History and Sociology of Science

1 Croyances et acceptations dans la pratique scientifique Le volontarisme épistémique de Cohen à l'épreuve de l'affaire Poisson et du cas Le Verrier Texte paru dans Croire ou accepter ? (dir. A. Bouvier & R. Künstler), Hermann, 2017 Raphaël Künstler

Despite their relative semantic proximity, the fields of public understanding of science (PUS) and social studies of science (SSS) / science and technology studies or science, technology and society (both STS) 1 appear to acknowledge their origins in different traditions, types of practice and trajectories. My purpose in this paper is to examine recent developments in both fields, observing the way they have been shaped in varying contexts and attempting to establish the extent to which they are converging towards a unified space of theory and practice, or whether each one operates relatively independently from the other. With this in mind, I provide a brief summary of the emergence of these fields in Europe, the United States and Latin America in order to identify the modulations characteristic of each context. I then go on to discuss the role played by PUS studies at two types

""She is best known for her curve, the witch of Agnesi, which appears in almost all high school and undergraduate math books. She was a child prodigy who frequented the salon circuit, discussing mathematics, philosophy, history, and music in multiple languages. She wrote one of the first vernacular textbooks on calculus and was appointed chair of mathematics at the university in Bologna. In later years, however, she became a prominent figure within the Catholic Enlightenment, gave up the academic world, and devoted herself to the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the homeless. Indeed, the life of Maria Agnesi reveals a complex and enigmatic figure—one of the most fascinating characters in the history of mathematics.

Using newly discovered archival documents, Massimo Mazzotti reconstructs the wide spectrum of Agnesi's social experience and examines her relationships to various traditions—religious, political, social, and mathematical. This meticulous study shows how she and her fellow Enlightenment Catholics modified tradition in an effort to reconcile aspects of modern philosophy and science with traditional morality and theology.

Mazzotti's original and provocative investigation is also the first targeted study of the Catholic Enlightenment and its influence on modern science. He argues that Agnesi's life is the perfect lens through which we can gain a greater understanding of mid-eighteenth-century cultural trends in continental Europe.

Reviews:

The overall result is micro-history at its best, and a history of mathematics that is narrated, as it always should be, through the broader history of the people and places that made this particular science what it is.

(J.B. Shank The Mathematical Intelligencer)

Mazzotti's text is many things: well written, historically detailed, and descriptive. What stands out is his depiction of Maria Gaetana Agnesi as humble, kind, and mathematically talented.

(Kathleen A. Acker, Ph.D. Convergence)

A welcome contribution to both an understanding of Maria Agnesi and life in the 1700s.

(Choice)

A nuanced and well-documented historical narrative that restores to us a key personage in eighteenth-century science and spirituality, combining cultural and political history with the history of the family.

(Brendan Dooley Catholic Historical Review)

Mazzotti's book succeeds admirably in pushing beyond this summary judgment—the same that judges her curve 'insignificant'—to find in Agnesi's approach to mathematics a way to open a whole world of eighteenth- century life and thought that supported her choices.

(Joan L. Richards Isis)

Mazzotti’s account of the rise and fall of a relatively non-gendered intellectual environment in the early eighteenth century thus sheds light on a rare instance in which the Catholic Church actually advocated women’s equality. The strangeness of that phenomenon alone renders his work an interesting addition to the history of science.

(Josipa G. Petrunic British Journal for the History of Science)

This book is both a life and a times; it will have many readers.

(Dorinda Outram American Historical Review)

Mazzotti's treatment of her is by far the most sophisticated biography that we have of this fascinating woman... His book is a cultural history of mathematics at its best.

(Paula Findlen Historia Mathematica)""

These slides begin with thoughts about what topics an epistemologically-informed sociology of science might explore, and then turn to one in particular: fraud in science.  After looking at how to define fraud, and explaining why it's often hard to detect, Haack looks at various (possible) examples, from Mendel to Cyril Burt.

CLICK HERE for a freely-available version of the article: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/HZ5T4KDSZFJMHVXKJCUN?target=10.1111/hic3.12704

This essay explores the relationships between food and health in Chinese history, from ancient times to the present. It briefly reviews how historians have written about dietary knowledge in China's past, from a midcentury focus on discoveries that prefigured those of modern nutrition science to a more expansive recent understanding of healthy eating. From there, the piece draws on scholarship from the past 2 decades to highlight the complexity of pre-modern Chinese ideas about food and its connection to ritual, social order, moral rectitude, pleasure, and physical and emotional well-being, all of which factored into dietetic prescriptions and prohibitions. Finally, the last section focuses on the modern period. It suggests that while Western foods and nutrition science acquired great prestige in early twentieth-century China, by the early 21st century both had lost some of their luster, and interest in classical and folk understandings of diet—inflected by the postsocialist political and economic order—was again flourishing.

Howard Gruber, a founder member of Psychologists for Social Action, reviewed the dissertation. His review, dated May 7, 1978, as Parkovnick (2015) points out, "... is worth quoting in full, as it captures the very essence of the dissertation":
“This is an effective dissertation and could become an important book. I began reading it very favorably disposed to it. Then I got more and more riled up, made many hostile notes. By the end I found myself almost won over, certainly illuminated. Francks [Gruber’s spelling] has a style that gets under your skin and stays there. This is a good thing and should not get lost in the process of expansion, rewriting, and editing. It will take some work to make it a persuasive book to a less sympathetic reader, and to reduce its present excessive vulnerability to academic criticism. Its very sweep opens many avenues to criticism, crit. of a kind that detracts the reader and potential reader from the central ideas. But all this can be worked out. As an academic type, I often find myself cringing, wanting things toned down. But by the time I finished, I felt that the direction of the change should be to strengthen the tone of the book, to make its central, disturbing message more apparent, bring it more up front.”  Gruber, H. (1978). Review of A history of American social psychology up to the Second World War by Peter Francks [Gruber’s spelling] for Ablex Publishing Corporation, May 7.

Readers should also look at: https://www.academia.edu/60033912/The_Psychology_of_Participation_Revisited_1984_2021

This study presents a sociolinguistics of academic publishing in historical as well as in contemporary times. From the perspective of Swedish academia, it unites a wide range of scholarly knowledge, including perspectives from the sociology of science, history of science and ideas, and research policy. The study focuses on publishing practices in the empirical realities of two disciplinary fields, history and psychology. Drawing on facts and figures from publishing practices as well as interviews, the study argues that English is currently making inroads into the field of history, in line with and aided by the field-external power of new regimes of research evaluation and performance-based funding impinging on the university field at large. In the field of history, unlike in psychology, the English language is thus currently a weapon since it provides access to international publishing markets where new forms of scientific authority can be obtained. This option seems to be most compelling for junior scholars seeking to enter the field. Following Bourdieu, publishing in English is here interpreted as pertaining to a social strategy, enacted in pursuit of investing differently, so as to subvert the order of the historical field.

Beim Matthäus-Effekt handelt es sch um ein soziales Phänomen und zugleich um ein Erklärungsmodell der Entstehung und Perpetuierung sozialer Ungleichheit in der Wissenschaft. Der Matthäus-Effekt bezeichnet ein Verteilungsproblem in einem als universalistisch und funktional interpretierten System des Wettbewerbs, dem der Wissenschaft, in dem es um die symbolische Anerkennung und Reputation von AkteurInnen geht. Sein Namensgeber Robert K. Merton ließ sich dabei von einem Satz aus dem Matthäus-Evangelium inspirieren: "Denn wer da hat, dem wird gegeben". Übertragen auf den wissenschafltichen Wettbewerb bedeutet dies, daß Forschenden, die bereits ein hohes Prestige in der Wissenschaft genießen, unabhängig von ihren tatsächlichen wissenschaftlichen Leistungen mehr Reputation zugesprochen wird als weniger bekannten KollegInnen, denen für gleiche Leistung weniger Anerkennung zuteil wird. Während der Matthäus-Effekt eine ungleiche Verteilung von Belohnungen charakterisiert, die dem meritokratischen Berufsethos zuwiderläuft, erklärt die damit verknüpfte Theorie kumulierten Vorteils und Nachteils die Entstehung sozialer Stratifikation im Wissenschaftssystem.

ermany’s first homosexual rights activist and one of the first to proclaim his homosexuality«;2
»the pioneer of the gay movement«:3
these
are just examples of titles often associated with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
(1825–1895). He was indeed an exceptional figure and prominent gay
activist of his time, who made significant contribution to the study of
homosexuality and sexuality in general. A figure that was at times forgotten, yet gained more and more recognition in recent years, including
websites that celebrate his work and streets named after him. Yet many
readings move too quickly from Ulrichs’s outstanding campaign of the
second half of the nineteenth century to contemporary gay movements
and their modern-liberal claims

Teško je shvatljivo kako to da uz silan razmah društvenih znanosti u nas sve do nedavno za nj nismo imali značajnijeg leksikografskog pomagala. Pra­ znina je tek djelomično popunjena pravnim i ekonomskim leksikonom i pre­ mda se radi o djelima rijetke vrijednosti i kvalitete, što se ne može reći i za još neke pokušaje kao što su Tubićev »Enciklopedijski rječnik marksističkih pojmova« — lošu zbirku zbrkanih pojmova ili na brzinu sastavljen »Rječnik sociologije, psihologije i socijalne psihologije« što su kompilirala samo tri au­ tora: Mandić, Bosanac i Petković. U takvoj smo situaciji naprosto nestrpljivo očekivali da u knjižarama ugledamo i neki leksikografski priručnik s područja sociologije. Tu je pra­ zninu popunio beogradski izdavač »Savremena administracija« izdanjem »So­ ciološkog leksikona« — obimnog djela od oko 760 stranica enciklopedijskog formata i s više od 3000 natuknica s područja sociologije i srodnih znanosti. Na kompilaciji tog izuzetno važnog djela radilo je oko 150 suradnika na čelu s redakcijskim odborom od 10 članova i glavnim redaktorima Radomirom Lukićem i Miroslavom Pečujlićem. Može se reći da se na listi suradnika us­ pjelo okupiti dobar dio sociološke elite Jugoslavije, premda na njoj nema i nekih ne tako beznačajnih imena kao što su Rudi Supek, Mladen Zvonarević, Branko Horvat i neki drugi. No, za tim vjerojatno žale i urednici i izdavači, a djelo (ovakvo kakvo je) ostaje opet prijeko potrebnim priručnikom te vrste u nas i dobrim će dijelom ispuniti nadu sastavljača »da će nestručnjaci u nje­ mu naći osnovna znanja o društvu, a stručnjaci pregled dosadašnjih rezultata sociologije.« Sastavljati leksikone i rječnike ponekad je očajnički posao i propusti su više pravilo nego iznimka. Leksikona bez mana nema, pa to nije i ovaj. Spo­ menimo samo nekoliko načelnih primjedbi: 1. Teško se, listajući ovu veliku knjigu, oteti utisku da izbor natuknica nije bio dovoljno strog i sistematičan. Neke vrlo bitne termine iz sociologije tu nećemo naći. Iako ima relativno dovoljno natuknica s područja sociološke statistike u leksikonu se ne može naći tri osnovne mjere centralne tendencije: aritmetičku sredinu, mod i medijan. Također, leksikon baš ne obiluje me­ todološkim natuknicama. Slično je i za sve posebne sociologije — tu nema nekih osnovnih pojmova sociologije znanosti, kulture ili jezika. S druge strane, naći ćemo mnogo natuknica kojih se leksikon lako mogao riješiti a da nimalo ne izgubi na kvaliteti, kao npr. nudizam, pozorište, teto­ viranje i slični. 133

This book sketches the history of higher education, in parallel with the development of science. Its goal is to draw attention to the historical tensions between the aims of higher education and those of science, in the hope of contributing to improving the contemporary university. A helpful tool in analyzing these intellectual and social tensions is Karl Popper’s philosophy of science demarcating science and its social context. Popper defines a society that encourages criticism as open, and argues convincingly that an open society is the most appropriate one for the growth of science. A closed society, on the other hand, is a tribal and dogmatic society. Despite being the universal home of science today, the university, as an institution that is thousands of years old, carries traces of different past cultural, social, and educational traditions. The book argues that, by and large, the university was, and still is, a closed society and does not serve the best interests of the development of science and of students' education.

What is the nature and extent of historical awareness in the development discourse? Does the development discourse learn from history, including its own? Set in the contexts of aging development institutions and a changing geopolitical climate, this paper provides one account through a historiographical survey of 136 journal articles across 10 leading development journals. It uncovers a substantial body of works, which offer descriptive histories, derivative lessons, and historiographical critiques. Altogether, they evidence two modes in which the development discourse attempts to learn from history. The first lies in the proactive use of external histories as empirical evidence for a variety of development issues. This is the predominant mode exhibited in the survey. A second mode lies in the use of internal histories of the development discourse, itself. Here, the survey finds a number of noteworthy but largely disparate efforts. This suggests a relative dearth in historiographical self-consciousness for a narrow but influential segment of the development discourse. A number of consequences are considered, ultimately responding to the legitimacy, efficacy, and sustainability of development action. In sum, our survey finds that the mainstream development journal discourse is adept at learning from external histories, but not necessarily from its own. Evidence, however, suggests that it can. A case is made for why it must.

This thesis explores the discourses on the evolution of species in the first three decades of Francoism (1939-1967). Starting from the study of these discourses in the public sphere, it reaches the debates on this subject in elitist groups: ecclesiastical elites, scientists and the so-called ideologues of the regime. The thesis shows the concern of these elites for the circulation of evolutionary ideas among the general public. This preoccupation was manifested, first, in an evolutionary silence in the general press that lasted for the first ten years of Francoism and, subsequently, in the initiatives to build a version of evolutionism consistent with the ideological principles of the regime, and apt for its circulation in the public sphere. The thesis argues that the discourses on evolution played a key role in the Catholic culture -and science- project, which was one of the programmatic bases of the New State. Through them, not only the anti-materialist and transcendental rhetoric advocated by the regime, but also its anti-communist rhetoric, were legitimized.
At an international level, the ideal of science intended for the New Spain clashed with the principles on which the Modern Synthesis of Evolution, or Neo-Darwinism, was being built. Neo-Darwinism rejected any transcendental explanation of the evolutionary process. The new current was being promoted with strength and resources from the United Kingdom and the United States. This thesis reveals the involvement of Spanish scientists in the construction of a scientifically based “Traditional Synthesis of Evolution” able to compete with Neo-Darwinism. The implantation of a Catholic science depended on the success of this alternative synthesis. And the Catholic science was part of the Catholic culture in which the ideologues of the Francois state had based the implantation of the new regime. In this sense, this thesis proposes that the scientists were also converted into ideologues of the Franco regime. Their discourses on science helped to build its foundations, legitimize it and perpetuate it.
The study of the public discourses leads to the focus on the Generation of ’48. This group, who were heirs and continuers of the traditional Catholic and monarchist Spanish thought, competed with other factions of the regime for cultural hegemony. Imposing their cultural project was considered a key step in achieving their political goals. The culture they advocated was, like that of all groups, a Catholic and unitary culture, in which all branches of knowledge were linked and united to the trunk of theology.
The peculiarity of the Generation of ’48 was that it tried to liberate culture of all past and present “heterodoxy” and to base it solely in the most “orthodox” tradition. This group tried to establish and disseminate a version of evolution coherent with its principles, free of all “heterodox” seeds: an “Evolution without problem” for Franco's Spain. This faction of the regime dominated strategic positions in the management of information and culture in Spain for much of the period covered in this thesis. Therefore, its discourses on evolution are the focus of this thesis. Through the initiatives to create its discourse, in which renowned Spanish scientists participated, this thesis has discovered a network that brought together the Generation of ’48 in a common endeavour beyond what the historiography had brought to light.
The “Traditional Synthesis of Evolution”, which was attempted and spread in Spain, however, was not the autarchic fruit of an isolated Franco regime. The research shows the connections and international collaborations of the project, and shows how Spain not only sought to be “the spiritual reserve of the West” but also “the scientific reserve of the West”. The Generation of ’48 was especially excited about this project, in which several renowned Spanish scientists played a crucial role.

Science textbooks influence the students’ understanding of science to some extent. Nature of Science drawing from philosophy, history and sociology has widened the understanding of science and the methods of science. Using the Nature of Science as a theoretical lens this paper analyses the science textbooks of classes 8 and 9 published by Karnataka Textbook Society. Through this paper, it is argued that the epistemic authority according to these textbooks is the scientists and the ‘Hindu’ gurus. The textbooks’ strong reference to slokas, traditional pasts, and the sages seem to recreate the tradition and the truth. The farmers are presented as ignorant and illiterate who ought to be educated. Thus, this analysis highlights the need for alternative approaches to presenting science.

The bibliography on watches and watchmakers is currently abundant, but the space of watchmaking has not yet been analyzed from a historical point of view that shows us its material evolution and the changes in the functions it provided to society. This text argues that only from the 18th century we witness the emergence of watchmaking more as a store and less as a workshop or smithy. Specifically, the watch store appeared more and more separated from the other mechanical arts, dedicated to the sale, repair and adjustment of watches rather than to their manufacture. A sort of social institution of time disposed to instruct the public in the rudimentary matters, but also in more complex questions about mechanics, arithmetic, and astronomy. This phenomenon occurred in the most important cities of Spain and Latin America, practically at the same time as in the rest of Europe. — A pesar de la abundante bibliografía sobre relojes y relojeros, el espacio donde se ejerció el oficio de la relojería aún no se ha sometido a un análisis histórico que nos muestre su evolución material y los cambios en las funciones que brindó a la sociedad. En este texto se sostiene que solo a partir del siglo XVIII asistimos a la aparición de la relojería más como una tienda y menos como un taller o herrería. Se trató de un establecimiento que adquirió autonomía frente los demás oficios mecánicos, dedicado a la venta, reparación y ajuste de relojes más que a su manufactura. Una especie de institución social del tiempo dispuesta a instruir al público en asuntos rudimentarios, pero también en cuestiones más complejas sobre mecánica, aritmética y astronomía. Fenómeno que se presentó en las ciudades más importantes de España y América, prácticamente a la par del resto de Europa. — Publicación completa en: https://www.trea.es/books/sobre-espana-en-el-largo-siglo-xviii

The scientific discipline as the primary unit of internal differentiation of science is an invention of nineteenth century society. There exists a long semantic prehistory of disciplina as a term for the ordering of knowledge for purposes of instruction in schools and universities. But, only the nineteenth century establishes real disciplinary communication systems. They are based on specialization of scientists, on role differentiation in the organizations of science, the emergence of standard forms of scientific publication and the rise of the research imperative which demands an incessant search for novelties. All these structural changes coalesce to the disciplinary community as a new type of communication system in science. After having been established, the discipline func¬tions as the unit of structure formation in the social system of science; in systems of higher education, as subject domain for teaching and learning in schools; and finally as designation of occupational and professional roles. Although processes of differentiation of science have been going on ever since, the scientific discipline as a basic unit of structure formation is stabilized by these plural roles in different functional contexts of modern society. Finally, each individual discipline is embedded into an internal environment of other disciplines. The continuous mutual observation and interaction of these disciplines is the most important factor in the dynamics of modern science.

Descripción y tipificación del contexto económico, política y cultural-ideológico imperante en Alemania en el periodo que va de 1890 a 1910.  Contexto en el que surge la Teoría Psicológica de la Gestalt.  El propósito principal es el explorar estos contextos, a la luz de citas textuales obtenidas de textos especializados, para determinar en ellos la tendencia sociológica imperante, en sentido de lógica o modo específico de organizar las esferas de lo cultural, ideológico, económico y político.  Presuponemos la prevalencia en el conjunto contextual de una tendencia que hemos nombrado totalista, sobre otras tendencias denominadas unitaria, totalitaria y global, respectivamente.  Finalmente, encontramos que se observa una mayor aparición de la tendencia unitaria, como rasgo sociológico organizador del contexto alemán visto en conjunto.  Descubrimiento que podría ser utilizado como punto de partida para un ulterior trabajo e el cual se indagaría la relación del hecho anterior con la epistemología específica de la Teoría Psicológica de la Gestalt.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

This article has a dual purpose. First, it looks at the transfer of the methodology of
systems analysis from the RAND Corporation to the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis (IIASA) in the wake of an East–West bridge-building effort during the
Cold War. Second, it draws out a more general argument about how the institutional
structures of these research organizations condition their methodological orientations.
Acknowledging the complexity of factors influencing methodological choices at RAND
and IIASA, the article concentrates on the centrality of institutional purpose, institutional
environments and internal organizational structure, and demonstrates how, when taken
together, these factors led to a methodological diversification at IIASA that is best
summarized as the internationalization of systems analysis.

One consequence of the rising political, intellectual and religious self-confidence and self-assertion of contemporary India, especially its  Hindu majority, is the Indian attempt to reclaim from the Western academy the right to 'objectively' and 'authoritatively', if not 'scientifically', explain itself and its history to the world. There is frequent tension between those  (a) who would defend with a learned voice Hinduism's traditional, scripture-based self-history, and those (b) who seek to explain India by the standards of Western humanistic scholarship, under the various rubrics of Indology. However, as Norvin Hein pointed out:
Ultimately, the opponents need each other ... They (a) ... are the most attentive people in the work of academics (b), with a scrutiny review of their writings, and how on the other hand, the contribution of these scholars (a) is necessary for the (b), although this makes them feel the most irritable. (Hein, 1992). If this process is not accepted, we would come to face the problem pointed out by Carl Sagan: "When one excludes the possibility of making critical observations and engaging in discussion, she/he is hiding the truth". Thus, in order to take this step of cognitive progress, Sagan suggests: "If we want to determine the truth on an issue, we should approach it with the greatest mental openness possible, and in full consciousness of our limitations and biases."

Several proposals for addressing the “replication crisis” in social psychology have been advanced in the recent literature. In this paper, we argue that the “crisis” be interpreted as a disciplinary social dilemma, with the problem facing early-career researchers being especially acute. To resolve this collective action problem, we offer a structural solution: as a condition of receiving their PhD from any accredited institution, graduate students in psychology should be required to conduct, write up, and submit for publication a high-quality replication attempt of at least one key finding from the literature, focusing on the area of their doctoral research. We consider strengths, weaknesses, and implementation challenges associated with this proposal, and call on our colleagues to offer critical response.

The commonplace, quantitative assertion that ‘invasions’ of exotic (introduced) organisms constitute the ‘second greatest threat’ of species extinction debuted in Edward O. Wilson’s 1992 book, The Diversity of Life. Based only on three interrelated publications summarising concerns about the conservation status of North American freshwater fishes, Wilson laconically extended the claim to planetary significance. This inspired the most-cited article ever published in the American journal BioScience, subsequently underpinning thousands of peer-reviewed publications, government reports, academic and popular books, commentaries, and news stories. While carefully recounting the origin, promotion, and deployment of the ‘second greatest threat’, I argue that its uncritical acceptance exemplifies confirmation bias in scientific advocacy: an overextended claim reflexively embraced by conservation practitioners and lay environmentalists because it apparently corroborated one particular, widely shared dismay about modern society’s regrettable effects on nature.

RE: Facades, illusions & ideological concepts created & promoted by ancient royalty out of necessity; effective creation of an alternate version of reality. It is only by knowing this information that the true nature of ancient texts may be understood correctly. Not knowing, means making incorrect assumptions & conclusions. Important!

Increasingly, a range of 'things' (e.g. infrastructure, data, knowledge, bodies, etc.) are configured and/or reconfigured as assets, or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process, which characterizes a particular form of technoscientific capitalism. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership, or the appropriation of value through ownership rights (e.g. intellectual property), monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices (e.g. investment dispute courts, exclusivity agreements, etc.). While rentiership and rent-seeking are often presented as negative phenomena (e.g. distorting markets, unearned income) in both neoclassical and Marxist literatures – and much in-between – it is my intention in this paper to unpack rentiership as an increasingly constitutive political-economic process underpinning technoscientific capitalism. Rather than being framed as a problematic 'side-effect' of capitalism, I argue that rentiership can help us to understand how different forms of value extraction are constituted by and come to constitute different forms of technoscience. This has significant analytical, political, and normative implications for understanding the relationship between science, innovation, and business (e.g. how do rentier rationales configure research agendas, how does innovation enable rentiership, what are the consequences for social equity, etc.).

This article identifies a seminal instance of Indigenous influence on Western thought. It does so by revealing a form of idea power exercised by Indigenous Americans: the power to transmit messages through the medium of people who came to meet and learn from them. In 1894, the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw people of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, invited the anthropologist Franz Boas to take part in their system of Indigenous governance, the potlatch. At a series of dances and feasts, Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw leaders performed the notion of transformation, offering a dynamic vision of humanity as a single, varied, and constantly changing global community. Guided by an Indigenous intellectual, George Hunt, the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw civilized Boas into a new way of seeing. They turned him from a static concept of culture, focused on the differences between groups of people, toward a dynamic concept of culture, focused on the universality of global experience—an experience of diversity. To identify such episodes of Indigenous influence, scholars must open a new archive—the vast corpus of Indigenous thought and action compiled by anthropologists—and begin writing a truly global history of ideas.

This is chapter 1 of "Nine Lives of Neoliberalism" edited by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian,  Philip Mirowski, published by Verso in May 2020.

Neoliberalism was born out of a collision between the controversial importation of the methods and authority of the experimental sciences into politics on the one hand, and the acknowledgement of the social and political conditions for the discovery and justification of knowledge on the other. It made the pursuit of knowledge and truth a political question, and gave the question of social order an epistemological answer: what we can do depends ultimately on what we can know. Nevertheless, this proclivity for epistemological investigations did not imply a unity of views among neoliberals, nor that their conclusions were devoid of political motivations. Moreover, in their contention to reclaiming the mantle of science, neoliberals shared many premises with progressive scientists regarding the position and “function” of science in society. This apparent paradox explains both the fluidity of neoliberal thinking and the inspiration it has drawn from its detractors at a sociological and organizational level, two dimensions still relevant today in accounting for the steadiness of neoliberalism and its success in cannibalizing competing ideas.

The first part of this chapter situates the scientific controversies in which neoliberal philosophers of science developed their intuitions. The second part revisits the socialist calculation debate as the cradle of their epistemological arguments for the superiority of the market. The third part deals with their common fight against the planning of science and the reciprocal relation they established between liberal institutions and the conduct of science.

This paper analyzes creation museums that explain the biblical creation story as an authoritative “scientific fact,” a certain type of museum that has become popular since the 1980s in the United States. Based on the perspectives gained from museum studies and from my analysis of exhibits during my fieldworks in August 2010 and January 2011 at the Creation Museum (2007-) in Petersburg, Kentucky, I argue that the museum problematizes the concept of “science museum” through its identity politics of scientific knowledge.

In the context of creation-evolution controversy since the 19th century, creationists after the 1970s have emphasized the validity of creationism by using scientific explanations, or so-called “creation science.” However, evolutionists have harshly criticized it and have argued that the controversy does not serve as a ground for “scientific debate.” Meanwhile, creationists have taken another strategy for justifying the creation science. With the change in the role of museum education particularly since the 1980s, scientifically authorized objects at exhibitions often have been replaced by replicas of authorized objects or audio-visual materials. As the visitors do not pay much attention to whether objects at science museums are scientifically authentic or not, the Creation Museum has come to use many scientifically unauthorized materials as their scientific “evidence.” From my analysis of its exhibitions, I demonstrate that this strategy enables the museum to succeed in avoiding the evolutionists’ counterarguments on the exhibited objects by appropriating traits of typical science museums.

[*An English version will be published soon.]

This article situates the collecting practices of museums of natural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in dialogue with similar practices amongst societies in the Pacific by focusing on how European curators, dealers in natural history and Pacific Islanders shared a common fascination with Spondylus shells. In particular, this article examines the processes for turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens. Spondylus shells were crucial for regulating gift and commercial exchanges in the societies of both regions. Famously, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski claimed that these shells were an essential element of the gift-based kula exchange, which helped him distinguish Western capitalist society from less developed societies without commercial trade. Yet Spondylus shells were also collected and exchanged as gifts amongst British and European naturalists in this period, performing the same roles as in Melanesia. In addition, such gift exchanges could only come into being thanks to the actions of commercially motivated dealers, located both in the Pacific and in Europe, who were the suppliers of these shells both to Melanesian participants in the kula and to Western natural historians and collectors. These observations call into question earlier arguments that equate modernity with the rise of commercial capitalism. It is instead claimed that commercial and gift exchanges were intricately connected and reliant on each other throughout the period, whether in the worlds of Western museums or in Pacific archipelagos. The act of turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens was the key tool for regulating these exchanges. Looking for difference amongst a sea of similarity is a recurring theme in Vakutan thinking. 1 Here is a Spondylus shell that entered the British Museum in the nineteenth century, originally collected by the Valparaiso sailmaker Hugh Cuming somewhere in the Pacific. 2 And here are three more Spondylus shells from the same museum that Bronisław Malinowski collected in Melanesia during the First World War (Figures 1-5). 3 Now, in 2021, they are clearly not duplicates of each other: they perform different functions

“Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology,” in The Anthem Companion to Robert Park, ed. Peter Kivisto (New York: Anthem Press, 2017), 159–180.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Laboratorium, 2012, vol. 4, no. 2: 199– 217.

H. G. Wells was one of the most celebrated writers in the world during the first half of the twentieth century. Famed for his innovative fiction, he was also an influential advocate of socialism and the world state. What is much less well-known is that he was a significant contributor to debates about the nature of social science. This article argues that Wells’s account of social science in general, and sociology in particular, was shaped by an idiosyncratic philosophical pragmatism. In order to demonstrate how his philosophical arguments inflected his social thought, it explores his attack on prevailing theories of race, while also highlighting the limits of his account. The article concludes by tracing the reception of Wells’s ideas among social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. Although his programme for utopian sociology attracted few disciples, his arguments about the dynamics of modern societies found a large audience among social scientists and political thinkers.

This open access book traces the development of sociology in Germany from the late 19th century to the present day, providing a concise overview of the main actors, institutional processes, theories, methods, topics and controversies. Throughout the book, the author relates the discipline’s history to its historical, economic, political and cultural contexts. The book begins with sociology in the German Reich, the Weimar Republic, National Socialism and exile, before exploring sociology after 1945 as a ‘key discipline’ of the young Federal Republic of Germany, and reconstructing the periods from 1945 to 1968 and from 1968 to 1990. The final chapters are devoted to sociology in the German Democratic Republic and the period from 1990 to the present day. This work will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, and to a general readership interested in the history of Germany. Stephan Moebius is Professor of Sociological Theory and Intellectual History at the University of Graz, Austria.

Science was originally born from a disinterested desire to know, but since the first industrial revolution up to our time its technological dimension and its link with economy and society became increasingly enlarged, to the point of completely configuring our modern society and so becoming essential and projected into an apparently unstoppable growth. As a consequence, humanity reached a quality of life unimaginable in other times. But the technological society in which we live raises also disturbing questions (connected with artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the ecological problem) in which the future of humanity is at stake. This book examines these problems and proposes some solutions from an anthropological and ethical perspective.

For decades, social scientists have explained the emergence of flying saucers in 1947 as a by-product of the cold war context. They claimed that people were influenced by cold war and "saw" Russian flying disks while the rest of the population, scared by the context, believed in the reality of these saucers. In this paper, I show that the explanation in terms of cold war influence does not explain the situation. For several reason. First because people in 1947 were not afraid of saucers, they spent their time making jokes about them. Only 1% of the people interrogated for a Gallup poll on the subjects mentioned the Russians as an explanation. This fact can be clearly understood when we compare the flying disks wave of 1947 and the ghost rockets wave on 1946 in Europe. We see that the reactions to the two events were very different. While Europeans took very seriously the existence of ghost rockets on 1946, the American public didn't take seriously the disks in 1947.
We may therefore think that the cold war explanation works for the ghost rockets and not for the disks, but the situation is a little more complex. This cold war explanation should be discussed for a second reason: sociology and social history cannot use explanation in terms of influence because social actors are not sponges that absorb the context: they define it, they discuss it, they chose among the elements from that context that they will take seriously and that they will reject. Social studies of subjects like UFOs as a lot to learn from the tools developed by social students of science. [note: this paper is a corrected version of a paper previously published in 2012 in the firs hardcover edition of the book in which it is included.]

Bilimsel bir alanda var olabilmek için gerekli şartları taşımanın tartışmalı yapısı bir yandan ontolojik sorunları diğer yandan ise epistemolojik ve metodolojik sorunları aynı anda çözmeyi gerektirmektedir. Bu sorunlar, her ne kadar üzerine bilim yaptıkları nesneleri birbirinden son derece uzak görünse de, sosyal bilimler ve doğa bilimleri açısından benzerliklerle ve alana özgü farklılıklarla yüklüdür. Ayrıca ilk sosyologlardan itibaren sosyoloji, doğa bilimleriyle yer yer tutkulu (öykünme, içerme, taklit) bir ilişkiye; yer yer ise dışlama pratiğiyle (etkilenme derecesi nedeniyle reddetme) uzaklaşma ve bağımsızlaşma ilişkisine sahiptir. Bu karmaşık ilişki, sosyolojinin doğa bilimlerine yönelik çalışmalar yapmasını sağlarken belli ölçüde tek yönlü (sosyal bilimlerden doğa bilimlerine) bir konuşmanın üretilmesine neden olmuştur.
Elinizdeki bu kitap, bilim sosyolojisi çalışmalarının teori ağırlıklı yapısına eklemlenecek bir alan araştırması olmanın önemine ilişkin farkındalığıyla, biyologların bilim, bilim insanı, toplum, sosyoloji’yi nasıl kavradığını ortaya çıkarmaya çalışmaktadır. Böylece tarihsel ve evrensel tartışma konuları olan bilim, bilim insanı ve bilimin nesnesiyle olan ilişkisi yalnızca sosyoloji cephesinden değil biyologların gözünden de ele alınmış, biyologlara hem kendi alanları hem de sosyoloji alanına dair düşüncelerini bir bilim sosyolojisi çalışması içerisinde ortaya koyma fırsatı verilmiştir. Nitel bir çalışma olmasına rağmen Türkiye ölçeğinde bir temsiliyet yakalamayı hedefleyen bu çalışma, 8 üniversiteden 40 biyologla yapılan derinlemesine görüşmelerle gerçekleştirilmiştir. Sonuç olarak görüşülen biyologlardan; temel bilim anlayışından bilim insanı tasvirine, bilimsel bilginin evrenselliğinden toplum tanımına, evrimden toplumsal gelişmeye birçok alanda fikirleri alınmış ve bu fikirler bilimler-arası ilişki ve diyalog çerçevesinde değerlendirilmiştir.

An updated version, with small modifications and an epilogue (2022), of the same paper from 2016. The article traces the sociopolitical and rhetorical aspects of the discourse in biblical archaeology in contemporary Israel. Through the article I will show that research and theoretical interpretations cannot be separated from identities and socio-political biases. Generally, Zionist archaeologists are much less skeptical towards the bible than Palestinian archaeologists, pro-Palestinian minimalists or Israeli post-Zionists. Since the 1990s, a new school from Tel Aviv University has been developing and promoting a new paradigm of Low Chronology, which denies the existence of a United Monarchy in the days of the Judahite Kings David and Solomon. Despite the success of the new paradigm, a conservative school, whose prominent representatives come from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, challenges the new paradigm and tries to protect or update the old paradigm of High Chronology. The most controversial excavation sites in the last decade are the City of David site and the ancient city excavated at Khirbet Qeiyafa. The article analyzes the struggle between the schools about the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, as it reflects in articles, books, lectures, presentations, interviews and heated debates in the media. (Damqatum The CEHAO newsletter, N. 17| 2021)

For each of us, there are certain things worthy of preservation. This paper – written more than forty years ago – was one of them for me. Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Important voices in the Sociology of Science. Popper tends to focus on the timeless and universal, emphasizing the importance of falsification in scientific methodology. Kuhn takes a more sociological perspective, stressing that ideas have a social context. Popper the purist. Thomas Kuhn the pragmatist. Both of these voices were important forty years ago and remain so today.