Mario Biagioli

Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities

My thanks to Mike Fischer, Cori Hayden, Colin Milburn, Kriss Ravetto, and Randy Starn for their suggestions and criticism. The conversation about the future of the humanities and science studies has evolved significantly since this essay was presented at the “Fate of the Disciplines” conference. The “digital humanities” project has quickly emerged as a strong innovative trend while “innovation studies” may be in the process of reshaping the institutional ecology of science studies. Believing that the arguments I present here have been reinforced rather than challenged by the emergence of the digital humanities and innovation studies, I have chosen not to engage in detail with these new trends in the final revised version of this essay. 1. Among the many books on the crisis of the university (and the role of the humanities in the university) Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capital (Minneapolis, 1993), and Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass., 1996) are particularly incisive. The perceived commercialization of the university is also discussed in David C. Mowery et al., Ivory Tower and Industrial Innovation: University-Industry Technology Transfer before and after the Bayh–Dole Act in the United States (Stanford, Calif., 2004); Capitalizing Knowledge: New Intersections of Industry and Academia, ed. Henry Etzkowitz et al. (Albany, N.Y., 1998); Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, ed. Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie (Baltimore, 1997); Roger L. Geiger, Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace (Stanford, Calif., 2004); Challenges to Research Universities, ed. Roger G. Noll (Washington, DC, 1998); Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton, N.J., 2003); Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, ed. David L. Kirp (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); and Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education (New York, 2005). Useful historical perspectives on the current predicament of the humanities are offered in The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II, ed. David A. Hollinger (Baltimore, 2006).

From Print to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe:

Surprisingly, patents are nowhere as central to the history of scientific instruments as they are to the history of technology. It will take much archival work to fill such an historiographical gap. My goal here is substantially more modest: to outline some patterns and chronological trends emerging from a comparison of printed patent rolls up to 1800 (which I am making available electronically) and other tactics used by instrument makers and designers to protect their businesses and authorship. My definition of instrument is capacious. I consider mathematical, optical, and philosophical instruments, but also include evidence about clocks, calculating machines, globes, and maps. Defining ‘patent’ and ‘inventor’ within the chronological and geographical boundaries of this study is, however, a more difficult matter. Not only are modern patents profoundly different from early modern privileges (which are nevertheless customarily referred to as “patents” in anglophone literature), but the role and form of privileges underwent changes in the 1500–1800 period discussed here. For simplicity’s sake, I use the terms ‘privilege’ and ‘patent’ interchangeably while also highlighting the differences between modern intellectual property and early modern privileges whenever relevant. I take a similarly pragmatic approach to the definition of inventor, which I equate to that of patent-holder while specifying, when important, whether that person was a designer or a producer, a maker or an investor, or whether inventorship was individual or multiple. Early modern mathematical and natural philosophical texts were usually assigned to one single author (whose shadow may have erased other technicians and contributors), but we will see that it was not uncommon for instrument patents to be shared by a group of inventors, each bringing different skills and resources. Multi-inventorship, it seems, predates multi-authorship. A question informing much of this essay concerns what the use of patents and other forms of protection can tell us about the early instrument makers’ and designers’ evolving markets, business practices, international mobility, relations with craft guilds, and changing sense of property in their instruments. A second question concerns the changing nature of the credit attached to instrument making and design. Instruments sit uneasily between the two main early modern systems of credit: one based on priority and publication (rewarded with symbolic, “philosophical” credit), and one based on the exchange of objects or labour for money. Many instruments were sold, but others — like Galileo’s telescope or Tycho’s apparatus — remained proprietary and often tightly guarded. They gained credit for their makers through

Replication or Monopoly? The Economies of Invention and Discovery in Galileo's Observations of 1610

i propose a revisionist account of the production and reception of galileos telescopic observations of 1609–10, an account that focuses on the relationship between credit and disclosure. galileo, i argue, acted as though the corroboration of his observations were easy, not difficult. his primary worry was not that some people might reject his claims, but rather that those able to replicate them could too easily proceed to make further discoveries on their own and deprive him of credit. consequently, he tried to slow down potential replicators to prevent them from becoming competitors. he did so by not providing other practitioners access to high-power telescopes and by withholding information about how to build them. this essay looks at the development of galileos monopoly on early telescopic astronomy to understand how the relationship between disclosure and credit changed as he moved from being an instrument-maker to becoming a discoverer and, eventually, a court philosopher.

Recycling Texts or Stealing Time?: Plagiarism, Authorship, and Credit in Science

Scientific plagiarism is as sui generis as the author function in science. A study of the specificity of scientific plagiarism and the ways in which it diverges from appropriation in other disciplines allows us to question traditional definitions that focus on the copying of published copyrighted materials. The form of plagiarism that is most damaging to scientists does not involve publications, is largely outside the scope of copyright law, and is unlikely to be detected by textual-similarity algorithms. The same features that make this kind of plagiarism difficult to identify and control also provide a powerful window on the unique construction of authorial credit in science, the problems of peer review, and the limitations of plagiarism surveillance technologies.

From ciphers to confidentiality: secrecy, openness and priority in science.

I make three related claims. First, certain seemingly secretive behaviours displayed by scientists and inventors are expression neither of socio-professional values nor of strategies for the maximization of the economic value of their knowledge. They are, instead, protective responses to unavoidable risks inherent in the process of publication and priority claiming. Scientists and inventors fear being scooped by direct competitors, but have also worried about people who publish their claims or determine their priority: journal editors or referees who may appropriate the claims in the manuscript they review or patent clerks who may claim or leak the inventions contained in the applications that cross their desks. Second, these protective responses point to the existence of an unavoidable moment of instability in any procedure aimed at establishing priority. Making things public is an inherently risky business and it is impossible, I argue, to ensure that priority may not be lost in the very process that is supposed to establish it. Third, I offer a brief archaeology of regimes and techniques of priority registration, showing the distinctly different definitions of priority developed by each system.

Plagiarism, Kinship and Slavery

In conversation with Marilyn Strathern’s work on kinship and especially on metaphors of intellectual and reproductive creativity, this paper provides an analysis of plagiarism not as a violation of intellectual property but of the kinship relationships between author, work, and readers. It also analyzes the role of figures of kidnapped slaves and children in the genealogy of the modern concept of plagiarism.

Playing With the Evidence

Reasonable people will no doubt disagree about the relative success of Biagiolis explanatory models. Unfortunately, his attitude toward historical evidence falls into another category altogether. His handling of textual and iconographical evidence and his inference from these sources not only leave some of his most original claims without a foundation, but often disregard the basic values of the historians craft.2

Between Knowledge And Technology: Patenting Methods, Rethinking Materiality

How does the law construe certain things and activities as knowledge that can become the object of intellectual property? When we look at the quantitative trends in recent patenting activities—more people patenting many more things—we tend to view that, in part, as an effect of the laws ability to construe new kinds of innovation (software, genetic sequences, etc.) in ways that conform to established legal concepts of patentable invention. The assumption is that what changes is not the shape of the box called invention, but the objects that are made to fit that box. But in fact while new technologies produce new innovations, the very concept of invention has not just expanded but undergone substantial qualitative change. The wave of inventive activity associated with the industrial revolution led to an unprecedented reliance on patenting, but as the law articulated ways to protect those inventions, it also took their emblematic form—the machine—as the template for the legal concept of invention. Analogously, the recent reinterpretations of patent law to enable the protection of living organism and biological entities have challenged and modified the traditional machine-inspired concept of invention, initiating a trend toward a more developmental one. The information-based inventions discussed here may elicit a reconceptualization of invention in yet another way.

Witnessing Astronomy: Kepler on the Uses and Misuses of Testimony

The role of eyewitnessing in science and natural philosophy has been a prominent research question in science studies and history of science in the last two decades. Philosophy too has begun to study its epistemic dimensions.1 Looking at modern scenarios, scholars have focused mainly on the increasingly extensive role of scientists and scientific evidence in legal proceedings. Historians of early modern science have instead focused primarily on the borrowings of legal witnessing practices and standards of evidence into natural philosophy—borrowings aimed at buttressing the new concepts of experience and experiment being developed by mathematicians and experimental philosophers.2 In this essay, I analyze the peculiar role of eyewitnessing in Kepler’s observational astronomy to revisit and substantially revise some of the received views of the relation between law and early modern science.

Weighing intellectual property: Can we balance the social costs and benefits of patenting?

The scale is the most famous emblem of the law, including intellectual property (IP). Because IP rights impose social costs on the public by limiting access to protected work, the law can be justified only to the extent that, on balance, it encourages enough creation and dissemination of new works to offset those costs. The scale is thus a potent rhetorical trope of fairness and objectivity, but also an instrument the law thinks with – one that is constantly invoked to justify or to question the extent of available IP protection. The balancing act that underlies the legitimacy of IP is, however, literally impossible to perform. Because we are unable to measure the benefits that IP has for inventors or the costs it has for the public, the scale has nothing to weigh. It conveys a clear sense that IP law can be balanced, but in fact propagates only a visible simulacrum of balance – one that is as empty as it is powerful.