Science is epistemically special, or so I will assume: it is better able to produce knowledge about the workings of the world than other knowledge-directed pursuits. Further, its superior epistemic powers are due to its being in some sense especially empirical: in particular, science puts great weight on a form of inductive reasoning that I call empirical confirmation. My aim in this paper is to investigate the nature of science's "empiricism", and to provide a preliminary explanation of the connection between empirical confirmation and epistemic efficacy. I will try to convince you that the place to find an account of empirical confirmation is the dusty, long-neglected instantialist account of scientific inference offered by mid-century logical empiricists. Some revision of instantialism will be required. As for what is advantageous in empirical confirmation, I propose that it is an unusual degree of independence from background belief.

During the 1930s a huge number of scholars and intellectuals have been forced to leave their countries of origin due to the takeover of the power by the Nazi party, first in Germany, later on in several other European countries. This well known migration, labelled as "Cultural Exodus", "The Muses Flee Hitler", etc., has been covered intensely over the last half century but no one did a comparison between these scholars who left ("émigrés") and those who didn’t ("homeguards", using a phrase of E.C. Hughes). Following Karl Mannheim’s concept of "generational units" the paper presents such a comparison, using biographical data of some 800 German and Austrian social scientists. The paper presents bivariate and multivariate analyses about social, religious and ethnic background, career developments at home and abroad and compares the reputation of the two groups.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, anthrax appeared in British, European, and American factories that processed animal wool, hair and hides. The dramatic and often tragic public health consequences stimulated natural historians, physicians, veterinarians and other investigators to try to understand anthrax's life cycle and patterns of infection. The questions they asked have been echoed by historians since: What comprised "anthrax," and where did it come from? How had this very localized disease become a global phenomenon? My talk will trace industrial anthrax using a novel combination of methodologies, including sociocultural, ecological, and phylogenetic analysis. Within the past ten years or so, computer models that simulate pathogens' ecology and genetic evolution have generated data that can inform historical narratives about disease. In the case of industrial anthrax, models demonstrate the relatively recent importation of rare Asian and Middle Eastern strains of anthrax bacilli into British factory towns, thus supporting the hypothesis that anthrax hitched a ride around the world in infected animal products. This combination of methodologies promises to give historians interested in disease new power to answer a central question: how human society and culture has interacted with the dynamic ecology and genetic development of disease-causing organisms.

In this talk, Professor Smith will explore the relationship of making, that is, the knowledge that craftspeople employ to make objects, and knowing, that is, the kind of knowledge employed by natural philosophers to theorize about the natural world. Making and knowing are normally not regarded as possessing the same status as knowledge. Making is goal oriented, how-to know-how about specific and particular practices, while knowing is generalizable and often abstract knowledge, expressed in general theories. She will argue that such distinctions are not always so simple, and that by studying craft practices and the objects that were produced by craftspeople, we can delineate what might be called a "vernacular science of matter." In other words, how making with natural materials was also about knowing nature.

Sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and Theorizing Early Modern Studies.

Pamela Smith demonstrates how much early modern science owed to an unlikely source: artists and artisans. Goldsmiths, locksmiths, carpenters, and painters were all sought after by early scientists for their intimate, hands-on knowledge of natural materials, as well as their ability to manipulate them.

Sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and Theorizing Early Modern Studies.

There is a fascination surrounding "Hitler's Bomb" that transcends and defies both scientific and historical analysis. This talk will briefly survey both the German work on nuclear weapons and how its history has been written in order to try and explain why this topic remains important and controversial.

Social scientists attempt to understand variations within a population in a socioeconomic or biomedical trait, e.g., household income, school achievement, unemployment, risk of heart disease or rate of diabetes-related death, by stratifying the population using a demographic variable like sex, age, race or ethnicity and studying the statistical relationship between the variable and the trait. In order to do so, they assign each member of the population or sample a race or ethnicity and assume that there is one correct way to make the assignment, e.g., by ancestry, other-reports or ancestry. I argue that there is no one correct way to assign an individual to a racial or ethnic category and that what race or ethnicity an individual should be assigned depends of the trait whose variation the social or biomedical scientist is attempting to understand; as a result, a member of the population might be assigned one race for the purpose of understanding a variation in one socioeconomic or biomedical trait and a different race for the purpose of understanding a variation in a different one, white in relation to sickle-cell disease and black in relation to academic achievement. I propose an approach to race and ethnicity similar to one some economists have adopted towards indices like poverty and unemployment, viz. that there is no best way to define 'poverty' or 'unemployment' and which definition is best depends on what the term is to be used for. My proposal would improve the research in the social and biomedical sciences on racial difference and oppose the common view that race is an intrinsic property of persons.

Sponsored by the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.

The physicist I. Bloch in his 1967 paper "Some Relativistic Oddities in the Quantum Theory of Observation" came to the conclusion that the instantaneous collapse of the quantum state, as it has traditionally been conceived, presented a problem for compatibility with relativity. This problem has been called "Bloch’s Paradox". Rather offhandedly, Bloch suggested that the problem might be avoided by taking the state transition due to a measurement to occur along a Lorentz invariant surface in Minkowski spacetime (i.e., the spacetime of special relativity). In particular, Bloch focused attention on the past light cone of the measurement event. The idea of positing the past (or future) light cone of a measurement event as the collapse transition surface in spacetime has a natural attractiveness to it because of the privileged status of the light cone structure in relativity theory. In this talk, I review the historically significant interactions with this proposal in the literature and critically examine objections to it. (The essence of the proposal and most of the objections to it can be understood pictorially with the help of spacetime diagrams.) Ultimately, the proposal fails to perform the explanatory work we seek from the process of state collapse in EPR situations. Reflection upon this failure provides insights which motivate embracing a hypersurface-dependent account of quantum state collapse of the sort first advocated by Aharonov and Albert in 1984.

This presentation endeavors to place into context recent developments surrounding the United States Food and Drug Administration recent approval of BiDil as the first ever race-specific drug—in this case to treat heart failure in African Americans. It traces the development of BiDil, from its origins in the 1980's and explores how practices of law, commerce and science and intertwined to transform BiDil from a drug to treat everyone regardless of race into a racially marked—and marketed—pharmaceutical. It focuses in particular on both commercial incentives and statistical manipulation of medical data as framing the drive to bring BiDil to market as a race-specific drug. In current discourse about pharmacogenomics, targeting a racial audience is perceived as necessary because at this point the technology and resources do not exist to scan efficiently every individual's genetic profile. The presentation argues that medical researchers may say they are using race as a surrogate to target biology in drug development, but corporations are using biology as a surrogate to target race in drug marketing.

Sponsored by the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.

In philosophy, persons are often distinguished by a propensity for reflection—a conscious and concerted mentation effecting control of behavior. In psychology, research on unconscious processing suggests that this philosophical conception of persons is unrealistic; ethically significant human behavior is very often beyond reflective control. A psychologically lifelike conception of persons will therefore de-emphasize reflective control; instead, the human ethical distinctiveness marked with such philosophical honorifics as "person," "agency," "practical rationality," and "the self" is found in the collaboratively developed rationalizing explanations of behavior by which humans living in groups regulate their lives.

Paul L. Errington and Aldo Leopold's field study of bobwhite quail in southwestern Wisconsin was a significant episode in the early (inter-war) history of wildlife ecology. It produced an ecological theory of predation, which focused on the whole environment. I will use this case study to develop a general concept of what I call "residential" science, a highly intensive, localized, and observational kind of field practice, for which local cultural practices (like hunting and trapping) were important models, and which is best regarded as a kind of land-use. Parallels will be drawn between Errington's ecological theory of predation and Leopold's developing environmental philosophy of "land-health."

Just after the Civil War, the citizens of St. Louis became seized with the need to bridge the Mississippi, seeking rail connections to the East analogous to those propelling Chicago, their great Midwest rival. By 1867 two bridge projects competed for engineering, financial, and political resources. A Chicago firm led by Lucius Boomer seemed to hold the strongest hand: this experienced bridge company amassed support for its proposed St. Louis span from a convention of America’s leading civil engineers -- lions of the profession. By contrast, a competing proposal originated with an engineer/entrepreneur, James B. Eads, who had never designed a bridge before in his life. Eads would amass an engineering team, mostly trained in Germany, to redress that shortcoming. A third key player who would exert great influence over this project, Major Gouverneur Warren, derived his authority as the leading member of the Army Corps of Engineers with responsibility to oversee bridge projects on the Western rivers.

It simplifies matters to speak of these three men; as the paper will clarify they really represented three different engineering communities, each with divergent membership and professional affiliations, and each valuing different allegiances and bodies of knowledge. This paper looks at how each of these vying communities was constructed, considering why they differed so markedly and how they clashed over the St. Louis project. In this era American civil engineers were fully engaged in the project of securing professional status for their elite members, men well represented in the Boomer and Warren camps. But the contests among these three coalitions reveal very different routes to professional status. Ironically, it was the outsider, Eads, who bested both Boomer and Warren with an innovative design for the St. Louis Bridge.

Historians of technology have long been interested in the nature of engineering communities, their professionalizing imperatives, and their roles in forming new knowledge. Among the many relevant titles, works by Calhoun and Sinclair cover the formation and operation of professional societies, while Seely and Reynolds consider the evolving knowledge parameters that constituted professional status. More recent studies by Meiksins, Dawson, and Brown look at professional communities within regional or national contexts. To go beyond those literatures, this paper seeks to assess the relative importance of social networks, knowledge endowments, and engineering paradigms in the professionalizing project of nineteenth-century engineers.

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis' famous and influential Discours sur les differentes figures des astres, which represented the first public defense of attractionism in the Cartesian stronghold of the Paris Academy, sometimes suggests a metaphysically agnostic defense of gravity as simply a regularity. However, Maupertuis' considered account in the essay, I argue, is much more subtle. I analyze Maupertuis' position, showing how it is generated by an extended consideration of the possibility of attraction as an inherent property and fuelled by an understanding of Lockean skepticism about knowledge of real essences that is more nuanced perhaps even than Locke's own.

This paper will explore the way roads have been redesigned for the automobile as parkways since the 1920s in the United States and Germany, what meanings they acquired, and how drivers and passengers experienced them. In particular, I will compare the driving experience on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina and the Deutsche Alpenstrasse in southern Germany. Construction on both roads began in the 1930s, yet under most different political regimes.

Spring Science Studies Symposium of McKnight Summer Fellows, University of Minnesota

Alan C. Love, Department of Philosophy
"Temporal Dimensions of Reductionism in Biology"
Although reduction clearly concerns spatial dimensions, such as relations between macroscale and microscale properties, at least three relevant temporal dimensions can be distinguished: historical, iterated compositional, and emergent process. The first two are prevalent in prior philosophical discussions but the third is surprisingly absent given its centrality in experimental biology. This neglected dimension is shown to be more appropriate for the representation of time in reductive explanations of development. My analysis uncovers an array of previously unrecognized questions about reductionism that revolve around potentially competing explanatory preferences and the diversity of temporal measures available to investigators.

Arun Saldanha, Department of Geography
"Cartographic Knowledge and Emerging Dutch Colonialism: the View from Population Biology"
There has been a comeback in understanding human migration through biogeography, as can be seen in popular authors like Jared Diamond. This paper will tentatively suggest some ways that the concept of population in Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky can aid in studying shifts in the patterns of settlement and long-distance control in our species. For instance, there was a rapid change in the ways that populations around the Indian Ocean world related with Holland around the turn of the seventeenth century. Historians usually attribute this shift to the Dutch accumulation of cartographic and economic information about the region. They find a environmentalist framework such as Diamond's overly reductionist, incapable of explaining forces such as monopoly capitalism or religious zeal. This paper will argue that to properly understand the spatial functioning of colonialism, an adapted biogeographical notion of "population" can still be useful. For humans, however, empirical due needs to be given to factors such as money and maps, as such communication channels are necessary for spurring movement and social organization. Causality does not go one-way from the biophysical to the cultural as in Diamond, but only emerges through and within uneven webs in which culture and biology are already entwined.

J. B. Shank, Department of History
"Galileo without Modernity? Preliminary Reflections on the Project of Writing Galileo Today."
What are the new trends in Galileo studies? None, I would suggest, because work on Galileo remains trapped, as it has been for three quarters of a century, in the modernist narratives of the "Scientific Revolution." These narratives also continue to anchor the modernizing project of mainstream history and philosophy of science (HPS), for ever since the founding fathers of the discipline institutionalized Galileo as the father of modern science by making him a central pillar in the discipline-defining edifice of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution (modernity through the passage From Galileo to Newton in Hall's classic formulation), writing about Galileo has essentially worked to reproduce the discipline of HPS through a continual reenactment of these founding stories of origin. Is it possible to liberate Galileo studies from the echo chamber of this discipline-bound conceptual framework? My paper explores these possibilities by asking whether there are alternatives to the "Galileo, First Modern Scientist" framework, and by exploring the implications of breaking free from this discipline-defining and modernity-enacting hermeneutic.

C. Kenneth Waters, Department of Philosophy
"Getting Real about Genetics and Genomics: An Antirealist Perspective"
Inflated accounts of knowledge in genetics and genomics are reinforced by the epistemological idea that successful research is organized by comprehensive theoretical frameworks that identify fundamental entities and processes. According to this epistemology, the success (or failure) of genetics and genomics depends on a comprehensive, theoretical framework that identifies the fundamentals of heredity and development. In this paper, I advance a deflationary epistemology for understanding genetics and genomics. Research in these sciences, I contend, is organized around investigative strategies involving the manipulation of a broad range of biological processes; it is not structured by comprehensive theorizing about the fundamentals of information, genetic programs, or developmental systems.

Through a re-examination of the Chemical Revolution, I advance an argument for scientific pluralism. My assessment, made on the basis of a comprehensive list of epistemic values, returns the verdict that there was no compelling rational reason for 18th-century chemists to discard the phlogiston theory. I then examine the benefits that could have (or could still) come from retaining or reviving phlogiston, with particular reference to Douglas Allchin's work. Finally I sketch some general arguments for scientific pluralism, building on existing arguments especially by Feyerabend and by Kellert, Longino and Waters.

Cosponsored by the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.

Cosponsored by
Center for Early Modern History
Consortium for the Study of the Asias

Author:
Jennifer Karns Alexander, Program in History of Science and Technology, University of Minnesota

Commentators:
Naomi Scheman, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies & Philosophy, University of Minnesota
Andrew Feenberg, Philosophy of Technology, Simon Fraser University
David Valentine, Anthropology, University of Minnesota

ABSTRACT: The Mantra of Efficiency analyzes the historical development of a belief that has become orthodox in modern technological societies: that all things should act efficiently. Like all orthodoxies it offers comfort and guidance, but it also has the power to wound those who cannot follow its dogmas or who resist its rituals of conformity. Efficiency is technological, because it has primarily to do with making things work, and it is particularly apparent in the current emphasis on quantifiable productivity and associated fears of waste. Historical study offers a tool for uncovering and critically examining the technological orthodoxies that increasingly dominate life in industrial and post-industrial societies. The Mantra of Efficiency contains a series of historical case studies, in American, German, British, and French history, which range from early industrial uses of water power to efficiency in ergonomics, neo-classical economics, and debates over slave labor. The Mantra of Efficiency argues that beneath efficiency's seemingly endless variety lies a common theme: the pursuit of mastery through techniques of surveillance, discipline, and control.

Cosponsored by the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.

On September 10, 1948, twenty-one year old Edith Mae Irby, the daughter of a sharecropper and a housekeeper, entered the University of Arkansas School of Medicine in Little Rock. Her enrollment marked the first desegregation of a Southern medical school and it occurred without court action, without hostile crowds, and without the need for federal troops. This presentation will analyze the factors that led to this historic admission and discuss how, in the words of a former Arkansas governor, it was accomplished "quietly and with dignity." It will also examine how the desegregation of the University of Arkansas School of Medicine challenges popular narratives of school desegregation in the South.

Cosponsored by the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology of Medicine and the Program in the Hist

'Emergence', and its contrary 'reduction', are buzz-words in both physics and philosophy. Both physicists and philosophers disagree about the extent to which we can understand large-scale or complex phenomena in terms of their microscopic parts. Examples include both everyday phenomena like the freezing and boiling of liquids, and fancy ideas like fractals. I will pour some oil on these troubled waters---partly by the philosopher's usual tactic of distinguishing different senses of the contentious terms! But I will also show that some cases of taking an infinite limit of a physical theory are cases of both emergence and reduction.

Cosponsored by the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.

In the sixteenth century, central European alchemists played on the full range of meanings attributed to secrecy as they offered their skills and knowledge to patrons and other practitioners. While some touted new artisanal techniques, such as a “secret art of smelting,” others proffered bookish, esoteric wisdom, such as how to make the philosophers’ stone. This paper will examine one particular type of alchemical secret – the revelation – through the life and work of the alchemist Anna Zieglerin (c1550-1575), exploring how she employed secrecy in constructing a kind of holy alchemy.

Cosponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and Theorizing Early Modern Studies.

The seventeenth century witnessed the emergence of new methods of anatomical investigation, such as microscopy, and the unprecedented refinement of others, such as vascular injections. With the notable exception of William Harvey's work, however, vivisection has not attracted much attention by historians, possibly because it was perceived as an ancient technique already familiar to Galen and even earlier sources.

In this presentation I shall argue that in the seventeenth century vivisection was a major technique of investigation and that, despite its antiquity, it was used with remarkable creativity and originality. Starting from the works by Harvey and Gasparo Aselli, I discuss a number of cases highlighting the surprising and remarkable achievements of anatomists such as Jean Pecquet, Marcello Malpighi, Reinier de Graaf, Richard Lower, and Anton Nuck.

More broadly, I shall argue that vivisection was a complex--and in many ways problematic--experimental technique requiring extensive anatomical knowledge, manual dexterity, and sophisticated conceptualizations. Thus my presentation challenges the traditional picture of seventeenth-century experimentation as primarily focused on the physical-mathematical disciplines, calling for a more comprehensive account encompassing the medical-anatomical disciplines as well.

In recent evolutionary theory, multi-level selection models have attracted considerable attention. In these models, natural selection acts simultaneously at more than one level of the biological hierarchy, e.g. the individual level and group level, leading to interesting evolutionary outcomes. I analyse a number of philosophical issues that arise in multi-level selection theory. In particular, can selection at one level ever be 'reduced' to selection at another? Can selective processes at different levels causally affect each other? Does the notion of emergence have a role to play, in understanding multi-level selection?

Cosponsored by the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.

Through the work of the experimental physicist John Tyndall, I will analyze the close relationship formed in the mid-nineteenth century between advances in the physical sciences and the equally dramatic rise of mountaineering. Tyndall held the position of Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution for over thirty years, and along with groundbreaking research in the physical sciences, he worked throughout his career to popularize the study of physics. He was also a pioneering mountaineer during the golden age of mountaineering in Europe. After receiving training in surveying and working as a railway engineer, Tyndall studied the magnetic properties of the earth’s rocks, which in turn led him to similar studies on the fracturing of glaciers. His work on glaciers led him to the topics of radiant heat, the scattering of light by particles in the atmosphere, and to his now famous explanation of global warming. Note that Tyndall's scientific research programs took an obvious vertical orientation, from the ground up. As he practices his science, from rock quarries to glaciers to the study of the atmosphere, Tyndall's interests in the fundamental forces of nature brought him to the summits of mountains. Or, said a bit differently, as he climbed mountains, he found that he could more readily answer questions concerned with the very nature of physics. In either case, his science and mountaineering were tellingly mixed. As one of the leading definers and popularizers of his discipline, Tyndall's life and work suggest that physics was at least partly defined on the vertical, rocky faces of mountains.

HST Colloquium had been CANCELLED.