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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation
by Steven Shapin
Steven Shapin attempts a grand project to examine the role of moral virtue in science over 200 years of history. This book is deeply researched, unfortunately it is frequently boring and trivial. There are really 3 books contained within The Scientific Life, and none of them get quite the attention that they deserve.
The first book is about the transition from the calling of natural philosophy to the career of science over the 19th century to the second World War, and the question of whether or not scientists had any special prerogative to speak for Truth as compared to non-scientists. This is the most deeply researched part of the book, and I'd easily believe that Shapin read literally everything that anybody of note said about scientists during the period, but I also found it the most tedious. And for a person who's not an expert on the political conflicts of the period, the arguments about scientists seem disconnected and irrelevant.
The second book is about the growth of big science in post-WW2 America, in corporate labs and on Federally funded projects, and the conflict between return on investment and the freedom required for scientific inquiry. Here, Shapin cites many leading thinkers of the period, but he doesn't really delve into the specifics of how an emerging financial infrastructure of peer review grants and corporate management supports and/or stifled research.
The final and most interesting section of the book is about the scientist-as-entrepreneur. In this section, Shapin does anthropological research on the start-up culture, from both the scientific and investment side. While this is a fascinating and under-explored area in the scholarship, this section is the least analytically, and draws broad generalities about the need for 'passion' and 'drive' instead of novel insights.
If you're looking to source a quote from some famous figure out science in their time, it is almost certain to be in this book. If you want to know if science requires something above and beyond the ordinary, and what that might be, keep looking.
The first book is about the transition from the calling of natural philosophy to the career of science over the 19th century to the second World War, and the question of whether or not scientists had any special prerogative to speak for Truth as compared to non-scientists. This is the most deeply researched part of the book, and I'd easily believe that Shapin read literally everything that anybody of note said about scientists during the period, but I also found it the most tedious. And for a person who's not an expert on the political conflicts of the period, the arguments about scientists seem disconnected and irrelevant.
The second book is about the growth of big science in post-WW2 America, in corporate labs and on Federally funded projects, and the conflict between return on investment and the freedom required for scientific inquiry. Here, Shapin cites many leading thinkers of the period, but he doesn't really delve into the specifics of how an emerging financial infrastructure of peer review grants and corporate management supports and/or stifled research.
The final and most interesting section of the book is about the scientist-as-entrepreneur. In this section, Shapin does anthropological research on the start-up culture, from both the scientific and investment side. While this is a fascinating and under-explored area in the scholarship, this section is the least analytically, and draws broad generalities about the need for 'passion' and 'drive' instead of novel insights.
If you're looking to source a quote from some famous figure out science in their time, it is almost certain to be in this book. If you want to know if science requires something above and beyond the ordinary, and what that might be, keep looking.