Harry Collins' central argument about experimental practice revolves around the thesis that facts can only be generated by good instruments but good instruments can only be recognized as such if they produce facts. This is what Collins calls the experimenters' regress. For Collins, scientific controversies cannot be closed by the ‘facts’ themselves because there are no formal criteria independent of the outcome of the experiment that scientists can apply to decide whether an experimental apparatus works properly or not.No one seems (...) to have noticed that the debate is in fact a rehearsal of the ancient philosophical debate about skepticism. The present article suggests that the way out of radical skepticism offered by the so-called mitigated skeptics is a solution to the problem of consensus formation in science.Keywords: Argumentation; Skepticism; Sociology of science; Philosophy of science; Scientific controversies. (shrink)
The object of this paper is to look at the extent and nature of the uses of analogy during the ªrst century following the so-called scientiªc revolution. Using the research tool provided by JSTOR we systematically analyze the uses of “analog” and its cognates (analogies, analogous, etc.) in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for the period 1665–1780. In addition to giving the possibility of evaluating quantitatively the proportion of papers explicitly using analogies, this approach makes it (...) possible to go beyond the maybe idiosyncratic cases of Descartes, Kepler, Galileo, and other much studied giants of the so-called Scientiªc Revolution. As a result a classiªcation of types of uses is proposed. Relations between types of analogies and research ªelds are also established. In this paper we are less interested in discussing the “real nature” or “essence” or even the cognitive limitations of analogical thinking than in describing its various uses and different meanings as they changed over the course of a century. (shrink)
We describe here a series of experimental analogies between fluid mechanics and quantum mechanics recently discovered by a team of physicists. These analogies arise in droplet systems guided by a surface (or pilot) wave. We argue that these experimental facts put ancient theoretical work by Madelung on the analogy between fluid and quantum mechanics into new light. After re-deriving Madelung’s result starting from two basic fluid-mechanical equations (the Navier-Stokes equation and the continuity equation), we discuss the relation with the de (...) Broglie-Bohm theory. This allows to make a direct link with the droplet experiments. It is argued that the fluid-mechanical interpretation of quantum mechanics, if it can be extended to the general N-particle case, would have an advantage over the Bohm interpretation: it could rid Bohm’s theory of its strongly non-local character. (shrink)
Academic debates are so frequent and omnipresent in most disciplines, particularly the social sciences and humanities, it seems obvious that disagreements are bound to occur. The aim of this paper is to show that whereas the agent who perceives his/her contribution as being misunderstood locates the origin of the communication problem on the side of the receiver who "misinterprets" the text, the emitter is in fact also contributing to the possibility of this misunderstanding through the very manner in which his/her (...) text is written. In other words, I propose a symmetric approach to understanding misunderstandings: taking simultaneously into account the position of the reader in the scientific field and the structure of the texts of the writers. The paper thus proposes to complement the sociological analysis of controversies in a scientific field with the close reading of texts, a practice usually found in studies of argumentation, in order to explain the occurrence of misunderstandings. The debate surrounding the charge of "relativism" among sociologists of scientific knowledge provides us with a case study to analyse in detail the argumentative context of misunderstanding. (shrink)
The object of this paper is two-fold: first, to show that contrary to what seem to have become a widely accepted view among historians of biology, the famous 1953 first Nature paper of Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA was widely cited — as compared to the average paper of the time — on a continuous basis from the very year of its publication and over the period 1953–1970 and that the citations came from a wide array of (...) scientific journals. A systematic analysis of the bibliometric data thus shows that Watson's and Crick's paper did in fact have immediate and long term impact if we define "impact" in terms of comparative citations with other papers of the time. In this precise sense it did not fall into "relative oblivion" in the scientific community. The second aim of this paper is to show, using the case of the reception of the Watson—Crick and Jacob—Monod papers as concrete examples, how large scale bibliometric data can be used in a sophisticated manner to provide information about the dynamic of the scientific field as a whole instead of limiting the analysis to a few major actors and generalizing the result to the whole community without further ado. (shrink)
In this paper, we provide a macro level analysis of the visibility of philosophy of science in the sciences over the last four decades. Our quantitative analysis of publications and citations of philosophy of science papers, published in 17 main journals representing the discipline, contributes to the longstanding debate on the influence of philosophy of science on the sciences. It reveals the global structure of relationships that philosophy of science maintains with science, technology, engineering and mathematics and social sciences and (...) humanities fields. Explored at the level of disciplines, journals and authors, this analysis of the relations between philosophy of science and a large and diversified array of disciplines allows us to answer several questions: what is the degree of openness of various disciplines to the specialized knowledge produced in philosophy of science? Which STEM and SSH fields and journals have privileged ties with philosophy of science? What are the characteristics, in terms of citation and publication patterns, of authors who get their philosophy of science papers cited outside their field? Complementing existing qualitative inquiries on the influence of specific authors, concepts or topics of philosophy of science, the bibliometric approach proposed in this paper offers a comprehensive portrait of the multiple relationships that links philosophy of science to the sciences. (shrink)
We describe a series of experimental analogies between fluid mechanics and quantum mechanics recently discovered by a team of physicists. These analogies arise in droplet systems guided by a surface wave. We argue that these experimental facts put ancient theoretical work by Madelung on the analogy between fluid and quantum mechanics into new light. After re-deriving Madelung’s result starting from two basic fluid mechanical equations, we discuss the relation with the de Broglie–Bohm theory. This allows to make a direct link (...) with the droplet experiments. It is argued that the fluid mechanical interpretation of quantum mechanics, if it can be extended to the general N-particle case, would have a considerable advantage over the Bohm interpretation: it could rid Bohm’s theory of its non-local character. (shrink)
In the scientific field, agents can choose to contribute to `normal' science, operate within the most highly legitimated avant-garde science or instead, develop theories within an entirely new theoretical framework, despite the risks which this entails. But the marginality of such theories raises a problem of strategy: those who choose to work on them do so at the expense of their own short-term interests, which would normally be oriented towards occupying a central position in already well-established fields. The theory of (...) scale-relativity demonstrates the interest of such a situation: the door is open to new possibilities, but ones that must be built `from scratch'. To pursue work in this direction is more demanding than to choose a project considered risky within the confines of an existing paradigm. On the one hand, TSR proposes to `innovate' and branch out from already widely-accepted conceptual bases, while, on the other hand, it finds itself in a marginal position with respect to the most legitimate avant-garde theories, such as `superstrings'. The case of the TSR thus allows us to study a region of the scientific field which has hardly been explored by a sociology of science that focuses primarily on `extreme' cases: histories of theories which have since been vindicated or spectacular controversies. In 2006, TSR occupies a marginal position within the field of physics. Its status differs widely from `theories' produced outside the field, yet does not correspond to any form of stable, accepted science. As we will show, using a detailed bibliometric analysis, the theory's diffusion throughout the scientific field has been limited — albeit real — and its results, when sanctioned by an official publication, are rarely taken into account by researchers who are not already TSR collaborators. This isolation within the field reveals conflict and tension between the transformation intended by a theoretical innovation and the norms of standard peer review. As a conclusion, we will compare the strategies of TSR's founder with those of other researchers who — at some point in their career — have attempted to reorient their scientific trajectory, which in turn reveals the social conditions of these bifurcations that put previously accumulated scientific capital at risk. (shrink)
L’intensification récente des relations entre les acteurs du champ universitaire et ceux du monde industriel a amené une montée en visibilité des questions qui touchent les conflits d’intérêts. Pratiquement toujours entendue comme une catégorie intemporelle et universelle, la notion de « conflit d’intérêts » a cependant une genèse historique et des conditions sociales d’émergence. À travers plusieurs exemples canadiens et américains du vingtième siècle, cet article montre comment émergent les conflits d’intérêts dans le champ universitaire. Alors qu’aujourd’hui ces exemples seraient (...) probablement perçus et dénoncés comme des cas flagrants de conflits d’intérêts, cela ne semble pas avoir été le cas à l’époque. En fait, le « conflit d’intérêts » suppose d’abord l’existence d’intérêts en conflits, eux-mêmes portés par des agents qui ont intérêt à percevoir, et parfois même à générer, ces conflits. (shrink)
The tendency is strong to take the notion of “conflict of interests” for granted as if it had an invariant meaning and an ethical content independent of the historical context. It is doubtful however, from an historical and sociological point of view, that many of the cases now considered as instances of “conflicts of interests” would also have been conceived and perceived as such in, say, the 1930s. The idea of a “conflict of interests” presupposes that there are indeed interests (...) in conflict. Conversely, as long as there is a consensus among the different groups involved, they will not conceive and even less denounce a given practice as being an instance of a “conflict of interests”. In this article we will show that the content of the discussions over conflicts of interests has changed over time in close relation with the transformations of the research system. In other words: there are social conditions for the emergence of “conflicts of interests”. The changing meaning of the notion is assessed by analyzing the presence of the expression “conflicts of interests” in the magazine Science over the past century. Three different meanings emerge and their content has evolved in close link with the changing structure of the relations between the scientific community first with the State and then with industry. It moved from a situation external to the scientific community to a debate going on inside the scientific community generated by the growing relations between university and industries. (shrink)
This article uses the methods of citation and network analysis to map the global structure of the intellectual field and its development over time. Through the case study of Mersenne's, Oldenburg's and Darwin's correspondences, we show how looking at letters as a corpus of data can provide a global representation of the evolving conversation going on in the Republic of Letters and in intellectual and scientific fields. Aggregating general correspondences in electronic format offers a global portrait of the evolving composition (...) of the intellectual and scientific scene, its changing foci of interests and the fortune of the intellectual discussions as expressed in cited persons in the letters. Such tools help replace a purely metaphoric use of the term “network” by a visible map of the intellectual relations between people on which well defined calculations of the centrality of the positions of different actors can be made as well as their evolution over time. These techniques provide welcome additions to the tool kit of scholars in an age where the computer and the web offer new ways of mapping and mining the rich store of information contained in intellectual correspondences. (shrink)
This study analyses the patenting activities of university science and engineering professors in Canada between 1920 and 1975. Unlike most studies on commercial activities in academia, which typically focus on the post-1980 period and on university practices, we focus on the pre-1980 period and on the individual decisions of professors to patent their inventions. Based on quantitative patent data, we show that patenting, and thus professors’ interest in the possible commercial value of their scientific discoveries made in university laboratories, was (...) relatively common on an individual and informal basis well before the 1980s and the advent of what is now called “academic capitalism”. This contradicts the belief that before that period, universities were a kind of ivory towers in which professors isolated themselves from external influences and engaged only in pure and disinterested research. (shrink)
On the basis of bibliometric data, this chapter shows that international collaboration in the social sciences and humanities has increased strongly between 1980 and 2014, but that the pattern of exchange has known few structural changes. At the basic level of production capacity and article output, the global field of the SSH is best described as a Euro-American duopoly. At the higher level of co-authorships and citations, however, the field structure tends to be monopolistic: no language can compete with English, (...) no country can rival with the USA. Globalization effects have been relatively weak, and the growth of transnational exchange has reproduced rather than undermined existing hierarchies. Due to its hegemonic position, USA journals remain largely national in their authorship and references, and researchers in the USA are less frequently involved in transnational co-authorship than their colleagues in Europe. For European researchers, transnational collaboration has become somewhat more global in scope, but most of it has remained with the USA and other English speaking countries; China is the only country that has become significantly more important. In European countries the reference pattern indicates that bi-nationalism is the predominant form of transnational exchange: citation hierarchies are dominated by a combination of national and American journals, whereas international and European journals are virtually absent. Patterns of transnational collaboration and exchange thus tend to be structured like star networks with many relations to the center, less frequent relations among semi-central countries, and infrequent or absent relations among semi-peripheral and peripheral countries. (shrink)
