2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Enlightenment by their activities. And in the nineteenth, the origins of social
science occurred during debates over the significance of piracy for the very
definition of society. Today, the new world of the life sciences is facing its own
brand of “biopiracy” —one that is calling fundamental principles of creativity
and intellectual property into question all over again. My presentation will thus
seek to put our present concerns into deep historical context. I hope thereby to
suggest how a historical understanding of piracy can help us make sense of
some urgent questions facing today’s scientific world.
Matthew␣ L. Jones Columbia University
Calculating Machinery:
Pascal and Leibniz on Knowledge and Spectacle in the Early Modern State
Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Leibniz offered their calculating machines and
techniques as means for augmenting and supplementing current techniques of
governing in the early modern state. Both introduced their machines and
calculational techniques within a detailed account of the roles of governmental
knowledge and spectacle for the smooth running of the state. Both provided
their techniques as means to perfect the monarch’s knowledge and to justify
and to help produce the faith the people ought to place in their ruler. Despite
the gap separating Pascal’s infamous pessimism and Leibniz’s even more
infamous optimism, their machines and techniques helped them to articulate
their accounts of the deliberate, artificial production of the tangible and
intangible elements necessary for producing and maintaining peaceful societies.
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Susan␣ D. Jones University of Colorado
Creating a Scientific Context for Contingent Knowledge in Veterinary
Medicine
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, North American veterinary
scientists became heavily involved in government-sponsored research on pressing
livestock disease problems. Using the cases of Pictou Cattle Disease and Texas
Cattle Fever, this paper illustrates the methodologies that veterinary scientists
agreed upon as legitimate for identifying the etiologies of animal diseases.
Stockmen had long suspected that Pictou Cattle Disease was caused by ingestion
of a poisonous plant, and Texas Cattle Fever by an infestation of ticks. As
veterinary scientists went about studying these diseases, however, their
epistemological loyalty to the tenets of bacteriology guided their investigations.
They also continued to rely upon fieldwork, and it served as the conduit through
which contingent knowledge and local context entered the realm of scientific
explanation. Especially in the case of Texas Cattle Fever, this methodology