May 2005 Brainstorming event of the 'facts' group

Schedule

19^th May

20^th May

Participant's Profiles

Jon Adams

Initially a student of philosophy and English literature, Jon's interest in the position of the humanities relative to the sciences led him to reporting on the science wars and the wider problem of squaring knowledge claims from the humanities with knowledge claims from the sciences - alongside an analysis of the philosophical foundations for both the scientific realist and social relativist positions that underpin these factions. Interested in the possibility and desirability of making a science out of literary criticism, Jon has investigated linguistic, evolutionary psychological, and various taxonomic accounts of literary study. He is intrigued by the ramifications of accepting a scientific account of literary creation or literary analysis.

After completing his PhD on science and the humanities in 2003, Jon continued teaching English literature part time to students at the University of Durham, before arriving at the LSE in January 2005 to begin full time work as a research officer with the Facts project. Arising from his research into how non-specialists might acquire a scientific education, Jon is looking at the ways in which popularisations of science transmit scientific facts, and how this information is used by non-scientists. 

Marta Ajmar

Dr Marta Ajmar is Course Tutor and a member of the Research Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She studied Art History and Italian Literature in Pavia and Milan before completing the MA Course in Combined Historical Studies (The Renaissance) at the Warburg Institute in London. She worked in the Coins and Medals Department at the British Museum for a number of years, where she co-curated an exhibition on the Cribb Collection of devotional objects.

She was appointed in 1995 by the Victoria and Albert Museum to plan and set up the Renaissance specialism within the V&A/RCA MA Course in the History of Design. Her doctoral research at the Warburg Institute concentrated on women, exemplarity and the domestic arts in Renaissance Italy. She has published on many aspects of gender and the material culture of the domestic interior. Her most recent contributions have been published in The Image of the Individual (British Museum, 1998), Material Memories (Oxford, 1999) and Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society (Oxford, 2000).

Rachel Ankeny

Rachel gained her BA in liberal arts (philosophy and mathematics) from St John's College, Santa Fe, and Master's degrees in Medical Ethics and Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Her PhD, also from Pittsburgh, was in the History and Philosophy of Science. In 1999-2000, Dr Ankeny held a Research Fellowship at Princeton University in the Shelby Cullom Davis Centre for Historical Studies. Since 2000, she has worked in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.

Dr Ankeny's scholarly work crosses several disciplinary boundaries. She is active in the field of bioethics, as well as in the history and philosophy of science, where she has done work on the roles of models and case-based reasoning in science. One of the projects she is currently working on is: "Model Organisms as Case-Based Reasoning: Worms in Contemporary Biomedical Science," for Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives (co-edited by Norton Wise). Between her many publications, Mutating Concepts, Evolving Disciplines: Genetics, Medicine, and Society, Philosophy & Medicine, is typical of why her work is of such interest to the Facts team.

Marcel Boumans

Dr Marcel Boumans (Universiteit van Amsterdam) was initially interested in the direct links between economics and physics, basing his study on the example of Jan Tinbergen. Tinbergen's "Maxwellian" understanding of economic phenomena was rooted in the idea that a phenomenon becomes a scientific fact only if the mechanism which produces it is uncovered; where "uncovering" meant coding a mathematical formula that describes the mechanism, and may be checked against empirical measures.

Subsequent to this work, Dr Boumans became more and more interested in both measurement and modelling in economics. In his recently published How Economists Model the World into Numbers (2005), he draws from several arenas: moving from an account of how metrology copes with a world where conditions are different to those in laboratories, to the preparations which are made by economists (who, similarly, are trying to measure shifting phenomena) in order to take their measurements.

Hasok Chang

Dr Hasok Chang is Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at University College, London. He has worked extensively on the history of meteorology, and in 2004 published Investing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress; a book which considered how meteorological facts were produced (an approach which also included the replication of 18th centuries experiences) and how the search for precision changed the understanding of phenomena - particularly because the use of measurement results was possible only if one had proved that these measurements were reliable, which in turn called for a theoretical understanding of the functioning of these instruments.
He has now turned his interests from physics to chemistry, and is currently trying to understand how the nature of the research on water and air changed over the course of the eighteenth century.

Julien Demade

Before coming to the LSE to work on the Facts project, Dr Julien Demade had been investigating the possibility of integrating micro- and macro-historical facts, and whether and how this would lead to a shift in the understanding of the analysed facts. For example, a regularity observed at the macro level could, after a micro-historical study, prove not to be the socially relevant phenomenon (which could as well lie in exceptions).

These historiographical issues are at the centre of his new project on price history in the 1920s and 1930s - and especially on Lord Beveridge's International Committee for Price History. The aim is to understand how this period saw a general shift in the understanding of what makes a historical price a scientific fact - a shift characterized by the wholly new idea that a historical price could only be considered as such if he pertained to a series - as well as to examine how this common scheme developed in very different directions according to the variety of national contexts (e.g. post-inflation Germany vs. gold-sterling England), disciplinary approaches (e.g. an economist and statistician like the French Simiand vs. an archivist like the Austrian Pribram) and institutional backgrounds ("big science" and division of labour as authorized by the Rockefeller funds, vs. the individual work of a traditional German scholar such as Abel).

Larry Epstein

Larry Epstein, Professor of Economic History at the LSE, received a tesi di laurea in Siena and then wrote his PhD in Cambridge - both works on the late medieval economic history of Italy, but on two different regions (Tuscany and Sicily). Then, expanding both the geographical and chronological scope of his research to the whole of Europe in the pre-industrial period, he generalized his results in Freedom and Growth: Markets and States in Europe, 1300-1750 (2000), showing how the growth of markets, and hence of the entire economy, was neatly linked to the development of state powers, which made possible a stable institutional setting for transactions and therefore lowered transaction costs.

After this global reinterpretation of pre-modern European economic history, Larry moved his interest from commercialisation toward production, more precisely toward the human capital factor. Focusing on the way guilds insured both the transmission and the production of knowledge, and hence a technological progress which allowed Europe to catch up with the far more developed China, he is interested in applying theories recently developed in neuroscience to the historical inquiry of technical knowledge. This explains his recent fellowships at the MIT's Dibner Institute for Science and Technology and at the Department for the History of Science in Harvard.

David Haycock

Dr David Haycock is Wellcome Research Fellow in the History of Medicine in the Department of Economic History at LSE. He has recently started a 3-year Wellcome Trust-funded project under the title "Proprietary medicines and the emerging medical market in England, c.1640-c.1740."

This in-depth examination of the production, retailing and consumption of proprietary medicines in England from the English Civil War to the mid-eighteenth century will present a major re-evaluation of the medical marketplace in this formative period. The project will be informed by recent developments in British economic history, which over the past two decades has seen an acceleration of research into the study both of central issues such as growth, distribution and consumption, and the interconnections between these issues, as well as narrower social, demographic and cultural themes. Dr Haycock's earlier work with Dr Patrick Wallis on the late seventeenth-century London business of Anthony Daffy, manufacturer of "Daffy's Elixir," has already clearly shown that the development of proprietary medicines must be seen to have been as much about business as it was about health.

David Haycock was previously Ahmanson-Getty Research Fellow in the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies at UCLA, where he contributed to the Clark Library programme, 'The Age of Projects: Changing and Improving the Arts, Literature and Life during the Long Eighteenth Century, 1660-1820'. He is the author of William Stukeley: Science, Archaeology and Religion in Eighteenth-Century England (Boydell Press, 2002) and co-editor of Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003).

Peter Howlett

Dr Peter Howlett was educated at Warwick and Cambridge, and had previously worked at Stirling University before arriving here at the LSE in 1989, where he is now Senior Lecturer in Economic History. Dr Howlett has written extensively on the economic dimension of wars - how combat affects import and export patterns, what types of trade agreements are made, and the extent to which political grievances impact upon economic relationships. In particular, he has researched extensively on the Second World War, including the widespread use of economic experts in government and their impact on economic policy and planning. The measurement of transitions across both time and space is an important aspect of his research into the railway labour market in the period 1870-1914 (Howlett 2001) and he is currently investigating the potential for applying transition measures used in other disci-plines to his work.

Bernhard Kleeberg

Bernhard Kleeberg studied history and philosophy at the University of Konstanz. He finished his dissertation on German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel in 2002 as a member of the Collaborative Research Center "Lire anteratud Anthropology", where he thereafter conducted a project on theories of aggression in paleoanthropology. He has been teaching history at the universities of St. Gallen and Konstanz and currently holds a position as a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He co-edited two collections, his book on Haeckel was published this spring.

His fields of interest are 19^th and 20^th century evolutionary theory and anthropology, natural philosophy/theology and aesthetics of nature. With his new project on the concept of raising the standard of living he recently has started working on theories of political economy. His interest in historical epistemology and the construction of knowledge in between biology, theology, economics and social practices connects him to the "facts-group".

Justus Lentsch

Justus Lentsch works as a researcher and project coordinator at the interdisciplinary working group "Scientific Advice to Policy" of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences (BBAW). Cooperating with the Institute for Science & Technology Studies (IWT) the group wants first to survey the current institutional practices and structures of providing scientific advice to policy in Germany. Drawing on this survey, it secondly aims at devising guidelines and concrete proposals for institutional implementation and statuary regulations for advising policy in a way more accountable to academic science and public concerns alike. Before joining the BBAW, Justus Lentsch had been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Science & Technology Studies (IWT) within the graduate programme "Entering the Knowledge Society".

Having studied mathematics, physics and philosophy he received a PhD with a thesis on the relationship between C. S. Peirce's pragmatism and his epistemology.
His current research focuses on the philosophy and sociology of policy oriented science, scientific expertise and advice to policy. He has special expertise in the fields of science studies, risk and technology assessment and science policy. He is also involved in a critical edition of C. S. Peirce's Lowell Lectures. Further areas of interest are social epistemology, American pragmatism, history and philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language and political theory.

Harro Maas

Dr Harro Maas is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches on the history and methodology of economics. From an active interest in the history of technology and scientific thought, Dr Maas has also written on William Whewell, Charles Babbage, and has composed numerous encyclopaedia entries.
In April of this year, his book William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics was published by Cambridge University Press as part of their Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics Series.

Dr Maas's interest in the relationship between scientific thought, economic theory, and the growth of technology leads him to make connections between each of these, suggesting that academic theory and technological practice are co-dependents in the development of novel ideas.

In the next few years, Dr Maas will be exploring the relationship between concept formation and representational practices in economics, and in particular how recent boundary crossings between the neurological sciences and economics transform the conceptual and visualising tools of economics, and how these transformations change the notion of evidence for theories.

Erika Mattila

After spending six months here at the LSE, Erika Mattila recently returned to Finland, where she is currently completing a PhD at the Center for Activity Theory in the University of Helsinki. While conducting her Master's Thesis on the value-neutrality debate in philosophy of science, her interest in the interaction of values in scientific practice led her to follow the tradition of laboratory studies. She decided to examine the empirical grounds upon which scientific models in Biometry are constructed.

Her current work examines the construction and use of probabilistic modelling the study of infectious diseases. She focuses on three issues related to interdisciplinary research on modelling infectious diseases: 1) models as repositories of interdisciplinary expertise in long-term collaboration, 2) the application of the know-how that is built-in the models for public health work, and 3) an analysis of the construction of credibility of models in the mutual processes of trust and epistemic dependence among modellers. Observing directly the behaviour of experts at points of contact between mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, infectious disease specialists, and policy makers, the transmission of information across disciplinary boundaries assumes an especial interest for Erika in her work.

Mary Morgan

Currently head of the Economic History department here at the LSE, Professor Mary Morgan has investigated questions of knowledge transfer between economists and economic policy makers (Morgan and den Butter, 2000); and more recently recently done substantive work on the history of measurement in economics (Klein and Morgan, 2001: "Measurement in Economics and Physics").

She is a consistent contributor to two of the disciplinary backgrounds of the "Facts" project (economics and the history & philosophy of science) and has directed successful research groups on models and measurement in physics and economics at the LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and the University of Amsterdam. At the moment she is also working on a book project on the history of economic modelling and its philosophical status in economic sciences (continuing work of a British Academy Research Readership, held 1999-2001).

Naomi Oreskes

Professor Naomi Oreskes began her career as a geologist working in the field for the Western Mining Corporation in Adelaide, before returning to academia to study toward a PhD at Stanford. This shift from practice to theory is reflected in her academic work, which records a gradual incorporation of philosophical ideas parallel to her continued work in geology. Professor Oreskes has edited two collections, and is the author of two books, most recently Plate Tectonics: An Insider's History of the Modern Theory of the Earth (with Homer Le Grand, Westview Press, 2001). She has held teaching and research positions at Stanford, Dartmouth, NYU, and Harvard, and currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

Straddling geology and the history and philosophy of science, Professor Oreskes field of expertise is intrinsically multidisciplinary, and sees her cited in and writing on a wide range of issues, across topics as diverse as military technology, climate change, seismology, scientific modelling, and women in science. 

Ranging over such a expansive knowledge base, the transit of facts is of considerable importance to Professor Oreskes's work - although in a recent review of Michael Crichton's State of Fear, Oreskes claimed that the author "should leave the scientific facts to scientists, the historical facts to historians" (San Francisco Chronicle, 16.02.05). 

Antoine Picon

Antoine Picon is currently Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the Harvard Design School. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian of science and art, Prof. Picon is best known for his work in the history of architectural technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. He received engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique and from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, an architecture degree from the Ecole d'Architecture de Paris-Villemin, and a doctorate in history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Professor Picon's biography attests to an enduring interest in the relationship between the mechanico-structural and aesthetic aspects of design. These themes are explored in French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988, trans. 1992), which examines the "deep structures" of architecture, garden design, and engineering in the eighteenth century. More recently, he has edited Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors (2003), which shows how scientific paradigms have migrated to architecture through the appropriation of organic and mechanical models, whilst architecture has provided images for scientific and technological discourse. Accordingly, this volume investigates the status and the content of the exchanges between the two domains.

Max-Stephan Schulze

Max-Stephan Schulze studied economics and history at Munich, Freiburg and the LSE, where he did completed his Phd. He has been a lecturer in economic history at the University of Wales, Swansea and, since 1993, at the LSE. He is author of several articles on (macro-) economic development, a book on Austria-Hungary's Machine-Building Industry, and has edited a volume on economic and social change in Western Europe.

Schulze's research interests are the economic history of Austria-Hungary and Germany, economic development of Continental Europe in the 19th century and the European economy since 1945. He currently works on macro-economic history of Austria-Hungary (1815-1918), on economic growth, convergence and income distribution dynamics among OECD economies since 1870, and on the Human Development Index. Here, Schultze deals with the problem of how different quantitative facts from medicine, biology, epidemiology and economics are integrated into the HDI, and with the relations between "soft weighting schemas" and "hard facts".

Charles Stafford

Charles Stafford is a specialist in the anthropology of China and Taiwan, and his research has focused primarily on child development, learning, cognition, kinship, religion, and (more recently) economics. His first major fieldwork was conducted in the late 1980s in the Taiwanese fishing village of Angang where he examined, among other things, the relationship between nationalist schooling and Chinese popular religion. In the 1990s he began to conduct fieldwork in mainland China, examining questions related to kinship, religion, and Chinese historical consciousness. During this research, he became especially interested in rituals of "separation" and "reunion," which help to structure the flow of social life in rural communities.

More recently, Professor Stafford has completed a major new research project, funded by the ESRC, entitled "Numeracy and Folk-Accounting: the Development of Economics-Relevant Skills in Rural China and Taiwan." This examined economic agency in the Chinese and Taiwanese countryside from the perspective of numerical cognition and the learning of economic skills.

Simona Valeriani

Simona Valeriani studied architecture in Italy where she specialised in the study and conservation of historical buildings. At the Technische Universität, Berlin, she earned a PhD in Building Archaeology, working with an interdisciplinary project alongside Medieval Historians, Restorers, Art Historians, and Sociologists.
Her research interests are in the field of Building Archaeology and Construction History, with special emphasis on the History of Carpentry (the subject of her PhD thesis, in press as Kirchendächer in Rom). At present she is working on "Travelling knowledge: building techniques in Europe between 16^th and 18^th century".

The first line of research inquires into the spatial transfer formalities of technical knowledge, where the following aspects are being considered: the single architectural theories, the building materials available in the specific area, the workers and designers, the site machineries, etc. The second area regards the same issue from the point of view of available sources. The inquiry into the relationship between empirical and theoretical knowledge is the hub of this part of the research. Attention will be also paid to the role of the building crafts in the process of transferring (in time and space) technical knowledge.

Patrick Wallis

Dr Patrick Wallis is a lecturer in the Department of Economic History at LSE. He was previously lecturer in history at the University of Nottingham, where he was seconded to the Leverhulme Trust-funded Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisk and Society (2001-2004). Here he developed some of his current research interests on the professional, social and ethical responses to epidemics, from plague to SARS. This work led to his current paper interpreting the historiographical framing of the seventeenth-century "plague village" of Eyam in Derbyshire, and questioning the heroic and romantic narratives that continue to permeate popular accounts of epidemics.

As well as researching the history of medicine and disease (particularly epidemics), pharmacy and medical practice, Dr Wallis is also interested in the early modern economy and cities, particularly London, and the history of guilds. His most recent projects include developing the exhibition "Drug Trade: Therapy, pharmacy and commerce in early modern Europe" at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, and debating the question at the Natural History Museum's Dana Centre, "Quacks and quackery: Neglected knowledge or medical madness?" He is the co-author Guilds, Society and Economy in London, 1450-1800 (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 2002) and The Account Book of Anthony Daffy's Elixir Salutis (Medical History, Supplement, forthcoming 2005), as well as papers in English Historical Review, Social Science and Medicine and Twentieth Century British History.

Florence Weber

Professor Florence Weber, Director of the Social Sciences Department at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), centres her work on a reflection about the problems linked with the production of scientific facts. She considered this problem from a theoretical point of view (reflecting upon the shifts between ethnographic description and sociological modelling) as well as from an historical perspective (reconstructing the procedures of producing ethnographical knowledge in the inter-war France), but certainly devoted much more time to a practical approach of that topic. Indeed most of her activity, centred on a cooperative and multidisciplinary approach to the same phenomenon, may be considered as a "reflecting by doing" upon the question of the specific ways in which various disciplines constitute facticity, and how this variety handicaps but also potentially enhances our understanding of social phenomena. For example, she recently worked along with economists on modern kinship (Charges de famille: parenté et dépendance, 2003), as well as with both historians and economists in order to understand the formation and circulation of value in the High Middle Ages (La fortune de Karol : marché de la terre et liens personnels, 2005).

Norton Wise

Professor Norton Wise (UCLA), a historian of science, considers science as the vector of various sorts of exchanges. He first concentrated on the relations between science and economy, studied through the paradigmatic example of British industrialisation in the 19^th century, where he showed how the same object, e.g. the steam engine as main hero of the "economic revolution," was at the centre of new reflections both in physics (i.e. thermodynamics) and in human sciences (i.e. economics), centred around different but similar terms (energy vs. force).

His approach to understanding these boundary exchanges, and the concepts he developed in the process, have proved of enduring importance in understanding actual research practices - their merits and limitations. In particular, his focus on the role of scientific instruments and measurement serves to unravel the way in which theories of different disciplines are or become related to one another, and how instruments and measurement serve to establish a relation in the first place between theory and data. One of the important messages of his work is that once this relation becomes established the actual practice of its production easily vanishes from view.