Category: history of science
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Polysemy, pragmatics and puppetry: What AI can learn from ethnomethodology
I recently wrote a blog post in which I summarised some research on the topic of multiple meanings and AI against the backdrop of an old paper of mine on ‘ambiguities we live by’, published in 2001 in the Journal of Pragmatics. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that studies how language is used in…
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The Kraken wakes: Tennyson and tales of Victorian science
During unsettling times such as these, I tend to escape into the distant literary and scientific worlds of the 19th century, into what one might call, using a verse by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson “the fairy-tales of science”. A new book by Richard Holmes has just come out that allows me to do just…
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From metaphors on market day to metaphors we live by
I was talking the other day with some people about AI metaphors. During that discussion the thorny question came up ‘what are metaphors anyway?’, followed by ‘is there anything in language that’s not metaphorical?’. This brought to mind a very old quote. In 1730 the grammarian and philosopher César Chesneau Du Marsais said: “I am…
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Making Science Public 2025: End-of-year round-up of blog posts
This year has been quite a year! First, I had to move the blog to a new independent home after the University of Nottingham shut down their blogging platform (I wrote two posts about this, one reflecting on the past and one on the future). Second, there was a lot to blog about, from wildfires…
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From symbolist poets to science communication: Exploring an invisible thread in my academic life
Years and years ago, I had an Academia profile in which I mentioned that when I began studying French literature in the mid-1970s I fell in love with Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I no longer have access to Academia, but somebody must have seen that sentence and recently sent me an email asking how I got…
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Metaphor, alchemy and lessons from the 17th century
Philip Ball has just published a magnificent book on the history of alchemy: Alchemy: An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments, and the Birth of Modern Science. This made me think about metaphor, of course, given how central metaphorical language was to alchemical practice. In a sense, metaphor is alchemy, metaphorically speaking, as it transmutes two…
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Erving Goffman: Memories, method and metaphors
If you do sociology or, indeed, any social science whatsoever, you’ll come across the work of Erving Goffman. I have done too but never engaged with it as much as I should have done. This was brought back to me when I talked with somebody who once shared a taxi-ride with Goffman and chatted with…
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Understanding computational hermeneutics: Making meaning between the past and the present
A large group of scholars led by Cody Kommers and Drew Hemment at the Alan Turing Institute recently published a paper on ‘computational hermeneutics’. They mention Hans-Georg Gadamer and Wilhelm Dilthey, two godfathers of hermeneutics, and talk about situated meaning, ambiguity and the plurality of meaning. How intriguing, I thought. The paper brought back memories…
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Let there be light!
We recently visited Derby and, for the first time in forty years, I actually went into the Cathedral. It doesn’t look very prepossessing from the outside, but boy the inside is great. It is full of light. It was built in 1725 and reflects and interacts with the ideas and values of the Enlightenment era. I…
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The Making Science Public blog: An introduction
I have now said farewell several times to my old university blogging platform, but I haven’t really started building up a new readership here. Newbies to the blog might wonder what the old Making Science Public blog was all about; what topics it covered before venturing to press the subscribe button….. As a gentle introduction…