“Structuring the Imagination under the Banner of Science”

Mary Kuhn (University of Virginia)

In 1789 Erasmus Darwin made a literary and scientific splash with his taxonomic poem “The Loves of the Plants.” Darwin wrote the poem to “Enlist the Imagination under the Banner of Science” in order to teach readers an easy way to learn the Linnaean classes of plants by describing the sex organs of flowers as young maidens and male suitors. By the early nineteenth century, novelists and poets were conversely enlisting science under the banner of the imagination to naturalize courtship plots by characterizing young female characters as women on the cusp of “blooming” into sexual maturity. In short, literary and scientific structure became mutually supportive as literature applied scientific ideas to social narratives, and science used literary techniques to communicate important concepts. Taxonomic botany’s role in substantiating courtship plots in nineteenth-century literature has been well acknowledged, but this paper will consider how other structural elements of botany impacted literary plots in the nineteenth century. In particular, it will look at the ways that writers found in certain botanical structures—including structures of botanical thought—the basis for political critique.

“Making Sense of Shapes, and Shapes of Sense: Structuring Smell, Vision, and Taste in the Late Nineteenth Century”

Michael Rossi (University of Chicago)

Is the sensation of color a trapezoid or a sphere? What are the coordinate points of vanilla ice cream? Where does frankincense sit in space, relative to the dimensions of “fragrant, ethereal, putrid, spicy, resinous, [and] burned” ?

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, groups of researchers across a number of rapidly consolidating fields — particularly in psychology and psychometrics — began attempting to ascribe order to the apparent chaos of the human sensorium through the use of simple shapes: spheres, cones, tetrahedrons, cubes. Although not uncontroversial — William James was skeptical of such endeavors, and reviewers of Hans Henning’s “smell prism” expressed perplexity when they tried to understand his system -- these efforts had far-reaching results. The nineteenth century idea that human beings possess a “color space," for instance — typically viewed as cubical or spherical — is a baseline assumption in much contemporary work in color standards, computer graphics, and perceptual psychology.

This paper examines the formal aspects of these attempts at structuring the unruly sensorium. It focuses in particular on the ways in which the creation of structures for sensations such as vision, smell, and taste demanded acts of translation: from registers of sight to touch, for instance, or registers of space to vision. The techniques through which researchers described senses as things that were at once tangible and intangible -- concrete and abstract -- provides a window more broadly into the ways in which structure becomes manifest as a formal property of sensing observers, and of objects (and subjects) of scientific observation alike.

“Between the Natural and Human Sciences: What was Structuralism?”

Isabel Gabel (University of Chicago)

The influence of structuralism in the nineteen fifties and sixties is indisputable. As an approach to the human sciences, it was characterized by an impulse towards disciplinary autonomy from the natural sciences. For structural anthropology this meant, for example, rejecting the idea that cultural practices could be explained in purely functional or biological terms. In this regard biology came to be seen anathema to structuralism, and this important period in the history of the human sciences is often retold as part of a rejection of biologism using the tools of structural linguistics. But when in 1953, the eminent philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty declared that “Saussure, the modern linguist, could have sketched a new philosophy of history,” he was deploying a concept of structure deeply informed not just by linguistics, but by biology as well. This paper maps the entwined histories of biological and linguistic concepts of structure in the mid-twentieth century, arguing that historians have been too quick to accept structuralists’ own accounts of their practices. Prior to the arrival of structural linguistics in France in the early fifties, Raymond Ruyer had, for example, published several works on the philosophy of structure. These works, which would later influence a generation of thinkers, deployed a biological concept of structure to resolve the problems posed by strict mechanist philosophy. As this paper shows, a transdisciplinary ideal was inseparable from the structuralist project of disciplinary autonomy.

“The Axiom of High Modernism”

Alma Steingart (Harvard University)

The quintessential twentieth century American social sciences were deeply committed to both scientism and cross-disciplinary universal theories. While both tendencies preceded World War II, scientism and universality did not dominate the American academy until the postwar era. In a generation that historian Hunter Heyck terms the “high-modernist social sciences,” American anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists interpreted all social phenomena in terms of structure, system, and function.

While historians have noted that the postwar transformation of the social sciences was characterized by an increased adoption of mathematics, mathematics tout court is an insufficient explanation. Further, it has remained unacknowledged that the high modernist social sciences primarily embraced axiomatic reasoning. Following Theodore Porter, historians understand the midcentury mathematization of the social sciences almost exclusively in terms of quantification, whereby “trust in numbers” was commensurate with objectivity. However, I argue that when postwar social scientists annexed mathematics for use in their theories of social behavior, they did so not by quantifying the phenomena they sought to explicate, but by axiomatizing them.

In the interwar period, social scientists emphasized the empirical and quantitative aspects of their work. That is, before World War II mathematization was tightly linked with measurement and observation, and the goal of such methods was to obtain statistical data for their own sake. The postwar mathematization of the social sciences had a different flavor – in economics, sociology, and political science, mathematics served not only as a computational tool, but a theoretical one as well. Axiomatic reasoning was crucial in this capacity.