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The lure of ethnography of science

This articles compares the results which have come out of the exercise, peculiar to post-Kuhnian sociologists and anthropologists of science, of documenting everyday scientific practices - or what has been called "science-in-the-making" - with the results which came out of an analogous exercise, concerning art, undertook some decades earlier by the art historian Ernst Gombrich. I argue that whereas Gombrich was led to very auspicious results - his concern with what could be called "art-in-the-making" has allowed him to explain how different styles of pictorial representation are formed and how they evolve -, the post-kuhnian sociologists and anthropologists were led to nothing but a tasteless chronicle of science. I discuss the reason of both, the success of the first and the failure of the latter.

Ethnography of science; Scientific progress; Context of discovery; Context of justification; Schemata


Departamento de Sociologia da Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo Av. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, 315, 05508-010, São Paulo - SP, Brasil - São Paulo - SP - Brazil
E-mail: temposoc@edu.usp.br