Argument

A recent comparative study of women in science has revealed that the situation in the Netherlands is worse than in other European countries. This raises the question whether there is a “Dutch case” concerning women’s standing in science. We argue that the cause is not to be found in a special brand of Dutch Protestantism, with its strong emphasis on motherhood and the family, and impact on labor patterns and social organization. Rather, we should take another look at religion, and especially at the specific Dutch segmentation of society along religious and political lines, called verzuiling, literally “pillarization.” From about 1880 until far into the 1950s the personal and social life of the Dutch (from schools to sports and ladies' organizations) was organized into four recognized pillars (a Protestant, Catholic, socialist and a liberal pillar), which at the top were represented in political parties. This article brings to light the often overlooked fact that between 1880 and 1945 state institutions, such as universities, were thoroughly pillarized, which strongly influenced recruitment and selection for those institutions. That is to say, no woman was appointed to the rank of full professor at any state university until after 1945. The Dutch case might also be explained by the many reorganizations and down-sizings of universities of more recent years that occurred simultaneous with the expansion of academic feminism. In addition, a newly configured “pillarization” has driven deep divides between gender studies scholars, equal opportunities officers, and women scientists.

But even in the long-industrialized European countries, the story has not been one of automatic growth and progress. Thus … in the Netherlands … there too the situation for women academics has deteriorated over the past two decades. Where in 1970 there were 2.7 per cent women professors, by 1980 this was down to 2.2 per cent and by 1988 to 2.1 per cent. (Rose 1994)

Sociologists and historians of science, such as Richard Whitley and Stephen Hilgartner, identified a culturally dominant discourse of science popularization in the broader society. In this dominant view, a clear distinction is maintained between scientific knowledge and popularized knowledge. Popularization of science is seen as the process of transmitting real science to a lay public. This discourse on science popularization was criticized by Whitley and Hilgartner as an inadequate simplification. Yet, the battered traditional model of popularization remains remarkably resistant to these theoretical attacks. In this paper I will argue, based on research of the output of the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912), and more specifically, his opinion on the role of government in economic life, that the boundary between science and popularization in political economy is not clear and that the status of scientists fluctuates over time and in different contexts. It is therefore impossible for historians or economists to distinguish science from popularization based on the essential characteristics or intrinsic quality of the work. De Molinari's ideas are followed through the different media of science and journalism. Although de Molinari himself differentiated between his scientific and “popular” work, the boundary between science and popularization proves to be highly permeable, in both directions.

This paper challenges the use of the notion of “culture” to describe a particular organization of mathematical knowledge, shared by a few mathematicians over a short period of time in the second half of the nineteenth century. This knowledge relates to “geometrical equations,” objects that proved crucial for the mechanisms of encounters between equation theory, substitution theory, and geometry at that time, although they were not well-defined mathematical objects. The description of the mathematical collective activities linked to “geometrical equations,” and especially the technical aspects of these activities, is made on the basis of a sociological definition of “culture.” More precisely, after an examination of the social organization of the group of mathematicians, I argue that these activities form an intricate system of patterns, symbols, and values, for which I suggest a characterization as a “cultural system.”

Argument

While we know that Russian mathematicians contributed to the application of probability in the theory of statistics, Western literature on the history of statistics generally overlooks the role played by statisticians working in zemstva statistics departments. This paper argues that the quantity and the diversity of statistical data needed by zemstva administrators stimulated methodological innovations in the field and influenced the rise and development of sampling surveys in Russia between 1875 and 1930. The first surveys on parts of the whole were done by statisticians who were seeking solutions to practical administrative problems, and their sampling techniques evolved as Russian administrators put these statistical surveys to use. Finally, the paper argues that Kovalevskiy’s mathematical treatment of the theory of stratified sampling, published in 1924, ten years before Jerzy Neyman’s, is in fact a synthesis of the zemstva statisticians’ sampling practice and the Russian university statisticians’ theoretical works before 1917.

The Doctor of Philosophy, a nonmedieval academic figure who spread throughout the globe in the Modern Era, and who emblemized the transformation of academic knowledge into the “pursuit of research,” emerged through a long and tortuous path in the early modern Germanies. The emergence and recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy would be correlative with the nineteenth-century professionalization of the arts and sciences. Throughout the Early Modern Era, the earlier Doctors and older “professional” faculties from the medieval university — Theology, Law, and Medicine — opposed recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy. In Saxony, the forces of “medievalism” were able to block recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy, and they retained the degraded Master of Arts or Philosophy as the highest degree in arts and sciences. Forces of “modernism” prevailed, however, in Austria and Prussia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Austria, the Doctor of Philosophy arrived as a wholly modern figure, the creation of a nice dossier and a civil service examination: the medieval “juridical” persona became a modern “bureaucratic” persona. Between this bureaucratic modernism of the Austrians and corporatist medievalism of the Saxons, the Prussians pursued a via media. Unlike the Saxons, they recognized the Doctor of Philosophy; but unlike the Austrians, they did not completely bureaucratize the candidate's persona. The Prussians demanded from the candidate a “work of research,” a doctoral dissertation, which exhibited the aesthetic qualities of the Romantic artist: originality and personality.

For historians of science, earthquakes may well have an air of the exotic. Often terrifying, apparently unpredictable, and arguably even more deadly today than in a pre-industrial age, they are not a phenomenon against which scientific progress is easy to gauge. Yet precisely because seismic forces seem so uncanny, even demonic, naturalizing them has been one of the most tantalizing and enduring challenges of modern science. Earthquakes have repeatedly shaken not just human edifices but the foundations of human knowledge. They have been known to cast doubt on divine providence, on the predictive ability of the sciences, and on the capacity of the human mind to learn from an experience of sheer terror. Most recently, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 have forced nuclear experts around the world to confront the limits of their knowledge and the vulnerability of their best-laid plans.

Argument

The paper focuses on a research project launched by Norwegian psychiatrists immediately following World War II. The project sought to investigate the roots of quislingism (collaboration with the Nazis) through psychiatric research on the collaborators. Considered with hindsight, however, the methodology of the project seems puzzlingly shallow. The paper discusses whether this was due to a general lack of adequate methodology in the contemporaneous sciences, or whether the explanation must be sought in the project's social and historical context. Ultimately, I conclude that considerable weight must be placed on the latter explanation, and that the general political ostracism of the collaborators in the postwar years played a major role in the psychiatrists' attitude.

Argument

This paper proposes an alternative view to Becker’s reconstruction of pre-Eudoxean theory of proportion. No extant document explicitly demonstrates the alleged alternation of theories of proportion before Book V of the Elements. Books V and VI of the Elements are not so complete as a theory of proportion in the abstract, and can be interpreted better as a collection of propositions useful in geometry. It follows then that older theories, if they existed at all, must have been less complete. Prevailing interest in geometry on the part of Greek mathematicians is also visible in some expressions in Book VI for specific ratio and proportion used only in definite geometric context. It is therefore more fruitful to consider the “theory” of proportion before Eudoxus as an aggregate of techniques about proportion that are useful in geometry, rather than as the result of a conscious effort to build a logically consistent set of propositions based on a definition.

Since the linguistic turn, the role of rhetoric in the circulation and the popular representation of knowledge has been widely accepted in science studies. This article aims to analyze not a textual form of scientific rhetoric, but the crucial role of materiality in scientific debates. It introduces the concept of material rhetoric to understand the promotional regimes in which material objects play an essential argumentative role. It analyzes the phenomenon by looking at two students of prehistory from nineteenth-century Belgium.

In the study of human prehistory and evolution, material data are either fairly abundant stone tools or very scarce fossil bones. These two types of material data stand for two different strategies in material rhetoric. In this article, the first strategy is exemplified by Aimé Rutot, who gathered great masses of eoliths (crudely chipped stones which he believed to be prehistoric tools). The second strategy is typified by the example of Julien Fraipont, who based his scientific career on only two Neanderthal skeletons. Rutot sent his “artifacts” to a very wide audience, while Fraipont showed his skeletons to only a few selected scholars. Unlike Rutot, however, Fraipont was able to monitor his audience's interpretation of the finds by means of personal contacts. What an archaeologist gains in reach, he or she apparently loses in control. In this article we argue that only those scholars who find the right balance between the extremes of reach and control will prove to be successful.

A number of issues related to vaccines and vaccinations in society are discussed in this paper. Our purpose is to merge an analysis of some recent changes in the vaccine market with social science research on the relationship between citizens and authorities. The article has two empirical parts. The first shows how the vaccine market, which for many years has had immense financial problems, nowadays seems to becoming economically vitalized, mostly due to the production of new and profitable vaccines. However prosperous the future may appear, certain reactions from the public regarding vaccination initiatives offer insight into inherent problems of vaccine policies in many Western countries. In the second part of the article, these problems are exemplified with the recent controversy over the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine. We conclude that in spite of the improving profit-margins, the vaccine market remains vulnerable and insecure. Vaccines are permeated by society, even more so than pharmaceutics that are used to cure or alleviate illnesses. Radical changes in financial conditions with promises of a more profitable market will not, we argue, solve other even more fundamental problems.

Argument

This paper examines Paracelsus and Paracelsianism in the light of the ideas of Max Weber concerning the social consequences of the Reformation, with special reference to his theories of Entzauberung and secularization. He linked these tendencies both to the rise of capitalism and the growth of experimental science. The detailed case study of Paracelsus' account of diseases linked with saints, in common with his interpretation of many other conditions, demonstrates that he self-consciously extended the boundaries of medicine and eroded the role of magic and witchcraft associated with the church. On the other hand, Paracelsus adopted the Neoplatonic worldview, was immersed in popular magic, and evolved a system of medicine that self-consciously revolved around magic. These factors seem to place a distinct limit on his role in the demystification of knowledge. However, the magic of Paracelsus entailed a decisive break with the entrenched elitist and esoteric tradition of the occultists and hermeticists. It is argued that this reconstructed magic re-establishes the credentials of Paracelsus as a significant contributor to the disenchantment and secularization of the worldview.

This article focuses on a problematic character of communication in science. Two solutions are compared: paradigm-based science (the natural sciences model and its extension to the social sciences as represented by economics) and the semiotic solution developed in the arts and social sciences. There are several parallels between the latter approach and Marxist dialectics. A third, original, approach to solving communication problems is proposed; it can be labeled “transactional.” It represents a version of the semiotic solution with particular emphasis on interactions, both face-to-face and depersonalized, and the imperative of negotiating and finding compromises. Communication problems existing at two registers of interactions, face-to-face and depersonalized, are differentiated; freedom is interpreted as the capacity to change the registers at will. An in-depth case study of the Coase theorem in economic sciences and legal studies illustrates key points in the proposed analysis.

This paper aims at understanding the concept of convention in mechanics as a notion transferred from the field of jurisprudence. This enables us to clarify it as a new epistemic category having a pertinent role in the transformation of mechanics in the nineteenth century. Such understanding permits a separation from linguistic and arbitrary conventions, thus highlighting its epistemic features and not transforming fundamental principles into mere arbitrary agreements. After addressing the main references in the literature discussing the role of convention in mechanics, we analyze its classical use as a concept originating from law. Then we explain its use by Carl G. Jacobi, Ferdinand F. Reech, and J. Henri Poincaré. Here we also show how their uses conform to the features analyzed regarding conventions in jurisprudence. Finally, we try to explain how the use of this concept, among other factors, contributed to the transformation of mechanics.

Mutuality in “contact zones” has been emphasized in cross-cultural knowledge interaction in re-evaluating power dynamics between centers and peripheries and in showing the hybridity of modern science. This paper proposes an analytical pause on this attempt to better invalidate centers by paying serious attention to the limits of mutuality in transcultural knowledge interaction imposed by asymmetries of power. An unusually reciprocal interaction between a Japanese forester, Ishidoya Tsutomu (1891–1958), at the colonial forestry department, and his Korean subordinate Chung Tyaihyon (1883–1971) is chosen to highlight an inescapable asymmetry induced by the imperial power structure. Ishidoya, positioning himself as a settler expert, as opposed to a scientist in Tokyo, pursued localized knowledge in growing interaction with Chung, resulting in Ishidoya's career change as a herbalist focusing on traditional medicine and Chung's leadership in Korean-only botanizing. However, their mutual transformations, limited by asymmetric constraints on their choices, did not unsettle the imperial power structure or the centrality of centers.

Argument

J. Robert Oppenheimer was a complex person. His work in physics during the 1930s, at Los Alamos during the 1940s, and as governmental advisor in the immediate postwar period, gave him a deep sense of connection with communities that had distinctive purposes. But he found it difficult to conceive an overall creative vision for himself or to devise a compelling objective for the community he belonged to if one had not been formulated at the time he assumed its leadership. I analyze the reasons for his successes: the vision and demands of physics during the 1930s, the make-up of Los Alamos, and the challenges of the postwar atomic world. In each of these enterprises he assumed a distinctive role and came to represent a distinctive persona – but he could not integrate his activities into a coherent whole that might be a model for the intellectual in the new world he had helped to shape.

The article examines the organizational patterns of nineteenth-century Swiss Alpine geology. It argues that early and middle nineteenth-century Swiss geognosy was shaped in genealogical terms and that the patterns of genealogical reasoning and practice worked as a vehicle of transmission toward the generalization of locally gained empirical knowledge. The case study is provided by the Zurich geologist Albert Heim, who, in the early 1870s, blended intellectual and patrilineal genealogies that connected two generations of fathers and sons: Hans Conrad and Arnold Escher, Albert and Arnold Heim. Two things were transmitted from one generation to the next, a domain of geognostic research, the Glarus Alps, and a research interest in an explanation of the massive geognostic anomalies observed there. The legacy found its embodiment in the Escher family archive. The genealogical logic became visible and then experienced a crisis when, later in the century, the focus of Alpine geology shifted from geognosy to tectonics. Tectonic research loosened the traditional link between the intimate knowledge of a territory and the generalization from empirical data.

Argument

This article focuses on the scientific practice of a specific class of models in neuroscience and biology that approach biological systems as computational or information processing systems. This specific approach to biological systems has a long tradition that started with the information discourse in the 1940s. Borrowing concepts, methods, and techniques from cybernetics, information theory, and physics, these models are situated at the interface of different scientific disciplines. This article examines in detail the Hopfield model, a model of the specific brain function of auto-associative memory that is situated at the interface of neuroscience, theoretical physics, and engineering. By drawing analogies to a model of disordered magnetic systems in physics, John Hopfield constructed a model that was able to mimic auto-associative memory. The model became an active field of research in theoretical physics and in engineering but not in neuroscience. According to neuroscientists, in the process of construction the model had lost touch with the biological system and the function that it was supposed to model. How did this happen? As will be shown, the process of constructing the model was guided by conceptualizing the biological organism as a computational, information-processing device. This construction process gained its own momentum that involved an interrelated development of a computational concept and a redescription of the biological system or phenomenon for bringing the computational concept to work. We will see how physicists and engineers tried to get models in touch with biological systems by constructing “a synthetic model.”

The subject of the paper is the shift from an astrology-oriented astronomy towards an allegedly more objective, mathematically grounded approach to astronomy. This shift is illustrated through a close reading of Tycho Brahe's scientific development and the contemporaneous changes in his communicational strategies. Basing the argument on a substantial array of original sources it is claimed that the Danish astronomer developed a new astronomical discourse in pursuit of credibility, giving priority to observational astronomy and natural philosophical questions. The abandonment of astrology in public discourse is primarily explained by Tycho's social position and greater sensibility to controversial issues. Tycho's example suggests that the changes in rhetorical strategies regarding astrology (which happened earlier than changes in astrological belief) should be given more recognition in the history of astronomy.

What are the aims of genetic services? Do any of these aims deserve to be labeled “eugenics”? Answers to these strenuously debated questions depend not just on the facts about genetic testing and screening but also on what is understood by “eugenics,” a term with multiple and contested meanings. This paper explores the impact of efforts to label genetic services “eugenics” and argues that attempts to protect against the charge have seriously distorted discussion about their purpose(s). Following Ruth Chadwick, I argue that the existence of genetic services presupposes that genetic disease is undesirable and that means should be offered to reduce it. I further argue that the economic cost of such disease is one reason why governments and health care providers deem such services worthwhile. The important question is not whether such cost considerations constitute “eugenics,” but whether they foster practices that are undesirable and, if so, what to do about them. The wielding of the term “eugenics” as a weapon in a war over the expansion of genetic services, conjoined with efforts to dissociate such services from the abortion controversy, has produced a rhetoric about the aims of these services that is increasingly divorced from reality. Candor about these aims is a sine qua non of any useful debate over the legitimacy of the methods used to advance them.

Many associations have recently been discovered between phenotypic variation and genetic loci, causing some to advocate what Robert Sinsheimer has called “a new eugenics” that would treat genetic “defects” in individuals prone to a disease. The first premise of this vision is that genetic association studies reveal the biological cause of the phenotypic variation. Once the responsible genes are known, the second premise is that we should focus upon changing “nature” rather than “nurture” by correcting the “defective” genes.

The first premise is flawed because associations between genetic markers and phenotypes can be spurious, as shown by an example. Moreover, it is shown that using non-causative but associated genetic markers one at a time (the normal practice) can lead to incorrect predictions of disease risk for many individuals. Going from association to causation is a non-trivial step scientifically that has rarely been done in much of the human genetic research.

Even when a particular locus does contribute to the phenotypic variation of interest, the first premise remains flawed because phenotypes in general arise from complex interactions among genes and between genes and environments as shown for genes associations with coronary artery disease (CAD). The ability of current molecular genetic tools to “fix” defective genotypes is extremely limited, but even if the technological problems could be overcome, the studies on CAD reveal no obvious “defective” gene to fix because the genetic effects are so context dependent (upon both other genes and environmental factors). Contrary to the second premise of the new eugenics, the more we learn about how different genotypes show variable responses to environments, the more important the environment becomes for individual treatment.

The paradigm of a “defective gene” may work for classical Mendelian genetic diseases that are due to loss-of-function mutations. However, such mutations affect only a small portion of humanity. When the focus is changed to common disease and behavioral phenotypes, the “defective gene” paradigm is biologically meaningless and often harmful when applied to individuals. Thus, even when genes clearly do influence common phenotypic variation, the premises of the “new eugenics” are biologically indefensible.