HPS&STNEWSLETTER

hps&stnewsletter

june 2020

The hps&st newsletter is emailed monthly toabout 8,400 individuals who directly or indirectlyhave an interest in the contribution of history andphilosophy of science to theoretical, curricularand pedagogical issues in science teaching, and/orinterests in the promotion of innovative, engagingand effective teaching of the history and philo-sophy of science. The newsletter is sent on todifferent international and national hps lists andinternational and national science teaching lists.In print or electronic form, it has been publishedfor 25+ years.

The newsletter seeks to serve the diverse interna-tional community of hps&st scholars and teach-ers by disseminating information about eventsand publications that connect to concerns of thehps&st community.

Contributions to the newsletter (publications,conferences, opinion pieces, &.) are welcome and

should be sent direct to the editor: Michael R.Matthews, unsw (m.matthews@unsw.edu.au).

The newsletter, along with resources, obitu-aries, opinion pieces and more, are available atthe website: http://www.hpsst.com/

hps&st newsletter staff

Editor Michael Matthews

Assistant Editor(Opinion Page& Formatting) Nathan Oseroff-Spicer

Assistant Editor(Publications& Website) Paulo Maurício

issn: 2652-2837

contents

Professional hps and Science Educa-tion Support for the Black LivesMat-ter Campaign . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Isis Provides Access to Online Workon Systemic Racism . . . . . . . . 3

International History, Philo-sophy, and Science Teaching(ihpst) Group Statement in Sup-port of the Black Livies MatterMovement . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Other Professional Statements on theBlack Lives Matter Campaign . . . . 5

The International Network for theStudy of Science and Belief in So-ciety: ‘Seed Funding and Small Re-search Grants’ . . . . . . . . . . . 5

University of Leeds, hps Group On-line Course . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

covid-19: An Integrated Response . 7

History and Philosophy of the LifeSciences Topical Collection 1 . . . . 7

History and Philosophy of the LifeSciences Topical Collection 2 . . . . 8

6th European Advanced Seminar inthe Philosophy of the Life Sciences,September 7-11 2020 . . . . . . . . 9

Ronald Giere (1938-2020) . . . . . 10

Colin Howson (1945-2020) . . . . . 11

The 16th Biennial International His-tory and Philosophy of Science andScience Teaching Group (ihpst)Conference, Calgary, Canada . . . . 12

Feng Shui Project: Historical, Philo-sophical, Scientific, Medical, Cul-tural and Educational Considerations 12

Opinion Page: Science and the Desireto Understand, Henk W. de Regt . . 15

Symposium on the History, Philo-sophy & Sociology of School Biology,Dublin City University . . . . . . . 20

‘History, Philosophy and ScienceTeaching: A Personal Story’ MichaelR. Matthews . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Recent hps&st Research Articles . . 22

Recent hps&st Related Books . . . 23

Coming hps&st Related Conferences 28

hps&st Related Organisations andWebsites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

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Professional hps and Science Edu-cation Support for the Black LivesMatter Campaign

Many professional hps and Science Education or-ganisations, societies and editorial boards havevoiced their support for the Black Lives Mattercampaign. The editor and assistant editors ofthis newsletter, and undoubtedly a good manyreaders, likewise express their dismay at the tra-gic killings of Black people in the US, Canada,France, and Australia that have been the imme-diate cause for the campaign. The internationalcampaign is united in its quest for justice for themurdered George Floyd, Sandra Bland, BreonnaTaylor, Freddie Gray, Eric Garder, Trayvon Mar-tin, Tamir Rice, and countless other Black people.

While it is clear there must be immediate policereform, such reform is not enough, since racism isboth deep and broad in scope. Other far-reachingchanges to our social and legal institutions are ne-cessary.

Additionally, racism is not just aWestern problem:West-Bank Arabs, Uyghurs, the Rohingya people,Amazonian Indians, West Papuans, and countlessother minorities suffer from systemic and system-atic racist economic, educational, housing, poli-cing, health and social policies imposed by major-ities in their own countries.

Please support Black Lives Matter here.

Isis Provides Access to Online Workon Systemic Racism

In an effort to contribute to the ongoing discus-sion about systemic racism and racist violence inthe United States and around the world, power-fully voiced in the blm campaign, the co-editorsof the US History of Science Association publica-tion Isis have compiled a selection of articles fromrecent years that examine the role of science inconstructing and perpetuating assumptions aboutrace, and the consequences of these practices forsociety.

Theworks listed are critical examinations ofWest-ern science, and of the discipline of history of sci-ence. The co-editors especially encourage readersto look at the newest Isis feature, an “Open Con-versation” from the June 2020 issue between ninescholars on the topic of the field’s diversity andhow we measure it. This and several other articleslisted here are free to read without a subscriptionfor a limited time.

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• Open Conversation: Diversifying the Discip-line or Disciplining Diversity? (Special section,June 2020) free to read

– Projit BihariMukharji,Myrna Perez Shel-don, Elise K. Burton, Sebastián Gil-Riaño, Terence Keel, Emily Merchant,Wangui Muigai, Ahmed Ragab, and Su-man Seth, “A Roundtable Discussion onCollecting Demographics Data”

• Andrew D. Evans, “‘Most Unusual’ BeautyContests: Nordic Photographic Competitionsand the Construction of a Public for GermanRace Science, 1926–1935,” (June 2020)

• Elise K. Burton, “Red Crescents: Race, Ge-netics, and Sickle Cell Disease in the MiddleEast,” (June 2019)

• Ryan Dahn, “Big Science, Nazified? PascualJordan, Adolf Meyer-Abich, and the AbortiveScientific Journal Physis,” (March 2019)

• Christopher Heaney, “How to Make an IncaMummy: Andean Embalming, Peruvian Sci-ence, and the Collection of Empire,” (March2018)

• Jim Wynter Porter, “A ‘Precious Minority’:Constructing the ‘Gifted’ and ‘AcademicallyTalented’ Student in the Era of Brown v. Boardof Education and the National Defense Educa-tion Act,” (September 2017) free to read

• Ashley Kerr, “From Savagery to Sovereignty:Identity, Politics, and International Expos-itions of Argentine Anthropology (1878-1892),” (March 2017) free to read

• Alexander Statman, “Fusang: The Enlighten-ment Story of the Chinese Discovery of Amer-ica,” (March 2016)

• Focus: Relocating Race (Special section,December 2014) free to read

– Suman Seth, “Introduction”

– Suman Seth, “Materialism, Slavery, andThe History of Jamaica”

– Helen Tilley, “Racial Science, Geopolit-ics, and Empires: Paradoxes of Power”Warwick Anderson, “Racial Conceptionsin the Global South”

– Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, “Better Scienceand Better Race?: Social Darwinism andChinese Eugenics”  

– Duana Fullwiley, “The ‘ContemporarySynthesis’: When Politically InclusiveGenomic Science Relies on BiologicalNotions of Race”

• Christopher Crenner, “Race and LaboratoryNorms: The Critical Insights of Julian HermanLewis (1891–1989),” (September 2014)

• Leila Zenderland, “Social Science as a “Weaponof the Weak”: Max Weinreich, the Yiddish Sci-entific Institute, and the Study of Culture, Per-sonality, and Prejudice,” (December 2013)

• Matthew Farish “The Lab and the Land: Over-coming theArctic inColdWarAlaska,” (March2013)

• Warwick Anderson, “Hybridity, Race, andScience: The Voyage of the Zaca, 1934–1935,” (June 2012)

• Chris Manias, “The Race prussienne Contro-versy: Scientific Internationalism and the Na-tion,” (December 2009)

• Constance Areson Clark, “‘You Are Here’:Missing Links, Chains of Being, and the Lan-guage of Cartoons,” (September 2009) free toread

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• Fred Jerome, “Einstein, Race, and the Myth ofthe Cultural Icon,” (December 2004)

• Michael G. Kenny, “Racial Science in SocialContext: John R. Baker on Eugenics, Race, andthe Public Role of the Scientist,” (September2004)

International History, Philo-sophy, and Science Teaching(ihpst) Group Statement inSupport of the Black Livies Mat-ter Movement

In theUS and Brazil, people are experiencing eventsof racism. Such events belong to a long historyof systematic racism, violence, discrimination, andoppression. People are in the street asking forchanges. According to the International History,PHilosophy, and Science Teaching (ihpst) Group’sBylaws (article xi), the group is against racism,sexism, and other forms of discrimination. Theihpst Group stands in solidarity with the protest-ors marching for the Black Lives Matter movementand supports all worldwide non-violent effors topromote equity and justice The ihpst Group worksto improve science teaching as a way of promotingequity and social justice in the world.

Other Professional Statements onthe Black Lives Matter Campaign

We highly recommend reading the following pro-fessional statements in support of the Black LivesMatter campaign.

We all must fight against structural and institu-

tional racism, both in academia and in wider so-ciety.

American History Association (aha)

American Physics Society (APS)

American Chemical Society (acs)

American Institute of Biological Sciences (aibs)

American Philosophical Association (apa)

American Educational Research Association(aera)

Canadian Society for the History and Philosophyof Science, Editors’ Letter Comuniqué (N.101,Summer 2020)

European Society for Evolutionary Biology (iseb)

The Geological Society of America (gsa)

International Astronomical Union (iau)

International Council of Museums (icom)

National Association for Research in ScienceTeaching (narst)

Philosophy of Science Association (psa)

The International Network for theStudy of Science and Belief in So-ciety: ‘Seed Funding and Small Re-search Grants’

insbs supports the growth of high-quality in-ternational research examining the relationshipbetween science and religion, in relation tocutting-edge social issues and individuals’ lived

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experiences.

We aim to foster and support research that ex-amines any social or cultural aspect of science,technology, engineering, mathematics or medi-cine (stemm) in relation to any religious, spiritualor non-religious tradition, position or worldview,including unbelief.  

Aims

This scheme seeks to promote the growth of thesocial study of science and religion globally, bysupporting the ongoing development of an inter-national network of active academic researchersin order to stimulate new avenues of individual orcollaborative research.  

Eligibility Requirements

Researchers at any career stage who work on thesocial study of science and religion in society mayapply. The scheme has been designed to supportacademics just starting out in their careers in thefield or seeking to establish themselves further byconducting socially relevant research in this field.

If you are not currently affiliated to a university, orother institution set-up to receive research grants,please contact our Grants Officer, Paula Brikci,at p.e.brikci@bham.ac.uk before applying. 

Value and Duration

Two levels of grant funding are available:

1. Seed Funding: No less than £1,000 and nomore than £5,000

2. Small ResearchGrants: No less than £5,000 andno more than £20,000

All projects must complete within ten months ofthe start date and are expected to complete no laterthan 31 July 2021.  

Application Process

The scheme will operate on a rolling basis untilat least 1 October 2020 when it will be reviewed.Applicants can apply anytime up until 1 October2020.

Full details can be found in the Grants section ofour website (www.scienceandbeliefinsociety.org),including Guidance for Applicants, ApplicationForm and supporting document templates.   Ifyou are not already a subscriber to our website,you may wish to join our mailing list at to stay upto date with announcements and news.

University of Leeds, hps Group On-line Course

The History and Philosophy of Science group atUniversity of Leeds has turned the videos of a pub-lic lecture series conducted in 2016-7 into a free,informal, online intro-to-hps course, called ”His-tory and Philosophy of Science in 20 Objects.”

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A description of the course and how to join can befound here.

covid-19: An Integrated Response

Brazilian scholars Charbel El-Hani and VirgilioMachado have published in Ethnobiology andConservation an Opinion Piece on the need ofan integrated and critical view on covid-19.They discuss contributions from different aca-demic sciences and beyond the academic scienceson covid-19, counterposing them with a focusstrictly on the health sciences or in academic sci-ences only; they consider how covid-19 becamea wicked problem and how this hampers an in-tegrated approach to the pandemic, with seriousconsequences to public health; they briefly dis-cuss the integration between traditional Chinesemedicine (tcm) and Western medicine for treat-ing covid in China; and finally they discuss re-lationships between scientific work and values incovid-19.

They maintain that to build an integrated view,different scientists and social actors should engagein trust relationships and accept mutual epistemicdependencies, as requisites for a concerted way ofunderstanding and acting on the problem. Finally,an integrated and critical view of covid-19 de-mands that we cast aside the myth of value-free

science, consider the relationships between valuesand scientific work, and conceive how knowledgecan be objective without being neutral. The paperis freely available here.

History and Philosophy of the LifeSciences Topical Collection 1

Seeing Clearly Through covid-19: Current andfuture questions for the history and philosophy ofthe life sciences.

Editors: G. Boniolo – L. Onaga

Rationale: This epidemic of global proportions hasseemingly surprised everyone, from laymen, lay-women and children, to politicians, economists,clinicians and biomedical researchers. The world-wide pandemic has drastically changed our waysof living and will likely continue to change ourways of living in the future. At the same time, his-torical reflections have indicated that there havebeen precedents for the conditions leading upto and representing the disastrous effects takingplace. It is the right moment to humanisticallyreflect simultaneously upon what has been hap-pening and what is going to happen to our lives,planet, socio-economical relationships, and inter-pretations of our ownmeanings of life. The time iscritical to think seriously through these historicaland philosophical issues in terms of global healthand global justice.

hpls wishes to invite a diverse group of schol-ars representing different regions of the world,disciplines, and intersectional concerns to pro-duce short papers that each grapple with ahistorical-sociological-political-epistemological-ethical question. These papers would not only en-

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gage with current aspects raised or stimulated bythe covid-19 pandemic but also with views con-cerning questions about our future. Together, wehope these collected papers could design a found-ation for ongoing conversations that highlight theexpertise and contributions of scholars in the his-tory and philosophy of the life sciences.

In particular, we appreciate that the follow-ing themes could be tackled: scientific expertsand laypeople; national science policies and in-ternational scientific organisations; governanceand governmentality; uncertainty; policy require-ments and political interference; big data; pri-vacy and social control; herd immunity; eugenics;assessment of epidemiological positions; clinicaland biomedical research; vulnerable and fragilegroups; death and suffering; legal and illegal busi-nesses; zoonotic diseases; environmental links;scientific globalisation; re-globalisation; vaccineresearch, animal models and experimentation onhumans; structural and latent racism; agriculture;food security; etc.

Format: Short pieces of about 1000 words, exclud-ing references (max 10), abstract consisting of nomore than two or three sentences, and amaximumof three keywords. Each question has to be well-posed and effectively contextualised both in theliterature and in real health and field frameworks.

Note: Titles, abstracts, and keywords, mustinclude searchable terms like virus, sars,coronavirus, covid-19, sars-cov-2, etc.

Publishing process: Authors have to send theirpieces to hpls through the Editorial Manager,choosing Notes & Comments and, then, our Top-ical Collection ‘SeeingClearlyThrough covid-19.’Manuscripts will be handled by Boniolo and On-aga, and they will undergo a light reviewing pro-cess involving at least one external reviewer. Ma-

nuscripts will be sent to production and publishedonline immediately following acceptance, so as tofacilitate the swift publication of research pieces ofhigh societal and scholarly relevance.

Time window: Beginning of papers acceptance:August 15, 2020; Closure of papers acceptance:December 31, 2020.

History and Philosophy of the LifeSciences Topical Collection 2

Biomedical Knowledge in a Time of Crisis: His-torical and Philosophical Perspectives on covid-19

Editors: D. Teira – S. Leonelli

Rationale: This Topical Collection brings togetherscholarly reflections on the covid-19 pandemicfrom scholars in the history, philosophy and so-cial studies of biology and biomedicine. Themesmay include, but are not limited to, the role ofmodelling, data practices and uncertainty in pan-demic science and policy responses; the genealo-gies and reconfigurations of life science expert-ise in the face of the pandemic; the biopoliticsand governance of biological knowledge, particu-larly in related fields such as epidemiology and im-munology; the implications for research organisa-tions and management worldwide, including ex-perimental practices and work with non-humanorganisms; the intersection between private andpublic research activities and services, includingwith regard to population monitoring and publichealth services, across countries; the history andimplications of the specific discourse and meta-phors (e.g. military) used to depict human re-lationships with disease; relevant conceptual un-

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derpinnings andmethodological questions in epi-demiology, such as how to compare differentpopulations; historical links to eugenics and ra-cism, particularly in relation to the focus (or lackthereof) on vulnerable populations; and method-ological reflections on how the pandemic may af-fect scholarly work in the history, philosophy andsocial studies of biology.

hpls invites a diverse group of contributors rep-resenting different regions of the world, discip-lines, and intersectional concerns. We hope thatthis collection will highlight the relevance and sig-nificance of contributions from the history andphilosophy of the life sciences towards under-standing the roots, unfolding and implicationsand of the pandemic.

Note: Titles, abstracts, and keywords, mustinclude searchable terms like virus, sars,coronavirus, covid-19, sars-cov-2, etc.

Publishing process: All papers will be peer-reviewed as soon as possible and will be publishedonline immediately following acceptance, so as tofacilitate the swift publication of research pieces ofhigh societal and scholarly relevance.

Time window: Submissions are welcome fromAu-gust 15, 2020 until May 31, 2021. This long win-dow for submission constitutes an exception tonormal hpls practice: it is meant to account forthe widely diverging effects of the pandemic onprospective authors around the world (some ofwhom may have had ample time to research andwrite due to lock-downs, while others have had totake a break from work due to illness, caring du-ties or abrupt shifts in their working patterns andfocus).

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences is an in-terdisciplinary journal committed to providing an

integrative approach to understanding the life sci-ences. It welcomes submissions from historians,philosophers, biologists, physicians, ethicists andscholars in the social studies of science.

6th European Advanced Seminarin the Philosophy of the Life Sci-ences, September 7-11 2020, kli,Klosterneuburg, Austria

Because of the covid-19 pandemic, we decidedto cancel this year’s European Advanced Seminarin the Philosophy of Life Sciences with the title“Dealing with Complexity in the Life Sciences”.

However, the easpls Consortium is committed tosupport early career researchers working in thephilosophy of the life sciences in a different way.Between September 7 and September 11, each ofthe instructors will offer a mentoring session oftwo hours each. Priority will be given to thosewho have applied for easpls 2020. If seats are stillavailable, it will be possible for other early careerscholars to sign in. We will circulate informationabout the details of the mentoring sessions (exacttimes, topics, how to register, specific topics etc.)before June 30.

The instructors who will be offering mentoringsessions are:

• Giovanni Boniolo (University of Ferrara)

• Guido Caniglia (KLI Klosterneuburg)

• John Dupré (University of Exeter)

• Sara Green (University of Copenhagen)

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• Philippe Huneman (CNRS/Paris-SorbonneUniversity)

• Maël Lemoine (University of Bordeaux)

• Sabina Leonelli (University of Exeter)

• Thomas Reydon (Leibniz University Han-nover)

• Federica Russo (University of Amsterdam)

• Isabella Sarto-Jackson (KLI Klosterneuburg)

• Jon Umerez (University of the Basque Coun-try)

• Marcel Weber (University of Geneva)

Ronald Giere (1938-2020)

Ron Giere died in late May at age 82. One obit-uary, along with comments on his life, work andinfluence, can be read here.

A leading contributor to the philosophy of science,Giere taught for roughly twenty years at IndianaUniversity, Bloomington, before moving to theUniversity of Minnesota in 1987, where he spendthe remainder of his teaching career. 

He was known for his work in philosophy ofscience, authoring many articles and books, in-cluding Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach(1988), Science Without Laws, (1999), CognitiveModels of Science (1992), Scientific Perspectivism(2010), and Understanding Scientific Reasoning(1984).

Much of his work is listed here.

He contributed to theThird ihpst conference heldin Minneapolis in 1995.

His work had considerable influence in scienceeducation especially his foundational work onmodelling in science. He co-authored the chapteron Models in Science and in Learning Science inthe International Handbook of Research in hpsand Science Teaching:

Passmore, C., Svoboda-Gouvea, J. & Giere, R.:2014, ‘Models in Science and in Learning Sci-ence: Focusing Scientific Practice on Sense-making’. InM.R.Matthews (ed.) International

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Handbook of Research in History, Philosophyand Science Teaching, Springer, Dordrecht, pp.1171-1202.

The subject was elaborated in nine papers in athematic double issue of the journal Science &Education, 2007, 16(7-8). A five-page Introduc-tion outlined some of the issues debated in hpsand elaborated in education.

By sad coincidence, in February this year, JohnGilbert of Reading University passed away. Johnmade substantial contributions to the better un-derstanding and utilisation of modelling in sci-ence pedagogy and in student thinking. See forinstance:

Gilbert, J.K. & Boulter, C. (eds.): 2001, Develop-ingModels in Science Education, Kluwer Aca-demic Publishers, Dordrecht.

An obituary for John can be read here.

Colin Howson (1945-2020)

Colin Howson died on 20 January 2020. He was astalwart of the British Society for the Philosophyof Science who published extensively in the fieldsof probability, logic, and scientific reasoning.

Aside from his logic textbook, Logic with Trees(1997), he authored three influential books: Sci-entific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach (withPeter Urbach), Hume’s Problem: Induction and theJustification of Belief (2000), and Objecting to God(2011).

He also published more than ninety articles inleading journals, almost all of them concernedwith clarifying the foundations and applications ofprobability theory. He continued to work on these

issues until the end of his life.

An obituary and list of publications can be readhere.

As well as serving as its President from 2003 to2005, he also acted as Assistant Editor for the bjps,first under Imre Lakatos and then under the co-editorship of John Watkins and John Worrall. Healso published extensively within the pages of thejournal, and so it is fitting that a new virtual is-sue containing his many bjps papers, and that arefreely downloadable, is devoted to this work. Itcan be accessed here.

Peter Urbach and John Worrall provide an Intro-duction to Colin’s collected bjps papers here.

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The 16th Biennial InternationalHistory and Philosophy of Sci-ence and Science Teaching Group(ihpst) Conference, Calgary,Canada, July 4-8, 2021

Conference Theme: Energising Education with theHistory, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science

The province of Alberta is the oil-sands energycentre of Canada. It has been the locale for debateabout fossil fuel usage, environmental impacts, re-newal energy production, First Nations relationsand much else.

The concept of Energy has a long history in philo-sophy and science. It is a foundational under-standing in all disciplines of science and techno-logy. The conference is an occasion to developthe variety of historical, philosophical, and soci-ological dimensions of energy that can be broughtto bear on its better and richer teaching.

Plenary Speaker: Carol Cleland

Carol Cleland is Professor of Philosophy at theUniversity of Colorado Boulder.  She arrived atcu Boulder in 1986, after having spent a year ona postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University’sCenter for the Study of Language and Information

(csli). She received a Ph.D. in philosophy fromBrown University and a B.A. in mathematics fromtheUniversity ofCalifornia (Santa Barbara). From1998-2008 she was amember of the nasa Instituteof Astrobiology (nai). She is currently Director ofcu Boulder’s Center for the Study of Origins.

Cleland specialises in philosophy of science andlogic. Her research focuses on issues about sci-entific methodology (historical science vs. exper-imental science, the role of anomalies in scientificdiscovery), biology (microbiology, origins of life,the nature of life, and astrobiology), and the the-ory of computation.

She has published articles in leading philosophyand science journals. She is the inventor of theterm ‘shadow biosphere,’ a subject on which shehas written and lectured extensively. Cleland isthe author of The Quest for a Universal Theory ofLife: Searching for Life as We Don’t Know It (Cam-bridge University Press, 2019).

Submission, registration, accommodation detailscoming here.

Conference chair: Dr. Glenn Dolphin, Depart-ment ofGeosciences (glenn.dolphin@ucalgary.ca).

Feng Shui Project: Historical,Philosophical, Scientific, Medical,Cultural and Educational Consider-ations

Feng shui is an internationally significant andgrowing body of theoretical beliefs and associ-ated architectural, health, medicinal, astrological,divination and geomantic practices. Its origins arein ancient China, but it now has a worldwide pres-

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ence. Feng shui constitutes a thoroughly natur-alistic worldview in which humans, nature, ourplanet, and the cosmos are unified. They eachshare a purported ‘vital energy’ or ‘life force’ chior qi – and the well-being of each depends uponappropriate distribution of this energy or entity.Acupuncture releases blockages in bodily chi flowthat causes illness and pains; tai chi exercise stim-ulates beneficial chi flow through the body, it isacupuncturewithout the needles; chi is the ontolo-gical foundation of all Traditional Chinese Medi-cine (tcm) including herbal and animal-part rem-edies.

Feng shui has obvious cultural and educationalramifications, yet very little systematic attentionhas been paid to the educational responsibil-ities and opportunities feng shui provides forclassroom examination by science teachers, or as

a case study for historians and philosophers of sci-ence.

Philosophical and educational discussion of fengshui has some features in common with morecommon debate about astrology, about comple-mentary or holistic medicine, arguments abouttreatment of special creation and evolution,and about social-psychological research on whypeople believe ‘unusual’, ‘minimally-evidenced’, or‘science-rejected’ contentions.

More generally in feng shui discussion there isoverlap with arguments about teaching the Natureof Science (nos), the place of multi-cultural andindigenous science in school programmes, andwith proposals for international stem education.Is feng shui theory scientific? If feng shui is em-bedded in a culture should it be taught or at leastnot criticised? Does stem education have any re-

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sponsibility for addressing pseudoscientific beliefand is feng shui in the latter category? Ideally,the general philosophical arguments and the loc-alised ones concerning feng shui should informeach other. But this is not much done.

This feng shui project is a contribution to the lar-ger endeavour of demonstrating how the historyand philosophy of science can illuminate theor-etical, curricular and pedagogical issues in sci-ence teaching. The beginning of this hps&st en-deavour is associated with Ernst Mach in the late19th century, it was furthered by John Dewey inthe early 20th century, and subsequently advancedby countless others including FrederickWestaway,Joseph Schwab, and Gerald Holton.

To address the shortfalls in educational discus-sion of feng shui a collection of research papersis being overseen and edited. Currently 15 au-thors fromChina, HongKong, usa, Korea, uk and

Australia are contributing. Their backgrounds areeducation, philosophy, economics, anthropology,geology, physics, psychology and Chinese studies.The participation of other scholars is most wel-come. The project has a web folder containing in-formation and files here.

A brochure for the editor’s recent book on the sub-ject, giving its 14-chapter contents and some ap-praisals, can be read here. An overview of thebook’s argument can be read here. A 110-item se-lect bibliography ofwritings on the subject is avail-able here. A more comprehensive 840-item bibli-ography is available here.

A general invitation for educators, philosophers,anthropologists and historians to contribute to theproject can be read here.

Project papers of 5-10,000 words need to be com-pleted by the end of 2020, with reviews and revi-

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sions completed by mid-2011.

Indication of interest and a 500-word Ab-stract should be conveyed to the editor(m.matthews@unsw.edu.au) by the end of June.

Opinion Page: Science and the De-sire to Understand

Henk W. de Regt

Institute for Science in SocietyRadboud University,Nijmegen,The Netherlands

henk.deregt@ru.nlhttps://www.ru.nl/english/people/regt-h-de/

This text is based on Chapter 1 from the au-

thor’s book Understanding Scientific Understand-ing, published with Oxford University Press. Thematerial is under copyright with oup.

Introduction

It might seem a commonplace to say that the aimof science is to provide understanding of theworldaround us. Scientists and laypeople alike will typ-ically regard understanding as one of themost im-portant and highly-valued products of scientificresearch and teaching. Indeed, science appearsto be quite successful in achieving this aim: Whowould doubt that science has given us understand-ing of such diverse phenomena as the motions ofthe heavenly bodies, the tides, the weather, earth-quakes, the formation of rocks and fossils, elec-tricity and magnetism, and the evolution of spe-cies? Climate scientists, who strive to understandthe process of global warming and other climatechanges, provide a contemporary example of thecentrality of understanding as an aim of science.The main task of the Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change (ipcc) is to assess progress in sci-entific understanding of the climate system andclimate change, as can be gleaned from its 2007 re-port. In the one-page introduction of the technicalsummary of Climate Change 2007: The PhysicalScience Basis (ipcc, 2012), the terms ‘understand’or ‘understanding’ are used nine times. Here is atypical passage:

While this report provides new and importantpolicy-relevant information on the scientific un-derstanding of climate change, the complexity ofthe climate system and the multiple interactionsthat determine its behaviour impose limitations onour ability to understand fully the future course ofEarth’s global climate. There is still an incompletephysical understanding of many components of the

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climate system and their role in climate change.(IPCC, 2012; my italics).

But what does it mean to seek or to achieve suchunderstanding? What exactly is scientific under-standing? This is first and foremost a philosoph-ical question, and one that has been addressedby philosophers of science in the context of thelong-standing debate about scientific explanation.Wesley Salmon, one of the key figures in this de-bate, spent the greater part of his career develop-ing a philosophical account of scientific explana-tion. As he emphasised in his essay ‘The import-ance of scientific understanding’ (Salmon 1998,pp. 79-91), the principal goal of scientific ex-planation is the production of understanding ofevents and phenomena. Salmon’s own theory, fo-cuses on causal explanations, highlighting the factthat understanding is often achieved by uncover-ing the causes of phenomena. While there are al-ternative philosophical views of how scientific un-derstanding is attained through scientific explan-ations, most philosophers agree on the idea thatunderstanding – whatever its precise nature – is acentral aim of science.

The question of the nature of scientific under-standing is also a historical question: to answer itwe can do no better than look at how scientific re-search has actually produced understanding in thecourse of its historical development. Indeed, sci-ence as a historical phenomenon may be definedwith reference to the notion of understanding: itis traditionally presumed that science was bornin ancient Greece, when Ionian philosophers ofnature – in particular Thales of Miletus and hisschool – first adopted what may be called a nat-uralistic approach to explaining natural phenom-ena: they abandoned the idea that nature is sub-ject to the capricious will of supernatural godsand thereby beyond human comprehension, and

instead assumed that observed phenomena canbe understood in terms of natural causes andlaws. This important change in the attitude to-wards nature has been emphasised, for instance,by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. In his 1948Shearman Lectures, delivered at University Col-lege, London, which were later published underthe title Nature and the Greeks, he stated:

The grand idea that informed these men was thatthe world around them was something that couldbe understood, if one only took the trouble to ob-serve it properly; […]. They saw the world as arather complicated mechanism, acting according toeternal innate laws, which they were curious to findout. This is, of course, the fundamental attitude ofscience up to this day” (Schrödinger, 1996, p. 57)

The prospect of understanding forms the basis ofmost – if not all – Greek natural philosophy sinceThales. It is, for example, fundamental to Aris-totle’s philosophical work. “All men by nature de-sire to know”, reads the famous opening sentenceof his Metaphysics in the well-known translationby W.D. Ross. In his introduction to Aristotle’sphilosophy, however, Jonathan Lear argues thatAristotle’s words are better interpreted as referringto a desire to understand: “To have epistèmè onemust not only know a thing, one must also graspits cause or explanation. This is to understand it:to know in a deep sense what it is and how it hascome to be” (Lear, 1988, p. 6). It was thereforethe idea that humans can understand nature thatsparked the development of science.

Scientific understanding: diversity and dis-agreement

In a word, science is the fruit of our desire to un-derstand. But we need to investigate and explicate

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the nature of the understanding that science canprovide. A first question that may be asked in thiscontext is: Are there universal, timeless criteriafor scientific understanding? Even a cursory lookat the history of science suggests that the answeris: no. As an illustration, I will sketch an epis-ode from the history of physics in which discus-sions about understanding played a crucial role:the genesis of quantum mechanics in the 1920s,which involved heated debates about the intelli-gibility of this theory and the related question ofwhether it can provide understanding of the phe-nomena in the domain of atomic physics. Thiscase shows that scientists’ standards of intelligib-ility and understanding vary strongly – not onlydiachronically but also synchronically.

The first quantum theory of atomic structure wasdeveloped by Niels Bohr, who presented it in hisfamous papers of 1913 and 1918. It included anatomic model that was problematic in various re-spects – both empirically and conceptually – andin the early 1920s many physicists attempted toimprove Bohr’s theory. After a number of yearswhen not much progress was made, two new,rival quantum theories of the atom appeared onthe scene: in July 1925 Werner Heisenberg sub-mitted a paper which contained the foundationsof ‘matrix mechanics’, and in early 1926 ErwinSchrödinger published a series of papers in whichhe presented ‘wave mechanics’ as an alternative tomatrix mechanics.

Heisenberg’s theory was intended to describe onlyrelations between observable quantities, such asthe frequencies and intensities of spectral linesemitted by atoms; it did not provide a con-crete picture or model of the internal structure ofatoms. Thus, it was a highly abstract theorywhich,moreover, was based on a type of mathematics –matrix theory – thatmost physicists were unfamil-

iar with at the time. Schrödinger’s wave mech-anics, by contrast, suggested the possibility of avisualising atomic structure: his theory describedthe atom in terms of wave phenomena. Also, themathematics of his theory was simpler and morefamiliar to physicists than that of matrix mechan-ics: it was based on wave equations, which werepart and parcel of university physics teaching.

Immediately, proponents of the two theories en-gaged in intense, sometimes even emotional dis-cussions on the question of which theory wassuperior. It was Schrödinger who brought thenotions of understanding and intelligibility tothe centre of the debate, claiming that his wavemechanics was much better in providing true un-derstanding of the phenomena, over and abovemere description and prediction. Schrödinger ex-pressed a strong commitment to the view thatvisualisation is a necessary condition for scientificunderstanding: “We cannot really alter our man-ner of thinking in space and time, and what wecannot comprehend within it we cannot under-stand at all” (Schrödinger, 1928, p. 27). Accord-ingly, he argued, only theories that are visualisablein space and time are intelligible and can give usunderstanding of phenomena.

Schrödinger was not alone in this respect: manyphysicists supported the idea that understandingrequires visualisation and space-time description.Therefore, according to Schrödinger, visualisabil-ity is a necessary condition for the intelligibilityof a scientific theory. Wave mechanics is visual-isable (or so Schrödinger suggested) and therebyintelligible. Matrix mechanics, by contrast, is notvisualisable, and accordingly unintelligible. Thiswas notmerely a philosophical point: Schrödingeralso argued that visualisable theories are morefruitful. Because of its visualisability and its math-ematical structure, wavemechanics was more eas-

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ily applicable to a great variety of physical prob-lem situations. It was therefore more favourablyreceived and – at least initially – empirically moresuccessful than matrix mechanics.

The advocates of matrix mechanics maintained,however, that their theory could yield un-derstanding as well, and they tried to refuteSchrödinger’s line of reasoning by arguing that in-telligibility is not necessarily associated with visu-alisability. Wolfgang Pauli, who like Heisenbergwas a member of Bohr’s group, admitted that mat-rix mechanics was an unusual theory that mightindeed appear less intelligible than wave mechan-ics. However, he claimed that understanding itwas merely a question of becoming familiar withthe new conceptual system of the theory. Pauliadmitted that the demand for intelligibility is le-gitimate, but he stated: “it should never countin physics as an argument for the retention offixed conceptual systems. Once the new concep-tual systems are settled, they will also be intel-ligible” (Pauli, 1979, p. 188). In other words,when future generations of physicists are used toquantum mechanics, they will find it intelligibleeven though it is not visualisable.

The competition between the two theories ulti-mately led to their synthesis. On the one hand,Schrödinger’s hope for a visualisable interpret-ation of quantum mechanics was not fulfilled:the visualisability of his model is limited be-cause it does not represent atoms as waves in or-dinary three-dimensional space but in a multi-dimensional Hilbert space. Heisenberg, on theother hand, abandoned his radically abstract ap-proach and re-introduced visualisable notions,such as position and momentum of electrons, atthe atomic level. The combination of matrix andwave mechanics led to quantum mechanics as itis accepted and taught today. With hindsight it

is clear that Schrödinger’s thesis that visualisabil-ity is a necessary condition for intelligibility mustbe rejected – there is no a priori relation betweenunderstanding and visualisation. Still, it does notfollow that his ideas were completely misguidedand worthless. History only shows that stand-ards of intelligibility and understanding may varyand change. Moreover, the history of quantummechanics shows that debates about understand-ing and intelligibility often stimulate scientific de-velopment.

Almost every physicist will agree that understand-ing is a key aim of science, but there appears to bestrong variation in views about what is requiredfor such understanding. The case of quantum the-ory illustrates this nicely. Even today physicistsand philosophers debate the question of whether –and if so, how – quantum mechanics can provideunderstanding (themany different interpretationsof the theory can be seen in this light). Of course,one might think that quantum theory is an ex-ceptional case, being an esoteric, counterintuit-ive theory that applies to a remote domain ofreality. Thus, Richard Feynman famously statedthat nobody understands quantummechanics. Ofatomic behaviour he said: “Even the experts donot understand it the way they would like to, andit is perfectly reasonable that they should not, be-cause all of direct, human experience and of hu-man intuition applies to large objects” (Feynman,Leighton, & Sands, 1963-1965, vol. 3, p. 1-1).While quantum theory surely is a strange theory,the fact that scientists disagree about its intelli-gibility is not exceptional: the history of physicsabounds with debates about the intelligibility oftheories and criteria for scientific understanding.

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Conclusion: Lessons from the history of sci-ence

Historical case studies can illustrate various as-pects of scientific understanding and inform aphilosophical analysis of it. For instance, therelation between metaphysical worldviews andscientific understanding emerges clearly in theseventeenth-century debate about the intelligibil-ity ofNewton’s theory of universal gravitation, andthe subsequent development of physicists’ viewson contact action versus action at a distance inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This casenicely illustrates how criteria for understandingmay change in time, and how they interact withmetaphysics.

Initially, Newton’s theory was criticised becauseit failed to conform to the Cartesian intelligibilityideal of contact action; the idea of forces acting ata distance was unacceptable to most seventeenth-century physicists. The main reason was that itdid not fit into the generally accepted metaphys-ical worldview of Descartes, which assumed thatmatter is passive and can affect other matter onlyby means of direct impact. But between 1700 and1850 action at a distance rather than contact ac-tion and causal chains dominated the scientificscene and attempts to formulate theories of gravit-ation based on contact action were ignored. Onlyin the second half of the nineteenth century didcontact action again become an acceptable explan-atory resource (see De Regt 2017, Chapter 5, for adetailed analysis).

I conclude that philosophy of science shouldtake the history and practice of science seriously,and should accordingly acknowledge the con-textual nature of scientific understanding. Asthe physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich vonWeiszäcker observed in a conversation with Grete

Hermann and Werner Heisenberg:

One should remember that with the historical de-velopment of science the structure of human think-ing also changes. Scientific progress does not onlyconsist in our discovering and understanding ofnew facts, but also in that, again and again, we learnnew possible meanings of the word ‘understanding’itself. (Heisenberg 1969, p. 173).

References

De Regt, Henk W. (2017). Understanding Sci-entific Understanding. New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Feynman, Richard P., Robert B. Leighton, andMatthew Sands (1963-1965). The FeynmanLectures on Physics. 3 vols. Reading, MA:Addison-Wesley.

Heisenberg, Werner. 1969. Der Teil und dasGanze: Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik.München: R. Piper & Co. Verlag.

ipcc. 2012. Climate Change 2007 – The PhysicalScience Basis, Working Group I Contributionto the Fourth Assessment Report of the ipcc.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lear, Jonathan (1988). The Desire to Understand.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pauli, Wolfgang (1979). WissenschaftlicherBriefwechsel, Band I: 1919-1929. New York:Springer-Verlag.

Salmon, Wesley C. (1998). Causality and Explan-ation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schrödinger, Erwin (1928). Collected Papers onWave Mechanics. London: Blackie.

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Schrödinger, Erwin (1996). Nature and theGreeks.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Invitation to Submit Opinion Piece

In order to make better educational use of thewide geographical and disciplinary reach of thishps&st newsletter, invitations are extended forreaders to contribute opinion or position pieces orsuggestions about any aspect of the past, presentor future of hps&st studies.

Contributions can be sent direct to MichaelMatthews or Nathan Oseroff-Spicer.

Ideally, they might be pieces that are already onthe web, in which case a few paragraphs introduc-tion, with link to web site can be sent, or else thepieces will be put on the web with a link given inthe newsletter.

They will be archived in the opinion folder at thehps&st web site: http://www.hpsst.com/.

PhDTheses in hps&st Domain

The hps&st newsletter is the ideal medium forpublicising and making known submitted andawarded doctoral theses in the hps&st domain.

The following details should be submitted to theeditor at m.matthews@unsw.edu.au:

• Candidate’s name and email

• Institution

• Supervisor

• Thesis title

• Abstract of 100-300 words

• Web link when theses are required to be sub-mitted for open search on web.

From Aeon Newsletter: Martin Rees‘The Good Scientist’

”The Good Scientist” by Martin Rees, England’sAstronomer Royal, is a 5/20/20 Aeon essay thatstresses the need formore scientists who can com-municate effectively with the general public. Heuses Carl Sagan as an example of a scientist whowas highly effective at this. Rees observes that”science is the one culture that all humans canshare” and science should strive for ”peaceful co-existence” with all faiths. He goes on to say scienceadvances through open debate and internationalcollaboration is needed todaymore than ever if weare to avoid the dangers of misusing science.

The essay can be read here.

Symposium on the History, Philo-sophy & Sociology of School Bio-logy, Dublin City University, 11 - 12December 2020

Under the aegis of The International Society forthe History, Philosophy & Social Studies of Bio-logy (ihspssb)

New curricular developments in biology acrossthe educational spectrum are resulting in the re-evaluation of practical biology and the unexpectedoutcome of reducing practical work in biology.

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The mission of this symposium will be to en-hance the hps of Biology by examining the rela-tionship between Biology as a discipline and howit is presented in schools.

The vision of the symposiumwill be to explore tra-ditional historical approaches in practical work-shops with historic equipment and re-evaluatethem in light of new pedagogies and curricular re-form, can school biology be called experimentalscience any longer? To ask, and answer, what isthe purpose of school biology?

Some suggested threads of interest:

• The relationship between biology and schoolbiology

• Historical approaches to teaching biology

• Experimental History of biology

• Methodologies and philosophies of instructionin biology

• The use of natural history collections in biology

• Gender balance and diversity in biology uptakeat the second level

• Thenature of biology, whether an experimentalscience?

• Thepurpose of school biology in society in gen-eral

• Mayr’s Philosophy of Biology and its applica-tion to school biology

Symposiarch : Dr. Thomas McCloughlin,tom.mccloughlin@dcu.ie,School of stem Education

Symposium website:https://sites.google.com/dcu.ie/ishpssb2020/home

‘History, Philosophy and ScienceTeaching: APersonal Story’MichaelR. Matthews

Michael Matthews has contributed to hps&stresearch, and associated institutional initiativessuch as the International History Philosophy andScience Teaching Group (ihpst) and the Inter Di-visional Teaching Commission of the dlmps anddhst over the past 30+ years. He has written art-icles and books, editing anthologies, handbooks,and journal special issues, given lectures in scoresof international universities, and has presentedpapers and lectures at numerous academic confer-ences. He founded, and for 25 years edited, theSpringer journal Science & Education: Contribu-tions from hps.

He has now written an intellectual autobiographythat details something of his own Irish-Catholicchildhood and schooling, his science studies andteacher education at SydneyUniversity in themid-1960s, his science teaching years, his early studies,research and teaching in philosophy of education,his University of Sydney honours degrees in philo-sophy, psychology and hps, his connection withSydney theological studies, his period lecturing atSydney Teachers College, appointment to Univer-sity of New South Wales, and his time as Founda-tion Professor Science Education at University ofAuckland. Also discussed is his five-year sojournas an alderman on Sydney City Council, the firstindependent alderman to be elected to the coun-cil.

The personal story elaborates a little on a num-ber of the issues and debates in philosophy of edu-cation, philosophy, hps, and science education to

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which Matthews has contributed. It is not a gen-eral account of hps&st but rather a personal storyof how he became involved with hps&st ques-tions, research, and institutions and how he seesthat past and future.

The essay can be read, and downloaded as a pdffile here.

Recent hps&st Research Articles

Centaurus (Volume 61, Issue 4)Special Issue: The Periodic System: The (Mul-tiple) Values of an IconEditors: Annette Lykknes Brigitte VanTiggelen

Archila, P.A., Molina, J. & Truscott de Mejía,A. (2020). Using Historical Scientific Con-troversies to Promote Undergraduates’ Ar-gumentation. Science & Education, 1-25.doi:10.1007/s11191-020-00126-6 online first

Bensaude-Vincent, B. (2020). Festschrift: Atthe Boundary between Science and IndustrialPractices: Applied Science, Arts, and Tech-nique in France, 13. Science Museum GroupJournal. doi:10.15180/201309

Cheung, K. (2020). Exploring the Inclusion ofNature of Science in Biology Curriculum andHigh-Stakes Assessments in Hong Kong. Sci-ence & Education, 1-22.doi:10.1007/s11191-020-00113-x online first

Coelho, R. L. (2020)On the EnergyConcept Prob-lem: Experiments and Interpretations. Found-ations of Science, 1-18.doi:10.1007/s10699-020-09675-z online first

de Carvalho, Í.N., El-Hani, C.N. & Nunes-

Neto, N. (2020). How Should We Se-lect Conceptual Content for Biology HighSchool Curricula? Science & Education, 1-35.doi:10.1007/s11191-020-00115-9 online first

de Waal, E., ten Hagen, S.L. (2020). TheConcept of Fact in German Physics around1900: A Comparison between Mach andEinstein. Physics in Perspective, 1-26.doi:10.1007/s00016-020-00256-y online first

Emden, M., Gerwig, M. (2020). Can Faraday’sThe Chemical History of a Candle Inform theTeaching of Experimentation? Science & Edu-cation, 1-28.doi:10.1007/s11191-020-00119-5 online first

Gilissen, M. R., Knippels, M.-C. & van Joolin-gen, W.R. (2020). Bringing systemsthinking into the classroom. Interna-tional Journal of Science Education, 1-29.doi:10.1080/09500693.2020.1755741 onlinefirst

Giri, V., Paily, M.U. (2020). Effect of ScientificArgumentation on the Development of Crit-ical Thinking. Science & Education, 1-18.doi:10.1007/s11191-020-00120-y online first

Grinnell, F. (2020). “Reinventing ScienceFairs.” Issues in Science and Technology, 36(3),23–25.https://issues.org/reinventing-science-fairs/

Karam, R. (2020). Schrödinger’s originalstruggles with a complex wave function.American Journal of Physics, 88, 433.doi:10.1119/10.0000852

Klein, U. (2020). Science, industry, and the Ger-man Bildungsbürgertum. Annals of Science, 1-12. doi:10.1080/00033790.2020.1748228 on-line first

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Machery, E. (2020). What is a Replication? Philo-sophy of Science, 1-42. doi:10.1086/709701 justaccepted

Mohan, A.K. (2020). Philosophical Standpoints ofTextbooks in Quantum Mechanics. Science &Education, 1-21.doi:10.1007/s11191-020-00128-4 online first

Pleasants, J. (2020). Inquiring into the Natureof stem Problems. Science & Education, 1-25.doi:10.1007/s11191-020-00135-5 online first

Sharon, AJ, Baram‐Tsabari, A. (2020). Can sci-ence literacy help individuals identify misin-formation in everyday life? Science Education.1– 22. doi:10.1002/sce.21581 online first

Silva, H.M., Mortimer, E.F. (2020). Teach-ers’ Conceptions about the Origin of Hu-mans in the Context of Three Latin Amer-ican Countries with Different Forms and De-grees of Secularism. Science & Education, 1-21. doi:10.1007/s11191-020-00124-8 onlinefirst

Tawa, J. (2020). Does Social ConstructionistCurricula Both Decrease Essentialist and In-crease Nominalist Beliefs About Race? Science& Education, 1-28. doi:10.1007/s11191-020-00125-7 online first

Walmsley, L.D. (2020). The strategy of modelbuilding in climate science. Synthese, 1-21.doi:10.1007/s11229-020-02707-y online first

Recent hps&st Related Books

Armstrong, Paul B. (2020). Stories and the Brain:The Neuroscience of Narrative. Baltimore, MD:John Hopkins University Press.isbn: 978-1-421-43775-0

“How do our brains enable us to tell and follow stor-ies? And how do stories affect ourminds? In Storiesand the Brain, Paul B. Armstrong analyses the cog-nitive processes involved in constructing and ex-changing stories, exploring their role in the neuro-biology of mental functioning.

“Armstrong argues that theways inwhich stories or-der events in time, imitate actions, and relate ourexperiences to others’ lives are correlated to corticalprocesses of temporal binding, the circuit betweenaction and perception, and the mirroring opera-tions underlying embodied intersubjectivity. He re-veals how recent neuroscientific findings about howthe brain works–how it assembles neuronal syn-theses without a central controller–illuminate cog-nitive processes involving time, action, and self-other relations that are central to narrative.

“An extension of his previous book, How LiteraturePlays with the Brain, this new study applies Arm-strong’s analysis of the cognitive value of aestheticharmony and dissonance to narrative. Armstrongexplains how narratives help the brain negotiate thenever-ending conflict between its need for pattern,synthesis, and constancy and its need for flexibil-ity, adaptability, and openness to change. The neur-oscience of these interactions is part of the reasonstories give shape to our lives even as our lives giverise to stories.

“Taking up the age-old question of what our abilityto tell stories reveals about language and the mind,this truly interdisciplinary project should be of in-terest to humanists and cognitive scientists alike.”(From the Publisher)

More information available here.

Banerjee, Somaditya (2020). The Making of Mod-ern Physics in Colonial India. Abingdon, UK:Routledge. isbn: 978-1-315-55579-9

“This monograph offers a cultural history of the de-

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velopment of physics in India during the first half ofthe twentieth century, focusing on Indian physicistsSatyendranath Bose (1894-1974), ChandrasekharaVenkata Raman (1888-1970) and Meghnad Saha(1893-1956). The analytical category ”bhadralokphysics” is introduced to explore how it becamepossible for a highly successful brand of modernscience to develop in a country that was still un-der colonial domination. The termBhadralok refersto the then emerging group of native intelligentsia,who were identified by academic pursuits andman-ners. Exploring the forms of life of this social groupallows a better understanding of the specific char-acter of Indian modernity that, as exemplified bythe work of bhadralok physicists, combined mod-ern science with indigenous knowledge in an ori-ginal program of scientific research.

“The three scientists achieved the most significantscientific successes in the new revolutionary fieldof quantum physics, with such internationally re-cognised accomplishments as the Saha ionisationequation (1921), the famous Bose-Einstein statistics(1924), and the Raman Effect (1928), the latter dis-covery having led to the first ever Nobel Prize awar-ded to a scientist from Asia. This book analyses theresponses by Indian scientists to the radical conceptof the light quantum, and their further developmentof this approach outside the purview of Europeanauthorities. The outlook of bhadralok physicists ischaracterised here as ”cosmopolitan nationalism,”which allows us to analyse how the group pursuedmodern science in conjunction with, and as an in-strument of Indian national liberation.” (From thePublishers)

More information available here.

Cordes, Eugene, H. (2020). Hallelujah Moments:Tales of Drug Discovery (2nd Ed.). Oxford, UK:Oxford University Press.isbn: 978-0-190-08045-7

“The discovery of novel drugs that fill unmet med-ical needs is important for the health and well-being of people everywhere. However, the generalpublic knows too little about the pathways throughwhich basic research discoveries are translated intoproducts that protect or restore human health. Inthe second edition of Hallelujah Moments, EugeneH. Cordes reveals the processes and pitfalls on theroute from the laboratory bench to the bedside.These are adventure stories in which wit and gritcreated several of the most important drugs in hu-man medicine.

“This new edition adds four new tales of drug dis-covery: for therapy of cancer, hepatitis C, hiv/aids,and for weight control. The stories emphasise theintegration of basic research in academe and ap-plied research in the pharmaceutical industry andintroduce the key scientists. In each case, suc-cess resulted from imagination, risk-taking, prob-lem solving, and perseverance.

“Cordes shares his firsthand knowledge of the drug-discovery world, having spent a long and distin-guished career in both academic and industrialsettings. The eleven drug discovery tales takethe reader from concept to clinic for some of themost important drugs in human health includingthe statins, ace inhibitors, antibiotics, avermectins,Januvia, and Taxol. These stories offer exciting in-sights into the fascinating world of drug discovery.”(From the Publisher)

More information available here.

Fara, Patricia (2020). Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Sci-ence, and Serendipity. Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni-versity Press. isbn: 978-0-198-84854-7 (New inPaperback)

“Dr Erasmus Darwin seemed an innocuousMidlands physician, a respectable stalwart ofeighteenth-century society. But there was anotherside to him.

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“Botanist, physician, Lunar inventor and popularpoet, Darwin was internationally renowned for ex-traordinary poems explaining his theories about sexand science. Yet he became a target for the politicalclasses, the victim of a sustained and vitriolic char-acter assassination by London’s most savage satir-ists.

“Intrigued, prize-winning historianPatricia Fara setout to investigate why Darwin had provoked suchfierce intellectual and political reaction. Invitingher readers to accompany her, she embarked onwhat turned out to be a circuitous and serendipit-ous journey.

“Her research led her to discover a man who pos-sessed, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ’per-haps a greater range of knowledge than any otherman in Europe.’ His evolutionary ideas influencedhis grandson Charles, were banned by the Vatican,and scandalised his reactionary critics. But formodern readers he shines out as an impassionedEnlightenment reformer who championed the ab-olition of slavery, the education of women, and theoptimistic ideals of the French Revolution.

“As she tracks down her quarry, Patricia Fara un-covers a ferment of dangerous ideas that terrifiedthe establishment, inspired the Romantics, and laidthe ground for Victorian battles between faith andscience.” (From the Publisher)

More information available here.

Fulford, Tim,&Ruston, Sharon (Eds.) (2020). TheCollected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy. Oxford,UK: Oxford University Press.isbn: 978-0-198-70586-4

“This is the first collected edition of the letters ofHumphry Davy. Davy is a significant figure in boththe history of science and literary history. One ofthe foremost chemists of the early nineteenth cen-tury, he was the first person to inhale nitrous ox-

ide. He pioneered electrochemistry, using the Vol-taic pile to isolate more chemical elements than anyother scientist; and he invented the miners’ safetylamp that came to be known as the ’Davy lamp’.His lectures and papers played a key part in theprofessionalisation of science, in the growth of sci-entific institutions, and in the emergence of sci-entific disciplines. He was the protégé of ThomasBeddoes and Joseph Banks, and the mentor of Mi-chael Faraday. He was also a poet, and a friend ofpoets, including Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, andByron.

“The edition contains fully annotated transcrip-tions of correspondence (much previously unpub-lished) with such figures as Joseph Banks, ThomasBeddoes, Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Samuel Taylor Col-eridge, Michael Faraday, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac,the Herschels, the Marcets, Marc-Auguste Pictet,Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure, James Watt, JosiahWedgwood, William Hyde Wollaston, and ThomasYoung.

“The edition throws new light on Davy, on the his-tories of science and literature, and on the socialhistory of the early nineteenth century. It illumin-ates scientific controversies over the safety lamp,the Board of Longitude, the Geological Society, andthe Royal Society. It offers new perspectives onthe 1790s poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, andSouthey. It illuminates women’s literary networks,reveals the links between science and government,and casts light on provincial and dissenting intel-lectual networks, among Quakers and Unitarians.”(From the Publisher)

More information available here.

Leng, Gareth & Leng, Rhodri Ivor (2020). TheMatter of Facts: Skepticism, Persuasion, and Evid-ence in Science. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press.isbn: 978-0-262-04388-5

“Modern science is built on experimental evidence,

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yet scientists are often very selective in decidingwhat evidence to use and tend to disagree about howto interpret it. In The Matter of Facts, Gareth andRhodri Leng explore how scientists produce anduse evidence. They do so to contextualise an arrayof problems confronting modern science that haveraised concerns about its reliability: the widespreaduse of inappropriate statistical tests, a shortage ofreplication studies, and a bias in both publishingand citing “positive” results. Before these problemscan be addressed meaningfully, the authors argue,we must understand what makes science work andwhat leads it astray.

“The myth of science is that scientists constantlychallenge their own thinking. But in reality, all sci-entists are in the business of persuading other sci-entists of the importance of their own ideas, andthey do so by combining reason with rhetoric. Of-ten, they look for evidence that will support theirideas, not for evidence that might contradict them;often, they present evidence in a way that makes itappear to be supportive; and often, they ignore in-convenient evidence.

“In a series of essays focusing on controversies, dis-putes, and discoveries, the authors vividly portrayscience as a human activity, driven by passion aswell as by reason. By analysing the fluidity of sci-entific concepts and the dynamic and unpredictabledevelopment of scientific fields, the authors painta picture of modern science and the pressures itfaces.” (From the Publishers)

More information available here.

Maxwell, Nicholas (2020) Our Fundamental Prob-lem: A Revolutionary Approach to Philosophy,McGill-Queen’s University Press.

“How can the world we live in and see, touch, hear,and smell, the world of living things, people, con-sciousness, free will, meaning, and value - how can

all of this exist and flourish embedded as it is inthe physical universe, made up of nothing but phys-ical entities such as electrons and quarks? How cananything be of value if everything in the universeis, ultimately, just physics? In Our FundamentalProblem Nicholas Maxwell argues that this prob-lem of reconciling the human and physical worldsneeds to take centre stage in our thinking, so thatour best ideas about it interact with our attemptsto solve even more important specialised problemsof thought and life. When we explore this funda-mental problem, Maxwell argues, revolutionary an-swers emerge for a wide range of questions arisingin philosophy, science, social inquiry, academic in-quiry as a whole, and - most important of all - ourcapacity to solve the global problems that threatenour future: climate change, habitat destruction, ex-tinction of species, inequality, war, pollution ofearth, sea, and air. An unorthodox introductionto philosophy, Our Fundamental Problem bringsphilosophy down to earth and demonstrates its vitalimportance for science, scholarship, education, life,and the fate of the world.

Details available here.

Richmond, Sheldon (2020), A Way Throughthe Global Techno-Scientific Culture, CambridgeScholars Publishing,

Computers are supposed to be smart, yet they frus-trate both ordinary users and computer techno-logists. Why are people frustrated by smart ma-chines? Computers don’t fit people. People thinkin terms of comparisons, stories, and analogies,and seek feedback, whereas computers are basedon a fundamental design that does not fit withanalogical and feedback thinking. They impose abinary, an all-or-nothing, approach to everything.Moreover, the social world and institutions thathave developed around computer technology hideand reinforce the lack of alignment between com-

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puters and people. This book suggests a solution:we do not have to accept the way things are now andwork around the bad social and technical designof computers. Rather, it proposes a diverse, dis-tributed, critical discussion of how to design andbuild both computer technology and its social in-stitutions.

Details available here.

Morange, Michael (2020). The Black Box ofBiology: A History of the Molecular Revolution.(Trans. Matthew Cobb). Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press. isbn: 978-0-674-28136-3

“Morange’s re-elaboration of his 1998 masterpiece,A History of Molecular Biology, is a gift. Compel-ling and masterful in its command of contempor-ary biology, history, and philosophy, The Black Boxof Biology is a key reference for grasping the scopeand roots of human interventions in the biologicalworld.” – Sabina Leonelli, University of Exeter

“An original and expansive analysis of the history ofmolecular biology, from its origins to the rise of ge-nomics and epigenetics. Unparalleled in its scopeand insight, The Black Box of Biology should be re-quired reading for historians and biologists seek-ing to understand the molecular transformation ofmodern biology.” – Michael Dietrich, University ofPittsburgh

“Written by a historian of science trained inFrançois Jacob’s laboratory, The Black Box of Bio-logy weaves together the social, political, and sci-entific dimensions of the ‘molecular revolution’ intoa compelling narrative and a fascinating read.” –Pierre-Olivier Méthot, Laval University

“Since the 1930s, a molecular vision has been trans-forming biology. Michel Morange provides an in-cisive and overarching history of this transforma-tion, from the early attempts to explain organismsby the structure of their chemical components, to

the birth and consolidation of genetics, to the latesttechnologies and discoveries enabled by the newscience of life. Morange revisits A History of Mo-lecular Biology and offers new insights from the pasttwenty years into his analysis.

“The Black Box of Biology shows that what led tothe incredible transformation of biology was not asimple accumulation of new results, but the mo-lecularisation of a large part of biology. In fact,Morange argues, the greatest biological achieve-ments of the past few decades should still be un-derstood within the molecular paradigm. Whathas happened is not the displacement of molecu-lar biology by other techniques and avenues of re-search, but rather the fusion ofmolecular principlesand concepts with those of other disciplines, in-cluding genetics, physics, structural chemistry, andcomputational biology. This has produced decis-ive changes, including the discoveries of regulatoryrnas, the development of massive scientific pro-grams such as human genome sequencing, and theemergence of synthetic biology, systems biology,and epigenetics.

“Original, persuasive, and breathtaking in its scope,The Black Box of Biology sets a new standard forthe history of the ongoing molecular revolution.”(From the Publisher)

More information available here.

Ramirez, Ainissa (2020). The Alchemy of Us: HowHumans and Matter Transformed One Another.Cambridge, MA: The mit Press.isbn: 978-0-262-54226-5

“In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writerAinissa Ramirez examines eight inventions–clocks,steel rails, copper communication cables, pho-tographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientificlabware, and silicon chips–and reveals how theyshaped the human experience. Ramirez tells thestories of the woman who sold time, the inventor

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who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded under-taker whose invention pointed the way to the com-puter. She describes, among other things, howour pursuit of precision in timepieces changed howwe sleep; how the railroad helped commercialiseChristmas; how the necessary brevity of the tele-gram influenced Hemingway’s writing style; andhow a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid’scameras to create passbooks to track black citizensin apartheid SouthAfrica. These fascinating and in-spiring stories offer new perspectives on our rela-tionships with technologies.

“Ramirez shows not only how materials wereshaped by inventors but also how those materialsshaped culture, chronicling each invention and itsconsequences–intended and unintended. Fillingin the gaps left by other books about techno-logy, Ramirez showcases little-known inventors–particularly people of colour and women–who hada significant impact but whose accomplishmentshave been hidden by myth-making, bias, and con-vention. Doing so, she shows us the power of tellinginclusive stories about technology. She also showsthat innovation is universal–whether it’s splicingbeats with two turntables and a microphone or spli-cing genes with two test tubes and crispr.” (Fromthe Publisher)

More information available here.

Scerri, Eric, & Ghibaudi, Elena (Eds.) (2020).What Is A Chemical Element? A Collection ofEssays by Chemists, Philosophers, Historians, andEducators. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.isbn: 978-0-190-93378-4

“The concept of a chemical element is founda-tional within the field of chemistry, but there iswide disagreement over its definition. Even theInternational Union for Pure and Applied Chem-istry (iupac) claims two distinct definitions: a spe-cies of atoms versus one which identifies chemical

elements with the simple substances bearing theirnames. The double definition of elements proposedby the International Union for Pure and AppliedChemistry contrasts an abstract meaning and anoperational one. Nevertheless, the philosophical as-pects of this notion are not fully captured by theiupac definitions, despite the fact that they werecrucial for the construction of the Periodic Table.Although rich scientific literature on the elementand the periodic table exists as well as a recentgrowth in the philosophy of chemistry, scholars arestill searching for a definitive answer to this import-ant question: What is an element?

“Eric Scerri and Elena Ghibaudi have teamed up toassemble a group of scholars to provide readers anoverview of the current state of the debate on chem-ical elements from epistemological, historical, andeducational perspectives. What Is A Chemical Ele-ment? fills a gap for the benefit of the whole chem-istry community-experimental researchers, philo-sophers, chemistry educators, and anyone lookingto learn more about the elements of the periodictable.” (From the Publishers)

More information available here.

Authors of hps&st-related papers and booksare invited to bring them to attention ofPaulo Maurício or Nathan Oseroff-Spicer forinclusion in these sections.

Coming hps&st Related Confer-ences

June 8-12, 2020, Philosophy of Biology at theMountains (pobam), Workshop, University ofUtah.Details available here.

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june 2020 hps&st newsletter

June 16-17, 2020, InternationalWorkshop onDis-ciplinary Identity: Insights from the History andPhilosophy of Chemistry. Hebrew University ofJerusalem, Israel.Details available here.

June 17-19, 2020, Fourth International History ofPhysics Conference, Trinity College DublinDetails available here.

June 29 – July 3, 2020, Objects of Understand-ing: Historical Perspectives on Material Arte-facts and Practices in Science Education. Europa-Universität, Flensburg, Germany. postponed to2021Inquiries at OoU-conference@uni-flensburg.de

June 29 – July 1, 2020, Measurement at the Cross-roads 2020 – Measuring and Modeling. Milan,Italy.More information available here.

June 30 – July 2, 2020, 7th annual conference of theInternational Association for Philosophy of Time.Barcelona, Spain.Inquiries at iapt7barcelona@gmail.com

July 1-3, 2020, ‘stemm and Belief in Diverse Con-texts: Publics, Praxis, Policy and Pluralism’, Stel-lenbosch, South AfricaDetails available here.

July 2-4, 2020, 4th International Conference onScience and Literature, University of Girona,Spain.Details at: http://icscienceandliterature.com/

July 7-10, 2020, Society for Philosophy of Sci-ence in Practice (spsp) Eighth Biennial Confer-ence, Michigan State University, USADetails available here.

July 8-11, 2020, British Society for History of Sci-

ence Annual Conference, Aberystwyth Univer-sity, Wales.Information at: http://bshsaberystwyth2020.info/

July 9-11, 2020, 6th International stem in Educa-tion Conference, Vancouver, Canada.Details at: www.stem2020.ubc.ca

July 15-17, 2020, 8th Integrated History andPhilosophy of Science Conference (&hps8). Vir-ginia Tech, Blacksburg VA.Information: Lydia Patton (critique@vt.edu) orJutta Schickore (jschicko@indiana.edu)

July 21-23, 2020, 24th Conference of the Inter-national Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry.Buenos Aires, Argentina.More information available here.

July 27-31, 2020, Summer School on “Open sci-ence”: ambivalences and tensions – New bor-derlands between science, technology and society(Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain.Details available here orLilia Bolz (lilia.bolz@humtec.rwth‐aachen.de).

August 10-14, 2020, Bayesian Epistemology: Per-spectives and Challenges. mcmp, lmu Munich.Details available here.

August 18-21, 2020, easst + 4S Joint Conference,PragueDetails available here.

August 31 – September 3, 2020, European Societyfor History of Science Biennial Conference, Bo-lognaDetails available here.

September 9-11, 2020. The 8th Congress of theSociety for the Philosophy of Science. Universityof Mons, Belgium.Details available here.

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September 14-19, 2020, 39th annual symposiumof the Scientific Instrument Commission, LondonDetails available here.

October 8-9, 2020 Conference on Science & Tech-nology Education, Porto, PortugalDetails available here.

October 8-11, 2020, History of Science SocietyAnnual Conference, New OrleansDetails available here.

November 19-22, 2020, Twenty-Seventh BiennialMeeting of the psa. Baltimore, MarylandDetails available here.

July 4-8, 2021, ihpst 16th International Confer-ence, University of Calgary, CanadaDetails from Glenn Dolphin:glenn.dolphin@ucalgary.ca.

July 25-31, 2021, 26th International Congress ofHistory of Science andTechnology (dhst), PragueInformation: https://www.ichst2021.org/

September 20-22, 2021, ‘Developing MarioBunge’s Scientific-Philosophical Programme’,Huaguang Academy of Information Science,Wuhan, ChinaDetails from Zongrong LI 2320129239@qq.com.

July 24-29, 2023, 17th dlmpst Congress, Univer-sity of Buenos Aires Information: Pablo Loren-zano, pablo@unq.edu.ar.

hps&st Related Organisations andWebsites

iuhpst – International Union of History, Philo-sophy, Science, and Technology

dlmpst – Division of Logic, Mathematics, Philo-sophy, Science, and Technology

dhst – Division of History, Science, and Techno-logy

ihpst – International History, Philosophy, andScience Teaching Group

narst – National Association for Research in Sci-ence Teaching

esera – European Science Education ResearchAssociation

asera – Australasian Science Education ResearchAssociation

icase – International Council of Associations forScience Education

unesco – Education

hss – History of Science Society

eshs – European Society for theHistory of Science

aha – American History Association

isheastme – International Society for the Historyof East Asian History of Science Technology andMedicine

bshs – British Society for History of Science

epsa – European Philosophy of Science Associ-ation

aahpsss - The Australasian Association for theHistory, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science

hopos – International Society for the History ofPhilosophy of Science

psa – Philosophy of Science Association

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bsps – The British Society for the Philosophy ofScience

spsp – The Society for Philosophy of Science inPractice

ishpsb – The International Society for the His-tory, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology

pes – The Philosophy of Education Society (USA)

The above list is updated and kept on the hps&stwebsite here.

hps&st-related organisations wishing their webpage to be added to the list should contact assistanteditor Paulo Maurício (paulo.asterix@gmail.com)

The newsletter is typeset in XeLaTeX.The font is Minion Pro.The cover image is used with permission fromhttps://pixabay.com/, free for commercial use.

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