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H. M. Collins is co-author of the widely acclaimed Frames of Meaning and Director of the Science Studies Centre at Bath University. He continues his work in the sociology of science with this book, a fascinating study of both the maintenance and alteration of order within science. Three original studies of scientific work -- the building of TEA-lasers, the detection of gravitational radiation, and experiments in the paranormal -- form the core of the book. They brilliantly demonstrate the interlinked problems of replication and induction in the actual day-to-day practice of science. As one of the foremost proponents of the "relativist" view of science, Collins convincingly illustrates how the individual scientist is tied to a whole variety of institutions and networks in the wider society and how these constrain research choices and influence laboratory outcome. Changing Order is a masterful, often witty, account of how one set of facts rather than another emerges from sometimes bitter controversy; and it shows how replicable results are induced in the untidy but normally private world of scientific practice.
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Changing Order CHANGING ORDER Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice H.M. Collins SAGE Publications · London · Beverly Hills · New Delhi Copyright © 1985 by H.M. Collins All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, eleCtronic or mechanical, including, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 28 Banner Street London ECIY 8QE SAGE Publications Inc @275 South Beverly Drive Beverly Hills, California 90212 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd C-236 Defence Colony New Delhi 110 024 British Library Cataloguing in Publication l)ata Collins, H.M. Changing order: replication and induction in scientific practice. I. Science - Social aspects I. Title 306' .45 Q175.5 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 85-040195 ISBN 0-8039-9757-4 ISBN 0-8039-97I7-5 pbk Printed in Great Britain by J. W. Arrowsmith Ltd., Bristol Contents Preface and Acknowledgements vii Introduction Chapter One The Mystery of Perception and Order 5 Chapter Two The Idea of Replication 29 Chapter Three Replicating the TEA-Laser: Maintaining Scientific Knowledge 51 Chapter Four Detecting Gravitational Radiation: The Experimenters' Regress 79 Chapter Five Some Experiments in the Paranormal: The Experimenters' Regress Revisited 113 Chapter Six The Scientist in the Network: A Sociological Resolution of the Problem of Inductive Inference 129 Postscript: Science as Expertise 159 Methodological Appendix 169 References Cited 175 Name Index 183 Subject Index 185 Preface and Acknowledgements This book shows how ships get into bottles and how they get out again. The ships are bits of knowledge and the bottles are truth. Knowledge is like a ship because once it is· in the bottle of truth it looks as though it must always have been there and it looks as though it could never get out again. Since order and knowledge are but two sides of the same coin, changing knowledge is changing order. This book takes scientific knowledge as a case study. I began to w9rk on these themes in the early f970s but the book includes ideas and approaches that go back to the beginning of my education in sociology; my debts go back correspondingly far. 1 The greatest of tqese is to my friend and first teache~ of sociology - Reg Hughes- who brought the subject alive for me. Later, I was lucky to encounter at the University of