@article{10.4159/harvard.9780674065222,
      recid = {1403894},
      author = {Isaac, Joel,},
      title = {Working knowledge making the human sciences from Parsons  to Kuhn / [electronic resource] :},
      publisher = {Harvard University Press,},
      address = {Cambridge, Mass. :},
      number = {10.4159/harvard.9780674065222},
      pages = {1 online resource (314 p.)},
      year = {2012},
      abstract = {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.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1403894},
}