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Critics of multiple realizability have recently argued that we should concentrate solely on actual here-and-now realizations that are found in nature. The possibility of alternative, but unactualized, realizations is regarded as uninteresting because it is taken to be a question of pure logic or an unverifiable scenario of science fiction. However, in the biological context only a contingent set of realizations is actualized. Drawing on recent work on the theory of neutral biological spaces, the article shows that we can have ways of assessing the modal dimension of multiple realizability that do not have to rely on mere conceivability.

AbstractScientific writings, as one essential part of human culture, have evolved over centuries into their current form. Knowing how scientific writings evolved is particularly helpful in understanding how trends in scientific culture developed. It also allows us to better understand how scientific culture was interwoven with human culture generally. The availability of massive digitized texts and the progress in computational technologies today provide us with a convenient and credible way to discern the evolutionary patterns in scientific writings by examining the diachronic linguistic changes. The linguistic changes in scientific writings reflect the genre shifts that took place with historical changes in science and scientific writings. This study investigates a general evolutionary linguistic pattern in scientific writings. It does so by merging two credible computational methods: relative entropy; word-embedding concreteness and imageability. It thus creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes in the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (PTRS, 1665–1869). The data from two computational approaches can be well mapped to support the argument that this journal followed the evolutionary trend of increasing professionalization and specialization. But it also shows that language use in this journal was greatly influenced by historical events and other socio-cultural factors. This study, as a “culturomic” approach, demonstrates that the linguistic evolutionary patterns in scientific discourse have been interrupted by external factors even though this scientific discourse would likely have cumulatively developed into a professional and specialized genre. The approaches proposed by this study can make a great contribution to full-text analysis in scientometrics.

AbstractMany believe that the quality of a scientific publication is as good as the science it cites. However, quantifications of how features of reference lists affect citations remain sparse. We examined seven numerical characteristics of reference lists of 50,878 research articles published in 17 ecological journals between 1997 and 2017. Over this period, significant changes occurred in reference lists’ features. On average, more recent papers have longer reference lists and cite more high Impact Factor papers and fewer non-journal publications. We also show that highly cited articles across the ecological literature have longer reference lists, cite more recent and impactful references, and include more self-citations. Conversely, the proportion of ‘classic’ papers and non-journal publications cited, as well as the temporal span of the reference list, have no significant influence on articles’ citations. From this analysis, we distill a recipe for crafting impactful reference lists, at least in ecology.

This paper is a part of a collaboration between computer scientists and historians aimed at development of novel methods for historical newspapers analysis. We present a case study of ideological terms ending with -ism suffix in nineteenthcentury Finnish newspapers. We propose a two-step procedure to trace differences in word usages over time: training of diachronic embeddings on several time slices and when clustering embeddings of selected words together with their neighbours to obtain historical context. The obtained clusters turn out to be useful for historical studies. The paper also discusses specific difficulties related to development of historian-oriented tools.

The new field of the history of knowledge is often presented as a mere expansion of the history of science. We argue that it has a greater ambition. The re-definition of the historiographical domain of the history of knowledge urges us to ask new questions about the boundaries, hierarchies, and mutual constitution of different types of knowledge as well as the role and assessment of failure and ignorance in making knowledge. These issues have pertinence in the current climate where expertise is increasingly questioned and authority seems to lose its ground. Illustrated with examples from recent historiography of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, we indicate some fruitful new avenues for research in the history of knowledge. Taken together, we hope that they will show that the history of knowledge could build the expertise required by the challenges of twenty-first century knowledge societies, just like the history of science, throughout its development as a discipline in the twentieth century, responded to the demands posed by science and society.

Although the historical connections between anatomy and the visual arts have been explored in quite some depth, especially in the cases of early modern anatomical drawing, sculpting, the making of wet preparations and wax modelling, the role of artistic techniques in the creation of corrosive preparations has received little attention thus far. This is remarkable, as there appear to be significant similarities between casting techniques like those employed by the influential artist Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508– 85) and anatomical corrosive techniques. This paper explores the connections between the two domains and argues that, although artistic and anatomical techniques were often very similar in terms of the materials used, the skills that had to be developed to apply them successfully, and the visual results, there were distinct materialities and techniques in each realm. It is demonstrated that the creation of corrosion casts, particularly wax-based casts, required particular skills that were unlike others in the period. The paper does so by analysing the material and technical qualities of corrosive preparations from the period 1700 – 1900, and by comparing the results of this analysis with written instructions for making corrosive preparations and making casts from the same period in both anatomical and artist handbooks.

The Horizon 2020 project CrossCult aims to highlight historical and cultural associations between different characters, locations, events, venues, or artworks, to develop new strategies with which to promote intercultural and cross-border aspects of history and heritage. This paper presents a pilot app that provides graph-based visualizations of those associations, arranged by Humanities experts in relation to several reflective topics, and glued together by narratives that may present the same facts from diverse points of view. After querying a knowledge base that brings together several Linked Data resources, the associations are curated by the experts using a dedicated tool, to ensure that only meaningful associations appear on the mobile app. In turn, the app users can contribute new associations in the form of written text, which the experts can turn into new concepts and properties in the knowledge base. Here, we present the design of the mobile app and the experts&rsquo tool, together with the results of early experiments aimed at assessing the instructional value of the proposal.

We investigate the accuracy of how author names are reported in bibliographic records excerpted from four prominent sources: WoS, Scopus, PubMed, and CrossRef. We take as a case study 44,549 publications stored in the internal database of Sapienza University of Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe. While our results indicate generally good accuracy for all bibliographic data sources considered, we highlight a number of issues that undermine the accuracy for certain classes of author names, including compound names and names with diacritics, which are common features to Italian and other Western languages.

Historically speaking, scientists have lived and worked in a multilingual world. Given that, in such a world, translation is simply part of (scientific) life, it is all the more remarkable that practices of translation in science have received less attention from historians of science than one might expect. A focus on translation allows historians of science to scrutinize the changes and transformations of scientific knowledge in motion. Instead of presuming that processes of translation are betrayals of the original, and thus asking about the “fidelity” of a translator or the “faithfulness” of a translation, the contributions to this Focus section see those processes as productive of knowledge, part and parcel of the history of science. This Focus section brings together a wide variety of languages and practices of translation in different places and times, from the Ottoman Empire to Japan and from antiquity to the nineteenth century.

This essay argues that we should consider perceptions of and associations with alchemical language and practices in academic and artisanal as well as popular culture in the Netherlands in order to gain a better understanding of the supposed transformation of alchemy into chemistry in this region. A fresh view on the sites of Dutch chemistry around 1700 is provided, demonstrating that the unique sociopolitical and geological characteristics of the Low Countries meant that the process of the “disappearance” of alchemy was distinctly different from that in the neighboring German lands. Finally, the essay shows that, as Lawrence M. Principe has previously suggested, the rhetoric with which Herman Boerhaave and other Dutch academics rejected the “excesses of chemistry” was less empirically than morally and socially motivated.