Cultural Relativity and the Scientific Enterprise:
Context and Contingency in the Development of Science

An International Symposium on the Occasion
of the Centennial of Albert Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis

Tel-Aviv University: March 6-7, 2005

Abstracts

Andreas Blank, Humboldt University, Berlin, & Tel-Aviv University

Ontological vs. Epistemological Reduction in 17th Century Science: The Case of Leibniz's Hypothesis Physica Nova  

Ontological reduction and epistemological reduction can be described as two fundamentally different research strategies informing 17th century science: The first strategy is directed at identifying the ultimate, simple, constituents of nature – i.e. the only objects that in a strict sense can be said to be real. The second strategy is directed at identifying the ultimate, simple, concepts by means of which a description of nature can be constructed – i.e. the concepts that set the standards of intelligibility. The present paper discusses the way these basic research strategies influenced Leibniz’s early work on theoretical physics and its relation to Cartesian physics. Emily Grosholz has argued that Cartesian science is based on a program of epistemological reductionism, whereas she and Elhanan Yakira ascribe to the early Leibniz a program of ontological reductionism. According to their interpretation, Leibniz reduces the properties of composite physical objects as well as the properties of mental activities to the properties of infinitely small material particles. Moreover, they claim that this program of ontological reduction is based on a purely hypothetico-deductive methodology. Alternatively, Dan Garber and Christia Mercer read Leibniz's early physics as a different kind of ontological reductionism, a reductionism according to which the properties of matter are reduced to the properties of mind. A common feature of these interpretations is that they contrast Leibniz’s physics with what they regard as the epistemological reductionism of Cartesian science. As Grosholz claims, Descartes’ program of reductionism is not based on a hypothetico-deductive methodology, but on a methodology of conceptual analysis leading to the ultimate, intelligible, components of our everyday conception of matter and mind. The present paper argues that there is no such clear-cut opposition between a Cartesian and a Leibnizian science. On the one hand, there are many explicitly hypothetical components in Descartes' physics, and Leibniz’s Anti-Cartesian remarks focus exactly on the components that are not integrated into an analytic methodology. On the other hand, Leibniz does not pursue a program of ontological reduction. Rather, describing mental activity in terms of the Hobbesian notion of 'conatus' leaves it open whether minds are material entities or not. Moreover, Leibniz tries to find a foundation of the conceptual framework of physics by analysing our everyday conception of matter and space. Thus, also Leibniz's view of science has a side that should be described as a form of epistemological reductionism.




Sonja Brentjes, Aga Khan University, London

Which kind of context are we looking for – the ideal or the real? Knowledge and its discipline(s) in Islamic societies in Western and Central Asia until 1700  

The contextualization of the ancient sciences in Islamic societies while having progressed in some areas such as metaphysics or astronomy continues to be, by and large, a stepchild in current research. Those few who take the subject on often come up with too easy answers that lack historical density and theoretical foundation. Generalization is dared before local conditions beyond the world of texts have been investigated. The texts themselves are treated in an imbalanced manner. Scientific content and biographical information is privileged over rhetorical style, expressions of belief, forms of names and titles or visual elements.

The three types of context that have attracted substantial research within the history of the classical mathematical sciences (geometry, number theory, astronomy, theoretical music, and their branches like arithmetic, algebra, magic squares, optics, burning mirrors, architecture etc.) are religion, scholarly knowledge and regionalism. The study of texts, instruments, maps, diagrams, tables, and sketches has yielded an enormous amount of new knowledge about the types and quantity of methods designed for satisfying demands of religious ritual such as the determination of the prayer direction or the times for prayer as well as about processes of disciplinary and professional separation and purification mainly within astronomy and with regard to astrology and philosophy, mainly epistemology and metaphysics. But we are far from a clear idea about how the mathematical sciences were practiced in a given time, at a given place, in a specific social environment, how they spread from one place to another one, who was involved in such a transfer, which material means were available, and who funded the undertaking. In short, we are still working under the assumption of an ideal world of knowledge products and did not yet manage to descend into the real world of knowledge production.

In my paper, I will try to express some of my ideas how to push forward on the way of contextualization in order to overcome the all too simple negative as well as positive judgments about what the adepts of the ancient sciences in Islamic societies achieved or did not achieve, which obstacles did they face or which support did they receive.




Yehuda Elkana, Central European University, Budapest

Current Conceptions of the Doctoral Dissertation in Europe and in the USA  

There is far more fundamental controversy within the sciences than its practitioners are prepared to confront. Doctoral students need to understand that much of modern science still must confront basic epistemological issues of knowledge and knowing. These range from questions of knowledge organization and images of the possible to arguments about method, precision, and rigor. The contradictions and inconsistencies of science must be cherished. Seminars should emphasize the examples of instances where the favored theories simply will not work.

  • Doctoral education in the sciences must emphasize the personality, character, habits of heart and mind, and general scholarly dispositions of the steward of the discipline. Being a steward of the discipline involves generation, conservation, and transformation (the educational and pedagogical functions of the scientist), as well as understanding the public context of the scientists’ work. Toward this goal, doctoral programs must encourage risktaking and intellectual adventurousness, while fostering the importance of precision and rigor.
  • The single most significant and pivotal process in science training is finding, choosing, and defining a problem and locating the problem on the larger map of one’s field. Problem choice should be a major focus of the entire doctoral program, a primary responsibility for the candidate to exercise. The program should focus more work—course work, colloquia, formal and informal conversations—on the state of the field and its controversies more generally, always with problem choice at the heart of this work.
  • Doctoral programs should devote far less attention to work within the boundaries of a discipline’s sub-fields and far more attention to the broader questions of the philosophical, sociological, and methodological contexts of work that combat overspecialization. This must be repeated regularly at all the important choice points in a doctoral program.
  • Doctoral education needs to “go meta” and encourage and guide the students to step back, look reflectively and critically, contemplate how it might be otherwise, and critically examine the weaknesses of the “mainstream” of the discipline, however well respected and well funded it might be.
  • Leaders in the disciplines must understand the critical roles of curricular and pedagogical work in their field, how deeply these functions are affected by the same epistemological understandings that relate to the research role. They must recognize, empirically, that most of those who earn the doctorate will spend far more time teaching and engaging with a variety of publics—in industry, policy, and community settings—than they will at the frontiers of science. Doctoral education must equip students to work in these settings.
  • Science is inexorably intertwined with the world, which today is globalized to an unprecedented degree. Doctoral students must have opportunities to explore the implications of this.
  • We must be willing to re-think the features of our doctoral program so that we are focusing doing what is necessary to produce stewards of the discipline.




Rivka Feldhay, Tel-Aviv University

Science and Religion: Conflict or Complementarity? 

This lecture offers a theoretical overview of the relationship of science and religion. Most of the examples are taken from my domain of historical research, namely, Christian Europe in the early modern period. The problem is relevant for understanding basic structures that constitute modern and contemporary culture, in spite of processes of secularization that Western societies have partially undergone during the last three hundred years. Moreover, globalization in the post modern era only sharpens the need for analytical tools to interpret a world in which religion and science are still the cores around which collective identities are organized.




Menachem Fisch, Tel-Aviv University

Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously: The Problem with Friedman's Einstein  

Michael Friedman’s Dynamics of Reason offers the most significant recent attempt to engage the problem of the rationality of science. Following the later Carnap and the later Kuhn, Friedman’s account of the structure and the growth of scientific knowledge fully concedes two major tenants of the linguistic turn in the philosophy of language and mind: the constitutively a priori role of a science’s normative vocabulary alongside its essential contingency. The “fundamental problem” of the rationality of science thus becomes for Friedman that of explaining “how it can be rational to move to a new constitutive framework, … despite the fact that this new framework, from the point of view of the old framework, is not even possible…? (Dynamics of Reason, 99-100) Critical of Carnap’s conventionalism, the conceptual relativism attributed to Kuhn’s Structure by the ‘Edinburgh School’, as well as of the absolutism with which Kuhn himself later responded, Friedman opts for Habermas’s notion of “communicative rationality” on which he grounds an ambitious philosophical and and historiographical account of scientific framework replacement.

The paper argues the following:

  1. That the problem of the rationality of framework replacement arises, not only for science, but for all normative outlooks.
  2. That in making a special case for the sciences (mathematical physics, to be precise) Friedman, by implication at least, concedes conceptual relativism its point outside science.
  3. That in opting for Habermas’s consensual notion of communicative rationality, Friedman is forced to significantly water-down the radicality of scientific paradigm shifts, and to describe science as couched in a wider philosophical and mathematical setting that serve as the source of new ideas. The upshot is a worryingly Wiggish flattening of scientific development wholly lacking of critical deliberation.
  4. That Friedman’s historiography of science finds an interesting parallel in the historiography of philosophy recently proposed by Robert Brandom.
The paper concludes by sketching an approach different from Friedman’s in which criticism replaces consensus as the basis for rational normativity, yet which remains fathful to both the constitutive and contingent nature of normative frameworks.




Eike Gebhardt, Berlin

The Myth of Creativity 

Einstein's praise of "creative opportunism“ suggests a high-risk enterprise for scientist. New hypotheses are neither clear cut methodical deductions nor mere subjective intuitions. Luck favors the prepared mind, in Pasteur's words; but what kind of preparation (beyond the inevitable command of one's field) is conducive to creative luck?

Creativity - many a renaissance artists still shunned the word as blasphemous - had turned into an ideal of an autonomous life during the enlightenment; in the course of the 20th century it turned into an advertising myth: job applicants are expecterd to show or claim creative abilities, and PR-kids call themselves "creative directors" the moment they help selling shampoo. But how "creative" can a scientist doing "normal science" in Kuhn's sense (afford to) be? How does scientific progress happen?

Thoreau mocked our notion of progress by noting: "We are forever devising improved means for unimproved ends." Creativity reasearch has amply shown that it it not the means but the ends that creative characters focus on - for creative scientists, therefore, Kuhn’s anomalous phase would be "normal science". It is the problem definitions themselves and, in the final analysis, the reality pictures that a scientific community negotiates as an ongoing process. But of course it is out of the question to institutionalize this supposed "anomaly". Where, then, in the course of scientific inquiry, does creativity have its place?




Orna Harari, Tel-Aviv University

Two Conceptions of Mathematical Explanation in Greek Thought 

The rise of modern science is often described in terms of an emancipation from Aristotelian preconceptions. This description implies that Greek science presupposes one conceptual framework; namely that of Aristotle's philosophy. In reconsidering this widely accepted description, I examine in this paper the reception and transformation of Aristotle's conception of mathematical proofs in late antiquity. Focusing on the notion of explanatory proofs, I discuss the relationship between Proclus' (a neo-Platonic philosopher from the 5th century AD) and Aristotle's conceptions of mathematical explanation. In the first part of the paper I show that Proclus, despite his commitment to the Aristotelian conception of explanatory proofs, modifies this conception so that it facilitates an incorporation of geometrical constructions in these proofs. In the second part of the paper, I attempt to put Proclus' modification of Aristotle's notion of proof in its conceptual context. In so doing, I discuss the reasons that led Proclus to regard efficient causes as theoretically prior to formal causes. A major consequence of this discussion would be a distinction between two Greek attitudes to science; that of the classical era and that of late-antiquity.




Shaul Katzir, Bar Ilan University

National Styles in Science: the Case of French and German Physics in late Nineteenth Century  

The question whether national styles existed in physics at the time of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis had long been debated. I suggest that local traditions explain differences in scientific approach better than national affiliations do. Experimental and theoretical styles characterized different schools of European physics. These schools were related to national settings, but neither included all scientists in one country nor were necessarily confined to one country or region. Apparently the physicists' training was the major component in the creation of different schools. Traditions were mostly based on direct connections between teachers and disciples. The education system created also national characteristics. In Germany it enabled a few approaches (including a new theoretical one) to prosper. On the other hand the separation of mathematical study from the experimental in France was an obstacle for the development of the new style of theoretical physics in the country. Nevertheless, Poincaré's formulation of a relativity theory independently of Einstein shows that French could still have significant theoretical contribution. Its lag after Germany in the subsequent research in the field suggests that differences in the approach towards theory still existed.

Experimental methods reveal clearer differences in approaches. Physicists showed different attitudes towards the method of exact measurements. The cases of piezoelectricity and radioactivity will exemplify differences between German-theoretical and French-German experimental approaches.




Alexei Kojevnikov, University of Georgia, Atlanta

The Phenomenon of Soviet Science  

Looking back now at Soviet or socialist science, we can discover several ways in which it anticipated global trends in the development of science as a profession and institution during the 20th century. This paper will analyze the Soviet scientific phenomenon, in its specificity, from an international, comparative perspective. The emphasis will be on similarities and reciprocal influences, rather than the contrasts and dichotomies that have been more typical of Cold War-kind historiography. I will deal with the problem at several levels: philosophical (Soviet thought on the relationship between science and society and the social construction of scientific knowledge); institutional (recognition of scientific research as a separate profession, research institutes and the phenomenon of big science); training (science as mass profession; ethnic and gender diversity); political (impact on science in Europe and America through the social relations of science movement of the 1930s and the Sputnik shock of the 1950s); and intellectual (socialist-inspired concepts of contemporary science).




Wolfgang Krohn, Universität Bielefeld

Universal Objectivism as Cultural Relativism – Reflections on the Origins and Endings of Western Science 

Historians and sociologists of science have always been puzzled by two seemingly contradictory features of modern science. While its knowledge claims are universal its cultural origins in the late Renaissance period are unique. I n its first part the paper presents a historical model for the analysis of t he social origins of modern science based on Olschki, Zilsel, and Panofsky. It then discusses the predominant values of objectivity and universal validity from an evolutionary epistemological perspective. In a next step the relativistic skepticism of the sociology of knowledge-approach and, more specifically, the program on the social construction of scientific knowledge is taken as a forceful objection against some exaggerated validity claims of science. It all serves to open up the question what kind of science, scientific norms and values can be relied upon after cultural relativism. The view developed in the final section is called “deliberative constructivism”.




Helga Nowotny, The European Research Advisory Board (EURAB), and the Science Center, Vienna

The Capacity to Aspire: Science, Innovation and The Fragile Future  

The concept of the capacity to aspire is taken from an observation made by the anthropologist Appadurai. Culture, he notes, is usually associated with the past and tradition, while the future is seen as linked to economic development to be dealt with by the economic sciences. Such a separation limits even further the horizon of those who are in greatest need of the cultural resources to navigate an uncertain future, the poor.

The capacity to aspire is indeed a valuable and scarce cultural resource, whose importance is not limited to the policies of economic development. Rather, it is indispensible for any individual and society to transcend the constraints of the immediate and short-term present by reaching out to cope with an uncertain and fragile future. I will argue, that the capacity to aspire has never been in such great demand as now when societies and the individual’s sense of identity are undergoing a profound transformation as a result of the impact coming from science and technology.

But science, especially its public nature, is also in the midst of a transformation that shows the degree to which it has become societally contextualized. This is manifest in two, seemingly contradictory, trends. One is the trend towards increasing propertization, i.e. to treat ownership of scientific data and artificially produced phenomena as private, with regulations of IPR becoming pivotal. The second trend arises from the demands for greater public participation and even involvement in priority setting, which challenges the public nature of science as not being public enough. The crucial question is how far these two principles of democratic and economic governance can be extended to the actual modes of working of science without endangering its autonomy.




Dhruv Raina, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Revisiting the Non-emergence of Modern Science in Early Modern South Asia  

Needham’s Science and Civilization in China prompted several similar projects on the Indian subcontinent. This paper reviews some of the proposed explanations for the non-emergence of science in South Asia, as well as for the non-appearance of an Indian version of the Needhamian project. It then goes further to reexamine the standard historiography of scientific revolutions and the Needham question against the backdrop of developments in sociological theories such as those of multiple modernities, the historiographies of connected histories, and the revised historiography of early modern South Asian history.




Shlomo Sela, Bar-Ilan University

The Rise of Medieval Hebrew Science 

During the centuries from antiquity to the Middle Ages, Hebrew scientific works of various sorts were written. However, they represent chronologically isolated and disconnected scientific works that may hardly be described as a homogeneous corpus of scientific texts belonging to a continuous scientific tradition. After the middle of the eighth century, with the completion of the Islamic conquest of the eastern, northern and part of the western shores of the Mediterranean, Jews willingly adopted the Arabic language and employed Arabic in the composition of their scientific works. The scientific output of scholars of Jewish descent, however, was by no means different from what was composed by Muslims or members of other religious communities, neither in their contents nor in the language in which they were couched. Beginning with the twelfth century a new ‘medieval Hebrew science’ emerged. This was a robust and continuous mainstream of original Hebrew compositions and translations into Hebrew, which conveyed with a clearly Jewish character, the Graeco-Arabic world view to Jewish civilization. How was this new Hebrew science created and what strategies were adopted in this enterprise? To answer these questions, the lecture will deal with the first stage of the process of development of ‘medieval Hebrew science’, perhaps the most creative and fascinating, and will focus on the scientific contribution of three outstanding twelfth-century Jewish scientists, Abraham Bar Hiyya (ca.1065–d. ca.1140), Abraham Ibn Ezra (ca.1089-ca.1167), and Maimonides (1135-1204).






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