EAN: 9780691156989

RULES - LORRAINE DASTON GEBUNDEN

We are  all of us  everywhere  always  enmeshed in a web of rules and constraints. Rules fix
the beginning and end of the working day and the school year  direct the ebb and flow of
traffic on the roads  dictate who can be married to whom and how  place the fork to the right
or the left of the plate  lay down the meter and rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet  and order
the rites of birth and death. Cultures notoriously differ as to the content of their rules  but
there is no culture without rules. In this book  historian of science Lorraine Daston adopts a
long term perspective for studying rules from diverse sources  including monastic orders 
cookbooks  and mathematical algorithms. She argues that in the Western tradition most rules can
be characterized as one of the following: tools of measurement and calculation  models or
paradigms  or laws. Moreover  they exist on spectra from specific to general  flexible to rigid
and the specific-to-general  and universal-to-particular. In investigating how rules work  how
they don't work  how they've changed across time  and why exceptions are necessary  Daston
paints a vivid picture of Western civilization from the antiquity to the present--

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