Contingency, Nature and Hermeneutics in History of Science

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-310
Author(s):  
Jeroen Bouterse
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Scientific Development ◽  
Sociology Of Scientific Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strong Programme

When, as historians, we want to explain developments in the history of natural science, how are we to do justice to the role of the natural world – the thing scientists investigate – in our explanations? The idea that the structure of the natural world renders the development of science inevitable seems to be inadequate, but so does the idea that we should explain the history of science without any reference to nature, as if what scientists study made no difference at all to what they believe. Is ‘nature’ even a feasible category, however? To what extent is it a problem that in referring to the result of scientific development in our explanation of scientific development, we are assuming the authority of science? Does this undermine the possibility of critical and independent historiography? This article deals with several possible solutions to these problems, and outlines an alternative to rationalism as well as to the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and Latour’s Actor-Network Theory.

scholarly journals The Roles of Mathematics in the History of Science: The Mathematization Thesis

2020 ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Ciro Tomazella Ferreira ◽  
Cibelle Celestino Silva
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Scientific Development ◽  
Mathematical Approach ◽  
New Science ◽  
History Of

In this paper, we present an analysis of the evolution of the history of science as a discipline focusing on the role of the mathematization of nature as a historiographical perspective. Our study is centered in the mathematization thesis, which considers the rise of a mathematical approach of nature in the 17th century as being the most relevant event for scientific development. We begin discussing Edmund Husserl whose work, despite being mainly philosophical, is relevant for having affected the emergence of the narrative of the mathematization of nature and due to its influence on Alexandre Koyré. Next, we explore Koyré, Dijksterhuis, and Burtt’s works, the historians from the 20th century responsible for the elaboration of the main narratives about the Scientific Revolution that put the mathematization of science as the protagonist of the new science. Then, we examine the reframing of the mathematization thesis with the narrative of two traditions developed by Thomas S. Kuhn and Richard Westfall, in which the mathematization of nature shares space with other developments taken as equally relevant. We conclude presenting contemporary critical perspectives on the mathematization thesis and its capacity for synthesizing scientific development.

The Map and the Territory

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Kristina Skåden
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
International Association ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
System Building ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Actors

In transnational history of traffic, transport, and mobility, historians have been arguing for studying organizations as “transnational system builders” in the establishment and modification of transnational infrastructure. Emphasis has been placed on examining human actors. Here, I argue that the role of material objects, the nonhuman actors, should also be taken into account by investigating how a particular map matters. The major research issue is, therefore: How can we understand and analyze how the Nazi regime put the map Deutschlandkarte displayed at the exhibition Die Strasse (Munich, 1934) into play? In addition, how did the map figure in transnational system building during and after the seventh International Road Congress arranged by the Permanent International Association of Road Congresses? Insights from transnational history in the fields of traffic, transport, and mobility as well as material cultural studies, critical mapping, and actor-network theory inform this article.

Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
American Science ◽  
Scientific Innovation ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

The chapter authors detail local engagements with technology and the natural world in Latin America across time and reveal the social, political, and economic conditions that have led to the relative obscurity of such research in a world history of science. Comparative thinking is an important feature in this volume, as it helps situate the issue of Latin American scientific innovation within the global currents of science and understand the particular inequalities they produce and reproduce. The asymmetries that govern the global production of scientific knowledge have certainly affected the kind of science that is possible “at the periphery,” to use the term adopted by many Latin American historians of science. While examining a number of cases from the colonial times to the present, we propose a critical understanding of how such asymmetries have operated. To give an example, the history of science in Latin America has been bound up, since colonization, with that of Spain, sharing its peripheral status in the global history of science. This representation is now beginning to be challenged with greater attention to the “dynamic and multiple” exchanges that characterized the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge in the colonial era and to the particular forms taken by colonial science. A number of chapters in this volume contribute to this new thrust in scholarship on colonial Spanish and Latin American science.

How Artefacts Do Leadership: A Ventriloquial Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 089331892199807
Author(s):  
Jonathan Clifton ◽  
Fernando Fachin ◽  
François Cooren
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Communication ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Distributed Leadership ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Human Actors

To date there has been little work that uses fine-grained interactional analyses of the in situ doing of leadership to make visible the role of non-human as well as human actants in this process. Using transcripts of naturally-occurring interaction as data, this study seeks to show how leadership is co-achieved by artefacts as an in-situ accomplishment. To do this we situate this study within recent work on distributed leadership and argue that it is not only distributed across human actors, but also across networks that include both human and non-human actors. Taking a discursive approach to leadership, we draw on Actor Network Theory and adopt a ventriloquial approach to sociomateriality as inspired by the Montreal School of organizational communication. Findings indicate that artefacts “do” leadership when a hybrid presence is made relevant to the interaction and when this presence provides authoritative grounds for influencing others to achieve the group’s goals.

scholarly journals Plato on Natural Kinds: The Promethean Method of the Philebus

Apeiron ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Proios
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Abstract Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints (Phaedrus 265d–66c) gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus, the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency.

Distributed corporeality: Anatomy, knowledge and the technological reconfiguration of bodies in ballet

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 869-890
Author(s):  
Sophie Merit Müller
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Black Box ◽  
The Body ◽  
Technical Improvement ◽  
Anatomical Knowledge ◽  
Classical Ballet ◽  
Anatomy Knowledge

Various specialist cultures configure bodies as complex technological devices. We know little about how exactly this is done. I focus on one of these cultures, classical ballet, to praxeologically reconstruct the conceptual, situational and material configuration of bodies as particular instruments. The technologization of the body is closely intertwined with the scientification of the practice – its ladenness with scientific knowledge about the body and an elaborate apparatus for the production of bodies. When anatomical knowledge and didactics intertwine in ballet class, this facilitates an opening of the black box ‘body’ for technical improvement. ‘A body’ becomes a plurality of (in this case, anatomically distinguished) actants. This distributed corporeality suggests that ‘the body’ is an assemblage that becomes apparent as such in moments of its modification. The empirical case as well as the analytical approach here give reason to reconsider the distinction between humans and non-humans that still prevails in actor-network theory and elsewhere.

scholarly journals What makes human–animal relations ‘organizational’? The de-scription of anthrozootechnical agencements

Organization ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 761-780 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoine Doré ◽  
Jérôme Michalon
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Performance Test ◽  
Dairy Farm ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Human Animal

Questions concerning animals’ role in society have received little attention from Organization Studies. This article develops and tests some theoretical and methodological propositions aimed at contributing to the elaboration of an analytical framework for interpreting our organized relations with animals and furthering our understanding of what makes human–animal relations ‘organizational’. First, examining the role of animals in the ‘non-human turn’ that has been emerging, especially with the Actor–Network Theory and the Symmetrical Anthropology project, it adresses the limits of the ‘non-human’ category to analyze situations of coordination of collective action involving animals. It then develops the concept of anthrozootechnical agencement to envisage the role of animals in the course of action through the lens of their relational properties and applies the notion of script to propose an operational formulation of the specifically organizational trials to which these particular agencements are subjected. Based on three case studies (the role of the leash in the organization of human–dog relations, the management of wolves’ return to France, and the production of milk on a dairy farm), this article shows that two main types of operation make human–animal relations ‘organizational’: first, the organization of anthrozootechnical relations is constituted by and constitutive of the combination of three types of specifically organizational test to which these particular agencements are subjected (the performance test, the coherence test, and the dimensioning test); second, the work of organizing anthrozootechnical relations then consists in elaborating, executing, and transforming heterogeneous scripts that are never strictly indexed on the nature (human, animal, technique) of the entities they concern.

scholarly journals Dramatic Networks: Marginalized Economics and Labour in The Norwich Grocers’ Play

Early Theatre ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery G Stoyanoff
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social Unrest ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Using actor-network theory, this essay argues that the Norwich Grocers’ Play creates a dramatic network among the city of Norwich, the actors of the play, and the marginal audience members from Norwich and its surrounding countryside when read in light of the Norwich Corporation assembly minute of 1527 and the history of social unrest culminating in Kett’s Rebellion of 1549. The staging, costuming, and language of the play all function to ally the audience with the salvation history presented in the play and, in so doing, ensure the continued peace and prosperity of Norwich in the later 1560s despite challenges that could have led to unrest mirroring that experienced in the 1540s.

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