Theodore Porter on Victorian Scientists

Another extracurricular presentation, this time on Victorian scientists and institutions. The speaker was Theodore Porter from UCLA. He was part of the Science and Technology Studies colloquium here at Michigan.

If there is any field of history that I gravitate toward it is science and technology studies. The connection to information science is sometimes tenuous but the philosophical questions about the weight of individuals and institutions are prominent.

Porter basically summarized some of his recent work on Karl Pearson and the scientific institutions in Britain during the 19th century. He argued that the professionalization of science in opposition to religion was complicated by the desires of people such as Pearson to make science into a form of public reason. I was particularly struck by the importance Pearson placed on statistics, his own major discipline, as the foundation of science and perhaps the seed of a lot of advanced educational emphasis on methodology. The final point was teased out by a comment by Paul Edwards during the question period.