bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A neglected early-ninth-century manuscript of the Lindisfarne Vita S. Cuthberti
Authors: Bullough Donald A.
Published: September 2008

Without the anonymous Lindisfarne Vita S. Cuthberti, written less than two decades after the saint's death in 687, our knowledge of aspects of the Iona-Lindisfarne tradition in the early Northumbrian church and of Cuthbert's life and death would be even more limited than it is. Its medieval tradition is, however, very different from that of Bede's (prose) version of the Life, which, with its greater sense of literary form, composed in superior Latin, and with some additional or better evidence about its hero (although often omitting telling details), effectively drove the earlier work from its land of origin. The Lindisfarne vita's later, post-1100, manuscript testimonies are exclusively in a closely-related group of continental legendaries (passionals); and the one extant pre-1066 English copy was among the books gifted to Saint-Vaast, Arras, c. 1070, by the former abbot of Bath, Sæwold.
A newly-found fragment of an Anglo-Saxon psalter
Authors: Gneuss Helmut
Published: September 2008

A notable addition to our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon manuscript fragments with Old English interlinear glosses has been made in a contribution by Professor Herbert Pilch of Freiburg to the recently-published Festschrift for Anatoly Liberman,1and I hope to show that the leaf he describes and edits has deserved closer inspection.
Why Is There No Hermeneutics of Natural Sciences? Some Preliminary Theses
Authors: Markus Gyorgy
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Contemporary natural sciences succeed remarkably well in ensuring a relatively continuous transmission of their cognitively relevant traditions and in creating a widely shared background consensus among their practitioners – hermeneutical ends seemingly achieved without hermeneutical awareness or explicitly acquired hermeneutical skills.

It is a historically specific – emerging only in the nineteenth century – cultural organization of the Author-Text-Reader relation which endows them with such an ease of hermeneutical achievements: an institutionally fixed form of textual and intertextual practices, normatively posited ways of adequate reception and criticism, etc. The same organization also explains a number of their often-discussed epistemic and cultural characteristics: their depersonalized objectivity, the social closure of their discourse and their reduced cultural significance, the shallow historical depth of their activated traditions, etc.

The cognitive structure and the social function of contemporary natural sciences are intimately interwoven with a set of sui generis cultural relations that are partially fixed in the textual characteristics of their literary objectivations. A comparative hermeneutical analysis of natural sciences as a specifically constituted and institutionalized cultural genre or discourse-type brings into relief those contingent cultural conditions and relations to which some of their fundamental epistemological characteristics are bound, or at least with which they are historically closely associated.
The Essence and Soul of Seventeenth-Century Scientific Revolution
Authors: Bechler Zev
Published: September 2008

The Argument

The inclusion of an item within a theory may be essential or accidental, and if the former then the explanation of its meaning and of its inclusion in the theory cannot be by accidental events and circumstances. Since all events and circumstances – be they social, political, religious, psychological, etc. – are accidental vis-à-vis the ideas they occasion, they cannot serve as explanation of these ideas. The only way to explain the ideas is by showing their essentiality to the theory rather than their importance to the people. Thus, the place of spirits and souls within seventeenth-century science is explained by Platonic ideology.

This demands a concept of nature which is thoroughly efficient causative, and a concept of explanation which is thoroughly informative. This means that theories must explain any given effect by a cause which is separable from it and is conceptually heterogeneous to it. Such a nature and such an explanation are inherently paradoxical and irrational, which explains the preponderance of these traits in seventeenth-century science as created by Kepler, through Galileo and Descartes to Newton.

The primary efficient-causal and explanatory agency is force, which is ontically distinct from matter and from the motion it causes in matter. Soul, spirit and active principle are mere variants of force. Thus, their presence in seventeenth-century science is explained only by their being conceptually essential to any Platonic philosophy of nature.
The Sociology of the Mechanistic World-Picture
Authors: Borkenau Franz
Published: September 2008

From about 1620 on a profound revolution occurred in the thought of the most developed European nations (France, Italy, Holland, and England), which found its most pregnant expression in the birth of the new philosophical schools of Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes. The renewal of philosophy at this juncture in the history of thought, however, does not signify above all a change in the specific, metaphysical content of thought about God, the soul, and immortality, although the revolution in thought does concern these themes as well. Central to the whole “modern” school of philosophers of this period is the constitution of a new conception of nature and – directly for some of them, implicitly for all – of human society as well.
Henryk Grossmann and Franz Borkenau A Bio-Bibliography
Authors: Russo Valeria E.
Published: September 2008

In the following pages I will outline the main biographical data and the intellectual activity of two of the major protagonists of the debate on the mechanistisches Weltbild within the Frankfurt “Institut fur Sozialforschung” in the thirties. I have included a selected bibliography of Grossmann's and Borkenau's works, and refer to titles with abbreviations [H.G.…] and [F.B.…].
The Place of Knowledge A Methodological Survey
Authors: Ophir Adi , Shapin Steven
Published: September 2008

A generation ago scientific ideas floated free in the air, as historians gazed up at them in wonder and admiration. From time to time, historians agreed, the ideas that made up the body of scientific truth became incarnate: they were embedded into the fleshly forms of human culture and attached to particular times and places. How this incarnation occurred was a great mystery. How could spirit be made flesh? How did the transcendent and the timeless enter the forms of the mundane and the contingent? Platonist and providentialist perspectives offered ways of speaking about the mystery, but, in general, it remained unresolved at the core of orthodox idealist historiography.1
Visible Colleges: Structure and Randomness in the Place of Discovery
Authors: Hillier Bill , Penn Alan
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Visible colleges, in contrast to the “invisible colleges” familiar to historians of science, are the collective places of science, the places where the “creation of phenomena” and theoretical speculation proceed side by side. To understand their spatial form, we must understand first how buildings can structure space to both conserve and generate social forms, depending on how they relate structure in space to randomness. Randomness is shown to play a crucial role in morphogenetic models of many kinds, especially in spatial forms and in social networks. We argue here that it can also play a crucial role in the advance of science.
Laboratory Space and the Technological Complex: An Investigation of Topical Contextures
Authors: Lynch Michael
Published: September 2008

The Argument

There can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin (1988) calls the “physical place” of the scientific laboratory. The physical place is defined by the locales, barriers, ports of entry, and lines of sight that bound the laboratory and separate it from other urban and architectural environments. Shapin's discussion of the emergence of the scientific laboratory in seventeenth-century England provides a convincing demonstration that credible knowledge is situated at an intersection between physical locales and social distinctions. In this paper I take up Shapin's theme of the “siting of knowledge production,” but I give it a different treatment – one based on ethnomethodological studies of work (Garfinkel 1986; Garfinkel et al. 1981; Garfinkel et al. 1989; Livingston 1986; Liberman 1985; Lynch 1985a; Lynch et al. 1983; Bjelic and Lynch forthcoming; Morrison 1990; MacBeth 1989). Without denying all that can be witnessed in the spectacle of the scientist at the bench and of the architectural habitat of the bench, I argue that the “place” of scientific work is defined by locally organizedtopical contextures. The paper describes two examples of such spatial orders – “opticism” and “digitality” – associated with distinct complexes of equipment and practice. These topical spaces might initially be viewed as “ideal” or “symbolic” spaces, but I argue that they are no less material (and no less social) than the “physical setting” of the laboratory; indeed, they are the physical setting.
Knowledge of the Territory
Authors: Revel Jacques
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Few spaces have been given such great importance as national space. It is often seen as the fulfillment of a predestination–simultaneously geographical, political, ethnic, and functional – granted affirmation by history. This being especially true for the French territory with its ancient history.

This paper takes a different approach as regards the establishment of knowledge concerning the national territory. Looking at two of the many ways of knowing the territory–proto-statistics and the map–it aims at showing that the acquisition of this knowledge is a discontinuous, partly cumulative process, with social, political, and cognitive rationales, which were heterogeneous and even contradictory for a long period of time.
“The Mind Is Its Own Place”: Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England
Authors: Shapin Steven
Published: September 2008

The Argument

It is not easy to point to the place of knowledge in our culture. More precisely, it is difficult to locate the production of our most valued forms of knowledge, including those of religion, literature and science. A pervasive topos in Western culture, from the Greeks onward, stipulates that the most authentic intellectual agents are the most solitary. The place of knowledge is nowhere in particular and anywhere at all. I sketch some uses of the theme of the solitary philosopher across a broad sweep of history, giving particular attention to its deployment in and around the scientific culture of seventeenth-century England. I argue that the rhetoric of solitude is strongly implicated in individualistic views of society and empiricist portrayals of scientific knowledge. Solitude is a state that symbolically expresses direct engagement with the sources of knowledge – divine and transcendent or natural and empirical. At the same time, solitude publicly expresses disengagement from society, identified as a set of conventions and concerns which act to corrupt knowledge. Hence, the study of the social uses of solitude adds further support to the notion that problems of knowledge and problems of social order are solved together.
Models of Critique: Introduction
Authors: Ben-menahem Yemima , Ophir Adi
Published: September 2008

Critique involves reflection, specifically self-reflection, and as such it is inherently linked with philosophy. Critique calls for change, awareness, liberation from false conceptions, and reshaping of spheres of action and belief. Consequently it is closely linked with the moral and the political. Critique aspires to enhance truth, beauty, and justice and is thus an integral part of science, art, and social action. The present volume tackles issues of critique through a selection of papers originally presented at the workshop on “Models of Critique in the Sciences, Society, and the Arts,” held in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv during May 1996. As the full program indicates, this selection provides only a partial picture of the topics discussed at the workshop. A major consideration has been the publication policy of Science in Context, with its emphasis on science, which is reflected here. We wish to express our gratitude to all the participants for their presentations and contributions to a stimulating exchange of ideas.
Science and Politics Between Domesticated and Radicalized Pragmatism
Authors: Unger Roberto Mangabeira
Published: September 2008

The Argument

This paper introduces a distinction between two understandings of the pragmatic tradition: domesticated and radicalized pragmatism. The main difference between these two views concerns the feasibility and moral legitimacy of a radical critique of an existing practice such as science, politics, and so on. It is argued that domesticated pragmatism, with its emphasis on local rather than global perspective, has led to trivialization and degeneration of self-reflective critique. Without rejecting pragmatism as such, this paper urges a reinterpretation of this tradition so as to make room for more thorough forms of critique of both science and social practice.
Heidegger, Science, and the Mathematical Age
Authors: Roubach Michael
Published: September 2008

The Argument

The purpose of this article is to read Heidegger's critique of modern science —especially in What Is a Thing? —as evolving from ontological issues that preoccupied Heidegger in the period after the publication of Being and Time. The main issues at stake are formal ontology and its connection with mathematics and modern mathematical physics, and the distinction between formal and regional ontology. The connection between these issues constitutes Heidegger's understanding of mathematics. An exposition of Heidegger's notion of the “mathematical” can help us uncover his assumptions in his critique of modern science, and give us new possibilities for evaluating it.
The Oxford Calculators in Context
Authors: Sylla Edith
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Our understanding of the predisposing factors, the nature, and the fate of the Oxford Calculatory tradition can be significantly increased by seeing it in its social and institutional context. For instance, the use of intricate imaginary cases in Calculatory works becomes more understandable if we see the connection of these works to undergraduate logical disputations. Likewise, the demise of the Calculatory tradition is better understood in the light of subsequent efforts at educational reform.

Unfortunately, too little evidence remains about the Calculators and their context to enable anything like a full reconstruction of the relation of the Oxford Calculators' work to its context. Nevertheless, seeking out and fitting together the bits of information that do remain can add to our insight. Among the topics worth further research are the relation of training incalculationesto later careers in church or government, and the special features of the Calculatory tradition as a tradition consisting of multiple parallel manifestations closely interconnected with other disciplines, ranging from logic and natural philosophy to theology and medicine.
The Formation of “Islamic Mathematics” Sources and Conditions
Authors: Høyrup Jens
Published: September 2008

The Argument

The development of autonomous theoretical science is often considered a “Greek miracle.” It is argued in the present paper that another “miracle,” necessary for the creation of modern science, took place for the first time in the Islamic Middle Ages, viz. the integration of (still autonomous) theory and (equally autonomous) practice.

The discussion focuses on the mathematical disciplines. It starts by investigating the plurality of traditions which were integrated into Islamic mathematics during its formation, emphasizing practitioners' “sub-scientific” traditions, and shows how these were synthesized in a way virtually unknown in earlier cultures. A discussion of the sociocultural roots of this specific synthesis concludes that a major role was played in the earlier period by the combination of fundamentalist convictions characteristic of Islam – that the most humble daily activity is directly responsible to the highest ontological level, while conversely this highest level is concerned with the humblest ranks of daily existence – with the absence of an institutionalized “Church” able to monopolize the interpretation of the mutual bond of the divine and the everyday levels.

As the institutions of learning crystallized around the turn of the millennium, the integrative attitude to theory and practice was fixated institutionally; the latter process is discussed, first with the example of the madrasah institution as the carrier of an arithmetical textbook tradition, and second with that of the bond between astronomy and theoretical geometry.
Practice, Reason, Context: The Dialogue Between Theory and Experiment
Authors: Lenoir Timothy
Published: September 2008

Experiment, instrumentation, and procedures of measurement, the body of practices and technologies forming the technical culture of science, have received at most a cameo appearance in most histories. For the history of science is almost always written as the history of theory. Of course, the interpretation of science as dominated by theory was the main pillar of the critique, launched by Kuhn, Quine, Hanson, Feyerabend, and others, of the positivist and logical empiricist traditions in the philosophy of science. Against Carnap, Hempel, Nagel, and Popper, who accorded observation reports an independent status either as a source of inductive support or as a basis for the falsification of scientific theories, Hanson and Kuhn emphasized the theory-ladenness of observation. They made this central point – that all observation is shaped by reference to theory – the cornerstone of a full-blown philosophy of science by buttressing it with two additional lines of argument: First, theories are always underdetermined by the data, several theories being compatible with the same set of data. Hence, choice between theories is never a matter of empirical support, but always turns around conceptual issues. Second, statements derived from theory never confront nature alone; they are always clothed in a web of interrelated beliefs. Thus, theories, their associated observation languages, and the entire technical culture they support must be accepted or rejected as wholes.
Experimental Accuracy, Operationalism, and Limits of Knowledge – 1925 to 1935
Authors: Beller Mara
Published: September 2008

The Argument

This paper analyzes the complex and many-layered interrelation between the realization of the inevitable limits of precision in the experimental domain, the emerging quantum theory, and empirically oriented philosophy in the years 1925–1935. In contrast to the usual historical presentation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as a purely theoretical achievement, this work discloses the experimental roots of Heisenberg's contribution. In addition, this paper argues that the positivistic philosophy of elimination of unobservables was not used as a guiding principle in the emergence of the new quantum theory, but rather mostly as a post facto justification. The case of P. W. Bridgman, analyzed in this paper, demonstrates how inconclusive operationalistic arguments are, when used as a possible heuristic aid for future discoveries. A large part of this paper is devoted to the evolution of Bridgman's views, and his skeptical reassessment of operationalism and of the very notion of scientific truth.
Genius, Method, and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760–1860
Authors: Yeo Richard
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Focusing on the celebrations of Newton and his work, this article investigates the use of the concept of genius and its connection with debates on the methodology of science and the morality of great discoverers. During the period studied, two areas of tension developed. Firstly, eighteenth-century ideas about the relationship between genius and method were challenged by the notion of scientific genius as transcending specifiable rules of method. Secondly, assumptions about the nexus between intellectual and moral virtue were threatened by the emerging conception of genius as marked by an extraordinary personality – on the one hand capable of breaking with established methods to achieve great discoveries, on the other, likely to transgress moral and social conventions. The assesments of Newton by nineteenth-century scientists such as Brewster, Whewell, and De Morgan were informed by these tensions.
Evolutionism as a Modern Form of Mechanicism
Authors: von Borzeszkowski Horst-Heino , Wahsner Renate
Published: September 2008

The Argument

The idea of evolution doubtlessly marks a revolution in our way of thinking. It is the most recent achievement of philosophy and forms the basis of the modern world picture. Current discussions concerning the status of science now convey the impression that any scientific discipline that wants to satisfy modern requirements must also become a theory of evolution. These discussions ignore the reasons which once induced Kant to desist from reformulating classical mechanics as a theory of evolution and instead to found his critical philosophy, according to which the epistemological starting points of natural science and philosophy are different in principle. In other words, there is no examination of whether the reasons given by Kant are of a principle nature so that they are still valid today, but rather, ignoring Kant's arguments, it is taken for granted that a different physical theory than classical mechanics could achieve this.

Because nonlinear thermodynamics in particular is often presented as a candidate that justifies hopes of an evolutionary physics, the position of this branch within the structure of physics will be investigated here. It will be seen that a historical component is introduced into physics via initial, boundary, and other supplementary conditions, but that this does not mean that historicity has been grasped in laws, which is of course the point of a scientific theory of development.

It is demonstrated that the conclusion drawn for physics by some authors from nonlinear thermodynamics, according to which physics today becomes an evolutionary physics incorporating the cognitive subject, is wrong. The progress made by modern thermodynamics is, without doubt, significant. The widespread philosophical interpretation of thermodynamics rests, however, on an antiquated ontologization of physical concepts and thus on the usual procedure of mechanicism.

If one tries to introduce the conception of evolution into natural science by leveling the difference between philosophy and natural science in a mechanistic manner, then the dialectical evolutionary conception which represents a new epoch of human thinking degenerates to an evolutionism, where lawfulness is replaced by accidentalness.
Images of Knowledge, Social Organization, and Attitudes to Research in an Indian Physics Department
Authors: Raj Kapil
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Sociologists of Third World science, who share the dominant assumption in the philosophy of science that the “culture” of specific substantive fields of scientific inquiry is invariant across the globe, have, after a period of blind optimism devoted to building a critical mass of scientists in the developing countries, relapsed into a bleaker mood and see the Third World as a peripheral region lacking in “creativity” in its research programs.

Challenging the doctrine of the universality of scientific practice by means of an in situ study of an Indian physics laboratory, an attempt is made to bring to light a particular community's shared ideals of knowledge (provided by the specific historico-cultural Indian context) which animate the everyday practice of its field of study and fashion its choice of problems, style of professional communication, attitudes toward experiment, etc. These local ingredients should not be understood as deficiencies with respect to some arbitrary norm (mostly taken as the practice in the particular field of inquiry in the “developed” world) but as what differentiates research practices in different parts of the world.
Quantification in Science and Cognition Circa 1937 A Newly Discovered Text of Ludwik Fleck
Authors: Löwy Ilana
Published: September 2008

Although Ludwik Fleck is today recognized as one of the pioneers of the historical sociology of science, his historical and epistemological writings, most of them dating from the 1930s, long remained practically unknown. They were rediscovered following the mention of Fleck's principal work, the monographGenesis and Development of a Scientific Fact(1935) in the preface of Kuhn'sThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions(1962), and thanks to the efforts of W. Baldamus (1977) and his student T. Schnelle (1982) and of the editors of the English translation of Fleck's book, R. K. Merton and T. J. Trenn. Fleck's work was studied by several scholars and was the subject of two meetings: “Colloquium Ludwik Fleck” (Hamburg, 1981) organized by L. Schaffer and T. Schnelle, and a symposium organized by R. S. Cohen (Berlin, 1984). Some of the papers presented at these meetings were published in Cohen and Schnelle 1986. Today, more than fifty years after the publication of his principal study, Fleck is on his way to becoming a “classic” of the sociology of science and of epistemology.
Hugo Dingler
Authors: Wolters Gereon
Published: September 2008

Hugo Dingler lived from 1881 to 1954. During the academic years 1901–2 and 1903–4 he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Munich. He spent the intervening year (and then the summer of 1906) in Göttingen, where he studied mathematics with David Hilbert and Felix Klein as well as – for the first time – philosophy (with Edmund Husserl). In 1907 Dingler completed his doctorate in Munich with Aurel Voss with a dissertation on general surface deformation. HisHabilitationfollowed in 1912, also at the University of Munich, but only for the prospectless field of “Method, Didactics and History of Mathematical Sciences.”
Science in the Church
Authors: Heilbron J. L.
Published: September 2008

The Argument

A brief review of the Merton thesis shows that its restriction to England is arbitrary. An example from the historiography of modern physics suggests the possible payoff of an ecumenical Merton thesis and the means to explore it. A summary of the careers of men who practiced science literally in the church – men who built meridian lines in Italian cathedrals – indicates the range of social support of astronomical studies by Catholic institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Light of Reason, Light of Nature. Catholic and Protestant Metaphors of Scientific Knowledge
Authors: Ashworth William B.
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Many of the epistemological issues that occupied natural philosophers of the seventeenth century were expressed visually in title-page engravings. One of those issues concerned the relative status to be accorded to evidence of the senses, as compared to knowledge gained by faith or reason. In title-page illustrations, the various arguments were often waged by a series of light metaphors: the Light of Reason, the Light of Nature, and the Lights of Sense, Scripture, and Grace. When such illustrations are examined with the authors' theological views in mind, it becomes apparent that in the first half of the seventeenth century, Catholic authors favored the Light of Reason as a source of truth, while Protestant authors favored the Light of Nature. Since by the end of the century it was widely accepted by scientists of all religious persuasions that certain knowledge must be grounded in sense evidence and the direct study of nature, one might argue that in this instance Protestantism was responsible for nurturing an important development of the Scientific Revolution. However, the skewed nature of the sample (the Catholics who used light metaphors were mostly Jesuits; the Protestants who did so mostly alchemists) and the large number of counterexamples available (many Catholic scientists believed in the ascendancy of the senses but failed to engage in metaphorical warfare) mitigate against taking this offshoot of the Merton thesis too seriously.
Science, Tradition, and the Science of Tradition
Authors: Mali Joseph
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Science consists in progress by innovation. Scientists, however, are committed to all kinds of traditions that persist or recur in society regardless of intellectual and institutional changes. Merton's thesis about the origins of the scientific revolution in seventeenth-century England offers a sociohistorical confirmation of this revisionist view: the emergence of a highly rational scientific method out of the religious-ethical sentiments of the English Puritans implies that scientific knowledge does indeed grow out of – and not really against – customary modes of thought.

In tracing the intellectual origins of this view back to the religious controversy between Protestants and Catholics, the essay demonstrates that the essential conflict between them with regard to natural science stemmed from their antagonistic conceptions of tradition and its function in the production of genuineknowledge– of religious as well as of natural affairs. Whereas the Protestants believed only in those truths that are immediately revealed by God to each man through his reason, the Catholics adhered to truths that are related to men or “made” by them through culture and history.
Reason, Nature, and God in Descartes
Authors: Hatfield Gary
Published: September 2008

The Argument

The present paper argues that the metaphysical doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths constituted a philosophical response to what Descartes considered to be the overly close relationship between philosophy and theology.

The paper examines Descartes' “metaphysical turn,” focusing on the radical doubt and the creation of the eternal truths. The radical doubt, it is argued, was most important not as a device for defeating skepticism or attaining certainty, but as a means to practice the proper use of the intellectual faculty. God and the soul were the first objects of this practice, but the ultimate aim was contemplation of pure extension, the essence of matter. The doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths provided a metaphysical context within which Descartes could claim that the human mind completely comprehends the essences of natural things without thereby having to adopt either a scholastic Aristotelian or a Neoplatonic conception of such comprehension, both of which tended toward the theologically objectionable position that in grasping the essences of created things, the human mind comprehends God (either his absolute power or ideas in his mind).
The Catholic Response to Secularization and the Rise of the History of Science as a Discipline
Authors: Motzkin Gabriel
Published: September 2008

The Argument

This paper argues that the development of the history of science as a discipline should be seen in the context of the bitter nineteenth-century conflict between religion and secular culture in Catholic countries. In this context, neo-Thomist theologians were interested in formulating a Catholic strategy of accommodation to modern science and to modern social systems that would also permit rejection of both modern social theory and the positivist theory of science. While theologians such as Cornoldi and Mercier worked with the positivist image of science common in their day, Duhem opted to reformulate the conception of scientific theory. His religiously motivated assignment of a central place to the history of science – as the only way of hinting at the prospective rapprochement between the conventionalist sphere of scientific theory and the metaphysics of the real world – played a formative role in its development. Duhem's conception of the function of the history of science directed the attention of scholars in the field to medieval science as a point of origin for modern science.
Robert K. Merton: The Celebration and Defense of Science
Authors: Mendelsohn Everett
Published: September 2008

The Argument

In Merton's early work in the sociology of science three theses are identified: (1) economic and military influence in shaping early modern science; (2) the “Puritan spur” to scientific activity; (3) the critical role of a democratic social order for the support of science. These themes are located in the contemporary economic crisis of the 1930s, the rise of Nazism and fascism, and the emerging radical and Marxist political activism of scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom. Merton's interaction with this context is critical for understanding his choice of problems and issues for the nascent sociology of science. The enunciation of the four-part normative structure of science is closely identified with the political ideals of this context. Merton's transition from an interest in problems of science in society to his postwar concern with the social and organizational structures of science and the social behavior of scientists is framed against the anticommunist and anti-Marxist thrust of immediate postwar politics in the United States. The implications of this change for the paradigms of the sociology of science are noted.
The Sorokin-Merton Correspondence on “Puritanism, Pietism and Science,” 1933–34
Authors: Merton Robert K.
Published: September 2008

On this occasion, I shall try to respond to the suggestions that I report what it was like to be a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1930s engaged in writing a dissertation which took the shape in print of the monograph, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England. This, quite some time before the sociology of science had emerged with a cognitive and social identity. I shall not attempt an account – let alone an explanatory account – of the micro-environment at Harvard back then that provided local context for that study. Indeed, I suspect that the Gerald Holton, Everett Mendelsohn and Arnold Thackray reconstructions come closer to the intellectual and social reality of that time and place than anything I might reconstruct.
Graphic Understanding: Instruments and Interpretation in Robert Hooke'sMicrographia
Authors: Dennis Michael Aaron
Published: September 2008

The Arugment

This essay answers a single question: what was Robert Hooke, the Royal Society's curator of experiments, doing in his well-known 1665 work,Micrographia?Hooke was articulating a “universal cure of the mind” capable of bringing about a “reformation in Philosophy,” a change in philosophy's interpretive practices and organization. The work explicated the interpretive and political foundations for a community of optical instrument users coextensive with the struggling Royal Society. Standard observational practices would overcome the problem of using nonstandard instruments, while inherent inrepresentation– the interpretive practice championed in the text – were important theological and political meanings. Hooke's kind of experimental philosophy undermined the claims made by “atheists” and “enthusiasts” – the enemies of the restored church and state – while also producing useful knowledge. Equally important, Hooke modeled the community described inMicrographiaupon the classicalres publica, but his community made important concessions to Restoration political realities, especially the growing role of commercial or transactional relationships.
Science as Receptor of Technology: Paul Ehrlich and the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry
Authors: Travis Anthony S.
Published: September 2008

The Argument

In Germany during the 1870s and 1880s a number of important scientific innovations in chemistry and biology emerged that were linked to advances in the new technology of synthetic dyestuffs. In particular, the rapid development of classical organic chemistry was a consequence of programs in which chemists devised new theories and experimental strategies that were applicable to the processes and products of the burgeoning dye factories. Thereafter, the novel products became the means to examine and measure biological systems. This took place as a result of two trends. The first was a move toward diversification in the dye industry – made possible by the extensive range of products – which in turn was stimulated by economic and political conditions. The second was the increasing availability of techniques, substances, and processes used in industry. This made possible a concrete program of introducing the qualitative and quantitative methods of chemistry into the domain of laboratory experimentation on biological materials, thereby realizing the abstract desire to transform cell biology into an exact science.

Moreover, the conceptualization of biological systems that emerged from this endeavor leaned heavily on a theory of dye chemistry that indicated which particular arrangements of atoms performed specific functions. This biological modeling used the imagery of chemical structural formulae to transform chemical nuclei and their side chains (substituents) into adequate representations of protoplasmic structure.
Linearity and Reflexivity in the Growth of Mathematical Knowledge
Authors: Corry Leo
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Recent studies in the philosophy of mathematics have increasingly stressed the social and historical dimensions of mathematical practice. Although this new emphasis has fathered interesting new perspectives, it has also blurred the distinction between mathematics and other scientific fields. This distinction can be clarified by examining the special interaction of thebodyandimagesof mathematics.

Mathematics has an objective, ever-expanding hard core, the growth of which is conditioned by socially and historically determined images of mathematics. Mathematics also has reflexive capacities unlike those of any other exact science. In no other exact science can the standard methodological framework usedwithinthe discipline also be used to study the nature of the discipline itself.

Although it has always been present in mathematical research, reflexive thinking has become increasingly central to mathematics over the past century. Many of the images of the discipline have been dictated by the increase in reflexive thinking which has also determined a great portion of the contemporary philosophy and historiography of mathematics.
Comments and Critique
Authors: Heelan Patrick
Published: September 2008

The Argument

In this rejoinder to Gyorgy Markus (Science in Context1:5–51), I argue that although there are nonphilosophical hermeneutical studies of communication among scientists (a “weak” hermeneutics) from which much can be learned about scientific practices, there is also the philosophical genre of a hermeneutics of natural science (a “strong” hermeneutics), with which this paper is concerned. The former is the nonphilosophical use of hermeneutics in the study of texts and historical sources; the latter is a philosophy pursued within a working canon of philosophical works defined principally by the writings of Heidegger and Husserl. There is also a hermeneutically sensitive analytic philosophy of science, such as in the work of Kuhn, Toulmin, and Elkana. These genres are distinguished by their literary canons and their basic phenomenologies or critical experiential givens; each genre comprises an exemplary phenomenology as understood with the help of a characteristic fundamental literary canon.

I argue that analytic philosophy is pursued within a canon that makes it difficult to raise hermeneutical questions about natural science, and that it assumes a generally positivistic phenomenology. I argue that hermeneutical phenomenology currently defines itself in dialectical opposition to “science” as understood (positivistically) by analytic philosophy, and has failed to exploit the opportunity of making its own positive contribution to the philosophy of science by examining for itself the phenomenology of laboratory work, especially data production, and the transformation of the language of theory into a descriptive language of scientific phenomena. A “strong” hermeneutical philosophy of natural science, then, challenges both analytic philosophy and the existing tradition of hermeneutical phenomenology.
Scientific Speculation and Literary Style in a Molecular Genetics Article
Authors: Myers Greg
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Stylistic analysis of an admittedly speculative scientific article can suggest what is involved in the social act of speculation. Walter Gilbert's influential paper “Why Genes in Pieces?” serves as an example of the conflicting demands of the need to display politeness and the need to display the urgency and excitement of the issues. Socially significant stylistic features emerge in comparison with another paper Gilbert co-authored, where the speculations occur in the discussion section of an experimental report, and in comparison with another, more typical “News and Views” article by another author. The stylistic features include the use of impersonal subjects, the hedging of verbs, the unusual uses of the present tense, and the reliance on repetition, rather than conjunctions or pronouns, for textual cohesion. Later references to the article assimilate it to various lines of research without suggesting its speculative style.
The Peculiarities of the Americans or Are There National Styles in the Sciences?
Authors: Reingold Nathan
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Over the years national styles have been invoked or denigrated in the writing of the history of science. This paper is an attempt to give the concept of national style a degree of precision and clarity enabling scholars to understand when and how it may be invoked and when and how its use would be dubious or even forbidden. The example of the United States of America is used because the history of the sciences in the United States was often written loosely in terms supposedly conducive to national style analyses. We first discuss the problem of commonalities, factors widely present within all countries in the Western tradition, which, by definition, cannot be exclusive national attributes. Here the problem is to somehow determine whether the supposed national style attribute is a case of a significantly different degree of intensity than some presumed norm in the Western tradition.

The principal thesis advanced is that pre-existing historiographic assumptions largely determine whether or not a scholar finds or does not find a national style. This is discussed in terms of some examples for the U.S. case. More particularly, a number of examples are discussed from the three principal genres or schools in current writing in the history of science: the knowledge-centered; the doing-science; and the context-oriented. Based on the analysis of the examples, an attempt is made to sketch an approach to a more rigorous use of the concept of national style.
The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions
Authors: Nye Robert A.
Published: September 2008

The Argument

I argue here that in its historical development, sexology developed differently in France than elsewhere in Europe. Though I concur that the modern notion of “sexuality” arose some time in the last half of the nineteenth century, the older notion of ”sex” persisted in French science and medicine for a far longer time than elsewhere because of a fear that nonreproductive sexual behavior would deepen the country's population crisis. I argue that the scientific and medical concepts of the sexual perversions, particularly homosexuality, were considered by French sexologists to be abnormal deviations from heterosexuality, whereas some English, German, and Austrian sexologists — including Freud — viewed the perversions more tolerantly as natural variations of the norm. I also address here the inadequacies of historical accounts of these developments that favor discursive ruptures in the Foucauldian manner, and stress the advantages of social history and causal historical explanation.
Epistemic Styles in German and American Embryology
Authors: Maienschein Jane
Published: September 2008

The Argument

This paper argues that different epistemic styles exist in science, and that these make up an important unit of analysis for studying science. On occasion these different sets of commitments to ways of doing and knowing about the world may fall along national boundaries. The case presented here examines German and American embryology around 1900 and shows that differences in goals and approaches make up different epistemic styles.

In particular, the Germans sought causal mechanical explanations of as many phenomena as possible, guided by strong theories which achieved confirmation when they fit with as much of the available data as possible. The Americans, in contrast, sought definitive facts, as many as possible, which might be quite specific or narrowly based. These facts could lead to empirical generalizations which, in turn, could guide the generation of new knowledge in the form of new facts. Thus, the two epistemic styles emphasized different goals, processes of investigation, and standards of evidence.
The Social and Cognitive Dynamics of Paradigmatic Change: A Scientometric Approach
Authors: Fischer Klaus
Published: September 2008

Argument

Kuhnian phases of paradigmatic development correspond to characteristic variations of citation measures. These correlations can in turn be predicted from a simple model of human information processing when applied to the common environments of scientists. By combining a scientometric and a human information processing approach to the history of scientific thought, structures of disciplinary development, and in particular paradigmatic cycles, can be more reliably assessed than before. Consequently, the quantitative historian of science is liberated to some extent from the vagaries of qualitative judgment, as exemplified by traditional narrative type approaches to the history of science.
What Is Newton's Law of Inertia About? Philosophical Reasoning and Explanation in Newton'sPrincipia
Authors: Ludwig Bernd
Published: September 2008

The Argument

In this paper it will be shown that Newton'sPrincipiagives an explication of and an argument for the first Law of Motion, that seems to be outside the scope of today's philosophy of science but was familiar to seventeenth-century commentators: The foundation of classical mechanics is possible only by recurrence to results of a successful technical practice. Laws of classical mechanics gain their meaning as well as their claims to validity only when considered as statements about artifacts whose production belongs to the shared know-how of a scientific community.
The Meaning of “Inhibition” and the Discourse of Order
Authors: Smith Roger
Published: September 2008

The Argument

The history of psychology, like other human science subjects, should attend to the meaning of words understood as relationships of reference and value within discourse. It should seek to identify and defend a history centered on representations of knowledge. The history of the word “inhibition” in nineteenth-century Europe illustrates the potential of such an approach. This word was significant in mediating between physiological and psychological knowledge and between technical and everyday understanding. Further, this word indicated the presence of a common discourse structuring ways of thought about order, whether in technology, moral activity, or experimental psycho-physiology. Writing history as the history of discourse suggests several difficulties; these are considered briefly. Nevertheless attention to language and meaning makes it possible to integrate the history of psychology with intellectual history and thereby to broaden its potential audience.