A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO WAYS OF KNOWING AND WAYS OF WORKING

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A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO WAYS OF KNOWING AND WAYS OF WORKING

The five invited papers in this collection both use and test the Ways of Knowing approach for a range of topics which spans from chemistry around 1800 to molecular biology now, and from classical bacteriology to classifications used in cancer hospitals. I have added two sections. At the end of the volume, I reflect on the papers, and then extend the discussion to further aspects of the WoK method and its potential uses. But additionally, in this Introduction, I have tried to summarize my general approach in the hope that the volume can be used more easily by readers who are new to the WoK project. To a first approximation, I here summarize material presented in my book of 2000/1 and my Isis paper of 2007; I have tried to simplify as much as possible, leaving the elaborations and qualifications to the Afterwords. The basic idea of the WoK approach is that the multiple configurations of knowledge and working practices seen in the general area of science, technology and medicine (STM), both now and across time, can be analysed as ‘compounds’ — as made up of ‘elementary’ ways of knowing and working. I have tried to characterize several ‘elementary’ types of ways of knowing (WoK) and of ways of working (WoW). I have further suggested, in 2007, that each WoK is associated with a WoW, and that each of the pairs might be also be seen as constituting a type of ‘working knowledge’; but in most of this presentation I will use WoKs and WoWs separately. These WoKs and WoWs are seen as developing, cumulating, and ‘nesting’, over time; the later ones involve the earlier, but the earlier may continue independently, as we shall see. To avoid a common misunderstanding, I stress here that WoKs and WoWs are used like elements in modern chemistry and not as taxonomic boxes into which instances of STM are to be placed, or forced. In that respect my approach differs notably (though not completely) from the listings of styles as given by Alistair Crombie and Ian Hacking — which are usually read as taxonomic. Hacking, it is true suggests that his styles can be combined, though he did not pursue this aspect. But if, by contrast, one looks for types of knowing and working which are interwoven in various ways, then the combinatorial possibilities are enormous. And since the analysis of complex cognitive and social configurations can be pursued to any level of detail, the method is not reductive in the usual objectionable senses. Hopefully indeed, the subtleties evident in the best recent historical and sociological analyses of STM can be modelled in ways which do justice to the cases, but which are also sufficiently systematic to facilitate multiple comparisons — including the transfer of historiographical findings between different fields of HSTM.

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