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Anne Dalke's picture

"Never Pure"

The book review's not laudatory, but worth a look just for the subtitle; check out Steven Shapin's new, 552-pp. volume, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People With Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. Of particular interest (to me) is the account of the shift in how scientific credibility, which originally derived from first hand observations, came to depend on more abstract (less reliable?) criteria: academic affiliation, consensus among other scientists, openness about methodology. This account put me in mind of a talk Paula Viterbo here gave a number of years ago, following a "scientific fact" from the laboratory into the social world: the movement included multiple levels of filtration, discussion, conversation, translation, and adaptation to accessible language.

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