al-mofhariz

I have only watched a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory on CBS (and don't plan to watch more), but I suppose that a show like this is something that historians of science in the United States will eventually have to deal with. From what I can glean, the show's science content as such plays a relatively small role, but its sense of the scientist/geek/nerd as an important modern/American type sits at the center of the show's concept. Could such a thing have been conceivable before the post-WWII proliferation of engineering and science jobs? Sure, you have Arrowsmith (1925) and works that valorize the scientist in the early twentieth century, but we don't see art that considers engineers or scientists to be normal, if socially awkward, folks. I guess we should read Steven Shapin's The Scientific Life next to an episode and see what happens.

I would not have thought about the show at all, had I not stumbled upon this call for papers for an edited volume on …

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…