To sum up, three external features of philosophy of science in Taiwan are apparent.
(1) The role of the Anglo-Saxon tradition has been dominant. Most studies introduce,
interpret, revise, and criticize one or another of the important philosophical theories
of science. (2) Concerns about the public affairs are apparent enough to constitute a
traditional “culture.” (3) Philosophers of science are few in number, between ten
(including general methodology and epistemology, history and philosophy of science,
and philosophy of physics, biology, and economics) and twenty (including philosophy
of mathematics, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science, and metaphysics of
mind and world) practitioners; there is no professional journal for philosophy of
science in Taiwan. (32)
STS research stimulates – or should stimulate – public involvement in decision-making and contributes – or should contribute – to constructing scenarios for alternative futures under incomplete information conditions, to improving our understanding of the social impacts of the exploitation of natural resources and of knowledge in general, to evaluating the effectiveness of cooperation among different interest groups, and to generating and applying various types of knowledge for the benefit of its societies. In this way, researchers in the STS field are in a good position to assist decision-makers and help the public understand the implications of present-day technoscientific change, and to support the development of fairer, more equitable solutions to combat the challenges of today’s changing world. It goes without saying that, far from having reached maturity, this is a space in a permanent state of construction. (33)
In Latin America, interest is centered on the problems of science and social inclusion, knowledge production and use, center-periphery relations, science, technology, and governance policies, and gender. (31)
One of the distinguishing features of Latin American STS studies was the desire to transcend disciplinary boundaries. However, unlike the European or US contexts, where the field advanced primarily in the direction of sensitization to other fields of knowledge and a variety of social actors, interaction with these other spaces in our own region is more intermittent. Three lines of work, nevertheless, stand out, which, even in their early stages, tried to mobilize other actors. (32)
So what are cultural studies of scientific knowledge? I use the term broadly to include various investigations of the practices through which scientific knowledge is articulated and maintained in specific cultural contexts, and translated and extended into new contexts. The term "culture" is deliberately chosen for both its heterogeneity (it can include "material culture" as well as social practices, linguistic traditions, or the constitution of identities, communities, and solidarities) and its connotations of structures or fields of meaning. An extensional characterization might usefully help specify this still quite broad notion, at least for those familiar with the science studies literature. Among the practitioners of cultural studies of science I would include such diverse historians as Donna Haraway, Robert Marc Friedman, Simon Schaffer, Evelyn Fox Keller, Robert Proctor, and V. B. Smocovitis; sociologists and anthropologists such as Sharon Traweek, Bruno Latour, Paula Treichler, Leigh Star, Michael Lynch, and Karin Knorr-Cetina; philosophers like Ian Hacking, Helen Longino, Arthur Fine, Sandra Harding, and myself; and literary theorists such as Gillian Beer and Ludmilla Jordanova. (2-3)
Anthropological STS involves (a) the skills of ethnographic detection—investigative description, evocation, provocation, the finding of strategic intersections of scale (conjunctures, multicausality, interferences, blockages, deflections); (b) deep and broad historical tracing of networks of technological and scientific exchange and influence, of cultural knowledges, of local resiliences and resistances, of governance imaginaries of better possibilities, and of the transferences (in psychological as well as material senses) of migration, new beginnings, and recuperations of lively pasts; and (c) the increasing use of digital technologies and mapping (as in the SafeCast dissemination of reliable portable Geiger counters and other sensing instruments to create independent, public, and verifiable maps of radiation danger post-Fukushima both in that prefecture and elsewhere and as in new research platforms for data production of air pollution and infrastructure decay, being pioneered in the Asthma Files at RPI with sites in Bangalore, Delhi, Beijing, and elsewhere). These are civil society endeavors that build community and that can verify or dispute official stories, thereby contributing to more robustness and plurality in the governance of society, again a matter of our common biopolis and life-worlds. (193)
“Maskovsky (2009) argued that ‘we must first and foremost take seriously the postcolonial critique of area studies’ complicity with imperialism and place U.S. empire at the center of analysis’ (p. 6).” (279)
“American cultural forms move beyond nation state boundaries with, for example, military action, rule of law, U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations, American expatriots, and U.S. corporations abroad.” (279)
“Focusing on the United States risks reinforcing nation-state boundaries, but I take the nation-state and its borders less as givens than as objects of analysis. I show that anthropologists of the United States have been concerned to locate the anthropological field (as discipline, ethnographic site, and theoretical domain) in three ways.” (276)
“By ‘location-work,’ Gupta & Ferguson (1997) refer to the ‘idea that anthropology’s distinctive trademark might be found not in its commitment to ‘the local’ but in its attentiveness to epistemological and political issues of location’ (p. 39).’ (276)
“Anthropologists often organize studies by space, but this practice does not necessarily lead to the naturalization of cultural boundedness. Instead, scholars in and of the United States have investigated the spatialization of the nation-state and citizenship through migration, the production and ideology of localized community, the racialization of place, the cultural politics of environment and the public/private distinction, and the operation of American power and cultural forms beyond U.S. borders.” (276)
“Anthropology is a science and has the tools to understand science as a form of culture. The culture concept has been reshaped by the necessity for anthropology to interrogate its own knowledge practices. This same move enables anthropologists to operationalize analytical models that are understood as both cultural and scientific. Anthropology is, in other words, the preeminent discipline from which to argue that the "science wars" are not a zero-sum game.” (165)
“There is a direct relation between the emergence of science studies within anthropology, the reexamination of anthropology as a science resulting from the gender-based critique of the discipline in the 1970s, and the expansion in self-consciousness about the thoroughly enculturated generic conventions of the discipline in the 1980s. Postcolonial critiques of anthropology as a Eurocentric panopticon have extended the possibilities for the discipline to include its own knowledge-production practices within its scope of explanatory techniques.” (169)
“This tradition, combining anthropological relativism with ethnographic empiricism, has begun to establish a trajectory that interrogates the history and foundations of ideas of the natural within anthropology, which in turn work at a deeper level to provide, by implication if not directly, a bridge between the two cultures in anthropology. It is through this work that a less knowledge-dependent, or mentalist, view of science has emerged, along with a greater appreciation of its thorough enculturation at every layer of the onion, and likewise a thicker account of the scientization of both local and global cultures.” (170)
“At issue in debates about multiculturalism and science is the possibility of better science, not just fewer supercolliders. Anthropology is arguably a better, more inclusive, less naively Eurocentric and even a more objective form of scholarly inquiry because of the sustained critique of its own practices that has kept it "in crisis" since at least mid-century. Were Western science to be reassessed as a cultural practice, in the narrowest and widest senses, it arguably stands to gain, in both resources and on its own terms, as an effective, predictive, useful and interested account of its objects. And were such changes to be undertaken, anthropologists are well positioned to draw on a recent history of great transformation in their own discipline and to attest to its advantages.” (179-180)
“What aspects of knowledge lie outside the realm of monetarisation” (8)
“Beyond a knowledge politics of ‘cognitive justice’ and the TMTM that bear such a burden in the global race for World Intellectual Property and patents, could the possibilities for intellectual debate expand if the questions posed under the troubled banner of indigenous knowledge are reimagined as a debate about intellectual heritage, including that of modernity? Would publics find new spaces for re-tooling criticism and innovation?” (8)
“Even though few philosophers of science have engaged these new developments in science studies that move beyond the constitutive assumptions of SSK, some of the most important and exciting developments in the philosophy of science and in philosophy more generally constructively complement the interdisciplinary work in other science studies fields. … Yet most scholars in science studies outside philosophy are similarly unaware of these philosophical developments and how they might speak constructively to their own concerns. In noting this mutual lack of awareness of complementary work, my aim is not to criticize scholars on either side for inattention, but instead to expand our horizons and encourage mutual conversation.” (13)
“When philosophers or sociologists focus on the justification and acceptance of scientific knowledge, they tend to overlook the complex challenges of articulating the world materially and conceptually. By contrast, the work I am linking together is more concerned with how the sciences articulate our understanding of the world, in models, experimental systems, and discursive practices, than with questions about the justification or acceptance of knowledge claims.” (17)
“The effort to think more comprehensively about scientific significance is the principal meeting point between recent philosophical work on causes, models, experimental systems, and conceptual articulation and the work in anthropology, cultural history, and feminist science studies that I have long tried to bring to philosophical attention.” (21)
“Moreover, such work also undercuts the epistemological debates of the 1980s and 1990s, in which philosophers and sociologists sharply opposed one another over questions about rationality and realism. … Recent work in philosophy of science and science studies has made these epistemological topics increasingly irrelevant to how scholars think about the practices and achievements of the sciences.” (23-24)