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Technology and Culture 43.3 (2002) 653-654



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Book Review

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


Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine. By John V. Pickstone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xii+271. $55/$20.

Two unusual features of John Pickstone's book strike the reader from the start. Firstly, science, technology, and medicine are discussed as a single area of knowledge, referred to as STM. Secondly, distinct ways of knowing are identified, operating in parallel with one another, and extending through all the disciplines that comprise STM. For example, one of these ways of knowing depends on describing, collecting, and classifying, in the way that is most familiar in natural history, although similar factual approaches may be found in other fields, including technology. Another way of thinking and knowing, by contrast, is more oriented to discovering how things work, often by measuring, calculating, theorizing, or simply taking them apart, and this is characterized as analysis.

Natural history and analysis, along with experimentalism, are three ways of knowing discussed by Pickstone. Two others are rather more concerned with the context in which STM is practiced. Thus, the way of knowing denoted as "world readings" includes not only general beliefs about the world and nature but also the whole range of social meanings—for example, about progress—that may become associated with science. By contrast, "technoscience" is a way of knowing related to the modern context in which science and technology converge, often in situations where there is collaboration between industry and academic research, sometimes involving government also.

The book does not offer a chronological history of STM. Separate chapters discuss the development of these five different ways of knowing. This is a fruitful approach through which a fresh and very welcome overview of the history of science emerges. The so-called scientific revolution is downplayed as other movements in science are emphasized, notably experimentalism in nineteenth-century physiology and in the studies of electricity, light, and heat that gradually came together in the new discipline of physics. It was within this context that the words "science" and "scientist" were first consistently used in their modern sense. Science was now located in laboratories, an institutional development matched to experimentalism as a way of knowing. [End Page 653]

Technology fits into this argument through a conception of three "ideal types of making" (p. 18), which correspond to three of the ways of knowing. For example, analogies are suggested between craft methods and natural history, and between rationalized production and analysis. Treated simply as analogies, the three ways of making may be useful in teaching the history of technology, but Pickstone has come to believe that "there are close, systematic linkages, recognition of which helps illuminate many common questions about science-technology relationships" (p. 19).

This potentially fruitful approach is not developed very far, and I would have been happier with slightly different wording. The knowledge gained by making and doing is indeed a basic way of knowing. However, the role played by unacknowledged insights or "tacit knowledge" makes comparisons between science and (especially) craft technology more difficult than is suggested here.

Ways of Knowing is so full of useful ideas that any problems in this area should merely serve to make it more stimulating for historians of technology. It is an important book in that it breaks the mold in which the histories of science, technology, and medicine have been stuck for too long. Fresh thinking should be easier now in many historical studies of STM, as I am finding in using ideas from the book in my own work. It needs to be noticed, however, that the book is a short one, especially in relation to its extensive scope. For those who are already well-read in the subjects discussed, it is immensely readable and stimulating. For others (in some chapters including myself) brevity makes some points hard to grasp. More historical narrative illustrating key arguments (especially about technology) could have made things clearer. Some of...

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