why pragmatic realism is agnostic about

 correspondence? one example maybe help

me to underestand that :) .

part2

186-192

201-208

incommensurability of theories 

 in last and future 

with ones in the "present time" proves that science is made through a long periods of continious growth governed by revolutions. will it suspect the rightness of ontological discoveries of present time in the future or just devaluing old theories?

or that shows the relativity of new knowledge to the old one?

I am not from the discipline so correct me if I am wrong, but if this book had been published 20-25 years ago it would have been somewhat 'provocative' in its approach?  Today not so much? 

I do not feel the 'mangle' metaphor contributed anything to the writing, and seeing that term so often made me think that Pickering actually thinks the mangle is a realistic depiction of science.  Need to be careful with metaphors and analogies. 

At least there were some images in this text.

Pickering's distinction between the temporal and emergent and the "substantive and enduring" seems to me to be without merit, if only because his examples of nonemergent characteristics such as interests, social constraints, rules, etc. are almost never enduring and almost always historically, temporally, and spatially situated, as well as in a certain sense contingent. I think what he really means to contrast is the agentic vs. the structural, which is a boring and familiar problem which is way overdone in the social sciences to begin with.   

Is the posthumanist space that Pickering positions himself in similar to Fortun's discussion of the future anterior in Advocacy After Bhopal?

Ok, nevermind, this is about how he has positioned his text as post-modern and Fortun's idea I think Pickering would say is impossible.

It seems that a great deal of emphasis is placed in the human agency of science due to its ability to direct science while it is essentially the material agent which ultimately determines scientific progress.  Although the fields of science may hold up specific theories for cultural or superficial reasons, ultimately it is the material agency which determines the direction of the sciences, and scientists must reinterpret, abandon, or falsify theories which do not hold up in the face of empirical or material evidence.  Over time only human and mechanical agents must do the accommodation since natural phenomena do not change, it either responds as predicted or not.  Only theories which cannot be observed or tested are entirely controlled by human agency.  It is interesting for example, in the search for subatomic particles; the nature of the phenomena under observation altered even the social makeup of the groups studying it in order to achieve significant progress.  I find it surprising that Pickering must come up with a crude metaphor like “the mangle” in order to acknowledge the material aspect of science and move the dialog away from the human aspect.

This is an ambitious book, in that it tries to propose a universal understanding of the critical elements of practice. Pickering's tone suggests that he's unearthing novel perceptions of scientific practice, but is the contention that people encounter resistances, and do something other than originally intended a surprise?