Description
Book SynopsisA comparison of the use of model systems and exemplary cases across fields in the natural and social sciences.
Trade Review“
Science without Laws inspires with its breathtaking scope. Delving from ethology to economics, molecular biology to microhistory, the authors illuminate crucial congruences in the way experts make their cases. Generations of scholars have taken physics as their model for right thinking, in science and beyond. This volume demonstrates that we are all biologists now.”—David Kaiser, author of
Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics“
Science without Laws is a superb book. It is a very strong collection, sharply defined yet impressive in scope and reach, rich in substance and deep in analysis.”—Arkady Plotnitsky, author of
Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida“[
Science without Laws] offers an interesting and eclectic set of essays. . . . Consciously self-reflexive, these essays are model studies of model studies and exemplary narratives of exemplary narratives. The book itself is an exemplary collection of model essays for historians and philosophers interested in model systems, and will be an engaging read for anyone interested in the vicissitudes of practices and reasoning strategies in science without laws.” -- Jacob Stegenga * British Journal for the History of Science *
“The range of scholarship represented here is vast, providing a valuable overview of models and cases (or what functions similarly, like exemplary narratives in history and psychoanalysis or ritual systems in anthropology) in a broad range of disciplines. . . . Sociology is not explicitly represented in this essays, but the implications for sociological knowledge are clear and significant, if also controversial. They merit serious consideration by all sociologists.” -- Kathleen M. Blee * American Journal of Sociology *
Table of ContentsIntroduction / Angela N.H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and M. Norton Wise 1
Part 1: Biology
Redesigning the Fruit Fly: The Molecularization of Drosophila / Marcel Weber 23
Wormy Logic: Model Organisms as Case-Based Reasoning / Rachel A. Ankeny 46
Model Organisms as Powerful Tools for Biomedical Research / E. Jane Albert Hubbard 59
The Troop Trope: Baboon Behavior as a Model System in the Postwar Period / Susan Sperling 73
Part 2: Simulations
From Scaling to Simulation: Changing Meanings and Ambitions of Models in Geology / Naomi Oreskes 93
Models and Simulations in Climate Change: Historical, Epistemological, Anthropological, and Political Aspects / Amy Dahan Dalmedico 125
The Curios Case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Model Situation? Exemplary Narrative? / Mary S. Morgan
Part 3: Human Sciences
The Psychoanalytic Case: Voyeurism, Ethics, and Epistemology in Robert Stoller’s
Sexual Excitement / John Forrester 189
“To Exist Is to Have Confidence in One’s Way of Being”: Rituals as Model Systems / Clifford Geertz 212
Democratic Athens as an Experimental System: History and the Project of Political Theory / Josiah Ober 225
Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible: An Experiment in Microhistory / Carlo Ginzburg 243
Afterword: Reflections on Exemplary Narratives, Cases, and Model Organisms / Mary S. Morgan 264
Contributors 275
Index 279
