By the late nineteenth century, science pedagogues and academicians became involved in a vast movement to popularize science throughout the Russian empire. With the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, many now found the new Marxist state a willing supporter of their goals of spreading science to an under-educated public. In the Stalin era, Soviet state officials believed that the spread of science and technology had to coalesce with the Communist Party's utilitarian goals and needs to revive the industrial sector of the economy. This resulted in a new Stalinist technologically oriented popularization campaign. In the Khrushchev era (1953–64), Soviet politicians became increasingly more aware of the competitive power of Soviet technology in the global arena and developed extensive campaigns to publicize Soviet feats for a broad domestic and foreign public audience. This was particularly true for topics such as the space program and big technologies such as nuclear power.

The linguistic relativist thesis maintains that there is no neutral ground for different scientific traditions with different theoretic frameworks to communicate rationally, due to the fact that linguistic structure crucially decides the way people think about reality. For quite a long time, historical studies of scientific exchange between East and West have been guided by this thesis. The challenge to this thesis comes from recent studies by Peter Galison, who argues that scientists from different research traditions can communicate rationally in a way similar to the trading exchanges between two countries, in which a local coordination can be reached even if there is a global disagreement about the corresponding word usage in two natural languages. In this paper, I try to show that the concept of trading zone communication provides an interesting and useful theoretical tool to examine how, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Chinese scientists communicated with and learned Western knowledge from Jesuit scientists by building local coordination among them. In the first section I introduce the basic ideas of Galison's trading zone theory. In the second section I study the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological differences between Chinese science and Western science. If the linguistic relativist thesis is taken for granted, these differences are likely to lead many historical studies on Jesuit science in China to reach the relativist conclusion. The third section deals with some of the basic concepts of the trading zone theory to explain how local rational communication among Chinese and Jesuit scientists was built and developed. In the last section I argue that Galison's trading zone theory can help us understand how Chinese scientists learned new knowledge from the Jesuits, especially astronomical and mathematical knowledge, despite the global differences between these two research traditions.

This issue of Science in Context presents a collection of historical studies on various aspects of science and its practice as developed in Latin-American contexts. Relatively few scholars working in the history of science, and even in the more general field of “science studies,” have devoted their research to this field. Likewise, relatively little research has been done by scholars of Latin American studies on the cultural, political, and social impact of science, a field that is usually considered to be one of the central, defining aspects of modern, Western civilization.

Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), by the engineer Euclides da Cunha, is one of the most important books in Brazilian literature, with more than 50 local editions and translations in at least nine languages. Published in 1902 after four years of writing, it is a book about nationality in Brazil that sparked a debate regarding the subject of national consciousness and the connection between a nation's physical landscape, its people, and its culture. The book draws from a wide spectrum of knowledge that synthesizes science and art as the pinnacle of human thought. Cunha was a man of great culture and learning and in this work his professional activities and scientific writings merge to celebrate Brazilian culture in different realms of knowledge. The author worked as an engineer and had connections with the scientific community and the world of natural science. His explicit references to naturalists, travelers, geologists, and botanists reflect the historical moment of scientific knowledge in Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and no less than that, Cunha's personal connections with the local scientific community.

Talk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment.

This paper is concerned with the diversity of microscopic research in nineteenth-century life sciences. It examines how two researchers, Ernst Wilhelm Brücke and Heinrich Müller, investigated the structure and function of the retina. They did so in significantly different ways, thereby developing quite different accounts of this organ and its role in the process of vision. Both investigators were carrying out microscopic investigations, both were particularly concerned with interpreting their findings in terms of physiological function, and both employed the physical sciences in their microscopic research. Their approaches differed, however, with respect to the manner of handling and preparing the tissues, as well as with respect to the conceptual tools they applied to their findings.

The cases indicate that the common tendency to associate microscopic research mainly with morphological studies of organic material is not appropriate. To understand nineteenth-century microscopy and its place in the sciences of life, close attention should be paid to the manner in which microscopic investigations were performed. It is only then that the flexibility and versatility of microscopic research comes into view.

Argument

In this paper I offer some reflections on the thirty-second proposition of Book I of Euclid’s Elements, the assertion that the three interior angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, reflections relating to the character of the theorem and the reasoning involved in it, and especially on its historical background. I reject a common view according to which there was at some time a petitio principii in the theory of parallels and argue that certain kinds of skepticism about Proclus’ historical reports are excessive. The evidence we have makes it reasonable to suppose that the so-called common notions were made explicit in the earlier fourth century BCE and the postulates, including the parallel postulate, somewhat later than that. On the other hand, it seems clear that some proof of I,32 was available by the mid-fifth century. I attempt to describe what such a proof would have been like and reflect on its significance for our understanding of early Greek geometry.

Agent-based social simulations have historically been evaluated using two criteria: verification and validation. This article questions the adequacy of this dual evaluation scheme. It claims that the scheme does not conform to everyday practices of evaluation, and has, over time, fostered a theory-practice gap in the assessment of social simulations. This gap originates because the dual evaluation scheme, inherited from computer science and software engineering, on one hand, overemphasizes the technical and formal aspects of the implementation process and, on the other hand, misrepresents the connection between the conceptual and the computational model. The mismatch between evaluation theory and practice, it is suggested, might be overcome if practitioners of agent-based social simulation adopt a single criterion evaluation scheme in which: i) the technical/formal issues of the implementation process are tackled as a matter of debugging or instrument calibration, and ii) the epistemological issues surrounding the connection between conceptual and computational models are addressed as a matter of validation.

The circulation of science across cultural boundaries involves the construction of various representations by the various actors, who each account for their involvement in the process. The historiography of the transmission of European science to China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has long been dominated by one particular narrative: that of the Jesuit missionaries who were the main go-betweens for these two centuries. This fact has contributed to shaping Western images of China's history and science up to the present day.

To retrieve the multifaceted history of this transmission, more than one discourse needs to be taken into account. Even within the Society of Jesus, representations changed with the evolution of patronage of the mission, and the concomitant building up of state-sponsored science in Europe. Chinese sources yield different pictures, accounting for the reception of Western learning — rather than “European science” — in terms of integration rather than of conversion, and legitimizing it first by the Jesuits' status as scholars, then by the idea that Western learning was of Chinese origin. This shift corresponded to the imperial appropriation of this learning.

This paper discusses the theory of motion of the philosopher Honoré Fabri (1608–1688), a senior representative of early modern Jesuit scientists. It argues that the consensus prevailing among historians – according to which Fabri's theory of impetus is diametrically opposed to Galileo's or Descartes' concept of inertia – is false. It shows: that Fabri carefully constructed his concept of impetus in order to easily incorporate the principle of linear conservation of motion (designated here as “limited inertia”), by adopting formal (rather than efficient) causality between impetus and motion and by allowing impetus to act only along straight lines; that he explicitly deemed Aristotle's famous “inertial paradox” not as a paradox at all; and that linear conservation of motion was not limited to “counterfactual” circumstances but played a significant part in his discrete theory of free fall and constituted an integral component of his general physical (and even mathematical) philosophy. However, the paper also shows that Fabri's notion of inertia was restricted to one dimension only, and therefore should indeed be considered “limited.” In his analysis of horizontal projectiles, Fabri explicitly rejected Galileo's important principle of superposition, and thus revealed significant constraints to his “inertial” thinking.

The argument developed herein, a countertheme to the Merton thesis, is that the ideal of science pursued by Galileo and his contemporaries in Italy would be unaffected by their Catholic faith if it could achieve apodictic proof in the subject of its investigations, in which case it would attain truth – the very goal sought by that faith. Unfortunately such proof was hard to come by in early seventeenth-century mechanics. A case study is proposed to show Galileo's difficulty demonstrating the tensile strength of columns in mathematical physics on the basis of improper suppositions, contrasting these with the suppositions of a contemporary, Giovanni de Guevara. The case study casts new light on the subject of Galileo's atomism and its relation to the Eucharist, refuting Redondi's claim that this was the real motive behind Galileo's trial in 1633. A further lesson relating to the Merton thesis can also be drawn, namely, that while challenges to science from religious orthodoxy may appear as temporary obstacles, in the long run they are an aid to science in its efforts to bring mankind closer to the truth.

The present paper argues that the metaphysical doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths constituted a philosophical response to what Descartes considered to be the overly close relationship between philosophy and theology.

The paper examines Descartes' “metaphysical turn,” focusing on the radical doubt and the creation of the eternal truths. The radical doubt, it is argued, was most important not as a device for defeating skepticism or attaining certainty, but as a means to practice the proper use of the intellectual faculty. God and the soul were the first objects of this practice, but the ultimate aim was contemplation of pure extension, the essence of matter. The doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths provided a metaphysical context within which Descartes could claim that the human mind completely comprehends the essences of natural things without thereby having to adopt either a scholastic Aristotelian or a Neoplatonic conception of such comprehension, both of which tended toward the theologically objectionable position that in grasping the essences of created things, the human mind comprehends God (either his absolute power or ideas in his mind).

Franco's fascist regime in Spain (1939-1975) offers the possibility of exploring the complex relationship between media communication practices and the processes of production, circulation, and management of knowledge. The regime persistently used film, and later on television, as indoctrination and disciplining devices. These media thus served to shape the regime's representation, which largely relied on the generation of positive attitudes of adherence to the rulers through people's submission and obedience to experts. This article examines the changing nature of modernization discourses and practices, as a fundamental element of the regime's propaganda strategies, and as portrayed in documentaries produced under its rule. The rhetoric of modernization involved an explicit deficit model of knowledge management, which aimed at legitimating the regime's deeds and policies in its first decades, as we shall see regarding colonial-medical documentaries produced for the official newsreel in the 1940s. However, the focus of such rhetoric, despite its enduring political aims, had to somehow open up as the relationship between experts and non-experts changed, both in epistemological and practical terms, such as in wildlife documentary films produced for television in the 1970s, the regime's last decade.

The first section of this issue brings together four essays on “surfaces” – a subject matter which might seem conspicuous or, indeed, palpable enough. Just think of the sheets of paper, window panes, and haptic interfaces surrounding you: the world, evidently, is diffused with surfaces, membranes, and boundaries of all sorts. Some of these things have been salient, for obvious reasons in fields such as media studies, or implicit in notions such as “boundary object”: the retina, photographic plates, basilar membranes, the skin, or various forms of “displays” immediately come to mind. Not even mentioning their immense metaphoricity, surfaces are the entities that make things visible, inscribable, or knowable. But not all of them have been so salient. In fact, most surface-phenomena arguably – and, typically, for similarly obvious reasons – haven't received much scholarly notice at all: plastic wraps, lacquers, lubricants, coatings, silicon wavers, cell membranes, glass, plant leaves, the ozone layer.

In spring 1888, an anonymous critic raised severe doubts about Ernst Mach's and Peter Salcher's studies, published one year before, on the processes in the air caused by very rapid projectiles. Paraphrasing the experiments for the French popular science magazine La Nature, the critic insinuated that the photographs upon which Mach and Salcher's argument were ostensibly based must have been of such low quality that they did not allow any well-founded conclusion. The critic did not deny the phenomena Mach and Salcher had presented in their article; he denied that the photographs taken in the course of the experiments could permit any observation of the phenomena. I take the resulting quarrel as a window into the actors’ ideas on the requirements of “good observations” and the role of technical devices in this case. In particular I enquire how the various arguments relate to Lorraine Daston's and Peter Galison's framing of photography as an emblem of “mechanical objectivity.” We will see that in the case under debate, actors considered naked-eye observation, observation by telescope and photography mainly with regard to the challenges of the particular research object.

In writing the history of science, the fluctuations between two meanings of the concept of style are of special interest: a simple or direct meaning of this concept referring to a means of expression and of presentation, and a philosophical interpretation of this term referring to “a world of objective spiritual order.” The last two chapters of this paper consider the perspective of the simple meaning of the concept, the first two chapters take the philosophical meaning as their starting point.

The concept of style in its general epistemological meaning emerges within a conceptual space that becomes effective as a totality at the end of the eighteenth century and which is built up of further notions such as: individual, genius, expression, symbol, education, creativity, and others.

The individual and, as believed, the nevertheless infinitely creative subject has taken the place that the concept of god had occupied within rationalism. But it is not only the subject as construction and will, but also the subject who reflected in a new way about the objective foundations of his conscience and tried to bring the object and the means of knowledge into a new relation.

In the following pages I will outline the main biographical data and the intellectual activity of two of the major protagonists of the debate on the mechanistisches Weltbild within the Frankfurt “Institut fur Sozialforschung” in the thirties. I have included a selected bibliography of Grossmann's and Borkenau's works, and refer to titles with abbreviations [H.G.…] and [F.B.…].

This paper introduces the notion of plausibility as a decisive condition for the acceptance by groups in society of fundamental ideas concerning the nature of illness.

Plausibility, it is argued, helps to explain both transition from one system of fundamental ideas to another in history, and coexistence of different such systems in a single civilization. Hence this paper challenges an interpretation of medicine prevalent, especially in medical anthropology, since the 1940s, when Erwin Ackerknecht introduced the idea of medicine as an integrated aspect of a society's or community's culture.

Because early research focused on small-scale communities where a majority, if not all, of the members adhered to one world view and experienced one and the same existential environment, medicine came to be identified as a cultural system representative of entire communities and, later, societies. Hence we speak of Chinese medicine as if there were one system of therapeutic ideas and practices representative of China as a whole. The fact is that even though medicine is indeed a cultural system, it is representative only of the culture developed by people sharing identical environments and experiences. That is, if within one civilization different groups coexist in different existential realities entailing different notions of what causes crisis and how to maintain harmony, then these groups will believe in different systems of ideas concerning the generation, treatment, and prevention of illness. Such systems of ideas are therefore always metaphorical reflections of a real social environment or ideas are therefore always metaphorical reflections of a real social environment or of one aspired to.

It is not truth(Wahrheit) that leads to an acceptance of basic therapeutic ideas but plausibility (Wahrschein).

The title of this issue of Science in Context – “Believing Nature, Knowing God” – is intended to suggest the moral, emotional, and cognitive conditions in which the historical alliance of “nature” and “God” operated, and to make a more general point about knowing and believing. The production of scientific knowledge includes mechanisms for bringing about acceptance that such knowledge is true, and thus for generating a psychological state of belief. To claim to have knowledge of nature involves an attitude of belief in certain epistemic values, in the procedures associated with them, and in the results to which they lead. “Nature,” both as a totality to be known, and as the sum of the results of research directed towards it, turns out to be an object of belief.

Argument

The past five years have seen revisions of what had been regarded as the single definitive reconstruction of Eudoxus’ homocentric sphere theory. Crucial to these revisions, which present alternative constructions for the moon (Mendell 1998a, 1998b) and the five planets (Yavetz 1998), is a careful assessment of Simplicius’ testimony regarding the Eudoxan theory. The purpose of this paper is to show that even though we can account for lunar motion by means of two distinct homocentric models, both models involve forced and ambiguous readings of Simplicius’ account. Both reconstructions adequately accommodate the lunar month and the 18.5-year precession of the lunar nodes in a homocentric model that fits the general spirit of Eudoxus’ approach to the problem. Both are also in full accord with Aristotle’s short, general account of the Eudoxan system. However, since neither of them can be naturally reconciled with Simplicius’ text, and since we know of no other appropriate alternatives, it seems to follow that Simplicius’ account may suffer from serious technical inadequacies, and that only limited historical weight can be given to his testimony regarding the details of the system.