This paper explores the links between the competing scientific, disciplinary, and institutional identifications of social scientists working for international organizations and the nature of the work produced in these establishments. By examining the case of UNESCO's Social Science Department from 1946 to 1955, the paper shows how the initial lack of organizational identification diminished the efficiency and productivity of the Department and slowed down the creation of an international system for research in the social sciences. It then examines how the elaboration of such identification resulted from a period of trial and error during which several national, academic, and scientific models were explored. The paper concludes that only the discourse of “moral sensitivity” kept the Department together at a time when disillusions regarding internationalism, the destabilization of the meaning of nation, and suspicion towards some Western disciplines rendered unacceptable the universalization of a single international social scientific identification.

In 1612, Lodovico Cigoli completed a fresco in the Pauline chapel of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome depicting Apocalypse 12: “A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet.” He showed the crescent Moon with spots, as his friend Galileo had observed with the newly invented telescope. Considerations of the orthodox view of the perfect Moon as held by philosophers have led historians to ask why this clearly imperfect Moon in a religious painting raised no eyebrows. We argue that when considered in the context of biblical interpretation and the rhetoric of the Counter-Reformation, the imperfect Moon under the woman's feet was entirely consistent with traditional interpretations of Apocalypse 12.

My contribution will focus on a central issue of Yehuda Elkana's anthropology of knowledge — namely, the role of reflectivity in the development of knowledge. Let me therefore start with a quotation from Yehuda's paper “Experiment as a Second-Order Concept.”

Argument

In the sixteenth century, several Central European Jews argued, with greater emphasis than their forebears, that the realm of nature and the realm of the divine are largely independent. This argument was expressed in three related claims. First, nature itself came to be seen as indifferent to creed. Though Jews may have assumed that they enjoyed an elevated status in the supernatural realm, the notion that their status and characteristics differed in the natural realm was, for some at least, discredited. Second, once nature was divorced from creed, natural philosophy and allied disciplines too came to be seen (by some) as a theologically neutral discipline. Third, once nature and natural philosophy were seen as insensible to differences in religious belief, discourse about natural philosophy came to be seen as a scholarly pastime that might be shared companionably by peoples of different beliefs. In short, among certain early modern Jews, nature, the discipline of natural philosophy, and the profession of natural philosophy all came to be seen as drained of religious particularity. These views bear an interesting and sometimes paradoxical relationship to secularization. On the one hand, the distancing of nature and creed may have been a harbinger of the actual secularization that portions of European – especially Ashkenazi – Jewish culture later experienced. On the other hand, these same attitudes may also have deterred interest in the physical world itself, discouraging the sort of “this-worldliness” that Max Weber and many others have associated with secularization.

This paper argues that the development of the history of science as a discipline should be seen in the context of the bitter nineteenth-century conflict between religion and secular culture in Catholic countries. In this context, neo-Thomist theologians were interested in formulating a Catholic strategy of accommodation to modern science and to modern social systems that would also permit rejection of both modern social theory and the positivist theory of science. While theologians such as Cornoldi and Mercier worked with the positivist image of science common in their day, Duhem opted to reformulate the conception of scientific theory. His religiously motivated assignment of a central place to the history of science – as the only way of hinting at the prospective rapprochement between the conventionalist sphere of scientific theory and the metaphysics of the real world – played a formative role in its development. Duhem's conception of the function of the history of science directed the attention of scholars in the field to medieval science as a point of origin for modern science.

Against the idea that modern historiography developed in the eighteenth century as a completely new way of looking at the past, this paper argues that modern historical science borrowed its sense of experience from seventeenth-century memoirs. However, seventeenth-century rnemorialists made very different as sumptions than modern historians about the relations between time, memory, and history. One consequence of their introduction of lived subjectivity into the depiction of the past was a debate in early eighteenth-century France about the relations between history and fiction, some arguing that fiction is a better way of grasping the subjective truth of the past. These debates about the relations between history and memory and between history and fiction have resurfaced recently. The historical moods that are one context for paradigm shifts share common motifs, such as a sense of defeat, of distance between the present and the immediate past, and a need for consolation through the elaboration of a new mode of experiencing the past.

In the last decades, many changes have occurred in scientific publishing, including online publication, data repositories, file formats and standards. The role played by computers in this process rekindled the argument on forms of technical determinism. This paper addresses this old debate by exploring the case of publishing processes in prehistoric archaeology during the second part of the twentieth century, prior to the wide-scale adoption of computers. It investigates the case of a collective and international attempt to standardize the typological analysis of prehistoric lithic objects, coined typologie analytique by Georges Laplace and developed by a group of French, Italian, and Spanish researchers. The aim of this paper is to: 1) present a general bibliometric scenario of prehistoric archaeology publishing in continental Europe; 2) report on the little-known typologie analytique method in archaeology, using publications, archives, and interviews; 3) show how the publication of scientific production was shaped by social (editorial policies, support networks) and material (typography features and publication formats) constraints; and 4) highlight how actors founded resources to control and counterbalance these effects, namely by changing and improving publishing formats.

Argument

In France 15 per cent of university professors are women. Though this percentage is not high, France ranks among the top European countries in this regard. We argue that the “relatively favorable” situation of French women scientists is related to the social structure of French society, in particular its child-care system, and to the stable permanent positions in academia, where people are hired in their early thirties. French women scientists experience less difficulty than other European colleagues to manage both a private and a professional life. We also argue that the weak position of French gender studies stems from its lack of institutionalization, and from the isolation of the single researchers in their specialized disciplines. Finally we argue that the French recent interest in the issue of women and science is specifically related to the general interest, since the mid-1990s, in the political parity problem.

The history of meteorology has focused a great deal on the “scaling up” of knowledge infrastructures through the development of national and global observation networks. This article argues that such efforts to scale up were paralleled by efforts to define a place for local knowledge. By examining efforts of the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, near Boston, Massachusetts, to issue local weather forecasts that competed with the centralized forecasts of the U.S. Signal Service, this article finds that Blue Hill, as a user of the Signal Service's observation network, developed a new understanding of local knowledge by combining local observations of the weather with the synoptic maps afforded by the nationwide telegraph network of the U.S. Signal Service. Blue Hill used these forecasts not only as a service, but also as evidence of the superiority of its model of local forecasting over the Signal Service's model, and in the process opened up larger questions about the value of a weather forecast and the value of different kinds of knowledge in meteorology.

Argument

By examining sources created by people who were detained or employed at the quarantine stations of Australia and the Western Pacific, this article illuminates aspects of the history of disease control that cannot be observed in other source material. Most research examining the history of maritime quarantine has tended to rely on the records of official and government agencies. As a result, discussion has largely been confined to government policy and larger issues of the political, economic, and social consequences of maritime disease control. This article contributes to the historiography by examining personal sources that show how quarantine policy and practice were experienced from the perspective of its participants. They reveal the experiences of otherwise obscured healthy detainees and illuminate agency among quarantined individuals that cannot be observed without these sources.

Most social scientists today think of data sharing as an ethical imperative essential to making social science more transparent, verifiable, and replicable. But what moved the architects of some of the U.S.’s first university-based social scientific research institutions, the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR), and its spin-off, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), to share their data? Relying primarily on archived records, unpublished personal papers, and oral histories, I show that Angus Campbell, Warren Miller, Philip Converse, and others understood sharing data not as an ethical imperative intrinsic to social science but as a useful means to the diverse ends of financial stability, scholarly and institutional autonomy, and epistemological reproduction. I conclude that data sharing must be evaluated not only on the basis of the scientific ideals its supporters affirm, but also on the professional objectives it serves.

The Scandinavian countries share a solid reputation as longstanding contributors to top level Arctic research. This received view, however, veils some deep-seated contrasts in the ways that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have conducted research in the Arctic and the North Atlantic. In this paper it is argued that instead of focusing on the geographical determinism of science – the fact that the Arctic is close to, indeed part of, Scandinavian territories – we should look more closely at the geopolitics of science to understand the differences and similarities between these three Nordic countries. Through case studies of, mainly, Swedish Arctic and North Atlantic glaciology in the 1920s through to the 1940s, and of Norwegian preparations in the 1950s for the International Geophysical Year 1957/58, the paper demonstrates how different styles of research – research agendas, methodological choices, collaborative patterns, international networks, availability of infrastructure, relations to politics and power – are conditioned on economic interests and strategic and geopolitical trajectories, either these are explicitly put in the forefront of scientific priorities as in the case of Norway in the 1950s, or when they are manifestly disregarded in the name of scientific internationalism, as in the case of Swedish glaciology. The case of Danish colonial science in Greenland is only cursorily drawn into this analysis but corroborates the overall thesis. The analysis of this wider science politics of Scandinavian circumpolar science is exercised against a brief introductory backdrop of Arctic science historiography. Its chief message is that the analysis of polar science applying modern theory and method of the social studies of science is comparatively recent and that the full potential of merging the literature of Arctic science and exploration with those of security, geopolitics, indigenous voices, and the politics of nationalism is yet to be realized.

Argument

The analogy between dream and film represents a central thread in the psychoanalytic discussion of cinema. Using examples taken from films created between 1900 and 1906, this paper develops a typology of dream scenes in early film. The basis for the proposed typology is provided by the dream knowledge in circulation toward the end of the nineteenth century. This knowledge was fed by a great variety of sources, some of them in the proximity of scientific research and some of them far from it, including wish-fulfilling prognostic models and those based on the reservoir of memory or on bodily stimuli. By setting cinema in a context of contemporary dream psychologies, it is possible to trace the specific conditions under which the analogy between dream and cinema could become effective.

Although Ludwik Fleck is today recognized as one of the pioneers of the historical sociology of science, his historical and epistemological writings, most of them dating from the 1930s, long remained practically unknown. They were rediscovered following the mention of Fleck's principal work, the monograph Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935) in the preface of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), and thanks to the efforts of W. Baldamus (1977) and his student T. Schnelle (1982) and of the editors of the English translation of Fleck's book, R. K. Merton and T. J. Trenn. Fleck's work was studied by several scholars and was the subject of two meetings: “Colloquium Ludwik Fleck” (Hamburg, 1981) organized by L. Schaffer and T. Schnelle, and a symposium organized by R. S. Cohen (Berlin, 1984). Some of the papers presented at these meetings were published in Cohen and Schnelle 1986. Today, more than fifty years after the publication of his principal study, Fleck is on his way to becoming a “classic” of the sociology of science and of epistemology.

Argument

Cultivated by a number of writers and studied by psychologists, the phenomenon of déjà vu is an invention of the nineteenth century and is part of a broader exploration of how the mind experiences memory and time. Thus this typically benign mental aberration provides an entry-point into the mechanisms that preside over the regulation of the flow of consciousness. The theories of the mind developed recently by neuroscientists help us understand, meanwhile, why investigations into this mental “event” necessarily invoke concepts of representation and narrative. In fact, our increasingly sophisticated models for processes of memory and perception depend on literary representations. This article relies on the paramnesiac writings of Gérard de Nerval, seen through the lens of Proust's analysis, to argue that a consideration of the aesthetic and representational features of déjà-vu can bring us closer to solving the epistemological challenges we face in studying this phenomenon.

For Gregory T. Polletta

Argument

The term “universal” is ambiguous; it can indicate either what actually exists in several instances, or what can so exist, even if it is actually exemplified in only one instance. The former sense implies the latter, but not vice versa. It is suggested that form for Aristotle is universal in the latter sense, including what is part of the nature of a species but not individual accidents due to the matter, and that this may help to explain a problematic passage in Metaphysics Z 15. Analysis of passages in Metaphysics Z 8 may however suggest that form as universal in the former sense exists only as a potentiality. The claim that form includes only specific, not individual features has implications for Aristotle's theory of heredity; more generally, his theory of form reflects the tensions between Platonist and non-Platonist elements in his thought and his methods of enquiry.

Argument

This article depicts the emergence of the modern, secular Jewish intellectual in the eighteenth century as a process of intellectual seduction and irresistible attraction of young men to knowledge outside the boundaries of Jewish culture. In the rhetoric of the Haskalah (Enlightenment), the cultural conversion was often described metaphorically as sexual attraction to a forbidden woman. The passion for knowledge inaccessible within the traditional Jewish culture (mainly of the natural sciences, but also of Hebrew, European languages, and philosophy) and intense curiosity were the hallmarks of the early maskilim (Jewish Enlighteners). It is difficult now to assess the sense of audacity, the awareness of sin, of guilt, and of subversion entailed in the desire to enter the realms of extra-Jewish and extra-religious knowledge, as well as the barriers of language and social norms that had to be crossed. The encounter of the Ashkenazi elite in eighteenth-century Europe with extra-Jewish knowledge was a traumatic conflict that grew in intensity as the shelf of Hebrew books and the number of maskilim grew.

I have always been a philosopher at heart. I write history of science and history of its philosophy primarily as a philosopher wary of his abstractions and broad conceptualizations. But that has not always been the case. Lakatos famously portrayed history of science as the testing ground for theories of scientific rationality. But he did so along the crudest Hegelian lines that did injury both to Hegel and to the history and methodology of science. Since science is ultimately rational, he argued, rival methodologies can prove their mettle by competing for whose tendentiously reconstructed account of the history of science renders more of it rational! (Lakatos 1971). My own approach to the relationship between history and philosophy of science started out perhaps a little more open-mindedly than Lakatos's, but in a manner no less crude. Over the years the relationship between the history I wrote and the philosophy to which I was committed took on a firmer and more reciprocal shape. It did so in the course of a process that I now realize exemplified the philosophical position it eventually yielded. I would like to trace that development in the following pages and reflect as best I can on where it has led and left me.

My first book, The Physicists, was conceived when I. I. Rabi visited Princeton in 1961–1962 as a Shreve Fellow in the History Department (see Kevles 1995). Some two years earlier C. P. Snow had published his influential provocation, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, and the academic world was abuzz with initiatives aimed at achieving better literacy in science among liberal arts majors. Rabi was a Nobel laureate in physics at Columbia University and his visit was one of Princeton's efforts to this end. It had been arranged by my mentor, Eric F. Goldman, a historian of modern America who had gotten to know Rabi through their mutual engagement with current issues in American democracy.