Moments of Science: Ideological and Technological Aspects

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Professor Wise is exploring the ways in which major explanatory strategies in the sciences are rooted in particular cultures at particular times. These cultural "moments" are to be understood not in the purely intellectual sense of the history of ideas, but in the larger anthropological sense, which includes political economy, social structure, and material and technological culture. Technologies, in fact, appear to play a major role as mediators between the larger culture and the narrower concerns of particular disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, or biology. This mediation is the focus of this study. Professor Wise is analyzing four moments, labelled "statics," "dynamics," "probabilism," and "chaos," centered historically in enlightenment France, industrializing Britain, Wilhelmian and Weimar Germany and contemporary America. The labels designate broad strategies employed over a wide range of disciplines to explain natural systems as balances, engines, random but holistic structures, or endlessly repeated codes, respectively. Such strategies have been stimulated by, and/or have stimulated, technologies adequate for the knowledge sought. It is these technically achieved balances, engines, statistical techniques, and means of iterating codes that ground the study.