Relying on the results of the fist paper of this pair (Vermeir, 2004), which argued the importance of theories of the imagination in debates on divination, I unearth the role of the imagination in a discussion on dowsing. References to the imagination often stayed implicit because of its negative associations, but I show in detail how the imagination was used to negotiate between the material and the spiritual, and between the natural, the supernatural and the moral. Natural philosophers, theologians as (...) well as moralists struggled for authority over divinatory phenomena. The debate evolved around the questions whether moral states could be naturalised and whether subtle material vapours could have moral qualities. (shrink)

Like it or not, a big picture of the history of science is something which we cannot avoid. Big pictures are, of course, thoroughly out of fashion at the moment; those committed to specialist research find them simplistic and insufficiently complex and nuanced, while postmodernists regard them as simply impossible. But however specialist we may be in our research, however scornful of the immaturity of grand narratives, it is not so easy to escape from dependence – acknowledged or not – (...) on a big picture. When we define our research as part of the history of science, we implicitly invoke a big picture of that history to give identity and meaning to our specialism. When we teach the history of science, even if we do not present a big picture explicitly, our students already have a big picture of that history which they bring to our classes and into which they fit whatever we say, no matter how many complications and refinements and contradictions we put before them – unless we offer them an alternative big picture. (shrink)

In the 17th and 18th century republic of letters the problem of scientific fraud was met with a discourse of charlatanism. Departing from Johann Burckhard Menckes famous treatise on the Charlatanry of the learned the following essay traces how the accusations of academic and scientific misconduct put in terms of ‚charlatanry’ primarily helped to produce the new species of the erudite ‚charlatan’. Facing a growing complexity of scientific culture this new frame of meaning, structured by numerous examples of scientific misconduct (...) offered a new way of orientation in the world of learning. But besides its cognitive impacts the discourse of charlatanry allowed to create symbolic boundaries, which determined decisions upon the affiliation or non affiliation to the new forming scientific community by separating honourable from dishonourable scientific personae. Speaking of charlatanry therefore always implied a social distinction as much as a scientific. The discourses on charlatanry also mirror differentiations within the scientific field. At first dominated by a critique built on courteous or bourgeois values, the scientific field later on developed its own criteria of appraisal like authorship, originality, transparency etc. Attracting the attention of a further growing public sphere, the explicit verbalisation of claims not relating to the value system of a republic of letters primarily concerned with the production and distribution of knowledge finally led up to a more implicit moral economy of science. A change that at a large scale level can be described both as an internalisation of the values of scientific conduct and a differentiation between justiciable and unjusticiable transgressions of the norms set up by the scientific community. (shrink)