What makes any investigative field a scientific discipline? This article argues that disciplines are ever-changing frameworks within which scientific activity is organised. Moreover, disciplinarity is not a yes or no proposition: scientific activities may achieve degrees of identity development. Degree of consensus is the key, and consensus on many questions (conceptual, methodological, institutional, and social) varies among sciences. Lastly, disciplinary development is non-teleological. Disciplines pass through no regular stages on their way from immature to mature status, designations articulated within the (...) rhetoric of discipline formation. Scientists assemble disciplines using many elements: phenomena, methods, instruments, theories, analytical techniques, and institutional tools such as journals, government bureaus, and university positions. Scientists created geophysics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through such a combination. Whether geophysics became a discipline depends on how discipline is defined. (shrink)

That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and ‘the West’. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product.

In 1946, the British biochemist Joseph Needham returned from a four-year stay in China. Needham scholars have considered this visit as a revelatory period that paved the way for his famous book seriesScience and Civilization in China. Surprisingly, however, Needham's actual time in China has remained largely unstudied over the last seventy years. As director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office, Needham travelled throughout Free China to promote cooperation between British and Chinese scientists to contain the Japanese invasion during the (...) Second World War. By rediscovering Needham's peregrinations, this paper re-examines the origins of his fascination for China. First, it contests the widely held idea that this Chinese episode is quite separate and different from Needham's first half-life as a leftist scientist. Second, it demonstrates how the political and philosophical commitments he inherited from the social relations of science movement, and his biochemical research, shaped his interest in China's past. Finally, this paper recounts these forgotten years to reveal their implications for his later pursuits as historian of science and as director of the natural-science division of UNESCO. It highlights how, while in China, Needham co-constituted the philosophical tenets of his scientific programme at UNESCO and the conceptual foundations of hisSCC. (shrink)

This paper examines the early years of decision making in the award of the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, and shows how the prize became a tool in the boundary work which upheld the social demarcations between scientists and inventors, as well as promoting a particular normative view of individual scientific achievement. The Nobel committees were charged with rewarding scientific achievements that benefited humankind: their interpretation of that criterion, however, turned in the first instance on their assessment of the (...) groundbreaking nature of the ‘science’, with the applied or practical ‘benefits’ of that discovery being treated as very much secondary factors in the award. Through an interrogation of the reports sent by the committees to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, this paper shows how committee members depended on a notion of ‘post-dated utilitarianism’ in reconciling potential tension between rewarding basic and applied science, and explores the ways in which the annual prize both shaped, and was shaped by, media perceptions of scientific virtue. (shrink)