Rachel Laudan

For Hutton, as for other late eighteenth-century geologists, a key problem was how loose sediments at the bottom of the ocean were consolidated into rock. Werner and his followers argued they were precipitated out of water. Hutton argued that they heated to a liquid and subsequently cooled and solidified. This was so even with the calcareous remain...

Leading figures in the “Foodie” movement of the last quarter century often speak of a Golden Age of cooking and eating, when all food was local, organic, and slow. Rachel Laudan argues that this view is utterly ahistorical. There was no Golden Age of cooking and eating. As Laudan shows with many examples from around the world, the labor to produce...

When the author arrived in Hawaii in the mid-1980s, the homegrown model of culinary evolution was widely, if tacitly, accepted. It assumes that cuisines develop in place, evolving from simple peasant cooking of local ingredients to refined high cuisine in cities. Hawaii, where successive waves of migrants had introduced and naturalized cuisines fro...

A basic premise of hyphenated history-and-philosophy-of-science is that theories of scientific change have to be based on empirical evidence derived from carefully constructed historical case studies. This paper analyses one such systematic attempt to test philosophical claims, describing its historical context, rationale, execution, and limited im...

The article explores the humble beginnings of the Cornish version of hand-held pies in the context of local history and looks at how these local pasties became an emblem for the "authentic" Cornish experience with the arrival of mass tourism in the early part of the 20th century.

Argues that William Smith created his 1815 Geological Map of England using topography and surface features, not fossils, to identify the strata.

Journal of World History 14.4 (2003) 563-566 At the core of this book is a facsimile reprint of the 1456 edition of a dietary manual, "The Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor's Food and Drink," including its enchanting illustrations of kitchen scenes and foodstuffs such as rice, wheat, millet, wolf, crane, sheep, crab, and carp. It was writ...

In the 1970s at the University of Pittsburgh, I was lucky enough to be part of a faculty discussion group on nineteenth-century studies. Over wine, eight or ten of us from the departments of French, Spanish, German, Art History, Physics, Philosophy, and History and Philosophy of Science discovered, with varying degrees of amazement and shock, the v...

Ever wonder why dessert is served after dinner? The origins of modern Western cooking can be traced to ideas about diet and nutrition that arose during the 17th century

Eighteenth-Century Life 23.2 (1999) 59-70 Thomas Gage, a rare seventeenth-century English visitor to New Spain, observed an unusual ritual in Chiapas. Gentlemen draped themselves casually in their doorways each afternoon "to see and to be seen, and there for half an hour will they stand shaking off the crumbs of bread from their clothes." Gage ridi...

The author explains that 'A kind of chemistry' was the way the authors of The Gifts of Comus (1739) described the new cookery of the European courts, a cookery that had begun to take shape a century earlier with Pierre de la Varenne's Le Cuisinier François (1651). This essay takes their metaphor at face value. It was indeed chemistry, a chemical co...

Os autores deste ensaio entendem que é preciso testar de forma mais completa as afirmações empíricas das recentes teorias da mudança científica. Tendo em vista facilitar tal empreendimento, apresentam-se em linguagem não-técnica as afirmações empíricas de Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos e Laudan, que estão organizadas por autor e por assunto. Ao final, i...

This paper surveys recent trends in the history of science, using quotations from works published in the last decade. It suggests that philosophers of science have not yet come to terms with those changes, indicates which might or might not lead to productive interchange, and concludes that history and philosophy of science are now further apart th...

It is widely supposed that the scientists in any field use identical standards for evaluating theories. Without such unity of standards, consensus about scientific theories is supposedly unintelligible. However, the hypothesis of uniform standards can explain neither scientific disagreement nor scientific innovation. This paper seeks to show how th...

In recent years, philosophers and historians of science have belatedly begun to pay serious attention to taxonomy, largely as the result of work by David Hull and other philosophers of biology. Their interest has yet to spill over into inquiries into taxonomic practice in the other sciences. But since all sciences, even those with relatively sparse...

Science is accorded high value in our culture because, unlike many other intellectual endeavors, it appears capable of producing increasingly reliable knowledge. During the last quarter century a group of historians and philosophers of science (known variously as ‘theorists of scientific change’, the ‘post-positivist school’ or the ‘historical scho...

Science has traditionally been taken to be the paradigm of rationality. If any beliefs are rationally warranted, they are beliefs in the best scientific theories of the day. Furthermore, the rationality of science has been taken to reside in the context of justification. Since one of the most striking features of science is the rapidity with which...

The central presupposition of this paper is that cognitive change in technology is the result of the purposeful problem-solving activities of the members of relatively small communities of practitioners, just as cognitive change in science is the product of the problem-solving activities of the members of scientific communities. If this is correct,...

One of the ironies of our time is the sparsity of useful analytic tools for understanding change and development within technology itself. For all the diatribes about the disastrous effects of technology on modern life, for all the equally uncritical paeans to technology as the panacea for human ills, the vociferous pro- and anti-technology movemen...

Periods of rapid theory change or ‘revolutions’ in science are apt to spur the scientists involved to write new histories of the discipline, and revolutions in geology are no exception. Two major episodes of historical writing by Anglo-Saxon geologists have been associated with revolutions in the discipline, namely Charles Lyell’s uniformitarianism...

Under the general term "geology" there exist two very distinct concepts of the aim and subject matter of the discipline. One concept is that geology is part of natural history and thus is primarily concerned with the reconstruction of the history of the earth. The other concept is that geology is part of natural philosophy and thus is primarily con...

The study of the ocean basins during the past century has led to new and unexpected results in a number of fields. Perhaps the most striking of these is the plate tectonic revolution that took place in geology in the 1960s, stemming in large measure from the discoveries of oceanographers (together with those of the paleomagnetists). This revolution...

One of the more curious aspects of most recent theories of scientific change is that their proponents have left unexplained how scientific change can occur at all. For change implies the existence of alternatives, and neither Kuhn (1962) nor Lakatos (1970) has specified the circumstances under which it is rational to attempt to develop alternatives...

The 1960s witnessed a striking change in geology. Since at least the seventeenth century, one of the central problems of the subject had been the origin of the major irregularities of the surface of the globe—continents and oceans, mountain chains and ocean islands—irregularities that were not anticipated by most physical theories. Traditionally th...