I didn’t mention Feyerabend; he seems like the crazy man of science and that most people now ignore him and I remember (I think) Terry and Lorne sort of waving their hands in his general direction. But maybe I should include him for completeness.

I also didn’t include the strong program (science progresses because of outside interests; constructed facts; relativism) or the guy who did Laboratory Life (science is a like a machine that consumes raw materials and observations of the world and poops papers full of constructed facts; science is its own motivation). I wonder if I should.

I feel pretty good about this essay aside from that I really need to proofread before I say that I’m done – lots of typos and grammatical errors. I did review the material just before I wrote this, but I didn’t need to access my notes to write it. I think I know the stuff. I also think it has a good structure. Probably the clearest essay I’ve written so far. First time I’ve used somewhat of a concluding paragraph.

I guess that one question I have about this material is that I simply recount the history of philosophy of science for both scientific change and sociology of science; I don’t attempt to draw any conclusions or say what I believe to be true (because I largely don’t know what I believe yet). Is this a problem?

Latour was the guy who did Laboratory Life.

Now that I’ve reviewed my notes, there were some things that I didn’t get quite right. Hull said that Merton’s characteristics arose out of a community of scientists in an Adam Smith “invisible hand” mechanism: many people acting individualistically/selfishly creates this community of cooperation, universalism, communalism. Hull also had something to say on scientific change: science is a struggle for ideas to out compete each other in the quest for reputation (memes). Kirchner modeled science mathematically to try to discover the best arrangement of scientists in order to make science most efficient: science hedges its bet. Different programs each got the same amount of reputation to split up among its contributor members, so the more people in a program, the smaller your slice of the pie. Stevens (“he with no name”) modified Kirchner to say that how big your slice of the pie was depended on how much you contributed.