The paper illustrates how organic chemists dramatically altered their practices in the middle part of the twentieth century through the adoption of analytical instrumentation — such as ultraviolet and infrared absorption spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy — through which the difficult process of structure determination for small molecules became routine. Changes in practice were manifested in two ways: in the use of these instruments in the development of ‘rule-based’ theories; and in an increased focus on synthesis, at the expense (...) of chemical analysis. These rule-based theories took the form of generalizations relating structure to chemical and physical properties, as measured by instrumentation. This ‘Instrumental Revolution’ in organic chemistry was two-fold: encompassing an embrace of new tools that provided unprecedented access to structures, and a new way of thinking about molecules and their reactivity in terms of shape and structure. These practices suggest the possibility of a change in the ontological status of chemical structures, brought about by the regular use of instruments. The career of Robert Burns Woodward provides the central historical examples for the paper. Woodward was an organic chemist at Harvard from 1937 until the time of his death. In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (shrink)

In concluding his ‘Autobiographical notes’, Albert Einstein explained that the purpose of his exposition was to ‘show the reader how the efforts of a life hang together and why they have led to expectations of a definite form’. Einstein's remarks tell of a coherence between personal ‘strivings and searchings’ and scientific activity, which has all but vanished in the midst of the current trend of social constructivism in history of science. As Nancy Nersessian recently pointed out, in the process of (...) illuminating complex relationships between scientific activity and its social context, ‘socio-historical analysis has “black-boxed” the individual scientist’. Has the pendulum swung too far? In reaction to the preceding great-man hagiographie approach to the history of science, the social constructivists have largely ‘thrown the baby out with the bathwater’; consideration of individual scientists' personal approaches to science was unnecessarily expunged with the removal of ‘genius’ as an explanatory tool. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe societal context within which science is pursued generally acts as a productive force in the generation of knowledge. To analyze this action it is helpful to consider particular modes of mediation through which societal concerns are projected into the very local and esoteric concerns of a particular domain of research. One such mode of mediation occurs through material systems. Here I treat two such systems – the steam engine and the electric telegraph – in the natural philosophy of (...) William Thomson (Lord Kelvin).The steam engine illustratesconceptualmediation. It simultaneously instantiates “labor value” in political economy and “work” in engineering mechanics, thereby identifying the two concepts in the region of their common reference. The partial identification carries with it a structural analogy between a network of concepts from political economy and a similar network in natural philosophy, providing a potent heuristic for the reformulation and further development of dynamics.The electric telegraph illustratesmethodologicalmediation. It projects the interests of engineering and industry into the interests of electromagnetic theory and vice versa, thereby establishing, in Thomson's view, a Baconian unity of truth and utility. As the common reference of theory and practice, the telegraph locates the truth of theoretical knowledge in its utility and the utility of practical knowledge in its truth.These particular cases of conceptual and methodological mediation indicate how the local practices, concepts, and interests of a research specialty, or subculture, draw on and are adapted to those of the larger culture within which they develop. Thus the analysis of mediation leads to an ecological model of the social construction of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The history of modern innovation is primarily that of the industrial research laboratory, but the demise of the independent inventor —like that of the entrepreneur —has been much exaggerated. Independent inventing, in fact, continues to flourish as a cultural and technical practice in the contemporary United States. There are, however, a number of structural and cultural impediments in the way of independent inventors who seek to translate their invention into a commercial innovation. By drawing a comparison with the art world, (...) this article explores these impediments and argues that their existence is revealing of the deep social embeddedness of the invention and innovation process. (shrink)

Is a policy-friendly philosophy of science possible? In order to respond this question, I consider a particular instance of contemporary philosophy of science, the semantic view of scientific theories, by placing it in the broader methodological landscape of the integration of philosophy of science into STS (Science and Technology Studies) as a component of the overall contribution of the latter to science policy. In that context, I defend a multi-disciplinary methodological integration of the special discipline composing STS against a reductionist (...) interdisciplinary unification, arguing that if STS wants to contribute to policy advising by constructing narratives of science practice feasible for science policy both in terms of descriptive completeness and intelligibility, then it must avoid the explanatory reductionism tendencies of special disciplines in interdisciplinary contexts. This would favour, at the same time, a relaxation of esoteric language. On this basis, it seems that the semantic view is one right candidate among other approaches in the philosophy of science for facilitating the integration of the methodologically different contributions to STS toward policy objectives. In fact, besides offering a more realistic and descriptively complete picture of science practice with respect to its predecessor in the philosophy of science, namely the syntactic view, the semantic view is also able to capture some aspects of science practice that elude even sociological approaches to STS, thus inviting different perspective on the same subject matter. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis introductory essay describes some intellectual intersections between the history and sociology of science and the history and sociology of accounting. These intersections suggest a potential field of inquiry that concerns itself explicitly with science and economic calculation, a potential that is partly realized in the essays that follow. It is possible to describe a broad shift from concerns for the scientific credentials of accounting to a recognition of the constitutive role that accounting plays for science. In other words (...) the so-called cultural hegemony of the scientist is giving way to that of the accountant. This shift has a number of loosely related but complementary elements. The first is to be found in some recent historical work that links ideals of scientific objectivity to administrative and political values. A second element is a body of work that is critical of theorydominant approaches to experiment and concerns itself with laboratory practice in social context. A third element is an emerging interest in the economics of science. I argue that such a program is weak where it abstracts from processes of economic calculation, and this suggests the fourth element: a contextual approach to economic calculation to be found in sociologically informed accounting research. In the light of these four elements, the essay concludes by considering directly the implications of accounting for science, particularly given recent initiatives to make science more accountable. (shrink)

The article retraces the social and institutional circumstances that in 1986 led two researchers at the IBM laboratory near Zurich, Müller and Bednorz, to discover high-temperature superconductivity. After confirmation of the unexpected breakthrough an unprecedented mobilization of research groups all over the world took place while simul taneously high-temperature superconductivity turned into a subject of intense media interest. The authors discuss these events under three perspectives: the closer interlinkage capacity of researchers and the relationship between the social organization of research (...) and unforeseen cases of scientific creativity. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper argues that science and technology studies need to adopt a much wider view of what counts as a laboratory. The factory, it is suggested, is as much a site of invention and intervention as the laboratory. As a site for the government of economic life, the factory is a laboratorypar excellence. One particular factory is studied — the Decatur, Illinois, plant of Caterpillar Inc. — as it is rethought and remade in accordance with ideals of cellular manufacturing, (...) Just-In-Time systems, customer-driven manufacturing, and competitor benchmarking. But it is not just the changes at the factory itself that are studied. The paper analyzes the linkages and relays between the redesign of a particular manufacturing plant and the plethora of calls for a revitalization of North American manufacturing industry and a new form of economic citizenship. The paper examines the remaking of a factory as anassemblage, a historically specific and temporarily stabilized complex of relations among ways of problematizing the factory in a multiplicity of locales. There are four steps to the changes analyzed here: a problematizing of the factory at the level of North American manufacturing as a whole in the 1980s; a problematizing of the notion of competitiveness at Caterpillar Inc, through the calculative practices of competitor benchmarking and related expertises; a diagraming of the ideal factory in systems terms; and the embedding of notions of the product, of competitiveness, and of a new economic citizenship in the “Assembly Highway” at the Decatur plant. Rethinking the factory took place within this assemblage of relations, rether than at any one site. (shrink)

The modern understanding of radiation got its start in 1895 with X-rays discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen, followed in 1896 by Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity. The development of the study of radiation opened a vast field of research concerning various disciplines: chemistry, physics, biology, geology, sociology, ethics, etc. Additionally, new branches of knowledge were created, such as atomic and nuclear physics that enabled an in-depth knowledge of the matter. Moreover, during the historical evolution of this body of knowledge a wide (...) variety of new technologies was emerging. This article seeks to analyze the characteristics of experimental research in radioactivity and microphysics, in particular the relationship experience-theory. It will also be emphasized that for more than two decades, since the discovery of radioactivity, experiments took place without the theory being able to follow experimental dynamics. Some aspects identified as structural features of scientific research in the area of radiation and matter will be addressed through historical examples. The inventiveness of experiments in parallel with the emergence of quantum mechanics, the formation of teams and their relationship with technology developed from the experiments, as well as the evolution of microphysics in the sense of “Big Science” will be the main structural characteristics here focused. The case study of research in radioactivity in Portugal that assumes a certain importance and has structural characteristics similar to those of Europe will be presented. (shrink)

During the first two decades of the Cold War, a new kind of academic figure became prominent in American public life: the credentialed social scientist or expert in the sciences of administration who was also, to use the parlance of the time, a “man of affairs.” Some were academic high-fliers conscripted into government roles in which their intellectual and organizational talents could be exploited. McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara are the archetypes of such persons. An overlapping group of (...) scholars became policymakers and political advisers on issues ranging from social welfare provision to nation-building in emerging postcolonial states. Many of these men—and almost without exception they were men—were also consummate operators within the patronage system that grew up around American universities after World War II. Postwar leaders of the social and administrative sciences such as Talcott Parsons and Herbert Simon were skilled scientific brokers of just this sort: good “committee men,” grant-getters, proponents of interdisciplinary inquiry, and institution-builders. This hard-nosed, suit-wearing, business-like persona was connected to new, technologically refined forms of social science. No longer sage-like social philosophers or hardscrabble, number-crunching empiricists, academic human scientists portrayed themselves as possessors of tools and programs designed for precision social engineering. Antediluvian “social science” was eschewed in favour of mathematical, behavioural, and systems-based approaches to “human relations” such as operations research, behavioral science, game theory, systems theory, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Medicine in a Neurocentric World: About the Explanatory Power of Neuroscientific Models in Medical Research and Practice Content Type Journal Article Category Editorial Notes Pages 307-313 DOI 10.1007/s12376-009-0036-2 Authors Lara Huber, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Institute for History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine Am Pulverturm 13 55131 Mainz Germany Lara K. Kutschenko, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Institute for History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine Am Pulverturm 13 55131 Mainz Germany Journal (...) Medicine Studies Online ISSN 1876-4541 Print ISSN 1876-4533 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 4. (shrink)

InStabilizing Dynamics Roy Weintraub provides a history of stability theory from the work of Hicks and Samuelson in the late 1930s to the Gale and Scarf counterexamples in the 1960s. Unlike his earlier work in the history of general equilibrium theory this recent contribution is not an attempt to fit the Walrasian program into the narrow framework of some particular philosophy of natural science. Rather, the theme inStabilizing Dynamicsis broadly social constructivist. Simply put, the constructivist view of science is “that (...) scientific knowledge itself is constructed socially, in communities of scientists: Knowledge is constructed, not found”. (shrink)

Harry Collins' central argument about experimental practice revolves around the thesis that facts can only be generated by good instruments but good instruments can only be recognized as such if they produce facts. This is what Collins calls the experimenters' regress. For Collins, scientific controversies cannot be closed by the ‘facts’ themselves because there are no formal criteria independent of the outcome of the experiment that scientists can apply to decide whether an experimental apparatus works properly or not.No one seems (...) to have noticed that the debate is in fact a rehearsal of the ancient philosophical debate about skepticism. The present article suggests that the way out of radical skepticism offered by the so-called mitigated skeptics is a solution to the problem of consensus formation in science.Keywords: Argumentation; Skepticism; Sociology of science; Philosophy of science; Scientific controversies. (shrink)

Unlike behaviorism, cognitive psychology relies on mental concepts to explain behavior. Yet mental processes are not directly observable and multiple explanations are possible, which poses a challenge for finding a useful framework. In this article, I distinguish three new frameworks for explanations that emerged after the cognitive revolution. The first is called tools‐to‐theories: Psychologists' new tools for data analysis, such as computers and statistics, are turned into theories of mind. The second proposes as‐if theories: Expected utility theory and Bayesian statistics (...) are turned into theories of mind, describing an optimal solution of a problem but not its psychological process. The third studies the adaptive toolbox (formal models of heuristics) that describes mental processes in situations of uncertainty where an optimal solution is unknown. Depending on which framework researchers choose, they will model behavior in either situations of risk or of uncertainty, and construct models of cognitive processes or not. The frameworks also determine what questions are asked and what kind of data are generated. What all three frameworks have in common, however, is a clear preference for formal models rather than explanations by general dichotomies or mere verbal concepts. The frameworks have considerable potential to inform each other and to generate points of integration. (shrink)

Modern science has undoubtedly become one the principal engines of economic growth, even though the epistemological status of scientific knowledge has been continuously contested. Leaving the philosophical problem of knowledge aside, this paper examines how scientific discovery contributes to the production of wealth. The analysis focuses on a recent achievement at the crossroads of chemistry, immunology and biotechnology: antibody catalysis. For this purpose, we develop a model of entrepreneurial work to explain how the discovery of natural products and processes generates (...) new economic opportunities. The proposed model is based on the assumption that scientists believe that the natural environment is a repository of 'natural capital'. Natural capital includes goods that are not made by humans but can be used to produce other goods and services. The belief in natural capital induces scientists to search for and identify a natural property that, in the specific cultural context of their work, is recognized as a valuable resource. The selection of such a property forms the initial phase of the discovery process. Certain research methods are then deployed to create novel empirical conditions within which the selected property is transformed into a specific good. The discovery of natural capital thus comprises a historically accountable entrepreneurial endeavour. (shrink)