Reading reflections, Jan 26th

Among this week’s readings, I personally felt most enlightened by “Pilgrim’s Progress,” likely because I used to be quite passionate about becoming a physicist myself. A theme in this chapter is the heroism and romanticism with which stories about the advancement of physics are constructed, which I suspect was one of the reasons I dreamed of becoming a physicist. Traweek contrasted this innocent view about doing physics with the tasks, challenges and frustrations a particle physicist typically faces in different stages of his/her career, especially the subtleties in interpersonal interactions among members of a research group as well as the larger particle physicist community, about which physicists tend to appear not to care much because they regard social skills as opposite to science and rationality. But undergraduate students, inspired by the stories of legendary physicists from the margins of their textbooks, may not be well prepared for all of these. The author’s discussion about the relationship between physics and gender is also interesting, although I want to argue that, besides the characteristics of nature that are usually associated with the females, such as passivity, elusiveness and beauty (from a physicist’s point of view), nature with its physical laws can also be perceived as powerful and unrelenting, traits often associated conventionally with the males. In addition, I am curious if the same elements of romanticism and genderedness also exist in other academic communities besides the particle physicists.

Good studies on a different community – medical school students, and his focus is on the formation and construction of human and illness. He showed how the medical training provides the students a different view on the human body, and how the anatomy lab almost feels like entering a different world, based on which he argued “the person is a cultural construct.” Although the cultural construct of human and illness leads to “inattention to the lifeworld of the patient,” it is also inevitable given the goals of medical practice, as Good pointed out. Regarding the style of the writing, however, I want to say that although I appreciate the author’s philosophical knowledge, sometimes I don’t think it is really necessary for him to throw in a philosopher’s concept while making his arguments, such as Wittgenstein’s “language game” and Austin’s “speech act,” because I think both of these concepts were originally introduced for very different philosophical purposes.