How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge
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Peter Howlett is an expert on the economic history of the First and Second World Wars and contributed the text for the official history: Fighting with Figures. Dr Howlett's publications also explore international economic growth and convergence since 1870 and the development of internal labor markets and have appeared in edited volumes and journals such as the Economic History Review, Explorations in Economic History and Business History. He teaches at the London School of Economics and is Secretary of the Economic History Society. Mary S. Morgan is Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics and the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on topics ranging from statistics to experiments to narrative, and from social Darwinism in late-nineteenth-century America to game theory in the Cold War. Her major works include The History of Econometric Ideas (Cambridge, 1990), The Foundations of Econometric Analysis (Cambridge, 1995, co-edited with David F. Hendry), and Models as Mediators (Cambridge, 1999, co-edited with Margaret Morrison). Professor Morgan's account of scientific modeling is forthcoming in The World in the Model. She is currently engaged in the research project 'Re-Thinking Case Studies Across the Social Sciences' as a British Academy-Wolfson Research Professor.'This fascinating interdisciplinary collection arising from an extraordinary international collaboration is a significant and innovative contribution to a crucial question in science and technology studies: what do we mean by a 'fact'? New light is thrown on this old question by a fresh focus on the transmission and transformation of facts between different contexts, with very welcome attention to neglected subject areas, too. It is an intellectual feast of a volume, with plenty of food for thought for historians, philosophers, and natural and social scientists, especially those who are uncomfortable sitting in conventional disciplinary pigeonholes.' Hasok Chang, University of Cambridge
'This is a lively and diverse collection of essays about the lives of facts: 'shared pieces of knowledge that hold the qualities of being autonomous, short, specific and reliable.' The book is not so much about what facts are, but about what makes them travel - across space, time, and social worlds - and what gives them character. Focusing on the engaging question, what makes some facts travel well, that is, with integrity, yet with the ability to be put fruitfully to new uses, the book provides such a rich survey of curious, prosaic, profound, and false - as well as true - facts that readers will want to try their hand at grand theorizing, which the authors have politely and wisely refrained from doing. It will be an interesting experiment to see how well these facts about facts travel, and where.' James Griesemer, University of California, Davis
'How Well Do Facts Travel? accomplishes the uncommon feat of bringing fresh thinking to a most common phenomenon. Far more than merely contextualizing the use of 'facts' in myriad fields, this eye-opening and deeply thoughtful collection of essays sets facts in motion, models their dynamics, and maps their travels. Adventurous yet grounded, the group of scholars engages and challenges assumptions in disciplines ranging from history and archaeology to economics and policy to biology and design.' Randall Mason, University of Pennsylvania
'Stemming from a five-year group multidisciplinary research project, How Well Do Facts Travel? is a welcome and insightful contribution to the growing bodies of scholarship on comparative and historical epistemology, cultural and technological transfer, social networking, and the philosophies of the social and physical sciences. As with the work of Daston, Poovey, and Latour, this diverse and compelling collection of essays will be as usefully provocative to scholars in the arts and humanities as it will to those in the sciences.' Mark A. Meadow, University of California, Santa Barbara and Leiden University, the Netherlands
'How Well Do Facts Travel? provides an usual perspective on science and its communication by dealing with the 'lives of facts' and their constitution, development, and circulation, in disciplines as diverse as architecture and social psychology, climate science, and gerontology.' Staffan Mueller-Wille, University of Exeter
'How Well Do Facts Travel? edited by Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan is an impressive exploration - interdisciplinary in character - of the circulation of 'facts' in a number of areas spanning both the natural and social sciences and the humanities as well. Science studies abound in work on the vagaries of metaphors, models, and images. Curiously, so far, facts have hardly been included in this list. Peter Howlett and Mary Morgan's assessment of less the production of facts but what makes them travel and how traveling transforms them opens a new horizon. The authors of the volume address the topic with subtleness and sovereignty, covering a broad range of carefully chosen case studies.' Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
'Philosophers of science have long talked about fruitfulness as a criteria of scientific merit. This collection asks how ideas - or facts - actually get to be recognized and used; it is a major contribution that greatly deepens this important problem.' Stephen P. Turner, University of South Florida