Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology

Transcription

1 Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology Series Editors James Fleming Colby College South China, Maine, USA Roger Launius Washington, D.C., USA

2 Designed to bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of technology, this series publishes the best new work by promising and accomplished authors in both areas. In particular, it offers historical perspectives on issues of current and ongoing concern, provides international and global perspectives on scientific issues, and encourages productive communication between historians and practicing scientists. More information about this series at

3 Elena Aronova Simone Turchetti Editors Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond Paradigms Defected

4 Editors Elena Aronova University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, USA Simone Turchetti University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Control Number: The Editors and Authors 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer Science+Business Media LLC New York

5 In memory of John V. Pickstone who encouraged us to pursue this research project.

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7 PREF ACE This book was inspired by an international conference Politics and Context of Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond, held at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg in Greifswald on March 22 24, The workshop s organizer, Elena Aronova, was generously offered this opportunity as a fellow-in-residence at the Wissenschaftskolleg. Her work on the history of the studies of science in Cold War America and the Soviet Union motivated the aim of the workshop: to investigate a variety of national science studies projects across the East West and Global North South divides during the Cold War, as a counterbalance to the extant historiography of science studies that focuses almost exclusively on the discussions in the West (the USA and Western Europe). The response to the call for papers confirmed what was obvious at the time: that almost everyone in the field was interested in the field s origins, contexts, and politics, but it was hard to find anyone who actually researched the subject the way historians of science research the history of other fields in the Cold War. The workshop thus became an incentive for many participants to dig into the archives, to survey the literature in a systematic fashion, and, in some cases, to reflect on their own past. Indeed, several contributors have been directly or indirectly involved in the episodes they historicize in their chapters. The initial versions of the papers presented at the workshop generated the discussion that continued further. The institutional support of the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg in Greifswald and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin allowed this project to evolve. With Simone Turchetti as a co-editor, we took the next step, making vii

8 viii PREFACE additional selection of contributions to strengthen the book s coherence around three parts: Science Studies in the West, Studies of Science Behind the Curtain, and National Agendas of the Studies of Science Beyond the Two Blocs. Elena Aronova would like to thank all the guests of the initial workshop and the keynote speaker, Naomi Oreskes, for their generous and stimulating interventions, as well as for their enthusiastic response and support without which this project would never have materialized. A special word of gratitude is due to the Wissenschaftskolleg staff that contributed to making the initial workshop an important inspiration to pursue the project further. Simone Turchetti would like to thank Jonathan Harwood, Gianni Battimelli, Paul Forman, John Krige, Michael Worboys, Roy MacLeod, John Christie, and Pietro Corsi for exchanging their views during the completion of his chapter. Turchetti s research was funded by the European Research Council. Michal Kokowski would like to express his gratitude to the editors of the volume, Elena Aronova and Simone Turchetti, for their helpful comments, criticism, and editorial work. Kokowski also acknowledges Aronova for arousing his interest in the subject through her publications. Lu Gao would like to acknowledge Zuoyue Wang who introduced her to Aronova and encouraged to pursue her research. Hans-Joachim Dahms thanks George Reisch for discussions in Greifswald, in Berlin, and on the internet. Thanks also for permission to cite from his unpublished articles! Dahms is also indebted to Aronova and Turchetti for discussions on his article. Ian James Kidd acknowledges Donald Gillies and Paul Hoyningen-Huene for helpful discussions, and the editors for their kind invitation to contribute to this volume and their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Kidd s research was funded by an Addison Wheeler Fellowship. Sommer s research was funded by the European Research Council and the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR). Vasen acknowledges the University of Quilmes and CONICET for institutional and financial support and Adriana Feld and Judith Naidorf for enriching discussions on the paper. Elena Aronova Santa Barbara, CA, USA Simone Turchetti Manchester, UK

9 CONTENTS 1 Introduction: Science Studies in East and West Incommensurable Paradigms? 1 Elena Aronova and Simone Turchetti Part I Science Studies in the West 21 2 Telegrams and Paradigms: On Cold War Geopolitics and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 23 George A. Reisch 3 What s So Great About Science? Feyerabend on Science, Ideology, and the Cold War 55 Ian James Kidd 4 Looking for the Bad Teachers: The Radical Science Movement and Its Transnational History 77 Simone Turchetti 5 Thomas Kuhn s Structure : An Exemplary Document of the Cold War Era? 103 Hans-Joachim Dahms ix

10 x CONTENTS Part II Studies of Science Behind the Curtain Blind Isolation: History of Science Behind the Iron Curtain 129 Gabor Pallo 7 The Science of Science ( naukoznawstwo ) in Poland: Defending and Removing the Past in the Cold War 149 Michał Kokowski 8 Scientists of the World, Unite! Radovan Richta s Theory of Scientific and Technological Revolution 177 Vítězslav Sommer Part III National Agendas of the Studies of Science Beyond the Two Blocs The Cold War, Political Neutrality, and Academic Boundaries: Imprints on the Origins and Early Development of Science Studies in Sweden 207 Aant Elzinga 10 What does a National Science Mean? Science Policy, Politics and Philosophy in Latin America 241 Federico Vasen 11 From Dialectics of Nature to STS: The Historical Evolution of Science Studies in China 267 Lu Gao Bibliography 289 Index 321

11 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Elena Aronova is an Assistant Professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara s History Department. She has published a number of articles, which examine the ways in which ideas about science have become a sphere of Cold War competition, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. She also works on the history of environmental data collection during the Cold War, and the history of the evolutionary theory. In , she was a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She received her Ph.D. at the University of California at San Diego, after a doctorate in Biology/History of Science from the Russian Academy of Science. Hans-Joachim Dahms is a (now retired) philosophy researcher, who studied at Göttingen and took his habilitation at the University of Osnabrück (Germany). His last position was at the Vienna Circle Institute of the University of Vienna (Austria). His main research interests are in the philosophy of science and its history as well as German and Austrian university history. He has also published on the Vienna Circle of logical positivism, Karl Popper s critical rationalism, and the Frankfurt Schools of critical theory. He is working on a book on the Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) in art, architecture, and philosophy, based mainly on archival sources. Aant Elzinga is Professor Emeritus of Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He combines the history and politics of science in the broader field called science and technology studies (STS). In the 1990s, he was, for several years, President of the European Association for the Study of Science and technology (EASST). A noteworthy publication is Einstein s Nobel Prize (2006). He is a member of editorial advisory boards of leading science studies journals as well as of The Polar Journal, a multidisciplinary social sciences and humanities publication on polar matters. A founding member (2004) of the History Group of xi

12 xii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR), his main interest is the history, politics, and social contexts of polar research. Lu Gao is an Associate Professor in the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. She received her Ph.D. from the STS center of Tsinghua University, Beijing. She was a visiting scholar at Edinburgh University from 2008 to 2009, and at Stanford University in Her research focuses on the history of technology in modern China, the co-evolution of science, technology, and society in modern Chinese Society, and the governance of modern biotechnology. Ian James Kidd is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham (UK). His research spans epistemology, philosophy of medicine, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of science. Within the latter area, this includes a number of papers on contingency and pluralism, epistemic virtues in scientific practice, and the life and work of Paul Feyerabend, including Reappraising Feyerabend, a special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, co-edited with Matt Brown (UT Dallas). Michał Kokowski is a professor at the Ludwik and Antoni Birkenmajer Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Secretary of the Commission on the History of Science of the Polska Akademia Umiejętności (PAU), and the Editor-in-Chief of the Prace Komisji Historii Nauki PAU (Proceedings of the PAU Commission on the History of Science)/Studia Historiae Scientiarum. He is interested in the history and philosophy of exact sciences, including analyses of relationships between exact sciences and other parts of culture: philosophy, theology, and arts, with special emphasis on: Copernicus and the Copernican Revolution; the critical estimations of Kuhn s interpretations of the Copernican Revolution; the physical theories framed by Wladyslaw Natanson; the methodology of exact sciences: including the Hypothetico- Deductive Method of Correspondence-Oriented Thinking; methodology of historiography of science; history of ideas; science of science, including the problem of two cultures of Sarton Snow; history of science of science; models of university; the critical estimations of scientiometrics and bibliometry. Gabor Pallo is Senior Consultant at the Visual Learning Lab, Budapest University of Technology and Economics. His fields of research include history of chemistry and physics, twentieth-century history of natural sciences in Hungary, philosophy of science, history of migration of scientists, the relationship between science, politics, and philosophy. George A. Reisch has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and is a historian of philosophy of science. He published How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and is currently writing a book on Thomas Kuhn and James Conant. He has taught at IIT and Northwestern

13 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xiii University and is managing editor of The Monist and Series Editor of the Popular Culture and Philosophy Series for Open Court Publishing. Vítězslav Sommer is a research fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague. He received his Ph.D. from Charles University in Prague in His dissertation explored the origins of communist party historiography in Czechoslovakia and its development in the Stalinist, post-stalinist, and reform communist period ( ). His recent research is concerned with the transformations of Czechoslovak future studies and with the relationship between knowledge production and state socialist governance. He is a head of The Road to Technocratic Socialism: Concepts of Governance in Socialist Czechoslovakia ( ) research project funded by Czech Science Foundation. Simone Turchetti is a lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM, University of Manchester, UK). He is interested in the history of twentieth-century science and technology, with special emphasis on the geosciences and the shaping of international relations. He has previously worked at the Universities of Bristol and Leeds and researched on a variety of issues that relate to Cold War science: from atomic espionage and nuclear energy (hence his first monograph: The Pontecorvo Affair. A Cold War Defection and Nuclear Physics, 2012) to Antarctic studies. From 2009 to 2014 he was the principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded project The Earth Under Surveillance, charting the development of the geosciences in Cold War Europe, which led to the publication of the edited collection The Surveillance Imperative : Geosciences during the Cold War and Beyond (New York: Palgrave, 2014). Federico Vasen is a CONICET postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies (IESCT, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina). His interests include the history of science and technology policy in Argentina and Latin America and its connections with the transformation of higher education institutions. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of Quilmes. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Xochimilco, Mexico City).