Moments of Science: Ideological and Technological Aspects

怀斯教授正在探索科学中的主要解释策略是如何根植于特定时期的特定文化的。这些文化“时刻”不应该从思想史的纯知识意义上理解，而应该从更大的人类学意义上理解，其中包括政治经济、社会结构以及物质和技术文化。事实上，技术似乎在更大的文化和特定学科（如物理、数学或生物学）的狭隘关注之间发挥着重要的中介作用。这种中介是本研究的重点。怀斯教授正在分析四个时刻，分别被称为“静态”、“动态”、“概率”和“混沌”，历史上以启蒙运动时期的法国、工业化时期的英国、威廉和魏玛时期的德国以及当代美国为中心。这些标签指定了在广泛的学科范围内使用的广泛策略，分别将自然系统解释为平衡、引擎、随机但整体的结构或无休止重复的代码。这种策略是由足以满足所寻求的知识的技术所激发的，和/或已经激发了这些技术。正是这些技术上实现的平衡、引擎、统计技术和迭代代码的方法奠定了研究的基础。

Professor Wise is exploring the ways in which major explanatory strategies in the sciences are rooted in particular cultures at particular times. These cultural "moments" are to be understood not in the purely intellectual sense of the history of ideas, but in the larger anthropological sense, which includes political economy, social structure, and material and technological culture. Technologies, in fact, appear to play a major role as mediators between the larger culture and the narrower concerns of particular disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, or biology. This mediation is the focus of this study. Professor Wise is analyzing four moments, labelled "statics," "dynamics," "probabilism," and "chaos," centered historically in enlightenment France, industrializing Britain, Wilhelmian and Weimar Germany and contemporary America. The labels designate broad strategies employed over a wide range of disciplines to explain natural systems as balances, engines, random but holistic structures, or endlessly repeated codes, respectively. Such strategies have been stimulated by, and/or have stimulated, technologies adequate for the knowledge sought. It is these technically achieved balances, engines, statistical techniques, and means of iterating codes that ground the study.