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Intro -- Title Page -- Dedication -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Introduction: The Uncommunal Community -- Chapter One. The Republic of Letters: Pen-Pal Science -- 1.1. Introduction: The End of Splendid Solitude -- 1.2. The Dance of Distance and Proximity -- 1.3. Mobilizing the Academies: The Transits of Venus -- 1.4. Centralizing Everything: The Mannheim Meteorological Network -- 1.5. Conclusion: Where Was Community? -- Chapter Two. Internationalism: Science as a World Project -- 2.1. Introduction: Thinking Globally -- 2.2. A Universal Parliament -- 2.3. The Carte du Ciel: The Diplomatic Model -- 2.4. The International Cloud Atlas: The Voluntarist Model -- 2.5. Conclusion: Cooperate or Defect? -- Chapter Three. The Scientific Community: Governance without Governments -- 3.1. Introduction: The Cosmic Community -- 3.2. The Academy of Academies: Top-Down Governance -- 3.3. Scientific Internationalism, United Nations Style: The World Meteorological Organization -- 3.4. The Scientific Community in the Cold War: Governance against Governments -- 3.5. Conclusion: The Numbers Game -- Epilogue: Being in the Room Together -- Acknowledgments -- Further Reading -- Notes -- Back Cover.

"We are, all of us, everywhere, always, enmeshed in a web of rules and constraints. Rules fix the beginning and end of the working day and the school year, direct the ebb and flow of traffic on the roads, dictate who can be married to whom and how, place the fork to the right or the left of the plate, lay down the meter and rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet, and order the rites of birth and death. Cultures notoriously differ as to the content of their rules, but there is no culture without rules. In this book, historian of science Lorraine Daston adopts a long term perspective for studying rules from diverse sources, including monastic orders, cookbooks, and mathematical algorithms. She argues that in the Western tradition most rules can be characterized as one of the following: tools of measurement and calculation, models or paradigms, or laws. Moreover, they exist on spectra from specific to general, flexible to rigid and the specific-to-general, and universal-to-particular. In investigating how rules work, how they don't work, how they've changed across time, and why exceptions are necessary, Daston paints a vivid picture of Western civilization from the antiquity to the present"--

A panoramic history of rules in the Western worldRules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don't, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived.Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change—how supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don't, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines.Rules offers a wide-angle view on the history of the constraints that guide us—whether we know it or not

Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is the bestselling and most-cited book ever published in the history and philosophy of science. Yet very few scholars in those fields would now endorse the book's main claims, and many are critical of its central premise: namely, that major changes in different disciplines and diverse historical contexts conform to a single "structure." Key Kuhnian concepts such as "paradigm shift" have become part of everyday language but all but disappeared from specialist publications. Nonetheless, the book still galvanizes readers encountering it for the first time—or even scholars who haven't reread it since their own student days. Kuhn's description of allencompassing and incommensurable mental worlds inhabited by scientists who practice in different paradigms resonates with the experience of readers who have experienced seismic changes in moral and political intuitions.

Scientific objectivity is neither monolithic nor immutable: our current usage is compounded of several meanings - metaphysical, methodological and moral - and each meaning has a distinct history, as well as a history of fusion within what now counts as a single concept of `objectivity'. The rise of aperspectival history in nineteenth-century science is one strand of this plaited history of objectivity, as embodied in scientific ideals and practices. It is conceptually and historically distinct from the ontological aspect of objectivity that pursues the ultimate structure of reality, and from the mechanical aspect of objectivity that forbids interpretation in reporting and picturing scientific results. Whereas ontological objectivity is about the fit between theory and the world, and mechanical objectivity is about suppressing the universal human propensity to judge and aestheticize, aperspectival objectivity is about eliminating individual (or occasionally group) idiosyncracies. It emerged first in the moral and aesthetic philosophy of the late eighteenth century and spread to the natural sciences only in the mid-nineteenth century, as a result of a reorganization of scientific life that multiplied professional contacts at every level, from the international commission to the well-staffed laboratory.

Que veut dire « l'interprétation classique » du calcul des probabilités ? Lorsqu'en 1933 Kolmogorov réussit à axiomatiser ce calcul, il a défini une théorie mathématique : son essence se trouve dans la validité formelle des axiomes, définitions et théorèmes qui permettent une foule d'interprétations. Ce système formel ne nous oblige en aucune manière à choisir telle ou telle interprétation de la probabilité : au point de vue de la théorie mathématique, on ne peut pas choisir entre probabilité comme fréquence et probabilité comme degré de certitude ou entre bien d'autres interprétations possibles. D'ailleurs, notre choix d'une interprétation ne dit rien sur la validité de la théorie mathématique purement formelle. Cependant, la distinction habituelle (et post-hilbertienne) entre la théorie formelle et ses interprétations — ou même celle du xixe siècle entre mathématiques pures et appliquées — aurait été étrangère aux probabilistes du XVIIIesiècle. Ils se seraient définis comme des praticiens des « mathématiques mixtes ».