bringing together theoretical perspectives of the Tartu school of biosemiotics and ethological studies of animal societies, we distinguish two basic types of cat cultures: the culture of street cats and the humano-cat culture of pets. The difference between these cultures is (...) documented on the level of zoosemiotic interactions, ecological relations, and human representations. We introduce a threefold model of human-animal interactions in urban environments which steer a careful course between the Scylla of realistic ontology and the Charybdis of social constructivism. A case study on Estonian cat shelters illustrates the significance of cultural representations and institutionalized actions in human-cat cohabitation. (shrink)

The four contributions in this special issue on Argumentation Through Languages and Cultures deals with clear cases of such argumentative situations as they develop in different cultures and language groups. One of these papers comes from the Inuit oral culture; three papers from written cultures, Chinese, Muslim and Indian cultures. Among written cultures, the Indian and Muslim cultures have developed sophisticated theories of argument, while the Chinese culture, according to Graham, combined “a sense of (...) rigorous proof with the indifference to logical forms”. (shrink)

This book takes part in the current revival of social-scientific interest in the study of moralities by seeking to introduce as its foundation a cross-civilizational framework that makes it possible to subject all traditions seeking to induce socially responsible behavior, both religious and secular, to systematic investigation.

Winch’s ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ addressed the question of how to interpret apparently irrational alien beliefs and practices. Criticizing Evans-Pritchard’s study of Zande witchcraft, Winch argued that across cultures there are divergent conceptions of what is rational and real and that, where they diverge, it is mistaken to apply ‘our’ standards and conceptions to ‘their’ beliefs. Winch’s position is here re-examined in the light of the current debate about whether the Hawaiians thought Captain Cook was divine. Sahlins holds that (...) they did, asserting that different cultures have different rationalities. Obeyesekere disagrees, holding that these views are just further evidence of European myth-making about the natives’ savage mentality, and that ‘practical rationality’ is common to all cultures. In conclusion it is argued that Sahlins’s ‘Maussian’ interpretative strategy is preferable to Obeyesekere’s ‘Davidsonian’ approach, that Sahlins cannot sustain his Winchean claim about rationality and that denying it is a precondition for understanding a practice central to all cultures: that of trying to get the world right. (shrink)

Returning to the text of his phrase-making Rede lecture Sir Charles Snow, surely an experienced explorer of the corridors of power, confesses to the awe of the sorcerer’s apprentice at the flood of comment, hostile and appreciative, near and far in origin, which his unpretentiously original thoughts upon the current rift in cultural communication conjured from the practitioners of literature and science, who broadly divide higher education in England today and whom he addressed at Cambridge in May 1959. The widespread (...) spontaneity of reaction has led him to conclude that his analysis touched a nerve, ‘something which people, all over the world, suspect is relevant to present actions’. His original lecture refused to relate itself to the political waging of ‘the cold war’ as ‘the prime absolute of our age’ and it castigated modernist literature for its neglect of the currently scientific stage of the industrial revolution, which is producing a new egalitarian society in our own time. Now he restates his major theme: the pressing need for a new education to promote common understanding between these two dominant cultures, so that the expanding social force of applied science be directed with the minimum danger and the maximum good for humanity. He does not minimise the danger of leaving a mystic status to the initiates of science. (shrink)

Performer Training is an examination of how actors are trained in different cultures.

The paper provides valuable accounts of the general concepts underlying privacy law in both cultures, and great detail about the impact of criminal procedure and evidence rules on privacy in reality rather than legal theory. It is, in this sense, a “realist” approach to privacy, particularly but not exclusively in relation to sexual activity. The distinction which the article draws between the frameworks within which privacy is conceived broadly, self-determination and limited government in the USA, protection of one’s persona (...) in Europe, and reputation in Islamic law. However, the paper argues that Western and Islamic traditions share many of the same concepts about the tests to be applied when deciding how far an intrusion on privacy is justified and value many of the same interests in doing so. At the same time, it will highlight those areas where they differ which are not ones of crucial importance when deciding, for example, what are the proper limits on mass surveillance. Indirectly, this shows that even though there may be stark differences between the cultures on some points, there is enough agreement on some aspects of privacy to make comparisons in relation to issues such as mass surveillance. (shrink)

(2002). Speaking Across Time and Cultures in Bioethics and Environmental Ethics. Ethics, Place & Environment: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 271-280. doi: 10.1080/1366879022000077804.

The famous 1959 Two Cultures essay by C. P. Snow has become a foil for decades of discussions over the relation between science and the humanities. The problem of the “two cultures” is often framed in terms of how the particular epistemological claims or general intellectual orientations of particular individuals on either side of this purported divide obstruct interdisciplinary dialogue or cooperation. This formulation, however, is ultimately unsatisfying, because often it focuses narrowly on the intentions and arguments of (...) individuals, without considering the institutional frameworks within which such debates occur. In this article, I propose to bracket issues of individual epistemological orientation while .. (shrink)

The cultures here in question are those of mathematics and of physics that I shall interpret with the goal of exploring different modes of creativity. As case studies I will consider two scientists who were exemplars of these cultures, the mathematician Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) and the physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955). The modes of creativity that I will compare and contrast are their notions of aesthetics and intuition. In order to accomplish this we begin by studying their introspections.

The purpose of this study was to identify general characteristics attributed to ethical business cultures by executives from a variety of industries. Our research identified five clusters of characteristics: Mission- and Values-Driven, Stakeholder Balance, Leadership Effectiveness, Process Integrity, and Long-term Perspective. We propose that these characteristics be used as a foundation of a comprehensive model that can be engaged to influence operational practices in creating and sustaining an ethical business culture.

The article presents an in-depth analysis of epistemic cultures in conflict by exemplifying the epistemic conflict between high energy physics and astronomy which emerged after the discovery of “dark energy” and the accelerating expansion of the universe. It suggests a theoretical framework combining Knorr-Cetina’s concept of epistemic cultures with Whitley’s theory of dependencies in the sciences system, which explains that epistemic conflicts occur, if the strategic and functional dependency of two incommensurable epistemic cultures is suddenly growing. The (...) pre-history of the conflict is discussed on a micro-level for the two research groups involved in the breakthrough. The analysis of the consequent epistemic conflict on a macro-level reveals that it embraces the preferred epistemic strategy, the collaboration style, the instrumental concepts and the question how social legitimacy can be generated. (shrink)

Dislocating Cultures takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas.