β Scribed by Stephen Downes
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
When presented with a book that purports to reveal the actual practice of science many philosophers of science are inclined to complain that general issues are lost in the detail and so such books are not worthy of philosophers' attention. Grinnell's book is an ideal place to start one's conversion from reading texts entirely on methodology, containing a few, hardly realistic, examples, to immersing oneself in full-blown case studies of science. Philosophers of science have also been suspicious of the case study approach to science, because the studies are usually presented by sociologists or historians, and any suspicions, methodological or otherwise, about these fields cast a cloud on any of their works. This avoidance tactic is not available in Grinnell's case as he is an active scientist, drawing his information on scientific practice from his own experience as a researcher.
Grinnell's book was first published in 1987. Writing a second edition gave Grinnell the opportunity to expand his section on scientific misconduct to a full chapter and rearrange his chapters on science and the world or science and society. Apart from these changes the overall structure of the book remains the same. The chapters focus on the various components of scientific practice, from the making of observations, to their interpretation and the design of experiments. Next Grinnell turns to the transmission and maintenance of the "scientific thought style" (more on this below). These chapters deal in the particulars of graduate training, refereeing procedures, laboratory design, and faculty evaluation. He then turns to fraud and secrecy in science and finally to the relations between science and society understood in terms of relations between science and religion, politics, ethics, and even an assessment of scientists as people. I will direct my comments to the topics of observations, thought styles and thought collectives, inter-subjectivity and fraud.
Grinnell's approach to observation leaves us with a far richer notion than generally emerges from accounts in philosophy of science. Observation is a complex activity involving the application of learned concepts and techniques. Grinnell' s examples from cell biology illustrate the difficulty in entertaining any straightforward notion of observation. One has to learn to see cells with the aid
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