Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (review)

Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine. By John V. Pickstone (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001) 271 pp. $55.00 cloth $20.00 paper

This book illustrates the paradox that the trivial and commonplace remarks made by historians and sociologists of science often manage to generate significant controversy. To write, as Pickstone does, that patients' groups may prefer to rely on their own experiences of illness rather than accept the facts presented to them by doctors seems commonsensical (198). Yet some doctors may well express alarm at the sentiment, and the "science wars" have shown how easily people are worried by statements that appear to undermine the credibility of widely respected expert groups like scientists and doctors. One lesson to be learned is that one cannot restate the obvious too many times! Unfortunately, this truth does nothing to alleviate the symptoms of controversy. But interdisciplinary science studies may have a special role to play in this context; the duty of scientists is to defend their work and their fields. They prefer to speak of what they know rather than what they do not know. It is up to others who take the sort of wider and longer view adopted by this book to make the "obvious" point that no expert is infallible. According to Pickstone, his central premise, that "our primary relationship to nature is one of meaning—of morals and aesthetics," seems "obvious" yet "too easily ignored" in light of the disenchantment wrought by the reductionism of the analytical style of modern science (216).

This book wears its interdisciplinarity on its sleeve. Pickering argues that studies of science, technology, and medicine should seek out wide vantage points, crossing boundaries not only of disciplines but of temporal eras in search of perspective. His own work certainly does so, dealing with the rise of reductive analytical science in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics and medicine around 1800. The sheer breadth of material in the book seems to encourage "jumping around," not an unpleasant experience when there are so many interesting sections and snippets. His necessarily brief comments about the work of other historians of science may well lead to another form of jumping around, into other texts, always an entertaining practice for the sort of reader that this book is likely to attract.

In one sense, Pickstone speaks to the heart of the science wars in his call for those involved in Science, Technology, and Medicine (stm) studies to advance not "the public understanding of science," which is the natural aim of popular science, but "the understanding of science for the public," or in the public interest (201). Two distinct interests are served by these aims. Pickstone feels that the latter aim, which places the public interest first, would be better served by historical research that not only encompasses different parts of science and technology but also can "link the technical with the social" (219). Thus does he see interdisciplinarity as an antidote to the reductionism of the analytical method. He also sees it as a form of resistance to attempts by corporate interests to co-opt the advancement of science for their own self-interested agendas. By analyzing scientific and technical projects within the wider political and economic context, Pickstone hopes that historians and sociologists of science can make themselves into a medium by which the public interest is given a voice in debates on appropriate directions for science and technology.