The work of the research group of Lorraine Daston for 1996-1997 addresses three major topics: the varieties of scientific experience, the history of demonstration, proof, and test in the sciences, and the history of scientific objectivity. All three projects aim to historicize, by means of specific examples taken from several periods and scientific disciplines, categories of analysis long taken for granted by historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science. These projects take as their departure point that experience, demonstration, and objectivity themselves have histories, which can be reconstructed on the basis of key examples.
Lorraine Daston (responsible), in cooperation with Sonja Brentjes, Rivka Feldhay, Doris Kaufmann, Ursula Klein, H. Otto Sibum, Stuart Strickland
Both the natural and human sciences have been extremely fertile in new forms of experience: clinical observations, laboratory experiments, legal indices, statistical tables, anatomical dissection, field work in natural history and anthroplogy, introspection, instrumental probes, ideal types, and computer simulations. Some of these forms of experience are as old as Hippocrates; others have emerged within living memory. Each has its characteristic objects of study, canons of evidence and proof, and conventions of literary presentation. All have, until very recently, been lumped together under the rubric "empiricism" by philosophers, and mostly ignored by historians. The project "The Varieties of Scientific Experience," begun fall 1996 in Department II, has three goals: (1) to construct a refined taxonomy of the forms of scientific experience across a varied sample of disciplines and periods; (2) to trace the history of each of these forms, with special attention to the conditions under which they emerge or disappear; and (3) to investigate the relationships between different forms of experience and corresponding standards of evidence, proof, and description within the sample.
Although the center of gravity for the sample lies within the natural sciences since the seventeenth century, for several reasons it has been considered essential to include some examples both from the human sciences and from earlier periods. First, some forms, like the clinical observation, have a long and continuous, though not static, history that stretches back to antiquity. Second, the current classifications of knowledge that divide the natural from the human sciences diverge sharply from earlier classifications. For example, in the medieval university curriculum, music theory was the near neighbor of astronomy, and astronomy and physics were remote from one another. Third, there are historical affinities and genealogies among forms of experience that cut across even contemporary classifications. It is, for example, difficult to understand seventeenth-century notions of what constituted a scientific fact without careful study of the legal doctrines of evidence drawn from things and witnesses from the early modern period. Throughout the project, the importance of comparisons has been emphasized - between disciplines, periods, and intellectual and cultural contexts.
The study of forms of scientific experience sheds light on two other fundamental issues in the history of science: how certain kinds of objects (and not others) come to qualify as objects of scientific inquiry; and what can and cannot be communicated in the presentation of scientific experience to a community dispersed in time and space. In the first case, there is an intimate connection between what can become a scientific object and what are considered to be legitimate forms of scientific experience. For example, the controversy in psychology at the turn of this century over the legitimacy of introspection as a form of scientific experience - it was empirical but not public knowledge - threatened to eliminate the will and consciousness itself as objects of scientific inquiry. In the second case, there are very special conditions placed upon communications intended for audiences scattered across the globe and even across centuries as opposed to those for an audience addressed face to face, as in the classroom. Certain crucial aspects of scientific experience, for example the elements of bodily skill required to get a capricious experiment to work, may become invisible because they cannot be communicated in words, though they might be learned by example.
In the early phases of the project effort was made to limit cases of scientific experience, specifically, to cases that stretch some aspect of the current conceptions of the empirical almost to the breaking point. These limiting cases unsettle the self-evidence of currently accepted forms of scientific experience by providing concrete alternatives to the choices of what to investigate and how. They also throw into relief the otherwise hidden criteria by which certain forms of experience and description are judged to be legitimate. If, for example, the late eighteenth-century Seelenforscher attempted to develop an empirical science of dreams, but psychologists of the early twentieth century rejected the possibility of a science even of waking consciousness, a crucial shift in these criteria may explain the change in attitudes. Similarly, if mid-eighteenth-century physicists discard reports of luminescent phenomena that their seventeenth-century predecessors deemed key to understanding the nature of light, the explanation for this probably lies in a change in criteria of evidence, significance, and even of facticity. Special attention has been paid to hybrid kinds of scientific experience, which usually emerge in contexts of application: for example, the standardization of scientific units and procedures through the creation of an electrification network, the extraordinary pressures on psychiatry to classify and cure war-time mental disorders, or the "paper tools" of tables and formulas manipulated by organic chemists suspended between the laboratory and the factory.
Lorraine Daston (in cooperation with Katharine Park, Wellesley College)
Final revisions on the book manuscript Wonders and the Order of Nature, which traces the responses of European naturalists from the high Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to marvels and anomalies in nature, were completed in the summer of 1996. The book will be published by Zone Books. Chapter headings are as follows:
Introduction: Nature at the Limit
Chapter 1: The Topography of Wonder
Chapter 2: The Properties of Things
Chapter 3: Wonder among the Philosophers
Chapter 4: Marvelous Particulars
Chapter 5: Monsters: A Case Study
Chapter 7: Wonders of Art, Wonders of Nature
Chapter 8: The Passions of Inquiry
The project aims to revise another misconception regarding the history of early modern science both in Europe and in the Muslim world. This subject emerged from a large-scale survey of reports about the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mogul empires written by European gentlemen travelers, diplomats, merchants, and missionaries between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. They not only demonstrate that, contrary to current standard historiography, there were scientific communities at work in the different Muslim societies during the period of investigation, but they also illustrate that European scientific endeavors were significantly linked with the Muslim societies of their times. On the European side, this concerns the endowment and enrichment of cabinets of curiosity, botanical gardens, and royal and other libraries. It also applies to astronomical and geographical observations, historical investigations, comparisons of measures, sales of instruments, the composition of general and specialized dictionaries, professional careers, and patterns of patronage. On the side of the Muslim societies, the connection is evident in the acquisition of European books and instruments, including telescopes and microscopes, and in the translation and discussion of geographical, mathematical, astronomical, or medical books by Italian, French, German, Dutch, and other European authors of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Also relevant were efforts to introduce different types of European mechanical devices in mining, printing, military techniques, or the usage of water as energy.
The project surveys a broad range of sources to establish the scope and types of these European-Muslim collaborative encounters in the sciences. Its major methodological foundation is the analysis of the cultural patterns which warranted and shaped these encounters.
Departing from the debates on the certitude and scientificity of the mathematical disciplines which erupted in the context of a commentary on the pseudo-Aristotlian Mechanical Questions, this book identifies and characterizes two different types of mathematical physical discourses on motion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and follows the development of an ontology of mathematical entities, which was used for purposes of legitimization by one discourse and rejected by the other. Themes of this book were developed in a contribution on Galileo and the Jesuits to the volume Companion to Galileo. A paper on "The Cultural Field of Jesuit Science" was written for the conference "The Jesuits: Culture, Learning and the Arts," which took place in Boston in May 1997. Another version was presented at the department seminar in the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Feldhay also wrote a paper ("On the Agony of Knowing") for a workshop held at the Einstein Forum in June, and participated in the conference, " The Varieties of Scientific Experience ," where she commented on two papers.
Following up on studies of the relationship between psychiatric discourse, its social context, and cultural representation from the 1850's to the turn of the century - a period which saw the establishment of a scientific psychiatry emphazising the physiological basis of psychic phenomena in general and the somatic causes of hysteria in particular - the current project focuses on the disappearance of the latter as a central object of psychiatric interest at the beginning of the twentieth century. Following Emil Kraepelin's new system of classification of nervous and mental diseases, the psychiatric discourse began to abandon the concept of hysteria as a disease entity by assigning hysterical symptoms to psychosis, which were defined on the basis of cerebral disfunctions. When the First World War presented the mass phenomenon of soldiers answering to the previously unknown experience of technical warfare in the language of hysteria, the psychiatric community once again was forced to address the conceptual and therapeutical question of hysteria. This project analyses the importance of the First World War as a new space for psychiatric experience and the development of new psychiatric definitions for the normal and the pathological. As a result of the First World War, the key question of the psychiatric discourse, namely whether external and social or internal and endogenous causes were responsible for psychic and mental disorders, was presumed to have been resolved. A further consequence was the beginning of the divergence of the disciplines of psychiatry and neurology on the one hand from psychoanalysis and psychotherapy on the other. This process in the 1920's is investigated on different levels: the clinic, the courts, the psychiatric discussion of the new "key" disease schizophrenia, and the non-scientific public language or discourse on the self. A primary focus concerns the distinctions and the common ground between psychiatric and public cultural practice, their impact, and the exchange between these spheres.
This project is concerned with the introduction of chemical formulas into nineteenth-century chemistry, the different functions of formulas as models and paper tools in organic chemistry, and, intimately connected to the latter, the transformation of vegetable and animal chemistry into organic chemistry during the first half of the nineteenth century. Chemical formulas in their still familiar algebraic form were introduced by Jacob Berzelius in 1813, but not even Berzelius applied them in the subsequent ten years. This changed starting in the late 1820's, when French and German chemists working in the emerging subdiscipline of organic chemistry began to use formulas. Within a few decades, chemical formulas not only became reified as paper tools accepted by all chemists, but also created a new "paper world" that thoroughly altered the image of chemistry. The widespread opinion on chemical formulas among scientists, philosophers and historians of science is that formulas were a convenient means of representing existing knowledge, mere abbreviations and means of communication. No historian or philosopher of science has considered with sufficient care the manipulative aspects of formula techniques and the power of chemical formulas to produce knowledge when applied as paper tools in chemical research. Although scholars have recognized the link between the fate of chemical formulas and the transformation of vegetable and animal chemistry into organic chemistry, the question as to why this link exists has not been investigated. This conjunction of two different research traditions and their following co-evolution demand explanation.
Detailed analysis of a series of experiments performed from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the 1850's - experiments which may be regarded as "paradigmatic" for organic chemistry - and study of the different functions of chemical formulas within this experimental practice, confirmed the conviction that chemical formulas were indispensable "paper tools" in the transformation of vegetable and animal chemistry into organic chemistry. This part of the project, which includes the analysis of the qualitative and quantitative meaning and of the representational form of chemical formulas is nearly finished. It is based on research reports published in various French and German scientific journals. The second part of the project, currently in progress, embeds this detailed analysis of the interaction of experiments and chemical formulas into the broader cultural changes that occurred in the transformation of vegetable and animal chemistry into organic chemistry. Compared with "vegetable chemistry" and "animal chemistry," "organic chemistry" meant a thoroughly different research culture. The epistemic objects of eighteenth-century vegetable and animal chemistry were natural bodies and natural transformations; the experiments done in these fields were intended to leave the natural state of the bodies as untouched as possible; the classification to a large extent followed the principles of natural history; theories were exclusively articulated in natural language; and conceptions were not based on quantification. In contrast, organic chemistry investigated chemical reactions which did not exist in "nature" outside the laboratory, created a new realm of artificial organic substances, introduced a new taxonomic system based on chemical formulas, and linked conceptions and theories articulated in natural language to chemical formulas which embodied measured quantities of chemical substances. This latter part of the project is based more strongly on the analysis of chemical textbooks, letters, and popular writings than on research reports.
The study addresses epistemological questions about the uses of experiments, and about the interaction of experimentation with symbolic representations, models, and conceptions and theories based on quantification in nineteenth-century sciences. A particular focus is the category of the model and techniques of modeling. The project's approach to "models" investigates their functions rather than their structure, thus embedding them in historically specific epistemic systems. The transformation of vegetable and animal chemistry into organic chemistry sheds some light on another epistemological question: what distinctions did nineteenth-century experimental scientists make between nature and art, and how did they draw the boundary between the natural and artificial? Both kinds of epistemological issues are linked to another large question. Modern science in its current epistemological forms, its specialization, and its abstinence from ethical and social issues was shaped in the nineteenth century. This project is a contribution to historical-epistemological studies which attempt to analyze the particular kind of knowledge and style of reasoning which became prevalent in nineteenth-century sciences, particularly in the physical sciences (including chemistry). It studies prerequisites for the transformation of nineteenth-century physical sciences such as quantification and mathematization, the pragmatic application of non-verbal paper tools, the marginalization of natural language, and links to industrial application.
Recent historical research has shown that the practices and representation of experiment differ greatly. This has led to a variety of methods of identifying and interpreting the traces produced by historical actors. Reworking experiments by performing them with replicas of historical objects is a technique developed to enrich our knowledge of historical laboratory events. This performative historiography demonstrates that working knowledge in the laboratory is embodied in human actions and cannot be expressed fully in literary form. These hidden dimensions of knowledge production generally are called skills or tacit knowledge, depending on the kind of scientific inquiry involved. As outlined in the Annual Report 1995, in order to study these neglected dimensions of experimentation and its historical meaning for the development of nineteenth-century physics, this methodological approach is the basis of a broader study of the history of a scientific fact, i.e., the mechanical equivalent of heat. At the time, this was seen both as one of the most important "constants of nature" and as the "golden number of the nineteenth century."
Pursuing this course of research raised another question as to the impact of sensuous experience on the formation of knowledge, and whether this can be reconstructed historically. This project addressed these issues in a two-step approach. Firstly, reworking Joule's paddle-wheel experiment by means of a replica provided insight into the use of both the instruments and the senses of the experimenter. Thermometrical skills were identified as particularly crucial for the performance of the experiment, although these were neither noted in Joule's literary renditions nor existent in the early Victorian scientific community. But it is reasonable to argue that such skills were part of the working knowledge of the historical experimenter. The project argues that instruments in action speak their own "language" and that the "eloquence" of the experiment is given through the actors' performance. This emphasis on the performative led to the notion of gestural knowledge in order to account for the embodiment of knowledge in human actions. Sensuous experience is certainly a constitutive part of the gestural knowledge of the experimenter, according to this dynamic perspective of knowledge production. Notebook entries and publications were important, but they were not sufficient representations of the gestural knowledge which was required to carry out experiments.
Secondly, in order to see how sensuous experience had an effect on the formation of scientific knowledge, the historical context in which this experiment was performed and the necessary gestural knowledge was acquired must be reconstructed. Previous historical accounts of Joule's thermometric experience point to his extraordinary skills, but leave open the question of where they were acquired. The reconstruction of apparently unrelated sites of knowledge production, such as the brewing culture to which Joule also belonged, show that only through his continuous work in the laboratory and at the brewing site was he able to develop the gestural knowledge necessary to perform the experiment. More recent results indicate that this brewers "world of sense" was formative even for Joule's knowledge of the dynamic nature of heat, far from accepted in the scientific community of his time. The results thus far have shown that it is possible to reconstruct the historical process of how changing sensory experiences are formative in the production of scientific knowledge. What conventionally has been called "tacit knowledge," and has often obscured the process of major scientific changes, is not tacit at all, but just those forms of expression of gestural knowledge of the historical actor or research collective which can become explicit only through their performance or partly through the objects themselves.
This project is an historical examination of the privileged, yet precarious, position of personal experience within the empirical sciences and of the ideological frameworks within which knowledge of nature became linked with knowledge of the self. While assertions of a perfect fit between an external natural environment and an internal self became increasingly common towards the end of the eighteenth century, these formulations consistently obscured at least two difficulties to which this project is addressed. On the one hand, by portraying nature as a living creature whose visible history corresponded to the life-history of an individual, this ideology conflated knowledge of the body and knowledge of the self. On the other, it tended to exclude an essential third term: the communities within which self-knowledge and knowledge of nature each sought their place. The claim that knowledge of nature led directly to knowledge of the self, and vice versa, must be read in the face of an awareness that the two held radically different status within contemporary scientific communities and within a communally shared body of knowledge.
This project thus is embedded at once in a history of modern subjectivity and in an analysis of how concerns about personal knowledge came to define the parameters of a distinctively scientific public sphere. To put it another way, the project investigates why, at this critical moment in the "structural transformation of the public sphere," the self became an issue within science - and how, within a discourse ostensibly devoted to nature, attention to the self of the scientist helped shape a new conception of individuality.
By focusing on the self-experimentation of Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, and Jan Purkyne, the study has begun to unpack an early moment in the formation of the ideology of self-knowledge by considering the peculiarities of locating the self within the body of the investigator, a body conceived at once as a laboratory instrument, a metaphor for nature, and a sign of the investigator's individual identity. Historicizing the relationship between the self and the body of the natural philosopher also requires scrutiny of the tensions between solitude and community at the turn of the last century. Those who experimented on their own bodies did so at great personal expense and often under intensely private conditions. Their withdrawal into an internal world of personal and perhaps even idiosyncratic experience may appear to have been an attempt to escape from the political and intellectual turmoil that accompanied the Napoleonic Wars and the demands of an emergent public sphere; but these retreats also presupposed an eventual return to a historically specific community whose reservations about personal knowledge were well known to and often ambivalently shared by those who fled. It is thus essential that this study of self-knowledge attend to the difficulties anticipated and encountered in trying to convey experiences rooted in a particular body to a scientific community that was, for ideological reasons of its own, increasingly coming to esteem general over particular truths.
Jutta Berger, "Georg Ernst Stahl's Concept of Chemical Processes"; Christophe Bonneuil, "Plant Science in the French Empire, 1870-1940"; Alix Cooper, "Local Knowledge and Natural History in the Early Modern German Territories"; Michael Dettelbach, "Surveying Techniques and Nature-Physiognomy in Humboldtian Science"; Elisabeth Emter, "The Human Corpse and Personal Identity in Germany in the 17th and 18th Centuries"; Martin Gierl, "Eighteenth-Century Numismatics and Scientific Rationalisation"; Cheryce Kramer, "The Psychiatry of Gemüth in a Biedermaier Asylum"; Christoph Lüthy, "Atomist Iconography"; Alexandre Mallard, "The Role of Scientific Instrument-Makers Between Science and the Market"; Brian Ogilvie, "Observation and Experience in Early Modern History"; Dorinda Outram, "Scientific Voyages in the Eighteenth Century"; Gianna Pomata, "From Recipe to `Historia' in Early Modern Medicine"; Annelore Rieke-Müller, "German Research Travels and Travelers in the Eighteenth Century"; Sophie Roux, "Rational Mechanics and Corpuscular Theories of Matter"; Richard Staley, "Inferometers, Experiment, and the Early History of Relativity Theory"; R. André Wakefield, "Cameralism and Useful Knowledge in Germany"; M. Norton Wise, "Muscles and Engines: Hermann Helmholtz in Industrializing Berlin"; Michael Witmore, "Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England" (see Activities of the Visiting Scholars and Research Fellows p. 190) .
Lorraine Daston (responsible) in cooperation with Wolfgang Küttler and Annette Vogt
When did objectivity begin? With the first gropings towards a philosophy of nature in the fragments of the pre-Socratics? With the strivings of ancient historians like Thucydides and Tacitus to render an impartial account of the past? With the meditations of Descartes on the possibility of certain knowledge? With the cult of facts established by seventeenth-century scientific societies such as the Accademia del Cimento, the Royal Society of London, and the Paris Académie des Sciences? With the attempts of Enlightenment savants to replicate each other's experiments on electricity, pneumatics, or animal magnetism? With scientific illustrations made by camera obscura - or by photography? With the emergence of techniques and instruments of precision measurement in the nineteenth century? With the invention of statistical techniques of data reduction and inference?
Each of these historical moments, which arc from the sixth century B.C. to the 1940's, reflects a facet of our current notion of objectivity. Truth, certainty, impartiality, facticity, publicity, authenticity, impersonality - these concepts all cluster tightly around objectivity as we know it, as do the practices of photography and statistical data analysis. But a mere inventory of the components and close neighbors of objectivity will tell us little about the meaning of the whole, and still less about its history. Both meaning and history depend not only on the components and associations but also on their interrelationships: how did these elements come to cohere together? The corresponding historical question is not, how and when did each element emerge, but rather, how and when did these components and associations crystallize into a whole?
This project seeks to answer this question by studying both the concrete practices (photography, statistical data analysis, etc.) and the reflective ideals (publicity, impersonality, etc.) of objectivity in historical context. Although seventeenth- and eighteenth-century case studies provide instructive antecedents and contrasts, the focus of the study lies in the period 1820-1950, when the very word "objectivity" and its cognates reappeared within major European languages, and when objectivity replaced truth as the primary goal of the sciences. This transformation of ideals and practices stretched across many disciplines in the natural sciences, from anatomy to geology, and also encompassed human sciences such as history and sociology. Hence, although the project emphasizes the specific cultural and intellectual contexts which made this transformation possible, it aims ultimately at a global account of a global phenomenon that affected many diverse disciplinary and national traditions.
At present, the project consists of three complementary studies, each concentrating on a different aspect of the history of objectivity: techniques of visualization in the natural sciences; the careers of women scientists and mathematicians at Berlin universities and within the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft during the first decades of higher education for women in Prussia; and the role of history within the social sciences at the turn of the twentieth century, emphasizing the work of Max Weber. Each of these studies emphasizes a different moment of scientific objectivity. New ways of making images, particularly photography and global mapping, at once symbolized and constituted new forms of scientific objectivity in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. These images were attempted solutions of epistemological and moral problems at the heart of objectivity. The career possibilities for women scientists in early twentieth-century Berlin shed light on another aspect of the practices of objectivity: to what extent were contemporary ideals of a science blind to personal traits realized in institutions and biographies? Although objectivity may have originated in the natural sciences, social scientists confronted with challenge of political relevance on the one hand and with the threat of political ideology on the other provided some of the most acute and far-reaching reflections on the possibility and limits of objectivity.
Lorraine Daston (in cooperation with Peter Galison, Harvard University)
The photograph and the global map: these images were at the core of two new and distinct forms of scientific objectivity which emerged in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, which might be called mechanical objectivity and communitarian objectivity. Mechanical objectivity countered the subjectivity of projection onto nature, including judgment and aesthetic idealization. It was nominalist in its metaphysics, mechanical in its methods, and self-restrained in its morals. Scientific images produced in the service of this brand of objectivity were neither types nor ideals nor averages - all time-honored modes of scientific illustration - but rather representations of concrete individuals. Wherever possible, image-making and observation were mechanized, through photographs, self-registering instruments, and statistical data reduction. In a moral vein, scientists upholding the ideals of mechanical objectivity exhorted themselves and their colleagues to refrain from intervention in and interpretation of phenomena. The unretouched photograph became both the emblem and the substance of mechanical objectivity.
Communitarian objectivity, in contrast, countered the subjectivity of idiosyncracy and parochialism, not only of individuals but also of local research groups. Proponents of mechanical objectivity worried that human intervention might distort natural phenomena; proponents of communitarian objectivity fretted about how anthropocentric scales of time and space might fail to register certain phenomena altogether - the path of a storm system, the shape of an isotherm, the distribution of a species. Communitarian objectivity preferred composites of many observations to representations of individuals, and standardized to mechanical techniques. Whereas mechanical objectivity called for self-restraint in judgment and interpretation in the name of authenticity, communitarian objectivity demanded the equally severe curtailment of individual and/or local autonomy in choice of instruments, methods, and even research topics in the name of solidarity. Its most characteristic visual technique was the global map - of the whole earth or the entire dome of the heavens - composed like a mosaic by a network of farflung observers, each contributing a fragment.
This study traces the emergence and development of both forms of objectivity through atlases of scientific objects, from nebulae to fossils, and through the records of the scientific collaborative projects, such as the Internationales Gradmessungsprojekt and the Carte du Ciel, launched in the mid-nineteenth century. Close attention to the choice of practices, such as choice of instrument or mode of illustration, described and debated in these sources reveals how both forms of objectivity fused methods, morals, and metaphysics into new ways of investigating and understanding nature.
In 1996-97 research was extended in two directions from its nineteenth-century focus: backwards into the eighteenth century and forward into the twentieth century, in order to highlight contrasts with the characteristic forms of objectivity that emerged in the nineteenth-century sciences. A study of eighteenth-century scientific illustration, particularly in botany and anatomy, reveals a different epistemic ideal, that of "truth to nature," which strived for accuracy while permitting idealization, interpretation, and abstraction in depictions of natural objects. In the twentieth century, scientific imaging techniques are increasingly accompanied by calls for judgment by an expert eye - not the genial interpreter of nature of the eighteenth century, still less the mechanical observer of the nineteenth, but rather the trained professional. Close comparison of preliminary sketches of objects - plants, insects, fossils, dissected animals - annotated by both artists and naturalists with published versions shows how scientific objects come into being: an initial rendition, often highly idiosyncratic with respect both to the object portrayed and to the style of portrayal, becomes a type specimen, which stands in for a whole class of objects and serves as a reference for a community of naturalists and artists.
Activities in the context of the present project focused on two major points. First the project investigated the relation between history, science, and objectivity in Max Weber's work. With respect to all three items, Weber's work and its reception reveal an internal tension between structural and evolutionary issues (i.e., social questions) as well as overarching elementary explanations of cultural motivations of action and systems of values and norms (i.e., general problems of culture).
The issues addressed in this project apply to the peculiarities of empirical research and concept formation in all historically oriented disciplines. An analysis of Weber's concept of value-relation and value-freedom of empirical research on history, of his ideal types, and of his concept of modernization as rationalization and disenchantment will be concluded in spring 1998 and will be published as a monograph. Another important contribution of Weber's approach is his perception of the historicity of nature and of human culture. Therefore Weber's approach to history has particular relevance for the role of science in modern rationalization. This process is seen by Weber not only as technical progress in civilization, but also as an irresolvable contradiction between the technical-bureaucratic increase of Zweckrationalität and the internal qualities of lifestyle (Lebensführung).
From this context, the interdisciplinary question of cultural history emerged: how are historicity, a cognitive function of science, and cultural value systems interrelated? This issue demands a comprehensive treatment of the basic typology of historical knowledge (involving structure, development, progress, events, actions, and historical alternatives). Weber's investigation of the relationship between religious structures of motivation in different cultures (which also function as formative elements of social structures) and of the ethics of lifestyle, especially of economic ethics (Wirtschaftsethiken) provides also a framework for assaying the different conceptions of knowledge, of life practice, and of historical change in these cultures.
In view of the changes to the concept of science and objectivity since the turn of the last century and subsequent decades, further studies have been initiated to investigate Weber's sources in the natural sciences and humanities of the nineteenth century, as well as to examine the reception of his innovative approaches. The hitherto conducted studies will be expanded in a wider framework of comparative studies embracing social and natural scientists in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The second set of activities closely linked to the research of the work of Max Weber, now partially completed, focuses on Marx's theory and method and on the Marxist tradition in the historical sciences. Like the Weber study, it addresses the issue of history as a form of knowledge on the one hand, and history as a means of orientation of practical life in modern societies on the other. Marx focuses on how scientific objectivity is linked to the knowledge of internal "objective" coherence in history and how this serves simultaneously both as a basis for theory formation and as a strategy for socio-cultural change. Marx brings together the traditional ideal of developing the historical and cultural disciplines towards the standards developed for the classical natural sciences with very concrete social perspectives. At the same time, he proposes a new concept tailored to the pecularities of the subject matter of the social and historical sciences. The roots of this innovation lie in the development of the sciences since the end of the eighteenth century. Marx's innovation had lasting but contradictory effects on the disciplines in question, their interdisciplinary relations and, particularly, their political engagement.
Two major studies which related Marx's approach to the development of the sciences in the nineteenth century as well as to the reception of his work in the twentieth century were finished in 1996 and 1997.
Work continued on the project of a comprehensive survey of women who graduated from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin from 1898/1899 to 1945 and of women scientists who worked at different institutes of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG) (see the Annual Reports of 1994 and 1995). Initial results were published and further results were reported in various lectures.
In addition to establishing the identities and biographies of this surprisingly large group of women researchers, the study aims to uncover:
(1) What were the reasons for women gravitating to certain institutions and specialities within the natural sciences and mathematics? For what reasons did women find opportunities in some Institutes of the KWG? Where did women have better chances, in the KWG or at the University? When and why did the situation change?
(2) What ideals and practices of early twentieth-century scientific research, particularly those of objectivity, helped or hindered the recruitment and the participation of women?
(3) What role did changing cultural views of femininity during this period in Germany play in the careers of these women scientists? What were the reasons for changing possibilities for employment of women? Why did the situation for female scientists, especially those working in industrial laboratories, change so rapidly after 1933?
As in 1994/95, archival research in 1996 and in 1997 was concentrated in the archive of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the archive of the University of Berlin and the Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Academy of Science in Berlin. Furthermore, in 1996, the papers of Lise Meitner in the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge (UK) were studied and other archives were consulted.
1. The study of the documents about the dissertations of women at the Berlin University from 1899 to 1945 has been finished. A surprisingly large number of 368 theses on natural sciences by women were studied. From 1899 to 1936, all 617 dissertations by women were done at the Philosophical Faculty; among them, 346 dealt with topics in the humanities and social sciences, whereas 271 covered topics in mathematics and natural sciences. From 1936 to April 1945 only 97 theses were submitted by women at the Mathematical-Science Faculty, while 310 theses were completed by women at the Philosophical Faculty.
Careful attention was given to the dissertations based on research performed at the laboratories of Institutes of the KWG. Between 1919 and 1936, at least 32 theses were based on research done at the laboratories of several Institutes of the KWG: fourteen in chemistry, fourteen in biology, two in medicine and two in physics. Between 1936 and 1945 only eleven theses were based on research done at the laboratories of Institutes of the KWG: three in chemistry, seven in biology and only one in physics.
Furthermore, all documents of those women who had completed a Habilitation at the Philosophical Faculty (twelve between 1919 and 1932 and four between 1937 and 1945) and at the Mathematical-Science Faculty (only two in 1939 and in 1943) were also studied.
A directory of all archival documents related to dissertations and Habilitationen by women, with a brief introduction to the theme and with preliminary results, was prepared for print and published as preprint no. 57 of the Institute (in April 1997).
To answer the questions mentioned above, further studies about the possibilities of the employment of women with a doctoral degree are necessary. Biographical research on women scientists who achieved a Habilitation at the University was begun in 1996 and continued in 1997. Furthermore, all documents of those women who worked as an assistant in the Institutes of the Philosophical Faculty and the Mathematical-Science Faculty were studied in 1997.
2. The biographical research on women scientists who worked in several Institutes of the KWG continued in 1996 and in 1997. In 1996, records of more than 150 women scientists working for the KWG during the period between 1912 and 1945 have been uncovered, to date, a total of over 192 women scientists. It has become apparent that women scientists headed at least eleven departments in Institutes of the KWG. There were large differences between the institutes, with some institutes employing no female scientists and others employing many. The reconstruction of the scientific careers of the eleven department heads at the KWIs, who have been omitted from the official history of the KWG until the present, continues. Initial results about the different places of the women scientists in the different KWIs and the explanations for these differences were published as preprint no. 67 of the Institute (in July 1997).
Expanding the level at this study from biography to prosography, the project next must reconstruct the sociological backgrounds of these women, the intellectual affinities governing their choice of a certain discipline or sub-discipline, and the culture of gender relations at the leading scientific institutions of Berlin during this period. In expanding the comprehensive survey of women at the University of Berlin and at the Institutes of the KWG, a special comparison must be drawn between the assistants at the University and the scientific workers at the KWIs on the one hand, and the female Privatdozenten at the University and the female leaders of departments at the Institutes of the KWG on the other.
Francesca Bordogna, "Objectivity and Psychical Research, 1880-1910"; Stéphane Callens, "History of Measure - History of Risk"; Berna Eden, "Psychology versus Logic in 19th-Century Probability Theory"; Morgane Labbé, "History of the Concept of Nationality in Statistics"; Sybilla Nikolow, "The Visual Representation of Statistics"; Libby Schweber, "Statistical Entities and the Creation of New Disciplines in 19th-Century France and Britain"; Zeno G. Swijtinks, "Early Visual Representations of Experimental and Observational Data" (see Activities of the Visiting Scholars and Research Fellows p. 190) .
Lorraine Daston (responsible) in cooperation with Joan Cadden, William Clark, and Sophie Roux
Epistemology studies how we know and how secure our knowledge is. Historical epistemology studies, inter alia, the history of the specific ways devised to make knowledge secure, from the mathematical demonstration to the judicial proof to the empirical test. Although the words "demonstration," "proof," and "test" in their narrow senses refer to very different aims and procedures - contrast, for example, the demonstration, which seeks to circumvent an induction over cases, with the eminently inductive test of a hypothesis or a machine - their histories and current usages are closely intertwined in the major European languages. This project is dedicated to posing philosophical questions about how knowledge, both theoretical and practical, becomes trustworthy in a concrete, historical vein: what are the forms of argument, the techniques, the procedures that guarantee various kinds of knowledge, and how did they emerge and become authoritative? Although the project takes mathematical and scientific knowledge as its departure point, it follows the broader disciplinary and practical traditions of the words "demonstration," "test," and "proof" in including theological, medical, legal, and technological cases as well. Particularly revealing are examples which treat (1) prototypical forms of argument that become models for all other forms of secure knowledge (e.g., Euclidean geometry, or scholastic arguments for the existence of God); (2) procedures and standards that migrate from one disciplinary context to another (e.g., the application of legal standards of evidence to early modern civil and natural history, or the adaptation of proofing techniques to assess the gold content of coins for chemical analysis); (3) the introduction of novel methods to prove or test (e.g., the polygraph in the cross-examination of witnesses, or double-blind trials in medical research); and (4) the convergence and conflict of different methods for securing knowledge about the same objects (e.g., bodily tact versus instruments, or computer simulations versus physical experiments).