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

Oppenheimer stood at the intersection between federal demands upon militarized scientific research and the traditional ideals of enlightened
science. This paper will explore the institutional and policy structure of cold war physics, Oppenheimer’s strategies as the nation’s
leading science advisor for negotiating his vision of science and the state, how those strategies ultimately failed, and some striking parallels
today as science advising experiences a similar crisis.
Frederick Churchill, Indiana University, (churchil@indiana.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM – Texas Ballroom III
The Biogenetic Law and its Paradoxes
Common wisedom has held that Ernst Haeckel’s Fundamental Biogenetic Law reigned as part of a Darwinian-morphological paradigm,
despite some scathing contemporary objections, until the first decades of the twentieth century. By then, as traditional accounts continue,
experimental embryology, Mendelian genetics and the weight of Haeckel’s own illogical pronouncements brought the paradigm to
a rather abrupt end and replaced it with an early Twentieth Century outlook where experimentation, classical genetics, physiology and/or
different professional standards ruled. This explanation in terms of an historical “discontinuity” presents definite problems, which will
be explored and perhaps explained (in part).
Deborah Coen, Harvard University (coen@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM – Texas Ballroom V
Beyond Public and Private: Science and Liberalism in Imperial Austria
Both historians of science and political historians have traditionally drawn a sharp division between the “public” and the “private.”
According to traditional political histories of Central Europe, civic consciousness and rational discourse took root exclusively in the public
sphere, the first through the rise of voluntary associations, the second through the spread of natural science. Science thus appears
as a quintessentially public activity, from which private concerns were at best distractions. Indeed, in the historiography particularly of
Vienna circa 1900, the home typically appears as the inversion of the public sphere: the antithesis of a voluntary association, an escape
from political engagement, a realm of interiority and irrational emotions. Recently, however, Central European historians have begun to
challenge this dichotomy, demonstrating that middle class homes were crucial sites for liberal self-fashioning and the negotiation of
political and economic power. The political and scientific significance of family life emerges clearly from my research on the most
prominent family of scientists in imperial Vienna, the Exners. For the Exners and others in their social network, the cultivation of the
domestic sphere was itself a political activity. Through an experiment in living communally as an extended family, the Exners sought
solutions to the central dilemma of Austrian liberalism: how to guard against the dogmatic absolutism of their clerical opponents without
giving up ground to the radical relativism of their left-wing challengers.
Jamie Cohen-Cole, University of Chicago (jamiecc@uchicago.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM – Texas Ballroom V
Experimental Psychology and the Professional Politics of Thinking About Thinking
In the mid 20th century experimental psychology experienced a revolution in its model of human nature as cognitive science replaced
behaviorism. This transition involved understanding people as active, creatively thinking beings, rather than as organisms that simply
respond to environmental conditions. Philosophy of science was at the center of this transformation. Behaviorists held to a positivist
line, and argued that science was a matter of recording and accounting for observable phenomena. They, as a consequence, left little
space for consideration of such unobservable phenomena as mental processes. On the other hand, cognitive scientists followed an antipositivist
philosophy. They argued that science was and should be not primarily an empirical process. To early cognitive scientist,s science
was theory-driven even to the point that theory determined and structured data. In arguing this anti-positivist philosophy, cognitive
scientists made room for their own theories and inferences about the human mind. Even more significant however is that cognitive
scientists ascribed such anti-positivism not only to themselves, but also to humans more generally. In the process, the normative
philosophy of science (or “good academic thinking”) that cognitive scientists use to reshape the discipline of psychology became, at the
same time, the descriptive (and nominally value free) model of human nature.
Alix Cooper, SUNY-Stony Brook (acooper@notes.cc.sunysb.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM – Texas Ballroom V
The Nature of Home: Work, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Natural History
In early modern Europe, the pursuit of natural knowledge was, in great part, a family enterprise. In the course of researching women’s
contributions to science, and more broadly issues of gender in science, historians of science have begun, over the past several decades,
to uncover the numerous ways in which the actual practice of science in fields ranging from astronomy to botany depended on women’s
unpaid (and often unrecognized) labor. As scholars like Londa Schiebinger have shown, wives and daughters frequently made the observations
or performed the calculations required to sustain their male relatives’ scientific projects. What I propose to do in my paper is
to apply these insights more generally to the early modern family as a whole. In particular, I would like to explore the ways in which,
within the field of natural history, research projects came to become the collective responsibility of entire households across generations—i.e.
involving not only wives or daughters, but also sons, for example, as they attempted to complete their fathers’ projects,
and to make complex decisions about the division of scientific labor and the credit for that labor. Drawing on my research into
cases such as that of the Breyne family of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Danzig, whose natural-historical observations