Urban History May Exam

Question 1

diff between induction and deduction

Answer 1

Therefore, inductive reasoning moves from specific instances into a generalized conclusion, while deductive reasoning moves from generalized principles that are known to be true to a true and specific conclusion

Question 2

what’s that really important book?

Answer 2

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962

Question 3

what came before that really important book?

Answer 3

Sir Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History published in 1931 which was a critique of histories positioning the past as a story of progress towards the present, challenging the notions of scientific progress which were still strong though the world was not clearly getting better post WW2, allowing the ideas to gain traction
He had three ideas about science:
1. it’s considered moral - embodying the basic values of freedom, rationality, truth and goodness
2. it’s philosophical - a particular method of inquiry producing causal laws
3. it’s considered a universal human enterprise - an expression of innate human curiosity

Question 4

What’s normal science according to Thomas Kuhnn?

Answer 4

normal science = science done when members of a field share a recognition of key past achievements in their field, believes about which theories are right, an understanding of the important probs of the field and methods for solving those probs - aka they share a paradigm
normal periods =/= stasis, but rather periods in which research is well structured
theoretical side of paradigm = worldview, providing categories and FWs to slot stuff into
practical side of paradigm = “form of life” - providing patterns of behaviour or FWs for action
normal science can be understood as “puzzle solving” - problems are to be solved within terms fo paradigm - failures are often blamed on researches rather than paradigm - regarded as an anomaly, fodder for future researchers
paradigms can only ever be partial reps of subject matter, so anomalies accumulate and may eventually become real problems which cause comfort and unease with terms fo paradgm, allowing scientists to consdier changes and alts to FW - this period is called CRISIS

example: textbooks, knowledge being passed down, indoctrination - educational and training structures

Question 5

What’s the Whig interpretation of history?

Answer 5

‘march of progress’
The Whig Interpretation of history within the history of science is historiography that focuses on the successful chain of scientific discoveries that led to present day science while ignoring failed theories, and was part of a broader movement dismissing teleological historical narratives after World War 1 called into question the liberalist impulse to place faith in the power of human reason to improve society regardless of past history and tradition. It was most famously defined and critiqued in Sir Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield demonstrated how, in the 1940s, science was being portrayed as philosophical, moral and universal, all of which are problematic assumptions. This essay will address each characterization of science, and show how more nuanced approaches to the history of science can challenge this monolithic perception.

Question 6

what’s kuhn’s idea of incommensurability?

Answer 6

“INCOMMENSURABILITY - ppl working in diff paradigms see world idfferently, meanings of theoretical terms change w/revs - can’t compare theories from diff paradigms

Question 7

What’s functionalism and who came up with it?

Answer 7

Robert Merton’s functionalist view sees science as serving the essential social function of providing certified knowledge, and this need structures norms of scientific behavior. This view dominated discussions of science through the 1960s. He argues that there is nothing especially ‘scientific’ about people who do science, but rather that social structures generally reward behavior that promotes growth of knowledge and penalizes behavior that retards it.
Embedded in other systems of power - “learnt thru relations of authority and maintained by the social discipline that sustains consensus in scientific communities”
Merton also tried to develop empirical, quantitative approaches to showing the influence of external factors on science. Despite these changes, Merton was quick to note his indebtedness to Hessen. Even with his emphasis on external factors, though, Merton differed from Hessen in his interpretation: Merton maintained that while researchers may be inspired and interested by problems which were suggested by extra-scientific factors, ultimately the researcher’s interests were driven by “the internal history of the science in question.

Question 8

How do you answer the idea that science is universal?

Answer 8

“Universal human enterprise, expression of innate human curiosity”
Idea that ‘pure science’ can travel geographically and remain unchanged
There is no such thing as raw observation
“Some of the most important values governing scientific practice are quite local; these local cultural values are tied to forms of social life and can be found articulated to some degree in situations of controversy”
INDOCTRINATION - people working within diff paradigms see things differently - enough so for it to shape their observations. there is no such thing as “raw observations” - observation is guided by language, concepts, ideas - this idea is called “theory-dependence of observation”

Question 9

Why wasn’t local history important in the history of science before?

Answer 9

“Some of the most important values governing scientific practice are quite local; these local cultural values are tied to forms of social life and can be found articulated to some degree in situations of controversy”

Science was seen as independent of geography - pure science could travel without changing

Question 10

What’s SSK?

Answer 10

Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

“Concerned precisely with what comes to count as scientific knowledge and how it comes to count as such, an essential foundation to the historiography of science”

Question 11

What’s a trading zone?

Answer 11

TRADING ZONE - area in which scientific and/or tech practices can fruitfully interact via simplified languages or pidgins w/o requiring full assimilations -

Question 12

What’s a boundary object?

Answer 12

Page 20: BOUNDRY OBJECTS - objects can form bridges accross boundaries if they can serve as a focus of attention in diff social worlds and are robust enough to maintain their IDs in those diff world - examples: standardized records
history of science has the power to get beyond textual readings of colonialism by looking at particular practices

Question 13

What is science if not philosophical?

Answer 13

Page 19: disciplines are ‘epistemic cultures’ which may have diff orientations to objects, social units of knowledge production and patterns fo interaction
idea that data may be subordinate to theory

Question 14

what was the history of science like before it became an academic discipline?

Answer 14

the development of the distinct academic discipline of the history of science and technology did not occur until the early 20th century, and was intimately bound to the changing role of science during the same time period. The history of science was once exclusively the domain of retired researchers — former scientists whose days in the laboratory had expired but still with a hearty interest in the field — and the rare specialist.

Question 15

Who was the founding father of the history of science in the US and what was his deal?

Answer 15

George Sarton
Though modern scholars do not usually share Sarton’s motivations — Sarton saw the history of science as the only genuine example of human progress

Question 16

Who kicked off the scientific rev in the 1930s?

Answer 16

In 1931, the Second International Congress of the History of Science was convened in London. The papers delivered by the Soviet delegation, led by N.I. Bukharin, quickly invigorated the discipline. Boris Hessen in particular delivered a paper entitled “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” in which he asserted that Isaac Newton’s most famous work was created to cater to the goals and desires of 17th century industry and economy. Hessen asserted that Newton’s work was inspired by his economic status and context, that the Principia was little more than the solution of technical problems of the bourgeoisie.
Present scholarship has revealed that Hessen’s motives were not completely academic. At that time in the Soviet Union, the work of Albert Einstein was under attack by Communist Party philosophers; being supposedly motivated by bourgeois values,

Question 17

What’s externalism

Answer 17

This method of doing the history of science became known as externalism, looking at the manner in which science and scientists are affected, and guided by, their context and the world in which they exist. It is an approach which eschews the notion that the history of science is the development of pure thought over time, one idea leading to another in a contextual bubble which could exist at any place, at any time, if only given the right geniuses.
In practice, the line between internalism and externalism can be incredibly fuzzy. Few historians then, or now, would insist that either of these approaches in their extremes paint a wholly complete picture

Question 18

What’s the strong programme?

Answer 18

The strong programme is a reaction against “weak” sociologies of science, which restricted the application of sociology to “failed” or “false” theories, such as phrenology. Failed theories would be explained by citing the researchers’ biases, such as covert political or economic interests. Sociology would be only marginally relevant to successful theories, which succeeded because they had revealed a true fact of nature.

Question 19

What were the tenants of the Edinburgh school?

Answer 19

As formulated by David Bloor,[3] the strong programme has four indispensable components:
1. Causality: it examines the conditions (psychological, social, and cultural) that bring about claims to a certain kind of knowledge.
2. Impartiality: it examines successful as well as unsuccessful knowledge claims.
3. Symmetry: the same types of explanations are used for successful and unsuccessful knowledge claims alike.
4. Reflexivity: it must be applicable to sociology itself.
barry barnes was also there

Question 20

WHat is Bruno Latour’s deal?

Answer 20

This early work argued that naïve descriptions of the scientific method, in which theories stand or fall on the outcome of a single experiment, are inconsistent with actual laboratory practice.
In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. Latour and Woolgar argued that, for untrained observers, the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy.
Latour and Woolgar produced a highly heterodox and controversial picture of the sciences. Drawing on the work of Gaston Bachelard, they advance the notion that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed within the laboratory—that they cannot be attributed with an existence outside of the instruments that measure them and the minds that interpret them. They view scientific activity as a system of beliefs, oral traditions and culturally specific practices— in short, science is reconstructed not as a procedure or as a set of principles but as a culture. Latour’s 1987 book Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society is one of the key texts of the sociology of scientific knowledge in which he famously wrote his Second Principle as follows: “Scientist and engineers speak in the name of new allies that they have shaped and enrolled; representatives among other representatives, they add these unexpected resources to tip the balance of force in their favor.”

Question 21

What is technoscience?

Answer 21

Technoscience states that the fields of science and technology are linked and grow together, and scientific knowledge requires an infrastructure of technology in order to remain stationary or move forward.
Technoscience thus comprises the history of human application of technology and modern scientific methods,

Question 22

Who is Elshakry and what does she say?

Answer 22

See: Week 2 - When Science Became Western by Marwa Elshakry
Looks at examples from 19th century Egypt and China to show how historiography reinterpreted Arabic and Chinese knowledge traditions in light of modern sciences to portray the as part of a diachronic and universal teleology culminating in ‘Western Science’
Concludes by arguing that a genealogy of the idea of Western science exposes the relationship between the history of science and knowledge traditions across the world as history of science occludes a more pluralistic global history of science.

Question 23

What is falsificationism?

Answer 23

Karl Popper, was obsessed with demarcating what is and is not science and created two criteria to distinguish science and non-science. For Popper, for something to be science it needs both to make risky predictions and for those predictions to be actualized. This idea about science is called falsificationism. Under this definition, neither Marxism nor psychoanalysis is a science because they are able to incorporate any outcome into their theory and rarely make specific predictions to be actualized. Theories which meet the first criteria by making a specific theory are deemed false when the theory is not actualized, according to Popper.

Question 24

What’s the Duhem Quine thesis?

Answer 24

The Duhem Quine thesis complicates this by arguing that a theory cannot be conclusively tested in isolation, but rather that tests also depend on a framework or web of beliefs which can be identified in the constellation of data, experimental setup and predictions. In practice, when a scientific test goes wrong, rarely is the entire theory dismissed. Rather, falsificationism is contaminated because the observer is blamed and the conditions of the experiment are often adjusted to account for their mistake. An example of this is when Newton’s predictions of the movement of the moon turned out to be wrong and he assumed that the theory, laws and maths were more likely to be correct with his observations and adjusted the optics until the data fit.

Question 25

What’s underdetermination?

Answer 25

Underdetermination is the name for the theory that scientists choose the best account of the data from among competing hypothesis but their choice cannot be logically conclusive because for every explanation, there are, in principle, indefinitely large numbers of possible other, empirically equivalent explanations.
The Vienna Circle, with their logical positivism would argue that there is no way of understanding the successes of science without accepting hat at least some circumstantial evaluations of evidence lead to approximately true theories.

Question 26

What does Mark Harrison argue about public health in india?

Answer 26

Mark Harrison argues that the history of public health administration in India dates from the assumption of Crown rule in 1859. Medical experts found that epidemic disease had seriously depleted the fighting capacity of British troops in repressing the rebellion in 1857 and insisted that preventive measures were much more effective than waiting for the next epidemic to break out.[115] Across the Empire it became a high priority for Imperial officials to establish a public health system in each colony. They applied the best practices as developed in Britain, using an elaborate administrative structure in each colony. The system depended on trained local elites and officials to carry out the sanitation improvements, quarantines, inoculations, hospitals, and local treatment centers that were needed.