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This week, the Harvard Program on Science, Technology, & Society held the latest installment in its Science and Democracy Lecture Series, featuring Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company.

The lecture, called "Deleterious Me," combined an account of 23andMe's practices, and the challenges they've faced, with a blend of optimism and fatalism about the future (and future ubiquity) of personalized medicine, affordable biotechnology, and patient- (or consumer-) driven innovation in the health care industry. 
Many in attendance, not least a few of the scholars on the panel tasked with responding to the address, found Wojcicki's boosterism unpalatable. In particular, a line of critique running through the commentary centered on the nature of the relationship between the two stated missions of 23andMe: one individualistic, one collectivist.
On the one hand, Wojcicki highlighted her desire to empower consumer-patien…

In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. – Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme"

I've been enjoying the discussion on our last couple posts (here and here), and wanted to break it out via a different vein of American philosophy and science: the history of the idea of the "conceptual scheme." It was suggested to me when Lukas quoted W.V.O. Quine's "On What There Is" to clarify what philosophers mean by "ontology." As Lukas (and Quine) suggest, ontology has long been a metaphysical problem about what there is and the categories that apply to it.


This problem changes, I think, if we move a few years later and look at Quine's most famous paper: 1951's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." Without going into Quine's indictment of the analytic-synthetic distincti…

“Why are today’s liberals usually right, and today’s conservatives usually wrong?” To answer this question, asserts Chris Mooney, we need to explore “the emerging science of the political brain” (7). The result is Mooney’s latest book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality (New York: Wiley, 2012). 




Basically, Mooney sets out to explain what he sees (and has seen before) as Republican aversion to science by using the object of that very aversion–namely, various studies from the mind and social sciences. 

I won't go into too much detail on the book's argument, but a key question for Mooney is whether the split between “liberal” and “conservative” that runs through the book constitutes an a priori category of analysis and, if so, whether it’s a legitimate one. For Mooney, “conservatives” (and their opposite) are real, set apart by a deep, psychological “resistance to change,” which is tied to “less Openness to Experience (and other related traits), …

I spent last Friday at a conference on "Science and Method in the Humanities," sponsored by the Rutgers British Studies Center, among others. Hats off to the organizers for putting on a stimulating, well-run event – lots to think about for scholars of all sorts. 

As Carin Berkowitz pointed out, the day's conversation seemed to proceed at two levels. On the one hand, there were epistemic questions about how various methods fit together; on the other, there was disciplinary anxiety about the current state of the academy.  

Of course, we all know that these two sorts of questions are inextricably linked (cf. "Hobbes was right."). But how? First, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith, disciplines coalesce not around methods but around questions, to which different methods are suited. For her, this is the basis for the plurality of available methods and the continued persistence of "the humanities." 


Second, and more to the point, Peter Dear made clear that the idea of…

This past weekend saw an interesting anniversary: the double birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, who were born across the Atlantic from one another on 12 February 1809. When I thought about how to mark it here on the blog, my mind turned where it so often does: to pragmatism.

Why? These two figures (in the form of their involvement with evolutionary theory and the Civil War) buttress what is now perhaps the most famous account of pragmatism and its origins: Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2002.


It's a captivating quadruple-biography and a compelling synthesis of lively philosophical ideas, in which Menand frames the development of "classical pragmatism" in the Cambridge of the 1870s as stemming from the joint impact of Darwin's theory of natural selection and various figures' relationship to the Civil War.


Certain reviewers questioned the strength of this Civil War connection, since only Menand's …

The Society for US Intellectual History (S-USIH, or "sushi") runs both a blog and an annual conference in New York City. The theme of last year's – at which I presented – was "Narratives," and they've just announced that next fall's will be "Communities of Discourse."

According to the CFP, proposals are due 1 June and the event itself will be 1-2 November 2012. Besides the obvious attraction of Manhattan, they've got a great keynote speaker (David Hollinger) lined up – and at least the potential for interesting dialogue with history of science.

Why "potential"? Well, it was my impression last year that the focus skews strongly to twentieth-century political thought. Whether true or not of the field overall, it left the interface with the history of science mainly in the form of the social sciences relevant to that history of political ideas.

But it strikes me that there are way more ways to skin this cat, and that those who work on …

Today marks what would've been the one-hundred-and-seventieth birthday of one of the most well-regarded and enigmatic figures in American science: William James. (And, while he's a central figure in my work, my admiration doesn't even approach that of one of my colleagues: William James Dromgold Bouk turns two this March.)


James is a towering figure in American intellectual history – and he's gotten lots of attention in the ensuing century as a result. Lately, it's been picking up. The last few years marked a series of centenaries, including those of some of his best-known works: most significantly, The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902 and Pragmatism in 1907.
But it's more than anniversaries that have raised James's profile. From Louis Menand's Metaphysical Club (which won the Pulitzer in 2002) to Robert Richardson's Bancroft-winning biography (2006) to the privileged place given him by Jim Kloppenberg in Reading Obama, James is on bookshelv…

A few weeks ago, a piece in the NYT Style Section called "New York's Literary Cubs" was making the rounds. It profiled The New Inquiry ("a scrappy online journal and roving clubhouse that functions as an Intellectuals Anonymous of sorts"), whose founders were after "a kind of literary salon reminiscent of the Lost Generation of the 1920s."

The story went viral thanks in large part to Gawker, who used it as evidence for "Why You Should Never Be Profiled by The New York Times Style Section." Their argument? While "[f]or hundreds of years, unbearable young people have tried to hang out with other unbearable young people," these young people were capitalized upon by the Times.

I'll leave their (fun) "Two Audience" theory of the Style Section (hint: the writing is purposefully annoying) to them. Instead, I want to explore the gap between "literary salons" ("Moveable Feast-type stuff") and the earlier phil…

What's the place of science (specifically, American science) in literature (specifically, American literature)? While literary scholars have written more about this than have historians, I think more dialogue's in order between historians of science and New Historicists. As a way in, I'll start where lots of others do – with Thomas Pynchon.
He's a special case for reasons of both content and style. First: it's a commonplace to note the omnipresence of references to (and meditations on) science, technology, and their aftermath in his work. Second: Pynchon's well-known obsession with dialectics (order vs. entropy, free will vs. determinism, technology vs. nature, &c.) bleeds into his prose in the form of endless appositions, yoyo-ing run-ons, and the interplay of colloquial dialogue and technical digressions.

Both points matter for understanding the place of science in Pynchon's novels because they help us see that it's more than just one side of a bina…

As announced in a recent post, the whole sick crew spent last weekend in Cleveland at the jointly-located 4S, HSS, and SHOT meetings. Dividing our time differently between the three hotels (and various local watering holes), we each got our own snapshot of the state of the field(-s) today.
To my mind, two themes characterized some of the best panels: (1) the material culture of theories and (2) the structural power of metaphors. I hope a co-blogger will touch on the former as featured at "Making Mathematics," a panel widely lauded as one of the weekend's best.
For my part, I'll describe the latter theme as it emerged in a Sunday panel on "Bodies, Colonies, and Stem Cells." Each of the three papers – by Ben Hurlbut, Hallam Stevens (the organizer), and our very own Lukas Rieppel – dealt with the link between social and scientific categories.
That's a sloppy way to label a subtle conversation, but I think the panelists (along with their commentator, Andy Yan…

Reflecting on how we came to name ourselves "AmericanScience" as HSS approaches, I noticed an interesting thing under our "About the FHSA" tab. The submission criteria for the Forum's Publication Prize are that the work be "on a topic in American Science ('American' loosely defined to include the western hemisphere, 'science' conservatively defined to exclude articles focusing on either the 'clinical and social history of medicine' or the 'history of technology')."
"American loosely defined," "science conservatively defined." On the one hand, these criteria are easy to understand (and justify). The looseness of the former accommodates work on Central and South America that has no other group identity in HSS; the rigidness of the latter prevents encroachment from those working on topics (medicine, technology) with their own associations, annual meetings, and opportunities for prizes elsewhere. Definiti…

This week, the father of the modern microhistory and one of the godparents of modern cultural history in general spoke at the Institute for Advanced Study on the relationship between observers, actors, and language in the historian's craft.
Carlo Ginzburg will be familiar to most for his epoch-making 1976 study The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, which explains just what its title promises and is required reading in most history methods courses.
Connections to AmericanScience aren't immediately obvious, but the talk (a) dealt with some of the theoretical issues we've touched on before and (b) cast new light on how history borrowed from (sacked?) its cousin anthropology a half-century ago.
The title of his talk was "Our Words, and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian’s Craft Today," and it began by noting what is both a blessing and a curse for history: that it is conducted in everyday language, in a vocabulary often shared with its a…

Last weekend, I co-organized Princeton's American Studies Graduate Conference. Our topic was "Science and Religion in America," and we had twelve papers, four panels, two keynote addresses, and one great Cheselden print:

Our chronology ranged over three centuries, and participants' disciplinary identities spanned history, religion, anthropology, political science, and integrated science studies programs at a variety of American institutions.
As you might be able to guess, given this range of interests and the broad nature of the theme itself, there was lots in the air over our day and half together – too much for one blog post (even if that blog post's written by me).
Rather than try to tie everything together, what I'll do here is just point out two of the major themes that emerged over the course of the conversation, and highlight a thematic arc connecting the two keynote addresses.
Authority – in many ways the ur-theme of the study of the relationship betwee…

I've touched on the relationship between history, philosophy, and science too many times to hyperlink (key posts: here, here, and (hesitatingly) here). It's both an important topic for the discipline and the subject of my own research, and today I'll try to bring those two things together.

My dissertation is about the scientific method. Specifically, it's about meta-scientific arguments between psychologists, philosophers, and scientists in the United States around 1900. I show why these folks felt so much was at stake in debates about methods in the sciences—and why they were right.
Part of what's interesting is that the vocational categories I just listed–psychologists, philosophers, and scientists–were only then coming into their modern forms. The result is a boon and a bother: contexts and terms blinked in and out of existence as these debates about science unfolded.
It turns out that changes in the cultural authority of science a century ago link up with the wa…

Are Republicans at war—on science? The relationship between the GOP and the scientific community is in the news, and certain aspects of the coverage will be of interest to those working on the history of science in America.

Rick Perry (on the "Stump") Rick Perry's recent entry into the race has raised a number of questions about his party's (and the American people's) relationship to science. Over the past few weeks, Perry has revealed—nay, reveled in—skepticism about both evolution and climate change.
Responding to a question from a New Hampshire child about whether or not he believed in evolution, Perry told the boy that evolution is "a theory that’s out there" that's "got some gaps in it," and that "In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution."
On climate change, Perry went even further. Asked, the previous day, to defend a claim (from his book Fed Up!) that climate science is "all one contrived phony mess" propag…

After last week's post on the tools of the trade, I got a lot of feedback (mostly offline). I think Lukas is right that there's probably enough helpful material in our collective experience to justify a few more posts on methods.
Most feedback centered on Scrivener, the "content-generation tool" I've switched over to for my first chapter. Some readers had already been using it and chimed in with their favorite features, others picked it up for the first time and are now using it for dissertations.
The web is full of Scrivener reviews – a "Blogs" search on Google yields a dozen in the last couple days. Most reviewers that I've seen are (aspiring) novelists, concerned with character profiles and writer's block. As historians, we share those issues and have a few of our own.
What I thought I'd do in this post is just post a few screen-shots of my own set-up in Scrivener, and use those to suggest a few of the ways it's been most helpful to me a…

We're a long way from the index card. Or are we?
It used to start here (or so I'm told..) Historians work a lot of different ways, and probably always have. Right at the beginning of my dissertation, I had a series of how-to conversations with other grad students: how to take notes in the archives, how to organize research material and your own thoughts, how to start (and finish) the writing process. That kind of thing.
I got a diverse set of responses; big surprise, right? Methods reflect the people who use them. Of course it matters what kind of project and sources you've got, but even more important is how you think – how patient and organized and efficient you are (or would like to be). I learned more about my friends than about their tools.
Still, some common themes did emerge, pertaining to every stage of the process. From what to do in the beginning to how to wrap it all up at the end, there seemed to be enough overlap to justify pursuing the question further. So, in th…

A few weeks ago, three of the four of us (Hank, Joanna, Lukas) spent a week together on Ischia, an island off of Naples.
We were there for the The Twelfth Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences, sponsored by the Wellcome, the MPIWG, and the Stazione Zoologica.

Lukas, Helen, Joanna, and Hank (poolside) Here's a description of the event. This year's theme was "Biology and the Public: Participation and Exclusion from the Renaissance to the Present Day," which was relevant to each of our projects in different ways.
We had a great time–inside and outside the seminar room–and decided to do a three-part report for the blog. Each of us will pick an interesting theme from the week's conversation and run with it (briefly).
I'm kicking things off, so here goes:
"Biology and the Public" vs. Biology and "the Public"
One thing I kept jotting down in my notes was that we spent way more time interrogating the category of "the public,&…

Last April, the Sixth Annual UK Workshop on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science was held at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. The workshop's title was “Revisiting the Aims and Methods of Integrated HPS," and the account of its proceedings (written up by attendees) suggests that the title was an accurate one.

While I wasn't able to make it to Free School Lane for the big show, I was happy to be able to peruse the e-version. Because I wasn't there, I can't say whether the summaries offered on the web are accurate to the actual conversations; still, the blend of nostalgia and optimism that rings through them can't be far off.

 Hasok Chang's opening remarks set the tone. Nostalgia for "an earlier heyday of integrated HPS" is central: "These were the days of N. R. Hanson, Imre Lakatos, Gerd Buchdahl and Mary Hesse, the now-forgotten Herbert Dingle, and the up-and-coming Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feye…