Making Sense of Science

皮克林博士正在探索一种对科学知识和实践的实用主义理解，一种认识到科学面向技术目标的理解，并探索这种认识的含义。这项研究将包括对科学史上重要事件的详细案例研究。目前已有两项这样的研究：一项是对路易斯·阿尔维列兹（Luis Alverez）决定建造一个大型氢气泡室的研究，另一项是对贾科莫·莫普戈（Giacomo Morpurgo）寻找物质——夸克上的少量电荷的研究。他已经在研究威廉·罗文·汉密尔顿（William Rowan Hamilton）对复数理论的扩展，从数对到三联体，最终得出了他的“四元数”。在这项研究资助下，他将完成第三项研究，并检查另外两项研究：拉瓦锡和法拉第的研究。除了案例研究之外，皮克林博士还将阐述实用主义分析对哲学、社会学和科学史中心议题的影响。他的分析将承认科学实践的跨情境结构，从而使自己脱离了对实践的根本定位本质的民族方法学坚持，同时它引起了对科学的开放性和不确定性的关注，从而使自己脱离了在方法方面对科学的“封闭”解释，理性或社会利益。实用主义方法跨越了传统的科学学科方法，并有望对诸如理性、现实主义、不可通约性和科学的社会建构等主题提供新的启示。它为世界和人类的实践提供了一个新的和重要的视角。

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.