In this paper, I defend causal presentism in the historiography of science. In causal presentism, historiography of science studies events, processes and practices that were causally relevant to the development of present science. I argue that causal presentism has three main virtues: First, causal presentism avoids the conceptual problems the historiography of science has recognized in its core. Secondly, causal presentism provides a clear account of what counts as historical explanatory understanding about science. Thirdly, causal presentism enables novel ways to (...) address several conceptual and methodological problems in the historiography of science. The conclusion is that causal presentism is distinctively strong position with respect to the historiography of science. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an explication of the notion of local explanation. In the literature, local explanations are considered as metaphysically and methodologically satisfactory: local explanations reveal the contingency of science and provide a methodologically sound historiography of science. However, the lack of explication of the notion of local explanation makes these claims difficult to assess. The explication provided in this paper connects the degree of locality of an explanans to the degree of contingency of the explanandum. Moreover, the (...) explication is shown to be compatible with the methodological need for a general consideration in the historiography of science. In this way, the explication satisfies the need to explicate an important notion, connects local explanations and contingency, and enables us to see how local explanations and general considerations can be connected. However, the explication also sheds critical light on many claims and expectations that are associated with local explanations and their satisfactoriness. (shrink)

Science in film, and usual equivalents such asscience on filmorscience on screen, refer to the cinematographic representation, staging, and enactment of actors, information, and processes involved in any aspect or dimension of science and its history. Of course, boundaries are blurry, and films shot as research tools or documentation also display science on screen. Nonetheless, they generally count asscientific film, andscience inandon filmorscreentend to designate productions whose purpose is entertainment and education. Moreover, these two purposes are often combined, and inherently (...) concern empirical, methodological, and conceptual challenges associated withpopularization,science communication, and thepublic understanding of science. It is in these areas that the notion of thedeficit modelemerged to designate a point of view and a mode of understanding, as well as a set of practical and theoretical problems about the relationship between science and the public. (shrink)

This article examines the communication networks within and between science and technology studies (STS) and the history of science. In particular, journal relatedness data are used to analyze some of the structural features of their disciplinary identities and relationships. The results first show that, although the history of science is more than half a century older than STS, the size of the STS network is more than twice that of the history of science network. Further, while a majority of the (...) journals in the STS network are connected by weak ties, about half of the history of science network consists of strong ties. The history of science network is thus more cohesive than the STS network. The relatively strong cohesion within the history of science network is associated with comparatively high degrees of intra-disciplinary communication, but comparatively weak ties to only a few related disciplines. The analysis also shows that very few members of the history of science cliques are situated on the shortest path between both specialties. Moreover, given the relatively impermeable nature of the history of science network, the latter partially depends on STS to reach some of the neighboring disciplines. (shrink)

We argue that industrial hazards have remained an integral feature of the international and ‘global’ economy since the early modern period, and invite historians of science into the study of their history. The growth and dissemination of knowledge about these hazards, as well as the production and trade that generate them, continue to generate deep inequalities in just who is exposed to them, as illustrated by the shifting impact of the asbestos-related disease plague in the past half-century. Exposure levels in (...) poorer countries have risen as those in affluent societies have fallen, the latter due as much to popular protest and media exposure as to scientific expertise. We suggest that the best way to understand the formation of knowledge about these hazards is not to return to the epistemological battlegrounds of the ‘science wars’ of the 1990s but to seek more interdisciplinary integration of the multifaceted ways that material bodies, environments and interests contribute to an understanding of such hazards and injuries. We propose the framework of ‘industrial-hazard regimes’ as an avenue into the ways in which knowledge about risks and dangers at work are created, translated and contested in different countries and times. While urging a return, in some respects, to the early models of ‘progressive enlightenment’ devised by radical commentators and pioneering historians of the industrial hazard in the early twentieth century, we would revise these early approaches, and also offer some sceptical commentary on the difficulties raised, more recently, by narratives of ‘heroic populism’ or ‘anti-science epidemiology’. The critical standpoints for which we argue recognize the diverse social and political identities and loyalties not only of past contributors to the controversies on industrial hazard, but also of historians of science and medicine themselves. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was developed at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in the 1930s and 1940s. It became a highly successful and highly controversial psychometric tool. In professional terms, psychometric tools such as the MMPI transformed psychology and psychiatry. Psychometric instruments thus readily fit into the developmental history of psychology, psychiatry, and neurology; they were a significant part of the narrative of those fields’ advances in understanding, intervening, and treating people with mental illnesses. At the same time, (...) the advent of such tools also fits into a history of those disciplines that records the rise of obsessional observational and evaluative techniques and technologies in order to facilitate patterns of social control that became typical during the Progressive Era in the United States and after. It was those patterns that also nurtured the resistance to psychometrics that emerged during the Vietnam War and after. (shrink)

The sociocultural landscape of contemporaneity can be represented as a porous inhomogeneous space consisting of border zones. These zones, understood by P. Galison as “local coordination of beliefs and actions,” can be deployed due to already existing conditions, for example, a project may arise at a university. However, such zones do not create sustainable social configurations and infrastructures associated with new areas of knowledge. In this article, we expand the concept of trading zones and call them zones requiring local ontologies (...) that arise on the border between different knowledge and imagination systems and, in turn, require their own infrastructure. This approach supports the view on humanities not as “pre-packaged” knowledge, but as special “technique” forming local ontologies. For a humanities-as-technique to emerge, it is necessary that two or more systems of knowledge coincide in time and form an intermediate zone, on the basis of which some local ontology can unfold. Thus, for example, when combining contemporary philosophy and contemporary mathematics, new images of knowledge emerge. Humanities-as-technique are considered as the basis for the establishment of trading zones, which are understood as local ontologies. We also propose a system of concepts that can be used to describe and construct these trading zones on the territory of the humanities in a techno-oriented cultural environment. (shrink)

Paul Hoyningen-Huene argues that what makes scientific knowledge special is its systematic character, and that this can be used to solve the demarcation problem. He labels this STDC: “Systematicity Theory’s Demarcation Criterion.” This paper argues that STDC fails, because there are areas of intellectual activity that are highly systematic, but that the great majority of scientists and historians and philosophers of science do not accept as scientific. These include homepathy, creationism, and climate change denial. I designate these activities “facsimile sciences” (...) because they mimic the appearance of science but are not, by the standards of philosophers and scientists, scientific. This suggests that we need additional criteria to demarcate science from non-science and/ or nonsense. (shrink)

American intellectual history in the future will be embodied, embedded, and extended. Building on a sturdy foundation of past practices, intellectual historians will consolidate the advances of the last half-century and continue to study ideas articulated in multiple registers, by multiple historical actors, for multiple purposes.

The principles of the 3Rs—replacement, refinement, and reduction—strongly shape discussion of methods for performing more humane animal research and the regulation of this contested area of technoscience. This special issue looks back to the origins of the 3Rs principles through five papers that explore how it is enacted and challenged in practice and that develop critical considerations about its future. Three themes connect the papers in this special issue. These are the multiplicity of roles enacted by those who use and (...) care for animals in research, the distribution of “feelings that matter” across species and spaces of laboratory animal practice, and the growing importance of “cultures of care” in animal research. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

With the demand for “counter-knowledge” in the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, “counter-experts” became an integral part of politics. In the field of environmental activism, counter-experts were particularly well represented in regions and agglomerations with high levels of industrial pollution. This essay argues that awareness correlated with a mode of knowledge production that was typical for the environmental sciences in the twentieth century. The history of the environmental sciences throughout that period was shaped by regional epistemologies, often emerging (...) in the context of large-scale infrastructural projects. Many counter-experts therefore had strong ties with the field of the environmental sciences. The article traces three influential counter-experts in the Frankfurt Main region by 1980: the pastor Kurt Oeser; scientific green activist Jutta Ditfurth; and the project of a “social natural science” related to the Darmstadt philosopher Gernot Böhme. (shrink)

The on-going discussion about a new empiricism in the study of the medical humanities has lead to a misapprehension about the problems attendant to representing health and illness. The difficulty in understanding the politics of health and illness as well as the concomitant new aestheticism that has arisen concerning its representation demands a rethinking of these categories in the 21st century. Obesity can provide a model for the importance of this problem today.

Excellence and frontier research have made inroads into European research policymaking and structure political agendas, funding programs and evaluation practices. The two concepts travelled a long way from the United States and have derived from contexts outside of science. Following their conceptual journey, we ask how excellence and frontier research have percolated into European science and higher education policies and how they have turned into lubricants of competition that buttress an ongoing reform process in Europe.

The essay outlines the development of the history of science and medicine in Croatia since the first half of the 20th century, addressing in more detail some recent research trends that seem to have the potential to reshape and reposition this relatively marginal field within the national academic landscape. It examines the origins and implication of the “historicization” of the history of science, as manifested in, among other things, tentative convergence between the history of science and medicine and “general” history. (...) Also considered are changes in the understanding of what counts as science and who as a historian of science within a specialist community in a small country that has struggled with balancing between the national and wider contexts, and with embracing newer conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches. (shrink)

The scope and mission of the history of science have been constant objects of reflection and debate within the profession. Recently, Lorraine Daston has called for a shift of focus: from the history of science to the history of knowledge. Such a move is an attempt at broadening the field and ridding it of the contradictions deriving from its modernist myth of origin and principle of demarcation. Taking the move from a pluralistic concept of medicine, the present paper explores the (...) actual and possible contributions that a history of knowledge can offer to the history of medicine in particular. As we will argue, the history of medicine has always been a history of knowledge, but for good reasons has always stuck to the concept of medicine as its object and problem throughout the ages, including the modern, scientific one. We argue that, in the history of medicine, the demarcation between scientific and non‐scientific represents an accident, but is not foundational as in the case of natural science. Furthermore, the history of medicine programmatically played a role in at least two academic domains (history proper and medical education), adjusting historical narratives of medical knowledge to its audience. Accordingly, we underscore that the history of both science and medicine, as traditionally defined, already provides room for almost the whole spectrum of approaches to history. Moreover, their different myths of origin can, and indeed must, be included in the reflexivity of the historical gaze. We argue that the position towards a history of science, medicine, or knowledge is not a question of narrative or theory, rather, it is a question of relevance and awareness of extant contexts. (shrink)

Contribution to a symposium on Kostas Gavroglu and Ana Simões, Neither Physics nor Chemistry, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What role does context play in the mind and brain sciences? This introductory article, “Of Means and Ends,” explores that question through its focus on the ways scientists and physicians engaged with and constructed technology in the mind and brain sciences in the twentieth century. This topical issue addresses how scientists, physicians, and psychologists came to see the ends of technology as important in-and-of themselves. In so doing, the authors of these essays offer an interpretation of historian Paul Forman's revisionist (...) and highly contextualist chronology of the twentieth century, which presents the comparatively recent tendency to aggrandize the ends of technology as evidence of a major, epochal transformation in the epistemic culture of twentieth-century American science. This collection of papers suggests that it was in the vanguard of such fields as psychology, psychiatry, and neurophysiology in North America and Europe that the ends and applications of technology became important in-and-of themselves. (shrink)

The article argues for the social production of curiosity. Due its motivating characteristic, curiosity is reconceptualized as an epistemic drive which organizes the social production of knowledge under given socio-historical and local-cultural circumstances. First, historical, philosophical, and sociological literature is reviewed to give a context for the argument. Then a theoretical apparatus is developed considering the emergence, development, and impact of epistemic drives which serves as a foundation for empirical analysis. The second part demonstrates applicability by discussing the problem of (...) economic incentives in scientific research. I argue that scientific projects with little to none immediate economic return have a significant disadvantage in acquiring funding which in turn impacts the mobilization of curiosity in their field. A tendency which systematically yields a disproportionate distribution of knowledge. In conclusion, the article suggests the usefulness of the epistemic drive notion in understanding curiosity as a sociological object. (shrink)

Bruno Latour have been included among the ranks of social constructivism since the 1990’s. In this paper, we analyze one of Latour’s most cited -and criticized- papers, in which he sustained that to say that Ramses II died because of tuberculosis was a nonsense, as ridiculous as to say the he died “of machine gun fire”. To do that, we will contextualize his text in its historical period of production, we will identify Latour’s ontological commitments, and we will introduce his (...) theory on the construction of facts and what he calls circulating reference. We will conclude that Latour was right, neither Ramses II died because of tuberculosis, nor he is a social constructivist. (shrink)

This special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values critically explores a new stage in which the life sciences and biomedical practices have entered. This new stage is marked by postgenomic developments and an increased interest of life sciences in the everyday lives of people outside laboratories and clinical settings. Furthermore, particular attention is given to many chronic and degenerative disorders such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or developmental disorders. These developments coincide—or have become entangled—with a new set of interests (...) that an anthropologically inclined science and technology studies is bringing to the analyses of biomedical practices. An increased interest is observed in the anthropologically inclined STS in studying phenomena on different scales and in exploring fields that are not readily dominated by technoscientific rationality in practice. The introduction to the special issue examines briefly these developments and situates them in a broader genealogy of different movements that have taken place in the anthropologically inclined subfield of STS since the late 1970s and early 1980s. (shrink)

This paper sketches a historical account of interdisciplinarity. A central claim advanced is that the modern array of scientific and humanistic disciplines and interdisciplinarity emerged together; both are moving targets, which must therefore be studied historically in relation to one another as institutionalized practices. A second claim is that of a steadily increasing complexity; new fields emerged on the boundaries of existing disciplines beginning in the late nineteenth century, followed by multi- and transdisciplinary initiatives in the twentieth, and finally transdisciplinary (...) programmatic research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The latter two phases in this development have been driven primarily by funding agencies seeking to move the sciences in particular directions deemed socially or politically desirable (in dictatorships as well as democracies), while the existing disciplines remained in place and new ones came into being. Such policy initiatives have transformed both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in unanticipated ways. The question whether multi- or transdisciplinary arrangements produce epistemically better science or scholarship appears not to have been raised, let alone examined, by the policy actors driving their creation. (shrink)

Since the early 1980s, actor-network theory has contested the status of “context” as an explanatory resource. Expressions and concepts such as “transformations of social worlds,” “enactments,” and “ontological politics” provide resources for grasping the ways in which agents actively transform the world and add something new. This has been of immense importance and serves as a warning against reducing events and actors to a given context. But a side effect of this forward looking move is that not enough attention is (...) given to that which enables issues and situations to emerge in the first place. Moreover, the focus on that which is constantly being enacted seems to have privileged the contemporary as the object of study and ethnography as the method of inquiry. History and the study of texts—from the past—seem, increasingly, to get lost in Science and Technology Studies. The aim of this article is instead to use actor-network theory resources as a historicizing method. The article explores the tense concern for the animal in political debates at the turn of the twentieth century. The article argues that contexts should not be seen as something external, but rather integral to the relevant text and situation, thus the very issue at stake. (shrink)

This essay takes a historical view on “citizen science” by exploring its socialist version via the case of a Soviet amateur seismologist Vladimir Mannar. In the wake of the 1948 Ashgabat earthquake, which coincided with Lysenko’s victory in his campaign against genetics, Mannar launched an aborted campaign for a participatory “socialist seismology.” Mannar co-opted Lysenkoist language of science for the people and gained professional status within professional seismology but was shut out by the experts capitalizing on a “big science” imperative (...) of cold war. Mannar’s personal experiences of navigating competing pulls of cold war seismology and his vision of “people’s seismology,” marginalized within increasingly technical and instrumental cold war science, shed light on oxymoronic nature of citizen science, and the clash between participatory vision of science and an increasing reliance on high-level technical expertise. This case provides a vantage point from which to examine the dual nature of citizen science with its dual loyalties, ambiguities, and the constantly renegotiated status of data—the raison d’être and the most tangible outcome of the initiatives unfolded on the outer fringes of academic science. (shrink)