Knowledge in Transit
Knowledge in Transit
复制标题
知识在途
作者：
J. Secord
哪些大问题和大规模的叙述使科学史具有连贯性？从20世纪70年代后期开始，该领域已经通过强调实践和性别研究的新观点，知识社会学以及对从业者和文化的广泛研究而发生了变化。然而，这些发展虽然早该出现，而且显然是有益的，但却伴随着分裂和方向的迷失。本文认为，科学史家所使用的叙事框架需要通过将科学理解为一种交流形式来适应多样性。在从民族志遭遇到阅读史等主题的研究中，移动、翻译和传播过程的中心地位已经显现出来。这种方法不仅提供了跨越民族、时期和学科界限的机会，这些界限很容易被认为是理所当然的;它还具有与其他历史学家和更广泛的公众进行更有效对话的潜力。
What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public.