al-mofhariz

Errol Morris published the fourth installment of his five-part personal essay on Kuhn in today’s NY Times.  All of it is worth reading (except perhaps part III, which drags on somewhat), and I definitely encourage everyone to take a look!

What is Morris’ beef with Kuhn?  In a nutshell, he thinks that Kuhn provided volatile ammunition for “postmodernists” (that’s Morris’ term): people who want to deny there is a truth (rather than many truths), a real world (rather than multiple realities), and a compelling distinction between ethical and unethical actions (rather than just social mores).  Now, I suspect that Morris is mostly tilting at windmills here, or, at the very least, that his argument is about ten years behind the times.  But for historians of science, I think, it is worth thinking about what’s got him so upset. 

Morris’ central objection centers on the relationship between paradigms and incommensurability.  What is a paradigm and what does it mean for two paradigms to be incomm…

An article in today’s NY Times implicitly asks whether the popular uprising against Col. Muammar Quaddafi poses a threat to the United States.  The rationale is that the Libyan Government has lost control over a large number of relatively sophisticated weapons (including assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades, and shoulder launched heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles) that have fallen into the hands of rebels.  The worry stems from the fact that these weapons are sought-after commodities.  So the temptation is high for rebel fighters to sell them, especially once the violence eventually dies down.  And once they have made their way onto the black market, there will be no way to keep them out of the hands of terrorists who harbor ill intentions towards the United States.

Does this line of thinking strike anyone else as incredibly cynical?

The implication is that it’s okay for Western countries to sell weapons to Muammar Quaddafi, who is currently using them to slaughter Libyan civilia…

As many of you no doubt know, the Obama Administration announced a decision to cease defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) against legal challenges this past Wednesday.  Just to be clear, this does not mean the administration will no longer enforce the law.  It just means they will no longer take steps to actively defend it in court.  Why not just stop enforcing it altogether?  Well, just imagine what would happen if every administration could simply pick and choose which laws to enforce!  Doing so would all but eliminate the legislative authority of the United States Congress. 
To my mind, these developments are interesting to historians of science for at least two reasons.  The first has to do with the specific legal reasoning employed in the administration’s decision.  The second is about the implications this reasoning has for the role that science plays in democratic society.  Let’s start at the beginning, with the law itself.
Section three of DOMA states that: “In determin…

When I'm not working, one thing I like to do is cook.  I've often wondered if I should not switch the order of my priorities: start working in a kitchen and read history in my free time.  I've also toyed with the idea of working as a cook in the afternoons and evenings, saving my mornings for writing.  Alas, some friends with restaurant experience have disabused me of these naive notions.  There's no way I would get a job sans professional experience other than maybe (maybe!) prepping veggies in the morning and washing dishes all night.

So I've been casting about for other ways to combine my work and free time.  Or rather, I should say, for ways to pass my hobby off as work.

As some of you may know, I'm supposed to be writing a dissertation about the history of paleontology around the turn of the 20th century.  One of the people who figures pretty prominently in my story is  Barnum Brown (who some of you may remember from a previous post).  It turns out that Brow…

Richard Conniff just published a fascinating piece for his New York Times series on Specimens.  It’s about the relationship between natural history and espionage and makes a historical link between the two, showing how many spies (both real and fictional) frequently donned the mantle of a naturalist as cover for their political activities.  For example, late in life the British secret agent Sir Robert Baden Powell (of Boy Scouts fame) freely admitted he used to pose as “one of the exceedingly stupid Englishmen who wandered about foreign countries sketching cathedrals, or catching butterflies.”   According to Conniff, this was primarily a one-way relationship: spies often disguised themselves as naturalists but scientists rarely gathered intelligence.  “[I]nstances of naturalists using their work as a cover for espionage are scarce,” we are told.  In actual fact, nothing could be further from the truth!  As it turns out, rather than having a spy dress up as a lepidopterist it often made…

Hank has been sending me text messages about not posting enough. He’s also encouraged me to pick a fight with him. Let me take up the challenge by making some critical remarks on something he wrote in a comment to a recent post. But before I do so I’d like to reiterate that Hank started it (!) so if this post has a slightly polemical feel you know who’s to blame. :-)
For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the comments section of this blog, Hank’s claim is as follows: In the last couple of decades historians have “gotten pretty good at [describing] how individual actors [use] ideas and cultural resources as they grapple with the world.” My guess is he sees this as a good thing. However, he also says that in our effort to understand individual strategies we have come to neglect the “structures determining both those usages and what's available to use in the first place.” For this reason, he advocates a return to structuralism and suggests using “tools in the digital …

Secrecy has become a fairly common topic of discussion among historians of science in the past few years. Two very different examples are a documentary film by Peter Galison and Robb Moss as well as a collection of essays on Galileo by Mario Biagioli. One reason this issue appeals to historians is that there is something paradoxical about the role of secrecy both in science and democratic society. Although usually accepted as indispensable, secrecy strikes at a putative core value of both: openness and transparency. For that reason, we might expect historians of science to take an interest in the recent spate of developments around the online anti-secrecy phenomenon Wikileaks.

I have been surprised that a limited and entirely informal poll of my colleagues reveals that most do not harbor much sympathy for Wkileaks. This is especially true after the recent release of US diplomatic cables which are often decried as of little global significance, essentially amounting to high-stakes…