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Botany and national identities: The Tokyo Cherry Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Wybe Kuitert
Argument When Japan faced the world after the collapse of its feudal system, it had to invent its own modern identity in which the Tokyo Cherry became the National Flower. Despite being a garden plant, it received a Latin scientific species name as if it was an endemic species. After Japan’s colonial conquest of Korea, exploring the flora of the peninsula became part of imperial knowledge practices
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George Montandon, the Ainu and the theory of hologenesis Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 John L. Hennessey
In 1909, Italian zoologist Daniele Rosa (1857–1944) proposed a radical new evolutionary theory: hologenesis, or simultaneous, pan-terrestrial creation and evolution driven primarily by internal factors. Hologenesis was widely ignored or rejected outside Italy, but Swiss-French anthropologist George Montandon (1879–1944) eagerly embraced and developed the theory. An ambitious careerist, Montandon’s
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Textual materiality and abstraction in mathematics Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Anna Kiel Steensen, Mikkel Willum Johansen, Morten Misfeldt
In this paper, we wish to explore the role that textual representations play in the creation of new mathematical objects. We do so by analyzing texts by Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813) and Évariste Galois (1811–1832), which are seen as central to the historical development of the mathematical concept of groups. In our analysis, we consider how the material features of representations relate to the
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The animal model of human disease as a core concept of medical research: Historical cases, failures, and some epistemological considerations Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Volker Roelcke
This article uses four historical case studies to address epistemological issues related to the animal model of human diseases and its use in medical research on human diseases. The knowledge derived from animal models is widely assumed to be highly valid and predictive of reactions by human organisms. In this contribution, I use three significant historical cases of failure (ca. 1890, 1960, 2006)
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Euclid’s Fourth Postulate: Its authenticity and significance for the foundations of Greek mathematics Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-07 Vincenzo De Risi
The Fourth Postulate of Euclid’s Elements states that all right angles are equal. This principle has always been considered problematic in the deductive economy of the treatise, and even the ancient interpreters were confused about its mathematical role and its epistemological status. The present essay reconsiders the ancient testimonies on the Fourth Postulate, showing that there is no certain evidence
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Detecting the unknown in a sea of knowns: Health surveillance, knowledge infrastructures, and the quest for classification egress Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-23 Francis Lee
The sociological study of knowledge infrastructures and classification has traditionally focused on the politics and practices of classifying things or people. However, actors’ work to escape dominant infrastructures and pre-established classification systems has received little attention. In response to this, this article argues that it is crucial to analyze, not only the practices and politics of
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How to build a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century: In search of autonomy for zoology at the Lisbon Polytechnic School (1837–1862) Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Daniel Gamito-Marques
This article discusses the conditions that lead to the autonomy of scientific disciplines by analyzing the case of zoology in the nineteenth century. The specialization of knowledge and its institutionalization in higher education in the nineteenth century were important processes for the autonomy of scientific disciplines, such as zoology. The article argues that autonomy only arises after social
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Crossing the doorsteps for social reform: The social crusades of Florence Kelley and Ellen Richards Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Gabrielle Soudan, David Philippy, Harro Maas
ArgumentThis paper contrasts the research strategies of two women reformers, Florence Kelley and Ellen Swallow Richards, which entailed different strategies of social reform. In the early 1890s, social activist Florence Kelley used the social survey as a weapon for legal reform of the working conditions of women and children in Chicago’s sweatshop system. Kelley’s case shows that her surveys were most
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True to form: Media and data technologies of self-inscription Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Christine von Oertzen
ArgumentThis paper examines self-inscription, a mode of census enumeration that emerged during the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1840s, a number of European states introduced self-inscription as an auxiliary means to facilitate the work of enumerators. However, a decisive shift occurred when Prussian census statisticians implemented self-inscription via individual “Zählkarten”—or “counting cards”—in
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Interview and interior: Procedures of narrative surveys around 1900 Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-06 Anke te Heesen
In the spring of 1893, the Austrian writer and critic Hermann Bahr began interviewing various people on antisemitism, a subject of heated discussion in the European feuilleton around 1900. “Once again, I am travelling the world sounding out people’s opinions and listening to what they have to say,” he wrote in his introduction to a series of articles on that issue that appeared in the feuilleton of
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Evidence of undercounting: Collecting data on mental illness in Germany (c. 1825-1925) Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Sophie Ledebur
Collecting data about people with mental disorders living outside of asylums became a heightened concern from the early nineteenth century onwards. In Germany, so-called “insanity counts” targeted the number and sometimes the type the mentally ill who were living unattended and untreated by professional care throughout the country. An eagerly expressed assumption that the “true” extent of the gathered
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Formative encounters: Colonial data collection on land and law in German Micronesia Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Anna Echterhölter
Data collections are a hallmark of nineteenth-century administrative knowledge making, and they were by no means confined to Europe. All colonial empires transferred and translated these techniques of serialised and quantified information gathering to their dominions overseas. The colonial situation affected the encounters underlying vital statistics, enquête methods and land surveying. In this paper
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The world of deviance in the classroom: Psychological experiments on schoolchildren in Weimar Germany Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Laurens Schlicht
The article uses three case studies from the 1920s to explore how psychologists and elementary school teachers employed psychological techniques to gain knowledge about elementary school children and their milieu. It begins by describing the role of the elementary school and the elementary school teacher in the Weimar Republic. It then discusses the so-called “observation sheets” that were used in
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Medical decisions influenced by eugenics: Hungarian gynecological practices during the 1910s Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Barna Szamosi
ArgumentThis study contributes to the discussion on the development of eugenics in Central-Eastern Europe by tracing the way that eugenic ideas entered into medical decision-making in Hungary. Through a case study that reviews the professional argumentation of the gynecological management of tuberculosis pregnancies, this paper shows that the subordination of individual reproductive rights to state
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A married couple of mathematicians from Vienna remembers Sigmund Freud (1953) Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze
The paper is based on a hitherto unexplored document (audiotape of an interview accompanied by a German transcript) from 1953, located in the Freud Papers at the Library of Congress. It contributes to a better understanding of the impact of Freud and of Psychoanalysis on personalities from the exact sciences, here represented by the noted applied mathematicians Richard von Mises and Hilda Geiringer
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The Theory-Practice Gap in the Evaluation of Agent-Based Social Simulations Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 David Anzola
ArgumentAgent-based social simulations have historically been evaluated using two criteria: verification and validation. This article questions the adequacy of this dual evaluation scheme. It claims that the scheme does not conform to everyday practices of evaluation, and has, over time, fostered a theory-practice gap in the assessment of social simulations. This gap originates because the dual evaluation
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Belgium and probability in the nineteenth century: The case of Paul Mansion Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-16 Laurent Mazliak
ArgumentThis paper explores how the Belgian mathematician Paul Mansion became interested in probability theory. In comparison to many other countries at the time, probability theory had a much stronger presence in Belgium. In addition, Mansion, who was an avowed Catholic militant, had found probability theory to be a useful means of reflecting on certain problems pertaining to determinism and randomness
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The Bryson synthesis: The forging of climate change narratives during the World Food Crisis Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-16 Robert L. Naylor
ArgumentDuring the first half of the 1970s, climate research gained a new significance and began to be perceived within political and academic circles as being worthy of public support. Conventional explanations for this increased status include a series of climate anomalies that generated awareness and heightened concern over the potentially devastating effects of climate change. Controversial climatologist
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Information, meaning and physics: The intellectual evolution of the English School of Information Theory during 1946-1956 Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-16 Javier Anta
ArgumentIn this comparative historical analysis, we will analyze the intellectual tendency that emerged between 1946 and 1956 to take advantage of the popularity of communication theory to develop a kind of informational epistemology of statistical mechanics. We will argue that this tendency results from a historical confluence in the early 1950s of certain theoretical claims of the so-called English
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Do scientific objects have a life (which may end)? Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Theodore Arabatzis
ArgumentThe aim of this article is to make a case for the pertinence of a biographical approach to the history of scientific objects. I first lay out the rationale of that approach by revisiting and extending my earlier work on the topic. I consider the characteristics of scientific objects that motivate the biographical metaphor, and I indicate its virtues and limitations by bringing out the positive
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Killed by its own obituaries: Explaining the demise of the ether Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Jaume Navarro
ArgumentIn this paper I follow the demise of the ether in the first half of the twentieth century to show how the first obituaries of the ether were instrumental in creating an object with specific and largely simplified properties related to, but different from, nineteenth-century ethers. I suggest that writing the history of dead objects (or objects an author wants to be dead) is not epistemologically
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Dead or “undead”? The curious and untidy history of Volta’s concept of “contact potential” Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Hasok Chang
ArgumentMuch of the long controversy concerning the workings of electric batteries revolved around the concept of the contact potential (especially between different types of metals), originated by Alessandro Volta in the late eighteenth century. Although Volta’s original theory of batteries has been thoroughly rejected and most discussions in today’s electrochemistry hardly ever mention the contact
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At the ends of the line: How the Airy Transit Circle was gradually overshadowed by the Greenwich Prime Meridian Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Daniel Belteki
ArgumentThe Greenwich Prime Meridian is one of the iconic features of the Royal Museums Greenwich. Visitors to the Museum even queue up to pose with one leg on either side of the Line. Yet, the Airy Transit Circle, the instrument that defined the meridian, is almost always excluded from these photographs. This paper examines how the instrument has become hidden in plain sight within the stories of
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Anatomy collections as “modern ruins”: The nostalgia of lonely specimens Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Alexandra Ion
ArgumentThis text is a reflection on the fate of a special kind of scientific object - anatomy collections - and their place in contemporary times. Though the phenomenon of keeping and displaying such collections is generally dying out, those specimens which survive continue to puzzle and fascinate us. To understand the current status of such collections, and the nostalgia evoked by the specimens within
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A terrifying poison or a cheap fertilizer? The life and death of Mount Vesuvius ash Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Corinna Guerra
ArgumentDuring the eighteenth century, chemists in the Kingdom of Naples (the South of Italy) were very busy analyzing the chemical composition of ash from Mount Vesuvius. Undoubtedly, after a huge eruption this dusty phenomenon was the most important scientific object of debate. In fact, it was crucial to determine if there were dangerous elements in the ash so that the population could be warned
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Dyeing off: On the deaths of dyestuffs as scientific objects Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Mat Paskins
Between the 1870s and the 1920s, the dye industry was at the center of claims about the productivity of organic chemistry. Dyestuffs were widely represented as the most complex molecules to find commercial application, and positioned at the center of nationalist projects to establish chemical industry, especially in Britain and the United States. By the later twentieth century, the complex of scientific
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Animism and natural teleology from Avicenna to Boyle Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Jeff Kochan
Historians have claimed that the two closely related concepts of animism and natural teleology were both decisively rejected in the Scientific Revolution. They tout Robert Boyle as an early modern warden against pre-modern animism. Discussing Avicenna, Aquinas, and Buridan, as well as Renaissance psychology, I instead suggest that teleology went through a slow and uneven process of rationalization
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Using one’s talents in honor of God: Lambert ten Kate (1674-1731) and Isaac Newton’s natural philosophy Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Steffen Ducheyne
Lambert ten Kate (1674-1731), the scholar of language, religious writer, art theoretician and collector, and natural philosophy enthusiast, was part of an informal network of Amsterdam-based mathematics and natural philosophy enthusiasts who played a pivotal role in the early diffusion of Newton’s natural philosophical ideas in the Dutch Republic. Because Ten Kate contributed to several areas of research
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Towards a new philosophical perspective on Hermann Weyl’s turn to intuitionism Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Kati Kish Bar-On
The paper explores Hermann Weyl’s turn to intuitionism through a philosophical prism of normative framework transitions. It focuses on three central themes that occupied Weyl’s thought: the notion of the continuum, logical existence, and the necessity of intuitionism, constructivism, and formalism to adequately address the foundational crisis of mathematics. The analysis of these themes reveals Weyl’s
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An infrastructural account of scientific objectivity for legal contexts and bloodstain pattern analysis Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 W. John Koolage, Lauren M. Williams, Morgen L. Barroso
In the United States, scientific knowledge is brought before the courts by way of testimony – the testimony of scientific experts. We argue that this expertise is best understood first as related to the quality of the underlying science and then in terms of who delivers it. Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA), a contemporary forensic science, serves as the vaulting point for our exploration of objectivity
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Individuals and collectives in the philosophy of Boris Hessen: An introduction Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Sean Winkler
This paper provides an introduction to three translations of articles by Soviet philosopher Boris Hessen: “Mechanical Materialism and Modern Physics,” “On Comrade Timiryazev’s Attitude towards Contemporary Science” and “Marian Smoluchowski (On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death)”. It begins by presenting a central tension in Hessen’s work; namely, how even though he is better known for the externalism
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Charlatan epistemology: As illustrated by a study of wonder-working in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Koen Vermeir
This article highlights the epistemic concerns that have permeated the historical discourse around charlatanism. In it, I study the term “charlatan” as a multivalent actor’s category without a stable referent. Instead of defining or identifying “the charlatan,” I analyze how the concept of the charlatan was used to make epistemic interventions about what constituted credible knowledge in two interconnected
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A democratic program for healing: The Raspail domestic medicine method in 1840s France Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Hervé Guillemain
Raspail’s domestic medicine method, popularized in 1840s France, has similarities with the practices of nineteenth century non-academic healers. His mass marketing of camphor as a universal treatment echoes the practices of “charlatans” and their circles. But Raspail is also very original in this history of popular care. As a scientist, a popularizer of encyclopedic knowledge and a political activist
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Useful charlatans: Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti’s fasting contest in Paris, 1886 Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Agustí Nieto-Galan
This paper analyzes the public fasts of two Italian “hunger artists,” Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti, in Paris in 1886, and their ability to forego eating for a long period (thirty and fifty days respectively). Some contemporary witnesses described them as clever frauds, but others considered them to be interesting physiological anomalies. Controversies about their fasts entered academic circles
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The “Controversial Cundurango Cure”: Medical professionalization and the global circulation of drugs Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Elisa Sevilla, Ana Sevilla
This article examines the medical and political discussions regarding a controversial medicinal bark from Ecuador – cundurango – that was actively sponsored by the Ecuadorian government as a new botanical cure for cancer in the late nineteenth century United States and elsewhere. The article focuses on the commercial and diplomatic interests behind the public discussion and advertising techniques of
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Becoming Eusapia: The rise of the “Diva of Scientists” Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Francesco Paolo de Ceglia, Lorenzo Leporiere
Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918) is remembered as one of the most famous mediums in the history of spiritualism. Renowned scientists attended her séances in Europe and in the United States. They often had to admit to being unable to understand the origin of the phenomena produced. Cesare Lombroso, for example, after meeting Eusapia, was converted first to mediumism, then spiritualism. This article will
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Levels of communication: The talking horse experiments Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Daniel Gethmann
In the early twentieth century, counting and speaking horses, like the famous Clever Hans or the “Horses of Elberfeld,” became widely debated subjects in experimental psychology. The idea was to determine whether their learning success was only a fraud, or if it might open up a new chapter in “animal psychology” - or even belong to the realm of parapsychology and telepathy. When their tricks were discovered
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Between learned and popular culture: A world of syncretism and acculturation Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Nathalie Richard
The world of charlatans is a world of constantly shifting borders and redefinitions, a world of crossed lines and pushed boundaries. Can one even speak of “the world” of charlatans in the singular, when the examples we are given to read in this volume reveal such great diversity that they seem to defeat any attempt to define common traits, as Roy Porter (1989) tried to do in his time? Certainly, commercial
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Why they shared: recovering early arguments for sharing social scientific data – ERRATUM Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-15 Emily Hauptmann
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Rendering Inuit cancer “visible”: Geography, pathology, and nosology in Arctic cancer research Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-07 Jennifer Fraser
ArgumentIn August of 1977, Australian pathologist David W. Buntine delivered a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia in Melbourne, Victoria. In this presentation, he used the diagnostic category of “Eskimoma,” to describe a unique set of salivary gland tumors he had observed over the past five years within Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Center. Only found
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The Local versus the Global in the history of relativity: The case of Belgium Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-07 Sjang L. ten Hagen
ArgumentThis article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein’s theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural diversity and reflectiveness of global conditions (the principal example being the First World War), proves well-suited to expose transnational flows
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Changing conceptions of mathematics and infinity in Giordano Bruno’s vernacular and Latin works Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-07 Paolo Rossini
ArgumentThe purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of Giordano Bruno’s conception of mathematics. Specifically, it intends to highlight two aspects of this conception that have been neglected in previous studies. First, Bruno’s conception of mathematics changed over time and in parallel with another concept that was central to his thought: the concept of infinity. Specifically, Bruno undertook
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The effects of publishing processes on scientific thought: Typography and typology in prehistoric archaeology (1950s–1990s) Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-07 Sébastien Plutniak
ArgumentIn 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
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Time, trauma, and the brain: How suicide came to have no significant precipitating event Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-07 Stephanie Lloyd, Alexandre Larivée
ArgumentIn this article, we trace shifting narratives of trauma within psychiatric, neuroscience, and environmental epigenetics research. We argue that two contemporary narratives of trauma – each of which concerns questions of time and psychopathology, of the past invading the present – had to be stabilized in order for environmental epigenetics models of suicide risk to be posited. Through an examination
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Newton, the sensorium of God, and the cause of gravity Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-07 John Henry
ArgumentIt is argued that the sensorium of God was introduced into the Quaestiones added to the end of Newton’s Optice (1706) as a way of answering objections that Newton had failed to provide a causal account of gravity in the Principia. The discussion of God’s sensorium indicated that gravity must be caused by God’s will. Newton did not leave it there, however, but went on to show how God’s will
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Why they shared: recovering early arguments for sharing social scientific data Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-03-15 Emily Hauptmann
ArgumentMost 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
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Historicizing the comparative survey of freedom: tracing the social trajectory of an influential indicator Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-03-15 Emily Zerndt
ArgumentThe Comparative Survey of Freedom, first published by Freedom House in 1973, is now the most widely used indicator of democracy by both academics and the U.S. government alike. However, literature examining the Survey’s origins is virtually nonexistent. In this article, I use archival records to challenge Freedom House’s retrospective account of the indicator’s creation. Rather than the outcome
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"Please, come in." Being a charlatan, or the question of trustworthy knowledge. Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Irina Podgorny,Daniel Gethmann
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Reconsidering the ignorabimus: du Bois-Reymond and the hard problem of consciousness Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-10-02 Paolo Pecere
ArgumentIn this paper I present an interpretation of du Bois-Reymond’s thesis on the impossibility of a scientific explanation of consciousness and of its present importance. I reconsider du Bois-Reymond’s speech “On the limits of natural science” (1872) in the context of nineteenth-century German philosophy and neurophysiology, pointing out connections and analogies with contemporary arguments on
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Physiology and philhellenism in the late nineteenth century: The self-fashioning of Emil du Bois-Reymond Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-10-02 Lea Beiermann, Elisabeth Wesseling
ArgumentNineteenth-century Prussia was deeply entrenched in philhellenism, which affected the ideological framework of its public institutions. At Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, philhellenism provided the rationale for a persistent elevation of the humanities over the burgeoning experimental life sciences. Despite this outspoken hierarchy, professor of physiology Emil du Bois-Reymond eventually
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Power, politics, and the development of political science in the Americas. Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-06-01 Thibaud Boncourt,Paulo Ravecca
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The superiority of economics and the economics of externalism – a sketch Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-03-23 Tim Winzler
ArgumentThe article takes as its starting point the relationship of academic economists and the wider society. First, various bodies of literature that deal empirically with this matter are discussed: epistemologically, they range from a bold structuralism via a form of symbolic interactionism to a form of radical constructivism. A Bourdieusian approach is recommended to complement these perspectives
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Citation patterns in economics and beyond Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-03-23 Matthias Aistleitner, Jakob Kapeller, Stefan Steinerberger
ArgumentIn this paper we comparatively explore three claims concerning the disciplinary character of economics by means of citation analysis. The three claims under study are: (1) economics exhibits strong forms of institutional stratification and, as a byproduct, a rather pronounced internal hierarchy; (2) economists strongly conform to institutional incentives; and (3) modern mainstream economics
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On the evolution of the glass ceiling in Italian academia: the case of economics Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-03-23 Marcella Corsi, Carlo D’Ippoliti, Giulia Zacchia
ArgumentFollowing an international trend, Italy has reformed its university system, especially concerning methods and tools for research evaluation, which are increasingly focused on a number of bibliometric indexes. To study the effects of these changes, we analyze the changing profiles of economists who have won competitions for full professorship in the last few decades in the country. We concentrate
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Confronting the anomaly: directions in (German) economic research after the crisis Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-03-23 Ulrike Jacob, Oliver A. Brust
ArgumentRecurring economic crises, like the one of 2007-2008, led to criticism of economic research and a demand to develop new strategies to avoid them. Standard economic theories use conventional approaches to deal with economic challenges, heterodox theories try to develop alternatives with which to face them. It remains unclear whether the 2007-2008 crisis led to a change in economic research as
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Six Dimensions of Concentration in Economics: Evidence from a Large-Scale Data Set Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2020-03-23 Florentin Glötzl, Ernest Aigner
ArgumentThis paper argues that the economics discipline is highly concentrated, which may inhibit scientific innovation and change in the future. The argument is based on an empirical investigation of six dimensions of concentration in economics between 1956 and 2016 using a large-scale data set. The results show that North America accounts for nearly half of all articles and three quarters of all
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Attachment and the archive: barriers and facilitators to the use of historical sociology as complementary developmental science Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-12-12 Robbie Duschinsky
ArgumentThis article explores historical sociology as a complementary source of knowledge for scientific research, considering barriers and facilitators to this work through reflections on one project. This project began as a study of the emergence and reception of the infant disorganized attachment classification, introduced in the 1980s by Ainsworth’s student Mary Main, working with Judith Solomon
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Blood purity and scientific independence: blood science and postcolonial struggles in Korea, 1926–1975 Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-12-12 Jaehwan Hyun
ArgumentAfter World War II, blood groups became a symbol of anti-racial science. This paper aims to shed new light on the post-WWII history of blood groups and race, illuminating the postcolonial revitalization of racial serology in South Korea. In the prewar period, Japanese serologists developed a serological anthropology of Koreans in tandem with Japanese colonialism. The pioneering Korean hematologist
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“The disadvantages of a defective education”: identity, experiment and persuasion in the natural history of the salmon and parr controversy, c. 1825–1850 Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-12-12 Reuben Message
ArgumentDuring the second quarter of the nineteenth century, an argument raged about the identity of a small freshwater fish: was the parr a distinct species, or merely the young of the salmon? This “Parr Controversy” concerned both fishermen and ichthyologists. A central protagonist in the controversy was a man of ambiguous social and scientific status: a gamekeeper from Scotland named John Shaw.
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The uses of trauma in experiment: Traumatic stress and the history of experimental neurosis, c. 1925–1975 Science in Context (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2019-12-12 Ulrich Koch
ArgumentThe article retraces the shifting conceptualizations of psychological trauma in experimental psychopathological research in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the United States. Among researchers studying so-called experimental neuroses in animal laboratories, trauma was an often-invoked category used to denote the clash of conflicting forces believed to lead to neurotic suffering