Making Sense of Science

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Dr. Pickering is exploring a pragmatist understanding of scientific knowledge and practice, an understanding that recognizes the orientation of science to technical goals and that explores the implications of this recognition. The research will involve detailed case studies of important episodes in the history of science. Two such studies already exist: a study of Luis Alverez's decision to build a large hydrogen bubble chamber and a study of Giacomo Morpurgo's search for fractional charges on matter--quarks. He is already engaged in a third dealing with William Rowan Hamilton's extension of complex-number theory from number pairs to triplets leading eventually to his "quaternions." Under this research grant, he will complete this third study and examine two more: those of Lavoisier and Faraday. Besides the case studies, Dr. Pickering will draw out the implications of the pragmatist analysis for central topics in philosophy, sociology and historiography of science. His analysis will acknowledge a trans-situational structure of scientific practice, thus setting itself off from the ethnomethodological insistence on the radically situated nature of practice, while at the same time it draws attention to the open-endedness and uncertainty of science, thus setting itself off from 'closed' explications of science in terms of method, reason or social interests. The pragmatist approach cuts across traditional disciplinary approaches to science and promises to shed new light on topics such as rationality, realism, incommensurability and the social construction of science. It offers a new and significant perspective on what the world and human practice in it is like.