Since the practice turn, the role technologies play in the production of scientific knowledge has become a prominent topic in science studies. Much existing scholarship, however, either limits technology to merely mechanical instrumentation or uses the term for a wide variety of items. This article argues that technologies in scientific practice can be understood as a result of past scientific knowledge becoming sedimented in materials, like model organisms, synthetic reagents or mechanical instruments, through the routine use of these materials in (...) subsequent research practice. The proposed theoretical interpretation of technology is examined through a case where a model organism—Drosophila melanogaster—acted as a technology for investigating a contested biological effect of a mechanical instrument: Hermann J. Muller’s experiments on X-ray mutagenicity in the 1920s. The article reconstructs how Muller employed two synthetic Drosophila stocks as tests for measuring X-rays’ capacity to cause genetic aberration. It argues that past scientific knowledge sedimented in the Drosophila stocks influenced Muller’s perception of X-ray-induced mutation. It further describes how Muller’s concept of X-ray mutagenicity sedimented through the adoption of X-ray machines as a ready-made resource for producing mutants by other geneticists, for instance George Beadle and Edward Tatum in their experiments on Neurospora crassa, despite ongoing disputes surrounding Muller’s conclusions. Technological sedimentation is proposed as a potential explanation why sedimentation and disputation may often coexist in the history of science. (shrink)

Slovenian epistemology is characterised by an idiosyncratic canon, based on three fundamental authors: Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, and Thomas Kuhn. What binds this canon together is the attitude that the history of science should be viewed as a history of radical breaks or revolutions in scientific thought. The drawback of such an anthology of authors is not only that it is outdated, but that, from the position of this canon, it is difficult to discern the problems stemming from the approach (...) to history of science it endorses. In order to highlight the blind spots of Slovenian epistemology, I examine a different interpretative trajectory of the notion of scientific revolution in the United Kingdom and the United States. The methodological program, which focuses on revolutionary breakthroughs in scientific ideas, is thus re-evaluated by considering its strategic role in the institutionalisation of the history of science as a discipline. The event that marked the translation of French epistemology into English history of science were the lectures of the delegates from the Soviet Union at the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in 1931. In post-war Anglo-American history of science, the concept of scientific revolution was adopted as a means of excluding Marxist studies of science – which had spread under the influence of the Soviet delegation – from the realm of acceptable discourse. I demonstrate how the Cold War historiography of science introduced a divide between the “internal” and “external” factors of scientific development, and their supposed synthesis in the work of Thomas Kuhn. Finally, I review the critiques that the sociology of scientific knowledge levelled at the story of the Scientific Revolution and point out the importance of these controversies for current epistemological research. (shrink)

William Petty's work has usually been regarded as an epistemic break in the history of statistical and politico-economic thought. In this paper, I argue that Petty's statistical notions stemmed from the natural-historical techniques he originally implemented to manage the Down Survey. Following Bacon, who viewed the description of trades as a paramount branch of natural history, Petty approached the art of surveying itself as an object of natural-historical analysis. He partitioned the surveying work into individual tasks and implemented a meticulous (...) division of labour, employing hundreds of disbanded soldiers as surveyors and using questionnaires to calibrate the responses of his ‘instruments’, as he called his specialized workers. By borrowing these methods from natural history to organize surveying work, Petty was able to conceptualize Ireland as a political body defined by tables of aggregate data. I then compare the Down Survey with John Graunt's observations on the bills of mortality to show that both are representative of a particular style of natural history, aimed at describing the natural and political state of a circumscribed territory. I close by considering other manifestations of ‘territorial natural history’, indicating a continuity between this research tradition and the appearance of statistics in the British Isles. (shrink)