Epistemic Cultures

Karin Knorr Cetina is Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Sociology, and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

• A Note on Transcription 1. Introduction 1.1. The Disunity of the Sciences 1.2. The Cultures of Knowledge Societies 1.3. Culture and Practice 1.4. The Structure of the Book 1.5. Physics Theory, and a First Look at the Field 1.6. Issues of Methodology, and More about the Field 2. What is a Laboratory? 2.1. Laboratories as Reconfigurations of Natural and Social Orders 2.2. From Laboratory to Experiment 2.3. Some Features of the Laboratory Reconsidered 3. Particle Physics and Negative Knowledge 3.1. The Analogy of the Closed Universe 3.2. A World of Signs and Secondary Appearances 3.3. The"Meaninglessness" of Measurement 3.4. The Structure of the Care of the Self 3.5. Negative Knowledge and the Liminal Approach 3.6. Moving in a Closed Universe: Unfolding, Framing, and Convoluting 4. Molecular Biology and Blind Variation 4.1. An Object-Oriented Epistemics 4.2. The Small-Science Style of Molecular Biology and the Genome Project 4.3. The Laboratory as a Two-Tier Structure 4.4."Blind" Variation and Natural Selection 4.5. The Experiential Register 4.6. Blind Variation Reconsidered 5. From Machines to Organisms: Detectors as Behavioral and Social Beings 5.1. Primitive Classifications 5.2. Detector Agency and Physiology 5.3. Detectors as Moral and Social Individuals 5.4. Live Organism or Machine? 5.5. Are There Enemies? 5.6. Physicists as Symbionts 5.7. Taxonomies of Trust 5.8. Primitive Classifications Reconsidered 6. From Organisms to Machines: Laboratories as Factories of Transgenics 6.1. A Science of Life without Nature? 6.2. Organisms as Production Sites 6.3. Cellular Machines 6.4. Industrial Production versus Natural (Re)production 6.5. Biological Machines Reconsidered 7. HEP Experiments as Post-Traditional Communitarian Structures 7.1.. Large Collaborations: A Brief History 7.2. The Erasure of the Individual as an Epistemic Subject 7.3. Management by Content 7.4. The Intersection of Management by Content and Communitarianism 7.5. Communitarian Time: Genealogical, Scheduled 8. The Multiple Ordering Frameworks of HEP Collaborations 8.1. The Birth Drama of an Experiment 8.2. Delaying the Choice, or Contests of Unfolding 8.3. Confidence Pathways and Gossip Circles 8.4. Other Ordering Frameworks 8.5. Reconfiguration Reconsidered 9. The Dual Organization of Molecular Biology Laboratories 9.1. Laboratories Structured as Individuated Units 9.2. Becoming a Laboratory Leader 9.3. The Two Levels of the Laboratory 9.4. The"Impossibility" of Cooperation in Molecular Biology 10. Toward an Understanding of Knowledge Societies: A Dialogue Notes References Index

[Karin Cetina] has studied the behavior and practices of physicists in the process of trying to acquire knowledge of the basic components of the universe, and of biologists seeking empirical knowledge of natural objects. According to Cetina, the way the two groups go about their business is fundamentally different, and this difference has something to tell us about how we know what we know...A thorough and thoughtful examination of the epistemic underpinning of a knowledge society.