ArgumentA plagiarism charge in 1827 sparked a public controversy centered between Jean-Victor Poncelet (1788–1867) and Joseph-Diez Gergonne (1771–1859) over the origin and applications of the principle of duality in geometry. Over the next three years and through the pages of various journals, monographs, letters, reviews, reports, and footnotes, vitriol between the antagonists increased as their potential publicity grew. While the historical literature offers valuable resources toward understanding the development, content, and applications of geometric duality, the hostile nature of the exchange (...) seems to have deterred an in-depth textual study of the explicitly polemical writings. We argue that the necessary collective endeavor of beginning and ending this controversy constitutes a case study in the circulation of geometry. In particular, we consider how the duality controversy functioned as a medium of communicating new fundamental principles to a wider audience of practitioners. (shrink)

‘Controversy’ is here introduced as a technical term referring to one aspect of dispute. ‘Controversy’ is here understood as referring to an ongoing antagonistic exchange over a disagreement that cannot be readily resolved by the means at hand. However, the issue is being discussed because the participants believe that the controversy will be resolveable in the framework of a more advanced view which will be generated by the dispute. It is claimed that this ‘controversy’ merits study; it is not claimed (...) that a dispute can be reduced to this aspect. In fact, it is shown that the dispute studied here involved intrigues in which personal and national prejudices served as weapons.The historical case study is a controversy conducted between G. W. Leibniz and Denis Papin. The first topic of the controversy, which began in 1689 and ended in 1691, was the ‘measure of force’, but it soon extended also to fundamental issues of mechanics and science in general: to the epistemological status of conservation laws, to the nature of abstractions in science etc.The study shows that far from being a ‘logomachia’, the ‘vis viva controversy’ reflected two exclusive legitimate interpretations of the conceptual system involved and enhanced both of them, preparing their ‘Aufhebung’ in a more elaborate and comprehensive system.An English translation of a not-yet published ‘Synopsis Controversiae’ by Denis Papin with annotations by Leibniz is attached as an appendix.Author Keywords: Conservation laws; Controversy; G. W. Leibniz; D. Papin; Vis viva. (shrink)

This article provides insight into the entwinement of the allegedly neutral category of handedness with questions of sex/gender, reproduction, dis/ability, and scientific authority. In the 1860s, Paul Broca suggested that the speech centre sat in the left brain hemisphere in most humans, and that right-handedness stemmed from this asymmetry. One century later, British psychologists Marian Annett and Chris McManus proposed biologically unconfirmed theories of how handedness and brain asymmetry were passed on in families. Their idea to integrate chance into genetic (...) models of handedness was novel, and so was their use of computerized statistics to parse out the incidence of handedness genotypes and phenotypes. Notwithstanding significant conceptual and methodological overlaps, McManus and Annett did not collaborate and proposed competing theories. I analyse the sexed/gendered dimensions of their controversy by drawing on published literature, unpublished documents, and oral history interviews. I first attend to the epistemological importance of sex/gender. Both psychologists published several iterations of their models, which increasingly relied on questions of sex/gender and reproduction. Annett additionally linked handedness with stereotypically gendered cognitive abilities. Second, I argue that using masculine-coded computer technologies contributed to Annett’s professional marginalization whereas similar methods endowed McManus with surplus authority. Finally, I show that Annett’s complicity in stabilizing sociocultural hierarchies within her theory mirrored her personal experience of marginalization based on sex/gender, age, education, and lack of institutional affiliation. This analysis exemplifies the entanglement of cognitive and social factors in scientific controversies and adds to the literature on 20th-century British women psychologists. (shrink)

Science advances by means of argument and debate. Based on a formal model of complex argumentation, this article assesses the interplay between evidential and inferential drivers in scientific controversy, and explains, in particular, why both evidence accumulation and argumentation are veritistically valuable. By improving the conditions for applying veritistic indicators , novel evidence and arguments allow us to distinguish true from false hypotheses more reliably. Because such veritistic indicators also underpin inductive reasoning, evidence accumulation and argumentation enhance the reliability of (...) inductive inference, for example, inference to the best explanation. 1 Introduction2 Theory of Dialectical Structures3 Debate Simulations4 From Evidence and Arguments to Truth: The First Route5 From Evidence to Truth: The Second Route6 Conclusion. (shrink)

The paper outlines the model of controversy spaces. The model of controversy spaces integrates two different elements of the dialectical tradition. On the one hand, dialectics in its ancient meaning: the practice of controversial dialogue. On the other hand, the model incorporates dialectics understood as a pattern of change in intellectual history, based on the confrontation between opposite standpoints. I will be argued in this paper, the dialectical tradition was almost completely left aside in modernity and substituted by a monolectic (...) approach. The model that will be outlined below aims at overcoming this view by focusing on the emergence, development and transformation of controversy spaces. (shrink)

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus, and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models (...) of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore curious to turn to the ‘passion play’ of the Scientific Revolution – whether in its early, canonical definitions or its more recent, hybridized, reconstructed and expanded versions: from Koyré to Biagioli, from Merton to Shapin – and find there a conspicuous absence of worry over what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe. Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this paper I seek to establish how ‘Life’ became a source of contention in early modern thought, and how the Scientific Revolution missed the controversy. (shrink)