Shelling from the ivory tower

Focaal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (80) ◽  
pp. 105-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Y. Kao
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
Models Of Development ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Foundations ◽  
Historical Examination ◽  
Project Camelot

This article is a historical examination of several watershed episodes in the militarization of US social science. It off ers an assessment of the actual “science” underpinning such initiatives as Project Camelot, and traces how American anthropology in its reaction to Project Camelot and Cold War studies moved from certain kinds of scientific/knowledge production toward others. By critiquing the intellectual foundations of Project Camelot alongside other examples of action-oriented social science, this article examines the connections between functionalism and the conceptual bias toward social order. What linked development, militarism, and imperialism was a more often than not oversimplified view of human behavior. In order to comprehend how models of development and modernization continue to shape American hegemony, this article scrutinizes a particular history of “military modernity.”

Illicit Ecologies: Queer Animacy and Epistemological Erasure in History of Wolves

Meliora ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Christian Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of

This thesis attends to the slippages between life and nonlife in Emily Fridlunds 2017 novel History of Wolves. It traces the matter that is granted life or animacy, as well as the matter that is devitalized. Through the protagonist, Linda, the novel investigates the role of both scientific knowledge production and Christian Science in placing arbitrary biological limits on life forms, making some visible and others unseeable and unsayable. The thesis fleshes out the characters’ climate denial as yet another erasure of the animate agents. Ultimately, the thesis asks: if we can expand what is worthy of life, can we, in turn, expand what agents, actors, and matters are deserving of care?  

The history of science and the history of bureaucratic knowledge: Saxon mining, circa 1770

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Felten
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Ore Deposit ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Ranking Official ◽  
Knowledge Claims

This article looks into mining in central Germany in the late eighteenth century as one area of highly charged exchange between (specific manifestations of early modern) science and the (early modern) state. It describes bureaucratic knowledge as socially distributed cognition by following the steps of a high-ranking official that led him to discover a rich silver ore deposit. Although this involved hybridization of practical/artisanal and theoretical/scientific knowledge, and knowers, the focus of this article is on purification or boundary work that took place when actors in and around the mines consciously contributed to different circuits of knowledge production. For the sake of analysis, the article suggests a way of opposing bureaucratic versus scientific knowledge production, even when the sites, actors involved in, and practices of that knowledge production were the same or similar. Whereas the science of the time invoked consensus among equals to conflate competing knowledge claims, bureaucracies did so by applying a hierarchy among ranked individuals.

On Constructing a Scientific Archives Network

Archivaria ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 104-147
Author(s):  
Bethany G. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Computational Approaches ◽  
Thought Collective ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of

Computational approaches to archives present archivists and users with new ways of engaging with records and their provenance. Such approaches are particularly useful for scientific archives due to the collective and collaborative nature of modern scientific knowledge production. This article explores computational approaches to digitized fonds of scientists involved in the transdisciplinary scientific movement cybernetics through the Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project as a means to reveal the ways cyberneticians have developed concepts and debated ideas through the creation and exchange of correspondence and other records. The project has experimented with machine-learning and natural-language-processing tools to generate data from the materials in an effort to reveal connections between the cyberneticians and their correspondence. Cybernetics seeks to understand the human condition through experiments with machines, and, in a cybernetically inspired sense, so too do archivists seek to understand their archives through experiments with machines. Such explorations are important for documenting scientific thought collectives like cybernetics in a digital age.

Patriotic hygiene: Tracing new places of knowledge production about malaria in Vietnam, 1919–75

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
Malaria Control ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Industrial Hygiene ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Medical Doctors ◽  
Racial Hygiene ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of

This article examines knowledge production about malaria in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam. During the 1920s and 1930s, medical doctors cooperated with plantation managers in order to develop industrial hygiene techniques consisting of environmental modification and quinine use. By the 1930s, changing motivations, in particular racial hygiene and patriotism, drove malaria control efforts. The wartime pressures to control malaria between the 1940s and 1975 further encouraged patriotic hygiene. This history of malaria science in Vietnam highlights the tension between change and continuity and shows the importance of place in the conjunction of scientific knowledge production and nation-building projects.

Leopold von Wiese and the ambivalence of functionalist sociology

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Liebersohn
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Personal Agency ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
Biological Determinism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Structural Functionalism

‘Spencer is dead’, wrote Talcott Parsons at the beginning of The Structureof Social Action, ‘but who killed him and how ? This is the problem’. In this study, which was both the foundation of Parsons’ structural-functionalism and a major reinterpretation of the history of modern social science, Spencer stood for a vanquished schoolof social thought. He represented positivism at the suicidal extreme where its naive individualism fell apart, paradoxically passing over into its antithesis, a biological determinism precluding individual initiative. His thought had died at the intersection of individual and society.Beyond this point, Parsons discovered the rise of a new social theory in Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim and Weber. From these four thinkers, working independently of one another, Parsons tried to put together the pieces of a system, succeeding where Spencer had decisively failed, reconciling personal agency and social order.

Re-examining the early history of the Leiden jar: Stabilization and variation in transforming a phenomenon into a fact

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cibelle Celestino Silva ◽  
Peter Heering
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Electrical Circuit ◽  
Early History ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
New Device ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of

In this paper, we examine the period that immediately followed the invention of the Leiden jar. Historians of science have developed narrations that emphasize the role of grounding during the process of charging the jar. In this respect, this episode shows significant aspects that can be used to characterize science, scientific knowledge production, and the nature of science. From our own experimentation, we learned that grounding was not necessary in order to produce the effect. These experiences inspired us to go back to primary sources. In doing so, we came to a new understanding of the early period after Kleist’s and Musschenbroek’s initial creation of the effect. From our analysis, we conclude that it is not the grounding which was perceived as a major innovation (as well as a challenge) during this early period of the discussion but the concept of an electrical circuit. This understanding was fundamental in characterizing the Leiden jar as a new device challenging the then current knowledge of experimental practices in the field of electricity.

scholarly journals Spaces of a Technological Power: The Idea of Order (from the History of Ideas)

Lex Russica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
I. A. Isaev
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Order ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Moral Justification ◽  
Powerful Source ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
Special Space

The paper is devoted to one of the fundamental problems of social science, namely: the problem of order. When a social order is taken for granted, it merges its meanings with the meanings rooted in cosmos.Nomos and cosmos begin to coexist. The order is endowed with a stabilizing force drawn from a more powerful source, i.e. cosmization implies the identification of this meaningful world with the world as such.The power and the law in their actions are aimed at creating and maintaining order as a system. The system itself develops the structure of technology formation aimed at both maintaining the existing order and changing it. Technology, as an anonymous power, dominates the society, but the society itself makes itself dependent on technology by deciding to apply technology. Thus, a special space of technological power emerges where actual influences determining its structure are expressed. The power and law acquire qualitatively new features in this context.The technology of power can be understood as a kind of “democracy.” It can be normalized in accordance with its constitutional prerequisites and it can restore its long-lost moral justification.

scholarly journals The counter-revolution of criminological science: a study on the abuse of reasoned punishment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Daniel D'Amico
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Formal Modeling ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Statistical Measurement ◽  
History Of

Trends in the history of social science dedicated to the study of crime and punishment are presented as a case study supporting F.A. Hayek's theory of social change. Designing effective social institutions and public policies first requires an accurate vision of how society operates. An accurate model of society further requires scientific methods uniquely suited for the study of human beings as purposeful agents and the study of human institutions as complex social phenomena. If guided by faulty methods, theories are inaccurate and policy outcomes veer from their intentions. Hayek termed such outcomes "abuses of reason". Aiming to replicate the objectivity of physical sciences via formal modeling and statistical measurement, economists throughout the 20th century imposed an excessively technical vision of human decision-making. Policy failures and social problems resulted. This paper argues that the historical trends of applied social science dedicated to crime and punishment can be understood similarly. Formal modeling and statistical measurement continuously displaced methods more attuned to human intentionality and social complexity. In result, amidst a long-run history of intellectual and political change, US law enforcement and criminal punishment policies became technocratic, and outcomes became disjointed from their stated intentions to promote social order and welfare.

George Hoggart Toulmin: politics and geology

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-481
Author(s):  
ROY PORTER
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Christian View ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).

Active Coeliac: Disassembling Gluten and Coeliac Disease

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 188-205
Author(s):  
Sofia Varino
Keyword(s):  
Coeliac Disease ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Food Additive ◽  
Gluten Free ◽  
Biomedical Knowledge ◽  
Dietary Practices ◽  
Object A ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
New Materialisms

This article follows the trajectories of gluten in the context of Coeliac disease as a gastrointestinal condition managed by lifelong adherence to a gluten-free diet. Oriented by the concept of gluten as an actant (Latour), I engage in an analysis of gluten as a participant in volatile relations of consumption, contact, and contamination across coeliac eating. I ask questions about biomedical knowledge production in the context of everyday dietary practices alongside two current scientific research projects developing gluten-degrading enzymes and gluten-free wheat crops. Following the new materialisms of theorists like Elizabeth A. Wilson, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, I approach gluten as an alloy, an impure object, a hybrid assemblage with self-organizing and disorganizing capacity, not entirely peptide chain nor food additive, not only allergen but also the chewy, sticky substance that gives pizza dough its elastic, malleable consistency. Tracing the trajectories of gluten, this article is a case study of the tricky, slippery capacity of matter to participate in processes of scientific knowledge production.

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