The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science

Today we have not one, not two, but five fabulous guests who all presented at this year’s conference for the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice, or SPSP24 for short. Many philosophers of science we have featured on the podcast, including Hasok Chang, Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli, were founding members of SPSP. Also, our earlier episode on ‘The Turn to Practice’ in philosophy of science has been one of our most popular. Therefore, it seemed an obvious decision to dedicate...

"It wouldn’t make sense to leave the entire burden of upholding objectivity in science on the shoulders of fallible individuals, right?" Prof. Fiona Fidler Today, we return to one of our favourite episodes, with the person who first came up with the idea for our podcast – Professor Fiona Fidler. Fiona is head of our History and Philosophy of Science Program at the University of Melbourne and co-lead of the MetaMelb research initiative. In this episode Fiona first discusse...

"These conversations are the focus of fierce debate, not because scientists lack authority, but because these are the intellectual battles worth fighting. These are the stakes on which modern society depends" Our guest today is Erika Milam, Charles C. and Emily R. Gillispie Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University. Through her research, Erika has found it useful to coin the term ‘Colloquial Science’ to describe work that deals with technical scientific topics but is produc...

“This is Holden Thorp. I'm the Editor in Chief of Science and thanks to Sam and Carmelina for all they're doing to get the word out about the history and philosophy of science” Today's guest is Holden Thorp, professor of chemistry at George Washington University and Editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals. In April of this year, Holden published an editorial in Science with the tantalising title ‘Teach Philosophy of Science’. Holden called for more substantial teaching of history an...

Today, Carmelina is joined by Dr. Nicole C. Nelson, Associate Professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Nicole is an ethnographer of science and a familiar face to many within both Science and Technology Studies, and Metascience. Today, Nicole explains how ethnographic studies can help us to make sense of the world, and how she uses ethnography to construct the story of science in a way that the published record of scientific ar...