Science in Context最新文献

The article argues that, contrary to what is often held in academic literature, traditional fishermen had solid empirical knowledge about underwater topography long before acoustic sounding. To substantiate the argument, a large mid twentieth-century collection of place names and terms collected among coastal fishermen in Norway is explored, with the aim to demonstrate that this vocabulary reflects a detailed knowledge about underwater geography as well as advanced navigational skills. The second aim of the article is to investigate the reformatting of this knowledge when it was first transferred to national fisheries maps and secondly when it entered the International Court of Justice as part of the Norwegian fisheries case against the UK in 1951. Reformatting represents more than a new context: It shapes and changes knowledge. The present article applies this more general principle of knowledge transformation to the study of the human-ocean relationship and explores how reformatting has decisively impacted activities at sea, influenced parameters for ocean use, and been constitutive to shaping the ocean as an object of knowledge.

In this paper I present a case study of the creation of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which provided the first image of a black hole shadow (April 2019) and that of the central black hole of the Milky Way (May 2022), as one in which the collaborative approach was primarily motivated by strong epistemic needs. To this end, I introduce and explore the notion of "epistemic constraint," meaning any component of the world that prevents us from gaining some definite kind of knowledge in a specific manner and allows or promotes some other specific kind of knowledge in defined ways. The collaborative approach that led to the recent images of black hole shadows through the EHT is described in terms of "epistemically constrained collaboration" - i.e., a collaborative mode of research where the epistemic constraints prevail over other factors - and the most important features of this concept are expounded.

Over a four-year period from 1909 to 1913, the German expedition to Tendaguru removed 250 metric tons of dinosaur fossils from what is now Tanzania and was then part of the colony of German East Africa. To this day, these fossils - some of them now world-famous exhibits - are held in Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde. Using hitherto unexamined sources, this paper reveals how the expedition's leaders translated their initial mission of "thorough excavation" into a strategy of total extraction, leading them to amass thousands of additional animals, plant samples, and cultural artifacts that were subsequently distributed among Berlin's national museums. It shows that this multi-institutional and transdisciplinary colonial archive relied heavily on colonial infrastructures and violence and argues that collecting in this context must be understood as an enactment of power. Following Dan Hicks, it asks how this history might be interpreted within a theory of taking.

This article develops a praxeological perspective on the history of partisanship in Central and Eastern Europe. The author proposes to examine partisanship not as an idea or a concept but as a virtue that was supposed to be forcibly cultivated and practiced in science and scholarship under Soviet domination. The article focuses on the cases of two prominent Marxist philosophers, Arnošt Kolman and Adam Schaff, who became devoted teachers of partisanship in the Soviet Union as well as in their "native" Czechoslovakia and Poland. Later, both were publicly accused of "non-partisanship." Based on these examples, the author argues that, with the establishment of the socialist regimes, partisanship became a tool of maintaining stability. This implied more autonomy for the scholars and scientists who learned how to use the quasi-moral authority of partisanship to exclude from the "moral consensus" those who, due to their "excessive diligence," threatened the internal norms and conventions.

When newly independent states in Africa set out to make their own economies in the 1960s, they did so under the label of "planning," a generic term denoting economic policy-making to create the economic future. This planning was guided by international experts, sent "on missions" to help, or perhaps oversee, local economists in what was seen then as an expert, technocratic process. Nigeria offers an important example of this technocracy at work, under the guidance of its "missionary": Wolfgang Stolper. His diary, and his writings of the day, reveal how local information and local values travelled around social, political and economic circles, to be then spliced together according to certain economic principles in making a "five-year plan" for the future of Nigeria.

Development planning was a form of interventionist social knowledge widely used in the mid-twentieth century. Planning was employed with different aims, and the adoption of concrete techniques and procedures was highly sensitive to each country's institutional context. This article studies the life trajectory of Colombia's Ten-year Plan, an internationally celebrated attempt to design economic development on a large scale in what actors characterized as a politically "democratic" and economically "liberal" setting. Based on the Colombian case, I argue that a central function of planning in developing countries was to build trust, on behalf of local stakeholders and international donors, in the state's capacity to credibly use public resources and foreign aid to achieve its development aims. In turn, planning also allowed outsiders to invigilate the actions taken by states on the economy, and to make them accountable for their commitments. I examine the media of persuasion used in the build-up to, and the publicization and revision of the Ten-year Plan, to account for the shift from the macro scale of comprehensive plans to the smaller-scale development interventions observed in the 1960s. This case shows that the malleability of planning procedures was key for the enduring resilience of the planning system.

In 1980, Belgian Plan Commissioner Robert Maldague clandestinely circulated a document called The Impossible Scenario, thereby reshaping planning practices in Belgium amidst a widely perceived moment of crisis. Using archival records and oral histories, this article traces how reformers within the (now federal) Belgian Planning Bureau combined foresight scenarios and macroeconomic modeling in The Impossible Scenario. It explains the use of foresight scenarios through the Planning Bureau's aim of restoring its capacity to intervene in Belgian policymaking. The article then highlights the broader political meaning of this epistemic transformation: the reconfiguration of planning infrastructures in Belgium-and, more broadly, in Europe-from instruments of democratic economic coordination to tools of market governance. Examining this previously underexplored Belgian case thereby reveals the neoliberalized and neoliberalizing character of Western planning infrastructures in the early 1980s.

This article examines how the American psychologist David McClelland advocated a quasi-colonial interventionist view to social science, shaped by his understanding of scientific progress, economic development, and social change. In the 1960s, he saw real-world experiments as a means both to test his theories and to generate knowledge efficiently and quickly-all with the ultimate aim of improving the human condition. While his primary focus was knowledge production rather than social transformation, his dual roles as professor and consultant carried an interventionist dimension, grounded in the belief that psychological measuring instruments could serve as tools for psychological training. By reconstructing this stance and the interstitial space McClelland created between academia and consultancy, I aim to show that his drive to intervene-exemplified by his company's work in Curaçao-stemmed less from a pre-scientific conviction than from a distinctive mode of scientific practice.

This article examines the intellectual and interventionist trajectory of American popular writer and commentator Robert Reich from his early 1980s advocacy of "industrial policy" to his time as US Secretary of Labor in the 1990s. It argues that Reich is an interesting figure to consider through the lens of "interventionist knowledges" because, although he draws selectively on social scientific data and knowledge, his syntheses of these things are more rooted in mythic thinking than in disciplined analysis. This article recounts the history of a failed bill, the Reemployment Act of 1994, to examine how Reich and those around him drew on and interpreted existing social scientific data to construct an idea of "the New Economy" and what, they claimed, it meant for national human capital policy. This article suggests that mythic visions of society and economy possibly play a large role in policy-making and issues advocacy.