In 1967, American biologist Adrian Wenner (1928-) launched an extensive challenge to Karl von Frisch's (1886-1982) theory that bees communicate to each other the direction and distance of food sources by a symbolic dance language. Wenner and various collaborators argued that bees locate foods solely by odors. Although the dispute had largely run its course by 1973 -- von Frisch was awarded a Nobel Prize, while Wenner withdrew from active bee research -- it offers us a rare window into mid-twentieth (...) century discussions about animals, language, and cognition. Historians, sociologists, and scientists have commented on the debate and its outcome, but none has seriously questioned why von Frisch and Wenner pursued such different explanations of the bees' dances. In this paper, I explore von Frisch and Wenner's differing visions of animals and their behaviors and show how these contributed to their respective positions. Von Frisch's early-twentieth-century training in experimental physiology disposed him to focus on individual animals, their abilities, and their behaviors' evolutionary significance. Wenner, by contrast, was trained in mathematics and statistics and the Schneirla school of behavior. He viewed the bees' behaviors probabilistically with an eye toward the entire hive and its surroundings and ultimately explained them in terms of simple stimulus--response conditioning. Finally, while the debate was resolved in von Frisch's favor, he neither waged nor won the battle by himself. Instead, I show that practitioners, whose agendas ranged from the nascent fields of sociobiology to cognitive ethology, took up the cause of the communicating bees. (shrink)

There is an extensive literature comparing the politics, sociology and economics of the United States and Canada, but very little work comparing the role that public intellectuals play in the space of public opinion and how their ideas are received in both nations simultaneously. Noam Chomsky provides a theoretically useful example of an established academic and public intellectual whose reputation is deeply contested in both countries. Our comparative case study offers leverage to contribute to debates on the sociology of knowledge, (...) reputations, intellectuals, and the politics of professors using data from six major Canadian and American newspapers from 1995–2009 and an innovative coding of media portrayal. Earlier work has demonstrated that Chomsky is discussed as a public intellectual more prominently in Canada than in the United States (McLaughlin and Townsley in Canadian Review of Sociology, 48(4):341–368, 2011). Here we examine the comparative construction of a “public intellectual” reputation in the context of significant political change. We document small differences between the Canadian and American receptions of Chomsky, show change in the patterns of portrayal and number of publications over time, and offer an analysis of differences between political attacks and consecrations. We demonstrate more engagement with Chomsky’s political view in Canada than in the United States, a rise in Chomsky’s fame post 9/11, and illustrate clear political patterns in attempts to marginalize him. (shrink)

This paper argues that the main global critiques of scientism lose their punch because they rely on an uncharitable definition of their target. It focuses on epistemological scientism and divides it into four categories in terms of how strong (science is the only source of knowledge) or weak (science is the best source of knowledge) and how narrow (only natural sciences) or broad (all sciences or at least not only the natural sciences) they are. Two central arguments against scientism, the (...) (false) dilemma and self‐referential incoherence, are analysed. Of the four types of epistemological scientism, three can deal with these counterarguments by utilizing two methodological principles: epistemic evaluability of reliability and epistemic opportunism. One hopes that these considerations will steer the discussion on scientism to more fruitful pastures in the future. For example, there are interesting methodological considerations concerning what evaluability or reliability and epistemic opportunism entail. (shrink)

This paper discusses the work of Noam Chomsky in the context of democracy, the media, and education. Through the analysis of selected works, a critical perspective emerges. This view demands that educators at all levels understand and confront the often deleterious effects the media can have on students' social and political views and further how the media can undermine democratic action in schools and society.

By the early part of the twentieth century, academia in the English-speaking world had stabilized (or ossified!) into a set of scientific and humanistic disciplines that still survives at the century’s end. The natural sciences have such disciplines as physics, chemistry, and biology, and the social sciences include economics, psychology, and sociology. These disciplines provide a convenient organizing principle for university departments and professional organizations, but they often bear little relation to cuttingedge research, which can concern topics that cut across (...) or occur at the boundaries of two or more of the established disciplines. When this happens, productive research and teaching must be interdisciplinary. Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind, embracing psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. It is undoubtedly one of the major interdisciplinary successes of the twentieth century, with its own society, journal, and textbooks, and with more than sixty cognitive science programs established at universities in North American and Europe. This paper is an attempt to answer the question: What are the factors contributing to the success of the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science? My discussion is organized around the metaphor of the trading zone, a novel and fertile analogy that Gallison (1997) developed for his rich and detailed discussion of the practices of twentieth-century physics. To understand the diverse groups of December 1, 2006 experimenters and theoreticians, Gallison presents their interactions in terms of the trading zones described by anthropologists: Subcultures trade. Anthropologists have extensively studied how different groups, with radically different ways of dividing up the world and symbolically organizing its parts, can not only exchange goods but also depend essentially on those trades.. (shrink)