Date:
Location:
"Universal Laws and the Case of Cholera"
Speaker:
John P. McCaskey, Lecturer, Department of History, Columbia University.
Contact:
Shana Rabinowich
shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Abstract:
Supposedly, induction cannot produce universal scientific laws. But here is a case where it did. In the 1800s, cholera epidemics could be devastating. Physicians could make general statements about the disease, but few universal ones. When there was an outbreak in Egypt in 1883, Germany sent Robert Koch to help. He was soon confident he had identified the cause—bacteria of a distinct shape. But other researchers could not confirm Koch’s findings. He replied that they were failing to identify “real” cholera. Community by community, physicians adopted Koch’s position: If it was not caused by this bacteria, it was not really cholera. Universal scientific laws about cholera came to be true by definition. But there was nothing subjective about this. Lives were saved. How should we think about cases where a scientific community defines certainty into its laws? How and why does the consensus emerge? Is it a good thing?
Biography:
John P. McCaskey (Columbia University, History), earned his PhD in history of science at Stanford University in 2006. Then and since he has researched the history of the philosophy of induction, developing the view that the “problem of induction” is an artifact of what we now mean by “induction”. McCaskey’s most recent major publication is a Latin translation and the first English translation of Jacopo Zabarella’s On Methods and On Regressus (Harvard University Press, 2014). He is now completing a comprehensive history of induction from Socrates to the twentieth century.
