The sociological study of knowledge infrastructures and classification has traditionally focused on the politics and practices of classifying things or people. However, actors’ work to escape dominant infrastructures and pre-established classification systems has received little attention. In response to this, this article argues that it is crucial to analyze, not only the practices and politics of classification, but also actors’ work to escape dominant classification systems. The article has two aims: First, to make a theoretical contribution to the study of classification by proposing to pay analytical attention to practices of escaping classification, what the article dubs classification egress. This concept directs our attention not only to the practices and politics of classifying things, but also to how actors work to escape or resist classification systems in practice. Second, the article aims to increase our understanding of the history of quantified and statistical health surveillance. In this, the article investigates how actors in health surveillance assembled a knowledge infrastructure for surveilling, quantifying, and detecting unknown patterns of congenital malformations in the wake of the thalidomide disaster in the early 1960s. The empirical account centers on the actors’ work to detect congenital malformations and escape the dominant nosological classification of diseases, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), by replacing it with a procedural standard for reporting of symptoms. Thus, the article investigates how actors deal with the tension between the-already-known-and-classified and the unknown-unclassified-phenomenon in health surveillance practice.

The paper is based on a hitherto unexplored document (audiotape of an interview accompanied by a German transcript) from 1953, located in the Freud Papers at the Library of Congress. It contributes to a better understanding of the impact of Freud and of Psychoanalysis on personalities from the exact sciences, here represented by the noted applied mathematicians Richard von Mises and Hilda Geiringer from Vienna. The detailed discussion of the interview sheds some new light on the different roles of Kraus and Freud in the Vienna culture, on the Vienna Jugendkulturbewegung (youth culture movement) during WWI in which Geiringer was involved, on Freud’s and Siegfried Bernfeld’s standing around 1930 among German philosophers and psychologists, and on Wilhelm Fließ’ theory of periodicity, which von Mises—based on his attitude as an applied mathematician—defended against superficial accusations. Finally, new biographical material is provided for von Mises and the remotely related Freud family, and for Geiringer’s and von Mises’ early lives. The interview, which was taken during the Cold War, also allows conclusions as to how politics influenced the memories and views of the participants. Part of the aim of the paper is historical documentation of unknown material (letters by Karl Kraus and Wolfgang Köhler, one book review by Wilhelm Ostwald, a file on R. Pfennig), including some correction of erroneous information in the literature.

This paper examines self-inscription, a mode of census enumeration that emerged during the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1840s, a number of European states introduced self-inscription as an auxiliary means to facilitate the work of enumerators. However, a decisive shift occurred when Prussian census statisticians implemented self-inscription via individual “Zählkarten”—or “counting cards”—in 1871. The paper argues that scientific ideals of accuracy and precision prevalent in the sciences at the time motivated Prussian census officials to initiate self-inscription as an at-home scenario unmediated by enumerators, in which the census form alone was to yield truthful information from the respondents. By illuminating the bureaucratic means for implementing scientific ideals and practices in gathering personal census data, the paper offers an in-depth analysis of the media, technologies, and manpower that census takers deployed to reveal the epistemic—as well as social and political—impact of being “true to form.”

Collecting data about people with mental disorders living outside of asylums became a heightened concern from the early nineteenth century onwards. In Germany, so-called “insanity counts” targeted the number and sometimes the type the mentally ill who were living unattended and untreated by professional care throughout the country. An eagerly expressed assumption that the “true” extent of the gathered numbers must be much higher than the surveys could reveal came hand in glove with the emerging task of “managing” insanity and its potential dangers in a modern society. The doorstep of the family home became a crucial site in psychiatrists’ and enumerators’ efforts to register the most sensitive of personal data. This article traces the ever more diligent methods that were employed to obtain the desired information, as well as the hidden agenda of the postulate of missing data itself. It also addresses the profound impact that the presumption of having only incomplete data has had on the practice of counting and surveying, as well as on the understanding of the need for professional monitoring of mental illness.

In the spring of 1893, the Austrian writer and critic Hermann Bahr began interviewing various people on antisemitism, a subject of heated discussion in the European feuilleton around 1900. “Once again, I am travelling the world sounding out people’s opinions and listening to what they have to say,” he wrote in his introduction to a series of articles on that issue that appeared in the feuilleton of the Deutsche Zeitung between March and September 1893. A year later, the Berlin publishing house S. Fischer turned Bahr’s articles into a book. Bahr conducted a total of thirty-eight interviews with prominent personages, such as August Bebel, Theodor Mommsen, Ernst Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen and Jules Simon. Bahr did not focus on the arguments in favour or against antisemitism. Instead, he set out explicitly to investigate the sentiments, perceptions and opinions on this topic within the cultured classes. Yet, as I will show in this article, Bahr tried to capture not only the “sentiments” [Empfindungen] aired by his interviewees, but also the settings and interiors in which the interviews took place. I argue that these descriptions of physical space served Bahr as authentication, as a three-dimensional certificate for the “facts of opinion” [Meinungstatsachen] he recorded.

This paper contrasts the research strategies of two women reformers, Florence Kelley and Ellen Swallow Richards, which entailed different strategies of social reform. In the early 1890s, social activist Florence Kelley used the social survey as a weapon for legal reform of the working conditions of women and children in Chicago’s sweatshop system. Kelley’s case shows that her surveys were most effective as “grounded” knowledge, rooted in a local community with which she was well acquainted. Her social survey, re-enacted by lawmakers and the press, provided the evidence that moved her target audience to legal action. Chemist and propagator of the Home Economics Movement Ellen Richards situated the social problem, and hence its solution, not in exploitative working conditions, but in the inefficient and wasteful usage of available resources by the poor. Laboratory work, she argued, would enable the development of optimal standards, and educational programs should bring these standards to the household by means of models and exhibits. With this aim, she constructed public spaces that she ran as food laboratories and sanitary experiments. Kelley and Richards thus crossed the doorsteps of the household in very different ways. While Florence Kelley entered the household to change the living and working conditions of the poor by changing the law, Richards flipped the household inside out by bringing women into hybrid public laboratory spaces to change their behavior by experiment and instruction.

Data collections are a hallmark of nineteenth-century administrative knowledge making, and they were by no means confined to Europe. All colonial empires transferred and translated these techniques of serialised and quantified information gathering to their dominions overseas. The colonial situation affected the encounters underlying vital statistics, enquête methods and land surveying. In this paper, two of those data collections will be investigated—a survey on land and a survey on indigenous law, both conducted around 1910 on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, which had fallen under German colonial influence a decade earlier. Strikingly, there are no enumerators or envoys of the state visiting the doorsteps of Pohnpei. To facilitate the data collection on homesteads, the whole population of the island was called upon to measure their respective plots of land themselves, without resorting to certified land surveyors. The preserved cadastral lists and spreadsheets testify to a rather peculiar contact between the colonizing administration and the colonized peoples. I argue that the production of data made encounters necessary, which are best observed though a methodological focus on data practices. I argue, furthermore, that the Pohnpeians were prompted during the surveys to define their homestead in new terms. This did not only entail new two-dimensional plots but also a new regime of private property. The change in the legal concept can be seen as a continuation of colonial violence by other means, given that it happened in the aftermath of the defeated Pohnpei Rebellion. The argument of the paper is, therefore, that data collection can have formative effects on society, and that measurement and quantified information are often, as Witold Kula argued, a scene of conflict. At its core, the installation of these metric regimes signified a change in patterns of justification, resource management and the unwritten constitution of the Pacific island.

During the first half of the 1970s, climate research gained a new significance and began to be perceived within political and academic circles as being worthy of public support. Conventional explanations for this increased status include a series of climate anomalies that generated awareness and heightened concern over the potentially devastating effects of climate change. Controversial climatologist Reid Bryson was one of the first to publicly promote what he saw as a definitive link between these climate anomalies and unidirectional climate change in the fall of 1973, and rising food prices in the same year gave him a platform on which to air his views to receptive senior members of the US Congress. Bryson’s testimony before a US Senate subcommittee offers a unique glimpse into how he was able to successfully resonate his agenda with that of senior politicians in a time of crisis, as well as the immediate responses of those senior US politicians upon first hearing climate change arguments. Bryson was one of the most prominent US climatologists to break a taboo against making bold climatological predictions and de-facto policy recommendations in public. As a result, although Bryson was criticized by many in the climatological community, his actions instigated the involvement of other scientists in the public arena, leading to an important elevation in US public climate discourse.

In this comparative historical analysis, we will analyze the intellectual tendency that emerged between 1946 and 1956 to take advantage of the popularity of communication theory to develop a kind of informational epistemology of statistical mechanics. We will argue that this tendency results from a historical confluence in the early 1950s of certain theoretical claims of the so-called English School of Information Theory, championed by authors such as Gabor (1956) or MacKay (1969), and from the attempt to extend the profound success of Shannon’s ([1948] 1993) technical theory of sign transmission to the field of statistical thermal physics. As a paradigmatic example of this tendency, we will evaluate the intellectual work of Léon Brillouin (1956), who, in the mid-fifties, developed an information theoretical approach to statistical mechanical physics based on a concept of information linked to the knowledge of the observer.

During the eighteenth century, chemists in the Kingdom of Naples (the South of Italy) were very busy analyzing the chemical composition of ash from Mount Vesuvius. Undoubtedly, after a huge eruption this dusty phenomenon was the most important scientific object of debate. In fact, it was crucial to determine if there were dangerous elements in the ash so that the population could be warned about the potential hazards, such as polluted drinking water. This was not at all a simple issue, as on the other hand there were scholars who realized that ash could be beneficial as a fertilizer, even as clouds of ash had obscured the sun. As chemical inquiries became more precise and the toxic concentration of many elements became known, this double life of Vesuvian ash as a scientific object gradually died.

In this paper I follow the demise of the ether in the first half of the twentieth century to show how the first obituaries of the ether were instrumental in creating an object with specific and largely simplified properties related to, but different from, nineteenth-century ethers. I suggest that writing the history of dead objects (or objects an author wants to be dead) is not epistemologically neutral but, on the contrary, it involves a reformulation of the object itself. I show that this was indeed the case with the ether: those arguing for its demise in the early twentieth century tended to overlook as irrelevant one of the ether’s most important properties, namely being the seat for the transmission of electromagnetic waves. Instead, they emphasized the contradictions between other properties of previous ether(s), so as to advocate for its disappearance.

Much of the long controversy concerning the workings of electric batteries revolved around the concept of the contact potential (especially between different types of metals), originated by Alessandro Volta in the late eighteenth century. Although Volta’s original theory of batteries has been thoroughly rejected and most discussions in today’s electrochemistry hardly ever mention the contact potential, the concept has made repeated comebacks through the years, and has by no means completely disappeared. In this paper, I describe four salient foci of its revivals: dry piles, thermocouples, quadrant electrometers, and vacuum phenomena. I also show how the contact potential has maintained its presence in some cogent modern scientific literature. Why has the death of the Voltaic contact potential been such an untidy affair? I suggest that this is because the concept has displayed significant meaning and utility in various experimental and theoretical contexts, but has never been successfully given a simple, unified account. Considering that situation, I also suggest that it would make sense to preserve and develop it as a multifarious concept.

The aim of this article is to make a case for the pertinence of a biographical approach to the history of scientific objects. I first lay out the rationale of that approach by revisiting and extending my earlier work on the topic. I consider the characteristics of scientific objects that motivate the biographical metaphor, and I indicate its virtues and limitations by bringing out the positive and negative analogies between biographies of scientific objects and ordinary biographies. I then point out various ways in which scientific objects may pass away and argue that their demise should be conceptualized as a process. Finally, I sketch the history of the concept of “ether” in nineteenth and early twentieth century physics and suggest that it lends itself particularly well to a biographical treatment. To that effect, I discuss the identity, heuristic character, and recalcitrance of the ether and examine the reasons that may have led to its passing.

The paper explores Hermann Weyl’s turn to intuitionism through a philosophical prism of normative framework transitions. It focuses on three central themes that occupied Weyl’s thought: the notion of the continuum, logical existence, and the necessity of intuitionism, constructivism, and formalism to adequately address the foundational crisis of mathematics. The analysis of these themes reveals Weyl’s continuous endeavor to deal with such fundamental problems and suggests a view that provides a different perspective concerning Weyl’s wavering foundational positions. Building on a philosophical model of scientific framework transitions and the special role that normative indecision or ambivalence plays in the process, the paper examines Weyl’s motives for considering such a radical shift in the first place. It concludes by showing that Weyl’s shifting stances should be regarded as symptoms of a deep, convoluted intrapersonal process of self-deliberation induced by exposure to external criticism.

Moreau (2019) has raised concerns about the use of DNA data obtained from vulnerable populations, such as the Uighurs in China. We discuss another case, situated in Europe and with a research history dating back 100 years: genetic investigations of Roma. In our article, we focus on problems surrounding representativity in these studies. We claim that many of the circa 440 publications in our sample neglect the methodological and conceptual challenges of representativity. Moreover, authors do not account for problematic misrepresentations of Roma resulting from the conceptual frameworks and sampling schemes they use. We question the representation of Roma as a “genetic isolate” and the underlying rationales, with a strong focus on sampling strategies. We discuss our results against the optimistic prognosis that the “new genetics” could help to overcome essentialist understandings of groups.

Lambert ten Kate (1674-1731), the scholar of language, religious writer, art theoretician and collector, and natural philosophy enthusiast, was part of an informal network of Amsterdam-based mathematics and natural philosophy enthusiasts who played a pivotal role in the early diffusion of Newton’s natural philosophical ideas in the Dutch Republic. Because Ten Kate contributed to several areas of research, it is worth asking whether connections can be found between his different scholarly activities and, more specifically, whether his oeuvre as a whole was shaped by his religious views, as has been suggested. In this essay, I shall argue that his oeuvre was indeed shaped by his religious beliefs, which reflect elements typical of Dutch doperdom, but also reflect a more general Christian orientation that transcends confessional divides. More particularly, I aim to show that, if we want to understand why Ten Kate was drawn to the natural philosophy of his day, and especially to Isaac Newton’s (1642-1727), and why he sought to promote it, we also need to pay attention to this broader Christian orientation in his thought. Along the way, I shall add nuance to earlier characterizations of how ten Kate mobilized Isaac Newton’s natural philosophy according to his own agenda.

Historians have claimed that the two closely related concepts of animism and natural teleology were both decisively rejected in the Scientific Revolution. They tout Robert Boyle as an early modern warden against pre-modern animism. Discussing Avicenna, Aquinas, and Buridan, as well as Renaissance psychology, I instead suggest that teleology went through a slow and uneven process of rationalization. As Neoplatonic theology gained influence over Aristotelian natural philosophy, the meaning of animism likewise grew obscure. Boyle, as some historians have shown, exemplifies this uneven process. There is an unresolved tension between his religious convictions and the implicit animism of his empirical practice.

Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918) is remembered as one of the most famous mediums in the history of spiritualism. Renowned scientists attended her séances in Europe and in the United States. They often had to admit to being unable to understand the origin of the phenomena produced. Cesare Lombroso, for example, after meeting Eusapia, was converted first to mediumism, then spiritualism. This article will retrace the early stages of her career as a medium and shed light on the way she managed to gain the attention of scientists. It will also show why they chose her as an epistemic object.

This article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein’s theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural diversity and reflectiveness of global conditions (the principal example being the First World War), proves well-suited to expose transnational flows and patterns in the global history of relativity. The attempts of Belgian physicist Théophile de Donder to contribute to relativity physics during the 1910s and 1920s illustrate the role of the war in shaping the transnational networks through which relativity circulated. The local attitudes of conservative Belgian Catholic scientists and philosophers, who denied that relativity was philosophically significant, exemplify a global pattern: while critics of relativity feared to become marginalized by the scientific, political, and cultural revolutions that Einstein and his theory were taken to represent, supporters sympathized with these revolutions.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of Giordano Bruno’s conception of mathematics. Specifically, it intends to highlight two aspects of this conception that have been neglected in previous studies. First, Bruno’s conception of mathematics changed over time and in parallel with another concept that was central to his thought: the concept of infinity. Specifically, Bruno undertook a reform of mathematics in order to accommodate the concept of the infinitely small or “minimum,” which was introduced at a later stage. Second, contrary to what Héléne Védrine claimed, Bruno believed that mathematical objects were mind-dependent. To chart the parallel development of the conceptions of mathematics and infinity, a seven-year time span is considered, from the publication of Bruno’s first Italian dialogue (La cena de le ceneri, 1584) to the publication of one of his last Latin works (De minimo, 1591).