Person:

Shapin, Steven

This is a historical survey of how and why the notion of the Ivory Tower became part of twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural vocabularies. It very briefly tracks the origins of the tag in antiquity, documents its nineteenth-century resurgence in literary and aesthetic culture, and more carefully assesses the political and intellectual circumstances, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, in which it became a common phrase attached to universities and to features of science and in which it became a way of criticizing practices and institutions deemed to be ‘irrelevant’. The paper concludes by reflecting on the tag’s relationship to pervasive cultural tropes and how its modern history may be used to appreciate better where science and its academic setting now stand in the ancient debate between the active and contemplative lives.

An evaluative contrast between learned expertise and lay knowledge is a pervasive and longstanding feature of modern culture. Occasionally, the learned have pointed to folkish proverbs to illustrate the inadequacies of common-sense reasoning and judgement. Proverbs are said perspicuously to display the superficiality, the imprecision, and even the logical contradictions of common-sense thinking. I offer an interpretation of proverbs in their naturally occurring settings as epistemically powerful, mnemonically robust, practically pertinent, and referentially flexible. My purpose is not just to recuperate the value of proverbial reasoning but, ultimately, to show the relevance of such reasoning to a revised appreciation of modern technical practices, including science, technology and medicine. To that end, the paper concludes with some speculative remarks about the linguistic forms in which the heuristics of present-day technical practices are expressed and transmitted.

Charismatic authority flourishes in places where some social scientists evidently do not expect to find it - in late modernity and in highly complex and instrumentally orientated technoscientific organizations. This paper documents and interprets participants' testimony about the workings of wartime Los Alamos in relation to the charisma of its Scientific Director. J. Robert Oppenheimer. We treat charisma as an interactional accomplishment, and examine its role in technoscientific organizations. Los Alamos was a hybrid place, positioned at the intersection of military, industrial and academic forms. Everyday life there was marked by a high degree of normative uncertainty. Structures of authority, communication and the division of labour were contested and unclear. The interactional constitution of Oppenheimer as charismatic enabled him to articulate, vouch for and, finally, come to embody a conception of legitimate organizational order as collegial, egalitarian and communicatively open. We offer concluding speculations about the continuing importance of charismatic authority in contemporary technoscientific organizations. Just as normative uncertainty is endemic in late modernity, so too, we argue, is charisma.

Analyzes the phrenological knowledge and the social structure of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh in Scotland. Accountability for conflict between phrenologists and anti-phrenologists; Details on the utility and the image of science in the region; Definition of ceteris paribus.