Abstract
Historians and sociologists of science usually discuss multiple independent inventions or multiple independent discoveries in terms of priority disputes among the inventors. But what should we make of the multiple invention of a technology that not only gave rise to very few priority disputes, but never worked and was rejected by each inventor’s contemporaries as soon as it was made public? This paper examines seven such situations in the history of botany. I devote particular attention to the inventors’ cultural and educational backgrounds, in particular, the scholastic education most of them shared, through which they would have become familiar with Llullian combinatorics and the mnemonic names used to distinguish syllogistic moods. I also examine their conceptions of the roles of nomenclature in botany, their assumptions about how memory works, their awareness of other similar efforts, and their contemporaries’ reactions to their proposals. Finally, I reflect on the impacts that a consideration of multiple independent inventions of failed technologies may have on current approaches to the history and sociology of science.
Highlights
Pistil number, stamen number, fruit type, inflorescence features, smell, Flower form, number of flower parts, floret type
I believe that multiple independent inventions dismissed as
That addressing the teleological aspects of successful scientific research
Summary
Previous research into multiples, writing, “The innovations became virtually inevitable as certain kinds of knowledge accumulated in the cultural heritage and as social developments directed the attention of investigators to particular problems” (Merton 1961, 475). Merton was concerned with demonstrating the reality, ubiquity and importance of multiples in the sociology of science. Unlike Brannigan, I believe that multiple independent inventions dismissed as failures by the inventors’ peers reveal important things about the social aspects of science. Their existence testifies to an unequal distribution of knowledge among scientific practitioners, since inventors of multiple duds are not only unaware of the invention of previous, similar approaches, but of their failures: even those inspired by previous duds, or who plagiarize earlier duds, misjudge their proposals’ potential for success. I refer to failed inventions as “duds” in this paper because the word “dud” is shorter and catchier than “invention judged to have been ineffectual by the inventor’s peers,” rather than to trivialize the efforts that each inventor put into devising a solution to the technical problems faced by botanists of his time
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