UNIVERSITY OF
LEEDS
History &
Philosophy of Science Seminar Series
Semester 1, 2020-21
Wednesdays, 3.15-5pm
UK time
All talks will be
live streamed over TEAMS.
Email Dr Ellen Clarke
e.clarke@leeds.ac.uk to get the
link.
14 OCTOBER 2020
Ruben Verwaal (Durham): ‘Fluid Deafness: Earwax
and Hardness of Hearing in Early Modern Science’
28 OCTOBER 2020
Hayley Clatterbuck (Wisconsin-Madison): ‘Darwin's
causal argument against creationism’
11 NOVEMBER 2020
Pierre-Olivier Méthot (Université Laval):
‘Beyond Foucault’s Grip: Making Sense of François Jacob’s
The Logic of Life’
25 NOVEMBER 2020
Lena Zuchowski (Bristol): ‘What Kind of Models are Deep
Learning Algorithms?’
9 DECEMBER 2020
Jimena Canales (Illinois): ‘Science and the History of
Non-Existent Things’
Abstracts below
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14 OCTOBER 2020
Ruben Verwaal (Durham): ‘Fluid Deafness: Earwax and Hardness
of Hearing in Early Modern Science’
Abstract: This talk discusses hearing disability in early
modern science and presents Enlightenment medicine as part of a profound shift
in thinking about deafness. Scholars have already described changes in the
social status of the deaf in eighteenth-century Europe, pointing at clerics’
sympathy for the deaf and philosophers’ fascination with gestures as the origin
of language. Yet few historians have examined the growing interest in deafness
by physicians. From the seventeenth century onwards, natural philosophers and
physicians researched varieties in ear wax, discovered fluids in the Eustachian
Tube and cochlea, and developed new theories about the propagation of sound
waves via so-called fluid airs. This paper proposes that the renewed focus on
the fluids brought about a new understanding of auditory perception, which
reconstructed hearing and deafness not in terms of a dichotomy, but in terms of
a grading scale.
28 OCTOBER 2020
Hayley Clatterbuck (Wisconsin-Madison): ‘Darwin's causal
argument against creationism’
Abstract: In the Origin of Species, Darwin vacillates
between two incompatible lines of attack on special creationism. At times, he
argues that functionless traits are evidence against special creation, as we
would expect a designer to create traits that are useful for their possessors.
At other times, Darwin argues that special creationism is explanatorily
vacuous, for any possible observation is compatible with some putative
intention of the designer. However, in later works, Darwin turns to an argument
against creationism—and indeed, against the possibility of design in nature
more generally—that he finds much more compelling. He argues that the
variations which arise are random with respect to fitness and hence there is no
designer. I will examine why Darwin found this argument much more compelling
than the ones in the Origin and will suggest that it is because it can be made
from general causal principles alone, rather than having to reason about the
intentions or capacities of a creator. I will use tools from today’s causal
modeling frameworks to examine whether and why this argument from random
variation succeeds.
11 NOVEMBER 2020
Pierre-Olivier Méthot (Université Laval): ‘Beyond Foucault’s
Grip: Making Sense of François Jacob’s The Logic of Life’
Abstract: With a few notable exceptions, commentators have
systematically observed striking similarities between French geneticist
François Jacob’s The Logic of Life – A History of Heredity (1970) and Michel
Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).
There are grounds for thinking that Jacob was indeed influenced by the work of
his colleague at the Collège de France: rejecting a linear view, Jacob proposed
a discontinuous framework whereby each historical period is delineated by
profound transformations in the nature of biological knowledge itself. He
further attended to the “various stages of knowledge” he identified and how
they enabled the study of new “objects” in biology, thanks not only to the
development of instruments but to new ways of looking at the organism.
Unsurprisingly, Foucault praised The Logic of Life as “the most remarkable
history of biology ever written” and even used it as a confirmation of his own
archaeological approach. This Foucauldian reading, although pervasive, is far
too simple and is at best incomplete, however. But if Foucault isn’t the main
intellectual source behind Jacob’s best-selling book, then who is? And why did
Jacob – a Nobel Prize winner – suddenly turned into a historian of biology? In
this talk, I advance a new narrative in order to make sense of The Logic of
Life. Drawing on archival material from the Institut Pasteur in Paris, I will
argue that the book is best characterized as a response to Jacques Monod’s
biological vision of scientific growth. According to Monod, ideas in science
follow a logic of mutation and selection, a view rejected by Jacob on the
grounds that it takes evolutionary principles beyond their rightful domain.
This crucial difference between Jacob and Monod, I will show, can shed new
light on the opposition between “history of ideas” and “history of objects”. I
will further argue that Jacob’s change in laboratory organism in the late 1960s
was an important impetus in writing the book. Only in loosening Foucault’s grip
and in situating The Logic of Life within its own cultural context can we hope
to critically assess the promises and the limitations of Jacob’s
historiographical legacy.
25 NOVEMBER 2020
Lena Zuchowski (Bristol): ‘What Kind of Models are Deep
Learning Algorithms?’
Abstract: I will introduce a novel conceptual framework for
the analysis of scientific modelling. The framework will be used to distinguish
and comparatively analyse three different ways of model construction: vertical
from covering theory and empirical knowledge about a given target system;
horizontal through the systematic variation or transfer of existing models; and
diagonal through a combination of vertical and horizontal construction steps. I
will then apply this framework to analyse the construction of Deep Learning
Algorithms and will argue that they can be interpreted as the automated,
vertical, bottom-up construction of a sequence of scientific models.
Furthermore, I will maintain that the practice of transfer learning can be
interpreted as horizontal model construction.
9 DECEMBER 2020
Jimena Canales (Illinois): ‘Science and the History of
Non-Existent Things’
Abstract: What does not or does not yet exist plays a
predominant role in science and technology. Discovery, either when considered
as a process of uncovering or of creation, involves the bringing into existence
of the new. As scientists search for answers and solutions, they are often
confronted with problems and paradoxes that seem to escape from the realm of
reason. The cause of such mischief is often anthropomorphized, called a demon,
and given the last name of famous scientists, such as Descartes, Laplace, and
Maxwell. The antechamber of discovery is not, as is frequently thought, an
inscrutable “private art” marked by punctual “Eureka!” moments. It is a rich
cultural, social, economic and political space filled with imaginary
perpetrators with recognizable characteristics that have remained fairly
constant throughout many centuries. A study of the half-empty glass of
scientific research reveals certain patterns in the search terms that drive
discovery.