Lamenting the absence of fruitful dialogue between philosophers of science and STS scholars in Taiwan, Ruey-Lin Chen argues that each field can and should help the other to improve. In particular, if I have understood Chen's arguments correctly, philosophers of science could learn from STS to pay closer attention to the social aspects of scientific activity, to social understandings of what science is, and to the political or ethical implications of scientific practice in a modern technoscientific society like Taiwan. The field of STS, meanwhile, could benefit both reflexively and methodologically from the philosophy of science by paying more rigorous analytical attention to its own theoretical lineages, internal contradictions, and truth-claims; by attending more closely to the validity of the scientific arguments at the core of most STS case studies; and by developing its capacity as a discipline to proceed from the level of specific case study to generalization.
