How are social relations appearing in computers? How are social relations realised in a different kind of medium, in the hardware and software of computers? How are the organising principles of computer building related to those of the life-worlds in a social system? Following a partly social constructivist and partly hermeneutic line a more general answer will be presented. The basic conclusion of this approach is simple: computers are constructed under the influence of the ideas of modernity and represent its (...) structure, interests and values, in contrast to computer networks, which embody the ideas of postmodernity. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn this paper three canonical studies of the scientific revolution are subjected to narratological analysis. Underlying this analysis is the assumption that in any single product of historical writing it is possible to distinguish, for analytical purposes, between three levels of reference: the object of the text — the events; the representation of the events — the narrative; and the text in which a story is represented by means of narrative. Through texts one learns about historical events, but also (...) about the process of producing the texts. Techniques of representation are means of production of texts that represent, in addition to the events, also the producer and his or her authority. The distinction made for any specific text allows the reader to play the two levels against each other in order to create a space within which historical writing should be criticized. Such criticism may draw attention to the difficulty of controlling the meaning of historical stories, and to the need to analyze narrative structures in order to appreciate the ideological changes of historical texts. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe article explores the reasons for the rise to prominence of Newtonian natural theology in the period following the publication of thePrincipiain 1687, its continued importance throughout the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, and possible explanations for its rapid decline in the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the career of Newtonian natural theology cannot be explained solely in terms of internal intellectual developments such as the theology of Newton's clerical admirers or the (...) impact of the work of Hume or of Charles Darwin. While such intellectual movements are undoubtedly of considerable importance in accounting for the rise and fall of Newtonian natural theology, they do not of themselves explain why British society was more receptive to particular bodies of thought in some periods rather than in others. Hence this article – in common with a number of recent studies – attempts to draw some connections between the growth of Newtonian natural theology and the character of Augustan society and politics; it also attempts to link the decline of this tradition with such nineteenth-century developments as the growing separation between church and state and the secularization of the universities and of scientific and intellectual life more generally. (shrink)

It is no longer necessary to defend current historiography of psychology against the strictures aimed at its early text book incarnations in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, Robert Young and others denigrated then standard textbook histories of psychology for their amateurism and their justifications propaganda for specific standpoints in current psychology, disguised as history. Since then, at least some textbooks writers and working historians of psychology have made such criticisms their own. The demand for textbook histories continues nonetheless. (...) Psychology, at least in the United States, remains the only discipline that makes historical representations of itself in the form of “history and systems” courses an official part of its pedagogical canon, required, interestingly enough, for the license in clinical practice.1In the meantime, the professionalization of scholarship in history of psychology has proceeded apace. All of the trends visible in historical and social studies of other sciences, as well as in general cultural and intellectual history, are noe present in the historical study of psychology. Yet despite the visibility and social importance of psychology's various applications, and the prominence of certain schools of psychological thought such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis in contemporary cultural and political debate, the historiography of psychology has continued to hold a marginal position in history and social studies of science. (shrink)

The social sciences have paid little sustained attention to society’s relations with the universe. This paper attempts to redress this failure, arguing that human beings have been increasingly alienated from the cosmos. This estrangement is a product of three closely related processes. These are the division between mental and manual labour in master–slave societies, the strengthening of abstraction due to the market, and the tendency of human beings to dichotomize a world they do not understand or experience as threatening. Alienation (...) from the cosmos is a dominant feature of all master–slave societies but it has been made an ingrained, all-pervasive feature of capitalism. Contemporary liberation theology, pre-figured by movements such as the peasant revolts of the fifteenth century and the Diggers of the seventeenth century, have attempted to resist this alienation, making new ‘heavens on earth’. Alternative cosmologies are also being made by scientists that describe the cosmos in forms that can be recognized by lay people. Critical realism, by revealing the links between dominant classes, infantilized cosmologies and human subjectivities, aids the emergence of these contestations and alternatives. (shrink)

The ArgumentStarting from the thesis that a science constructs the knowledge of the part of the world allotted to it, the present paper aims at bringing together all the various aspects of physics under a unified conceptual framework — that provided by the Marxian concept “mode of production.” After an introduction providing the initial plausibility grounds for the undertaking, the concept is analyzed into its conceptual elements in Part I of the paper. The analysis presents the reconstruction initiated by Louis (...) Althusser and developed by his followers. Part II starts from a characterization of physical problems. This offers a basis for “reading” physics in the terms introduced in Part I. The rest of Part II is devoted to the identification of all the aspects of physics with the conceptual elements in question. The paper aims at three things: to uncover the connections holding among seemingly disparate aspects of physics, usually discussed in almost total independence from each other; to take full account of the social dimensions of physics without vindicating social constructivism; to show that the boundaries separating the disciplines of philosophy, history and sociology of science are more arbitrary than usually considered. (shrink)

Bachelard's concept of the problématique is used in order to classify physical problems and their interrelations. This classification is effectuated along two dimensions. Along the horizontal dimension, physical problems are divided into the kinds that the different modes of physics' development define. These modes are themselves determined by the interplay among the conceptual system, the object and the experimentation transactions specific to physics. Along the vertical dimension, physical problems are classified according to the different stages of maturation they have to (...) undergo before the process of their solution is effectively undertaken. To determine these maturation stages, the Althusserian conception of ideology is used. The interrelations between physical problems are examined through the introduction and elaboration of the notion interdependence network. (shrink)