14 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2021
  2. Sep 2017
    1. Kuhn (1970, p. 167) commented that science education tends to elide the processthrough which knowledge has been constructed, whereas students of other subjectsare exposed to varying interpretations over time. As a result, he suggested, sciencestudents are blind to the history of their subject, seeing it only as unproblematicprogress. The interview data suggest that this is indeed a point of difference betweenthe ‘arts’ and ‘science’ students in this sample. While both of them tend to have adualistic view of science itself, the ‘arts’ students seem to be more at ease with arelativistic view of knowledge in history.

      Kuhn on lack of training science students receive on how knowledge is constructed.

  3. Jul 2016
    1. Page 187 On hyper authorship

      "hyper authorship” is an indicator of "collective cognition" in which the specific contributions of individuals no longer can be identified. Physics has among the highest rates of coauthorship in the sciences and the highest rates of self archiving documents via a repository. Whether the relationship between research collaborators (as indicated by the rates of coauthorship) and sharing publications (as reflected in self archiving) holds in other fields is a question worth exploring empirically.

  4. Jun 2016
    1. t "[ilf Northrop Frye should write an essay attacking archetypal criticism, the article would by definition be of much greater significance than an article by another scholar attack- ing the same approach" (Schaefer 5). The reason, of course, is that the approach is not something in- dependent of what Northrop Frye has previously said about it; indeed, in large part archetypal criticism is what Northrop Frye has said about it, and therefore anything he now says about it is not so much to be measured against an independent truth as it is to be regarded, at least potentially, as a new pronouncement of what the truth will hereafter be said to be

      author-function at work: Frye is an author-concept and his work is a coherent whole--an Oeuvre.

      This is absolutely fine for literary criticism and the humanities. The same is in practice true of the sciences--what Steven Hawking says about physics is more interesting than other people, especially if he reverses his previous claims. But in contrast to Frye, where a reversal is a change in the discursive practice (cf. Foucault), in the case of science, it should not be the case that hearing a "great man" reverse himself is more significant than hearing an unknown post-doc. The reversal should be evidence-based.

  5. screen.oxfordjournals.org screen.oxfordjournals.org
    1. verningthis function is the belief that there must be - at a particular levelof an author's thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire — apoint where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatibleelements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere arounda fundamental and originating contradiction. Fin

      This is not true (in theory) of scientific authorship. We don't judge the coherence of the oeuvre.

      Again it conflict with Fish's view of literary criticism

    2. athe-matical treatise, the ego who indicates the circumstances of com-position in the preface is not identical, either in terms of his posi-tion or his function, to the T who concludes a demonstrationwithin the body of the text. The former implies a unique individualwho, at a given time and place, succeeded in completing a project,whereas the latter indicates an instance and plan of demonstrationthat anyone could perform provided the same set of axioms, pre-liminary operations, and an identical set of symbols were used. It isalso possible to locate a third ego: one who speaks of the goals of' his investigation, the obstacles encountered, its results, and theproblems yet to be solved and this T would function in a field ofexisting or future mathematical discourses. We are not dealing witha system of dependencies where a first and essential use of the Tis reduplicated, as a kind of fiction, by the other two. On thecontrary, the 'author-function' in such discourses operates so as toeffect the simultaneous dispersion of the three egos

      Hmmm. Argues for a "second self" in scientific writing.

      1. I'm not sure this kind of first person is that common (though it is common in literary criticism);
      2. If it is, I'm not sure there is a distinction between the author and some narrator-type figure or his third category (the person who speaks of the goals of the investigation (an implied author?)).
    3. alue of a text by ascertaining the holiness of its author. In

      prove the value of a text by asserting the holiness of its author.

      This is ironically what T&P committees do.

    4. the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed whenscientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positionedwithin an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of estab-lished truths and methods of verification. Authentification no longerrequired reference to the individual who had produced them; therole of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and,where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denot

      Argues that in the 17th and 18th centuries, science was supposed to stand on its own and the author vanished as the "index of truthfulness." Interesting that one of the main arguments in favour of maintaining scientific authorship now is this index of truthfulness

    5. exts, however, that we now call 'scien-tific' (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine or illness,the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truthfulduring the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated.Statements on the order of 'Hippocrates said ..." or 'Pliny tellsus that . . .' were not merely formulas for an argument based onauthority, they marked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed whenscientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positionedwithin an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of estab-lished truths and methods of verification. Authentification no longerrequired reference to the individual who had produced them; therole of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and,where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denote

      Chartier argues that this is very wrong in his history.

      Foucault here argues that scientific authors did exist in the "Middle Ages" because they were an "index of truthfulness"--so not really authors but guarantors.

    6. nsequently, we cansay that in our culture, the name of an author is a variable thataccompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a privateletter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; acontract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and, similarlyan anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, buthe cannot be an author. In this sense, the function of an author isto characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certaindiscourses within a society

      Very useful statement of where foucault applies in this case: to literary discussion, not advertising, not letters, and so on.

      Science would fall into the "not this" category, I suspect.

    7. We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves fromthe interior of a discourse to the real person outside who producedit, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts -separating one from the other, defining their form, and character-izing their mode of existence. It points to the existence of certaingroups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse withina society and culture. The author's name is not a function of aman's civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach,among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of dis-course and their singular mode of existence. C

      Again, an "Implied Author" type idea that is completely not relevant to science--although ironically, the H-index tries to make it relevant. In science, the author name is not the function that defines the text; it is the person to whom the credit it to be given rather than a definition of Oeuvre. This is really useful distinction for discussing what is different between the two discourses.

    1. First of all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the theme of expression. Referring only to itself; but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

      Be interesting to try to say this of scientific authorship!

    1. Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

      Why science authorship is not the same as poetic authorship: the lack of identity of the author. cf. Booth 1961, Rhetoric of Fiction

    1. Before the precursors of today’s scholarly journals es-tablished themselves in the second half of the 17th century,scientists communicated via letters.

      original form of scholarly comm was letters