The Price of Success: Sociologist Harry Alpert,the NSF's First Social Science Policy Architect

Harry Alpert (1912–1977), the US sociologist, is best-known for his directorship of the National Science Foundation's social science programme in the 1950s. This study extends our understanding of Alpert in two main ways: first, by examining the earlier development of his views and career. Beginning with his 1939 biography of Emile Durkheim, we explore the early development of Alpert's views about foundational questions concerning the scientific status of sociology and social science more generally, proper social science methodology, the practical value of social science, the academic institutionalisation of sociology, and the unity-of-science viewpoint. Second, this paper illuminates Alpert's complex involvement with certain tensions in mid-century US social science that were themselves linked to major transformations in national science policy, public patronage, and unequal relations between the social and natural sciences. We show that Alpert's views about the intellectual foundations, practical relevance, and institutional standing of the social sciences were, in some important respects, at odds with his NSF policy work. Although remembered as a quantitative evangelist and advocate for the unity-of-science viewpoint, Alpert was in fact an urbane critic of natural-science envy, social scientific certainty, and what he saw as excessive devotion to quantitative methods.     

The letter,the dictionary and the laboratory: translating chemistry and mineralogy in eighteenth-century France

SUMMARY

Eighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition (dictionaries, grammars and other helpful materials, such as translated works in both languages), texts acquisition and dissemination (including author's additions and corrections, oral presentations in academic meetings and announcements of forthcoming translations).

The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to become a collective enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements (Collection académique, 1755–79) or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts (Guyton de Morveau's ‘Bureau de traduction de Dijon’, devoted to chemistry and mineralogy, 1781–90). That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts (colour, odour, shape of crystals, etc.) with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation – with both the experiments and the translations – the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation.     

A New Translation of and Guide to Newton's Principia

This paper discusses the emergence of new medical experimental specialties at the Medical School of Surgery (Escola Médico-Cirúrgica) and the Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon University (Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Lisboa) between 1897 and 1946, as a result of the activities of Marck Athias's (1875–1946) histophysiology research school. In 1897, Marck Athias, a Portuguese physician who had graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, founded a research school in Lisbon along the lines of Michael Foster's physiology research school in England and Franz Hofmeister's physiological chemistry school in Germany. His research programme was highly innovative in Portugal. Not only did it bring together many disciples and co-workers, but it branched out and created new medical specialties within Portuguese medical science. These new disciplinary areas grew out of the study of the histology of the nervous system but eventually expanded into normal and pathological histophysiology, physiological chemistry and experimental endocrinology. The esprit de corps that existed between research school members ensured the school's success and influence in various fields social and political as well as scientific. Athias's school was strongly influenced by positivist ideals and promoted a teaching and research style that sought inspiration in Humboldt's university model, thus helping to bring about a change in the dominant scientific ethos and to modernize scientific research in Portugal during the first half of the twentieth century.     

The abundant world: Paul Feyerabend's metaphysics of science

The goal of this paper is to provide an interpretation of Feyerabend's metaphysics of science as found in late works like Conquest of Abundance and Tyranny of Science. Feyerabend's late metaphysics consists of an attempt to criticize and provide a systematic alternative to traditional scientific realism, a package of views he sometimes referred to as “scientific materialism.” Scientific materialism is objectionable not only on metaphysical grounds, nor because it provides a poor ground for understanding science, but because it implies problematic claims about the epistemic and cultural authority of science, claims incompatible with situating science properly in democratic societies. I show how Feyerabend's metaphysical view, which I call “the abundant world” or “abundant realism,” constitute a sophisticated and challenging form of ontological pluralism that makes interesting connections with contemporary philosophy of science and issues of the political and policy role of science in a democratic society.     

'Science Fights Death': David Stark Murray,Science, and Socialism in Interwar Britain

The pathologist David Stark Murray (1900-77) was a founder and leading member of the Socialist Medical Association (SMA), an organization affiliated to the Labour Party and instrumental in shaping its health policy in the period up to 1945. Murray played a prominent role in the SMA as a member of its Executive Committee and as Editor of its journal MedicineToday and Tomorrow. This article examines Murray's popular writings about science during the interwar period, focusing on his emphasis on the relationship between, on the one hand, scientific knowledge and scientific method; and, on the other, a socialized health service and a socialist society.     

From ‘Beastly Philosophy’ to Medical Genetics: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union

This essay offers an overview of the three distinct periods in the development of Russian eugenics: Imperial (1900–1917), Bolshevik (1917–1929), and Stalinist (1930–1939). Began during the Imperial era as a particular discourse on the issues of human heredity, diversity, and evolution, in the early years of the Bolshevik rule eugenics was quickly institutionalized as a scientific discipline—complete with societies, research establishments, and periodicals—that aspired an extensive grassroots following, generated lively public debates, and exerted considerable influence on a range of medical, public health, and social policies. In the late 1920s, in the wake of Joseph Stalin's ‘Great Break’, eugenics came under intense critique as a ‘bourgeois’ science and its proponents quickly reconstituted their enterprise as ‘medical genetics’. Yet, after a brief period of rapid growth during the early 1930s, medical genetics was dismantled as a ‘fascist science’ towards the end of the decade. Based on published and original research, this essay examines the factors that account for such an unusual—as compared to the development of eugenics in other locales during the same period—historical trajectory of Russian eugenics.     

Contemporary Darwinism as a worldview

The most public-facing forms of contemporary Darwinism happily promote its worldview ambitions. Popular works, by the likes of Richard Dawkins, deflect associations with eugenics and social Darwinism, but also extend the reach of Darwinism beyond biology into social policy, politics, and ethics. Critics of the enterprise fall into two categories. Advocates of Intelligent Design and secular philosophers (like Mary Midgley and Thomas Nagel) recognise it as a worldview and argue against its implications. Scholars in the rhetoric of science or science communication, however, typically take the view that Darwinism isn't a worldview, but a scientific theory, which has been improperly embellished by some; they uphold the distinction between is and ought and argue that science is restricted to the former. This prompts an is–ought problem on another level. I catalogue the ways in which Darwinism plainly is a worldview and why commentators' beliefs that it ought not to be distorts their analysis. Hence, it is their own worldview that precludes them from accepting Darwinism's worldview implications.     

Lavoisier and his Last Printed Work: The Mémoires de physique et de chimie (1805)

On the basis of a significant number of unpublished documents, here published for the first time, the article reconstructs the historical and scientific origins of Lavoisier's Mémoires de physique et de chimie. Because of the paucity of primary sources available so far, this work has previously received little attention and its 'publication' is commonly attributed to Madame Lavoisier's effort to revive the memory of her husband. In contrast with this image, this article suggests that Madame Lavoisier had only a subsidiary role and that Armand Séguin's contribution to both the editing and the scientific organization of the Mémoires needs a historical reassessment. Lavoisier's collaboration with Séguin, dating from 1792, resulted in a work the aim of which was far more ambitious than that of collecting already published memoirs. Furthermore, it is argued that the contents of the first volume of the Mémoires indicate an important evolution in Lavoisier's chemical theory.     

Narrow and broad styles of scientific reasoning: A reply to O. Bueno

In a recent paper, Otávio Bueno (2012) introduced a narrower understanding of Hacking's concept of styles of scientific reasoning. Although its ultimate goal is to serve a pluralist view of science, Bueno's proposal is a thought-provoking attempt at outlining a concept of style that would keep most of the original understanding's heuristic value, while providing some analytical grip on the specific details of particular scientific practices. In this reply, I consider solely this latter more proximate goal. More precisely, I assess whether or not Bueno's narrower understanding of styles could provide historians and philosophers of science with a workable unit to investigate particular transformations in scientific practices. While the author's proposal is certainly interesting overall, the usefulness of the unit it describes may be compromised by three shortcomings: 1° the extent to which the unit is meant to be narrower is indeterminate; 2° it does not improve much on the analytical capabilities of Hacking's concept; and 3° like Hacking's concept it is rather powerless to capture the dynamical character of particular scientific practices.     

Outward bound: women translators and scientific travel writing, 1780–1800

SUMMARY

As the Enlightenment drew to a close, translation had gradually acquired an increasingly important role in the international circulation and transmission of scientific knowledge. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the translators responsible for making such accounts accessible in other languages, some of whom were women. In this article I explore how European women cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations. Focusing specifically on the genre of scientific travel writing, I investigate the narrative strategies deployed by women translators to mark their involvement in the process of scientific knowledge-making. These strategies ranged from rhetorical near-invisibility, driven by women's modest marginalization of their own public engagement in science, to the active advertisement of themselves as intellectually curious consumers of scientific knowledge. A detailed study of Elizabeth Helme's translation of the French ornithologist François le Vaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique [Voyage into the Interior of Africa] (1790) allows me to explore how her reworking of the original text for an Anglophone reading public enabled her to engage cautiously – or sometimes more openly – with questions regarding how scientific knowledge was constructed, for whom and with which aims in mind.     

Science and Security before the Atomic Bomb: The Loyalty Case of Harald U. Sverdrup

In the summer of 1941, Harald Sverdrup, the Norwegian-born Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in La Jolla, California, was denied security clearance to work on Navy-sponsored research in underwater acoustics applied to anti-submarine warfare. The clearance denial embarrassed the world renown oceanographer and Arctic explorer, who repeatedly offered his services to the U.S. government only to see scientists of far lesser reputation called upon to aid the war effort. The official story of Sverdrup's denial was the risk of blackmail over relatives in occupied Norway. Declassified documents tell a different story. Although Sverdrup's integrity was defended on the highest levels of U.S. science, doubt was cast upon him by members of his own institution, who accused him of being a Nazi sympathiser. Personal distrust, rooted in scientific and intellectual disagreement, spilled over into questions about Sverdrup's loyalty and judgement. These doubts were considered sufficient grounds for withholding clearance, until Roger Revelle, a former student of Sverdrup now working within the Navy, was able to obtain a limited clearance for Sverdrup to develop techniques to forecast surf conditions during amphibious assaults. After the war, this work was credited with saving many lives, but at the time it placed Sverdrup out of the mainstream of Navy-sponsored oceanographic research. In being denied access to major areas of scientific work, Sverdrup's position as a leader of American oceanography was undermined.The loyalty case of Harald Sverdrup illustrates the emergence of an institutional apparatus through which the U.S. military began to control and shape the organisation of American science in the twentieth century. Military sponsorship of scientific research, begun during the open conflicts of World War II and continuing into the simmering tensions of the Cold War, involved explicit control by the U.S. military of who had access to critical information. This in turn meant who could do science in conjunction with the military. As the U.S. Navy became the principal sponsor of oceanography in the post-war years, clearance to do military work became to a great extent clearance to do oceanography. Choices about who could be trusted were also choices about who would do science, and what kind of science they would do.     

Phenomenotechnique: Bachelard's critical inheritance of conventionalism

The concept of phenomenotechnique has been regarded as Bachelard's most original contribution to the philosophy of science. Innovative as this neologism may seem, it benefited from a generation of debates on the nature and status of scientific facts, among conventionalist thinkers and their opponents. Granting that Bachelard stood among the opponents to conventionalism, this article nonetheless reveals deep similarities between his work and that of two conventionalist thinkers who insisted on what we call today the theory-ladenness of scientific experiment: Pierre Duhem and Édouard Le Roy. This article, therefore, compares Bachelard's notion of phenomenotechnique with Duhem's developments on the double character of scientific instruments, and with Le Roy's claim that scientific facts are fabricated to meet the requirements of theory. It shows how Bachelard retained Duhem and Le Roy's views on the interplay between theory and experiment but rejected their sceptical conclusions on the limitations of experimental control. It claims that this critical inheritance of conventionalism was made possible by a reflection on technology, which led Bachelard to re-evaluate the artificiality of scientific facts: instead of regarding this artificiality as a limitation of science, as Le Roy did, he presented it as a condition for objective knowledge.     

On a Lecture Trip to Spain: the Scientific Relations Between Germany and Spain During the Entente Boycott (1919–1926)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the scientific relations between Germany and Spain during the Entente Boycott (1919–1926) and the German academic policy that fostered it. The study of the international relations of German science during the 1920s has been carried out using as a basis the archives of scientific institutions. Personal initiatives by individual scientists to establish relations have therefore not been taken into account. The relations between the scientific communities of Germany and Spain during the 1920s indicate the importance of such personal relationships and from their transcendence at a political level. They also offer an example of how political strategies could dictate the politics of academic recognition. This paper is based on the analysis of sources found at the Foreign Office Archives in Berlin. It gives us a clear idea about the role of scientific relationships between the two countries in shaping their scientific policies.     

Philosophy of science for globalized privatization: Uncovering some limitations of critical contextual empiricism

The purpose of this paper is to uncover some of the limitations that critical contextual empiricism, and in particular Longino's contextualism, faces when trying to provide a normative account of scientific knowledge that is relevant to current scientific research. After presenting the four norms of effective criticism, I show how the norms have limited scope when dealing with cases of current scientific practices. I then present some historical evidence for the claim that the organization of science has changed in recent decades, and I argue that the uncovered limitations emerge from this larger phenomenon. Finally, I conclude by suggesting two ways to overcome the previously uncovered limitations.     

From Helmholtz to Schlick: The evolution of the sign-theory of perception

Efforts to trace the influence of fin de siècle neo-Kantianism on early 20th Century philosophy of science have led scholars to recognize the powerful influence on Moritz Schlick of Hermann von Helmholtz, the doyen of 19th Century physics and a leader of the zur?ck zu Kant movement. But Michael Friedman thinks that Schlick misunderstood Helmholtz' signature philosophical doctrine, the sign-theory of perception. Indeed, Friedman has argued that Schlick transformed Helmholtz' Kantian view of spatial intuition into an empiricist version of the causal theory of perception. However, it will be argued that, despite the key role the sign-theory played in his epistemology, Schlick thought the Kantianism in Helmholtz' thought was deeply flawed, rendered obsolete by philosophical insights which emerged from recent scientific developments. So even though Schlick embraced the sign-theory, he rejected Helmholtz' ideas about spatial intuition. In fact, like his teacher, Max Planck, Schlick generalized the sign-theory into a form of structural realism. At the same time, Schlick borrowed the method of concept-formation developed by the formalist mathematicians, Moritz Pasch and David Hilbert, and combined it with the conventionalism of Henri Poincaré. Then, to link formally defined concepts with experience, Schlick's introduced his ‘method of coincidences’, similar to the ‘point-coincidences’ featured in Einstein's physics. The result was an original scientific philosophy, which owed much to contemporary scientific thinkers, but little to Kant or Kantianism.     

Public scientific testimony in the scientific image

In this paper, I draw on philosophy of science to address a challenge for science communication. Empirical research indicates that some people who trust a meteorologist's report that they are in the path of a storm do not trust a climate scientist's report that we are on a path to global warming. Such selective skepticism about climate science exemplifies a more general challenge:

The Challenge of Selective UptakeLaypersons who generally accept public scientific testimony nevertheless fail to accept public scientific testimony concerning select, equally well warranted, scientific hypotheses.

A prominent response arising from the novel interdisciplinary science of science communication is a principle called Consensus Reporting. According to this principle, science reporters should, whenever feasible, report the scientific consensus or lack thereof for a reported scientific view.However, philosophy of science may offer a different perspective on the issue. This perspective is critical insofar as it indicates some inadequacies of Consensus Reporting. But it is also constructive insofar as it guides the development of an alternative principle, Justification Reporting, according to which science reporters should, whenever feasible, report aspects of the nature and strength of scientific justification or lack thereof for a reported scientific view. A central difference between these proposals is that Consensus Reporting appeals to the authority of the scientists whereas Justification Reporting appeals to the authority of scientific justification. As such, Justification Reporting reflects the image of science.The paper considers the philosophical and empirical motivation for Justification Reporting and its limitations. This includes prospects and problems for implementing it in a way that addresses The Challenge of Selective Uptake. From a methodological point of view, the paper illustrates how empirically informed philosophy of science may help address challenges for science communication.     

Leibniz's Observations on Hydrology: An Unpublished Letter on the Great Lombardy Flood of 1705

Although the historical reputation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) largely rests on his philosophical and mathematical work, it is widely known that he made important contributions to many of the emerging but still inchoate branches of natural science of his day. Among the many scientific papers Leibniz published during his lifetime are ones on the nascent science we now know as hydrology. While Leibniz's other scientific work has become of increasing interest to scholars in recent years, his thinking about hydrology has been neglected, despite being relatively broad in extent, including as it does papers on the ‘raising of vapours’ and the formation of ice, as well as the separation of salt and fresh water. That list can now be extended still further following the discovery of a previously unpublished letter of Leibniz's on the causes of the devastating Lombardy flood of October and November 1705. This letter, which will be the focus of our paper, reveals the depth of Leibniz's understanding of key hydrological processes. In it, he considers various mechanisms for the flood, such as heavy rains on high ground, underwater earthquakes, and a mountain collapse. Over the course of the paper we examine each of these mechanisms in depth, and show that Leibniz was in the vanguard of hydrological thinking. We also show that the letter contains one of the first scholarly attempts to apply aspects of the still-forming notion of the hydrological cycle to account for a flood event.     

Genetic epistemology,equilibration and the rationality of scientific change

Genetic epistemology is concerned not only with the development of knowledge in the individual person, but also with the epistemological development of scientific thought. If so, problems and solutions in the one area should be roughly isomorphic to problems and solutions in the other area. To illustrate this, I consider Piaget's theory of equilibration and show how this theory has implications for issues concerning scientific progress, change and rationality. Piaget's views about these issues have much in common with claims of contemporary philosophers of science (such as Popper and Lakatos) concerning the rational growth of science, but in addition purport to be grounded in empirical psychology. This suggests thatt it may be fruitful to investigate the possibility of integrating cognitive psychology and philosophy of science in a new way.     

Scientific progress: Knowledge versus understanding

What is scientific progress? On Alexander Bird's epistemic account of scientific progress, an episode in science is progressive precisely when there is more scientific knowledge at the end of the episode than at the beginning. Using Bird's epistemic account as a foil, this paper develops an alternative understanding-based account on which an episode in science is progressive precisely when scientists grasp how to correctly explain or predict more aspects of the world at the end of the episode than at the beginning. This account is shown to be superior to the epistemic account by examining cases in which knowledge and understanding come apart. In these cases, it is argued that scientific progress matches increases in scientific understanding rather than accumulations of knowledge. In addition, considerations having to do with minimalist idealizations, pragmatic virtues, and epistemic value all favor this understanding-based account over its epistemic counterpart.