(January 25: Michael )Strevens
"What Is Empirical Testing?"
ABSTRACT: Science is epistemically special, or so I will assume: it is better able to produce knowledge about the workings of the world than other knowledge-directed pursuits. Further, its superior epistemic powers are due to its being in some sense especially empirical: in particular, science puts great weight on a form of inductive reasoning that I call empirical confirmation. My aim in this paper is to investigate the nature of science's "empiricism", and to provide a preliminary explanation of the connection between empirical confirmation and epistemic efficacy. I will try to convince you that the place to find an account of empirical confirmation is the dusty, long-neglected instantialist account of scientific inference offered by mid-century logical empiricists. Some revision of instantialism will be required. As for what is advantageous in empirical confirmation, I propose that it is an unusual degree of independence from background belief. (return)

(February 1: Christian Fleck)
"Austrian and German Émigré and Homeguard Social Scientists during the Nazi Period: A Prosopography"
ABSTRACT: During the 1930s a huge number of scholars and intellectuals have been forced to leave their countries of origin due to the takeover of the power by the Nazi party, first in Germany, later on in several other European countries. This well known migration, labelled as “Cultural Exodus”, “The Muses Flee Hitler”, etc., has been covered intensely over the last half century but no one did a comparison between these scholars who left (“émigrés”) and those who didn’t (“homeguards”, using a phrase of E.C. Hughes). Following Karl Mannheim’s concept of “generational units” the paper presents such a comparison, using biographical data of some 800 German and Austrian social scientists. The paper presents bivariate and multivariate analyses about social, religious and ethnic background, career developments at home and abroad and compares the reputation of the two groups. (return)

February 8: Susan Jones)
"Tracing Anthrax: History, Ecology, and Phylogenetics"
ABSTRACT: In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, anthrax appeared in British, European, and American factories that processed animal wool, hair and hides. The dramatic and often tragic public health consequences stimulated natural historians, physicians, veterinarians and other investigators to try to understand anthrax's life cycle and patterns of infection. The questions they asked have been echoed by historians since: What comprised "anthrax," and where did it come from? How had this very localized disease become a global phenomenon? My talk will trace industrial anthrax using a novel combination of methodologies, including sociocultural, ecological, and phylogenetic analysis. Within the past ten years or so, computer models that simulate pathogens' ecology and genetic evolution have generated data that can inform historical narratives about disease. In the case of industrial anthrax, models demonstrate the relatively recent importation of rare Asian and Middle Eastern strains of anthrax bacilli into British factory towns, thus supporting the hypothesis that anthrax hitched a ride around the world in infected animal products. This combination of methodologies promises to give historians interested in disease new power to answer a central question: how human society and culture has interacted with the dynamic ecology and genetic development of disease-causing organisms. (return)

(Thursday, February 14: Pamela Smith)
"Tacit Knowledge and the Written Word: Reconstructing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe"
ABSTRACT: In this talk, Professor Smith will explore the relationship of making, that is, the knowledge that craftspeople employ to make objects, and knowing, that is, the kind of knowledge employed by natural philosophers to theorize about the natural world. Making and knowing are normally not regarded as possessing the same status as knowledge. Making is goal oriented, how-to know-how about specific and particular practices, while knowing is generalizable and often abstract knowledge, expressed in general theories. She will argue that such distinctions are not always so simple, and that by studying craft practices and the objects that were produced by craftspeople, we can delineate what might be called a "vernacular science of matter." In other words, how making with natural materials was also about knowing nature. (return)

(Friday, February 15: Pamela Smith)
Book Discussion: The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution
ABSTRACT: Pamela Smith demonstrates how much early modern science owed to an unlikely source: artists and artisans. Goldsmiths, locksmiths, carpenters, and painters were all sought after by early scientists for their intimate, hands-on knowledge of natural materials, as well as their ability to manipulate them. (return)

(February 22: Mark Walker)
"Why Do We Care about 'Hitler's Bomb,' and should we?"
ABSTRACT: There is a fascination surrounding "Hitler's Bomb" that transcends and defies both scientific and historical analysis. This talk will briefly survey both the German work on nuclear weapons and how its history has been written in order to try and explain why this topic remains important and controversial. return)

(February 29: Michael D. )Root
"Stratifying a Population by Race"
ABSTRACT: Social scientists attempt to understand variations within a population in a socioeconomic or biomedical trait, e.g., household income, school achievement, unemployment, risk of heart disease or rate of diabetes-related death, by stratifying the population using a demographic variable like sex, age, race or ethnicity and studying the statistical relationship between the variable and the trait. In order to do so, they assign each member of the population or sample a race or ethnicity and assume that there is one correct way to make the assignment, e.g., by ancestry, other-reports or ancestry. I argue that there is no one correct way to assign an individual to a racial or ethnic category and that what race or ethnicity an individual should be assigned depends of the trait whose variation the social or biomedical scientist is attempting to understand; as a result, a member of the population might be assigned one race for the purpose of understanding a variation in one socioeconomic or biomedical trait and a different race for the purpose of understanding a variation in a different one, white in relation to sickle-cell disease and black in relation to academic achievement. I propose an approach to race and ethnicity similar to one some economists have adopted towards indices like poverty and unemployment, viz. that there is no best way to define ‘poverty’ or ‘unemployment’ and which definition is best depends on what the term is to be used for. My proposal would improve the research in the social and biomedical sciences on racial difference and oppose the common view that race is an intrinsic property of persons. (return)

(March 7: Brian A. )Woodcock )
"Quantum State Collapse Along a Light Cone: History and Objections"
ABSTRACT: The physicist I. Bloch in his 1967 paper “Some Relativistic Oddities in the Quantum Theory of Observation” came to the conclusion that the instantaneous collapse of the quantum state, as it has traditionally been conceived, presented a problem for compatibility with relativity. This problem has been called “Bloch’s Paradox”. Rather offhandedly, Bloch suggested that the problem might be avoided by taking the state transition due to a measurement to occur along a Lorentz invariant surface in Minkowski spacetime (i.e., the spacetime of special relativity). In particular, Bloch focused attention on the past light cone of the measurement event. The idea of positing the past (or future) light cone of a measurement event as the collapse transition surface in spacetime has a natural attractiveness to it because of the privileged status of the light cone structure in relativity theory. In this talk, I review the historically significant interactions with this proposal in the literature and critically examine objections to it. (The essence of the proposal and most of the objections to it can be understood pictorially with the help of spacetime diagrams.) Ultimately, the proposal fails to perform the explanatory work we seek from the process of state collapse in EPR situations. Reflection upon this failure provides insights which motivate embracing a hypersurface-dependent account of quantum state collapse of the sort first advocated by Aharonov and Albert in 1984. (return)

(March 28: Jonathan )Kahn
"Race, Medicine, and Money: Contextualizing the Emergence of 'Ethnic' Drugs"
ABSTRACT: This presentation endeavors to place into context recent developments surrounding the United States Food and Drug Administration recent approval of BiDil as the first ever race-specific drug—in this case to treat heart failure in African Americans. It traces the development of BiDil, from its origins in the 1980’s and explores how practices of law, commerce and science and intertwined to transform BiDil from a drug to treat everyone regardless of race into a racially marked—and marketed—pharmaceutical. It focuses in particular on both commercial incentives and statistical manipulation of medical data as framing the drive to bring BiDil to market as a race-specific drug. In current discourse about pharmacogenomics, targeting a racial audience is perceived as necessary because at this point the technology and resources do not exist to scan efficiently every individual’s genetic profile. The presentation argues that medical researchers may say they are using race as a surrogate to target biology in drug development, but corporations are using biology as a surrogate to target race in drug marketing. (return)

(April 4: John Doris)
"On Reflection (...more or less)"
ABSTRACT: In philosophy, persons are often distinguished by a propensity for reflection—a conscious and concerted mentation effecting control of behavior. In psychology, research on unconscious processing suggests that this philosophical conception of persons is unrealistic; ethically significant human behavior is very often beyond reflective control. A psychologically lifelike conception of persons will therefore de-emphasize reflective control; instead, the human ethical distinctiveness marked with such philosophical honorifics as "person," "agency," "practical rationality," and "the self" is found in the collaboratively developed rationalizing explanations of behavior by which humans living in groups regulate their lives. (return)

(April 4: Robert Kohler)
"Wildlife Ecology: A Residential Science"
ABSTRACT: Paul L. Errington and Aldo Leopold's field study of bobwhite quail in southwestern Wisconsin was a significant episode in the early (inter-war) history of wildlife ecology. It produced an ecological theory of predation, which focused on the whole environment. I will use this case study to develop a general concept of what I call "residential" science, a highly intensive, localized, and observational kind of field practice, for which local cultural practices (like hunting and trapping) were important models, and which is best regarded as a kind of land-use. Parallels will be drawn between Errington's ecological theory of predation and Leopold’s developing environmental philosophy of "land-health." (return)

(April 18: John Brown)
"Professional Imperatives in Engineering Communities: A Contest in Constructing the St. Louis Bridge, 1867 - 1874"
ABSTRACT: Just after the Civil War, the citizens of St. Louis became seized with the need to bridge the Mississippi, seeking rail connections to the East analogous to those propelling Chicago, their great Midwest rival. By 1867 two bridge projects competed for engineering, financial, and political resources. A Chicago firm led by Lucius Boomer seemed to hold the strongest hand: this experienced bridge company amassed support for its proposed St. Louis span from a convention of America’s leading civil engineers -- lions of the profession. By contrast, a competing proposal originated with an engineer/entrepreneur, James B. Eads, who had never designed a bridge before in his life. Eads would amass an engineering team, mostly trained in Germany, to redress that shortcoming. A third key player who would exert great influence over this project, Major Gouverneur Warren, derived his authority as the leading member of the Army Corps of Engineers with responsibility to oversee bridge projects on the Western rivers.

It simplifies matters to speak of these three men; as the paper will clarify they really represented three different engineering communities, each with divergent membership and professional affiliations, and each valuing different allegiances and bodies of knowledge. This paper looks at how each of these vying communities was constructed, considering why they differed so markedly and how they clashed over the St. Louis project. In this era American civil engineers were fully engaged in the project of securing professional status for their elite members, men well represented in the Boomer and Warren camps. But the contests among these three coalitions reveal very different routes to professional status. Ironically, it was the outsider, Eads, who bested both Boomer and Warren with an innovative design for the St. Louis Bridge.

Historians of technology have long been interested in the nature of engineering communities, their professionalizing imperatives, and their roles in forming new knowledge. Among the many relevant titles, works by Calhoun and Sinclair cover the formation and operation of professional societies, while Seely and Reynolds consider the evolving knowledge parameters that constituted professional status. More recent studies by Meiksins, Dawson, and Brown look at professional communities within regional or national contexts. To go beyond those literatures, this paper seeks to assess the relative importance of social networks, knowledge endowments, and engineering paradigms in the professionalizing project of nineteenth-century engineers. (return)

(April 25: Lisa )Downing
"Maupertuis on Attraction as an Inherent Property of Matter"
ABSTRACT: Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis' famous and influential Discours sur les différentes figures des astres, which represented the first public defense of attractionism in the Cartesian stronghold of the Paris Academy, sometimes suggests a metaphysically agnostic defense of gravity as simply a regularity. However, Maupertuis' considered account in the essay, I argue, is much more subtle. I analyze Maupertuis' position, showing how it is generated by an extended consideration of the possibility of attraction as an inherent property and fuelled by an understanding of Lockean skepticism about knowledge of real essences that is more nuanced perhaps even than Locke's own. (return)

(May 2: Thomas Zeller)
"Consuming Landscapes: Parkways and Driving Cultures in the United States and Germany, 1920-1970"
ABSTRACT: This paper will explore the way roads have been redesigned for the automobile as parkways since the 1920s in the United States and Germany, what meanings they acquired, and how drivers and passengers experienced them. In particular, I will compare the driving experience on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina and the Deutsche Alpenstrasse in southern Germany. Construction on both roads began in the 1930s, yet under most different political regimes. (return)