Theses - History and Philosophy of Science
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Item Open Access Harvesting Diversity Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the Transformation of the Green Revolution, 1950–2000Chu, Chia-LiThe Green Revolution, coined in 1968 by aid agencies to promote high-yielding cereals for economic development, has been scrutinized for its connection to American Cold War geopolitical strategies and its uneven socio-ecological outcomes. The thesis explores how scientists in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, in particular the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia, transformed the Green Revolution through what I call the expanded and reformist visions. The thesis follows the history of the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC). Created in Taiwan in 1971, the center traced its root to the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), funded by American aid and managed by Republic of China (ROC) officials. Following the ROC’s retreat to Taiwan in 1949, the JCRR transformed the island’s tenant farmers into landowners and organized them into associations for the distribution of agrochemicals, seeds, and irrigation water. The AVRDC, initiated by JCRR officials, inherited this experience and attempted to expand the improved yield in the Green Revolution from cereals to vegetables and achieve the diversification and intensification of commodity production. The expanded vision was nevertheless contested by Southeast Asian ecologists and anthropologists in the 1980s who argued the pursuit of productivity had to be balanced with sustainability, and believed that the Green Revolution could be reformed from within to conserve the socio-ecological diversity in rural societies. This thesis examines the achievements, interaction, and limitations of the expanded and reformist visions in bringing the focus of the Green Revolution beyond cereals, and studies how Cold War agricultural development influenced the contemporary discourses of sustainability and agroecology. By showing scientists’ ambition and negotiation with national governments, international donors, and local farmers, this thesis contributes to the historiography of Green Revolution, the scholarship on Cold War Taiwan and Southeast Asia, and the history of science and environment.Item Controlled Access The Age of Insects: Gender, Class, Race and the Experience of British Entomology in the Long Nineteenth CenturyGreen, Leore JoanneAccording to John Lubbock, well-known politician and man of science, the long nineteenth century was the Age of Insects, with unparalleled interest in insects across the British Isles and empire. Thus far, histories of British entomology have mostly been dominated by questions of professionalisation. But what happens if we shift the focus to experience? Specifically, the thesis explores three aspects of experience: senses, morals, and emotions. Within their experiences, practitioners of science felt constant tension: for example, between the enjoyment of beauty and objectivity, or the way anxiety and disappointment often existed alongside pleasure. I ask how people negotiated these tensions and argue this was done by self-fashioning, managing emotions, and the development of a special, entomological gaze. The moral and emotional economies of entomology were shaped by a dominant streak of middle-class gentility, which upheld an ideal of the ‘true’ entomologist, defined by a gentlemanly character. This is showcased in debates of the late nineteenth century, which deemed the over-collecting of butterfly species ungentlemanly: those who displayed such ungentlemanliness were publicly shamed. Examining virtues and emotions is necessary for understanding why people practised science; entomology was a moral occupation, but it was also, simply, pleasurable. Emotions act as a connecting medium for scientific communities, and are the glue that holds those communities together. Even objectivity, ostensibly the absence of emotion, is thus revealed to be a method of managing emotions. For example, Margaret Elizabeth Fountaine, an independent butterfly collector, revealed different emotions in different texts: in her public articles, she distanced herself from sentimentality by using narratives of objectivity and imperialism. Her private journals, meanwhile, became an outlet for the feelings of guilt and shame she felt at times when killing butterflies, as well as her great love for them. Objectivity was not contradictory to love and guilt, just expressed in different spaces and texts. Self-fashioning played a large part in practitioners’ experience. Bound to contemporary social structures, entomologists could nonetheless stretch them through creative self-fashioning. The structures this thesis is most concerned with are those related to class, gender, and race. For example, women were mostly marginalised from science, but some crafted personae which made it acceptable for them to take part in the entomological community. The concept of the ‘entomological gaze’ is used to describe how entomologists were taught to observe. Viewing the world through a magnifying glass, this was a dissecting gaze preoccupied with distinction, race and classification. It often seeped into everyday life colouring the way entomologists viewed others. This tendency was fully manifested when travelling entomologists encountered local people and viewed them as entomological specimens. That non-Europeans were thought incapable of developing the entomological gaze shows how deeply racialised it was. This gaze was also directed inwards, as analysed in the chapter about Bruce Frederic Cummings, who in his journals turned himself into his own bug. Throughout this thesis, I address the physicality of science and of scientific practitioners. Hands-on interaction with nature was deemed necessary to truly learn, which was why, even as species were disappearing, many entomologists believed novice should keep collecting. The physical aspects of entomology were also important to some women, such as Fountaine, who found freedom in her movement and clothes while collecting around the empire. On the other end of the spectrum were those who felt physically inhibited by the science. Cummings, for example, lived with multiple sclerosis, and his experience of being constrained in body, space, and time was analogous to his sense of being constrained at the British Museum, where he worked but was unable to acquire a higher status and more interesting work (and especially the ability to work beyond entomology) because of his class and lack of higher education. At the core of this thesis are the intimate, sensate, and emotional histories of practitioners navigating the hierarchical structure of the entomological community, specifically the categories of gender, class, and race. Using the community as a focal point and juxtaposing broader analyses (Chapters 1, 2, and 6) with micro-histories (Chapters 3, 4, and 5), results in a history that is both broad and intimate. An understanding of the emotional and moral economies of science is necessary both for understanding how communities formed and operated, and for learning about individual experience.Item Embargo Instrument and Influence: The Problem of Fair Weather Electricity (1850–1930)Duncan, Katherine; Duncan, Katherine [0000-0002-3976-5292]This thesis presents a history of the fair weather problem, an atmospheric electric phenomenon, between 1850 and 1930. The analogy and presumed identity between lightning and the sparks drawn from electrical machines in 1752 has been heralded as a pivotal moment in the history of physics. That same year, Louis-Guillaume Le Monnier (1717-1799) found his electroscope rendered another phenomenon visible on a clear day: ordinary air appeared electrical too. But how was this possible? This dissertation explores various attempts to solve this scientific problem across an eighty-year period, and argues that an instrument-oriented analysis of this history reveals a richer view of atmospheric electricity than has previously been provided. Chapter 2 provides an account of the instruments and innovations made by British physicist and industrialist William Thomson (1824–1907) around 1850, and then explores his attempts at instigating a global electrical survey. Chapter 3 assesses Continental responses to Thomson’s programme in the decades that follow, through the divergent programmes of Austrian physicist Franz Exner (1849–1926) and German schoolteachers Julius Elster (1854-1920) and Hans Geitel (1855-1923) between 1870 to 1900. Chapter 4 analyses the theoretical problems arising from the ionisation of the atmosphere, and explores the controversies surrounding British physicist C.T.R. Wilson’s (1869-1959) new global electrical circuit theory between 1900 and 1930. In this thesis, I put forward the term *instrumental thinking* to describe the plasticity of instruments designed for measurements of atmospheric electricity. Instruments enabled phenomena to be interrogated creatively and productively through physical interaction and metaphorical speculation. Instruments were designed, used, improved, altered, and co-opted by an array of practitioners to investigate atmospheric electrification. Further, thinking with electrical instruments was central to many practitioners’ conceptualisations of the Earth-atmosphere system. Metaphorical Leyden jars, capacitors, circuits, and batteries were often invoked to carry significant explanatory weight. Shifts in understanding fair weather were mediated by physical and metaphorical scientific instruments with different perspectives of invisible electric quantities: potential, charge, and current. These shifts were also reflected in practitioners’ various choices: which measurements were considered useful and valuable, what instruments allowed them to obtain these values, and which atmospheres and environments were appropriate for measurement. Across these chapters, the sustained utility of the electrical atmosphere to various practitioners across this period becomes clear. In exploring the fair weather problem through both its instrumental and environmental dimensions, this thesis makes a case for considering alternative kinds of histories of science. By using instruments to track approaches to a persistently thorny problem that resisted disciplinary categorisations, this thesis has revealed a rich, alternative narrative of science across the long nineteenth century. Instead of following more standard forms of scholarship, upon inherited textbook narratives, neat disciplinary lines, or tidy results, this thesis asks what else might be gained from using instruments to pursue these kinds of unsatisfying, untidy, and difficult histories of science.Item Embargo Forging a Social Science of Prevention in the United States, 1950-2005Di Castri, TheoThis thesis offers a critical account of the rise of “prevention science,” a field that coalesced in the United States during the 1990s. Prevention scientists borrow methods from public health and evidence-based medicine to design preventative interventions for a range of problems they deem detrimental to healthy development—e.g. substance use, delinquency, violence, academic failure, mental illness and risky sexual activity. Where social critics have attributed the emergence of prevention science to the abstract workings of “neoliberalism,” this thesis tells a more processual and variegated story about the field’s past, present and potential future—one that highlights the plurality of preventive projects that have managed to survive through the broader political, economic and ideological shifts that have taken place since the 1950s. To do so, it traces the roots of prevention science back to a mid-century landscape comprised of distinct yet overlapping subcultures of preventive research and follows the dispersal of that landscape during the 1980s and 1990s. This thesis is structured around three localized subcultures of preventive research: the behavioral scientific Program on Problem Behavior at the University of Colorado; the positivist criminological Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington, Seattle; and the social justice-oriented Vermont Conferences on the Primary Prevention of Psychology at the University of Vermont, Burlington. After tracing the respective development of these communities between the 1950s and 1980s, it follows their interplay and eventual divergence through the formalization of prevention science during the 1990s.Item Controlled Access Visualising Lung Disease in Modern China: Body, Nation, and Environment from the Nanjing Decade to the Cultural RevolutionGui, Vera AngelaRespiratory pathologies were major causes of death and disease in twentieth-century China. This thesis analyses lung disease in public health images from the advent of national public health services in the Republic of China in the 1920s, to the official recognition of the People’s Republic of China in intergovernmental health work in the 1970s. It argues that practices of visualising, displaying, and viewing lung diseases served to define these as medical conditions for urban publics, while simultaneously investing them with national significance. Through four case studies, it shows that over the course of the period studied, public health images of lung disease brought ever more citizens and audiences to engage with projects of national construction. In the process, such images contributed to new relationships between individual bodies, the environment, and Chinese nation-states. Chapter 1 demonstrates how the introduction of X-ray diagnosis in the 1930s produced visual categories for early- versus late-stage tuberculosis in educational images of the lung- diseased Chinese body as a symbol of national failure. Chapter 2 traces the orchestration and photojournalistic coverage of an annual summer camp for improving the respiratory health of children in the mid-1930s; it shows how visual constructions of children’s bodies as experimental subjects defined childhood as a site of medicalised resistance to imperialism. Chapter 3 details how programmes to control lung disease prioritised industrial workers and expanded in the early 1950s as public health images of lung disease enacted an entangled relationship between respiratory health and political consciousness. Chapter 4 illustrates how the People’s Republic sought transnational support and geopolitical legitimacy in part through portrayals of the control of occupational lung disease in foreign-facing propaganda magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s. The thesis thus extends our understanding of public health and nationalism in modern China, and helps to historicise lung disease at the intersection of infectious, occupational, and environmental disease.Item Controlled Access London Zoo, Commercial Television, and Primate Ethology from the Launch of ITV to The Naked ApeKempton, Miles; Kempton, Miles [0000-0002-8258-1819]This thesis argues that the foundations for a new vision of human nature as a composite of apish instincts overlaid by a thin veneer of culture - of ‘man’, ‘the naked ape’ - were built on British commercial television. It highlights TV as a major arena of science and cultural politics, while also unpicking its intermedial relations with other technologies of expert and mass communication. Above all, it uncovers the remarkable interpenetration and interdependence of academic zoology and commercial entertainment. Challenging a TV-historical literature dominated by the BBC, this is the first history of science on ITV, the ad-funded service which broke the BBC monopoly in 1955. Beginning with the launch of ITV, I trace the establishment, outputs, and legacies of the Granada TV – Zoological Society Film Unit. Through the unit broadcasters and zoologists co-produced films about animal behaviour which circulated widely, shaping disciplinary knowledge in ethology - the evolutionary science of animal behaviour - industry norms of natural-history broadcasting, and the institutional identity of London Zoo. High hopes for financial and scientific rewards brought the unit into being. Conflict and fraught negotiations between Granada and the ZSL punctuated its first two years. But when filmmaking began alongside live transmissions, the unit came into its own. The first director and later the curator of mammals, Desmond Morris, built up an ethological research group focused on apes and monkeys. Working with Granada and then the zoo’s in-house production unit, this was a filmic research culture. Its members filmed pioneering work on chimp intelligence, primate facial expressions, and the behaviour of dogs and wolves. All the while, Morris was collecting, trialling, and debating material for a project on ‘the human animal’. In 1967 this filmic research culture fed into the sensational authorship, publication, and reception of the international bestseller, *The Naked Ape*.Item Open Access The Problem of the Earth's Figure: Measurement, Theory, and Evidence in Physical GeodesyOhnesorge, Miguel; Ohnesorge, Miguel [0000-0003-4583-4124]This thesis tells the story of a surprisingly difficult problem in gravitational physics: deriving and measuring the shape of our planet. Chapter 1 reconstructs the emergence of gravitational theories of planetary equilibrium figures and quantitative measurements of the Earth’s shape and surface gravity (c. 1660-1730). I show that early geodesists made substantial empirical progress despite deep theoretical disagreements about the nature of gravitation. Chapter 2 reconstructs how geodesy came to offer a decisive test of the interactive nature and compositionality of gravitation (c. 1740-1825). I retell how Pierre-Simon Laplace established that the Earth’s external attraction is the resultant force of the mutual attractions between its constituent particles; a momentous but overlooked achievement in the history of gravitational physics. Chapter 3 traces the numerical conflicts in the measurement of the central quantity characterising Earth’s figure: its ellipticity. These conflicts persisted throughout the nineteenth century and complicated the coordination between geodetic models and measurements. Chapter 4 reconstructs how geodesists finally achieved convergent measurements of Earth’s ellipticity between 1880 and 1924. Jointly, the four chapters illustrate key steps in obtaining strong evidence for quantitative claims about a complex and partially inaccessible system: using measurements to initiate theoretical inquiry (chapter 1), using measurements to conduct severe tests of theoretical laws (chapter 2), using discordant measurements to study second-order phenomena (chapter 3), and using multiple alternative measures to identify the sources of persistent errors (chapter 4).Item Open Access Mind the Matter: Active Matter, Basal Cognition, and the Making of Bio-Inspired Artificial IntelligenceHarrison, DavidThis thesis explores a recent trend in theoretical biology and cognitive science called the biogenic approach to life and mind: the view that living processes of self-organization and self-maintenance are intimately linked with agential capacities underpinning survival and reproduction. It addresses a central question within this body of literature: what is an agent? What are the conditions that must be in place for agency to emerge in nature? What systems can be called agents in a realist sense; and what systems are metaphorically ascribed agency? Because the systems the biogenic approach examines (such as protists, unicellulars, and slime moulds, to name a few) do not exhibit sharp distinctions between their materiality and their cognitive capacities, these questions boil down to how mind relates to its material substrate more generally—connecting to debates in the life and mind sciences concerning the epistemic and ontological status of ascribing agency to natural phenomena. That is, it addresses the naturalisation of agency: how do we reconcile the purposive nature of organismic processes with our naturalist commitments to scientific methodology? Historically, this amounted to showing how the supposedly agential nature of organisms can be reduced to mechanistic processes. We treat organisms as if they are agents, but ultimately this locution can be elided when ontologising. In this thesis, I pull from recent developments in Active Matter Physics, Basal Cognition, and Bio-Inspired A.I. to argue that this conception of materiality and physicality needs to be reworked to reflect the state-of-the-art. When we pivot away from a conception of materiality as entailing reductive physicalism, we find that the above adumbrated disciplines are in fact conceptualising and operationalising notions of agency (and closely related notions of emergence and downward causation) that are both realist with regards to agency and non-reductive when exploring materiality. To conclude, I argue that the biogenic approach can better overcome concerns of reductionism and as if teleology when equipped with this updated view of materiality.Item Embargo Making Sense of Understanding: A Pragmatist Account of Scientific UnderstandingWesterblad, OscarScientists strive to understand the world. Traditionally, philosophers of science have thought that this is a matter of constructing explanations, based on theories and laws, thereby gaining understanding of phenomena by explaining them. This thesis takes a radically different approach, instead relating the notion of understanding to the *activities* that scientists perform. Scientific understanding is not just a matter of representing or explaining the world, but a matter of practical and intelligent *doing*. Philosophers of science have continued to sell short the project of making sense of scientific understanding, limiting their views to the articulated and well-formed products of inquiry, like theory and explanation. In taking a pragmatist approach to the epistemology of understanding, I reorientate our theorising about understanding from products to processes, and from explanations to methods and concepts. I thereby provide an ecumenical account of scientific understanding that can accommodate the dynamics and heterogeneity of scientific practice. In Chapter 1, I argue against the dominant focus on explanatory understanding in philosophy of science, thereby making room for my own account of operational understanding. Chapter 2 provides an account of how concepts are essential constituents of understanding. Concepts frame entities so that scientists can think and talk about and interact with them intelligently. Chapter 3 gives an account of understanding-how, through my notion of operational understanding, which relates to the methods that structure and guide successful performances of activities. In Chapter 4, I take up the task of describing the *psychology* of understanding, the kind of *state* that understanding is, which I argue is accounted for in terms of *skill*. In Chapter 5, I develop an account of how cognitive devices — tools for thinking, like models and thought-experiments — facilitate and produce understanding.Item Open Access Building Black Holes: Analogue experiments and analogical reasoningField, Grace; Field, Grace [0000-0003-2629-7191]Analogue experiments investigate empirically accessible ‘source’ systems that are meant to mirror the behaviour of less accessible ‘target’ systems. This disseration aims to answer two questions about analogue experiments. First, what are they useful for? Second, how do analogical reasoning and the reasoning underlying analogue experimentation compare to other forms of inductive reasoning? The first question has been controversial ever since experiments in analogue gravity began to reveal effects which are in principle undetectable by conventional means. The second question connects analogue experimentation with the broader landscape of inductive reasoning, including the ‘problem of induction’ (e.g. Norton (2021)), analogical reasoning more broadly construed (e.g. Hesse (1966), Bartha (2010)), and simulation and modelling (e.g. Parke (2014), Morgan (2005)). Chapter 1 provides background on both analogical reasoning and analogue experimentation. Chapter 2 expands on a Bayesian framework introduced by Dardashti et al. (2019) to argue that analogue experiments can in principle provide significant confirmation for claims about their target systems, but only when supplemented with an independently plausible claim which is *significantly positively relevant* to both the source and target systems. Chapter 3 situates analogical reasoning and analogue experimentation within a new categorisation of inductive reasoning, arguing that inferences which we would typically place into the same class often provide very different kinds of inductive support for very different conclusions. Chapter 4 represents these categories as variations of Chapter 2’s Bayesian framework, lending generality to the arguments presented in Chapter 2 and providing a quantitative perspective on the arguments presented in Chapter 3. Finally, Chapter 5 uses recent developments in analogue gravity to show that analogue experiments can be useful for reasons beyond confirmation of hypotheses about their target systems: they can directly detect generalised phenomena, and they can be used as exploratory tools.Item Controlled Access The Clock and the Hand: Taking the Pulse in English Medicine, 1650-1710Huang, YijieThis thesis examines the knowledge and practice of pulse diagnosis in early modern England. An essential sign of the human body and its disease, the pulse had nonetheless been difficult to interpret since the earliest days of medicine. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, the Lichfield physician Sir John Floyer (1649-1734) introduced the method of measuring the pulse assisted by a “pulse watch” in his sphygmological treatise, *The physician’s pulse-watch* (2 vols, 1707 and 1710). Floyer’s new method is often explained within prevalent discourses on the monumental transformation of science and medicine from qualitative to quantitative and subjective to objective. Prompted by Floyer’s writings, this thesis instead argues that pulse diagnosis ought to be understood as part of the history of the sense of touch and as an artefact of multiple experiences of the body. Taking Floyer’s argumentation and equivocation as clues, it traces how the pulse was explained against natural philosophers’ conception of the clocklike human body, how it was expressed under various medical practitioners’ fingers, and how it was manipulated according to lay people’s repertoire of cure concerning the wrist. In doing so, this thesis traces how the pulse was variously perceived in the entangled, vibrant early modern medical world Floyer inhabited. Drawing on a wide range of sources from translations of Chinese medicine to exegeses of Greek and Latin classics, from anatomical experiments to medical manuals and recipe collections, it sits at the intersection of the histories of medicine, science, and the senses. Bringing the pulse watch back into the contexts of its emergence, it seeks to contribute to the historical reflections on the fruition and tension of knowing through sensory experience.Item Embargo Tempering the Ambition of Social Science Genomics: Causation, Explanation, and Evidence for PolicyBondarenko, OlesyaThis thesis offers a philosophical account of social science genomics (sociogenomics) – an integrative field of study which brings together behavioural genetics and the social sciences. Sociogenomic integration consists in the use of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and related tools (particularly the so-called polygenic scores) within psychology, sociology, economics, and evidence-based social policy. I propose that the anticipated epistemic and non-epistemic payoffs from this type of integration can be understood in terms of two overarching promises or ambitions: credibility and trustworthiness. For the social sciences, sociogenomic integration is associated with the promise of greater credibility, as some hope that polygenic score-informed research designs will strengthen causal inference about psychological or environmental influences on individual outcomes such as educational attainment, socioeconomic status or well-being. In turn, the infusion of social science frameworks into genetic research on human behavioural differences is meant to increase the latter’s trustworthiness by lending it a more ethically responsible and socially attuned character. Having characterised the ambitions of the integration in this way, I proceed to examine whether sociogenomic research has been able to realise them. I argue that the payoffs from this type of inquiry have been more modest than its proponents claim. In particular, applications of polygenic scores in the social sciences have suffered from methodological and theoretical shortcomings which cast doubt on their ability to revolutionise causal inference in the relevant domains. Moreover, social science genomics does not fully address the longstanding challenges associated with the causal interpretations of behavioural genetic findings, even though it seeks to turn these challenges into new lines of cross-disciplinary investigation. I also argue that significant progress is still needed to improve the ethical profile of behavioural genetics, and that the involvement of the social sciences should not be seen as a panacea against genetic determinism, reductionism, and fatalism. In fact, as the thesis demonstrates, these problematic views often persist in sociogenomic research in less overt or obvious forms. This suggests that conceptual and theoretical resources of the social sciences have a more limited ability to counteract such views than is typically recognised.Item Open Access Chiffchaffs chirp and cherries are real: a scientifically informed defence of wholehearted emergentismTabatabaei Ghomi, HamedIn this thesis, I provide a scientifically informed defence of metaphysical emergence, the idea that some systems are metaphysically distinct from their constituent parts and possess properties that are not reducible to their parts’ properties. Moreover, I argue that metaphysical emergence is acceptable only if embraced wholeheartedly, along with all its ontological corollaries. Finally, I offer an ontology that suits metaphysical emergence. I begin, in chapter 1, by rejecting a computational class of theories of emergence that I take to be the most important rivals to metaphysical emergence. These theories try to explain the irreducible properties of emergent phenomena by reference to their computational irreducibility. I show that computational irreducibility fails to fulfil its philosophical roles in these theories. In chapter 2, I offer a practical argument in support of metaphysical emergence. The main message is that the growing reliance on so-called irrational scientific methods provides evidence that objects of science are indecomposable and as such, are better described by metaphysical emergence as opposed to an alternative reductionistic metaphysics. In chapter 3, I analyse the emergentist research programme in linguistics as an example of the scientific application of the concept of emergence. The underlying theme of this chapter is that half-hearted emergentism is hopeless. I show that if one adopts some weak understandings of the concept of language emergence, the emergentist programme is not fundamentally different from the other non-emergentist research programmes in linguistics. On the other hand, if one adopts some stronger understandings of emergence then the programme would have a unique character, but at the cost of some philosophical corollaries that demand a fundamental revision of the emergentist programme in its present shape. In chapter 4, I suggest that if one accepts metaphysical emergence, then one needs to revise one’s ontological views as well. I compile the minimum set of ontological commitments necessary for maintaining the metaphysical and causal claims of structuralist accounts of metaphysical emergence. The set has three elements: (A) structural realism, (B) structural causation, and (C) the condition of downward percolation.Item Open Access A Hybrid Theory of InductionSegarra Torné, AdriàIn this thesis I motivate and develop a Hybrid Theory of Induction (HTI), and I explore some of its virtues and implications. The HTI is a hybrid second-order model of inductive support. It is a hybrid model of inductive support because it holds that two ingredients play a necessary role in understanding inductive support: rules and facts. It is a second-order model of inductive support because it is a model within which first-order models of inductive support (i.e. logics of induction) can fit. In chapter 1 I argue that we need both rules and facts to play a role in a successful account of inductive support. Rules of induction accurately describe relations of inductive support when they are warranted; facts do the warranting work. I call this type of warrant "factual warrant''. The resulting account is both functional and accurate, it helps us make sense of how different rules of induction can coexist and it allows us to resolve some current debates in induction. For the purposes of chapter 1 I adopt an existing binary account of factual warrant. In chapter 2 I develop a Graded account of Factual Warrant (GFW), according to which factual warrant comes in degrees. I integrate the GFW in the HTI. I then show that the GFW illuminates the connection between factual warrant and inductive support, and it can successfully account for the role of idealisations and theory in our understanding of inductive support. In chapter 3 I argue that the HTI is also useful for agents, since it can provide methodological guidance to ensure strong inferences and conceptual guidance to assess the strength of our inferences. Finally, in chapter 4, I explore Bayesian inductive logics from the perspective of the HTI. This analysis brings to light the central role that probability models play in Bayesian inductive logics, offering a logical underpinning for some recent suggestions in Bayesian epistemology. Furthermore, throughout this thesis I analyse in detail three rules of induction from the perspective of the HTI: enumerative induction in chapter 2, causal inference in chapter 3 and Bayesian inductive logics in chapter 4. These analyses illustrate how the HTI can help us think more clearly about rules of induction, offering new tools to tackle existing challenges.Item Embargo Making Sense of Pain: A Pluralist Remedy for Pain EliminativismOtt, DanielIn this dissertation, I argue that pain is a sense. This argument is made against pain eliminativism, a position which argues that pain is no longer a meaningful scientific concept and that it should be removed from scientific and philosophical investigations. I make this sensorial argument by focusing on the methodology needed to answer the question: given what we now know about pain, how can we increase our understanding of it? In Part I, I focus on pain and sense concepts, by first developing three intractable problems for which current theories cannot account, these being: Perceptual Objectivity, Mechanistic Disparity, and Phenomenal Heterogeneity. Stemming from the requirements these three problems methodologically impose, I develop a novel internal logic for the dissertation, formed of two premises. The first, the Veridical Criterion, states that for a perceptual theory to be successful, it must account for the possibility of hallucinations and illusions and thereby differentiate veridical perceptual states versus misperceptions. I argue that for perceptual theories to address the Veridical Criterion, they must methodologically proceed first from a place of public consensus, a position termed within as the Priority Thesis, which forms the second premise. Using these premises, I evaluate and then conclude that the eliminativist methodology is not a viable philosophical argument for scientists or philosophers to adopt for pain concepts. I then contrast the understand of pain concepts with that of sense concepts, and argue that the three preceding problems of pain equally apply to the traditional sense categories, such that pain eliminativism, if accepted, necessitates sense eliminativism. This realisation creates an impasse for the dissertation, having demonstrated the prevailing concepts deficiencies, while simultaneously rejecting the removal of them by means of eliminativism. In Part II, I respond to this impasse by developing an original definition of sense, termed afferent action, and argue that this definition is inclusive of pain. I reject the prevailing notion of Veridical Criterion, and posit the Standardisation Criterion as a replacement. I show how, if this definition of pain as a sense is accepted, paining must be taken as equivalent to seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. This novel verbialist theory of pain is put in contrast to prevailing adverbial theories, and is shown to successfully resolve the original three problems of pain. I conclude that this theory allows scientists and philosophers alike to make sense of pain.Item Embargo Bowu and the Natural World in the Formation of Modern ChinaYu, JiaMy PhD thesis looks closely at a Chinese word, *bowu* 博物, interpreted by historians of science and technology in China as ‘broad learnings’ and which refers to knowledge with a great diversity of origins across Chinese history. Arguing for its enduring relevance in knowledge-making of the natural world in China, this thesis presents a first step in investigating the long-term history of *bowu* by tracing various manifestations of *bowu* as an intellectual and cultural category of knowledge. Chapter One provides a comprehensive review of some exemplary uses of *bowu* in pre-modern eras, ranging from association with a kind of polymath (*bowu junzi* 博物君子) which emerged between the fifth and second centuries BC to the term’s continuous occurrence in major reference books, such as the Qing imperial encyclopaedia *Qindin Gujin tushu jicheng* 欽定古今圖書集成. The following three chapters focus on the transitional period, starting from the 1850s, during which *bowu* experienced profound and rapid changes in meaning. Chapter Two examines one of the most significant moments in the history of *bowu*, when American Baptist medical missionary Daniel Jerome Macgowan (1815-1893) interpreted *bowu* to refer to natural philosophy and general sciences. This chapter centres on Macgowan’s 1851 compilation of a popular scientific work in Chinese, titled *Bowu tongshu* 博物通書 (Philosophical Almanac), which communicated basic elements and general uses of novel technologies of electric telegraphy. Chapter Three presents a different approach to *bowu* taking place around the same period. The renowned British medical missionary Benjamin Hobson (1816-1873), whose Chinese works introducing Western medical knowledge had been widely circulated and read by Chinese elites and doctors, published a three-volume Chinese book in 1855 called *Bowu xinbian* 博物新編. The book sought to ‘diffuse’ useful knowledge that helped its readers to take a new look at the natural world. These two chapters aim to show how Western natural philosophy and natural history made their way into late imperial China through their association with *bowu*. The last chapter studies the modern developments of traditional *bowu* and local operations of *bowu xue* (‘*bowu* learning’) from the perspective of native practitioners of the early Republican era, when Chinese educators and reform-minded members of the gentry established learned institutes, launched specialized journals, and organized field practices of *bowu xue* across the new nation. With these four chapters, the goal of my thesis is to show that long-term historical studies of local knowledge categories like *bowu* provide us with a clearer understanding of the importance of non-Western knowledge systems in shaping and re-shaping our visions of the natural world prior to the arrival and standardization of modern disciplinary sciences, yet they did not become visible parts of the historiography of modernity in most places around the globe.Item Open Access Visualising the Aurora: Embodied and Instrumental Sensing throughout the International Polar and Geophysical Years (1880-1960)Amery, FionaThis thesis traces the various ways in which the aurora was imaged, visualised and understood during the International Polar and Geophysical Years of 1882-1883, 1932-1933 and 1957-1958. I explore the depiction of the phenomenon, from hand-drawings to radio echoes, while paying heed to what was occluded from portrayals, the imaginative and aesthetic considerations involved in rendering the aurora and the epistemological problems of capturing a transient, unpredictable and intangible atmospheric object. Photography, spectroscopy, radio imaging and the introduction of the all-sky perspective were integral technological developments, influencing the ways in which the aurora was presented and viewed. Nevertheless, experiential knowledge of the phenomenon, gained through watching the affective light displays and occasionally listening for its potentially illusive sounds, remained crucial to each of the endeavours. With a focus on the practices of Polar research, I trace the shifting balance between reliance on embodied and instrumental registration of the phenomenon. This perspective reveals the significance of amateur participation to the Polar Years and the centrality of outdoor, situated practices of knowledge creation, complicating our understanding of the spaces of the nineteenth and twentieth century physical and geophysical sciences. The project to perfectly reproduce the aurora, and thus come to know it, was from the outset an impossible task. This thesis is, therefore, a story of incremental learning, of the calibration and standardisation of the phenomenon across vast distances, of bringing together fragments of the aurora’s ontology to create a fuller, more complete picture of the phenomenon, and of both fallibility and success.Item Open Access On the Challenges of Measurement in the Human SciencesLarroulet Philippi, Cristian; Larroulet Philippi, Cristian [0000-0001-5793-4670]Measurement practices are central to most sciences. In the human sciences, however, it remains controversial whether the measurement of human attributes—depression, happiness, intelligence, etc.—has been successful. Are, say, widely used depression questionnaires valid measuring instruments? Can we trust self-reported happiness scales to deliver quantitative measurements as it is sometimes claimed? These and related questions are till today hotly disputed. There are two main frameworks under which human measurements are studied and criticized. One is the so-called construct validity framework. Here, criticisms to human measurements are typically of the form “this instrument is not valid: it does not actually measure the attribute we set out to measure”. The second framework is the standard typology of measurement scales (nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio). Human measurements are commonly challenged for being merely ordinal—not quantitative: interval or ratio—despite the fact that many researchers use measurement results as if they were quantitative. The first part of the dissertation studies how adequate these frameworks are for evaluating measuring instruments and the inferences they afford. Regarding the concept of validity, it is commonly understood unconditionally, that is, without restricting validity judgments about measuring instruments to context-specific situations. Instruments are said to be (in)valid *simpliciter*. In Chapter 2, I argue against this conception of validity and in favor of a contextual one. Regarding the second main framework, the standard typology of scales is typically linked to a set of prescriptions regarding (un)justified measurement inferences. I call this classification-cum-prescriptions the “received view” on measurement scales. In chapters 3 and 4, I question the idea that the received view is an impeccable guide for clarifying the kinds of inferences we are licensed to make from measurement results in human science contexts. I motivate general doubts about the adequacy of the received view in Chapter 3, and I articulate these doubts in detail for the specific case of average group comparisons in Chapter 4. The upshot of this first part of the dissertation is a deeper awareness of the complexity surrounding which inferences can legitimately be made from measuring instruments. The first part of the dissertation is largely framed under the assumption that some human attributes are indeed quantitative, even if they are not currently being measured quantitatively. The second part addresses two important issues raised by that assumption. Chapter 5 tackles the so-called “quantity objection”: that human science attributes are themselves not quantitative, thus they cannot be quantitatively measured. This objection has been deployed to argue against optimistic positions regarding human quantification. I argue that the quantity objection is not successful in this sense—it begs the question to these optimistic human scientists that, just like their colleagues in the physical sciences have done, postulate theoretical quantitative attributes as *working hypotheses*. But what does treating human attributes quantitatively as working hypotheses amount to? And what are, or can be, “amounts” of depression, happiness, etc.? Chapter 6 argues that there is not one but various approaches for quantitatively conceiving of human attributes, each with its own success conditions. This chapter offers a conceptual framework for making progress on debates about controversial human measurements.Item Open Access Globalising China: Jesuits, Eurasian Exchanges, and the Early Modern SciencesGiovannetti-Singh, Gianamar; Giovannetti-Singh, Gianamar [0000-0003-3752-6359]This dissertation argues that the Manchu conquest of China in the mid-seventeenth century transformed several ostensibly “European” sciences in the early modern period. The “Tartar war” between the weakened Ming dynasty (1368-1644), peasant rebels, and the Manchus—a semi-nomadic population from northeast Asia—was experienced first-hand by several Jesuit missionaries proselytising in China. During the unstable interregnum, Jesuits sought patronage from disparate warring factions, offering their astronomical expertise to help various pretenders secure the “Mandate of Heaven” to rule legitimately over China, hoping to ensure their mission’s survival. By engaging with Chinese and Manchu astronomical labourers, reading Chinese treatises on cosmology, agriculture, cartography, history, and moral philosophy, and interacting with scholar-officials and military commanders, Jesuits learned extensively from local technoscientific discourses and practices. Between 1653 and 1658, the Tridentine missionary Martino Martini (1614-1661) served as a “procurator”—responsible for promoting the China mission in Europe—and a representative of the new, Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1636/44-1912). In Europe, Martini published accounts of the Ming-Qing War (1654), China’s geography (1655), and its history (1658) with commercial printers, reaching a wide, interconfessional readership. He courted patronage from powerful Habsburg rulers and defended the Jesuits’ involvement in Chinese sciences and politics at an audience with Pope Alexander VII. As this dissertation contends, Martini’s successful mobilisation of disparate political, religious, commercial, and scholarly networks across a turbulent Eurasia enabled his laudatory accounts of Chinese sciences to convince an extraordinarily wide audience. In turn, during the long eighteenth century, European writers drew—often polemically—on Martini’s accounts of Chinese agriculture, astrology, cartography, chronology, cosmology, ethnography, military cultures, and moral philosophy to articulate new solutions to contemporary technoscientific, social, and political crises. As such, the dissertation argues that Manchu and Chinese cultures of knowledge, mediated by Jesuits, occupied an important and underappreciated role in Enlightenment sciences.Item Open Access The Logical Structure of Scientific Knowledge-SystemsVos, BobThis thesis seeks to assess and develop the use of formal methods in philosophy of science. More specifically, I argue that the particular strand of philosophy of science that concerns itself with the formal structure of scientific knowledge has focused excessively on the structure of scientific theories. In response, I consider the prospects for the formal study of other, supratheoretical aspects of science, culminating in the proposal for a research programme centred around the formal study of, what I shall call, scientific knowledge-systems. This line of argument is laid out over the course of two parts, along with an extended introduction. In my extended introduction, I will situate myself with respect to the wider philosophy of science. This is necessary, because the body of work I seek to build on in this thesis is emblematic of a style of philosophy of science, referred to here as the architectonic style, which today has largely fallen out of favour. Accordingly, I will first offer some general arguments for the desirability and viability of this style of metascientific enquiry. In Part I of the thesis, I offer a critical appraisal of extant work on the formal structure of scientific knowledge, referred to there as architectonic metascience. Following an extensive survey of architectonic metascience (Chapter 1), I argue that it suffers from the problem of theory-centrism (Chapter 2). The upshot of this observation, I argue, is that frameworks for the formal study of scientific knowledge should adopt a supra-theoretical unit of analysis (or macro-unit, for short). I conclude my appraisal by discussing the few extant—but seldom acknowledged—examples of the formal study of macro-units (Chapter 3). Finally, in Part II, I seek to make a contribution to the formal study of macro-units. A recurring theme throughout the history of analytic philosophy is the idea that we may draw on the metatheoretical study of logic to inform the metatheoretical study of science. In line with this tradition, I first survey the movement of logical abstractivism, within which we find various frameworks for the systematic study of different systems of logic (Chapter 4). Following this is an intermezzo which presents an existing application of logical abstractivism to philosophy of science (Chapter 5), and a brief discussion on the explication of target systems in formal analyses of science (Chapter 6). Building on these reflections, I set out the programme of metascientific abstractivism for the study of scientific knowledge-systems (Chapter 7).