Science in Context最新文献

{"title":"On Comrade Timiryazev’s attitude towards contemporary science","authors":"Boris M. Hessen, Vasiliy P. Egorshin","doi":"10.1017/S0269889722000084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889722000084","url":null,"abstract":"[188] Our note, signed H.E., on the fifth Congress of Russian Physicists appeared in No. 1 [of this journal] (Gessen & Egorshin 1927a, 134–141 [TN]). Cde. A. Timiryazev3 was displeased with the note, especially with our brief report on the debate over his own report. We do not consider the pages of our journal to be a suitable place for conducting polemics on special issues in physics. The journal Under the Banner of Marxism4 has set other tasks for itself. Therefore, we will not enter into a discussion of the purely physical, experimental and technical aspects of the Dayton Miller5 and Kennedy experiments.6 Discussion on these matters should be conducted in special physics journals. That part of Cde. Timaryazev’s article devoted to the controversy and to Prof. S.I. Vavilov’s7 objections, would be most appropriate in the journal where S.I. Vavilov’s article was published.","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"34 1","pages":"143 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44932681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Levels of communication: The talking horse experiments.","authors":"Daniel Gethmann","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000156","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the early twentieth century, counting and speaking horses, like the famous Clever Hans or the \"Horses of Elberfeld,\" became widely debated subjects in experimental psychology. The idea was to determine whether their learning success was only a fraud, or if it might open up a new chapter in \"animal psychology\" - or even belong to the realm of parapsychology and telepathy. When their tricks were discovered, the teachers of the animals were marked as charlatans. Both the attempts to detect charlatans and the efforts to avoid this accusation during the talking horse experiments proceeded using the method of introducing new levels of communication into the human-animal interaction process in order to substantiate each respective standpoint. This paper argues that the scientific studies and debates on the talking horses are relevant not only from psychological, biological, and semiotic vantage points, but also from the perspective of communications theory, giving rise to the foundational issue of levels of communication.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"33 4","pages":"473-490"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39741920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Becoming Eusapia: The rise of the \"Diva of Scientists\".","authors":"Francesco Paolo de Ceglia,&nbsp;Lorenzo Leporiere","doi":"10.1017/S026988972100020X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S026988972100020X","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918) is remembered as one of the most famous mediums in the history of spiritualism. Renowned scientists attended her séances in Europe and in the United States. They often had to admit to being unable to understand the origin of the phenomena produced. Cesare Lombroso, for example, after meeting Eusapia, was converted first to mediumism, then spiritualism. This article will retrace the early stages of her career as a medium and shed light on the way she managed to gain the attention of scientists. It will also show why they chose her as an epistemic object.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"33 4","pages":"441-471"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39741922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In memory of Miriam Greenfield","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0269889721000211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0269889721000211","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"33 1","pages":"353 - 353"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42354776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Please, come in.\" Being a charlatan, or the question of trustworthy knowledge.","authors":"Irina Podgorny,&nbsp;Daniel Gethmann","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000120","url":null,"abstract":"With these words from the 1860s, Guido Bennati (1827–1898), an ambulant quack from Pisa, introduced himself at his arrival at the market places in the Italian Piedmont. By calling himself a charlatan, Bennati did not disqualify his art. He called his profession by its real name, and he underscored its value: he was a self-styled practitioner in the lower regions of the medical profession who, in Italy, during the time of the Risorgimento, were still licensed to sell some kinds of external remedies and to perform external operations. They seemed to be making themselves heard everywhere. From England to Italy, from France to Spain and the Americas, markets and newspapers were filled with their advertisements and remedies. “Charlatan,” while a profession, meant something different in other linguistic contexts. Just across the border, in France, the journalist and writer Jean-Baptiste Gouriet (1774-1855) had published a compilation of the most famous charlatans that visited Paris from ancient times to the present day. In so doing, he specified that the term included the jugglers, jokers, jesters, operators, acrobats, crooks, swindlers, soothsayers, card-pullers, fortune-tellers and all the characters who have made themselves famous in the streets and public squares of Paris. Gouriet connected their stories to the history of theatre, entertainment, and illusion, but also to their use of the public space and their itinerant life (Gouriet 1819). Traveling from one marketplace to another, dealing in exotic objects and remedies, organizing shows and exhibitions, performing miraculous healings by appealing to the curative power of words and liniments, charlatans have infested Paris and traversed Europe at least since early modern times. The category included advocates for the elegant dog, the sage donkey, and the talking horses, a conversation that – as Daniel Gethmann shows in his article below – made its way into the scientific debates of the twentieth century. In that sense, tracing the history of charlatans and talking horses can be a means of seeing and understanding the changing frontiers of science. As Nathalie Richard develops in her epilogue, the science of modern charlatans syncretizes elements of a popular culture that far from having “no history” is rather constituted with elements borrowed from the cutting edge of the modernity of its time. As the classic mountebank he was, Bennati arrived in the Italian towns accompanied by a parade of exotically dressed musicians and entertainers (Fucini 1921, translated by and quoted in Gambaccini 2004, 200). Like many other European traveling doctors, Bennati appealed to “drum and trumpet” theater performances, old routines that in the nineteenth century had incorporated the “ethnographic parade,” in the style of Phineas Taylor Barnum’s circus, which originated in the US as traveling medicine shows: the association of a “doctor” with a Native","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"33 4","pages":"355-361"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39741924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Useful charlatans: Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti's fasting contest in Paris, 1886.","authors":"Agustí Nieto-Galan","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000168","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper analyzes the public fasts of two Italian \"hunger artists,\" Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti, in Paris in 1886, and their ability to forego eating for a long period (thirty and fifty days respectively). Some contemporary witnesses described them as clever frauds, but others considered them to be interesting physiological anomalies. Controversies about their fasts entered academic circles, but they also spread throughout the urban public at different levels. First, Succi and Merlatti steered medical debates among physicians on the \"scientific\" explanations of the limits of human resistance to inanition, and acted as ideal mediators for doctors' professional interests. Second, they became useful tools for science popularizers in their attempt to gain authority in drawing the boundaries between \"orthodox\" and \"heterodox\" knowledge. Finally, in the 1880s, Succi and Merlatti's contest, the controversy around the liquids they ingested, and their scientific supervision by medical doctors, all reinforced their own professional status as itinerant fasters in a golden decade for that kind of endeavor. For all those reasons, Succi and Merlatti can be viewed as useful, epistemologically-active charlatans.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"33 4","pages":"405-422"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39727276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between learned and popular culture: A world of syncretism and acculturation.","authors":"Nathalie Richard","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000119","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The world of charlatans is a world of constantly shifting borders and redefinitions, a world of crossed lines and pushed boundaries. Can one even speak of \"the world\" of charlatans in the singular, when the examples we are given to read in this volume reveal such great diversity that they seem to defeat any attempt to define common traits, as Roy Porter (1989) tried to do in his time? Certainly, commercial interests and the lure of a quick and easy profit seem to have motivated some charlatans. Certainly, the universal effects of the nostrum or (psycho)therapeutic procedures were often put forward as a commercial argument. Certainly, many had an itinerant career; but this was not always the case. In fact, these traits are not shared, and the main reason is probably that, aside from a very particular context in early modern Italy, the qualification of charlatan was not claimed by the actors themselves, but was attributed to them by others, be they contemporaries or later historians. These features are therefore only common if we understand them as stigmata1 attributed to charlatans by those who wish to distinguish themselves from them or to draw a line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"33 4","pages":"491-495"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39741919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SIC volume 33 issue 4 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0269889721000181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0269889721000181","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":" ","pages":"b1 - b2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48502100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SIC volume 33 issue 4 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s026988972100017x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s026988972100017x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":" ","pages":"f1 - f3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45773008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Charlatan epistemology: As illustrated by a study of wonder-working in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.","authors":"Koen Vermeir","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000193","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article highlights the epistemic concerns that have permeated the historical discourse around charlatanism. In it, I study the term \"charlatan\" as a multivalent actor's category without a stable referent. Instead of defining or identifying \"the charlatan,\" I analyze how the concept of the charlatan was used to make epistemic interventions about what constituted credible knowledge in two interconnected controversies. Focusing on these controversies allows me to thematize how the concept of \"the charlatan\" expanded beyond medical contexts and to bring a history of knowledge perspective to the history of medicine.The title of the article, \"Charlatan Epistemology,\" indicates a historical epistemological approach to charlatanism as well as the existence of a charlatan's embodied epistemology. On the one hand, I historicize the epistemic characteristics of charlatanism, focusing on virtues as well as vices, knowledge as well as ignorance, by addressing the historical and contextual specificities of two case studies and the larger epistemic concerns at play. On the other hand, I show how references to charlatanism implied the existence of specific embodied knowledges, special skills and techniques to manipulate either natural secrets or the human psyche, and I explore the similarities and differences between charlatan epistemology and artisanal epistemology.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"33 4","pages":"363-384"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39727277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}