This paper studies the constellations of attitudes––sentimental, moral, epistemological, and social––that three leading psychologists active in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America took to be essential to the production of scientific knowledge. William James, G. Stanley Hall, and Edward Titchener located the virtues and traits proper to the scientific frame of mind, and combined them into normative images of the man of science, or, ‘scientific personae’ as I use the term here. I argue that their competing formulations of the scientific ethos informed their psychological (...) practice and epistemological commitments. James, Hall, and Titchener mobilized their representations of the man of science in order to reconfigure the field of psychology and redefine its boundaries, as well as to promote forms of sociability and define the proper role of scientists both within the academy and in the wider polity. (shrink)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, are increasingly employed for military purposes. They are extolled for improving operational endurance and targeting precision on the one hand and keeping drone crew from harm on the other. In the midst of such praise, what falls by the wayside is an entangled set of concerns about the ways in which the relationship between the pilots and their operational environment is being reconfigured. This paper traces the various manifestations of this reconfiguration and goes on to (...) situate our being-with drones in a broader set of sociotechnical practices that shape our understanding of visual technologies. Our inquiry is grounded in technical reports of performance, media coverage of accidents, as well as a detailed first-person account of a former drone pilot. Our analysis suggests that being-with drones is disciplining our perception in subtle ways that remain underexplored. We conclude that when it comes to appraising technologies that interface with the human sensorium, functionalist claims of enhancement are inadequate to the task and propose that phenomenology’s commitment to the phenomena themselves can serve as a useful corrective. (shrink)