Scientific Persona Research Articles

Romantický život zasvěcený vědě: autobiografie André-Marie Ampèra

This article explores Andr-Marie Ampre's autobiography in order to analyse the dynamics of science in early 19th century French institutions. According to recent works that have emphasised the value of biographies in the history of science, this study examines Ampre's public self-representation to show the cultural transformations of a life dedicated to science in post-revolutionary French society. With this aim, I have interpreted this manuscript as an outstanding example of the scientific rhetoric flourishing in early 19th century French Romanticism, which celebrated the life and works of men of science by means of biographies. Following this approach, Ampre's account has been analysed in relation to certain commonplaces shared with other autobiographies of that time, such as his traumatic experience linked to the French Revolution. Finally, this article discusses Ampre's autobiography as revealing an emerging model of scientific personae, i.e. a new collective way of thinking, feeling and perceiving, which announced the category of the modern scientist.

The Controversialist as Scientific Persona Review ofPlaying with fire: The controversial career of Hans J. Eysenck

The Controversialist as Scientific Persona Review of<i>Playing with fire: The controversial career of Hans J. Eysenck</i>

Rationalizing disease: James Kilpatrick's Atlantic struggles with smallpox inoculation

This essay uses the career of the inoculating physician James Kilpatrick as an example of how itinerant medical entrepreneurs navigated the various knowledge spaces of the British Atlantic World. Moving from Ireland to Charleston and finally to London, Kilpatrick's involvement with smallpox inoculation in the diverse peripheries of the British empire in the early eighteenth century provided him with the experience of controversy and experiment that paved the way for his ascent as a philosopher of inoculation within metropolitan and continental medical circles. This article focuses in particular on Kilpatrick's time in Charleston, an area rich in African and British migrants and then an important outpost of medical information and experimental inquiry within the interrelated medical circuits of the Atlantic world. This article shows how Kilpatrick leveraged the circuits of information that defined the town in order to promote the practice of inoculation and to create a medical and scientific persona that fit the expectations of Lowcountry audiences. Kilpatrick's efforts to promote inoculation in Charleston ultimately failed, but he put his colonial experiences to work in the service of building a metropolitan identity, traveling to London and publishing a pamphlet on the practice of inoculation in Charleston. This paper argues that it was experiences of controversy and failure on the British periphery that taught individuals such as Kilpatrick how to establish their authority as they navigated the medical cultures of the Atlantic world.

Steven Shapin. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation

In The Scientific Life, Steven Shapin argues that people and their virtues matter in late modern science. While scientists struggle to remain objective and impersonal, it is the personal, familiar, and charismatic—the traits once swept aside as vices by the scientifically virtuous—that have come to embody the “truth-speakers” of late modernity. With an enormous and sometimes daunting wealth of primary sources (from technical commentaries to his own sociological fieldwork), Steven Shapin breathes life back into these quotidian virtues. The Scientific Life is as much a disjointed genealogy of scientific virtue as a reminder that trust still matters at the cutting-edge of scientific “future-making.” Shapin’s mastery of historical narrative is clear; anyone interested in the American scientific persona and how it has transformed in the twentieth century would do well to wade patiently through this thick and rewarding text. But hang up your expectations of historical linearity (and, sometimes, thematic coherence) as you weave through motley professionals, theorists, and critics drawn from over a century of science commentators. Perhaps this work is best described as textured: rich in detail, woven intricately, but hardly smooth to the touch.

The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (review)

Reviewed by: The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 Helen Hattab Stephen Gaukroger. The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 563. Cloth, $65.00. The sheer variety of both cognitive and non-cognitive contributions to the emergence of a scientific culture in the West and the complex relations to pre-modern developments that scholars have brought to light over the past decades have put into question both the Enlightenment and Kuhnian accounts of the scientific revolution. Gaukroger’s work performs the ambitious but indispensable task of beginning to formulate an alternative way of understanding this momentous transition, one based on recent scholarship. Gaukroger treats science as both “a particular kind of cognitive product, and as a particular kind of cultural product” (3). His overarching goal is to show that examining the interrelations between the two can teach us something about modernity that focusing on one, to the exclusion of the other, cannot. He argues that the enduring success of Western science was not due to its advances (there were previous advances in other cultures), but due to its ability to consolidate. Successful consolidation promotes the cognitive claims of science and builds a scientific culture to legitimate them. Hence, throughout this book, Gaukroger explores how particular advances (e.g., in astronomy and natural philosophy) were legitimated by their ability to reinforce revelation, unify different disciplines, and exemplify the scientific persona. Since these means of consolidation, unlike methods of scientific discovery, rely on both cultural forces and intellectual advances, Gaukroger makes good on his promise to teach us something that intellectual and cultural histories taken separately cannot. Gaukroger characterizes Western modernity in terms of the eventual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones. He targets the Enlightenment view which, as a result of this assimilation, reinterprets the success of scientific practices over others in ahistorical terms. On this view, the longstanding success of science results solely from cognitive advances, such as the commitment to objectivity (science was assumed to have dissociated itself from religion), the employment of adversarial, non-dogmatic arguments, and the development of quantitative and empirical methods. Gaukroger shows instead that: (1) early modern Epicurean and mechanist natural philosophies forged a closer connection to religious doctrine in response to the ultimate failure to maintain the Thomist reconciliation of theology with Aristotelian natural philosophy; (2) the threat posed by the naturalism of Renaissance philosophers like Pomponazzi led to a privileging of systematization over innovation in late Scholasticism, as well as a renewed interest in natural history, which later spawned the enterprise of physico-theology; (3) the adversarial character of ancient means of cultivating wisdom was rejected in favor of gentlemanly cooperation. This went hand-in-hand with a gradual reassignment of the aims of enquiry from the attainment of a transcendent truth to a productive truth, and the corresponding construction, by Bacon and others, of the scientific persona, which embodied the cognitive virtue of objectivity rather than the ethical virtue of ancient and medieval wisdom. Finally, (4) Beeckman and Descartes failed to achieve the quantification of natural philosophy they aimed for, in large part due to their conflicting commitment to corpuscularian matter theory. The successful replacement of Aristotelian causal explanations in natural philosophy by mechanistic explanations lay in mechanism’s ability to unify all causal explanation, rather than its ability to offer quantitative [End Page 640] explanations of various natural phenomena. Similarly, the experimental methods of Gilbert and Boyle were at first hotly contested, the eventual success of non-foundationalist, empirical approaches owing more to the unifying role played by the experiments of Gilbert, Boyle, and Newton. Although Boyle’s experimental philosophy included a mechanistic matter theory, unlike strict mechanists, experimentalists used experiments to focus and unify heterogeneous phenomena rather than grounding explanations in matter theory. Gaukroger presents the relevant cultural developments and theoretical advances with an impressive degree of detail and accuracy. Readers will gain insights about everything from the differences between early medieval Augustinianism and late medieval Aristotelianism, to Spinozism versus its late seventeenth-century alternatives. Scholars with expertise in specific areas will no doubt take issue with individual claims...

Objectivity, Collective Sight, and Scientific Personae

Lorraine original and important landmark study that contributes to broader understanding of the emergent history of objectivity, the epistemic values of scientific visualization, and the links connecting both. Objectivity is based on a close examination of numerous scientific and medical atlases published in Europe and the US since the eighteenth century. The authors are eminent historians of science who specialize in different historical periods: Daston is a scholar of early modern science, while Galison is a historian and philosopher of twentieth-century microphysics. Both scholars have published extensively and influentially on a number of topics regarding the scientific community, objectivity, vision, and representation. Objectivity, beautifully produced and containing over one hundred illustrations (including twenty-one color plates), depicts a variety of scientific phenomena studied since the eighteenth century, from astronomical to botanical to meteorological subjects, and more. Daston and Galison explore how historically variant approaches to scientific image-making since the eighteenth century have expressedand reinforcedchanging epistemic ideals and values linked to the intellectual authority of scientists. Objectivity is a rich, sophisticated, and complex historical analysis to which a brief summary cannot adequately do justice, and readers will find many treasures of their own to mine. A few of their main arguments can be highlighted here: The authors emphasize that scientific objectivity is a contingent value that has meant different things throughout history and that it is far more complex and novel a concept than it has sometimes seemed. Specifically, Daston and Galison show that making sense of objectivity as a historical value requires deep understanding both of

‘The Charlatanry of the Learned’: On the Moral Economy of the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Germany

The notion of charlatanism is central to the social workings of the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Starting with Johann Burkhard Mencke's famous treatise The Charlatanry of the Learned, this paper traces how accusations of academic and scientific misconduct put in terms of ‘charlatanry’ initially helped to produce the new species of the erudite ‘charlatan’. Facing a growing complexity of scientific culture, this new frame of meaning, structured by numerous examples of scientific misconduct, offered a way of mapping the world of learning. But besides its cognitive impacts, the discourse of charlatanry allowed the creation of symbolic boundaries, which determined decisions as to the affiliation or non-affiliation to this recently forming scientific community by separating honourable from dishonourable scientific personae. Speaking of charlatanry therefore always implied a social distinction as much as a scientific one. The discourses on charlatanry also mirror differentiations within the scientific field. At first dominated by a critique built on courteous or bourgeois values, the scientific field later developed its own criteria of appraisal, such as authorship, originality, transparency, etc. Attracting the attention of a growing public sphere, the explicit verbalization of claims which were not related to the value system of a republic of letters primarily concerned with the production and distribution of knowledge finally led to a more implicit moral economy of science.

Scientific personae in American psychology: three case studies

This paper studies the constellations of attitudes––sentimental, moral, epistemological, and social––that three leading psychologists active in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America took to be essential to the production of scientific knowledge. William James, G. Stanley Hall, and Edward Titchener located the virtues and traits proper to the scientific frame of mind, and combined them into normative images of the man of science, or, ‘scientific personae’ as I use the term here. I argue that their competing formulations of the scientific ethos informed their psychological practice and epistemological commitments. James, Hall, and Titchener mobilized their representations of the man of science in order to reconfigure the field of psychology and redefine its boundaries, as well as to promote forms of sociability and define the proper role of scientists both within the academy and in the wider polity.

Judith Rich Harris: The Miss Marple of Developmental Psychology

This paper contributes to inquiries into scientific personae by employing a rhetorical approach. It analyzes the persuasive strategies of Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (1998). Rhetorical analysis of Harris' self-fashioning in this remarkable best-seller and the reactions of the press to her persona demonstrates the resilience of specific archaic cultural repertoires for constructing scientific identities. While historical studies investigate how repertoires for scientific self-fashioning evolve through time, rhetoric reveals how identity models from an earlier age may be appropriated in the present.

Semantics of learned quackery in the 17th and 18th centuries

In the 17th and 18th century republic of letters the problem of scientific fraud was met with a discourse of charlatanism. Departing from Johann Burchhard Menckes famous treatise on the Charlatanry of the learned the following essay traces how the accusations of academic and scientific misconduct put in terms of 'charlatanry' primarily helped to produce the new species of the erudite 'charlatan'. Facing a growing complexity of scientific culture this new frame of meaning, structured by numerous examples of scientific misconduct offered a new way of orientation in the world of learning. But besides its cognitive impacts the discourse of charlatanry allowed to create symbolic boundaries, which determined decisions upon the affiliation or non affiliation to the new forming scientific community by separating honourable from dishonourable scientific personae. Speaking of charlatanry therefore always implied a social distinction as much as a scientific. The discourses on charlatanry also mirror differentiations within the scientific field. At first dominated by a critique built on courteous or bourgeois values, the scientific field later on developed its own criteria of appraisal like authorship, originality, transparency etc. Attracting the attention of a further growing public sphere, the explicit verbalisation of claims not relating to the value system of a republic of letters primarily concerned with the production and distribution of knowledge finally led up to a more implicit moral economy of science. A change that at a large scale level can be described both as an internalisation of the values of scientific conduct and differentiation between justiciable and unjusticiable transgressions of the norms set up by the scientific community.

Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories

Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories

“Be what you would seem to be”: Samuel Smiles, Thomas Edward, and the Making of a Working-Class Scientific Hero

ArgumentThis paper examines the effort that was involved in sustaining the nineteenth-century middle-class ideological fabrication of the image of the working-class scientific autodidact. The construction and reception of Samuel Smiles’ biography of the Scottish cobbler and naturalist Thomas Edward provides a way to investigate this process in detail and to show how Smiles’ conception of the scientific persona related to the “politics of character” in mid-Victorian Britain. Edward’s own response to the biography offers an unusual opportunity to analyze the making of a Victorian scientific hero, who, in the process of being fitted to Smiles’ notion of a scientific persona, came to feel that he had been robbed of his life.

The making of modern scientific personae: the scientist as a moral person? Emil Du Bois-Reymond and his friends

This article examines the notion of the `scientist as a moral person' in the light of the early stages of the commodification of science and the transformation of research into a big enterprise, operating on the principle of the division of labour. These processes were set in train at the end of the 19th century. The article focuses on the concomitant changes in the public persona and the habitus of scientific entrepreneurs. I begin by showing the significance of the professional networks that were built up and maintained to further a group's research ideas and the careers of its members, thus demonstrating one condition on which depended their practice of science and their ability to earn a living. This leads to a characterization of the changing styles of work, thought and life, and to a consideration of public perceptions and of the ways in which a new self-image of scholarship and science was fashioned. A critical discussion of the public role of these mandarin scientists follows in order to highlight the strains created by the commodification of science at a time of international tensions and conflicts, when shared beliefs in scholarly cosmopolitanism were subverted by appeals to science and scholarship to work in the service of one's own nation as its `courtiers'. Various considerations of peculiar analogies between national styles of research and the style of social organization are then noted. In the final section, the article queries the long-term impact of these developments on the ideal of the scientist as a `moral person'. Taking a cue from Max Weber and pursuing reflections by Zygmunt Bauman on `science moralized', I argue that the emergence of a type of `specialists without spirit' was an unintended but fatal consequence of the changes in research practices promoted by scientific entrepreneurs such as Du Bois-Reymond. I conclude that the temptation to sever the ties to a general ethos of civil virtues lay in the rationalization, specialization and potential de-humanization of the objectifying scientific outlook once advocated for its efficiency.

Objectivity and the Scientist: Heisenberg Rethinks

ArgumentObjectivity has been constitutive of the modern scientific persona. Its significance has depended on its excision of standpoint, which has legitimated the scientist epistemically and sociopolitically at once. But if the nineteenth century reinforced those paired effects, the twentieth century brought questioning of both. The figure of Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) puts the latter process on display. From the Kaiserreich to the Federal Republic of Germany, between quantum mechanics and interest group politics, his evolution shows an increasing openness to perspectival pluralism, together with an attempt to save some form of objectivity as discursive coherence. Heisenberg’s self-understanding and the reactions of his publics display the transmutation of the persona as objectivity was rethought. By the end of the day, speaking “as a scientist” would mean something different from what it had at the start.

The Rhetoric of Science and the Rhetoric of Revolt in the “Story” of Positive Accounting Theory

Examines Watts and Zimmerman′s Positive Accounting Theory as a literary narrative, as the “PAT story”, in an effort to explain its success in light of the fact that it falls well short of their professed methodological standards. Their use of the rhetoric of science is examined, with special attention to their projection of a “scientific persona”, their rhetorical construction of the legitimate” boundaries of accounting research, their use of metaphor and other literary devices, their rhetorical transport of “scientific authority” from other disciplines, and the circumstances that made their audience receptive to scientific rhetoric. Their use of conservative political rhetoric (the rhetoric of revolt against the interference of government in economic affairs) is also examined, with special attention given to the devices used to convey a normative message while maintaining a positive posture, and to the role of sociohistorical circumstances (the Reagan era) that encouraged their audience to overlook the story′s lack of scientific substance.