[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, April 22 - Henry Cowles (Please RSVP)

[STS]

STS Circle at Harvard
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Henry Cowles
Princeton, History

on
Vocabularies of Method: Pragmatism and the History of Science


Monday, April 22
12:15-2:00 p.m.
Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu> by 5pm Wednesday, April 17.

Abstract: Science has always had methods, but “the scientific method” has a history. That history is rooted in American debates over the meaning and authority of science in the decades around 1900. Alongside the rise of both evolutionary theory and the experimental ideal, a network of figures from the emerging fields of psychology, philosophy, and the natural sciences forged a "vocabulary of method" in the wake of the Civil War. That vocabulary had profound effects on the shape of the disciplines, the understanding of human nature, and the rising authority of science in that period—and, in many ways, is still with us today. This talk seeks to demonstrate two things. First, it shows how the modern "scientific method" emerged from the application of evolutionary theory to the study of human cognition. Specifically, it argues that natural selection served as an analogy for mental processes, with the result that science itself was re-imagined in explicitly evolutionary terms. Second, it suggests that this model continues to underwrite the way many scholars discuss science today. Though this recursiveness poses certain problems for the historian, it also affords an opportunity to reflect on the assumptions built into the study of modern science.




Biography: Henry Cowles is a PhD candidate in the Program in History of Science in the History Department at Princeton University. He was a visiting fellow with the the Harvard STS Program in the spring of 2012. Henry works on the intellectual and cultural history of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on scientific developments and the way those developments were theorized and received. His dissertation, titled "'A Method Only': The Evolving Meaning of Science in the United States, 1859-1929," treats debates about scientific methodology in the decades around 1900 as debates about the meaning of science itself. It argues that the modern "scientific method" emerged as philosophers, psychologists, and scientists argued with one another about the nature of knowledge. Henry's broader interests include the long history of evolutionary psychology and the impact of pragmatism on the history and philosophy of science.

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