Science without laws.
During the 1970s, something deeply consequential happened in the cultural, economic, and social relationships between science and technology. Paul Forman has proposed that the abrupt reversal of the culturally ascribed primacy in the science-technology relationship circa 1980 be taken as a demarcation of postmodernity from modernity. Modernity's most basic cultural presuppositions-the superiority of theory to practice, the elevation of the public over the private and that of the disinterested over the interested, and the belief that the means sanctify the ends-were ascribed to science. In postmodernity, science is subsumed under technology, and the status of technology relative to science reflects our pragmatic-utilitarian subordination of means to ends. These cultural changes have resonated with deep epistemological and ontological changes within the sciences themselves, and all these have manifested themselves in universities becoming entrepreneurial, and the consequences thereof. Science Without Laws insightfully illustrates some of the changes within the life and human sciences by analyzing the role played by model systems and case studies.
Schweber
Silvan S
SS
Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, Cambridge, MA02138, USA. schweber@fas.harvard.edu
D001319:Authorship; D001877:Books; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D010684:Philosophy; D012586:Science / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D012922:Social Change; D013672:Technology / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*