Introduction

1 Background and Questions

The rapid rise of science, technology, and society (STS) studies in East Asia during the past two decades can be characterized by a series of remarkable events. STS studies are beginning to diversify and take on forms within academia both permanent and official; the number of researchers is growing at high speed; several associations and societies have been established. These communities communicate regularly, and since 2002 they have taken turns holding the annual East Asian STS-Network Conference. Moreover, Taiwan's National Science Council founded this very journal in 2007.

When we trace the trajectory of STS studies in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and China, we find that philosophy of science has played an important role in the success of this new discipline. In Korea the program for history and philosophy of science at Seoul National University trained many of the country's leading STS scholars. In Japan the University of Tokyo established its Department of History and Philosophy of Science as early as 1951—though the word society was avoided until the 1980s. During the 1970s Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions influenced and even dominated the third stage of Japanese STS, in large part due to the work of Shigeru Nakayama 中山茂, who had studied with Kuhn (Nakajima 2007). In Taiwan several philosophers of science engaged in promoting the development and growth of STS studies. In China almost all the discipline's researchers come from philosophy of science and technology—what was long known as the "dialectics of nature." Anyone who is interested in the development of East Asian STS studies should begin by looking at its relation to philosophy of science.

Despite its rapid ascent, East Asian STS scholarship continues to rely on the theoretical contributions of Western nations—mainly the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and France. The scholars in Osaka, Tainan, Seoul, or Shanghai who investigated Western studies of science would inevitably encounter descriptions of the happy and unhappy interactions between philosophy of science and STS studies. Did these sorts of interactions reappear in the East Asian context? Or did quite divergent histories, cultures, intellectual institutions, and social circumstances ensure that the Asian experience would be something else entirely?

In spite of a deep historical connection, philosophers of science and STS scholars tend to have disparate views and positions that have placed them on opposite sides in the "science wars." When we cast our eyes toward the future, what sort of relations can we expect? From a normative view, how should philosophers of science and STS scholars treat each other's work? The special issue is meant to provide a preliminary answer to those questions.

2 Individual Articles

Joseph Rouse's article, "Philosophy of Science and Science Studies in the West: An Unrecognized Convergence," suggests a possible path for East Asian scholars. Since Western STS studies and philosophy of science have always provided theoretical exemplars for their East Asian counterparts, that pattern may well continue. However, a suggestion is nothing but a normative possibility; the East Asian story may run slightly differently from its model. Or perhaps one should speak of East Asian stories. To appreciate Rouse's article most fully, one must be familiar with his previous work.

Seventeen years ago, Rouse wrote an article titled "What Are Cultural Studies of Science?" (1993) in which he identified an alternative approach to science studies—he called it cultural studies of science. Unlike social constructivists, adherents of the cultural approach denied that science was essentially "scientific"; rejected a purely explanatory stance toward scientific knowledge; insisted on the local, material, and discursive character of scientific practice; demonstrated that traffic streams constantly across the boundaries that allegedly divide scientific communities from other spheres; and reframed long-standing philosophical debates on realism and value neutrality. Cultural studies of science have a strongly cultural and political engagement and do not eschew epistemic and political criticism.

Twelve years later, in a review of historian John H. Zammito's A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour, Rouse (2005) faulted Zammito for failing to examine alternatives to the sociology of scientific knowledge, in...