The One Culture?: A Conversation about Science

If you listen closely, you can hear scientists slugging it out from within their fortified labs and conference spaces. The One Culture?: A Conversation About Science lets readers listen in. Edited by chemist Jay A. Labinger, an administrator at the Beckman Institute at Caltech, and sociologist Harry Collins, director of the Study of Knowledge, Expertise, and Science at Cardiff University, the book collects recent theoretical papers on the debate about whether science approaches objectivity or is hopelessly (or gloriously) determined by culture, and by language. While most readers won't recognize most of the names here (though Social Text hoax perpetrator Alan Sokal is among them), these 35 essays by eight scholars emerged from a 1997 conference and evolved from the caucusing that went on there, lending the close arguments a more intimate, if often forbiddingly erudite, tone. ( Aug.)