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Making Economic Knowledge: Reflections on Golinski's Constructivist History of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

E. Roy Weintraub
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708.

Extract

While most scientists and philosophers of science privilege scientific knowledge, and have sought demarcations of science from non-science to justify the privilege, sociologists of science, small numbers of philosophers of science, anthropologists, and some scientists themselves have been attracted to a new way of talking about science. Prefigured by Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979) and Gaston Bachelard (1934/1984), nurtured by the controversies over Thomas Kuhn's work, and instantiated in the Edinburgh School's Strong Program, the naturalistic turn portrays science as a human activity, part of the woof and warp of culture itself. Yet curiously historians of science have been less involved in this recent reconceptualization of both science and scientific knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2001

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