108 research outputs found
Science and Society : Past, Present and Future, éd. by Nicholas H. Steneck
No full textMandelbaum J. Science and Society : Past, Present and Future, éd. by Nicholas H. Steneck. In: Revue d'histoire des sciences, tome 28, n°3, 1975. pp. 274-275
Science and Society : Past, Present and Future, éd. by Nicholas H. Steneck
No full textMandelbaum J. Science and Society : Past, Present and Future, éd. by Nicholas H. Steneck. In: Revue d'histoire des sciences, tome 28, n°3, 1975. pp. 274-275
Axiomaticism in science development.
No full textThis study represents a theoretical synthesis of the history of exact science. The persistent epistemological regularities identified in the study includes: (1) The Principle of Axiomaticism, or the Heraclitean-Confucian Principle. Every branch of physics and mathematics culminated in an axiomatized format. In fact, axiomatization and scientific underst and ing are equivalent. The historical roots of axiomaticism are traced; its congeniality with Aristotle's "teleological economy" is pointed out; so is its identity with Ernst Mach's "economy of mental effort." (2) The Principle of the Expansive Pools of Measurables. Knowledge in physics has been accumulated by way of empirical and intellectual manipulations of a number of physical measurables. The progress of physics corresponds to the "expansions" of "a pool of measurables," in one, or two, or all three possible manners. (3) The Principle of "Saving the Appearances." This ancient idea is now formulated as a principle in contrast to another ancient idea of "thinking up the true causes." In generalizing Pierre Duhem's work, this study shows that competition between these two attitudes has been persistent. (4) The Prinicple of Quasi-Deterministic Accumulation of Physical Science. Physical sciences are characterized by rigid internal logic. Did the historical building-up of physical sciences follow accidental courses? The answer is no, although neither was it historically deterministic. Since the accumulations of related positive results of sciences are sequential and orderly, they are described as quasi-deterministic. The study has been conducted with the observation that the whole history of physics serves well to illustrate all these historical regularities. The success of this viewpoint is evinced in a profound presentation of the Copernican Revolution, the Newtonian Synthesis, and the Chemical Revolution. As an epistemological exposition of the history of science, this study uses its own definition of science. In the beginning chapter, a thorough and exact definition of science is proposed, on the one h and , as an antidote to the movement that declares that "science is not all that scientific" and , on the other h and , as a successor to a number of definitions formulated by authors since antiquity. The study, however, concedes incompleteness in collecting and analyzing past definition of science.PhDScience historyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161851/1/8812969.pd
Order out of chaos: Automobile safety, technology and society, 1925 to 1965.
No full textThis dissertation examines the way experts in the United States, using the rhetoric of science and the rationale of safety, controlled access to and shaped the character of the automobile and road as a technological system. Mass automobile ownership in the 1920s freed individuals from the tyranny of timetables and the prison of rural isolation. But to many observers, the annual tens of thousands of traffic fatalities and the millions of collisions and injuries were grim evidence that Americans had become too free and were mixing dangerously, including across the lines of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and age. The study centers on four groups of experts: traffic engineers, traffic police, forensic psychiatrists, and driving educators. This network of safety experts established driver control as the cornerstone their effort. Laws governing driver behavior were developed by traffic engineers and enforced by increasingly sophisticated police forces. Police treated traffic transgressions as vice crimes and as the cause of most accidents. Drivers deemed accident-prone were sent to forensic psychiatrists who measured their physical, emotional, and intellectual suitability for road security. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of court clinic records shows that these evaluations were biased against the oldest and youngest drivers, as well as African Americans and the foreign born. The work of early safety experts was instrumental in establishing the belief that imbuing drivers with a proper attitude toward society would reduce collisions. Their Progressive ideology sought to balance individual freedom with social control. Progressive educators therefore used driver education not only to make automobile travel safer but as a powerful tool for adjusting young people to modern life. This study offers further evidence that large-scale technological systems embody the societal outlook of their creators. History shows that safety policy is only partly motivated by lifesaving. It provides a new approach to automotive history which emphasizes both the new freedoms and the new controls brought on by automobility. Finally, it shows that safety policy has been, and still is, controlled by a narrow collection of experts working with a particular view of the relationship between the individual and society.PhDAmerican historyGeographyHealth and Environmental SciencesPublic healthSocial SciencesTransportationUrban planningUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130646/2/9811020.pd
Medicine and government in early modern Wuerttemberg.
No full textIn the fourth decade of the eighteenth century, a group of physicians in the employ of Wurttemberg's government attempted to restructure the legal framework for the practice of the healing arts in the duchy. This dissertation analyzes the conditions that led to the attempted reform and the reasons for its failure. It seeks to discern the forces shaping the medical profession in the later eighteenth century, and to contribute to knowledge of the function of institutions in retarding and in accelerating innovation. The investigation begins in the later seventeenth century, when morale was low among physicians and there was little hope for employment except as a member of the public health apparatus. At the upper levels of the medical bureaucracy, some Leibmedici and Hofmedici were growing dissatisfied with traditional patronage practices that frequently assigned familial and political association a higher value than medical knowledge and experience. At the bottom of the medical hierarchy, the Physici in the towns were faced with intransigent and conservative local notables who also employed a patronage system to fill public health positions. Using materials from government and university archives, the dissertation depicts the practice of medicine in early modern Wurttemberg. Here, as in other European polities, abuses by untrained healers were rife and health practitioners exceed the traditional bounds of their competence. Public health physicians were unable to control "medicastering" not only because of their relatively small numbers and limited resources, but also because attempts to impose regulation met with resistance from local magistracies who resented central government interference with the affairs of the commune. Analysis of the legislative reform of 1740 and its ultimate defeat reveals the vision of the ideals of health care espoused by university educated public health physicians, and also why the political and social dynamics of early modern Wurtemberg precluded its acceptance by other professional bureaucrats. Finally, the dissertation discusses the great portent of the medical code adopted in 1755 for the direction of medicine in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and debates briefly the significance of the notion of "professionalism" as applied to early modern medicine.PhDScience historyEuropean historyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161881/1/8813019.pd
Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research
No full textNo Abstract.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/34843/1/2118_ftp.pd
Witelonis perspectivae liber primus : (Book I of Witelo's Perspectiva). An English Translation with Introduction and Commentary and Latin Edition of the Mathematical Book of Witelo's Perspectiva. By Sabetai Unguru. Wroclaw (The Polish Academy of Sciences). 1977. Studia Copernicana, Vol. 15. 330 pp., 12 plates
No full textPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/23252/1/0000185.pd
Confronting misconduct in science in the 1980s and 1990s: What has and has not been accomplished?
No full textThe Relevance of the Middle Ages to the History of Science and Technology
No full textPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75707/1/j.1749-6632.1985.tb14574.x.pd
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