your straw pole is certainly as damning of working scientists as it is of the philosophy of science (and, of course, pretty much all widely-known natural scientists, who are also leftists, that I know of - Bernal, Einstein, Gould, Lewontin, Levins, Vandermeer, et al. - are/were well versed in phil o' sci)... people who don't know, and are not interested in, the traditions embedded in how they hink about their own work have little or no likelihood of being able to think criticaly and in socially self-reflexive ways about their work and its consequences... all the ag biotech researchers I know who really hink that they are solving neo-Malthusian problems don't care about the phil o sci either... nor do all the functionalist quantoids in US Soc, Anth and Geog departments... not company I want to keep.
science studies has very few philosophers and a large number of historians, sociologists, anthropologists and geographers - about half of whom were practicing bench scientists earlier in their careers... folks who actually look at the way science is practiced, rather than how it has been represented or thought about, in order to inform their epistemological and ontological statements... Latour's epistemontology may be problematic, and the reasons he follows these, as opposed to those actors and networkings may be opaque, but he's very very very focused on what real people and real things do...
On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 6:46 PM, James Heartfield < Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> A point made here against Sokal is that he does not engage with the school
> of science studies, which is of course a damaging criticism so far as it is
> true.
>
> But surely it is more damaging that, according to my straw poll, no working
> scientists seem to be remotely interested in the philosophy of science.
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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319