2015-16 Colloquium Series

September 28, 2015

Science Studies Program Meeting

SSP faculty and students only

October 5, 2015

Martha Lampland

Associate Professor, Sociology, UC San Diego

Cancelled

October 12, 2015

Natalie Aviles

PhD Candidate, Sociology and Science Studies, UC San Diego

October 19, 2015

Gerald Doppelt

Professor, Philosophy, UC San Diego

Do Social Values Necessarily Distort Scientific Inquiry?

Positivists make a sharp distinction between fact and value, and expose ideological claims that rest on political values disguised as scientific claims. The problem is not just that the values may be perverse but rather that key claims are taken to be immune to empirical evidence. The legacy is the view that genuine science is “value-free” and its results ought to be insulated from values.

Nonetheless, social values often motivate scientific research and determine the way we evaluate the usefulness of the results – such as the prevention of illness. My aim is to provide a framework for distinguishing circumstances in which social values corrupt scientific inquiry from cases in which inquiry is grounded by them. I develop a distinction between social and epistemic values – such as a theory’s predictive accuracy. I argue that the attainment of scientific knowledge depends on an appropriate relationship between social and epistemic values. I challenge the view that what makes knowledge “knowledge” is a function of “evidence alone,” or epistemic values.

I examine the role of social values in the science of the weather, a science of “stress” invoked by Air Traffic Controllers and the case of “Agent Orange” in the Vietnam War.

October 26, 2015

Tayra Lanuza Navarro

Huntington Fellow, University of Valencia

"Raising natal charts". The persecution of astrologers by the Spanish Inquisition during the early modern period

The Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition was one of the distinctive institutions of the Iberian World during the seventeenth century.

Inquisitorial activity affected both religious issues and scientific matters. Astrology was thus not studied and practiced in the same way in those territories where the Tribunal was active as in those where it was not. One may ask whether astrology declined faster or more drastically in Catholic countries where the Inquisition persecuted those who practiced judicial astrology and censored books on the subject. Until the end of the seventeenth century, astrology, which provided a general cosmological explanation and an interpretation of nature, belonged to the scholarly realm and to the set of subjects considered legitimate knowledge.

This paper aims to examine the actual attitude of the Spanish Inquisition toward astrology through an analysis of inquisitorial trials of men who were accused of being astrologers, of being "guilty of raising natal charts", in order to identify accusations against specific people, and the contents that caused certain astrological works to be forbidden or censured. The persecution of practitioners of astrology must be considered not only in light of the Inquisition’s own rules and the assertions of its members about the discipline and their practitioners, but also taking into account the reality of the application of this theoretical norm, and the actual practice. By analyzing the Inquisitorial attitude towards different kinds of astrological predictions and the arguments set forth in inquisitorial trials, it is possible to understand to what extent this institution was concerned with the problem of forbidden knowledge in general, and astrological practice in particular.

November 2, 2015

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

Assistant Professor, Sociology, UC San Diego

What is a Relation? Infrastructures, Connections and Meaning-Making in Social Thought

In recent years, relational approaches have flourished throughout sociology. From the study of culture and social movements to discussions about intimate economic transactions and the production of economic objects, relations figure prominently in the intellectual toolkit of a broad collection of theorists and analysts in our discipline. Characterized by a reflexive and critical perspective on interpersonal and collective phenomena, these relational approaches have contributed much to the understanding of how the ongoing construction of meaning through interactions and connections constitutes the fabric of social life. In this lecture, though, I ask the apparently trivial question of “what is a relation?” to problematize the analytical scope of relational approaches in sociology. In particular, I look at theoretical developments in a sister discipline (anthropology) to imagine what an alternative relational sociology might look like. Departing from the dominant paradigm of the Durkheimian/Levi-Straussian relational conception, I engage with the theories of Marilyn Strathern, whose STS-inspired work presents relations as the products of specific shared knowledge practices. This theoretical shift allows examining a different type of relational sociology, one that emphasizes knowledge infrastructures, demarcation, and category building over other connective forms of meaning making. I apply this relational/infrastructural approach to two cases (economic sociology and the methodological challenges of big data) in order to highlight some of the potential challenges and rewards that we might reap by shifting our understanding of what constitutes a relation. 

November 9, 2015

Andrea Woody

Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of Washington

The Turn to Practice: Negotiating Descriptive and Normative Accounts of Scientific Explanation

In the past couple of decades, philosophy of science has become increasingly focused on the details of contemporary scientific practice. I want to explore some of the tensions inherent in this shift through consideration of scientific explanation. This topic has a detailed philosophical heritage, but little of this history grapples seriously with the contextual and pragmatic nature of actual explanatory practice. By appeal to explanatory practices in chemistry, which appear importantly influenced by overarching aims and often display distinctive representational choices that highlight spatial information, I will consider some (potentially unintuitive) consequences that follow from trying to ground philosophical analysis in practice.

November 16, 2015

Judy Wajcman

Anthony Giddens Professor, Department of Sociology, The London School of Economics and Political Science

Pressed for Time: Everyday Life in the Digital Age

November 23, 2015

Jim Endersby

Senior Lecturer, The History of Science, The University of Sussex

Crafty, Killer, Moral Orchids

At the end of the nineteenth century, orchids were among the most desirable, collectable and exotic flowers to grace British greenhouses, but despite the hours spent watering and tending to them, they turned on their keepers and started trying to kill those who grew them. The first victim was a Mr Winter-Wedderburn, who almost died when a vampiric orchid tried to drain every drop of blood from his body; only his quick-thinking housekeeper's intervention saved him. Others were not so lucky, and the list of fatalities grew slowly but steadily during the next few decades. Fortunately, these attacks only occurred in fiction (Mr Winter-Wedderburn was a character in a short story by H.G. Wells), yet they present a curious puzzle for historians. Orchids were to become deadly, sexy, mobile and ­ most noticeably ­ increasingly cunning over the next few decades. To understand why, we need to trace the killer orchid genre back, via popularisations of Darwin's botany, to a mystery that Darwin was unable to solve; why some orchids mimic insects. The solution was only found in the twentieth century, and I will argue that the fictitious orchids formed a crucial link in this discovery.

November 30, 2015

Ursula Dalinghaus

Postdoctoral Scholar, Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, UC Irvine

Cashing out of the euro? Situating affective monetary attachments in the Euro-Zone

“The euro in your pocket” is the single most important material object that brings the EU into being for Europe’s citizens, so one is often reminded by institutional proponents and scholars alike. And yet, with recent speculations about the possibility of Greece leaving the euro zone and the imposition of capital controls there—which have limited ATM-withdrawals, disabled international payments, and called into question the free movement of capital, goods, and people built in to the principles of the European monetary union—why are the challenges inherent in detaching persons and states from euro cash, and hence the euro project, not accorded the same analytical attention? What would it actually mean to “cash out” of the euro entirely? How has the long process of “cashing in” to the project materialized in peoples’ lives? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of communications work at the German central bank as well as oral and archival histories of Germany's 1990 monetary union, I propose to think of euro banknotes and coins not simply as media of exchange with their attendant European iconography, but also as singular yet dispersed material objects that keep the monetary union together through various affective and institutionally embodied attachments. I do so by simultaneously conceptualizing capacities for detachment based on empirical histories of previous currency shifts in order to trace the specific modalities and infrastructural relations that cash enables in this case. My work draws on literatures from across STS, cultural economy, and the social studies of finance to understand cash as a market device through which the affective economies of state-issued currency are produced. I show how euro-cash attaches people differently and unevenly to national-historical and financial economies of belonging and immobility in Europe. By shifting focus from the immateriality of money in bank bailouts and quantitative easing to its cash impediments, I aim to open up new avenues for analyzing the relation between affective monetary attachments and human mobility currently at the center of multiple crises in Europe. 

December 7, 2015

No Colloquium

Finals Week

January 4, 2016

Science Studies Program Meeting

SSP faculty and students only

January 11, 2016

Janet Vertesi

Assistant Professor, Sociology, Princeton

The Social Life of Spacecraft

How does social organization affect the conduct and practice of science? To explore this question, I present empirical data from a comparative ethnographic study of work on two NASA robotic spacecraft mission teams. While the robots appear to be singular entities operating autonomously in the frontiers of space, decisions about what the robots should do and how they accomplish their science are made on an iterative basis by a large, distributed team of scientists and engineers on Earth. As spacecraft team members negotiate among themselves for robotic time and resources, their sociotechnical organization is paramount to understanding how decisions are made, which scientific data are acquired, and how the team relates to their robot. Describing the contrasting organizational practices, interaction rituals, and forms of talk by means of which decisions are made and consensus is achieved on two robotic spacecraft teams, I explore implications for sociotechnical and socially-grounded understandings of group solidarity, data sharing, and scientific results.

January 18, 2016

No Colloquium

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

January 25, 2016

Jan Golinski

Professor, History and Humanities, University of New Hampshire

The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science

Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was a pivotal figure in the emergence of new scientific disciplines at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but his career cannot be understood through the traditional narrative of specialization and professionalization.  Davy was a protean individual who forged his social persona with remarkable creativity.  He exploited his institutional location to build a charismatic reputation with a public audience.  He applied new electrical instruments and powers to reconfigure the discipline of chemistry.  And he engaged in a sustained and profound exploration of his own subjectivity, through testing nitrous oxide and galvanism on his own body, and through literary exercises of poetry and fiction.  Social ambidexterity, interdisciplinary creativity, and sometimes grueling self-experimentation were the keynotes of this extraordinary individual¹s self-made identity.  I shall argue that Davy's experiments in selfhood illuminate the historical formation of the man of science in an era when social institutions and personal subjectivity were both in flux.

February 1, 2016

Alex Levine

Professor, Philosophy, University of South Florida

Constructing by Destroying:  The Earth as Epistemic Object

This paper pursues two lines of enquiry to their common end.  The first line of enquiry reflects on the destructive character of epistemic activity.  When the epistemic subject is understood as an animal, its knowledge-gathering activities must, like all of its other activities, be understood as increasing entropy.  Put less abstractly:  we frequently learn how things work by breaking them.  The frog, once dissected, never hops again.  Even in domains of knowledge in which researchers work to avoid the more destructive modes of investigation, some destruction remains inevitable.  The act of handling an archival document, for example, degrades it.

My second line of enquiry considers consequences of the emergence, in the modern era, of the Earth, as distinct from the universe, as a singular epistemic object.  My chief example will be the nineteenth century investigation of global ocean currents spearheaded by American oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury.  This example is of particular interest because it sets the stage for the convergence of my two lines of enquiry in the twentieth century, with the emergence of global climate as an epistemic object:  an object whose study is made possible by its very vulnerability to human activity.

February 8, 2016

Alan Richardson

Professor, Philosophy, University of British Columbia

"The Left Vienna Circle," Hans Reichenbach, and the Question of a Political Philosophy of Science

Sarah Richardson (2009a, 2009b) offered both historical counter-evidence to and historiographical criticism of what she terms “Left Vienna Circle scholarship” (henceforth, LVCS), which she associates with the work of Don Howard, Thomas Uebel, and Alan Richardson. Uebel (2010) rebutted much of the historical case, but left the historiographical issues largely untouched. Speaking from the magisterial perspective of the trained professional historian, Sarah Richardson finds LVCS to be typical amateur disciplinary history as done by practitioners and, specifically, that LVCS scholarship offers a longer-term view of “political philosophy of science” in order further to marginalize feminist voices in philosophy of science: good old-fashioned logical empiricists had a political philosophy of science and, thus, feminist philosophy of science has not introduced any new elements into the field. Among the issues raised in Sarah Richardson's essays is the question of the meaning of "political" in such discussions. After reminding us of the prima facie reasons for thinking there was a political agenda to logical empiricism in Vienna in 1929, I will inquire more closely into this question of meaning, using as a test case Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953), who was not a member of the Vienna Circle and who is often placed on the "right" wing of logical empiricism.

February 15, 2016

No Colloquium

President's Day

February 22, 2016

Emily York, 

PhD Candidate, Communication and Science Studies, UC San Diego

Producing Intellectual and Human Capital: Nanoengineering in the University

The Jacobs School of Engineering’s Vision Statement states it will “provide the human capital and the intellectual capital to drive our innovation society.” Indeed, two years in a row I observed the dean of the school welcome incoming undergraduate students with the words, “You are the human capital we are producing.” In this talk, I examine how the production of a disciplinary and professional identity for nanoengineering—which is institutionalized at UC San Diego as a new department and undergraduate program within the Jacobs School—is grounded in the practices and cultures of entrepreneurial science. Drawing on a four-year ethnography of the department, one of its laboratories, and the undergraduate program, I argue that the ideological and political economic imperatives of capital accumulation permeate the pedagogical and research practices of university-based nanoengineering. The department, which the chair has likened to an innovation ecosystem, understands itself as producing societal benefit through its innovation in both research and pedagogy. I consider how “intellectual capital” and “human capital” become the products of this innovation, and how these terms articulate the university, citizenship, and the good in terms legible to the market. 

February 29, 2016

Miriam Solomon

Professor, Philosophy, Temple University

The Historical Epistemology of Evidence-Based Medicine

Since the early 1990s, evidence-based medicine has come to be a model of objectivity in medical research and practice. This paper explores how evidence-based medicine superseded other accounts of objectivity in medicine, and how the recent developments of translational medicine, personalized medicine, and precision medicine are responses to the shortfalls of evidence-based medicine.

March 7, 2016

Massimo Mazzoti

Director, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society

Associate Professor, History, UC Berkeley

The Politics of Mathematical Purity

Early nineteenth-century mathematical life was characterized by a distinctive foundational anxiety: much mathematical knowledge began to be perceived as lacking, and in need of more solid foundations. Many of the processes that came to define modern mathematics - such as the emergence of pure mathematics or the rigorization of calculus - were indeed shaped by such anxiety. Mostly, the meaning of these transformations has been considered obvious and self-explanatory: after all, there were logical gaps in eighteenth-century mathematical knowledge. In this paper I shall offer a different interpretation of the roots of our mathematical modernity, claiming that this foundational anxiety and its technical incarnations are best understood as a dimension of a broader process of “return to the order.”

March 14, 2016

No Colloquium

Finals Week 

March 21, 2015

Spring Break

March 28, 2016

Science Studies Program Meeting

SSP faculty and students only

April 4, 2016

William Shea

Galileo Professor of the History of Science Emeritus, University of Padua

Teaching Galileo: What We Should Know

PhD graduates in the history of science and Science Studies are often required, when beginning their career as assistant professors, to teach a survey course where prominent figures such as Galileo, Kepler and Newton are expected to be expounded in a way that is intelligible to students from different backgrounds. They are also expected to answer some of the general questions that a new generation is asking. In this illustrated lecture some suggestions will be made on how this can be done. We will focus on Galileo's astronomical discoveries, and on how the Church actually reacted, rather than how it was later assumed to have done. Anachronistic accounts abound, and history can rescue us from facile generalisations and some downright falsehoods.  

April 11, 2016

Bernard Lightman

Professor, Department of Humanities, York University

Fashioning the Victorian Man of Science: Tyndall’s Shifting Strategy

This paper discusses the self-fashioning strategies of the eminent Victorian physicist John Tyndall. It traces how Tyndall began as a conservative, rebelled against his conservative upbringing when he was a surveyor, submerged his radical self when he began to work at the Royal Institution, and then allowed the rebel to resurface after the death of his “scientific father,” Michael Faraday. By presenting this new picture of Tyndall, I attempt to explain why he did not participate in the debates over Darwin’s Origin of Species for much of the 1860’s even though he had become close friends with T. H. Huxley and other scientific naturalists.

April 18, 2016

Kerry McKenzie

Assistant Professor, Philosophy, UC San Diego

On the Prospects for a Present-Day Metaphysics of Science

Metaphysicians of science are in the business of putting a philosophical gloss on scientific theories.  And present-day metaphysics of science are doing so while recognizing that we still await a scientific theory that we can regard as fundamental.  But one might wonder whether they have any hope of getting their metaphysics right, given the capacity for new developments in science to falsify what we previously took to be knowledge.  In his seminal paper  ‘A Confutation of Convergent Realism’ (1981), Larry Laudan used this observation to undermine not merely the distinctively metaphysical claims that philosophers like to make about science, but the core claims of science itself, arguing in particular that classical physics cannot be regarded as even approximately true by the lights of quantum mechanics.  Since then, however, philosophers of physics have hit back, holding that the claims of classical physics have not been supplanted but rather vindicated by the emergence of the quantum theory.   

This restoration of convergence – in physics at least – lends hope to the idea that further progress in science toward a fundamental theory might vindicate our present-day beliefs about science, instead of overthrowing it.  But if that is right, metaphysicians might likewise feel optimistic about our capacity to do metaphysics in advance of a fundamental theory.  In this paper, however, I will argue that such hopes are forlorn. There is nothing in the restoration of convergent realism in physics that implies that anything remotely comparable will prevail in the case in metaphysics.  Indeed, the convergence that exists in physics may actually undermine that there are any non-fundamental metaphysical facts out there to be known at all.  

April 25, 2016

CANCELLED

May 2, 2016

Anna Starshinina

PhD Candidate, Communication and Science Studies, UC San Diego

May 9, 2016

Kavita Philip

Associate Professor, History, UC Irvine

Forward to the Past? Tribes and Castes in Technological India

In the early 21st century, India is often invoked as an exemplary post-colonial technoscientific space. India’s 1991 economic liberalization, its entry into the World Trade Organization’s IPR regime, and its post-9/11 role in global security discourse, have formed an enabling frame for the emergence of particular forms of proprietary techno-scientific knowledge. New forms of citizenship, subjectivity, and knowledge-based development proper to the twenty- first century post-colonial state are emerging, and there are vigorous debates about the market, the State, and cultural shifts. But forms of nineteenth-century race science live on in the invisible infrastructures of post-colonial India’s census databases, population demographics, and urban planning. The historical gaps in South Asian histories of racial science, along with the lack of a robust public debate about the techniques and terms of infrastructure, allow a hybrid digitized racialism to reshape populations, government, and politics.

May 16, 2016

Peter R. Dear

Professor of the History of Science, Department of History, Cornell University

The Ideological Significance of Francis Bacon

May 23, 2016

Sarah Klein

PhD Candidate, Communication and Science Studies, UC San Diego

Shaping Experiment: Performance Collaboration in the Cognitive Science Lab

May 30, 2016

No Colloquium

Memorial Day

June 6, 2016

No Colloquium

Finals Week