The historian’s job is to see things in the perspective of time, to describe human development, and to explain as best he can what change he observes. In a discussion such as this heoughtto be able ...to establish how men’s “aims and hopes” have changed, say, in the past thousand years, and precisely to what extent the changes have been the result of “advancing science” or of other factors. Some in his audience will probably expect him also to gaze steadily into the crystal ball and predict what is going to happen to human hopes and to science
“Monster” is an anthropocentric concept: the being of monsters inheres precisely in theiraberration fromus or from our sense of the normal. Etymologically, amonstrum(Latin) was an omen defined by a ...departure from the ordinary and, as all aberrations contain the trace of their departure point, monsters confirm that point as the center from which the monstrous is elaborated. The imagining of monsters is thus necessarily constrained: if we were capable of imagining an alien being that was entirely free of us—a “totally other”—it would not be monstrous.
Like the ordinary and the monstrous , science
The scientist's decision of accepting a given proposition is assumed to be dependent on two factors: the scientist's 'private' information about the value of that statement and the proportion of ...colleagues who also accept it. This interdependence is modelled in an economic fashion, and it is shown that it may lead to multiple equilibria. The main conclusions are that the evolution of scientific knowledge can be path-dependent, that scientific revolutions can be due to very small changes in the empirical evidence, and that not all possible equilibria are necessarily efficient, neither in the economic nor in the epistemic sense. These inefficiencies, however, can be eliminated if scientists can form coalitions.
The notion of transdisciplinary science and technology has been gradually formed duringstruggles to establish the recognition of non-natural scientific foundation of engineering. This articlepresents ...the way the struggle has been conducted in the author’s step-by-step advance towardsthe understanding of transdisciplinary science and technology. Similar notions related to transdisciplinaryscience and technology, such as “pure engineering” and “design sciences”, are discussed inthe context of engineering education and social relevance of science and technology. The importanceof the transdisciplinary science and technology in the future techno-society is discussed. Consilienceof knowledge is discussed in the light of transdisciplinary science and technology.
Roberts examines Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," focusing on his theory of paradigms. Devotion to one paradigm or another involves more than empiricism--it depends on ...the community to which a practitioner belongs.
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