ENGR 696A -- Science and Social Theory

This class has examined the science from a sociological standpoint (science as social relations). The professor was Dr. Jennifer L. Croissant.

Paper

.Von Neumann Architecture as a Kuhnian Paradigm

Abstract:

In this paper I examine the history of computer architecture in the 1930s and 1940s. The acceptance of the von Neumann architecture as a foundational element of computer design from the late 1940s to the present shows that the von Neumann architecture is a Kuhnian paradigm for computer science.

Book Review

What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason by Hubert L. Dreyfus.

Summaries

This class had a very extensive reading list. Here are summaries of the books and articles I read for this class:

• Toward a Theory of Intellectual Change: The Social Causes of Philosophies by Randall Collins
• Three Blind Spots? A Comment on the Sociology of Science by a Puzzled Outsider by Sara Delamont
• Geography of Science by Harold Dorn; Ecological Factors in the Emergence of Modern Science by Herbert Karp and Sal Restivo
• When Math Worlds Collide: Intention and Invention in Ethnomathematics by Ron Eglash
• Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge by Steven Epstein
• The Manufacture of Bodies in Surgery by Stefan Hirschauer
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
• We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour
• The Invisible Technician by Steven Shapin
• The mysterious morphology of immiscible liquids: A study of scientific practice by Michael Zenzen and Sal Restivo

Copyright © 1997 Gordon Zaft.

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