ArgumentIn the late 1960s, in the midst of campus unrest, a group of young economists calling themselves “radicals” challenged the boundaries of economics. In the radicals' cultural cartography, economic science and politics were represented as overlapping. These claims were scandalous because they were voiced from Harvard University, drawing on its authority. With radicals' claims the subject of increasing media attention, the economics mainstream sought to re-assert the longstanding cultural map of economic science, where objectivity and advocacy were distinguishable. The resolution (...) of the contest of credibility came with a string of cases of dismissals and denial of tenure for radicals. The American Economic Association's investigations of these cases, imposing the conventional cultural map, concluded that personnel decisions had not been politically motivated. Radicals were forced to migrate from the elite institutions from which they had emerged to less prestigious ones. “Place” became a marker of their marginalization within the profession. (shrink)

The ArgumentThere can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin 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. 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 than the “physical setting” of the laboratory; indeed, they are the physical setting. (shrink)

This article charts the development of the modern astronomical observational system. I am interested most acutely in the digitization of this system in general, and in the introduction of adaptive optics in particular. I argue that these features have been critical in establishing the modern observatory as a factory for scientific data, rather than as a center of calculation in its own right. Throughout, the theoretical focus is on the nature of technological evolution in the observational system, understood as inextricably (...) bound up with both the system-internal drive to surpass the limits imposed upon the distributed cognition of the researcher and the boundary at which empirical objects resolve themselves into technical objects. In short, this article explores the historically constituted character of expert astronomical perception, arguing that it is impossible to understand without constant reference to its material substrate. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis essay describes the emergence and stabilization in French and English experimental accounts, in second half of the seventeenth century, of the narrative sequence: X did (some process in the laboratory) and X saw (something happen), where X stands for a pronoun, I or we in English,je, nousoronin French. Focussing on the French case, it shows how the use of the collective pronounonin the experimental accounts registered in the files of the Académie des Sciences is directly related to the (...) will of this newly created institution to assert a collective authority on the production and legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact produced in the laboratory. It is argued, through the case of the discovery of the blind spot in the eye by Mariotte, that this new narrative form imbeds a construal of the experiment as a public spectacle, and of the proof as a witnessing event, which eludes the Academy's attempts to monopolize the process of fact validation and favors the diffusion and display of experiments in front of larger audiences. The question of whether a privileged witness such as the King of France who patronized the Academy could not have constituted by himself a suitable audience to ensure a full legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact while remaning within the bounds of academic practices is addressed. It is answered in the negative by providing evidence for the lack of interest of the absolute monarch in experiments. On the other hand, the outdoor practices of observation and measurement are shown to interfere in a constructive manner with the absolutist power and to capture the attention of the absolutist monarch, where laboratory experiments had failed. It is proposed that natural philosophers in the early modern period bear the burden of proof in buying credibility for the phenomena they try, by paying a tribute to the standing of the patrician elites that witness their experiments. This makes sense in a straightforward manner of the lack of interest of the King of France in a practice which exalts the power of the very group he is trying hard to control through the absolutist structure of power. (shrink)

Les philosophes naturels du XVIIe siècle accordent une importance croissante aux faits nouveaux et singuliers construits par des démonstrations spectaculaires réalisées devant témoins. Cet essai tente de montrer comment cette évolution s’opère comme une synthèse de deux courants auparavant disjoints, d’un côté la pratique coopérative et informelle, critique sans être véhémente, de savants dont Mersenne constitue un bon exemple dans les années 1630, et de l’autre celle des alchimistes, remettant radicalement en cause les savoirs traditionnels tout en restant viscéralement attachés (...) au secret. On montrera comment le cercle parisien qui se réunit autour du même Mersenne au milieu du siècle pour débattre des expériences du vide réalise cette synthèse particulière. Mais dans une communauté érudite intéressée surtout à employer les faits expérimentaux comme matériau nouveau dans les disputes philosophiques, et pour laquelle la correspondance privée constitue la principale source d’information sous la forme de narrations circonstanciées par des témoins des événements singuliers survenus au cours de démonstrations expérimentales, le récit à la première personne apparaît comme une ressource superflue lorsqu’il s’agit de passer au format imprimé; Pascal, par exemple, recourt dans ses traités à une description des expériences se déployant sur un registre hypothétique et syllogistique qui exclut la narration directe. Le succès ultérieur des techniques matérielles et littéraires administrant la preuve en donnant à voir le protocole expérimental peut alors être mieux compris si l’on considère la parenté que celles-ci entretiennent avec les pratiques de la lecture publique traditionnelles dans les cercles érudits, proximité qui leur permet d’enrichir la signification et d’accroître la force de persuasion de l’expérience artificielle aux yeux des mêmes audiences. (shrink)

This article offers a brief overview of recent studies on note taking and paperwork in histories of early modern science. Showcasing the wide variety of note-taking practices performed by a range of historical actors across diverse sites and knowledge practices, it argues that a focus on note taking and “paper technologies” enables us to put in conversation a number of linked epistemic practices from reading and writing to making and doing to observing and surveying to classifying and categorizing. By viewing (...) these practices as a continuum rather than as distinct parts, we are able to further understand early modern knowledge production. (shrink)

In the early and mid-twentieth century, scientific conferences were a popular tool to establish communication between scientists. Organisational efforts, research and funds were spent defining what makes a productive and successful scientific gathering. A unique example of this was the monitoring and evaluation system of the Gordon Research Conferences (GRCs), which conceptualized informal communication in small, specialized meetings as the best method of advancing cutting-edge research. Studying the detailed monitoring reports of the sessions and the evaluation forms filled by the (...) participants, this paper explores how a concrete format of scientific knowledge production and identity formation was created and reproduced. The normative assessment of the participants’ interactions is examined in the contexts of (a) their professional affiliations, (b) the conference presentations and discussions and (c) activities related to play. The study of the GRCs exemplifies how scientists actively conceptualised characteristics like academic affiliation, manners, leisure practices and social categories such as gender as ways to understand, describe and measure how knowledge is best produced and transmitted, turning the conferences into a fertile ground for meta-scientific reflections. (shrink)

ABSTRACT After a productive start in the 1980s, laboratory history is now surprisingly neglected—not lab science, but the lab as social institution. To restart interest, I suggest that we see labs as period specific (early modern, modern, postmodern) and of a piece with each era's dominant social institutions and practices. In the modern era, for example, labs have become powerful and ubiquitous because their operating principles are those of the nation-state and its consumerist political economy. Their educational function is crucial: (...) labs have authority because they are an effective vehicle for educating en masse for life in modern states; they provide general entry to careers in scores of disciplines and a thousand occupations; and they embody prevailing ideals of a meritocracy of competence, transparency (through publication), and a universalistic logic of objectivity. An older microhistory of laboratory practices may thus be reborn as a systematic, macrosocial history of the lab. (shrink)

ABSTRACT How are scientists made? How, as young adults, have they discovered a scientific vocation and career? Through formal schooling, typically; but in the field sciences also through practical apprenticeship—through work. This essay presents the story of a frontier farm lad who became a career naturalist as a hired collector of animal specimens in the American West. Family and work are the leitmotifs of Vernon Bailey's story. It was family farming—bringing in the hay and finding the cows—that connected Bailey's love (...) of skilled outdoor work with a desire to know nature scientifically. Traveling and working with professional naturalists, he came to see himself as a professional as well. His socialization was less a replacement than a layering of two identities, family and career. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An examination of the use of the word “laboratory” before the nineteenth century yields two striking results. First, “laboratory” referred almost exclusively to a room or house where chemical operations such as distillation, combustion, and dissolution were performed. Second, a “laboratory” was not exclusively a scientific institution but also an artisanal workplace. Drawing on the historical actors' use of “laboratory,” the essay first presents (some necessarily scattered) evidence for the actual correspondence between artisanal and scientific laboratories in the eighteenth (...) century. A particularly instructive case is the way the equipment of the laboratory of the Prussian Academy of Sciences was acquired. There was, in this case, a direct transfer of instruments, vessels, and materials from a pharmaceutical to an academic laboratory. The essay then argues that we ought to distinguish between two different experimental traditions in the early modern period: experimental philosophy and the laboratory tradition that meshed studies of nature with technological innovation. (shrink)

While some seventeenth-century scholars promoted natural history as the basis of natural philosophy, they continued to debate how it should be written, about what and by whom. This look into the studios of two Amsterdam physicians, Jan Swammerdam (1637–80) and Steven Blankaart (1650–1705), explores natural history as a project in the making during the second half of the seventeenth century. Swammerdam and Blankaart approached natural history very differently, with different objectives, and relying on different traditions of handling specimens and organizing (...) knowledge on paper, especially with regard to the way that individual observations might be generalized. These traditions varied from collating individual dissections into histories, writing both general and particular histories of plants and animals, collecting medical observations and applying inductive reasoning. Swammerdam identified the essential changes that insects underwent during their life cycle, described four orders based on these ‘general characteristics’ and presented his findings in specific histories that exemplified the ‘general rule’ of each order. Blankaart looked to the collective observations of amateurs to support his reputation as a man of medicine, but this was not supposed to lead to any kind of generalization. Their work alerts us to the variety of observational practices that were available to them, and with what purposes they made these their own. (shrink)

In 1933 Margaret Lasker, a biochemist who worked at the labs of Montefiore Hospital in New York, developed an accurate method for the differentiation between pentosuria and diabetes. Research into pentosuria, and mostly its genetic aspects, became Lasker’s lifelong passion. Since research was not part of her job description, she conducted the chief part of her study in her home kitchen. Lasker’s extensive and personal correspondence with her patients and their families may be the secret key for her success in (...) maintaining a prolonged research career against all odds. Laker’s last article was published in 1955 in Human Biology, presenting data on 72 cases of pentosuria, which occurs almost exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews. More than half a century later, and long after Lasker was gone, her well kept data and family records allowed the discovery of two mutations in the DCXR gene, by Mary-Claire King and her team. (shrink)

This article suggests that institutional workshops of assay were significant experimental sites in early modern London. Master assayers at Goldsmiths’ Hall on Foster Lane, in the heart of the city, and at the Royal Mint, in the Tower, made trials to determine the precious-metal content of bullion, plate and coinage. The results of their metallurgical experiments directly impacted upon the reputations and livelihoods of London's goldsmiths and merchants, and the fineness of coin and bullion. Engaged in the separation and transformation (...) of matter, assayers and the affairs of their workshops were also a curiosity for those interested in the secrets of nature. Making use of a wide-ranging body of sources, including institutional court minutes, artisanal petitions, mercantile guidebooks, recipe books and natural-philosophical treatises, this article uncovers a complex culture of metropolitan expertise. We first examine the workshop spaces in which assayers undertook their professional activities, and their secretive corporate cultures. We turn next to the manuscript culture through which assayers codified and communicated knowledge, ‘secrets’ and techniques to broader urban audiences. Finally, we assess exchanges and tensions between assayers and the wider community of Londoners engaged in scientific knowledge production and dissemination. (shrink)

Sandra Harding is working on the reconstruction of scientific objectivity. Lorraine Daston argues that objectivity is a concept that has historically evolved. Her account of the development of "aperspectival objectivity" provides an opportunity to see Harding's "strong objectivity" project as a stage in this evolution, to locate it in the history of migration of ideals from moral philosophy to natural science, and to support Harding's desire to retain something of the ontological significance of objectivity.

The relationship of man himself to his environment is an inseparable part of ecology; for he also is an organism and other organisms are a part of his environment. Ecology, therefore, broadly conceived and rightly understood, instead of being an academic science merely, out of touch with humanistic interests, is really that part of every other biological science which brings it into immediate relation to human kind. The proper place of humans in ecological study has been a recurring issue for (...) ecology. Of course humans are part of Nature writ large, but are they part of the ecologist's nature? The question bothered biologists even before the discipline of ecology was firmly institutionalized.... (shrink)

This paper explores the process of technological innovation from a geographical perspective. Some explanations of technological change concentrate on the development of technology itself - in which makers play a central role, while other explanations focus more on consumption and the users of technology. In this paper, discussion will focus on interactions between makers and users, and on the particular places in which such interactions occur. It is proposed that these interactions, especially during the early phase of rapid product development, (...) produce creative spaces. An adaptation of the social construction of technology model is therefore proposed which stresses the geographical settings in which rapid innovation occurs, and therefore is called geographical construction of technology. The G-COT model is illustrated by the case of the Coventry bicycle industry from its foundation in 1869 to 1880 when this town had become the world's largest center of bicycle production. (shrink)

From 8 February until at least 19 April 1686, the Dublin Philosophical Society was occupied with a prodigiously talented young girl whose name was never recorded. She was less than eleven years of age, but still much older than the society itself, which had begun meeting less than three years previously. Although one of many wonders engaging the curiosity of the nascent society, this girl served a surprising range of purposes, so that accompanying her anonymity was a curious malleability. Pressed (...) into several different roles and identities, her exploitation affords a glimpse into the various qualities that could make a spectacle useful in a philosophical climate that was unique among the British Isles. The use of this girl therefore not only sheds light on the needs of a less familiar learned society, but also shows how these could differ from those of its better-understood counterparts. For a period of time, it was the versatility not of the gentlemen in Dublin, but of the prodigy they used, that best served this group on the periphery. (shrink)

This article aims to challenge the thesis of the craft origins of scientific empiricism by demonstrating how the empirical practices of early experimentalism differed in significant ways from the activities of artisans. Through a phenomenological analysis of instrumental observation and experimental demonstrations, I aim to show how experimentalism privileged modes of experience that were foreign to craft traditions and which facilitated a newfound estrangement of human subjects from the objects of their knowledge. Firstly, we will review concerns surrounding the promotion (...) of optical instruments by early experimentalists to reveal how these technologies were understood not only to amplify the senses but also to obscure contextual and relative qualities available to unaided visual perception. Secondly, we will examine the experimental practices of the early Royal Society, to see how experimental demonstrations were deliberately structured to facilitate experiences of the natural world that were divorced from practical and personal contexts. It is here that the divergence from artisanal epistemology is rendered most apparent. For in contrast to craft practices, which favored forms of experience which were personal and engaged, I will argue that the new scientific practices of the 17th century played a central role in effecting the researcher's transformation into a new kind of epistemological subject – the spectator. (shrink)

Historians have usually connected the presentation of nature as a part of natural history with the natural cabinet or the natural history museum. A closer look at travel and field work, however, shows that display of nature as a spatial concept and set of material conditions begins already in the first moment of collecting objects, specimens and economic information about a region. In 1720 Tsar Peter I of Russia sent the German physician Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt to Siberia to explore this (...) hitherto terra incognita. During his travels Messerschmidt established two main instruments for collecting data and things, which I shall describe as organizing, material principles for his field work: written lists and notes, and boxes and cases. An analysis of these material objects and their specific uses reveals the intellectual and practical traditions in which learned activities and strategies took place at the beginning of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

This paper argues that, as all available accounts of how scientific and non-scientific goals might be distinguished rely upon distinctions as much in need of explication as the notion of scientific goals itself, naturalized accounts of science should reject the notion that there are characteristically scientific goals for a given time and place and instead countenance only the goals which happen to be had by individual scientists or their communities. This argument and the recommendation that follows from it are illustrated (...) by reference to Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA. (shrink)

Laboratory experimentation was once considered impossible or irrelevant in economics. Recently, however, economic science has gone through a real ‘laboratory revolution’, and experimental economics is now a most lively subfield of the discipline. The methodological advantages and disadvantages of controlled experimentation constitute the main subject of this thesis. After a survey of the literature on experiments in philosophy and economics, the problem of testing normative theories of rationality is tackled. This philosophical issue was at the centre of a famous controversy (...) in decision theory, during which a methodology of normative falsification was first articulated and used to assess experimental results. In the third chapter, the methodological advantages of controlled experimentation are illustrated and discussed with examples taken from the experiments on the so-called ‘preference reversal’ phenomenon. Laboratory testing allows to establish with a high degree of certainty that certain phenomena lie behind the experimental data, by means of independent testing, elimination of alternative hypotheses, and the use of different instruments of observation. The fourth chapter is devoted to a conceptual analysis of the problem of ‘parallelism’. This is the problem of inferring from the occurrence of a phenomenon in the laboratory, to its instantiation also in non-laboratory environments. Experimental economists have discussed parallelism at length, and their views are presented and criticised. Eventually, it is argued that parallelism is a factual matter and as such can only be established on empirical grounds. The fifth chapter provides an example of how one can argue for parallelism, focusing on the case of experimentation on the ‘winner’s curse’ phenomenon. The role of experiments as ‘mediators’ between theoretical models and their target domain of application is illustrated, and the structure of parallelism arguments analysed in detail. Finally, in the last chapter, economic experiments are compared to simulations, in order to highlight their specific characteristics. (shrink)

A generation or so ago, scholarly discussion about the creation of new scientific knowledge in seventeenth-century England was often framed in terms of the respective contributions of scholars and practitioners, the effects of their training and background, the relative importance of the universities compared with London, and of the role of external and internal factors, and so forth. These discourses have now largely been put aside in favour of those emphasizing spatial metaphors and models, which are recognized as powerful conceptual (...) tools for representing the dynamics of complex systems. The role that geographies play in the fostering of creativity and innovation in human systems at both the social and cognitive levels is a subject that is attracting widespread interest. (shrink)

What sort of activities took place in the academic laboratories developed for teaching the natural sciences in Britain between the 1860s and 1880s? What kind of social and instrumental regimes were implemented to make them meaningful and efficient venues of experimental instruction? As humanly constructed sites of experiment how were the metropolitan institutional contexts of these laboratories engineered to make them legitimate places to study ‘Nature’? Previous studies have documented chemists' effective use of regimented quantitative analysis in their laboratory teaching (...) from the 1820s, but less is known about how Victorian academics made other sorts of laboratories unproblematic pedagogical spaces. This paper will examine the literary, disciplinary and instrumental technologies of microscopy deployed by T. H. Huxley at his South Kensington laboratory during the early 1870s to render his biology teaching legitimate, meaningful and efficient. As such it is a response to Pickstone's recent call for a broader account of microscopy teaching in late nineteenth-century academic life science, and one localized answer to Bennett's enquiries as to what the appearance of a microscope in laboratories and other domestic settings betokened to historical actors, and how such tokens changed over time. (shrink)

Just as political theorists have long argued that democracy is viable only in communities of certain sizes and shapes, perhaps epistemologists should also entertain the idea that knowledge is possible only within certain social parameters-ones which today's world may have exceeded. This is what I mean by the "postepistemic" society. I understand an "epistemic society" in Popperian terms as an environment that fosters the spirit of conjectures and refutations. After castigating analytic philosophers for their failure to see this point, I (...) show how Rousseau and Feyerabend occupy analogous positions as critics of, respectively, the nation-state and Big Science. Rather than endorsing the disestablishment of the state, however, I offer a proposal for reinjecting the critical attitude into Big Science. It involves heightening the sporting character of scientific disputes, perhaps even to the point of enabling the public to bet on their outcomes. (shrink)

The ArgumentNaturalization confers authority on beliefs, conventions, and claims, but what kind of authority? Because the meaning of nature has a history, so does that of naturalization:naturalization is not the same tactic when marshaled in, say, eighteenth-century France and in late nineteenth-century Britain. Although the authority of nature may be invoked in both cases, the import of that authority depends crucially on whether nature is understood normatively or descriptively, within the framework of the natural laws of jurisprudence or within that (...) of the natural laws of mechanics. During the early modern period, the denotative center of gravity of the word “nature” shifted dramatically. Writings about the female intellect are particularly well suited to reflect and focus these changes for three reasons: first, as with so many aspects of gender identity, what was distinctively female about women's way of thinking was usually alleged to be part and parcel of their “nature”; second, thepolitical and social implications of the female intellect were debated heatedly and in unprecedented detail, particularly in France; and third, the actual content of beliefs about what traits sex the intellect as female remained relatively constant during this period, despite sharp differences of opinion over their putative “natural” causes. The female intellect was naturalized not once but repeatedly, and therein lies its value for a history of naturalization. (shrink)

The ArgumentIt 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. (shrink)

Ideas about the natural world are intertwined with the personalities, practices, and the workplaces of scientists. The relationships between these categories are explored in the life of the taxonomist William Steel Creighton. Creighton studied taxonomy under William Morton Wheeler at Harvard University. He took the rules he learned from Wheeler out of the museum and into the field. In testing the rules against a new situation, Creighton found them wanting. He sought a new set of taxonomic principles, one he eventually (...) found in Ernst Mayr's "Systematics and the Origin of Species". Mayr's ideas tied together a number of themes running through Creighton's life: the need for a revised taxonomy, the emphasis on fieldwork, and the search for a new power center for ant taxonomy after Wheeler died. Creighton's adoption of Mayr's ideas as part of his professional identity also had very real implications for his career path: field studies required long and intensive studies, and Creighton would always be a slow worker. His method of taxonomy contrasted sharply not only with Wheeler's but also with two of his younger colleagues, William L. Brown and E. O. Wilson, who took over Wheeler's spot at Harvard in 1950. The disputes between these men over ant taxonomy involved, in addition to questions of technical interest, questions about where and how best to do taxonomy and who could speak with the most authority. Creighton's story reveals how these questions are interrelated. The story also reveals the importance of Mayr's book for changes occurring in taxonomy in the middle of the twentieth century. (shrink)

John Dee’s arrangements at his Mortlake house have received some attention as an English ‘academy’ or ‘experimental household.’ His ideas for St Cross, which he requested as a suitable living in 1592, have received less detailed attention. This paper examines Mortlake and his St Cross plans in detail and argues that, at their core, they shared an aspiration to create a national research institute. These plans are related to the context of Dee’s pursuit of royal patronage and his idea of (...) the social and intellectual role of the natural philosopher. His ideas for a research institute are also placed in the context of alternatives to traditional sites of learning, including contemporary academies, princely courts, and independent establishments, indicating that Dee’s ideas, while part of a Renaissance vogue for such alternatives, were independent of other models. Discussion includes the historiographic debate regarding openness versus secrecy in the pursuit of natural knowledge. Finally, Dee’s ideas are contrasted with Francis Bacon’s proposal for a research institute, which also originated in the 1590s and culminated in ‘Solomon’s House.’. (shrink)

Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615–91), Robert Boyle's older sister with whom he lived for the last 23 years of his life, has lurked in the shadows of the historical record since their deaths in...

The ArugmentThis 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. (shrink)

In 1880, Charles Darwin publishedThe Power of Movement in Plants, a heavy volume of nearly six hundred pages in which he presented the results of many years of experiments conducted with his son Francis on the reaction of plants to the influence of light and gravity. His results contradicted the observations and explanations of the same phenomena offered by the German plant physiologist Julius Sachs in his influentialLehrbuch der Botanik(1868, English translation 1875). Darwin wished rather to ‘convert him than any (...) other half-dozen botanies put together’. Sachs, however, regarded Darwin's work with contempt. Taking up the topic in hisVorlesungen über Pflanzenphysiologiein 1882 and taking issue especially with Darwin's experiments on the movement of root radicles in reaction to gravity, he remarked sharply: In such experiments with roots not only is great precaution necessary, but also the experience of years and extensive knowledge of vegetable physiology, to avoid falling into errors, as did Charles Darwin and his son Francis, who, on the basis of experiments which were unskilfully made and improperly explained, came to the conclusion, as wonderful as it was sensational, that the growing point of the root, like the brain of an animal, dominates the various movements in the root. (shrink)

Surprisingly little attention has been given hitherto to the definition of the laboratory. A space has to be specially adapted to deserve that title. It would be easy to assume that the two leading experimental sciences, physics and chemistry, have historically depended in a similar way on access to a laboratory. But while chemistry, through its alchemical ancestry with batteries of stills, had many fully fledged laboratories by the seventeenth century, physics was discovering the value of mathematics. Even experimental physics (...) was content to make use of almost any indoor space, if not outdoors, ignoring the possible value of a laboratory. The development of the physics laboratory had to wait until the nineteenth century. (shrink)

How can constructivism and feminism inform and strengthen one another? The author of this text is a constructivist-feminist hermaphrodite, and so s/he addresses this question in the form of an inner dialogue. Instead of taking sex as a characteristic of individuals, s/he analyzes it as something performed locally in ways that vary from one situation to another. Investigating these performances offers constructivism an interesting theoretical opportunity and a chance to turn away from a sterile anti-epistemological stance. For feminism, a radicalized (...) notion of the construction of sexes opens up new political spaces and strategies. Constructivist texts, moreover, have the potential to "do" both the contingency and the necessity of our forms of life in their very style. (shrink)

The main focus of this essay is to closely engage with the role of scientist-subjectivity in the making of objectivity in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s book Objectivity, and Daston’s later and earlier works On Scientific Observation and The Moral Economy of Science. I have posited four challenges to the neo-Kantian and Foucauldian constructions of the co-implication of psychology and epistemology presented in these texts. Firstly, following Jacques Lacan’s work, I have argued that the subject of science constituted by the (...) mode of modern science suffers from paranoia. It is not the fear of subjectivity interfering with objectivity but the impossibility of knowing the truth of the real that causes paranoia. Here, I have argued that it is not the ethos of objectivity that drives epistemology as Daston and Galison suggest, but the pathos of paranoia. The second challenge builds upon Kant’s own denial that the perfect correspondence between the human will and the moral law is possible. Kant himself thought that an ethical human act is impossible without the component of “pathology.” This questions Daston and Galison’s argument that there is always ethical imperative at the core of epistemic virtue. The third challenge contests the way Daston and Galison take appearance for being in their application of the Foucauldian concept of technologies of the self in modeling the master scientist-self. The fourth challenge questions the notion of the psychological and unconscious in the making of epistemology in Daston’s later and earlier work. Against this background, I aim to make a claim that understanding and disclosing “entities” in the scientific domain presupposes an understanding of “being” in general. My goal is to open up the discussion for an alternative conception of the scientist-subject and thereby an affective and existential formulation of science. (shrink)

The ideals and realities of field research have shaped the development of behavioural primatology over the latter half of the twentieth century. This paper draws on interviews with primatologists as well as a survey of the scientific literature to examine the idealized notion of the field site as a natural place and the physical environment of the field as a research space. It shows that what became standard field practice emerged in the course of wide ranging debate about the techniques, (...) personal qualities and site conditions best suited to the scientific study of the natural behaviour of apes and monkeys. Although the laboratory was a constant presence in this debate, the export of techniques from the laboratory to the field was limited, due to concerns that experimental manipulation would destroy the naturalness of the behaviour. The paper goes on to demonstrate the central significance given by primatologists to the unique social, historical and ecological circumstances of particular field sites, and to sketch some of the complexities that fieldworkers contend with in trying to realize their ideals. Primatologists seek field sites that answer their questions; but once their studies become long term, they also need to find questions that answer to ever changing conditions at those sites. (shrink)

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.