Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

Items from 1 to 20 out of 71 results

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Griffith Brewer, “The Wright brothers’ Boswell”: Patent management and the British aviation industry, 1903–1914

Jonathan Hopwood-Lewis

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 259-268

From 1908, the British aviation community increasingly feared the possibility of litigation over their perceived (often actual) infringement of the Wright brothers’ UK patent that described wing-warping, their pivotal invention for three-dimensional control in flight. At the same time, Wilbur Wright first met Griffith Brewer, an established member of the British aviation community, and one of the...

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Patents, publicity and priority: The Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, 1897–1919

Jonathan Hopwood-Lewis, Christine MacLeod

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 212-221

During the first decade of the twentieth century, the long cherished ambition of powered flight was finally achieved. For the amateurs who had been exchanging information freely in pursuit of this common goal there appeared the new prospect of a commercial aviation industry, which posed more acutely the dilemma of whether to continue such open exchanges or to seek private profits through trade secrecy...

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Kuhn vs. Popper on criticism and dogmatism in science, part II: How to strike the balance

Darrell P. Rowbottom

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 161-168

This paper is a supplement to, and provides a proof of principle of, Kuhn vs. Popper on Criticism and Dogmatism in Science: A Resolution at the Group Level. It illustrates how calculations may be performed in order to determine how the balance between different functions in science—such as imaginative, critical, and dogmatic—should be struck, with respect to confirmation (or corroboration) functions...

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Galileo’s defense of the application of geometry to physics in the Dialogue

Douglas Bertrand Marshall

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 178-187

Alessandro Piccolomini and several other prominent 16th-century Aristotelians claimed that while a sphere touches a plane at a point in geometry, a material sphere touches a plane not at a point but over a small surface. These thinkers thereby called into question the reliability of geometric reasoning in physics. In this article I provide a detailed analysis of Galileo’s reply to such worries about...

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Electrical technoscience and physics in transition, 1880–1920

Stathis Arapostathis, Graeme Gooday

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 202-211

This paper examines the shifting relationship between the academic disciplines of physics and electrical engineering in Britain c.1900, focusing on their shared engagement with new electrical technologies of lighting, power, and telecommunications. It examines these disciplines’ common cultures of patenting before the Great War, showing how “electricians” in these intersecting domains used patents...

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Meters, patents and expertise(s): Knowledge networks in the electricity meters industry, 1880–1914

Stathis Arapostathis

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 234-246

Knowledge management in the British electrical industry was a highly proprietary activity where the practitioners sought patents in order to configure their market in a highly competitive industrial sector. This article focuses on the management of “intellectual property” assets in the electricity meters industry in Britain in a period when the electrical industry started gradually to become competitive...

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“A delicate business”: Wartime airplane designs and their post-war evaluation, 1919–1924

Christine MacLeod

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 269-279

This paper investigates the difficulty of protecting industrial design within the framework of intellectual property law. By 1914, British law offered protection to patentable inventions, registered designs, copyright and trademarks, and an established procedure for compensating patentees whose inventions (or registered designs) were used by the state. However, the law understood “design” to refer...

article

Combative patenting: Military entrepreneurship in First World War telecommunications

Graeme Gooday

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 247-258

This paper examines how British patent rights for invention were affected by the vicissitudes of warfare looking especially at new communications technologies from the Crimean War up to the aftermath of the Great War. We can thus see longer-term continuities in the complexities of patenting innovations for military usage that avoid exceptionalist references to the pathologies of the “Chemists’ War...

article

Intellectual property, plant breeding and the making of Mendelian genetics

Berris Charnley, Gregory Radick

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 222-233

Advocates of “Mendelism” early on stressed the usefulness of Mendelian principles for breeders. Ever since, that usefulness—and the favourable opinion of Mendelism it supposedly engendered among breeders—has featured in explanations of the rapid rise of Mendelian genetics. An important counter-tradition of commentary, however, has emphasized the ways in which early Mendelian theory in fact fell short...

article

The value of epistemic disagreement in scientific practice. The case of Homo floresiensis

Helen De Cruz, Johan De Smedt

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 169-177

Epistemic peer disagreement raises interesting questions, both in epistemology and in philosophy of science. When is it reasonable to defer to the opinion of others, and when should we hold fast to our original beliefs? What can we learn from the fact that an epistemic peer disagrees with us? A question that has received relatively little attention in these debates is the value of epistemic peer disagreement—can...

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The professor and the pea: Lives and afterlives of William Bateson’s campaign for the utility of Mendelism

Gregory Radick

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 280-291

As a defender of the fundamental importance of Mendel’s experiments for understanding heredity, the English biologist William Bateson (1861–1926) did much to publicize the usefulness of Mendelian science for practical breeders. In the course of his campaigning, he not only secured a reputation among breeders as a scientific expert worth listening to but articulated a vision of the ideal relations...

article

Experiments in empire-building: Mendelian genetics as a national, imperial, and global agricultural enterprise

Berris Charnley

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 292-300

The first British geneticists framed the productive value of their work against national, international, and colonial contexts. They drew on traditional links between nation, wheat, and civilisation, promising rural stability and national security if only they could command the resources required to create new, agriculturally useful, varieties. Framing their new science in this manner allowed them...

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Claiming ownership in the technosciences: Patents, priority and productivity

Christine MacLeod, Gregory Radick

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > 188-201

Intellectual property (IP) in and around the sciences is nowadays a matter of high public as well as historical interest. Here we propose an integrative concept of IP that, drawing upon insights scattered across decades of scholarship, forges from them a framework for a new style of historical research. This expanded concept of IP takes in patents, copyright and other legal instruments (or their surrogates)—IP...

article

Editorial board and publication information

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 2 > IFC

article

Kant and Newton on the a priori necessity of geometry

Mary Domski

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 3 > 438-447

In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant explicitly rejects Newton’s absolutist position that space is an actually existing thing; however, Kant also concedes that the absolutist successfully preserves the a priori necessity that characterizes our geometrical knowledge of space. My goal in this paper is to explore why the absolutist can explain the a priori necessity of geometry by turning to Newton’s...

article

Understanding as explanatory knowledge: The case of Bjorken scaling

Kareem Khalifa, Michael Gadomski

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 3 > 384-392

In this paper, we develop and refine the idea that understanding is a species of explanatory knowledge. Specifically, we defend the idea that S understands why p if and only if S knows that p, and, for some q, S’s true belief that q correctly explains p is produced/maintained by reliable explanatory evaluation. We then show how this model explains the reception of James Bjorken’s explanation of scaling...

article

Explanation, understanding, and unrealistic models

Frank Hindriks

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 3 > 523-531

How can false models be explanatory? And how can they help us to understand the way the world works? Sometimes scientists have little hope of building models that approximate the world they observe. Even in such cases, I argue, the models they build can have explanatory import. The basic idea is that scientists provide causal explanations of why the regularity entailed by an abstract and idealized...

article

Explicit nomenclature and classification in Pliny’s Natural History XXXII

Andrea Guasparri

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 3 > 347-353

Pliny’s Natural History has been traditionally considered as the unoriginal work of an uncritical compiler. This has also been held to be true of the “biological” books, especially when one compares them with the works of Aristotle, one of Pliny’s main authorities in this domain. Aristotle’s achievements would be remarkable, especially in the field of classification, of which the philosopher is traditionally...

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Where explanation ends: Understanding as the place the spade turns in the social sciences

Stephen Turner

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 3 > 532-538

Explanations implicitly end with something that makes sense, and begin with something that does not make sense. A statistical relationship, for example, a numerical fact, does not make sense; an explanation of this relationship adds something, such as causal information, which does make sense, and provides an endpoint for the sense-making process. Does social science differ from natural science in...

article

Hume’s Theorem

Colin Howson

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science > 2013 > 44 > 3 > 339-346

A common criticism of Hume’s famous anti-induction argument is that it is vitiated because it fails to foreclose the possibility of an authentically probabilistic justification of induction. I argue that this claim is false, and that on the contrary, the probability calculus itself, in the form of an elementary consequence that I call Hume’s Theorem, fully endorses Hume’s argument. Various objections,...

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2013

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44 (71)

Keywords

NEWTON (8)
KANT (7)
EXPLANATION (5)
UNDERSTANDING (5)
PATENTS (4)
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (3)
KUHN (3)
MENDELISM (3)
RECENT SCIENTIFIC HERITAGE (3)
AERONAUTICS (2)
AGRICULTURE (2)
APPLIED SCIENCE (2)
CLASSIFICATION (2)
FIRST WORLD WAR (2)
LAWS (2)
LEIBNIZ (2)
MATERIAL CULTURE (2)
MATERIAL HERITAGE (2)
MECHANICS (2)
MODELS (2)
PHYSICS (2)
PLANT BREEDING (2)
PRIORITY (2)
PROBABILITY (2)
PURE SCIENCE (2)
ROWLAND BIFFEN (2)
SCIENTIFIC COLLECTIONS (2)
SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION (2)
SCIENTIFIC HERITAGE (2)
SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS (2)
SCIENTIFIC REALISM (2)
SECRECY (2)
SPACE (2)
THEORY CHOICE (2)
ACADEMIC HERITAGE (1)
ACTION AT A DISTANCE (1)
AERONAUTICAL THEORY (1)
AESTHETIC EMOTION (1)
ANOMALY (1)
APPLICATION (1)
APPROXIMATION (1)
AQUATIC ANIMALS (1)
ARCHIVES (1)
ARTEFACT (1)
ARTHUR MORIN (1)
ATTRACTION (1)
AUTHORSHIP (1)
AVIATION (1)
BARBARA MCCLINTOCK (1)
BASE-RATE FALLACY (1)
BENTLEY (1)
BIO-EPISTEMOLOGY (1)
BUILDING-TYPE (1)
CANADA (1)
CAUSAL MODELING (1)
CAUSALITY (1)
CHEMICAL LABORATORY (1)
COGNITIVE ATTITUDES (1)
COLLABORATION (1)
COLLECTION (1)
COMMEMORATIVE PRACTICES (1)
CONSERVATOIRE NATIONALE DES ARTS ET MÉTIERS (1)
CONTEMPORARY COLLECTING (1)
CONTEMPORARY HERITAGE (1)
COSMOGENY (1)
COSMOGONY (1)
DECISION THEORY (1)
DESIGN (1)
DESIGN ARGUMENTS (1)
DEUTSCHES MUSEUM (1)
DIGITAL SCIENCE (1)
DISPERSED COLLECTIONS (1)
DOCUMENTATION (1)
DORTOUS DE MAIRAN (1)
DYNAMICAL LAWS (1)
DYNAMICS (1)
ELASTICITY (1)
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING (1)
ELECTRICITY METERS (1)
EMPIRE (1)
EPICUREANISM (1)
EPISTEMIC PLURALISM (1)
EPISTEMIC RELATIVISM (1)
ETHICS OF EXPERTISE (1)
ETHNOBIOLOGY (1)
EVOLUTIONARY EPISTEMOLOGY (1)
EXPERT WITNESSING (1)
EXPLORATORY (1)
F. W. LANCHESTER (1)
FONTENELLE (1)
FREDERICK SUPPE (1)
FRENCH SCIENTIFIC HERITAGE MANAGEMENT (1)
FUNDING (1)
GALILEO (1)
GENOMICS (1)
GEOMETRY (1)
GOALS OF SCIENCE (1)
GOD (1)
GRAVITY (1)
GRIFFITH BREWER (1)
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

Griffith Brewer, “The Wright brothers’ Boswell”: Patent management and the British aviation industry, 1903–1914

Patents, publicity and priority: The Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, 1897–1919

Kuhn vs. Popper on criticism and dogmatism in science, part II: How to strike the balance

Galileo’s defense of the application of geometry to physics in the Dialogue

Electrical technoscience and physics in transition, 1880–1920

Meters, patents and expertise(s): Knowledge networks in the electricity meters industry, 1880–1914

“A delicate business”: Wartime airplane designs and their post-war evaluation, 1919–1924

Combative patenting: Military entrepreneurship in First World War telecommunications

Intellectual property, plant breeding and the making of Mendelian genetics

The value of epistemic disagreement in scientific practice. The case of Homo floresiensis

The professor and the pea: Lives and afterlives of William Bateson’s campaign for the utility of Mendelism

Experiments in empire-building: Mendelian genetics as a national, imperial, and global agricultural enterprise

Claiming ownership in the technosciences: Patents, priority and productivity

Editorial board and publication information

Kant and Newton on the a priori necessity of geometry

Understanding as explanatory knowledge: The case of Bjorken scaling

Explanation, understanding, and unrealistic models

Explicit nomenclature and classification in Pliny’s Natural History XXXII

Where explanation ends: Understanding as the place the spade turns in the social sciences

Hume’s Theorem

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