A Generalist’s Vision

Abstract

Many of the recent advances in the history of science have come from local microstudies, but with the unintended by-product of a typically "postmodern" fragmentation of knowledge. The question for us post-postmodernists is how to write a broader "general" history of science-a history for all of us specialists--without losing the advantages of case study. One way, this essay suggests, is to structure case studies around the activities or issues that are common to knowledge production generally: for example, issues of common practices, role and identity, credibility and trust, fairness in participation and reward, and translocal circulation. Such studies would be particular and local yet transcend the singularities of period, place, and discipline. They would facilitate productive contest over the general meaning of science in its diversely varied forms.

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