2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
of Cumberland (now Cumbria), in the northwestern marches of England.
Believing that copper, unlike the traditional “royal metals” gold and silver,
belonged to the owner of the land where it was found, Northumberland argued
in court that the Company of Mines Royal had no right to profit from mining
copper which was rightfully his. The crown’s lawyers, however, asserted that
the copper ore in question also contained some silver, which automatically
rendered the copper mines royal property and nullified the Earl’s claim to
them. The case, tried before the highest court that could be assembled in
Elizabethan England, ultimately turned on the amount of silver present in the
ore, leaving the Earl at a grave disadvantage. For the crown, through its
domination of the Company of Mines Royal (many of whose senior
shareholders were members of Elizabeth’s Privy Council), enjoyed a complete
monopoly over the expert metallurgical knowledge needed to assay the ore
and make any such determination. Northumberland, who lacked mining and
metallurgical expertise himself and had no access to those who possessed it,
was therefore unable to defend himself in court and suffered a costly and
humiliating defeat as a result. This paper will examine the particular mining
expertise that was so pivotal in determining the verdict, and the ways in which
the crown was able to control the outcome of the trial by alternately marshaling
and withholding the rare expertise they commanded.
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Mitchell␣ G. Ash University of Vienna
A Human Science?
Psychology as Science and Profession 1850-1970
Psychology occupies a peculiar place among the sciences, suspended between
methodological demands derived from the physical and biological sciences
and a subject matter extending into the social and human sciences. The struggle
to create a science of both subjectivity and behavior and the interrelated effort
to develop professional practices utilizing that science’s results illuminate both
the formative impact of science on modern life, and the effects of technocratic
hopes on science. The aim of this paper is to bring out certain common threads
in this varied narrative. One of those common threads is that the history of
psychology has been a continuous struggle by multiple participants to occupy
and define a sharply contested, but never clearly bounded, discursive and
practical field. A second common thread is that the history of psychology as a
science and that of the psychological profession are inseparable, at least in the
twentieth century. A third common thread is that while psychologists struggled
to establish international networks, they also drew upon local traditions. As a
result the contents of both the discipline and the profession have varied
according to particular social and cultural circumstances in ways that do not
easily conform to grand narratives of progressive knowledge acquisition and
practical success.
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