‘… not fundamental in a state of full civilization’: The Sociedad Astronómica de Barcelona (1910–1921) and its Popularization Programme

Scrutinizing the main activities of the Sociedad Astronómica de Barcelona (SAB), a scientific society that was founded in 1910 and lasted until 1921, this paper analyses how and why its members disseminated astronomy to society at large. Inspired by Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), and with a strong amateur character, the programme of the SAB raised interest among academic scientists, politicians, priests, navy officers, educated audiences, and positivist anticlerical writers. It rapidly conquered the public sphere through well-attended lectures, exhibitions, observations, and publications. In the context of an industrial city, which at that time was suffering serious social tensions, the popularization of astronomy transcended social and cultural boundaries. It created common ground between expert and lay knowledge, science and art, the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’, and between science and religion. In addition, it was considered as one of the only possible ways to raise the scientific level of a country such as Spain, which at that time perceived itself as peripheral, even backward, in terms of mainstream innovations in science and technology.     

The emergence of new scientific disciplines in Portuguese medicine: Marck Athias's histophysiology research school, Lisbon (1897-1946)

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.     

Vaunting the independent amateur: Scientific American and the representation of lay scientists

This paper traces how media representations encouraged enthusiasts, youth and skilled volunteers to participate actively in science and technology during the twentieth century. It assesses how distinctive discourses about scientific amateurs positioned them with respect to professionals in shifting political and cultural environments. In particular, the account assesses the seminal role of a periodical, Scientific American magazine, in shaping and championing an enduring vision of autonomous scientific enthusiasms. Between the 1920s and 1970s, editors Albert G. Ingalls and Clair L. Stong shepherded generations of adult ‘amateur scientists’. Their columns and books popularized a vision of independent non-professional research that celebrated the frugal ingenuity and skills of inveterate tinkerers. Some of these attributes have found more recent expression in present-day ‘maker culture’. The topic consequently is relevant to the historiography of scientific practice, science popularization and science education. Its focus on independent non-professionals highlights political dimensions of agency and autonomy that have often been implicit for such historical (and contemporary) actors.

The paper argues that the Scientific American template of adult scientific amateurism contrasted with other representations: those promoted by earlier periodicals and by a science education organization, Science Service, and by the national demands for recruiting scientific labour during and after the Second World War. The evidence indicates that advocates of the alternative models had distinctive goals and adapted their narrative tactics to reach their intended audiences, which typically were conceived as young persons requiring instruction or mentoring. By contrast, the monthly Scientific American columns established a long-lived and stable image of the independent lay scientist.     

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 role of ‘complex’ empiricism in the debates about satellite data and climate models

Climate scientists have been engaged in a decades-long debate over the standing of satellite measurements of the temperature trends of the atmosphere above the surface of the earth. This is especially significant because skeptics of global warming and the greenhouse effect have utilized this debate to spread doubt about global climate models used to predict future states of climate. I use this case from an understudied science to illustrate two distinct philosophical approaches to the relations among data, scientist, measurement, models, and theory. I argue that distinguishing between ‘direct’ empiricist and ‘complex’ empiricist approaches helps us understand and analyze this important scientific episode. I also introduce a complex empiricist account of testing and evaluation, and contrast it with the basic Hypothetico-Deductive approach to the climate models used by the direct empiricists. This more developed complex empiricist approach will serve philosophy of science well, as computational models become more widespread in the sciences.     

Value-entanglement and the integrity of scientific research

Throughout much of the 20th century, philosophers of science maintained a position known as the value-free ideal, which holds that non-epistemic (e.g., moral, social, political, or economic) values should not influence the evaluation and acceptance of scientific results. In the last few decades, many philosophers of science have rejected this position by arguing that non-epistemic values can and should play an important role in scientific judgment and decision-making in a variety of contexts, including the evaluation and acceptance of scientific results. Rejecting the value-free ideal creates some new and vexing problems, however. One of these is that relinquishing this philosophical doctrine may undermine the integrity of scientific research if practicing scientists decide to allow non-epistemic values to impact their judgment and decision-making. A number of prominent philosophers of science have sought to show how one can reject the value-free ideal without compromising the integrity of scientific research. In this paper, we examine and critique their views and offer our own proposal for protecting and promoting scientific integrity. We argue that the literature on research ethics and its focus on adherence to norms, rules, policies, and procedures that together promote the aims of science can provide a promising foundation for building an account of scientific integrity. These norms, rules, policies, and procedures provide a level of specificity that is lacking in most philosophical discussions of science and values, and they suggest an important set of tasks for those working in science and values—namely, assessing, justifying, and prioritizing them. Thus, we argue that bringing together the literature on research ethics with the literature on science and values will enrich both areas and generate a more sophisticated and detailed account of scientific integrity.     

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.     

Constructing dystopian experience: A Neurath-Cartwrightian approach to the philosophy of social technology

Social situations, the object of the social sciences, are complex and unique: they contain so many variable aspects that they cannot be reproduced, and it is even difficult to experience two situations that are alike in many respects. The social scientists' past experiences that serve as their background knowledge to intervene in an existent situation is poor compared to what a traditional epistemologist would consider ideal. A way of dealing with the variable and insufficient background of social scientists is by means of models. But, then, how should we characterize social scientific models? This paper examines Otto Neurath's scientific utopianism as an attempt to deal with this problem. Neurath proposes that social scientists work with utopias: broad imaginative plans that coordinate a multitude of features of a social situation. This notion can be used in current debates in philosophy of science because we notice that utopias, in Neurath's sense, are comparable to models and nomological machines in Nancy Cartwright's conception. A model-based view of science lays emphasis on the fact that scientists learn from the repeated operation of such abstract entities, just as they learn from the repetition of experiments in a laboratory. Hence this approach suggests an approximation between the natural and the social sciences, as well as between science and utopian literature. This is exemplified by analyzing the literary dystopia We, written by Yevgeny Zamyatin, to show that reasoning from and debating about utopian writings, even if fictional and pessimistic, creates phenomena of valuation, which are fundamental for constituting a background of experiences in the social sciences.     

‘Holding’ and ‘endorsing’ claims in the course of scientific activities

My principal aims are to show that holding, adopting and endorsing (definitions of which I provide) are distinct cognitive attitudes that may be taken towards claims at different moments of scientific activities, and that none of them are reducible to acceptance (as defined by Jonathan Cohen); to explore in detail the differences between holding and accepting, using the controversies about GMOs to provide illustrations; and to draw some implications pertinent to democratic decision-making concerning public policies about science and technology, and to the responsibilities that scientists thereby incur.     

In Pursuit of Accurate Timekeeping: Liverpool and Victorian Electrical Horology

This paper explores how nineteenth-century Liverpool became such an advanced city with regard to public timekeeping, and the wider impact of this on the standardisation of time. From the mid-1840s, local scientists and municipal bodies in the port city were engaged in improving the ways in which accurate time was communicated to ships and the general public. As a result, Liverpool was the first British city to witness the formation of a synchronised clock system, based on an invention by Robert Jones. His method gained a considerable reputation in the scientific and engineering communities, which led to its subsequent replication at a number of astronomical observatories such as Greenwich and Edinburgh. As a further key example of developments in time-signalling techniques, this paper also focuses on the time ball established in Liverpool by the Electric Telegraph Company in collaboration with George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer Royal. This is a particularly significant development because, as the present paper illustrates, one of the most important technologies in measuring the accuracy of the Greenwich time signal took shape in the experimental operation of the time ball. The inventions and knowledge which emerged from the context of Liverpool were vital to the transformation of public timekeeping in Victorian Britain.     

Introduction to values and pluralism in the environmental sciences: From inferences to institutions

Philosophers of science continue to elaborate our understanding of the roles that values play in scientific reasoning, practice, and institutions. This special issue focuses on the environmental sciences, a mosaic of fields ranging from restoration ecology to forestry to climatology, unified by its attention to the relationships between humans and their habitats. It is a field that revolves around ameliorating environmental problems, aiming to support the provision of social goods and provide guidance to policymakers about how to regulate individuals and industries. Values abound in such judgments as setting the boundaries of an ecosystem, integrating the human dimensions of social-ecological systems, and collaborating with stakeholders. Since few in the field are likely to insist that these judgments can be made without reference to social values, environmental science can serve as fertile ground for exploring the ethical, social, and political terrain at the frontier of the science and values discourse.     

‘The Great Fiasco’ of the 1948 presidential election polls: status recognition and norms conflict in social science

All three ‘scientific’ pollsters (Crossley, Gallup and Roper) wrongly predicted incumbent President Harry Truman’s defeat in the 1948 presidential election, and thus faced a potentially serious legitimacy crisis. This ‘fiasco’ occurred at a most inopportune time. Social science was embroiled in a policy debate taking place in the halls of Congress. It was fighting a losing battle to be included, along with the natural sciences, in the National Science Foundation, for which legislation was being drafted. Faced with the failure of the polls, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) intervened quickly to prevent social science’s adversaries from using this event to degrade further its status. After all, many social scientists considered the sample survey as the paramount tool of social research, and sampling as one of social science’s greatest innovation. Concurrently, there was an ongoing conflict among polling practitioners themselves—between advocates of probability sampling and users of quotas, like the pollsters. The SSRC committee appointed to evaluate the polling debacle managed to keep this contentious issue of sampling from becoming the centre of attention. Given the inauspicious environment in which this event happened, the SSRC did not wish to advertise the fact that the house of social science was in turmoil.     

A consideration of Babylonian astronomy within the historiography of science

This paper traces the reception of Babylonian astronomy into the history of science, beginning in early to mid twentieth century when cuneiform astronomical sources became available to the scholarly public. The dominant positivism in philosophy of science of this time influenced criteria employed in defining and demarcating science by historians, resulting in a persistently negative assessment of the nature of knowledge evidenced in cuneiform sources. Ancient Near Eastern astronomy (and astrology) was deemed pre- or non-scientific, and even taken to reflect a stage in the evolution of thought before the emergence of science (in ancient Greece). Two principal objections are examined: first, that the Near East produced merely practical as opposed to theoretical knowledge and, second, that astronomy was in the service of astrology and religion. As the notion of a universal scientific method has been dismantled by post-positivists and constructivists of the second half of the twentieth century, an interest in varieties of intellectual and cultural contexts for science has provided a new ground for the re-consideration of Babylonian astronomical texts as science developed here.     

Evaluating community science

Community science—scientific investigation conducted partly or entirely by non-professional scientists—has many advantages. For example, community science mobilizes large numbers of volunteers who can, at low cost, collect more data than traditional teams of professional scientists. Participation in research can also increase volunteers’ knowledge about and appreciation of science. At the same time, there are worries about the quality of data that community science projects produce. Can the work of non-professionals really deliver trustworthy results? Attempts to answer this question generally compare data collected by volunteers to data collected by professional scientists. When volunteer data is more variable or less accurate than professionally collected data, then the community science project is judged to be inferior to traditional science. I argue that this is not the right standard to use when evaluating community science, because it relies on a false assumption about the aims of science. I show that if we adopt the view that science has diverse aims which are often in tension with one another, then we cannot justify holding community science data to an expert accuracy standard. Instead, we should evaluate the quality of community science data based on its adequacy-for-purpose.     

Knut Lundmark,Meteors and an Early Swedish Crowdsourcing Experiment

Mid twentieth century meteor astronomy demanded the long-term compilation of observations made by numerous individuals over an extensive geographical area. Such a massive undertaking obviously required the participation of more than just professional astronomers, who often sought to expand their ranks through the use of amateurs that had a basic grasp of astronomy as well as the night sky, and were thus capable of generating first-rate astronomical reports.

When, in the 1920s, renowned Swedish astronomer Knut Lundmark turned his attention to meteor astronomy, he was unable to rely even upon this solution. In contrast to many other countries at the time, Sweden lacked an organized amateur astronomy and thus contained only a handful of competent amateurs. Given this situation, Lundmark had to develop ways of engaging the general public in assisting his efforts. To his advantage, he was already a well-established public figure who had published numerous popular science articles and held talks from time to time on the radio. During the 1930s, this prominence greatly facilitated his launching of a crowdsourcing initiative for the gathering of meteor observations.

This paper consists of a detailed discussion concerning the means by which Lundmark's initiative disseminated astronomical knowledge to the general public and encouraged a response that might directly contribute to the advancement of science. More precisely, the article explores the manner in which he approached the Swedish public, the degree to which that public responded and the extent to which his efforts were successful. The primary aim of this exercise is to show that the apparently recent Internet phenomenon of ‘crowdsourcing’, especially as it relates to scientific research, actually has a pre-Internet history that is worth studying. Apart from the fact that this history is interesting in its own right, knowing it can provide us with a fresh vantage point from which to better comprehend and appreciate the success of present-day crowdsourcing projects.     

Book reviews

This paper traces the relationship between the food committees of the Royal Society and government during the First World War, concentrating on the period up to the resignation of Lord Devonport as first Food Controller. It argues that, in the context of a radical public science discourse emanating from some sections of the scientific community and greatly increased contacts between scientists and government, the food scientists of the committees were moved to press for a formalization of the committees' role in food policy. The members constantly manoeuvred to achieve this aim, but also used a network of alternative channels into the heart of the policy process to get their findings translated into hard policy. In doing so, they explicitly rehearsed characteristic 'public science' arguments. In the institutional blur of wartime state-science relations, scientists often got close to the policy-making process. Post-War, the state swiftly moved to clarify the position: science was to be given more money, but was to be specifically blocked by new administrative arrangements embodied in the Haldane Report on the Machinery of Government from having any say in the core areas of general policy, the expert domain of the generalist policy-maker.     

Misuses of biology in the context of the paranormal

Public suspicion of science stems from science's challenging of perceptions and myths about reality, and a public fear of new technology. The result is a susceptibility to pseudoscience. In claiming that creation 'science' is as valid as evolution the creationists misquote scientists and seek to spread their own 'scientific' myths concerning a young age for the earth, an act of creation based on a particular literalist interpretation of the Christian Bible and a single worldwide flood. They use methods of debate and politics, rather than scientific research. A selection of their arguments is examined and the nature of the evidence for evolution is discussed. Problems with the creation 'science' model are noted. In the myth of the hundredth monkey phenomenon, original research is misquoted to denigrate scientific research and support sentimental ideas of paranormal events. The misuse of science is seen as damaging to society because it reduces the effective gathering and application of scientific information. However, pseudoscience provides a valuable guide to gaps in public scientific education.     

The natural selection of conservative science

Social epistemologists have argued that high risk, high reward science has an important role to play in scientific communities. Recently, though, it has also been argued that various scientific fields seem to be trending towards conservatism—the increasing production of what Kuhn (1962) might have called ‘normal science’. This paper will explore a possible explanation for this sort of trend: that the process by which scientific research groups form, grow, and dissolve might be inherently hostile to such science. In particular, I employ a paradigm developed by Smaldino and McElreath (2016) that treats a scientific community as a population undergoing selection. As will become clear, perhaps counter-intuitively this sort of process in some ways promotes high risk, high reward science. But, as I will point out, risky science is, in general, the sort of thing that is hard to repeat. While more conservative scientists will be able to train students capable of continuing their successful projects, and so create thriving lineages, successful risky science may not be the sort of thing one can easily pass on. In such cases, the structure of scientific communities selects against high risk, high rewards projects. More generally, this project makes clear that there are at least two processes to consider in thinking about how incentives shape scientific communities—the process by which individual scientists make choices about their careers and research, and the selective process governing the formation of new research groups.     

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.