Content area
Full Text
LORRAINE DASTON (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. x + 308. ISBN 0-226-13672-8. 13.50, $19.00.
Significant parallels between the topics investigated by historians and sociologists of science and those addressed by their colleagues in technology studies allow for a fertile exchange of theoretical concepts across these neighbouring fields of enquiry. The two spheres also differ in interesting ways, however. One of the contrasts is that a great proportion of the material objects examined by scientists are conceived of as permanent features of the world, while the whole point of technologists' manipulation of objects is to change their form and properties. Scientific objects are assumed to belong to nature, whereas in a basic sense, at least, technical artefacts, just like scientific theories, are unquestionably cultural entities. The project of constructivist science and technology studies is essentially about extending the sense in which scientific practice and technological development, and the outcomes of both, are understood to be part of specific cultures. The nature/culture dichotomy itself, however, is accepted in most of the STS literature, though some authors have maintained that scientific objects are constituted by the discourse of scientists.
As suggested by its title, that dichotomy is disputed in the volume under review. In her introduction to the collection, Lorraine Daston challenges us to repudiate the traditional epistemology which forces us sharply to distinguish discoveries from inventions, the real from the constructed and the natural from the cultural. Emphasizing that the topics addressed in the book range across the scope covered by the German term Wissenschaft, Daston claims that the contributions demonstrate scientific objects to be, at one and the same time, real and constructed, their reality being an achievement, increasing or diminishing as a result of the concerted actions of scientists. She does recognize, however, that the theoretical conclusions drawn from the empirical material analysed by individual authors, whose papers were all presented at a conference in Berlin in 1995, entitled `The Coming into Being and Passing Away of Scientific Objects', are far from uniform.
The essays indeed diverge considerably. The contribution most closely related to Daston's introduction is authored by Bruno Latour, and differs from the others by being wholly programmatic in character. In this...