ABSTRACT This essay analyzes how academic institutions, government agencies, and the nascent biotech industry contested the legal ownership of recombinant DNA technology in the name of the public interest. It reconstructs the way a small but influential group of government officials and university research administrators introduced a new framework for the commercialization of academic research in the context of a national debate over scientific research's contributions to American economic prosperity and public health. They claimed that private ownership of inventions arising (...) from public support would provide a powerful means to liberate biomedical discoveries for public benefit. This articulation of the causal link between private ownership and the public interest, it is argued, justified a new set of expectations about the use of research results arising from government or public support, in which commercialization became a new public obligation for academic researchers. By highlighting the broader economic and legal shifts that prompted the reconfiguration of the ownership of public knowledge in late twentieth‐century American capitalism, the essay examines the threads of policy‐informed legal ideas that came together to affirm private ownership of biomedical knowledge as germane to the public interest in the coming of age of biotechnology and genetic medicine. (shrink)

For over 50 years, Minerva has been one of the leading independent journals in the study of ‘science, learning and policy’. Its pages have much to say about the origins and conduct of the ‘intellectual Cold War’, the defence of academic freedom, the emergence of modernization theory, and pioneering strategies in the social studies of science. This paper revisits Minerva through the life and times of its founding Editor, Edward Shils, and traces his influence on its early years – from (...) its association with the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s, to the higher reaches of research policy in the 1990s. At the close of his life, Minerva continued to espouse Shils’ commitment to what he saw as the fundamental Enlightenment traditions of consensus, civility, and community. In the 21st century, with the achievements of science producing rapid change in every walk of life, his legacy so far retains an established place in the history of scholarship. Whether that legacy will endure – and if so, what role Minerva will play in its defence – remain key questions for the coming generation. (shrink)

Robert Maxwell Young's first book Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, written from 1960 to 1965, still merits reading as a study of the naturalization of mind and its relation to social thought in Victorian Britain. I examine the book from two perspectives that give the volume its unique character: first, Young's interest in psychology, which he considered should be used to inform humane professional practices and be the basis of social reform; second, new approaches to the history (...) of scientific ideas. I trace Young's intellectual interests to the Yale Philosophy Department, the Cambridge Department of Experimental Psychology and a new history and philosophy of science community. Although Young changed his political outlook and historiography radically after 1965, he always remained faithful to ideas about thought and practice described in Mind, Brain. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” endorses Nicholas Gaskill's analysis of Rorty's limited legacy in the field of science and technology studies. It shows how, rather than engaging with scientific practice in a substantial way, Rorty relied heavily on the ideas of Thomas Kuhn. The article surveys the development of science studies since Kuhn's day, sketching an intellectual genealogy for Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, whose work addresses—much more directly than Rorty's—current concerns with the (...) climate crisis and environmental degradation. (shrink)

I respond to Rupert Read's highly critical review of my Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul Science . In contrast to my pro-Popper take on the debate, Read promotes a Wittgenstein-inflected Kuhn, whom I dub "Kuhnenstein." Kuhnenstein is largely the figment of Read's—and others'—fertile philosophical imagination as channeled through scholastic philosophical practice. Contra Read, I argue that Kuhnenstein provides not only a poor basis for social epistemology but Kuhnenstein's prominence itself exemplifies a poor social epistemology for philosophy. Nevertheless, (...) like Read, I wish to speak in favor of amateurism in philosophy; for me, the exemplar is the dialectical Popper rather than the gnomic and dogmatic Kuhnenstein. Key Words: Kuhnenstein • social epistemology • Kuhn • Popper • Wittgenstein • skepticism • language therapy • amateurism. (shrink)

This paper challenges the claim that science is metaphysically neutral upheld by contenders of the separation of peacefully co-existent science and religion and by evolutionary theists. True, naturalistic metaphysical claims can neither be refuted nor proved and are thus distinct from empirical hypotheses. However, metaphysical assumptions not only regulate the theoretical and empirical study of nature, but are increasingly supported by the growing empirical body of science. This historically evolving interaction has contributed to the development of a naturalistic worldview that (...) renounces the necessity of a transcendent god and of purposeful design. The thesis presented here differs not only from the claims of the “separatists” and of evolutionary theists. In pointing to the metaphysical aspects of science, I also criticize the failure of some evolutionary naturalists to distinguish between empirical and metaphysical contentions. Most important, based on the examination of science suggested here, creationists’ false accusation that science is only a naturalistic dogma is refuted. Finally, the difficulties involved in the position endorsed here for the public support of evolution are acknowledged, taking into account the high religious profile of the American society and the social and political context in the US and in other countries. (shrink)

This article examines how experimental psychology experienced a revolution as cognitive science replaced behaviorism in the mid-20th century. This transition in the scientific account of human nature involved making normal what had once been normative: borrowing ideas of democratic thinking from political culture and conceptions of good thinking from philosophy of science to describe humans as active, creatively thinking beings, rather than as organisms that simply respond to environmental conditions. Reflexive social and intellectual practices were central to this process as (...) cognitive scientists used anti-positivist philosophy of science simultaneously to justify their own work as valid and also as a model of human thinking. In the process, the normative philosophy of science or ‘good academic thinking’ that cognitive scientists used to reshape the discipline of psychology and characterize themselves became, at the same time, the descriptive model of human nature. (shrink)

Naukovedenie (literarily meaning ‘science studies’), was first institutionalized in the Soviet Union in the twenties, then resurfaced and was widely publicized in the sixties, as a new mode of reflection on science, its history, its intellectual foundations, and its management, after which it dominated Soviet historiography of science until perestroika . Tracing the history of meta-studies of science in the USSR from its early institutionalization in the twenties when various political, theoretical and institutional struggles set the stage for the development (...) of the field, to the sixties when the field resurfaced within the particular political context of the Cold War, and using the history of Moscow Institute for the History of Science and Technology as a case-study, I situate Soviet naukovedenie project within the culture of late-socialism in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, asking what this discourse meant for its creators and practitioners, as well as for the high-ranked Soviet officials who provided the authoritative support for this field. (shrink)

The Congress for Cultural Freedom is remembered as a paramount example of the “cultural cold wars.” In this paper, I discuss the ways in which this powerful transnational organization sought to promote “science studies” as a distinct – and politically relevant – area of expertise, and part of the CCF broader agenda to offer a renewed framework for liberalism. By means of its Study Groups, international conferences and its periodicals, such as Minerva, the Congress developed into an influential forum for (...) examining the ways Big Science impacted the relations between science, society, and politics, thus constituting a semi-institutional niche for Science Studies before its professionalization within academia during the 1970s. I argue that the Congress contributed to the construction of public space in which the relations between science, society and politics were debated, and science was reconceptualized as a social activity. The vision of “science studies” the CCF-associated intellectuals promulgated was different from the science studies we know today. Yet, this alternative vision, in which the issues of science politics appeared inseparable from those of science policy, science organization, and science governance, constituted the “pre-history” of science studies today. (shrink)

The Congress for Cultural Freedom is remembered as a paramount example of the “cultural cold wars.” In this paper, I discuss the ways in which this powerful transnational organization sought to promote “science studies” as a distinct – and politically relevant – area of expertise, and part of the CCF broader agenda to offer a renewed framework for liberalism. By means of its Study Groups, international conferences and its periodicals, such as Minerva, the Congress developed into an influential forum for (...) examining the ways Big Science impacted the relations between science, society, and politics, thus constituting a semi-institutional niche for Science Studies before its professionalization within academia during the 1970s. I argue that the Congress contributed to the construction of public space in which the relations between science, society and politics were debated, and science was reconceptualized as a social activity. The vision of “science studies” the CCF-associated intellectuals promulgated was different from the science studies we know today. Yet, this alternative vision, in which the issues of science politics appeared inseparable from those of science policy, science organization, and science governance, constituted the “pre-history” of science studies today. (shrink)