Topic for Spring 2019: The Making of Scientific Facts
In this seminar we’ll examine scientific facts: what they are and how they are constructed and contested. For background, we’ll read physician Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), physicist-historian Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), and anthropologist Bruno Latour and sociologist Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979). We’ll explore the practices of scientists at Lawrence and consider the role of facts in disputes over science education and climate change.