Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Recent sociological studies of scientific discovery have challenged the assumption that such discoveries are easily identifiable processes which take place in the mind of heroic discoverers. In this paper, four examples of discovery stories are chosen from the critical period of transition from natural philosophy to the nineteenth-century scientific disciplines. In each case it is impossible to find any criterion for discovery apart from the local practices of contemporary research communities. `Discovery' is a retrospective label attributed to candidate events by these communities - a technique for marking technical practices which are prized by the community. Each discipline was sustained by the reproduction of these new techniques, with the aid of an ideologically loaded model of discovery and discoverers. Finally, it is suggested that the early nineteenth century was also marked by a change in the historiography, as well as the practice, of the sciences. Natural philosophers had often presented their histories as methods for training practitioners in discovery, but historians of the sciences from the early nineteenth century separated the disciplined training of scientists from the heroic discovery moment, for which no training was possible. The emergence of the disciplined sciences was thus the context in which discovery stories were constructed, and in which a historiography emerged which made those stories effective. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Since World War II, scientific activity has grown significantly in Latin America, and with it there has been a modest development of the social study of science (SSS). This paper investigates the changing significance of the work of science planners and social thinkers with respect to the understanding of the social role of science in Latin America. On the basis of this study it is argued that, despite promising signs, institutional developments in SSS in Latin America are very fragile, and that the chances for their survival and success lie in their capacity to demonstrate their ability to bridge the `research gap' between academia, public decision-making and industry. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Professional music journals frequently publish descriptions of newly registered patents concerning classical musical instruments. Only a few of the many proposals for innovation actually enter production. The large number of ideas for improving musical instruments such as the violin, the flute and the bassoon contrasts strikingly with the stability of the often age-old design of these instruments. Notably, the instruments of the symphony orchestra have basically retained their features since the mid-19th century. Compared with many other artefacts of Western culture, such stability in design and outlook is remarkable. Why is this? And what strategies do today’s innovation-seeking instrument makers use to break into this world of perfection? How, in other words, do they innovate and sell in a tradition-bound field? Moreover, how could insights in such strategies be valid for fields of technology-development in which tradition and craft have a similar significance? To address these questions, we examined music journals and, based on interviews and promotional literature, we explored the views and opinions of 12 instrument makers and promoters of unusually constructed flutes, bassoons, saxophones, violas, guitars and oboe-reeds. To account for their work, we will focus on the role of attachment to technology, on the go-betweens whose creative marginality enables them to connect technological and musical cultures and on the relevance of recasting tradition so as to innovate and sustain tradition at the very same time. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The internationalization of Antarctica as a continent for science with the Antarctic Treaty (1961) was heralded as bringing about international cooperation and the free exchange of data. However, both national rivalry and proprietorship of data, in varying degrees, remained integral to Antarctic science and politics throughout the 20th century. This paper considers two large field-surveys in Antarctica: first, an aerial photographic survey carried out by the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition of 1946—8; and second, the Scott Polar Research Institute's radio-echo sounding survey of 1967—79. Both surveys involved geoscientific data but the context in which the investigations and the exchanges of their results took place changed. We argue that the issue of control of data remained paramount across both cases despite shifting international political contexts. The control of data on Antarctic territory, once framed in terms of geopolitics and negotiated between governments, became a matter of science policy and credit to be negotiated among scientific institutions. Whereas the Ronne data were of potential strategic value for reinforcing national territorial claims, the radio-echo sounding data contained information of potential economic and environmental value. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This essay is a remembrance and also a reminder of Harold Garfinkel’s contributions to science studies. Garfinkel is best known as the founder of ethnomethodology, the sociological investigation of the production and coordination of ‘methods’ in non-scientific as well as scientific settings. In addition to studying the tacit organization of everyday activities, Garfinkel and his students also investigated practices in the natural and social sciences that elude formal methodological prescriptions and reports. Garfinkel’s work sometimes is acknowledged as a precursor to early ethnographies of scientific laboratories, but this essay argues that his conceptual and methodological innovations continue to have a pervasive, though often unacknowledged, place in science and technology studies and related fields. </jats:p>