PULLMAN, Wash. — Steve Fuller, a founder of the social epistemology field, is scheduled to give Washington State University’s first Science, Technology and Environment Lecture on Thursday, April 8.
Fuller’s talk, “Is Social Science an Idea Whose Time has Come and Gone?” is set for 7 p.m. in the Samuel H. Smith Center for Undergraduate Education, Room 203. The event is free and open to the public.
“Steve Fuller is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the history, philosophy and social context of science,” said Eugene A. Rosa, professor of sociology at WSU. “His erudition, extending across all three fields, provides an unprecedented launching pad for examining some of the most challenging philosophical underpinnings of science and the relationship between the sciences and how modern societies govern ourselves,” Rosa said.
“Recent challenges attracting his ambitious and provocative lens are books on Thomas Kuhn, founding saint of postmodern approaches to science, and Karl Popper, whose logic of scientific inquiry punctuates the fundamental basis of hypothesis testing among all the sciences,” Rosa said.
Some of Fuller’s most recent books include “Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times” (University of Chicago Press, 2000), “The Governance of Science” (Open University Press, 2000), “Knowledge Management Foundations” (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002) and “Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science” (2003). He is also the founding editor of the “Social Epistemology” journal.
Fuller is a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. He holds a master’s degree and doctorate in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University and the University of Pittsburgh, respectively.
The lecture is sponsored by the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service and the Environmental Studies Colloquium Group.
