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In his biography of Isaac Newton, which forms the most recent production in this flourishing genre, Niccolò Guicciardini states as his first point of departure that Newton's work arose not from 'attempts to answer questions that came to him spontaneously, but [from addressing] those posed by his contemporaries' (p. 20). Right he is to communicate to the larger audience for which he is writing this principal fruit of by now almost a century of professional history-of-science writing - a deep-seated awareness that every scientific view or finding, even if looking timeless in retrospect, has emerged from some given historical context that shows us where the scientist in question started, and that helps explain how, and in what direction, they managed to venture beyond the original context.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Psychiatry Med
December 2018
1 OHSU Family Medicine, Portland, USA.
Michael Balint's pioneering work in primary care was not simply the application of psychodynamic theory to the complex problems and relationships encountered by clinicians. Rather, Balint's work was part of a wider conversation in Western epistemology that had already begun to break down the enlightenment rationalist agenda. Since the time of Descartes, we sought to find certain truth through decontextualizing and abstracting problems, and through separation of the observer from the thing observed, with a focus on finding universal timeless laws that could be generalized.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Hist Behav Sci
April 2011
Program in Science in Society and Department of Sociology, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, USA.
This paper has two aims. The first is to shed light on a remarkable archival source, namely survey responses from thousands of American psychologists during the 1960s in which they described their contemporary research practices and discussed whether the practices were "ethical." The second aim is to examine the process through which the American Psychological Association (APA) used these survey responses to create principles on how psychologists should treat human subjects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIsis
June 2010
Program in the History and Anthropology of Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E51-185, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140, USA.
Historians of science have in recent years become increasingly attentive to the ways in which issues of process, matter, meaning, and value combine in the fabrication of scientific objects. This essay examines the techniques that went into the construction--and authentication--of one such scientific object: a model of a blue, or "sulfur-bottom," whale manufactured at the American Museum of Natural History in 1907. In producing their model, exhibitors at the American Museum employed a patchwork of overlapping discursive, procedural, and material techniques to argue that their fabrication was as authentic--as truthful, accurate, authoritative, and morally and aesthetically worthy of display--as an exhibit containing a real, preserved cetacean.
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