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

quarter of the twentieth century, away from the classic hierarchical structure of the vertically integrated
firm to a flexible, non-hierarchical structure that responds to mobility and flux. They also suggest a
reaction against technoscientific rationalism in their lingo of enabling, nurturing, and partnering. The
theoretical interest taken by scientists and engineers in management techniques is itself an interesting
phenomenon: one does not expect to find clippings from Fortune and the Harvard Business Review in
the reading files of scientists. Instead of taking scientific approaches and applying them to management,
as in the Taylorism of the 1920s or the systems engineering of the 1950s and 1960s, JPL took industrial
techniques and applied them to science and technology. But techniques for managing manufacturing
processes proved difficult to transfer to a research environment and despite a quantitative side that
emphasized measurable "metrics," their holistic vocabulary encountered resistance among hard-headed
technical staff in the laboratory.
Williams, Elizabeth
E-mail Address: williea@Okstate.edu
The "Newtonian" Defense of Medical Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century France
It is a commonplace of medical history that vitalism re-emerged in the mid-eighteenth century to
contest iatromechanist doctrines that had come to dominate medical theory in Europe. The precise
character of the iatromechanism challenged by vitalists has, however, been little explored and has often
been characterized simply as a blend of Cartesian and Newtonian elements. It has therefore been commonly
assumed that medical vitalists deplored all mechanist theorists, including Newton. This paper
seeks to modify this view by focusing on the uses to which the label "Newtonian" was put by vitalist
theorists of the Montpellier school. At mid-century, in the work of Theophile de Bordeu and his close
associate, the physician and chemist G.F. Venel, hostility to Newton was, indeed, an important feature of
vitalist thinking. But by the 1770s, the principal standard-bearer of Montpellier vitalism, Paul-Joseph
Barthez, invoked Newton's name to defend his own use of a concept of vital "force" that mechanistminded
critics denigrated as "occult." Praising Newton, Barthez and his disciples sought to associate
their own approach with his by arguing that the effects of vital force could be demonstrated even it its
ultimate nature could not be defined. Yet in this vitalist use of "Newtonianism," no mention was made
of the centrality of mathematical demonstration to Newton or of the vitalists' own skepticism about the
potential and utility of mathematics in the science of life. This paper will argue that Barthezian-style
"Newtonianism" constituted protective coloring, a rhetorical strategy intended to associate vitalism with
the mainstream movement of inductive science while claiming Newton himself as an ally in the struggle
against the theoretical "excesses" of medical mechanists.
Wisnioski, Matthew
E-mail Address: mwisnios@princeton.edu
Playing Games: Chess, Automata, and Artificial Intelligence
Chess has been described as the drosophilae of artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, for the past fifty
years almost every public headline about AI has referred to a machine's ability to play chess, a trend that
culminated spectacularly in the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue challenge. Yet, I contend, aside from its
initial incorporation into the study of intelligent machines in the late 1940s, chess has played a minimal
role in the AI research program. How, then, do we explain the seemingly disparate focus on chess inside
and outside of the AI community? I attempt to answer this question by investigating how and why chess
came to be associated with AI, and how that perception has persisted in popular culture. I do so by
examining technical literature on chess and computers, popular science magazines and books, science
fiction, and cultural artifacts. I also address the long cultural traditions of chess and automata. The
questions I pose include the following: Why is the ability to play chess considered to be indicative of