Social Studies of Science

How does ‘place’ contribute to the credibility of scientific claims? The Chicago School of urban studies (1918-32) had close ties to the city for which it was named: its social scientists lived in Chicago, were affiliated with the University of Chicago, and made Chicago the object of almost all of their empirical research. In order for this city to become a legitimate source of claims about urban form and process, Chicago is textually made to oscillate between two available authorizing spaces. As a field-site, the city of Chicago becomes a found and uncorrupted reality, the singularly ideal place to do urban research, and requiring the analyst to get up-close and personal. As a laboratory, Chicago becomes a controlled environment where artificial specimens yield generalities true anywhere, requiring of the analyst distance and objectivity. The distinctive epistemic virtues of both field and laboratory are preserved as complementary sources of credibility, and Chicago becomes the right place for the job.

Discussions of mathematical problem-solving and heuristic reasoning have typically examined how proofs that are already known might be found. This approach has at least three problems: first, provers engaged in discovering proofs for themselves cannot have this perspective; second, if a proof is difficult, formulaic strategies quickly run out; third, beginning with a proof already in-hand separates reasoning about a proof from the actual circumstances in which such reasoning occurs. As an alternative approach to the study of mathematical reasoning, this paper presents a detailed descriptive account of the work of finding a specific proof, including the shifting of perspectives, the wrong paths, the mistakes and the outright errors. Even the appearance of a sketched diagram or of a course of mathematical writing can suggest unanticipated possibilities for finding a proof. This material is used to illustrate the paper’s central claim - that the ways that provers go about working on proofs provide the context for continuing that work and for discovering the reasoning that a particular proof is then seen to require.

Blood pressure is one of the key measurements taken in standard clinical examinations. Its importance has long been associated with the instrumental precision offered by the sphygmomanometer, which is supposed to have replaced other, more imprecise methods of blood pressure measurement, such as feeling the pulse with the finger. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a neurosurgical clinic, this paper explores the co-existence of the sphygmomanometer and the finger methods in practice. I argue that in neurosurgery these methods are both independent from and interdependent with each other: independent in the way they achieve different assessments of the patient’s blood pressure at the same time; and interdependent in the way the surgeon’s and anaesthetist’s measurements are dynamically linked with each other. The paper suggests that this particular form of coordination through heterogeneity might be described, borrowing from Michel Serres’ work, as mutual parasitism, and that this metaphor might be useful in rethinking the role of science - research, or ‘evidence’ - in medical practice.

This paper compares changing patterns of science news over a period of 50 years. The study analyses a biannual corpus of 2800 news articles in Britain (the Daily Telegraph) and 5800 in Bulgaria (Rabotnichesko Delo), and shows divergent and convergent trends. Britain carries considerably more science news than Bulgaria all through the period, while the coverage shows parallel swings: increasing intensity during the 1950s, a turning point in the early 1960s, declining into the 1970s, and rising again in the 1980s and 1990s. Media coverage in both countries shows similar swings in public appeal. The trends in the medicalization of science news, the reporting of controversy and the evaluation of science diverge in the two contexts. The paper concludes with speculative explanations of these results. Similarities and differences in these long-term trends point to common factors and specific differences at work on either side of the (former) ‘Iron Curtain’.

US and European Union (EU) approaches to the regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are often explained using the ideas of ‘sound science’ and the ‘precautionary principle’. These stereotypes, however, can be misleading. They can conceal conflicts within jurisdictions and important interactions between them. This paper avoids these ideas and instead analyses conflicts and interactions associated with the regulation of GMOs in the USA and the EU, using the example of Bt maize - a genetically modified crop. It focuses on risk assessment as a standard-setting process, and explains changes in regulatory standards. In this case, public protest and trade conflict created an opportunity for a transatlantic network of critical scientists to challenge regulatory standards and for non-governmental organizations to press for higher ones. The paper links two analytical perspectives to account for how this happened. ‘Regulatory science’ helps to explain what happens when the ‘private’ government-industry-academia network associated with risk regulation is opened up to greater public scrutiny. It also helps to explain how the context and content of regulatory science mutually shape each other. ‘Trading up’ helps to explain opportunities and pressures to raise regulatory standards associated with US-EU trade liberalization and trade conflict.