Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

entrepreneurs fought the unions by introducing new management techniques and employee incentive
programs. I claim that these organizational innovations gave corporations in the Silicon Valley a substantial
competitive advantage over their more traditional Eastern counterparts. These innovations were
adopted by computer and disk drive firms in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and a wide range of industrial
sectors in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Lefevre, Wolfgang
E-mail Address: wlef@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Ordering and Labelling - Guyton de Morveaus' and Lavoisier’s' Reform of the Chemical Nomenclature
The Méthode de nomenclature chimique composed by Guyton de Morveau, Lavoisier, Bertholet,
Fourcroy, and others, published 1787 in Paris, contains a classificatory table of chemical substances. The
Méthode is well known as a chief means of promoting Lavoisier's anti-phlogistic chemical theory.
However, the specific relations between nomenclature, classification, and the new chemical theory are
far from obvious. The paper will argue that the impact of Lavoisier's peculiar theory on both the nomenclature
and the classification of the Méthode was less consequential for subsequent classificatory and
nomenclatorial efforts in chemistry than those features that were neutral with respect to the phlogiston/
oxygen controversy. In particular, the paper will critically investigate the assumption that these latter
features were due to certain general linguistic rules of systematic nomenclatures rather than the deeply
rooted conceptual frameworks of eighteenth-century chemistry.
Levens, Joshua
E-mail Address: JPL12@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu
Sexual Arousal and the Central Nervous System: the Contributions of W. Horsley Gantt and
Frank A. Beach
The study of sexual arousal and mating behavior was a pivotal area of research for the development of
behavioral endocrinology as a comparative science. In this emerging field, ideas about male-female
differences in humans were informed by studies of these differences in animal species. One such research
problem was susceptibility to conditioning in males and females. In explaining the differential
rates of marginal sexual practices (e.g., voyeurism, masochism, transvestism, and transsexualism)
between men and women, researchers of human sexual behavior in the 1940s and 1950s, such as Alfred
C. Kinsey, claimed that men were more easily conditioned than women. This conclusion about human
sexual behavior was based on a body of evidence that included canine sex research performed by W.
Horsley Gantt, the first American student of Pavlov and director of the Pavlovian Laboratory at the
Johns Hopkins Medical School (1929-1964), and Frank A. Beach, a student of Karl Lashley, whose text
Hormones and Behavior (1948)helped to define the field of behavioral endocrinology. Building from
Gantt's observations that the sexual behaviors of male dogs were more easily conditioned than those of
females, Beach claimed that this revealed an underlying difference in the neural mediation of these
behaviors. He identified hormones as more important for lower vertebrates and females, and cortical
mechanisms as more important for higher vertebrates and males. The different experimental settings
they employed--Gantt's laboratory and Beach "field" experiments--shaped their views of sexual differences
in the canine brain.
Levitt, Theresa
E-mail Address: levitt@fas.harvard.edu
No More Magic Moonbeams: Astronomy as Public Science in Nineteenth Century France
France seemed under the shadow of some dark star in 1832. Newspapers reported the unnerving