Ernst Cassirer's theory of language as a symbolic form, one of the richest and most insightful philosophies of language of the twentieth century, went virtually unnoticed in the mainstreams of modern linguistics. This was so for what seems to be a good metatheoretical reason: Cassirer insisted on the constitutive role of meaning in the explanation of linguistic phenomena, a position which was explicitly rejected by both American Structuralists and Chomskian Generativists. In the last decade, however, a new and promising linguistic framework has emerged — the framework of lexical semantics — which seems to bear close theoretical resemblance to Cassirer's theory. In this paper, I show how the empirical results accumulated within the framework of lexical semantics serve to validate Cassirer's most fundamental philosophical insights, and suggest that Cassirer's philosophy helps position these empirical results in their appropriate epistemological context. I discuss the following fundamental points, which, for me, constitute the backbone of both Cassirer's philosophy and the theory of lexical semantics: (i) natural language grammars constitute structural reflections of a deeply-rooted, highly structured level of semantic organization; (ii) the representational level of linguistic meaning, which is prior to experience in the Kantian sense, comprises a partial set of semantic notions, which language selects as centers of perceptual attention; (iii) this partial set is potentially different from the sets selected by other symbolic forms, such as myth, science, and art; and (iv) linguistic variability is to be explained in universalistic terms, thus allowing for specific patterns of variability within universally-constrained limits.

This paper sets out a framework for understanding how the scientific community constructs computer simulation as an epistemically and pragmatically useful methodology. The framework is based on comparisons between simulation and the loosely-defined categories of “theoretical work” and “experimental work.” Within that framework, the epistemological adequacy of simulation arises from its role as a mathematical manipulation of a complex, abstract theoretical model. To establish that adequacy demands a detailed “theoretical” grasp of the internal structure of the computer program. Simultaneously, the pragmatic usefulness of simulation arises from its role as a “virtual laboratory.” That role is made possible by black-boxing the internal structure of the program, such that the scientist can interact with the computer in an intuitive, “experimental” manner. Thus simulation is rendered authoritative, opening up encoded theories to a novel, “experimental” type of manipulation.

This paper examines the debate in China over the shape of the earth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The main arguments are as follows. First, trust plays an important role in knowledge transmission. Second, partial communication between different woridviews is possible. In the case of the debate over the shape of the earth, partial communication was accomplished by the spread of Western astronomical instruments and calculating tools. Third, such alien concepts as the four elements and the experience of navigation did not serve as effective cultural resources to convince Chinese literati of the sphericity of the earth. Fourth, as a result, the legitimacy of the sphericity of the earth had to be reconstructed in an alien environment. The theory of the Chinese origins of Western learning was fabricated within such a context. Fifth, debate over factual knowledge bears social and cultural implications. Thus the debate over the sphericity of the earth involved not only how the phenomenon could be understood but also how the Chinese empire was to be positioned in the new cultural atlas. Finally, the sphericity of the earth eventually became a matter of common sense for the Chinese largely because of the political and cultural transformation of modern China.

This paper provides a historical perspective to one of the liveliest debates in common law courts today — the one over scientific expert testimony. Arguing against the current tendency to present the problem of expert testimony as a late twentieth-century predicament which threatens to spin out of control, the paper shows that the phenomena of conflicting scientific testimonies have been perennial for at least two centuries, and intensely debated in both the legal and the scientific communities for at least 150 years.

The publication of Johannes Kepler's brilliant and revolutionary Astronomia nova (1609) has hitherto been viewed as somehow inevitable. This paper argues that, on the contrary, the book's very existence and a measure of its unusual form and content are in fact highly contingent, and derive from a legal dispute between Kepler and Tycho's heirs over the right to capitalize on his astronomical legacy. On Tycho's death, Kepler rather accidentally found himself in charge of Tycho's posthumous astronomical publications, especially the highly prestigious Rudol phine Tables. Tycho's legal heirs, not having been paid by the emperor for Tycho's astronomical assets and feigning Kepler's unworthiness as his successor, wrested this mandate back. Ordered in turn to justify his employment, Kepler contrived the Astronomia nova as an interim announcement of the fruits of his astronomical research. In an effort to block Kepler's continuing exploitation of Tycho's observations, the heirs obtained the legal right to censor his publications, which severely threatened his philosophical freedom. The threat of editorial interference was responsible in part for Astronomia nova's unusual narrative form.

The circulation of science across cultural boundaries involves the construction of various representations by the various actors, who each account for their involvement in the process. The historiography of the transmission of European science to China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has long been dominated by one particular narrative: that of the Jesuit missionaries who were the main go-betweens for these two centuries. This fact has contributed to shaping Western images of China's history and science up to the present day.

To retrieve the multifaceted history of this transmission, more than one discourse needs to be taken into account. Even within the Society of Jesus, representations changed with the evolution of patronage of the mission, and the concomitant building up of state-sponsored science in Europe. Chinese sources yield different pictures, accounting for the reception of Western learning — rather than “European science” — in terms of integration rather than of conversion, and legitimizing it first by the Jesuits' status as scholars, then by the idea that Western learning was of Chinese origin. This shift corresponded to the imperial appropriation of this learning.

Cassirer's analyses of twentieth-century physics from the perspective of the philosophy of science focuses on the concept of the object of scientific experience. Within his concept of functional knowledge, he takes a structural stance and claims that it is specifically this concept of the object that has paved the way for modern science. This article aims, first, to show that Cassirer's interpretation of Felix Klein's “Erlanger Programm” provided the impetus for this view. Then, it analyzes Kant's conception of objectivity in order to examine whether Cassirer can rightfully claim that his view is a further development of transcendental principles. Finally, it is argued that it is Cassirer's concept of the object that enables him to integrate one decisive feature of scientific progress, namely, the increasing generalization of the basic concepts of a science, into his conception of knowledge. This is illustrated in more detail through the example of the progression from Newton's mechanics to relativity theory.

In its reconstruction of scientific practice, philosophy of science has traditionally placed scientific theories in a central role, and has reduced the problem of mediating between theories and the world to formal considerations. Many applications of scientific theories, however, involve complex mathematical models whose constitutive equations are analytically unsolvable. The study of these applications often consists in developing representations of the underlying physics on a computer, and using the techniques of computer simulation in order to learn about the behavior of these systems. In many instances, these computer simulations are not simple number-crunching techniques. They involve a complex chain of inferences that serve to transform theoretical structures into specific concrete knowledge of physical systems. In this paper I argue that this process of transformation has its own epistemology. I also argue that this kind of epistemology is unfamiliar to most philosophy of science, which has traditionally concerned itself with the justification of theories, not with their application. Finally, I urge that the nature of this epistemology suggests that the end results of some simulations do not bear a simple, straightforward relation to the theories from which they stem.

Ernst Cassirer's fundamental conception of symbolism (symbolic pregnance) derives from what may be called a bio-medical model of semiotics, not a linguistic one. He employs both models in his philosophy of symbolic forms, but his notion of the “prototype and model of symbolism” was not derived from linguistics. The sources for his conception of symbolism include the ethnographic and anthropological literature he discovered in Aby Warburg's (1866–1929) Hamburg research library, findings of medical research on aphasia and related conditions, particularly the work of Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965) and the theoretical biology of Jacob von Uexküll (1864–1944). The linguistic model of semiotics regards the bond between the signifier and the signified as purely arbitrary and conventional, but Cassirer traced meaning back to a “natural symbolism” of image-like configurations in bodily feeling and perception. In this way, his doctrine of symbolism assumed a form that undercut the distinction between philosophical Naturalism and Idealism. This helps to explain why in later years Cassirer developed his theory of Basic Phenomena. Cassirer's notion of the “prototype and model of symbolism” illustrates his method of thought, which eschews pure argument in favor of interaction with empirical research.

The “raison d'être” of this paper is my dissatisfaction with current portrayals of the place and the fate of the so-called rational sciences in Muslim societies. I approach this issue from the perspectives of West European visitors to the Ottoman and Safavid Empires during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I show that these travelers encountered educated people capable of understanding and answering their visitors' scholarly questions in non-trivial ways. The travels and the ensuing encounters suggest that early modern Muslim societies and their institutions, their ways of producing knowledge, the types of their knowledge, and their material resources contributed important elements to various early modern West European approaches to gaining knowledge about nature, history, and politics.

In the summer of 1783, a trial took place in the French city of Arras. One M. de Vissery, a resident of the nearby village of St. Omer, was appealing a decision by his local aldermen, who required him to remove a lightning rod he had put on his chimney. His young defense lawyer was Maximilien Robespierre, who made a name for himself by winning the case. In preparation, Robespierre and his senior colleague corresponded with natural philosophers and jurisconsultants. Robes- pierre then persuasively resolved the crucial problem, namely, the proper relations of scientific to legal authority. He exploited the empiricist dogma common to contemporary physics and jurisprudence to argue that judges need not defer to scientific experts, but must only consider the facts, which required no expertise. It was a first approximation of an argument Robespierre would make with mounting authority over the next decade.

What kind of objects are computer programs used for simulation purposes in scientific settings? The current investigation treats a special case. It focuses on “event generators,” the program packages that particle physicists construct and use to simulate mechanisms of particle production. The paper is an attempt to bring the multiplex and unfolding character of such knowledge objects to the fore: Multiple meanings and functions are embodied in the object and can be drawn out selectively according to the requirements of a work setting. The object's conceptual complexity governs its application in some contexts, while the object is considered a mere “black box,” transparent and ready-to-hand, in others. These two poles span a full spectrum of object aspects, functions, and conceptions. Event generators are ideas turned into software, testing grounds for models, just a tool to study the performance of a detector, etc. The object's multiplex nature is submitted to negotiation among different actors.

When economists report on research using mathematical models, they use a literary form similar to the experimental report in the laboratory sciences. This form consists of a narrative of a series of events, with a clear temporal segregation of the agency of the author and the agency of the objects of study. Existing explanations of this literary form treat it as a rhetorical device that either conceals the agency of the author in constructing and interpreting the findings, or simply appropriates the appearance of accepted (natural-)scientific method. This article — based on analysis of a research program in economics, a single article that issued from that program, and in-depth interviews with the authors — proposes an alternate interpretation. Drawing on the praxeological “laboratory studies” tradition in science studies, we treat work with mathematical models as involving the interaction of economists with objects (models) that act independently of the analyst's will. The clear separation of the economist's and the models agency, as depicted in the published report, is not the result of a rhetorical rewriting of actual events, but is a practical accomplishment. Every step in the analytical work that preceded the paper is devoted to developing a procedure in which the economists' agency will be completely accountable in terms of accepted practices, and the performance of the model will be distinct and compelling.

Biology, understood in turn-of-the-century Germany to include psychology, held a central but enigmatic place in the philosopher Ernst Cassirer's work. From his earliest studies with Hermann Cohen through his long engagement with the theoretical biology of Jakob von Uexküll and Adolf Meyer-Abich, Cassirer consistently used the history and practice of biology to examine and delineate a set of characteristic tensions between the natural and cultural sciences. This paper examines Cassirer's treatment of this theme by addressing two contrasting interpretations he gave — in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929) and in his Essay on Man (1944) — to the benchmark case from empirical psychology of the “talking” horse “Clever Hans.” The original case involved the horse's ability to signal answers to remarkably complex questions by stamping its hooves, an ability that ultimately appeared to rest on a capacity to detect extremely minute unintentional movement cues in its auditors as it reached the appropriate answer. Due to both Cassirer's shifting description of the case within his philosophy and the case's inherent polyvalence, Cassirer's remarks provide a useful window onto the social, epistemological, and stylistic meaning of his “unified” philosophy of human culture and science.

In the nineteenth century, American legal educators drew on the idea of “legal science” the claim that the study of law was similar to the study of the natural sciences. In this paper, I propose to examine the particular conceptions of “science” that were incorporated into that idea. The primary point of the paper is to argue that in antebellum America, a particular view of the natural sciences dominated public discourse, and it was this conception that was appropriated by contemporaneous legal scientists. Public discussions of natural science in lyceums, surveys, and journals, were carried out in a language grounded in the same religious commitments and the same normative conception of nature that drove the ideology of laissez-faire. Described under the rubric “Protestant Baconianism,” the approach was characterized by commitments to four elements: natural theology; a constrained version of Baconian inductivism; a belief in grand synthesis and proof by analogy; and claims of moral improvement. These elements were typical of the efforts of a particular influential circle of natural scientists and, similarly, of some of the more influential legal scientists in the antebellum period. This article examines the elements of the Protestant Baconian approach that were incorporated into Christopher Columbus Langdell's model of legal science in the 1870s, a model that continues to influence thinking about both legal education and jurisprudence to this day.

During the later European Renaissance, some scholars began to write about the history of scientific disciplines. Some of the issues and problems they faced in constructing their narratives have had long-term effects on the history of science. One of these issues was how to relate scholars from the Islamic traditions of scientific scholarship to those of antiquity and of postclassical Europe. Recent historians of science have rejected a once-common Western opinion that the contribution of these Islamic scientists had lain mainly in their preservation of ancient texts that were then handed over to Western scholars, who mastered them and then moved beyond them as part of the scientific revolution. This article examines the first effort to write a history of mathematics, the Lives of the Mathematicians by Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617), to determine how he treated this issue in his work. Baldi's efforts are especially important here because he was also an early European scholar of Arabic.

An examination of the work shows that Baldi did not share the negative views held by later Europeans about these non-European scientists. However, despite his knowledge of Arabic he had no active contacts with ongoing mathematical scholarship in Arabic. As a consequence, his narrative does follow the chronology of those later Europeans who would limit consideration of these mathematicians to approximately the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. In Baldi's writings, then, we can see the later narrative shape used by Western historians of science until recent years, but not the subsidiary role accorded to non-European scholars.