2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
which challenge aspects of the national history. Moreover, an article focusing on
huaqiao recently appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies that will surely attract
the attention of China historians with its broad readership. As historical exposition
begins to move beyond the mode of national histories, the China field will have to
contend with aspects of Chinese history that unfold in spaces not traditionally
considered China and have thus been ignored. Dr. Tee’s scientific practice dovetails
nicely into this growing area of Chinese history. The work of both Peter and Tee
reflects specific mechanisms by which western scientific knowledge was
transmitted and institutionalized in modern China and how this knowledge
displaced, coexisted and competed with pre-existing Chinese forms of scientific
knowledge and practice.
Frederick Gregory University of Florida
Continental Critiques of Scientific Objectivity
During the last decades of the nineteenth century representatives of different
sectors of the German and Austrian intellectual community contributed to
fundamental questioning of the popular image of the objectivity of scientific
knowledge. While the contributions of the physicist Ernst Mach, the theologian
Wilhelm Herrmann, and the philosopher Hans Vaihinger represent just three
articulations of this concern, this paper investigates the individual agendas
that motivated each one and inquires to what extent the common thread of
their arguments caught on in the years around the turn of the twentieth century.
Implicit in this inquiry is another: can these critiques of the objectivity of
science suggest ways in which we can understand the obvious appeal scientific
objectivity held for many and the function it performed for them?
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Daniel Haag Institute of Soil Science and Land Evaluation, University of
Hohenheim
Ecosystem Simulation:
Dynamical Systems vs. Self-Modifying, Historical Systems
Dynamical systems are the paradigm for the formal representation of complex
natural systems in simulation modeling. Based on the notion of an abstract state,
ecosystems are encoded in a closed set of equations with determined parameters.
For the encoding, the system is severed from its environment and from background
“noise” discriminating supposedly essential from accidental features. Parameters
in dynamical systems are fixed a priori, many of them being parameters of
convenience which fulfil the formal needs of (systems) theory. To account for
ecosystem “complexity” , the number of parameters often is increased
unrestrictedly. The ensuing non-identifiability of parameters is a major shortcoming