Carl Becker's classic 1931 address "Everyman his own historian" holds lessons for historians of science today. Like the professional historians he spoke to, we are content to display the Ivory- Tower Syndrome, writing scholarly treatises only for one another, disdaining both the general reader and our natural readership, scientists. Following his rhetoric, I argue that scientists are well aware of their own historicity, and would be interested in lively and balanced histories of science. It is ironic that the very professionalism (...) that ought to equip us to write such histories has imposed on us a powerful taboo that renders us unable to do so. We who count ourselves sophisticated in describing the effects of social forces upon past scientists have been remarkably unconscious of the ways our own practices are being shaped by our need to distinguish ourselves from scientists who write history. Our fear of presentism in general and Whig history in particular is really a taboo, that is, an excessive avoidance enforced by social pressure. It succeeds at making our work distinct from histories written by scientists, but at the awful cost of blotting out the great fact of scientific progress. Scientists may be misguided in expecting us to celebrate great men, but they are right to demand from historians an analysis of the process of testing and improvement that is central to science. If progress in general is a problematic term, we could label the process "emendation.". (shrink)

That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and ‘the West’. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product.

Tarski’s conceptual analysis of the notion of logical consequence is one of the pinnacles of the process of defining the metamathematical foundations of mathematics in the tradition of his predecessors Euclid, Frege, Russell and Hilbert, and his contemporaries Carnap, Gödel, Gentzen and Turing. However, he also notes that in defining the concept of consequence “efforts were made to adhere to the common usage of the language of every day life.” This paper addresses the issue of what relationship Tarski’s analysis, and (...) Béziau’s further generalization of it in universal logic, have to reasoning in the everyday lives of ordinary people from the cognitive processes of children through to those of specialists in the empirical and deductive sciences. It surveys a selection of relevant research in a range of disciplines providing theoretical and empirical studies of human reasoning, discusses the value of adopting a universal logic perspective, answers the questions posed in the call for this special issue, and suggests some specific research challenges. (shrink)

Before 1950, history of science did not exist as an independent academic branch, but was instead pursued by practitioners across various humanities and scientific disciplines. After professionalization, traces of its prehistory as a cross-disciplinary area of interest bound to an interdisciplinary, educational philosophy have remained. This essay outlines the development of history of science as an interdisciplinary academic field, and argues that it constitutes an obvious choice for inclusion in an interdisciplinary academic program, provided faculty and administrators learn how best (...) to manage its advantages and pitfalls. (shrink)

The scientific work of Leonardo da Vinci may have served as the main inspiration for the historical research of George Sarton. Although he never produced a work he felt was worthy of its subject, the little that he did write about Leonardo reveals the importance he attributed to him in the history of science. This is especially clear in Sarton´s treatment of Leonardo and a discovery he did not make: William Harvey´s discovery of blood circulation in the 17th Century. In (...) this article, we refer to this particular episode to trace Sarton´s conception of the development of science. It is a conception that illustrates well the traditional historiographic perspective that is the target of Thomas Kuhn´s criticisms. Although Kuhn never wrote about Leonardo or Harvey, we aim to show that he clearly positioned himself contrary to Sarton, albeit indirectly, with respect to this particular historical episode, as well. (shrink)