The typological-population distinction has its genesis in the distinction between "races as types" and "races as populations" made by Theodosius Dobzhansky in a paper delivered at a 1950 Cold Spring Harbor symposium that sought to embrace physical anthropology and human genetics within the modern evolutionary synthesis. While developments in Dobzhansky's field of population genetics rendered the concept of "races as types" obsolete, his redefinition of "races as populations" remains to be fully understood, both historically and philosophically. This paper explores the question of race - especially the question of the reality of race - in Dobzhansky's work. Dobzhansky's views are compared with those of his and our contemporaries and critically assessed. Particular attention is paid to tensions arising in his joint appeal to an object ontology and a process ontology. On the one hand, a race is considered to be a genetically distinct Mendelian population, "which exists regardless of whether a classifier describes it or not." On the other hand, "what is considered essential about races is not their state of being but that of becoming."

The decade of the 1960s in oceanography was characterized by excitement and optimism regarding the possibilities for studying the ocean and for the uses to which the resulting technology and knowledge might be put. The second world war touched off explosive growth of ocean sciences, such that marine sciences and oceanography are among the most generously funded sciences in the United States (and often at the top of this list). Certainly through the Cold War, physical oceanography, funded for its relevance to undersea warfare, dominated scientific study of the ocean. A look through 1960s eyes, however, reveals a different vista. Study of the ocean was expected to encompass human physiology, engineering and underwater archaeology in addition to geology, chemistry, marine biology, and physics. The number of anticipated uses of the ocean environment and its resources proliferated. These new uses, many eagerly anticipated but never realized, included wilderness to explore, farmland to cultivate, battleground, playground, dump site, mine, oil well, construction site, movie set, and human habitat. To live, work, and play on and within the ocean would require new knowledge and technology – which the ocean scientists and engineers of the 1960s eagerly set about creating. Their vision of ocean science was much broader than the version of oceanography that remained by the mid-to-late 1970s. Their version was intended to support a new human relationship with the sea, one akin to plans for that other frontier of the time, outer space

Electricity has been linked, by cultural historians of the US and by historians of technology, with American ideologies of progress, civilization, and, in turn, whiteness. Perhaps most obviously demonstrated at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, but evident in any number of late 19th- and early 20th-century sources, electricity seems to have been entwined with a kind of moral obligation to modernity – at least for the white nation. In a period of increasingly entrenched racism, when civilized progress was routinely contrasted with the dark primitive and material privileges were increasingly denied (on trains, in bathrooms, on sidewalks) in demonstration of legal and social segregation, electrification would seem an unlikely feature of any spaces of designated blackness. Yet Tuskegee Institute was electrified by 1898, and several of its spin-off schools in the rural south had generators at a time when, overall, electrification was still rare, and northern African Americans had trouble putting technological knowledge to economic use. This paper seeks to link the material dimensions of technological choice with ideological context, exploring the entwined and regionalized understandings of race, technology, and social order in a period of rapid industrialization.

Despite the novelty of sunspot study in the Latin West, Galileo placed no particular emphasis on pitfalls in either the observational process or the visual presentation of his data: in the second of his Letters on the Sunspots, the camera obscura and the ephemeral phenomena it was designed to show figure as curiously available to all. While Galileo emphasized the naturalness and inevitability of the engravings that accompanied his work—or, better, the irrelevance of their prehistory as traced projections of the sunspots—his rival Christoph Scheiner masked his own reliance on the camera obscura with frequent and misleading references to his direct observations of the sun and to the inaccuracy of his hand-drawn sketches. In this lecture I will examine the strategies adopted by both observers in the earliest phase of the debate, and I will use the sunspot images produced through direct observation by the English scientist Thomas Harriot in this same period to evaluate the logic of their arguments, and the strengths and limits of these visual data.

Responding to Steve Shapin’s recent essay in Isis bemoaning the lack of scholarship that appeals to an audience beyond a very limited group of historians, I’ll use John Beatty’s idea of ‘relative significance’ disputes in evolutionary theory, and the history of biology more broadly, to argue that the debate over group selection can illuminate the history of evolutionary biology and the process of science more generally. The debate over group selection, though often characterized as a categorical rejection of naïve evolutionary theorizing, was actually a much more complex affair. Analyzing the initial debate that occurred in the 1960s and then examining the current status of the theory demonstrates the value of the relative significance framework for historians of biology and invites application of this approach in other sciences.

Biologists studying complex causal systems identify some factors as causes and treat other factors as background. For example, when geneticists explain biological phenomena, they often identify certain genes as the phenotypic causes and relegate other factors to the background. But many of the factors relegated to the background are causally necessary for the production of phenotypic traits, even traits at the molecular level such as the amino acid sequences in polypeptides. Critics have charged that because there is parity among causes, the privileging of genes reflects only reductionist bias, not a difference based in reality. The idea that there is an ontological parity among causes is related to a philosophical puzzle identified by John Stuart Mill: what, other than interests or biases, could possibly justify identifying some causes as the actual or operative ones, and other causes as mere background? The aim of my talk is to solve this conceptual puzzle. It turns out that my solution helps answer a seemingly unrelated philosophical question: what kind of causal generality matters in biology?

There has long been a debate about the nature of war. It is well known that Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) and others at end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries sought to found a "scientific" understanding of this phenomenon. It was an important and even urgent goal, given the protracted and devastating wars of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Yet it is also clear that, after a lifetime of experience and contemplation, Clausewitz concluded this was an impossible quest. In line with others of his time, what did Clausewitz think a science of war would entail? Why did he believe it could not be achieved? What was the best we could accomplish in the real world? Are his concerns still relevant today?

The fusion of social science and state power represents a dominant theme in the history of the modern American state. The meaning of the "science" in social science, however, has changed markedly throughout the decades, from the qualitative traditions of the early twentieth century to the scientism of the post-World War II period. The combination of social investigation and advocacy as represented in the various social survey movements of the 1900s and 1910s, in which the scientific identification of social facts did not rule out subjectivity and political engagement, persisted well into the New Deal years. This paper will examine the path from the social survey movement, to reformist currents in legal thought in the 1910s and 1920s, to securities regulation within the Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1930s in order to explore the vitality of qualitative forms of social inquiry in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although advocates of scientific rigor strongly criticized New Deal methods, in the political context of the 1930s, the qualitative search for social facts nonetheless allowed the state to "see" new areas of national economic life and provided powerful justification and means for trying to regulate a chaotic, dysfunctional marketplace.

Gravitational Waves represent a nearly unique instance of unfinished business in the history of modern physics. One of the slew of novel concepts which arose in the revolutionary period of the early 20th century, they retained their place in the new physics for nearly a century in the total absence of any kind of experimental confirmation. It was only natural, therefore, that their theoretical development was marked by repeated debate over whether they really existed, or played any kind of role in astrophysical systems such as binary stars. The course of these controversies (including the quadrupole formula controversy) is briefly recounted, and it is argued that both confidence in and skepticism of their existence were nourished by the nature of the analogy with electromagnetic waves which enabled their conceptualization in the first place.

Ludvik Fleck is often quoted as one of the inspirations for Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I will argue that there were some fundamental differences between their models of scientific change. While Kuhn was concerned with the production of knowledge within local communities, Fleck focussed on the translation of knowledge among such communities.

Most images of spaceflight stress the flight and living and working in space. Few give attention to the work that goes on before liftoff, to the ground operations that take place at the Kennedy Space Center. In contrast to the emphasis given systems engineering and program management by scholars such as Thomas Hughes, this paper will explore the operational side of the technology of space flight.

Questioning the highly rational view of management structures and the designed centered logic of systems engineering, I argue that significant new knowledge is generated at the operational level. Differences in the culture of the operations and design communities have, however, obscured the importance of hands on learning and the highly innovative and even experimental nature of operational work. The Challenger and Columbia accidents and the failure of the space shuttle to live up to its promises reflect the subordination of operations and the overly abstract systems engineering and management structures of the space program.

Philosophers of science increasingly recognize the importance of idealization, yet there is little consensus on some of the most basic questions about idealization, or even the best characterization of the practice. Despite this high degree of variation, some consensus has clustered around three types of positions, or three kinds of idealization. I will argue that all three kinds of idealization play important roles in scientific research traditions. There is no single purpose for idealization and hence there is not a single set of rules that theorists ought to follow when idealizing. While all three kinds of idealization can be found in scientific practice, they share enough in common that they can be characterized and studied in a unified way. The key is to focus not just on the practice and products of idealization, but on the goals governing and guiding it. I call these goals the representational ideals of theorizing and although they vary between the three kinds of idealization, attending to them gives a more unified picture of the practice.

The nineteenth-century epidemic erupted at a moment when both popular and scientific ideas of disease -- in humans, plants, and animals -- were changing dramatically. Scientists such as Louis Pasteur and Anton de Bary and their disciples argued for a pathogenic model of disease. The scientists who visited the devastated coffee farms in India and Ceylon explained the epidemic in pathogenic terms, repudiating earlier models of disease that focused on the susceptibility of hosts. While the coffee planters accepted aspects of the pathogenic model of disease, they continued to insist that host susceptibility played an important role in shaping the epidemics. The coffee planters' field observations ultimately changed the scientists' strictly pathogen-centered model of disease.

This Friday's colloquium in History and Philosophy of Science is part of a two-day symposium (Friday and Saturday) of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), University of Minnesota, on "Time and Relativity." On Thursday there are two related events. The symposium was organized by Antigone Nounou (Philosophy of Science) and Michel Janssen (History of Science). Below is some basic information about all three events. More details can be found at:

http://www.ias.umn.edu/timeandrelativity.php

3:30-4:10 Amit Hagar, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University
Subject: "Length Matters: The Einstein-Swann Correspondence and the Constructive Approach to Special Relativity"

4:10-4:50 Don Howard, Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
Subject: "Einstein on the Principle Theories/Constructive Theories Distinction"

4:50-5:10 Coffee

5:10-5:20
Chris Smeenk, Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario
Commentator

5:20-6:00 Discussion

I will argue that representation (and correspondences between representations) should replace ontology as the central explainer in the philosophy of mathematics. The argument has two parts. The core of the argument shows how distinctive qualities of competing representations help explain the ability of their users to grasp (and prove) mathematical relationships. I refer to several case studies (Descartes vs Euclid, but especially: ways of representing knots). The closing argument contrasts ways in which traditional ontology-oriented inquiries are unproductive in explaining the intellectual power of mathematics.

This talk will compare the boundary work of evolutionary psychologists and cultural anthropologists as they create their scientific disciplines. I will argue that each group attempted to put forth a different argument about what counted as a proper explanation of culture and the kinds of definitional moves each group made differed substantially. Here at the dawn of the twenty-first century, some psychologists are creating a new discipline called "evolutionary psychology." The evolutionary psychologists maintain that all of our explanations for social and cultural behavior are truncated because these explanations are not grounded in Darwinian evolution. Evolutionary psychologists point to Boasian cultural anthropology as the worst offender for non-Darwinian explanations of culture. At the dawn of the twentieth century, cultural anthropologists, particularly Alfred Kroeber (1879-1960) did indeed argue that cultural explanations should not invoke biology. However, a close examination of Kroeber’s claims reveals that Darwinian thought was a necessary part of Kroeber’s separation of culture from biology.

Examining the American inventor Stanford Ovshinsky's fruitful analogy between a human nerve cell and an adaptive machine and the steps he took from this analogy to his “threshold” switch and subsequent inventions offers new perspectives on analogy as a motor of invention.

This talk addresses the problem of the underrepresentation of women of color in STEM fields from a historical perspective.

In his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), the astronomer and philosopher J.F.W. Herschel claimed that it was sometimes acceptable to invent a theory by making a "bold leap" to a hypothesis, so long as this hypothesis was then tested deductively. Because of this comment, Herschel has generally been considered a proponent of the "hypothetical-deductive" or "hypothetical" method of science. It has been argued by commentators that because Herschel was well-versed in science, he realized that the science of his day relied on unobservable entities, such as light waves, ethers, and tiny particles of matter; Herschel, it is said, correctly recognized that theoretical science requires a hypothetical method. In my paper, I will show that this interpretation of Herschel is just one of a number of instances in which modern philosophers of science have erred in attributing a hypothetical method to writers of the past. I will demonstrate that Herschel, like these other writers, believed that analogical reasoning was a key part of scientific discovery. Scattered comments about "bold leaps" are meant to refer to instances of analogical inference, not conjectures or guesswork. Herschel, and other misunderstood writers such as Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century and Herschel's friend William Whewell in the nineteenth, believed that analogical inference played a large role in scientific discovery, even for theoretical science. And they were right. Part of the reason for these misinterpretations is historical: commentators have ignored the context of these comments within the work of the writer and within his intellectual and social framework. And part is philosophical: analogical inference is very often overlooked or undervalued as a part of inductive reasoning. I will argue here that, by debunking this "myth" about "bold leaps" in the scientific method proposed in the past, we can learn important lessons for philosophy of science in the present.

Relativism, the view that all knowledge is relative to some percipient subject and that there is no universal, objective truth, is a product of knowledge. Historically, it was probably the result of a generalisation of some observations made by Greek mariners and merchants: laws and customs in distant (and not so distant) countries were different, sometimes opposite, from those of the Greeks. Knowledge of different customs brought about a challenge to knowledge itself. Some daring thinkers argued that there was thus an obvious contrast between what is valid by nature, always and everywhere, and what is valid by custom or law, and is therefore situated in a specific time and place. From a notion about knowledge, relativism quickly and naturally expanded into a full-fledge theory about everything: moral values, education and civilization, political arrangements, the existence of the gods.

Nowadays, it is especially moral and cultural relativism that hold the sway, because of the strong immigration fluxes and the exposure to different cultures not mediated by that typical attitude of Western superiority that was still dominant until a few decades ago. The problem of relativism, when applied to practical matters, is still more interesting and commands our attention for its consequences. Is there any standard, beside our preferences, likes and dislikes, by which we may evaluate competing claims about entities of the utmost importance (values, political arrangements, religion, scientific theories about man and the universe)?

In my paper I will examine historically the origins of relativism and the first consistent relativist thinker, Protagoras, in order to show how his theory about knowledge contains an explicit non-relativist part when it comes to value-judgements. I then move on to maintain that relativism, although an attractive theory for its deconstructionist slant, it is untenable as a general outlook on reality.