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This book offers a new account of what makes science special among other human pursuits, critically engaging with a variety of approaches, especially constructivist and relativist studies of science and technology. It focuses on the studied?lack of haste? of science, its relative stress-freeness and its socially sanctioned withdrawal from the swift pace of ordinary life. Unhastening Science offers a balanced and thoughtful argument which emphasises the dangers of cosseting science from the?scourge? of internal competition while at the same time highlighting the need for?distance? between th

An important theme of science communication research is research on science article writers. However, not many scholars are interested in doing this research. Based on this fact, we conducted a research on the ideal position of a science article writer. It turns out that he definition of science writer has changed in Indonesia. Quantitative content analysis of articles reported by The Conversation Indonesia during December 2021 found that the writerss motivated the public to understand and use scientific principles to meet their daily needs. The results of in-depth interviews with three prominent professors at Universitas Gadjah Mada confirm the same fact. They do not just tell the object of research in a certain context. This fact certainly needs to be imitated by other science writers. However, there is a basic recipe that must be practiced by other science writers. The practice of the recipe will make them autonomous and responsible to society. Thus, the article will explain the ways that can be taken to make it happen.

Abstract: The report of the Science Task Force of the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration rekindled an old debate on autonomy versus accountability for government scientists. The rationale given there for allowing the natural science community great discretion in managing its own affairs while in receipt of very considerable public funds did not get much support in the debate. Unfortunately, the debate did little to illuminate the problems facing those charged with producing creative, but relevant research in public institutions. A more productive way of tackling the question of autonomy and accountability is to see whose interests are promoted by different stances on the issue. Some critics represent the quest for autonomy as simple power‐seeking by professional elites. Yet the institutional setting for many supposedly autonomous scientists involved in successful innovation in industry often involves extensive interaction with non‐scientists. User groups — such as the agricultural commodities research committees — influence scientists through a loosely coordinated network. In this situation a form of accountability exists, although it is not exerted through formal parliamentary mechanisms. The arrangements have some elements of corporatism. Autonomy is not prominent within this setting except elusively as a rationale used to blunt temporarily the impact of particular interest group demands that threaten the continuity required to realize investments in long‐term research projects. In this case, autonomy is essentially a myth. However, to the extent that it allows scientific institutions to combine interaction in the practical world that their research must serve with some insulation from short‐term political or interest group pressures, it may be valuable for successful research management. Science administrators sometimes regulate the research of their juniors quite closely, indicating that even individual "scientific autonomy" can be a very limited form of freedom. None the less, it can be managed in such a way as to allow creative talent to flourish within an accountable structure albeit one that departs from the conventional norms of responsible government.

Mechanism-based explanations are widely discussed in contemporary social science. A virtue of mechanism-based explanations is that they can tell us how social and psychological factors are related to each other and in addition provide explanatory depth. I will argue against an argument which contends that to describe underlying mechanisms at the individual level do not contribute to improve macro-explanations at the social level. However, the critics of the mechanism approach are right that under certain conditions there can be successful explanations without mentioning underlying mechanisms. Although the mechanism approach is a reductive strategy, it does not entail that the social sciences will lose their descriptively and explanatory autonomy. The debate about reductionism and explanation often take place at an abstract philosophical level, but it is argued that to what extent the mechanism approach will influence the autonomy of the social sciences is an empirical problem and cannot be decided a priori.

This article offers a reassessment of the main import of Peter Winch's philosophy of the social sciences. Critics argue that Winch presented a flawed methodology for the social sciences, while his supporters deny that Winch's work is about methodology at all. Contrary to both, the author argues that Winch deals with fundamental questions about methodology, and that there is something substantial to learn from his account. Winch engages methodological questions without being committed to social ontology. Instead, Winch's work on methodology is best described as a descriptive metaphysics of social inquiry. This alternative reading clarifies the close link between Winch's argument for the autonomy of the social sciences and R. G. Collingwood's philosophy of history.

In the past 30 years, the role of science and technology in the international system has changed markedly. Science and technology have emerged as primary instruments of power and social control, with the major industrialized countries, especially the superpowers, relying more and more on science and technology as a means of maintaining their dominance in that system. Notwithstanding beachheads of technological competence and scientific excellence in the Third World, the technological gap between the North and the South has widened during this period because of the near-monopoly that a few industrialized countries have acquired on the generation and productive use of new technology based on modern science. Development strategies, relying on importation of capital-intensive, socially inappropriate, environmentally destructive Western technologies, cannot but lead to a massive global equity crisis in the 1980s. These technologies have been at the heart of the accelerating de-industrialization of the Third World by the First and Second Worlds on a scale far beyond what occurred in historical colonialism. The critical need is to focus the debate, at the forthcoming world conferences dealing with science, technology and development, on these underlying issues, leading to the formulation of concrete action proposals at the national and international levels which will effectively promote the technological autonomy of the Third World. While we cannot be certain that greater autonomy will lead to greater equity, few Southern countries can go very far in meeting the minimum material needs of most, not to speak all, of their people without a greatly strengthened autonomous capacity for creating, acquiring, adapting and using technology to solve their own urgent economic and social problems.