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The Semantics of Medical Discourse

  • Chapter
Sciences and Cultures

Part of the book series: Sociology of the Sciences a Yearbook ((SOSC,volume 5))

Abstract

Steven Toulmin (1977) recently observed that during the 1960’s, students of the history and philosophy of science began to shift their attention from the comfortable study of the inner logic of scientific systems — the genetic history of science — toward a serious examination of the relationship of scientific systems to other aspects of society. As it became politically fashionable to expose the link between scientific practices and the interests of those who support it, and as it became theoretically clear that changes in scientific systems are linked to broader social changes, the easy divorce between studies of scientific ‘context’ and ‘content’ was recognized as impossible. As a result, the prohibition against confusing formal or logical issues with empirical matters broke down, and philosophers began to move beyond studying the formal logic of scientific knowledge to studies of scientific practice. Among historians of science, the clarity of the distinction between issues ‘internal to’ the intellectual development of the various sciences and their ‘external context’ was called into question, and studies previously considered unsound — studies of the social and institutional context of science, of the role of economic motivation and political priority in the shaping of scientific practice — became legitimate.

… the joint task for historians and philosophers of science becomes, not so much to establish and exemplify the formal and universal Ten Commandments of the scientific method, as to map out the historical development of its jurisprudence…

(Toulmin,1977, pp. 156)

Support for the research in Iran upon which this paper is based was provided by a Foreign Area Training Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council for Mary-Jo Good, a U.S. Public Health Service Traineeship for Byron Good, and a grant from the Pathfinder Fund. The writing was supported in part by N. I. M. H.-Psychiatry Education Branch, Grant No. MH 14022.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Davis, USA

    Byron J. Good & Mary-Jo Del Vecchio Good

Authors
  1. Byron J. Good
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  2. Mary-Jo Del Vecchio Good
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of the History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., USA

    Everett Mendelsohn

  2. The Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation, Jerusalem, Israel

    Yehuda Elkana

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© 1981 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland

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Good, B.J., Del Vecchio Good, MJ. (1981). The Semantics of Medical Discourse. In: Mendelsohn, E., Elkana, Y. (eds) Sciences and Cultures. Sociology of the Sciences a Yearbook, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8429-5_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8429-5_6

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