Reviews for Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine - John V. Pickstone - Pap...

The average rating for Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine - John V. Pickstone - Pap... based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-15 00:00:00 Buk Yah I thought the book might work for my introduction to the history of science, but the students found the writing too impenetrably philosophical, while I labored hard to supply all the historical context the author too often took for granted. This book would be more valuable as a refresher for someone already well-informed about the issues that have roiled history of science the circles for the past couple of decades.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-05-02 00:00:00 Anthony Kern A classic generalist work on the history of modern STM (science, technology, medicine) from a mostly British perspective. Although somewhat dated now, it still touches upon some central aspects of our understanding and study of STM. At its core, it concerns what Pickstone calls the five main ways of knowing (not to be confused with these “ways of knowing”): world-readings (hermeneutics), natural history, analysis, experimentalism, technoscience. These are, according to him, the dominant ways in which we can understand work in STM to be done. Although this series does represent a certain kind of development in STM over the past couple of centuries, these ways of knowing are not all evenly distributed in time. Pickstone spends most of his time explaining how these ways of knowing dominated STM practices at different points in time, concluding with a comment on the public understanding of science in Britain around 2000. As this outline implies, he is very much a generaliser, and his argument can at times feel pretty outdated. His style of writing is scholarly but highly approachable (no jargon, little assumed knowledge, etc.) which is critical given that he wrote the book primarily for readers with a budding interest in the history of STM, or students in this field who are still looking to navigate some of its broader concerns. This is one of those books where I think you would mainly benefit from reading just the introduction and final chapter, because I think it is these sections which have the best chance of standing the test of time. Chunky Synopsis For A Rainy Day The introduction includes a statement on what he considers to be the four guiding principles (or keys) of his narrative: breadth, history, dissection, and work. The first two are a defence of the broad church view of STM (i.e. that we should consider STM in the broadest possible sense, not merely along strict/modern disciplinary lines) and of the “big picture” view in STM studies (i.e. the willingness to look at wide timeframes in STM studies). His idea of dissection refers to his classification of scientific work into five ways of knowing. In doing so he is inspired by the methodologies of several titans of science studies (Foucault, Kuhn, Mumford, Collingwood, Temkin, Weber). I found it slightly funny, though, how for all the mid/late twentieth century historiography he draws from, it is the method of the nineteenth century writer (Weber) whom he draws on the most (with regard to his concept of ‘ideal types’, which Pickstone’s ways of knowing mimic). The final guiding principle refers to his division of work in STM into three categories: craft, rationalised production, and systematic invention. I did not find this division to be particularly important for the rest of his argument, but it serves as a reminder that for all the emphasis on ways of knowing, there are also different ways of doing in STM which are equally important. Overall, I found it striking how relevant his introduction still is to this day, which is why I think it is still worth reading if only for the way he expresses his aims and approaches to the history of science. Chapter 2 concerns his first WoK, that of world-readings. The introductory anecdote of the sore throat and the multitude of ways you can think about it is a masterful demonstration of the complexity of hermeneutics (finding meaning) in STM. For much of human history (up to the European Renaissance, according to Pickstone), we humans saw society and the world around us in terms of meanings. The idea that the natural world was a mysterious place started to unravel – according to Pickstone and his predecessors – during the Renaissance with the “disenchantment” of nature. From the sixteenth century onwards, different ways of knowing gained dominance in different places (quite literally in his analysis, as he draws from traditional Alpine divides (northern Europe vs southern Europe) at times). He makes some very broad brush strokes about the development of these ways of knowing in post-Renaissance periods, which in itself isn’t particularly useful, but sets out the scope for the following chapters. Chapter 3 looks at “natural history” as the dominant way of knowing up to the mid/late eighteenth century. Sometimes described as “notebook culture”, it involved collecting, identifying, or otherwise rendering visible nature and natural things. Think private collections and museums as repositories of knowledge about the natural world, explorers cataloguing exotic flora and fauna, instruments (like the air-pump) making visible the invisible (like the vacuum). Contrast this to Chapter 4, which concerns analysis and the rationalisation of production. Focused on the decades around 1800, Pickstone argues that the sciences were less concerned with meaning, and less concerned with stuff that way continuous with everyday knowledge (like collecting and cataloguing exotic plants was an extension of collecting and cataloguing local/domestic plants). The “Age of Analysis” (Gillispie), which is coterminous with the “Age of Revolutions” (c.1770s-1850s), represented a tradition of deconstructing nature to its constituent elements. Pickstone uses the German analytical chemist Justus Liebig as the figurehead for this way of knowing, emphasising the fact that the German states lay at the centre of this tradition. Chapter 5 can be viewed as a continuation of Chapter 4, except instead of focusing primarily on analytical chemistry, Pickstone discusses other analytical traditions, namely in medicine, earth sciences, and social sciences (the former gets a lot more love than the latter two I should note). Analysis in medicine can be viewed as a concern predominantly for biological markers (tissue analysis, diagnostic tests, etc.) rather than biography (i.e. addressing the ailment based on the patient’s specific situation). But there are further distinctions to be made even within the analytical tradition. He distinguishes, for example, between the ‘French’ mode of analysis, which called for dissection (assuming a certain "multiple-element-compound model", whereby human bodies or natural objects were seen as composed of various elements, tissues, and organs), and the ‘German’ mode of analysis, which relied on the concept of a structural idea which ‘unfolds’ through development (see