03 Nov 2018 01:30 PM - 03:45 PM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T133020181103T1545America/VancouverAlternatives to Fact
Knowledge is more than the sum of its facts. Historians have shown how intuitions, beliefs, rituals, fictions, and other ways of knowing bolster the cultural authority of scientific thinking in every era. Despite the ubiquity and importance of these alternatives to fact, knowledge claims still tend to rest explicitly on forms of evidence cemented in scientific disciplines over a century ago. This holds for historians and scientists alike: despite recognizing diverse practices in knowledge production, the foundations of historical and scientific knowing remain stubbornly factual. In an age of “alternative facts,” a new definition of knowledge centered on non-factual processes seems both philosophically possible and politically urgent.
This panel explores intellectual authority today in light of the histories of various alternatives to fact within the human and social sciences. Joanna Radin excavates “off-label” uses of early SSK in the mass market fiction of Michael Crichton. Henry Cowles examines the contested place of anecdotes in the “new psychology” that took shape in the late nineteenth century. Myrna Perez Sheldon analyzes the role of hereditary “facts” embedded in eugenic sermons written and preached by American Protestants pastors in the early twentieth century. Benjamin Breen looks at the strange entanglements between occult communities and technologists in mid-twentieth century California. A synthetic comment by Cathy Gere will draw together shared themes from these four historical moments, suggesting how they might speak to current conversations—within the discipline and beyond.
Organized by Henry Cowles (University of Michigan)
Kirkland, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
Knowledge is more than the sum of its facts. Historians have shown how intuitions, beliefs, rituals, fictions, and other ways of knowing bolster the cultural authority of scientific thinking in every era. Despite the ubiquity and importance of these alternatives to fact, knowledge claims still tend to rest explicitly on forms of evidence cemented in scientific disciplines over a century ago. This holds for historians and scientists alike: despite recognizing diverse practices in knowledge production, the foundations of historical and scientific knowing remain stubbornly factual. In an age of “alternative facts,” a new definition of knowledge centered on non-factual processes seems both philosophically possible and politically urgent.
This panel explores intellectual authority today in light of the histories of various alternatives to fact within the human and social sciences. Joanna Radin excavates “off-label” uses of early SSK in the mass market fiction of Michael Crichton. Henry Cowles examines the contested place of anecdotes in the “new psychology” that took shape in the late nineteenth century. Myrna Perez Sheldon analyzes the role of hereditary “facts” embedded in eugenic sermons written and preached by American Protestants pastors in the early twentieth century. Benjamin Breen looks at the strange entanglements between occult communities and technologists in mid-twentieth century California. A synthetic comment by Cathy Gere will draw together shared themes from these four historical moments, suggesting how they might speak to current conversations—within the discipline and beyond.
Organized by Henry Cowles (University of Michigan)
Creatures of Habit: Anecdotes and Animal ReasonView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences01:30 PM - 02:00 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 20:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:00:00 UTC
Can anecdotes be evidence? In general, “anecdotal evidence” is deemed potentially misleading (if not an oxymoron). But there are certain situations, and certain fields, in which anecdotes register phenomena that can be hard to capture, control, or quantify. Anecdotes are often the only way to record chance occurrences or account for inner experience. Because they can carry moral values as well, anecdotes also trouble the is/ought divide in scientific discourse. A history of efforts to collect, analyze, and use anecdotes—as well as the opposition to such efforts—might thus provide a kind of counter-history to the coalescence of evidentiary standards in modern science. This paper addresses the authority of anecdotes in the context of animal psychology, specifically as the field developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. With the rise of experimentalism and the decline of introspection, animal anecdotes occupied a vexed middle ground in the work of such figures as George John Romanes, Conwy Lloyd Morgan, and Edward Thorndike. On the one hand, anecdotes about “other minds” were seen as superior to introspective data; on the other hand, such evidence resisted experimental control, thwarting attempts to standardize research subjects. Through a case study of the American beaver, this paper recovers the role of anecdotes both in scientific studies of animal reason and in the unmaking of situated knowledge, showing how “anecdotal” became a bad word that was used to reject some scientific claims in favor of others.
Scientific Facts Embedded in Christian TeachingsView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences02:00 PM - 02:30 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:30:00 UTC
How does scientific knowledge gain authority in relationship to other ways of knowing? Standard narratives of modernity assume that science expands through secularization; as scientific facts and theories emerge to explain natural and social phenomena, these are thought to replace explanations offered by religions, indigenous traditions, the humanities, etc. What is overlooked in this narrative is the role that these other modes of knowing have and continue to play in shaping and authenticating science within various communities. This was especially true in the context of the emergence of the biopolitical state; by the late 19th century “facts” from the new hereditary sciences were woven into pronatalist religious and nationalist movements throughout the world. These larger movements both made sense of, and grounded the authority of, the new eugenic sciences. This paper analyzes one example of this from a sermon contest convened by the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s. The AES offered cash prizes to American pastors to write and preach sermons on the topic “Religion and Eugenics--Does the Church have any responsibility for improving the human stock?” The records of these sermons, preserved in the AES papers, reveal how substantively Christian teaching was utilized to articulate and promote the moral imperatives of American eugenics-- to preserve and protect the hereditary purity of the American racial stock.
On Alternating Sounds and Alternatives to Fact, or The Importance of OrthographyView Abstract Part of Organized SessionPractical Knowledge02:30 PM - 03:00 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:00:00 UTC
For mid nineteenth century scientists of language, orthography was important. Spelling was a conduit of fact. The ability to render spoken sounds into written symbols was essential to understanding what was roundly understood as the “evolution” of language — the supposedly law-like progression of spoken communication from “primitive” to more “civilized” forms of sound-production. This paper examines a small but central debate between American linguists Lewis Grout and Josiah W. Gibbs over symbolic representations of sound-production and spelling in a community they termed “South African languages.” This debate provides in miniature a window into both the imperial ambitions of projects of standardized orthography and linguistic fact-making, as well as a sense of the moral and ethical stakes of attempting to concretize the slipperiness of “alternating” sounds. Ultimately, orthographic symbols were part of a project of value-making, connecting claims of phonetical truth to facts about bodies, labor, and political order.
Technology and the Occult from Oppenheimer to ARPANETView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences03:00 PM - 03:30 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 22:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:30:00 UTC
During the past two years, the internet seems to have taken a turn toward the occult (a term which, in its original incarnation, simply referred to concealed knowledge). The darkly conspiratorial mindset of contemporary digital culture is not entirely new, however. In this paper, I explore a set of submerged connections between California tech culture and occult traditions which date back to the early modern period. Jack Parsons, for instance, helped found the Jet Propulsion Lab at Cal Tech even as he led the West Coast branch of Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientalis in acts of ritualistic "sex magick" and attempts to summon Babylonian demons. These overlapping interests, I argue, were not atypical in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Physicists like Robert Oppenheimer immersed themselves in mysticism, while new religions like Scientology advertised their “technologies” in periodicals like Popular Mechanics. Reconnecting the occult tradition with the history of science sheds new light on the social and mental worlds of twentieth century technological change. Going forward, it might also help guide us through an uncertain future in which techniques like machine learning proceed beyond the realm of human intelligibility and become re-inscribed with the divinity (or demonology) of the occult.
