Reviews for Basic Medical Laboratory Technology

The average rating for Basic Medical Laboratory Technology based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-03 00:00:00 Peter Knowlton Analytic Philosophers have done a terrible job reading Kuhn, while sociologists and sociologically-informed Historians have used Kuhn to deepen our understanding of how Science is actually done. Barnes' book is a guide to how sociologists have used Kuhn, and therefore how Kuhn is best understood (which is not necessarily how Kuhn himself understood his work). Thematically, it's quite similar to other works by Barnes, and so instead of reviewing the SSK programme again, I just include some telling quotes from this text: The philosophers stipulate what science is, and, when forced to choose between common usage and their stipulations, fall back on the latter. Thus, ultimately, for a Popperian, science is what Popperian philosophy asserts it to be, and not necessarily what is typically encountered in accepted scientific contexts. Should the world's scientific manpower turn (or turn out to be) Kuhnian or Baconian, it would be said that they had abandoned science. Most epistemologists and all Popperians have a normative orientation to science, not a naturalistic one. They aspire to be moralists. They moralise with the term 'science' and about science. Accordingly, they tend to read Kuhn as a moralist also, and they dislike what they read. Kuhn does not make a satisfactory demarcation between science and non-science; indeed, his work undermines any such demarcation, and consequently frustrates the grand undertaking of separating 'reason' from 'unreason'.(59) Since there are now several empirical studies which attempt to relate scientific knowledge and interests, these points can be made more concretely. Forman (1971) has attempted to relate the ready acceptance by German physicists of an acausally interpreted quantum mechanics to general social and political conditions in the Weimar republic which made for aversion to determinism: here, the hypothesis is that broadly based social interests and objectives had a role in structuring inference. Pickering (1981) has attempted to relate the wide acceptance of the 'charm' hypothesis in modern particle physics to very specific goals and objectives located within physics itself: here, the hypothesis is that narrow professional interests structured inference, and no attention is focused upon the wider social setting. But the forms of Pickering's and Forman's very different attempts at explanation are the same. Goals and interests exist; they channel inference and judgement; they thus help to account for the emergence of a specific body of knowledge. (Nor is it selfevident that the operation of macro-political factors, as in the first case, is inherently less desirable than the operation of micropolitical factors, as in the second case.) (115) In my judgement the general significance of Kuhn's work lies neither in its specific historical narrative of the development of science, nor in the concepts invented for that narrative, but simply in its explicit discussions of general problems concerning cognition, semantics and culture. Kuhn is important where he examines similarity relations, concrete problem-solutions, and the development of usage and procedure by analogy and direct modelling. Here, our understanding of the conventional nature of knowledge is advanced, as is our understanding of the nature of convention itself. (120) Scientific inference, like empirical inference generally, is not deductive. It proceeds from particular to particular on the basis of resemblance and analogy. Knowledge is built up and extended a bit at a time by the revisable clustering of instances and applications. Our sense of the scope and validity of a general claim arises from the way we develop analogies between particulars, and cluster the particulars together. Inferences, and convictions of validity, can move from particular to particular, or upwards from the particular to the general; but they cannot flow directly down the hierarchy from the general to the particular. This is because the only way to ascertain whether a general claim applies to a given particular is to consider what analogy exists between the particular and other particulars already acknowledged to be covered by the generalisation. Any' deduction' about empirical phenomena involves a hidden analogical step. (122) But the significance of a body of writing has not a great deal to do with its abstract verbal formulations, even upon major issues. Marx and Durkheim have both made invaluable contributions to sociology; but the majority of all their statements are now routinely taken to be erroneous. Their value lies in the prototype methods and procedures they provide, embedded in analyses of specific situations and events. They offer resources for sociological research, not correct instructions. Perhaps the same should be said of Kuhn.(126)

Review # 2 was written on 2021-07-31 00:00:00 Muhannad Qasem From a sociologist's perspective by far the best Kuhn intro. It's a bit dated, but the main points are still valid and relevant.