Setting out to understand Frege, the scholar confronts a roadblock at the outset: We just have little to go on. Much of the unpublished work and correspondence is lost, probably forever. Even the most basic task of imagining Frege's intellectual life is a challenge. The people he studied with and those he spent daily time with are little known to historians of philosophy and logic. To be sure, this makes it hard to answer broad questions like: 'Who influenced Frege?' But (...) the information vacuum also creates local problems of textual interpretation. Say we encounter a sentence that may be read as alluding to a scientific dispute. Should it be read that way? To answer, we'd need to address prior questions. Is it .. (shrink)

This article looks at how fisheries biologists of the early twentieth century conceptualized and measured overfishing and attempted to make it a scientific object. Considering both theorizing and physical practices, the essay shows that categories and understandings of both the fishing industry and fisheries science were deeply and, at times, inextricably interwoven. Fish were both scientific and economic objects. The various models fisheries science used to understand the world reflected amalgamations of biological, physical, economic, and political factors. As a result, (...) scientists had great difficulty stabilizing the concept of overfishing and many influential scholars into the 1930s even doubted the coherence of the concept. In light of recent literature in history of fisheries and environmental social sciences that critiques the infiltration of political and economic imperatives into fisheries and environmental sciences more generally, this essay highlights both how early fisheries scientists understood their field of study as the entire combination of interactions between political, economic, biological and physical factors and the work that was necessary to separate them. (shrink)