Science without myth: on constructions, reality, and social knowledge

✍ Scribed by Sergio Sismondo

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The book argues that there are a number of important and interesting ways in which scientific knowledge can be a social construction but that it often is knowledge of the material world; therefore, this book is an essay on mediationor the mediatory roles of scientists between nature and knowledge. By identifying and separating different senses of the "construction" metaphor, this book displays senses in which scientists construct knowledge, phenomena, and even worlds. It shows science as made up of thoroughly social processes and that those processes create representations of a pre-existing material world. Science without Myth's argument provides a counter-balance to skeptical tendencies of constructivist studies of science and technology by showing that skepticism cannot cut so deeply as to deny the possibility of knowledge and representation.