Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn

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Description

The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis for the reason that Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these recent disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century’s middle decades understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs.

For various these thinkers, questions about what types of knowledge the human sciences could produce didn’t rest on grand ideological gestures toward “science” and “objectivity” but were linked to the ways wherein knowledge used to be created and taught in laboratories and seminar rooms. Isaac places special emphasis at the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas. With regards to Percy Williams Bridgman, Talcott Parsons, B. F. Skinner, W. V. O. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn, the institutional milieu wherein they constructed their models of scientific practice used to be Harvard University. Isaac delineates the role the “Harvard complex” played in fostering connections between epistemological discourse and the practice of science. Operating alongside but with the exception of traditional departments were special seminars, interfaculty discussion groups, and non-professionalized societies and teaching programs that shaped thinking in sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, science studies, and management science. In tracing this culture of inquiry in the human sciences, Isaac offers intellectual history at its most expansive.

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