The history of science as oxymoron: From scientific exceptionalism to episcience

ISIS

Volumn 104, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 88-101

  Alder, Ken ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; HUMAN; KNOWLEDGE; METHODOLOGY; NOMENCLATURE; ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT; PHILOSOPHY; SCIENCE;

HISTORIOGRAPHY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; KNOWLEDGE; PHILOSOPHY; SCIENCE; TERMINOLOGY AS TOPIC;

EID: 84875971867     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/669889     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. If you think I'm minimizing the progress we've made on this score, click on the Wikipedia entry for the history of science.
2. Deborah Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007).
3. Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004)
4. John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006).
5. This aspiration does not appear in the printed version of Kuhn's presentation, so I am basing my claim on my own recollection of his response, which is quite vivid, as I had just completed my Ph.D. and was setting out for my first academic job-in a history department. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science: Robert and Maurine Rothschild Distinguished Lecture, 19 November 1991 (Occasional Publication of the Department of the History of Science) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), rpt. in The Road since Structure (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 105-120.
6. Lorraine Daston, "Science Studies and the History of Science, " Critical Inquiry, 2009, 35:798-813.
7. See also Peter Dear and Sheila Jasanoff, "Dismantling Boundaries in Science and Technology Studies, " Isis, 2010, 101:759-774.
8. Gary Wilder, "From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographical Turns, " American Historical Review, 2012, 117:723-745.
9. Cyrus Mody, Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).
10. Certainly this is the case for the postrevisionist debate over the origins of the French Revolution. See William Sewell, "The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France, " Past and Present, 2010, 206:81-120.
11. Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2010).
12. Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2011).
13. For an update on Mertonian norms of science, once deemed "exceptional, " see Sheila Jasanoff, "Government and Science in the United States, " in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen, and Trevor Pinch, rev. ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995), pp. 556-560.
14. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1997).
15. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic, 2010).
16. Adam Cohen, "An SAT without Analogies Is Like: (A) A Confused Citizenry, " New York Times, 13 Mar. 2005.
17. For a brilliant study of how the Romantics imagined the productive milieu see John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2012).
18. For the biological origins of the idea of the "environment" see Trevor Pearce, "From 'Circumstances' to 'Environment': Herbert Spencer and the Origins of the Idea of Organism-Environment Interaction, " Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2010, 41:241-252.
19. C. H. Waddington, "The Epigenotype, " Endeavor, 1942, 1:18.
20. Jessica Riskin, "The Restless Clock, " in Early Modern Things, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 84-101.
21. Erik L. Peterson, "Finding Mind, Form, Organism, and Person in a Reductionist Age: The Challenge of Gregory Bateson and C. H. Waddington to Biological and Anthropological Orthodoxy, 1924-1980" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Notre Dame, 2010).
22. Anna-K. Mayer, "Setting up a Discipline, II: British History of Science and the End of Ideology, 1931-1948, " Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A, 2004, 35:41-72.
23. Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000).
24. A. D. Riggs et al., "Introduction, " in Epigenetic Mechanisms of Gene Regulation (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1996).
25. Hannah Landecker, "The Life of Movement: From Microcinematography to Live Cell Imaging, " Visual Culture, 2012, 11:1-22.
26. Historians of information are now showing that even the history of digital computing-the main source of these "informatic" metaphors for life-has been shaped by material constraints; see Jean-François Blanchette, "A Material History of Bits, " Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2011, 62:1042-1057.
27. Raphael Falk, "What Is a Gene?" Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 1986, 17:133-173.
28. Lenny Moss, "From Representational Preformationism to the Epigenesis of Openness to the World? Reflections on a New Vision of the Organism, " in From Epigenesis to Epigenetics: The Genome in Context, ed. Linda Van Speybroeck, Gertrudis Van de Vijver, and Dani de Waele, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2002, 981:219-229.
29. Michel Morange, "The Relations between Genetics and Epigenetics: A Historical Point of View, " in From Epigenesis to Epigenetics, ed. Van Speybroeck et al., pp. 50-60.