Working knowledge [electronic resource] : making the human sciences from Parsons to Kuhn / Joel Isaac.
2012
H62 .I77 2012eb
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Title
Working knowledge [electronic resource] : making the human sciences from Parsons to Kuhn / Joel Isaac.
Author
Isaac, Joel, 1978-
ISBN
9780674065222 electronic book
0674065220
9780674065741
0674065220
9780674065741
Publication Details
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2012.
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (314 p.)
Call Number
H62 .I77 2012eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
300.71/17444
Summary
The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century's middle decades understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. For a number of these thinkers, questions about what kinds of knowledge the human sciences could produce did not rest on grand ideological gestures toward 0science0 and 0objectivity0 but were linked to the ways in which knowledge was created and taught in laboratories and seminar rooms. Isaac places special emphasis on the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas. In the case of Percy Williams Bridgman, Talcott Parsons, B. F. Skinner, W. V. O. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn, the institutional milieu in which they constructed their models of scientific practice was Harvard University. Isaac delineates the role the 0Harvard complex0 played in fostering connections between epistemological discourse and the practice of science. Operating alongside but apart from traditional departments were special seminars, interfaculty discussion groups, and non-professionalized societies and teaching programs that shaped thinking in sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, science studies, and management science. In tracing this culture of inquiry in the human sciences, Isaac offers intellectual history at its most expansive.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Working knowledge.
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Table of Contents
Prologue: crafting knowledge in the human sciences
The interstitial academy : Harvard and the rise of the American university
Making a case : the Harvard Pareto circle
What do the science-makers do? : migrations of operationism
Radical translation : W. V. Quine and the reception of logical empiricism
The levellers : Harvard's social scientists from World War to Cold War
Lessons of the revolution : history, sociology, and philosophy of science
Epilogue: the great disembedding
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index.
The interstitial academy : Harvard and the rise of the American university
Making a case : the Harvard Pareto circle
What do the science-makers do? : migrations of operationism
Radical translation : W. V. Quine and the reception of logical empiricism
The levellers : Harvard's social scientists from World War to Cold War
Lessons of the revolution : history, sociology, and philosophy of science
Epilogue: the great disembedding
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index.