When is the right time to know something? What difficulties arise if knowledge is created prematurely or tardily? How do fears about the punctuality of knowing shape the tools applied to knowledge problems? And how is the historian's understanding of the past configured by her concepts of time?
This panel investigates how the practice of scholarly and investigative programs is linked to distinct understandings of and anxieties about time in different contexts. It will consider not only how the temporal modes of those who conceive projects inform goals and planning, but also how the portrayal of those projects is determined by the temporal assumptions of observers: the pressure to deliver results on the clock and results that will last; the distinct temporal orientations of the cathedral builder, the industrial time-manager, the historicist legal-scholar; the many granularities of time in diverse fora at home and abroad. It will examine how time-scales and timing-schemes figure in disciplines like historiography (past and present), to architecture, economics, biology, and philology. Projects meant to be “timeless” will be examined alongside historiographical questions about “availability”: which versions of the past are accessible from which vantages, and what sort of ruptures make new world-views possible?
“Timing Knowledge” takes time both as an historical object and a point of methodological reflection. By assessing the restless tension between the timelessness and timeliness of knowing, between fluid contingencies and fixed truths, the panel attempts to move the conversation from “knowing what” and “knowing how” to “knowing when.”
Organized by Anna-Maria Meister (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berl ...
Ravenna B, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
When is the right time to know something? What difficulties arise if knowledge is created prematurely or tardily? How do fears about the punctuality of knowing shape the tools applied to knowledge problems? And how is the historian's understanding of the past configured by her concepts of time?
This panel investigates how the practice of scholarly and investigative programs is linked to distinct understandings of and anxieties about time in different contexts. It will consider not only how the temporal modes of those who conceive projects inform goals and planning, but also how the portrayal of those projects is determined by the temporal assumptions of observers: the pressure to deliver results on the clock and results that will last; the distinct temporal orientations of the cathedral builder, the industrial time-manager, the historicist legal-scholar; the many granularities of time in diverse fora at home and abroad. It will examine how time-scales and timing-schemes figure in disciplines like historiography (past and present), to architecture, economics, biology, and philology. Projects meant to be “timeless” will be examined alongside historiographical questions about “availability”: which versions of the past are accessible from which vantages, and what sort of ruptures make new world-views possible?
“Timing Knowledge” takes time both as an historical object and a point of methodological reflection. By assessing the restless tension between the timelessness and timeliness of knowing, between fluid contingencies and fixed truths, the panel attempts to move the conversation from “knowing what” and “knowing how” to “knowing when.”
Organized by Anna-Maria Meister (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; TU Munich)
Mapping the Future: Different Temporalities in Economic ForecastingView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography01:30 PM - 02:03 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 20:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:03:00 UTC
Despite numerous failures, economic forecasting has maintained its interest and importance. But both the forecasting instruments and the understandings of time that inform them have changed fundamentally. The paper examines three forecasting tools, developed by American and European economists and businessmen from 1920 until 1955, and investigates the different temporalities associated with the tools and their implications. In the early 1920s, American and European economists celebrated the (1) Harvard Index of General Business Conditions, which was based on a cyclical understanding of time, as the first “scientific” approach to business forecasting. But the unstable economy of the 1920s and 1930s and the growing influence of the Federal Reserve prompted contemporaries to question the index’s value. Because the past was no longer perceived as a reliable guide to the future, economists and businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic experimented with forecasting approaches that were based on a linear understanding of time. The paper goes on to discuss the (2) Leading Indicators established at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the 1930s and the (3) survey-based forecasting approach employed by American companies in the aftermath of the Great Depression and, two decades later, by economists in Europe. While the Leading Indicators were based on data from the past, but allowed for a dynamic, time-variant application, the surveys inquired about the expectations of economic agents. By investigating the different designs and workings of the tools, I show that their different temporalities brought about different interactions between economic and political decision-makers.
Philology on (and off) the Clock: The Case of the Thesaurus Linguae LatinaeView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography02:03 PM - 02:36 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:03:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:36:00 UTC
For all time or for the moment? This paper considers two opposed temporal “modes” or “idioms” in the work of turn-of-the-century philologists: one dismissing the clock (and the calendar) and orienting itself towards the eternal and unbounded, the other embracing the budget and deadline, calibrating itself to the stroke of the hour and the passage of the year. Focusing on the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, a monumental Latin lexicon begun in Germany in the 1890s and still in progress today, I will ask how these opposed currents are reflected both in the shape of one of the era’s characteristically ambitious philological enterprises and in the quotidian realities of the scholars who worked on it. Engaging larger questions about what kind of scholarly work could and should be done on the clock, the tension between extra-temporal designs and measured règlement had stakes not just for planning and publicity around the Thesaurus, but also for the careers of philologists associated with the project, the disposition of their daily work, and the assessment of their results.
Simulated Knowledge, Simulated TimeView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography02:36 PM - 03:09 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:36:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:09:00 UTC
In recent years, computer simulations have become ubiquitous in science. They work with huge sets of data, are technologies to study processes, events or behaviour and introduce ways of doing science other than through observation, experiment or theory.
In my paper, I will study the use of computer simulations in the modern life sciences. By examining life computationally, modern systems biology aims at a new complexity of investigation, integrating information from the micro-level of molecules to the whole organism and its environment.
In particular, I will investigate the different time scales operating in simulations of biological processes. Knowing when and what are intricately entwined and play out at various levels in these combined experimental–computational set-ups: the time of the organism, the time of the simulation and the time of the scientist. My discussion will focus on the question whether simulations are new tools to integrate these various dimensions of time into a new understanding of the organism as a whole.
Culpability as a Psycho-Historical Problem: The Temporality of Responsibility in 19th-century ViennaView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography03:09 PM - 03:42 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 22:09:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:42:00 UTC
To what extent can a criminal action be positively attributed to a particular psychological cause at a specific moment in time? By using a prominent case of matricide from 1870s Vienna to draw out just how urgent and messy this problem was, my paper explores how Viennese jurists used contemporary theories of mind to evaluate individual culpability in the courtroom. How were the circumstances of a culprit’s life history––upbringing, family life, education, social position–– exculpatory or explanatory of the mental events that eventuated a criminal act? I look at how jurists used contemporary theories of psychology to disambiguate juristic from medical expertise and to insist on the primacy of the latter over the former in legal practice. To the extent that the relationship between mental events and criminal acts could be approximated, it fell to the jurist to interpret the specific moment of a crime in relation to the "total development" of the mind of the accused. I explore how the idea that the totality of an individual’s life history should serve as the explanatory framework for interpreting the subjective moment of a criminal act. Psychology furnished legal thinkers, I suggest, with a manner of understanding and operationalizing the historicity of personal identity before the law.
