Science, Knowledge And Actions

Professor Harry Collins is the professor of social science school of Cardiff University in UK. He is one of the famous sociologists of science and knowledge, the founder and main leader of Bath School. Since 1970th, he went to the laboratory to do his social investigation on the experiment. He has achieved a great success in science studies during the thirty years practical research. It also gains a high reputation in sociology of science and knowledge for him, even in philosophy of science.View from the main research characters of Harry Collins, he is good at empirical research. He always follows up the trails of controversy which happened in experiment, discusses the whole construction process, and then forms his metaphysical thinking about science. He would like to use micro-analysis method in studying sociology of science and knowledge. It can makes him find the problems which is significant but always be neglected by traditional philosophy of science. So, whatever from epistemological level or methodological level, it still has enlightenment for Harry Collins views to the philosophy of science.This article aims at use Harry Collins'views on science as a perspective, which focus on reading on the important thesis and hot spots of philosophy. Roughly, this article has three parts. Chapter 1 is the first part, recalling the background of Harry Collins'thoughts. The second part is from chapter 2 to chapter 4, elaborate Harry Collins'views on science, knowledge, and actions differently. The third part is chapter 5, stress on significance and limitations by compare Harry Collins'views with other sociologist of Merton School and sociologist of science and knowledge.In the first chapter, state the background of Harry Collins'thoughts firstly. To be specific, the development of Harry Collins'thought is based on the British tradition of philosophy and sociology, and so does Collins'individual experience. In the sociology, it has a long history to taking knowledge as an object, as early as Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge research and Robert Merton's sociology of science. The sociological tradition makes it legally for Collins research on science. At the philosophy background, Collins is submitted to the idea of'forms of life'from Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the idea of paradigm from Kuhn. Those two issue mixed together to make Collins hold an epistemological stance of'methodological relativism'. Both philosophy and sociological tradition has provided the theory basis for Collins at the theory perspective. Furthermore, Collins' experience provides another guarantee for his study.The second chapter is mainly talked about Collins view on science. Based on the investigations on the gravitational wave and other experiments, Collins has found that science if fulfilled with controversy. To trace the root of the controversy, Collins believes that different scientific community has cherished different beliefs. Because they are short of the standard of science, so the experiment always falls into the 'experimenters'regress'circle. It makes Collins extracted the research programme from experimenters'regress thesis, which named as empirical programme of relativism.Chapter three has discusses Collins'view on knowledge. With the development of study, Collins has changed his research perspective from the problem of scientific communication to knowledge transformation. After his study, he believes the knowledge is not the information, so the flow of the knowledge is not equals to exchanges of the information. Because the existence of tacit knowledge. It inspired Collins to study on the tacit knowledge. Now, these years, Collins began to have interest in studying a kind of new types of tacit knowledge, which is the expert's tacit knowledge. That is expertise.Chapter four elaborates Collins'view on actions. With the study on knowledge, especially on the tacit knowledge, Collins discovered that there is a puzzle for philosophers on the epistemology study which is the conversion between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. For this question, Collins began to study on actions. Based on the perspective of social-context, Collins has distinguished the connotation of the actions and behaviors. He believes that actions has the context-dependency, however the behavior is no-context. Furthermore, Collins has distinguished two types of actions on the action levels, one is the mimeomorphic action another one is polimorphic action. After redefined the reclassified, Collins discussed the relationship between actions further. Then he used action path as vertical ordinate, action cascade as horizontal ordinate, to contribute an action model, called action-tree model.In the fifth chapter, based on the analysis on Collins'view on science, knowledge, and action, this article has compared the thought of Collins with sociologists of science and other sociologists of science and knowledge. After that, we believe, Collins'thought is kind of overcome to the traditional science studies in epistemological and methodological perspective. It has a realistic significance for us, but still has flaws, which is that Collins has overstated too much about the social factors in science.