On the Assembly of Things

A curious article came my way on how Merton’s work is cited in various branches of STS and Sociology of Scientific knowledge. The author argues that Merton opened up four lines of inquiry in the sociology of science, but that the rise of what we now know as “STS” has reduced Merton’s contribution to the field either to a citation “Merton (1973)” or in fact renders his work visible, if at all, in the negative sense of citing those people who ‘debunked’ the scientific claim to there being an ethos of science (as in Laboratory Life).
When there is a citation “Merton (1973)” usually stands in for a claim about Merton’s work that makes it look like Karl Mannheim’s. That is to say, “a claim that sociological analysis of the specific content of scientific knowledge is impossible”. “Merton 1973” allows a prior moment to be named as limiting STS claims to narrow boundaries of the “social” and puts the author in a position to ‘move beyond’ it. This is a common scientific strategy of course. There is a short and under-explored point about how Kuhn cites Merton ‘positively’ and how “post-Kuhnian” authors in STS cite Kuhn and yet re-inscribe this anti- or non Mertonian identifier (Cf. post-script to laboratory life p 275).

The article in the journal Scientometrics.

Health and the question of flourishing

stavrianakis — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 01:44:17 +0000

At SynBERC, the Human Practices thrust posed the question of whether ‘flourishing’ could operate as a metric for our inquiry into the organizational form and work of the molecular biologists, chemists, varieties of engineer and anthropologists practicing their arts and undertakings.

Although all ancient Greek ethics were eudaimonistic, the term is best known from Aristotle’s, as he was the one that invented the term ethics. He makes use of a medical model and set of analogies in order to lay out what he thinks ethical inquiry is. The reason they are useful as analogies is that they point out that moral excellences (and deficiencies) may be determinate without being invariable constants. The down side as analogies for those of us working with his ethics as a guide for thinking today is that they rely on the polis. The discernment of moral pathology, in the Aristotelian mode, seems to require a polis to be able to practice ethical diagnosis and remedy: The good is that which the morally healthy person recognizes as good and it is pathologies of this healthy state which need to be discerned and remedied with pedagogy (and for those already grown into malformed humans, laws). After the polis it was rendered as ‘society’ modeled on the well functioning or poorly functioning organism.

In a situation today where the good is no longer analogous to health but arguably ‘is’ health, it makes the medical model less useful to think with insofar as ethics and health are conflated. How then to refract the question so as to discern something about flourishing?
Attached are pages (180-185) from Foucault on the meanings of salvation, some of them medical but not all, which might be a resource for this question.

Outlaw Biology

ckelty — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:05:04 +0000

I’ve posted an essay I wrote for the Symposium on Outlaw Biology at UCLA (Jan 29-30). Any thoughts, suggestions, withering critiques are welcome.

Essay is located here.

Collaboration

rabinow — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 14:47:31 +0000

Friends,

I am beginning to put together a piece on collaboration; especially with reference to the labinar and ARC. If you have thoughts, notes you would like to contribute I would appreciate it.

At this stage I think the piece will be mostly about how we imagined the projects with then a section on evaluation and lessons learned.

looking forward to your collaboration,

Paul