Rules with Lorraine Daston

Overview & Shownotes Lorraine Daston is Director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and a visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. On today’s episode of Examining Ethics, we’re discussing her new book Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. She explains that regulations that seem to have little to do with morality–like spelling rules–are often tied to deep-seated values in a society. For the episode transcript, download a copy or read it below. Contact us at [email protected] Links to people and ideas mentioned in the show Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Ludwig Wittgenstein on rule following Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperatives 1908 National Spelling Bee Credits Thanks to Evelyn Brosius for our logo. Music featured in the show: “Gin Boheme” by Blue Dot Sessions “Songe d’Automne” by Latché Swing from the Free Music Archive. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 F

Doppelgänger : la science au miroir de l’art, histoires parallèles

Depuis au moins une génération, histoire de l’art et histoire des sciences avancent avec une étonnante similarité. Le cheminement peut se résumer ainsi. Toutes deux ont engagé des débats passionnés pour savoir lesquels des discours, « internes » ou « externes », étaient les mieux à même d’expliquer une œuvre artistique ou scientifique : la logique interne des techniques, des matériaux et des formes (celle des technologies, des concepts et des formalismes pour les sciences) s’opposait ainsi au..

Nineteenth-Century Popular Science Magazines, Narrative, and the Problem of Historical Materiality

In his Some Reminiscences of a Lecturer, Andrew Wilson emphasizes the importance of narrative to popular science lecturing. Although Wilson promotes the teaching of science as useful knowledge in its own right, he also recognizes that the way science is taught can encourage audiences to take the subject up and read further on their own. Form, according to Wilson, should not be divorced from scientific content and lecturers should ensure that not only is their science accurate, but that it is presented in a way that will provoke curiosity and stimulate interest. This paper discusses the influence of narrative in structuring scientific objects and phenomena, and considers the consequences of such presentations for historical research. As scientific journalism necessarily weaves both its intended audience and the objects under discussion into its accounts, these texts demand that we recognize their nature as social relationships inscribed in historical objects

The Inuit discovery of Europe? The Orkney Finnmen, preternatural objects and the re-enchantment of early-modern science.

The late-seventeenth century saw a peak in accounts of supposed encounters with ‘Finnmen’ in Orkney. These accounts have shaped the folklore of the Northern Isles. Scholars linked to the Royal Society suggested the accounts represented encounters with Inuit. Subsequent explanations included autonomous travel by Inuit groups and abduction and abandonment. These accounts should be understood as part of a European scientific tradition of preternatural philosophy, occupied with the deviations and errors of nature. Far from indicating the presence of Inuit individuals in Orkney waters, they provide evidence of the narrative instability of early-modern science and its habit of ‘thinking with things’. Captivated by Inuit artefacts, the natural philosophers and virtuosi of the Royal Society imagined Orkney as a site of reverse contact with the ‘primitive’. Nineteenth-century antiquarians and folklorists reliant on these texts failed to understand the extent to which objectivity was not an epistemic virtue in early-modern science

Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century

There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists

Neurointerfaces, mental imagery and sensory translation in art and science in the digital age

The chapter focuses on the issue of transmedial and sensory exchange in the context of digital culture and biometric technology. It analyzes critically the epistemic claims behind the various brain-scanning technologies, focusing on the status of the inner images that underlie cognitive activity. Multimedia performances and artistic experiments designed in collaboration with neuroscientists open up new dimensions in the discussion of translation between different sensory modalities, as well as translation between human perceptive apparatus and computational systems. Engaging the methodologies of contemporary image science and critical neuroscience, the paper shows how artistic scenarios help to both localize and expand our understanding of mental imagery and to offer an alternative to the existing correlations-based approach.FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

Standardizing Slimness: How Body Weight Quantified Beauty in the Netherlands, 1870–1940

This chapter investigates the history of one of the most powerful quantitative beauty standards: weight. The chapter argues that weight is neither a natural nor a neutral standard for the beauty ideals of slimness and fatness. It is shown first how, in late nineteenth-century Netherlands, weight had not yet become a standard of beauty but was rather a bodily curiosity, measured at fairgrounds. The chapter then analyses Dutch newspaper advertisements for slimming remedies to show that, by the 1930s, weight was strongly established as a standard of beauty, scales having ceased to be a fairground attraction. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the consequences of this new standard of beauty, which complicated its character by partially separating it from the visual

A History of Universalism: Conceptions of the Internationality of Science from the Enlightenment to the Cold War

That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and 'the West'. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product

Virology Experts in the Boundary Zone Between Science, Policy and the Public: A Biographical Analysis

This article aims to open up the biographical black box of three experts working in the boundary zone between science, policy and public debate. A biographical-narrative approach is used to analyse the roles played by the virologists Albert Osterhaus, Roel Coutinho and Jaap Goudsmit in policy and public debate. These figures were among the few leading virologists visibly active in the Netherlands during the revival of infectious diseases in the 1980s. Osterhaus and Coutinho in particular are still the key figures today, as demonstrated during the outbreak of novel influenza A (H1N1). This article studies the various political and communicative challenges and dilemmas encountered by these three virologists, and discusses the way in which, strategically or not, they handled those challenges and dilemmas during the various stages of the field’s recent history. Important in this respect is their pursuit of a public role that is both effective and credible. We will conclude with a reflection on the H1N1 pandemic, and the historical and biographical ties between emerging governance arrangements and the experts involved in the development of such arrangements