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The Scientific Revolution, by Steven Shapin. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 218 pp. $19.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-22675020-5. NPL paper. ISBN: 0-226-75021-3.
This short book is explicitly meant for a lay audience and thus has no bibliographic references in the text. I do not believe that a lay audience that has not already read a considerable amount about science in the seventeenth century and is not familiar with current debates in the social studies of science will get much out of this book. It simply is too brief, lacking the kind of detailed examples that illustrate the points Shapin is trying to make. It also fails to underline these points (although they are obvious to nonlay readers), and is, in parts, disorganized.
The first chapter provides a description of the basic themes around which the new science was built. Despite the author's claims that he, unlike earlier generations of historians of science, is going to show how the science was grounded in specific historical context, Shapin does very little of this, and most of what he does is vague. Instead, he concentrates on the mechanical, experimental, and corpuscular philosophies of nature. He emphasizes the attempt to "depersonalize" science in contrast to the Aristotelians, who used teleological explanations of scientific phenomena and the belief that science was a rule-governed body of knowledge that was supposed to be disinterested. He then points out that the notion of rules governing scientific work and disinterestedness were largely myths, and not an adequate description of what "really" was done by scientists.
The most important point in the first chapter is that, contrary to the impression that one might get from reading a more traditional account...