Browsing by Author "Cohen, Benjamin R."
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- Notes from the Ground: Science and Agricultural Improvement in the Early American RepublicCohen, Benjamin R. (Virginia Tech, 2005-02-25)This dissertation is an analysis of systematic studies of the land in the early American Republic, from the 1790s to the 1840s; more specifically, it explores the role scientific and technical practices played within that era's improvement ethic. I argue that science, as seen through the lens of agricultural chemistry and, to a lesser extent, geology, became an important, acceptable, and credible way to interact with early Republic land because it fit within the multivalent improvement ethic of that period. Through a study of the agricultural press, farmers’ diaries, and county and statewide scientific surveys, I examine how scientific and technical practices aided agricultural improvement, how they were promoted or resisted by local farmers, and in what ways they gained social credibility for interpreting and interacting with agrarian nature. Part I, “The Place of Science,” explores how science was interpreted by people. I there ask about the social, moral, instrumental, and literary places of agricultural science in rural culture. Part II, “The Science of Place,” asks instead how science interpreted the land, there studying county and state scientific surveys in Virginia. Underlying the entire work is an exposition of the georgic ethic (as distinct from the pastoral ethic), which emphasizes the labor-based means through which most rural peoples understood their land and ties the moral plea for cultural improvement to the material pursuit of agricultural progress. The story herein introduces the production of an important set of conditions that allowed later scientific developments across the land to have meaning and significance: forms of communication, precedents of organization, field-tested modes of analysis, a tradition of improvement and experimentation, the long-standing search for solutions to soil exhaustion, increasingly mechanistic philosophies of soil composition, a market force to drive all of these, and a unique American political and agricultural environment into which the above could take shape. The lesson is not that the entirety of our modern scientific worldview can be traced to the activities of a disgruntled antebellum American farming class, but that this example of rural science and agricultural improvement provides a fruitful example of what it takes to make a scientific worldview. Thus, arguments about philosophical and conceptual bases for scientizing the land–topics of great importance in the fields of environmental history and various branches of science and technology studies–gain strength and plausibility by reference to the workings of antebellum agents who first argued over the value of using science to define their land. By putting the circulation of agricultural science in the context of early Republic improvement-minded agents, we can better locate agrarian American culture into a post-Enlightenment setting, we are better equipped to recognize how everyday citizens came to treat scientific practices as legitimate means of interacting with their lands, and we have a more developed picture of how morality, materiality, and theory were wedded in the much-revered principles of practice and practicality. The sum of those points highlights how traditional means of managing the land, as with religious doctrine, almanac strictures, the lessons inherited through family lineage by generations of daily practice, or uncodified folk knowledge in general, were being complemented with or displaced by organized, methodical, and systematic–eventually, scientific–practices on the land.
- Uniquely Structured: Debating Concepts of Science, from the Two Cultures to the Science WarsCohen, Benjamin R. (Virginia Tech, 2001-04-23)The purpose of this thesis is to compare the science wars of the 1990s with the two-culture debate of the 1960s. It is a work in the history of intellectual debates, focusing on contested concepts of science. Over the past decade, there have been numerous references made in science wars literature that evoke comparisons to the two-culture controversy. I intend to show that while these comparisons have merit for their popular cultural reference, they are not valid when we consider the structures and contexts of the two debates. Thus, I will compare those structures, summarizing the main points of argument between the relevant actors in each instance, to illustrate the differences. The thesis advanced by C.P. Snow in 1959, and responded to most pointedly by F.R. Leavis in 1962, was predicated on the existence of foundational differences between science and humanities. The broader issues then were what validity a distinction between forms of knowledge had and which domain had the more reliable claim to knowledge. Just as the two-culture controversy called into question the credibility of literary knowledge, the credibility of science studies scholarship was ultimately at stake in the science wars, and is of central concern in this thesis. My contention is that recognizing the differences between the two-culture debate and the science wars can help guide the future of science studies, since those differences demonstrate the importance and validity of STS scholarship. When scholars ignore those differences, and presume that the two debates are comparable, they unintentionally give credibility to those who defend science against perceived assaults by STS scholars.