Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

This paper examines a tradition of eusocial insect research stemming from the Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch. As I show in this paper, one of the most enduring features of the Frischean tradition has been an experimental methodology developed by Frisch in the early 1910s. By tracing this methodology's use through Frisch's student, Martin Lindauer, and two of Lindauer's students, Rüdiger Wehner and Randolf Menzel, this paper illuminates a surprising aspect of ethology's development during the last half of the 20^th century. Namely, it sheds light on how the Frischean tradition, a tradition that had a complicated relationship with ethology since the discipline's formation in the 1930s, produced scientists who became leading figures in neuroethology, the most prominent contemporary field of behavioral research to retain the label of “ethology.” Some of the features that distinguished Frisch's training method from the program of classical ethology and the work of his contemporaries later helped his academic descendants adapt the method to the neuroethological program.

During the 1970s, ethologists at the German Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen started a series of research projects at several regional kindergartens in search of natural predispositions in human behavior. This so-called “Kindergarten Project” became one of the pillars of research activity at the newly founded Forschungsstelle für Humanethologie (Research Center for Human Ethology) where Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and a team of researchers set out to explore new fields of research for the discipline of ethology. Taking the research project conducted by biologist Barbara Hold on ranking behavior among kindergarten children as a vantage point, this paper explores the shift in ethology from animal to human behavior which occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes how human ethologists coped with the methodological, conceptual, and ethico-political challenges which arose from crossing the human-animal divide. This article thus sheds light on the hitherto unwritten history of human ethology as it was developed at the MPI since the late 1960s.

What sounds like a laborious set up for a shallow joke actually hits the core of the problem this issue covers: What do the leading archaeologist of the former German Democratic Republic in re-unifying Germany, Bulgarian scientists in the late 1960s and some recent discussions about representations of Polish ancient history have in common? They all operate along fractures in the crust of scientific authority, they mark moments in time when classical figures of knowledge reach or breach authoritative status. They serve to study how authoritative speech bridged and manifested these relations and help identify areas where scientific authority is contested. This volume transcends this topological rhetoric with a praxeological take on scientific authority. Concentrating on authority figures, it brings specific margins and contestations into sight. The papers in this volume study cases from former socialist countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, and thus examples that present us with the complexity of agonal relations within state socialism and post-socialist transformations that complicate matters of scientific authority in many ways, yet also offer illustrative examples of shifting constellations of (scientific) authority.

This issue is dedicated to historical challenges to scholarship as the paramount producer of facts and their discursive reprocessing. Focusing on historical sciences, sociology, as well as natural sciences and technology and their non-academic counterparts, it maps changes in the political configuration of knowledge production in modern societies. The historical reconstruction and analysis of scientific self-conceptions are aligned with the question of convergence or fragmentation of epistemologies, increase or decline of universalistic claims, and exploitations from particularistic groups’ perspectives. We thus approach the rationalities that divide science and the humanities and politics as well as the “boundary work”¹ at the intersections. When and how did the boundaries shift, were they strengthened, weakened or removed, and how did this affect the epistemic figures in different scientific disciplines? We want to know if and to which extent these dynamics, which we recently observe in the fragmentation of epistemic authority and tribalization of truth, can be regarded as an effect of political and socio-economic transformations: of processes of re-nationalization, conservative and religious turns, or the popularization of postmodernity. Where and how can we trace the consequences of the shifts in media technologies that unsettle classic information media, and what impact do social fragmentation and the subsequent emergence of specific groups have on all this?

Following these questions, this issue investigates the relations of scientific practices, reflexive scholarship and changing epistemological frames since the 1960s. Within the broader methodological framework of the history of sci

The aim of this paper is to examine open-air, full-scale archaeological reconstructions through the prism of concepts of authority and truth. I will approach it along the lines of a praxeology of truth. Accordingly, the questions asked here mainly address negotiations of truth and the practical context in which truth claims are embedded, as well as broader implications accompanying the invocation, questioning, perversion, and deconstruction of truth. Selected examples from Poland are cited, embodying issues of the creation and negotiation of truth claims about the past and illustrating how the authority of archaeologists and other professional heritage specialists sometimes clashes with broader processes and various heritage stakeholders.

Women's and gender history in Russia has been developing since the 1990s and began to be institutionalized in the 2000s and 2010s. Throughout that period, unfavorable intra-academic and sociopolitical conditions hindered the development of women's and gender history in Russia. Those who tried to establish a new field of study under these conditions sought various strategies by which to legitimize their research and build up authority among peers. This article analyzes their strategies for legitimizing women's and gender history in the Russian academy and beyond, using Bourdieu's work in the scientific field. I argue that in the 2000s, at the stage of institutionalization, researchers in the field of women's and gender history tried to legitimize their field by applying a number of strategies. These included appeals to scale, geography, and a connection with the generalized “West,” as well as attempts to ascertain the practical significance of women's and gender history and, finally, highlight their connections to the classical heritage of the humanities and social sciences. Despite arguing with an explicitly feminist gist in mind, researchers of this generation had little to do with activism and were comparatively less active in the media than before. In the 2010s, however, as the development of new media and a new wave of feminism in Russia significantly changed the strategies for legitimizing the field, researchers started coming to women's and gender history by way of feminist activism. Lacking prospects within the academy, young researchers turned to social media and journalism to establish their authority through popularity with the general public.

This essay studies the narrative self-positioning of Science Studies in the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s. Drawing on archival material on the foundation of the Council for Marxist-Leninist Science Studies at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin in March 1988, it analyses how boundaries between Science Studies as a lone standing discipline and several other fields were construed and crossed at the same time and how (scientific) authority was claimed from the intermediate position of an external insider. Not only did Science Studies engage with their subject – the sciences –, but also with the politics of the Socialist Party, with the institution of the Academy, and with (industrial) production. After a formative institutional phase that spanned across the 1970s, Science Studies made efforts to centralize their work during the 1980s, to bind themselves closer to the state and scientific institutions, and to distinguish themselves from them at the same time.

The emergence of illiberal science policy also raises serious questions about the European scientific authorization process as the rapid spread of illiberal science policies, such as closing accredited study programs and research institutions, privatizing higher education, appointing university leaders based on their loyalty to the government, ignoring quality assurance, etc. demand not only a reaction but also critical analysis. The article applies the theoretical framework of the polypore state (Grzebalska, Pető) to tackle the difficulty lies in understanding the rise of illiberal science policy in Hungary, as it is a twofold case study in both polypore government control/state capture, and neoliberal marketization of higher education.

The evaluation and transformation process of the GDR research system in the wake of German reunification 1989/90 was immediately accompanied not only by debates within the scientific community, but also by an extensive discussion about the value and future perspectives of East German scholarship and its protagonists in the nationally circulated press. In 1990, the focus turned temporarily to the prominent East German prehistorian Joachim Herrmann after his election to the board of an international historical association. The article uses the example of Herrmann and the public discussion about him as a case study to examine the status of, and changes in, the authority of scholarship and the scholar in the context of the evaluation and restructuring of the East German research landscape in the early 1990s. A selection of press articles from nationwide German newspapers and newsmagazines, as well as archival letters exchanged between different participants in the debate serve as prisms carving out the central arguments and subjacent structures of the discussion. Therefore, Herrmann's case exposes generic characteristics of (different concepts of) scientific authority and the close connection between its negotiation and the search for identity in the newly reunited German academic sphere.