Scientific Practice and Human Inquiry (HPSC30035)

One of the central insights to emerge from Thomas Kuhn’s landmark work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was the importance of attending to what scientists do, rather than simply what scientists believe. A new generation of scholars after Kuhn increasingly tuned their attention to scientific practice, and in the process, transformed our image of the dynamics of scientific research. This subject explores many of the new perspectives to have emerged from the ‘practice turn’ in the history and philosophy of science over the past two decades, and the new insights this has brought to the understanding of how knowledge is generated. Drawing on historical case studies and philosophical analysis, we focus on questions such as: How do scientists become convinced of the existence of a new entity? To what extent are the epistemic aims and practices of field sciences (like ecology and palaeontology) different from those of the laboratory sciences? How did the introduction of new forms of visual representation, such as diagrams, tables and maps, lead to theoretical advances in chemistry, evolutionary biology and physics? What can the study of laboratory notebooks reveal about the hidden dynamics of experimental research? Do computer simulations constitute a new form of inquiry?