Language is the most essential medium of scientific activity. Many historians, sociologists and science studies scholars have investigated scientific language for this reason, but only few have examined those cases where language itself has become an object of scientific discussion. Over the centuries scientists have sought to control, refine and engineer language for various epistemological, communicative and nationalistic purposes. This book seeks to explore cases in the history of science in which questions or concerns with language have bubbled to the surface in scientific discourse. This opens a window into the particular ways in which scientists have conceived of and construed language as the central medium of their activity across different cultural contexts and places, and the clashes and tensions that have manifested their many attempts to engineer it to both preserve and enrich its function. The subject of language draws out many topics that have mostly been neglected in the history of science, such as the connection between the emergence of national languages and the development of science within national settings, and allows us to connect together historical episodes from many understudied cultural and linguistic venues such as Eastern European and medieval Hebrew science.
1. Introduction Miles MacLeod, Rocķo G. Sumillera, Jan Surman and
Ekaterina Smirnova
2. Modern Science and the Spirit of Language, Literature
and Philology Matthias Dörries Part 1: Language, Rhetoric and History
3. How
Language Became a Tool: The Reconceptualisation of Language and the Empirical
Turn in Seventeenth-Century Britain Miles MacLeod
4. The Beginnings of
Scientific Terminology in Polish: Koss Algorithmus (1538) and Grzepskis
Geometria (1566) Jerzy Biniewicz
5. Language and History in the Context of
the Société des Observateurs de lHomme (1799-1804) Martin Herrnstadt and
Laurens Schlicht
6. Contested Boundaries: How Scientists Deal with
Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Language Priya Venkatesan Hays Part 2: The
Creation of Scientific Terminology
7. Reading Astrolabes in Medieval Hebrew
Josefina Rodrķguez Arribas
8. Opyt in the Social Lexicon of Modernity: The
Experience/Experiment Dichotomy Ekaterina Smirnova
9. Linguistic Precision
and Scientific Accuracy: Searching for the Proper Name of "Oxygen" in French,
Danish and Polish Jan Surman
10. Mathematical Machines: Automating Thinking?
Helena Durnovį Part 3: Imagining Universal Languages
11. 17th-Century British
Projects for a Universal Language and Their Reception in the Augustan Age:
The Cases of John Wilkins and Jonathan Swift Rocķo G. Sumillera
12. One
Second Language for Mankind: The Rise and Decline of the World Auxiliary
Language Movement in the Belle Époque Markus Krajewski
13. Impacts of a
Global Language on Science: Are There Disadvantages? Scott L. Montgomery
Miles MacLeod is Assistant Professor for Philosophy of Science at the University of Twente, The Netherlands.
Rocķo G. Sumillera is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Valencia.
Jan Surman is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Leibniz Graduate School at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg.
Ekaterina Smirnova is currently affiliated with Sciences Po (Paris) and the STS Center in EUSP.
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