Abstracts of the History of Science Society 2004 Austin Meeting 18 ...

standard from which they are supposed to diverge is entirely missing.
Minghui Hu, University of Chicago (mhu@uchicago.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Hill Country A
Measuring the Cosmos: Tension between Confucian Cosmology and Jesuit Cosmography
If an informed literatus of mid-eighteenth century China had been asked to describe Jesuit astronomy, he probably would have begun
to suggest that the Jesuit science focused exclusively on the measures of the cosmos (cetian ??). The measures of the cosmos constituted
the core of Qing imperial calendar, and the precision measures in the imperial calendar served to symbolize the Qing state power.
The Manchu conquest of Ming China consequently led to the formation of state orthodoxy within which the Manchu monarchs shared
his legitimacy with the intellectual and cultural elites in China. How, or to what extent, did the divinatory and ritualistic elements remain
in the Qing state cosmology? How did these elements hang together with mathematical and observational astronomy that were so crucial
in the demonstration of the Qing court prowess in precision measures? How did the literati and officials at court put Confucian
cosmology and Jesuit cosmography together in the state orthodoxy?
Patti Wilger Hunter, Westmont College (phunter@westmont.edu)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Hill Country A
Foundations of Statistics in American Textbooks: Probability and Pedagogy in Historical Context
The pages of journals dealing with statistics education have contained in recent years a number of discussions about the most effective
ways to treat the subject of probability in introductory statistics courses. The conversation about the role of probability and the form
it should take in statistics courses is not a recent phenomenon, but has been going on since the introduction of statistical inference in
the early decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, prominent members of the statistics community made important contributions
to that conversation, contributions shaped significantly by statisticians’ concerns about their place in the broader scientific community.
This paper will analyze the treatment of probability in several American statistics textbooks from the 1920s through the 1940s. It will
show that the emergence and development of the American statistics community and its concerns about its place in the larger academic
and scientific world influenced the approaches statisticians took to presenting the ideas of probability.
Yoshiko Iizuka, Rissho University (hazime@ris.ac.jp)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Hill Country D
Birth Technology and Gender Problems in Recent Japan
In Japan, the first test tube baby was born in 1983 and a baby’s sex selection birth was performed in 1985. Before these birth technologies
had popularized, medical accident in the field of obstetrics and gynecology had occurred in 1980. It gave serious social impact for
Japanese society. It was a matter that normal uterus and/or ovary were removed surgically in the private hospital. In the present study,
we surveyed the press comments of the matter chronologically in relation to the gender problem and birth technology. As a result,
stereotyped comments that happiness for females are conception, child birth and child care appeared in 1980’s. However, reproductive
health and rights problem has been popularizing since 1990’s. Also, birth technology has well developed. And bioethical issues occurred.
Joel Isaac, Trinity College, University of Cambridge (jti20@cam.ac.uk)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country C
The Education of a “Scientific Philosopher”: W. V. Quine and the Analytic Turn in American Philosophy, 1926-1940
For half a century, until his death in December 2000, Willard Van Orman Quine was considered by his peers to be the most important
and influential of living philosophers. At the forefront of developments in logical empiricism and logical positivism, Quine helped to
establish analytic philosophy in the United States, where it has flourished since the 1950s. This paper discusses the circumstances of
Quine’s education in the late 1920s and 1930s, and the unique conceptions of scientific knowledge it engendered, namely, holism and a
“naturalist” epistemology. By following Quine through Oberlin College, graduate school at Harvard, a year of instruction in Europe,
and, finally, a junior fellowship at Harvard’s Society of Fellows, it is argued that we can see the basic tenets of Quine’s mature thought
set in as early as his sophomore year at Oberlin. Significantly, however, Quine did not develop these tenets explicitly until the later 1930s,
electing instead to concentrate on elaborating for an American audience the views of his mentor Rudolf Carnap, “even though” his nascent
conceptions of scientific knowledge induced profound misgivings about Carnap’s approach. It is contended that Quine elected to
soft-peddle his own convictions in favour of a strong body of European philosophy in order to carve out a space for his own project
within the American philosophical tradition. In common with figures in other disciplines in mid-twentieth century America, Quine
exploited a traditional deference to European arts and sciences to effect a turn towards a new set of concepts and problems in the philosophy
of science and the science of philosophy.
Kenji Ito, The University of Tokyo (kenjiito@post.harvard.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country B