Experiments, Models, Paper Tools
Experiments, Models, Paper Tools

Author: Ursula Klein

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780804743594

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In the early nineteenth century, chemistry emerged in Europe as a truly experimental discipline. What set this process in motion, and how did it evolve? Experimentalization in chemistry was driven by a seemingly innocuous tool: the sign system of chemical formulas invented by the Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius. By tracing the history of this “paper tool,” the author reveals how chemistry quickly lost its orientation to natural history and became a major productive force in industrial society. These formulas were not merely a convenient shorthand, but productive tools for creating order amid the chaos of early nineteenth-century organic chemistry. With these formulas, chemists could create a multifaceted world on paper, which they then correlated with experiments and the traces produced in test tubes and flasks. The author’s semiotic approach to the formulas allows her to show in detail how their particular semantic and representational qualities made them especially useful as paper tools for productive application.

The World in the Model
The World in the Model

Author: Mary S. Morgan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-09-17

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139560417

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During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes and analyses that change - both historically and philosophically - using a series of case studies to illuminate the nature and the implications of these changes. It is not a technical book; it is written for the intelligent person who wants to understand how economics works from the inside out. This book will be of interest to economists and science studies scholars (historians, sociologists and philosophers of science). But it also aims at a wider readership in the public intellectual sphere, building on the current interest in all things economic and on the recent failure of the so-called economic model, which has shaped our beliefs and the world we live in.

Representation and Productive Ambiguity in Mathematics and the Sciences
Representation and Productive Ambiguity in Mathematics and the Sciences

Author: Emily R. Grosholz

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2007-08-30

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0191538515

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Emily Grosholz offers an original investigation of demonstration in mathematics and science, examining how it works and why it is persuasive. Focusing on geometrical demonstration, she shows the roles that representation and ambiguity play in mathematical discovery. She presents a wide range of case studies in mechanics, topology, algebra, logic, and chemistry, from ancient Greece to the present day, but focusing particularly on the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that reductive methods are effective not because they diminish but because they multiply and juxtapose modes of representation. Such problem-solving is, she argues, best understood in terms of Leibnizian 'analysis' - the search for conditions of intelligibility. Discovery and justification are then two aspects of one rational way of proceeding, which produces the mathematician's formal experience. Grosholz defends the importance of iconic, as well as symbolic and indexical, signs in mathematical representation, and argues that pragmatic, as well as syntactic and semantic, considerations are indispensable for mathematical reasoning. By taking a close look at the way results are presented on the page in mathematical (and biological, chemical, and mechanical) texts, she shows that when two or more traditions combine in the service of problem solving, notations and diagrams are sublty altered, multiplied, and juxtaposed, and surrounded by prose in natural language which explains the novel combination. Viewed this way, the texts yield striking examples of language and notation that are irreducibly ambiguous and productive because they are ambiguous. Grosholtz's arguments, which invoke Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, will be of considerable interest to philosophers and historians of mathematics and science, and also have far-reaching consequences for epistemology and philosophy of language.

Beyond the People
Beyond the People

Author: Zoran Oklopcic

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-05-30

Total Pages: 659

ISBN-13: 0192519859

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Beyond the People develops a provocative, interdisciplinary, and meta-theoretical critique of the idea of popular sovereignty. It asks simple but far-reaching questions: Can 'imagined' communities, or 'invented' peoples, ever be theorized without, at the same time, being re-imagined and re-invented anew? Can polemical concepts, such as popular sovereignty or constituent power, be theorized objectively? If, as this book argues, the answer to these questions is no, theorists who approach the figure of a sovereign people must acknowledge that their activity is inseparable from the practice of constituent imagination. Though widely accepted as important, even vital, for the development of political concepts, the social practice of imagination is almost always presumed to operate either historically or impersonally, but seldom individually. Those who theorize the figures of popular sovereignty do not see that they are, in effect, 'conjurors' of peoplehood. This book invites constitutional, international, normative, and other political and legal theorists of sovereign peoplehood to embrace the conjuring-side of their professional identities, as a way of exploring the possibility of moving beyond eternally recurring, insolvable, and increasingly irrelevant questions. Instead of asking: Who is the people? What is the function of constituent power? Where may the people exercise its right to self-determination? Beyond the People asks the reader to consider the prospect of a riskier and more adventurous theoretical road, that opens with the question: What do I as a 'theorist-imaginer', or 'conjuror of peoplehood', assume, anticipate, and aspire to as I theorize the vehicles that mediate the assumptions, anticipations, and aspirations of others? This question is examined throughout the book as it interrogates the idea of peoplehood beyond disciplinary boundaries, showing how polemical, visual, affective, conceptual, and allegorical language critically shapes our idea of peoplehood. It offers a nuanced account of the contested relationship between the social imaginary of peoplehood on the ground, and the imaginative practices of the professional 'conjurors' of peoplehood in the academy.

Tools and Modes of Representation in the Laboratory Sciences
Tools and Modes of Representation in the Laboratory Sciences

Author: U. Klein

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2001-10-31

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9781402001000

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Fourteen chapters provide insights into the efforts of 19th- and 20th-century scientists to construct working representations of invisible objects, such as the structural formula of a dye, a three- dimensional model of a protein, or a table conveying relationships between chemical elements. The essays focus on scientists' pragmatic use of representation, exploring the concrete ways that scientists implement sign systems as productive tools both to achieve and to shape their organizational goals. Editor Klein is associated with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

The Construction of Analogy-Based Research Programs
The Construction of Analogy-Based Research Programs

Author: Rebecca Mertens

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 383944442X

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When the German chemist Emil Fischer presented his lock-and-key hypothesis in 1899, his analogy to describe the molecular relationship between enzymes and substrates quickly gained vast influence and provided future generations of scientists with a tool to investigate the relation between chemical structure and biological specificity. Rebecca Mertens explains the appeal of the lock-and-key analogy by its role in model building and in the construction of long-term, cross-generational research programs. She argues that a crucial feature of these research programs, namely ascertaining the continuity of core ideas and concepts, is provided by a certain way of analogy-based modelling.

The Case of the Poisonous Socks
The Case of the Poisonous Socks

Author: William Hodson Brock

Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1849733244

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A collection of essays containing 42 tales of chemists and their discoveries from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Experiments in Practice
Experiments in Practice

Author: Astrid Schwarz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1317317920

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Traditionally experimentation has been understood as an activity performed within the laboratory, but in the twenty-first century this view is being challenged. Schwarz uses ecological and environmental case studies to show how scientific experiments can transcend the laboratory.

Working with Paper
Working with Paper

Author: Carla Bittel

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2019-06-29

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0822986809

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Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender. Through a series of dynamic investigations covering Europe and North America and spanning the early modern period to the twentieth century, this volume breaks new ground by examining material histories of paper and the gendered worlds that made them. Contributors explore diverse uses of paper—from healing to phrenological analysis to model making to data processing—which often occurred in highly gendered, yet seemingly divergent spaces, such as laboratories and kitchens, court rooms and boutiques, ladies’ chambers and artisanal workshops, foundling houses and colonial hospitals, and college gymnasiums and state office buildings. Together, they reveal how notions of masculinity and femininity became embedded in and expressed through the materials of daily life. Working with Paper uncovers the intricate negotiations of power and difference underlying epistemic practices, forging a material history of knowledge in which quotidian and scholarly practices are intimately linked.

Models as Make-Believe
Models as Make-Believe

Author: Adam Toon

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-10-17

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1137292237

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Scientists often try to understand the world by building simplified and idealised models of it. Adam Toon develops a new approach to scientific models by comparing them to the dolls and toy trucks of children's imaginative games, and offers a unified framework to solve difficult metaphysical problems and help to make sense of scientific practice.