At some point over the past decade, I began to think more about ideas and material from the history, philosophy and sociology of science (HPS) I’d been exposed to in some of my studies (including an MA degree I completed over 2007-2011 at University of Melbourne) and their potential connections to more everyday practices. This includes consideration of both normative questions (about how we should try to act, such as in our knowledge practices) and explanatory questions (i.e., about why we act in the ways that we do).
Here’s a list of some of the posts that either explicitly address this, or touch upon related themes in important and/or potentially interesting way(s):
- Learning from Mark Lynas’s reflections on his ‘exemplary’ personal journey
- Towards a sociology of knowledge practices?
- Review of ‘Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)’ by Tavris & Aronson
- Towards new sociological conceptions of knowledge practices
- An evolutionary perspective on dogmatism and reason
- Insights into knowledge practices from Cheryl Misak’s book ‘Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein’
- The knowledge illusion and its effects, good and bad
- Contemplating the tensions between scholarship and activism
- Casting a sociological eye on the mobilisation of techniques of prospection by scientists
- Going to extremes: Cass Sunstein on extremism, “crippled epistemology” and group polarisation
- What is, or should be, the core focus of sustainability science?
- One of the most important sustainability-related articles you have never read