The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. By Steven Shapin. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. xviii, 468 pp. $29.00, ISBN 978-0-226-75024-8.)
The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. By Steven Shapin. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. xviii, 468 pp. $29.00, ISBN 978-0-226-75024-8.)
复制标题
科学生活：现代晚期职业的道德史。
DOI：
10.1093/jahist/96.2.596
复制
发表时间：
2009
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
S. Kohlstedt
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
S. Kohlstedt
皇家学会成员引入了一种实验观，塑造了他们这一代自然调查员，尽管他们的生活是在宗教背景下进行的。《科学生活》从这一研究出发，探讨了“召唤”的概念，这种概念使研究和个人动机合理化，这一代人被认为制定了科学革命。在整个世纪，从业者和公众将科学家与道德优越感联系在一起，沙平观察到，这是基于自然与神圣知识的联系，基于科学的方法，以及基于人类然而，到了世纪初，宗教关系已经消失了，取而代之的是一种关于科学在道德上等同于科学的复杂思想，科学已经成为一种具有公众意义的，通常报酬丰厚的职业。沙平指出，早期的社会学家在这些关于科学和科学家的观点中发挥了一定的作用。从一开始，他就概述并挑战了马克斯·韦伯（Max Weber）的主张，韦伯1918年的论文《科学作为职业》（Science as Vocation）指出了魅力权威的丧失和个人行动在现代性中的重要性下降。沙平同意韦伯关于世纪早期研究和开发机构官僚主义增长的观点，但他指出，有影响力的管理者，如伊士曼柯达公司的肯尼斯·米斯，给予他的创造性员工特权，并为他们和他们的工作提供相当大的自由。社会学家罗伯特·默顿（Robert Merton）在世纪中期的著作中直接挑战了科学家个人特别杰出或有道德的说法，当代科学家也强调他们生活的平凡性，这与他们的智力成果不同。倒数第二章是基于对25名加州人的口头采访（在某些情况下，沙平使用了缩略语，这一事实只在索引中提到），他们的主要活动是吸引风险投资家。在这里，职业的概念似乎遥不可及，但沙平认为，个人美德的重要性仍然存在，因为投资者不仅要衡量拟议投资的价值，还要衡量其倡导者的性格。因此，沙平认为，韦伯、默顿和其他人的理论遗漏了科学中人类动力学的一部分，以及职业前景的持久性。也许吧，但这一假设需要接受企业家和17世纪实验哲学家的等价性。尽管如此，这本书是一个令人回味的看历史的社会学的科学和生活在科学。
Royal Society members introduced an experimental outlook that shaped their generation of nature investigators even as their lives were framed in a religious setting. The Scientific Life launches from that study into the idea of “calling” that rationalized the investigation and personal motivation of the generation credited with formulating a scientific revolution. Through the nineteenth century, practitioners and the public associated a moral superiority with scientists, based, Shapin observes, on the association of nature with divine knowledge, on the methods of science, and on the men (almost exclusively men) presumed to pursue it. By the early twentieth century, however, the religious nexus had dropped away, and in its place was a complex of ideas about the moral equivalence of science in what had become a publicly significant, often well-paid occupation. Shapin points out that early sociologists played some role in these ideas about science and scientists. From the outset, he outlines and challenges assertions made by Max Weber, whose 1918 essay “Science as Vocation” identified a loss of charismatic authority and diminishing importance of individual action in modernity. Shapin agrees with Weber on the growth of bureaucracy in facilities for research and development in the early twentieth century, but he points to influential managers such as Kenneth Mees of Eastman Kodak Company, who privileged his creative staff and provided considerable latitude for them and their work. The sociologist Robert Merton, writing in the mid-twentieth century, directly challenged the assertion that individual scientists were particularly exceptional or virtuous, and contemporary scientists also stressed the ordinariness of their lives, as distinguished from their intellectual results. The penultimate chapter is based on oral interviews (in some, Shapin uses pseudonyms, a fact mentioned only in the index) with twenty-five Californians whose major activity is wooing venture capitalists. The idea of vocation might seem far removed here, but Shapin argues that the importance of individual virtue persists as investors gauge not only the worth of a proposed investment but also the character of its advocate. Thus, Shapin argues, the theories of Weber, Merton, and others missed some part of the human dynamics in science and the persistence of a vocational outlook. Perhaps—but that hypothesis requires accepting the equivalence of entrepreneurs and seventeenth-century experimental philosophers. Nonetheless, the book is an evocative look at both the history of sociology of science and of lives in science.