Everett Mendelsohn

The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge

I: The Institutionalisation of the Sciences: Changing Concepts and Approaches in the History and Sociology of Science.- The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge.- The Social Construction of Science: Institutionalisation and Definition of Positive Science in the Latter Half of the Seventeenth Century.- Problems of a Historical Study of Science.- Scientific Ideology and Scientific Process: The Natural History of a Conceptual Shift.- II: Social Relations of Cognitive Structures in the Sciences.- Ontological and Epistemological Commitments and Social Relations in the Sciences: The Case of the Arithmomorphic System of Scientific Production.- Cognitive Norms, Knowledge- Interests and the Constitution of the Scientific Object: A Case Study in the Functioning of Rules for Experimentation.- Changes in the Social and Intellectual Organisation of the Sciences: Professionalisation and the Arithmetic Ideal.- What Does a Proof Do If It Does Not Prove? A Study of the Social Conditions and Metaphysical Divisions Leading to David Bohm and John von Neumann Failing to Communicate in Quantum Physics.- III: Social Goals, Political Programmes and Scientific Norms.- The Political Direction of Scientific Development.- Scientific Purity and Nuclear Danger: The Case of Risk-Assessment.- Creation vs Evolution: The Politics of Science Education.

The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge

In the closing pages of her remarkable study of Giordano Bruno, Frances Yates set forth the critical problem of modern science: The basic difference between the attitude of the magician to the world and the attitude of the scientist to the world is that the former wants to draw the world into himself, whilst the scientist does just the opposite, he externalizes and impersonalizes the world… Hence, may it not be supposed, when mechanics and mathematics took over from animism and magic, it was this internalisation, this intimate connection of the mens with the world, which had to be avoided at all costs. And, hence, it may be suggested, through the necessity for this strong reaction, the mistake arose of allowing the problem of mind to fall so completely out of step and so far behind the problem of matter in the external world and how it works… This bad start of the problem of knowledge has never quite been made up (1).

Science, technology, and the military

World War II and the subsequent Cold War produced a dramatic change in the way scientists became involved in the weapons innovation process. For the first time in history military research and development (R&D) became a large-scale institutionalized process even in peacetime. The resulting ‘qualitative’ arms race in nuclear, conventional, and biological and chemical weapons raised the question of whether national and international security actually decreased, rather than increased, as a result of ‘destabilizing’ weapons innovations. These concerns brought about a new type of studies—defense technology assessment studies—that dealt with the impact of new weapons systems and dual-use technologies on national and international security. Negative impacts, such as undermining existing arms control agreements, also raised the question of whether and how the weapons innovation process could be influenced. The article discusses a variety of analytical approaches aimed at understanding the dynamics of the weapons innovation process. It argues that a sociotechnical network approach is the most promising one to provide valuable insights for influencing this innovation process. The approach also provides a suitable framework for investigating the relationship between civil and military technological innovation. This is of particular interest for the new information and communication technologies that may revolutionize future military affairs, and in which area civil and military technologies become increasingly integrated.

The practices of human genetics

Preface. Introduction. Modern Biological Determinism: The Violence Initiative, The Human Genome Project, and the New Eugenics G. Allen. Projecting Speed Genomics M. Fortun. The Practices of Producing Meaning in Bioinformatics J.H. Fujimura. Circulating Mice and Viruses: The Jackson Memorial Laboratory, the National Cancer Institute, and the Genetics of Breast Cancer, 1930-1965 J.-P. Gaudilliere. The Automated Laboratory: The Generation and Replication of Work in Molecular Genetics P. Keating, et al. Hans Nachtsheim, A Human Geneticist under National Socialism and the Question of Freedom of Science U. Deichmann. Good Genes and Bad Genes: DNA in Popular Culture D. Nelkin, M.S. Lindee. Making Decisions about Someone Elses Offspring: Geneticists and Reproductive Technology S. Novaes. PKU Screening: Competing Agendas, Convergning Stories D. Paul. From Butterflies to Blood: Human Genetics in the U.K. D.T. Zallen.

The Biological Sciences in the Nineteenth Century: Some Problems and Sources

THE revolutionary changes in biology of the last few decades have caused a number of working biologists to take stock of the situation and examine the nature of the alterations they have witnessed and have taken part in bringing about.P What is immediately apparent is the recognition that changes in philosophy and attitude have been equal in importance to the introduction of new scientific content. This same combination of rapid and radical shifts in biological concepts and techniques marked the period just a century ago when biology in its modern form seemed to come into being in several fields at the same time. Evolution, biochemistry, physiological regulation, germ theory are just a few of the areas which were transformed during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Involved in these transformations was a discussion about the relationship of organic to non-organic processes and an argument about the very nature of life itself.

Sciences and Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Studies of the Sciences

A Programmatic Attempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge.- On the Boundaries of Science in Seventeenth-Century England.- What Should We Do with the Monster?: Electromagnetism and the Psychosociology of Knowledge.- Science and Modern Chinese Culture.- The Meaning Context of Illness and Care: Reflections on a Central Theme in the Anthropology of Medicine.- The Semantics of Medical Discourse.- The Necessity of Field Methods in the Study of Scientific Research.- Anthropological Perspectives in the Sociology of Science.

The social locus of scientific instruments

The organizing question I chose for this paper goes to the heart of my conception of the relations of instruments to science: what would you expect to find in the work organization or system for the production of scientific knowledge of late 20th-century advanced science? And how would instruments be utilized in this process? How would they be integrated? Similarly, of course, you can ask the same for earlier periods of the history of modern societies in which science was being produced. Recent studies, including several important ones in this volume, have addressed the question of the production of science in the period of the Scientific Revolution, the advanced industrial revolution of the 19th century, and the large-scale science after post-World War II decades.

Metaphors: Is there a Bridge over Troubled Waters?

It would seem to be a simple and unexciting fact that metaphors, analogies, and models, are taken from one area of human thought and practice to another. They very term “analogy” denotes this process. And yet, at least with respect to science, this fact has attracted the attention of numerous authors in more than 6,000 books and articles throughout the last decades.1 And the attention is by no means limited to the use of metaphors in science, i.e., between disciplines, but can also be found when they are transferred from science to the social and political arena and vice versa. Hence, although this transfer of concepts and ideas apparently is a customary feature of both scientific and nonscientific discourses, there must be something about this feature which elicits irritation. What are the reasons for this irritation? What accounts for the often passionate debates about the pros and cons of the use of metaphors?

The Politics of Pessimism: Science and Technology Circa 1968

When volume two of Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine, entitled The Pentagon of Power was published in 1970, the critics were waiting and a number of reviews came rapidly.1 It is almost as though the reviewers were anticipating Mumford’s narrative and his pronouncements. On the ninth of November, 1970, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the veteran New York Times book-reviewer, opened with this description: “Lewis Mumford is perhaps our most distinguished flagellator.” The secret of Mumford’s success? “He’s a megacritic, to coin a Mumfordian word.” Lehmann-Haupt, always the judicious voice, was both bemused and annoyed by Mumford’s latest effort, which, he pointed out, was his twenty-fourth book! He complained that there were too many self-citations in the bibliography, that there were too many self-congratulatory quotations from earlier works. (Both complaints seem, on the surface, to be justified.) That was not where Lehmann-Haupt left his judgment, however.

Philosophical Biology vs Experimental Biology: Spontaneous Generation in the Seventeenth Century

By the time John Harris published his Lexicon Technicum, or an Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1704) he was able to dispose of spontaneous (or equivocal) generation in the following manner: Equivocal Generation, is the Production of Plants without Seed, Insects or Animals without Parents, in the Natural way of Coition between Male and Female. The Learned World begins now to be satisfied, that there is nothing like this in Nature; and since the use of Microscopes, and a more particular Application to Enquiries of this kind, a prodigious Number of Plants have been discovered to have seeds; and of Animals (Insects) have been found to be produced Univocally, or in the ordinary way of Generation, which before we thought to be equivocally produced.1