History of science society distinguished lecture: How science became technical

ISIS

Volumn 100, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 292-309

  Porter, Theodore M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70349593776     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/599552     Document Type: Review

References (87)

1. Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 223-224.
2. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 377.
3. David C. Cassidy, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century (New York: Pi, 2005), pp. 249-250, 263, 345-347.
4. Theodore M. Porter, " Speaking Precision to Power: The Modern Political Role of Social Science, " Social Research, 2006, 73:1273-1294.
5. Thomas Bender, " The Erosion of Public Culture: Cities, Discourses, and Professional Disciplines, " in The Authority of Experts, ed. Thomas Haskell (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 84-106. More generally.
6. Bender's fine collection of essays, Intellect and Public Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993).
7. Sydney Smith, " Characters of the Late Charles Fox, " Edinburgh Review, July 1809, 14(28):353-360, on p. 359.
8. Robert B. Laughlin, The Crime of Reason and the Closing of the Scientific Mind (New York: Basic, 2008).
9. Robert H. Thurston, " Functions of Technical Education for Business and the Profession, " Science, 19 June 1903, 17:961-975, on pp. 962-963.
10. H. E. Slought, " Retrospect and Prospect, " American Mathematical Monthly, Jan. 1914, 21:1-3.
11. G. A. Miller, " Discussion and Correspondence Apropos of the Proposed Historical Section, " Science, 9 May 1919, 49:447- 448. Alexandre Koyré, É tudes Galiléenes (Paris: Alcan, 1940).
12. Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968).
13. Edgar Zilsel, " The Sociological Roots of Science, " American Journal of Sociology, 1942, 47:544 -562.
14. Thomas S. Kuhn, " Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science, " Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1976, 7:1-31, rpt. in Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1977).
15. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1974). On craft and locality in mathematics.
16. Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003).
17. Thorpe, Oppenheimer (cit. n. 1), pp. 255-259.
18. Steven Shapin, " Why the Public Ought to Understand Science-in-the-Making, " Public Understanding of Science, 1992, 1:27-30, on p. 29.
19. Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth- Century England (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994). This argument also harmonizes well with recent efforts to close up the space between science and technology.
20. Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2008).
21. John L. Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 119.
22. David Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996). On science in Western civilization as understood by early professional history of science in the United States.
23. Charles C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960).
24. Theodore M. Porter, Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004).
25. Porter, " Is the Life of the Scientist a Scientific Unit?" Isis, 2006, 97:314 -321.
26. E.g., Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).
27. Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988).
28. M. Norton Wise, " Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, " History of Science, 1989, 27:263-317, 391-449, 1990, 28:221-261.
29. Mary Morgan, The History of Econometric Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).
30. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).
31. Alain Desrosières, La politique des grands nombres: Histoire de la raison statistique (Paris: La Découverte, 1993).
32. Lorenz Kru"ger et al., The Probabilistic Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
33. Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).
34. Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995).
35. Gillispie, Edge of Objectivity (cit. n. 12), Ch. 5.
36. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980).
37. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004).
38. Eric Brian, La mesure de l'É tat: Administrateurs et géomètres au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Michel, 1994).
39. Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997).
40. Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2002).
41. Simon Schaffer, " Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century, " Hist. Sci., 1983, 21:1- 43.
42. Geoffrey Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995).
43. Keith Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 75, 124, 230, 290, 297.
44. This point has been widely recognized by historians for a long time, and I think it best to avoid making it depend on the special claims for a bourgeois public sphere, as developed in Ju"rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
45. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross, " Introduction: Writing the History of Social Science, " in The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 7: Modern Social Sciences, ed. Porter and Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 1-10.
46. Auguste Comte, " Plan of the Scientific Operations Necessary for Reorganizing Society" (1822), in Auguste Comte: The Essential Writings, ed. Gertrude Lenzer (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 9-67, on p. 25.
47. Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), p. 161.
48. Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols. (1828 -1840), 2nd ed., Vol. 6 (Paris: J. B. Baillère, 1864), Leçon 57, p. 375.
49. Ibid., pp. 379, 390-395.
50. The scholarship on these issues is particularly rich for nineteenth-century Britain. See, e.g., Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organisation of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984).
51. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1989).
52. James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2001).
53. A few works on ambitions for science in the late nineteenth century: Frank M. Turner, " The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension, " Isis, 1978, 69:356 -376, rpt. in Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 171-200.
54. Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007).
55. Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007).
56. Porter, Karl Pearson (cit. n. 13).
57. Paul White, Thomas Huxley: Making the " Man of Science" (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003).
58. T. H. Huxley, " On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences" (1854), in Huxley, Science and Education (New York: Collier, 1902), pp. 40-86, on p. 46.
59. Hermann von Helmholtz, " On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General" (1862), in Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 86-87.
60. Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 151, 161.
61. Edwin Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (1971; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986).
62. Edwin Layton, " Veblen and the Engineers, " American Quarterly, 1961, 14:64 -72.
63. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (1921; New York: Viking, 1933).
64. Kendall E. Bailes, " Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918-1924, " Soviet Studies, 1977, 29:373-394.
65. Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis (New York: Viking, 1989), pp. 366-367, 378-379.
66. David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 196-210.
67. David Hollinger, " Science as a Weapon in Kulturka"mpfe in the United States during and after World War II, " Isis, 1995, 86:440-454.
68. See, e.g., C. E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 53.
69. Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith, Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), p. 28.
70. Joseph Ben-David's important book The Scientist's Role in Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971) is structured as an account of how science achieved professional self-determination.
71. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003).
72. David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 2008).
73. Soraya de Chadarevian, Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), p. 25.
74. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Viking, 2007), p. 552.
75. Our more recent experience of missile defense does not encourage the supposition that only fascist regimes are vulnerable to scientific reveries of this kind.
76. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1962).
77. Charles Gillispie, " Remarks on Social Selection as a Factor in the Progressivism of Science" (1968), rpt. in Gillispie, Essays and Reviews in History and History of Science (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), pp. 366-378.
78. See also Gillispie's new introduction to his review of Kuhn's Structure, "Thomas S. Kuhn: The Nature of Science,"Charles Gillispie, Essays and Reviews in History and History of Science,2007
79. Allen Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (New York: Basic, 2007).
80. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2008).
81. Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990).
82. Ezrahi, " Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies, " in States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order, ed. Sheila Jasanoff (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 254-273.
83. On the scientists' educational campaign see Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1998). On social science and the American public.
84. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), Ch. 10.
85. Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005).
86. Porter, " Speaking Precision to Power" (cit. n. 2).
87. Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic, 2005).