Rationale:
These seminars are intended to provide a venue for junior researchers (broadly, postgraduate students and post-doctoral researchers) to present their mature work in the field of Science and Technology Studies, broadly construed. This series is intended to fill a niche between the departmental seminar series and the work in progress series.
Seminars are held on Monday evening, between 17.00 and 18.30, in G3, 22 Gordon Square. This is on the ground floor of the building, at D3 on this map.
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Schedule:
5pm Monday 5th October 2009
Hauke Riesch, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
David Spiegelhalter, Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Levels of uncertainty: some thoughts on combining formal risk models, risk perception and the sociology of risk
'Risk' is a concept that has taken on a very important role in many disciplines, from environmental models, risk regulation and communication in health care and psychology, to Beck's famous idea that increasing awareness of risks fundamentally shapes late modern society, and thus forms a cornerstone of contemporary social theory. Yet what the different disciplines really mean by risk is contested. Risk modellers and some risk psychologists have come under fire for neglecting the social and societal aspects of risks and ignoring ambiguities when conducting formal analysis, while Beck has been criticised for not worrying about science and the quantifiable aspects of risk. While most risk scholars now recognise the shortcomings of their approaches, we are still some distance away from being able to
translate between the different concepts of risk. In this paper we propose a classification of risk and uncertainty into multiple levels, focussing on the objects of our uncertainty as opposed to its source. We start with aleatory uncertainty about specific events, and then progress to epistemic uncertainty about the values of
parameters in formal models, scientific uncertainty about the underlying knowledge, through to critical uncertainty about the whole modelling edifice: this highest level may feature acknowledged and unacknowledged sources of doubt. We argue that in almost all risk situations these levels are present, but that different situations and disciplines start from different ends of the hierarchy. Using a number of examples we hope such a structure might help clarify and reduce interdisciplinary misunderstanding.
5pm Monday 2nd November 2009
Tom Quick, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine
Practicing Life in Imperial Britain: Physiological Psychology in the Academic Appointments of Thomas Laycock and William Benjamin Carpenter.
In comparison with phrenology or early twentieth-century neurology, professional historians have paid little attention to the articulation of a 'physiological psychology' in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Studies of this period that do address claims that mind and nervous system are congruous tend to take one of two approaches - either they address them as ideas in history (and place them in intellectual context), or they address their rhetorical power (and portray them as means of establishing personal and professional authority). This paper aims to close the gap between these types of portrayal. It addresses the role that drawing a conceptual link between mind and life plays in the careers of two of its foremost protagonists in this period - Thomas Laycock and William Benjamin Carpenter. Though both Laycock and Carpenter's publications advocate the adoption of a zoologically-informed understanding of nervous physiology, their respective psychologies make subtly different claims.
Where Laycock highlights the role of non-conscious nervous operations in human consciousness, Carpenter places more emphasis on establishing a nervously-constituted conscious will in the human brain. These differences, I argue, are accompanied differing approaches to both zoological and political life. Where Carpenter perceives a pressing need for the assertion of willpower over volatile unconscious nerves, Laycock understands appeals to a physiological unconscious as a more effective
means of influencing those around him. The physiological and psychological claims of Carpenter and Laycock are thereby related to the attainment of the respective academic positions of each.
5pm Monday 23rd November 2009
Norberto Serpente, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine
From Imaginations to Imagery in 1980s Cell Biology: The Role of the Textbook: 'Molecular Biology of the Cell'.
By the early 1980's cell biology began to undergo a significant change at the level of its imagery. Traditional images of cells obtained with optical and electronic microscopes began to recede and images of visual models portraying molecular interactions began to become dominant. This visual change hinged on a combination of many internal and external factors to the discipline. Among those factors a primary one was the relentless molecularisation of the life sciences that began to take shape soon after the development of genetic engineering during the 1970s. Pivotal for the sustainability of the program of molecularisation was the production of textbooks directed to a growing population of students in USA and Britain. The textbook that heralded the process of molecularisation of cell biology was 'Molecular Biology of the Cell' (MBC) by Alberts et al.
The new visuality emerging in MBC heavily relied in a translation of new signs 'molecular traces' into optical like images of cells to describe their functionality. One of the most dramatic consequences of this visual change has been the creation of new areas of knowledge inside the discipline such as signal transduction, area that is fully dependant on the new visuality. Signal transduction not only 'reinvented cell anatomy at a functional level but and grew enormously in complexity inside and outside MBC. It is an open question if this visual shift has created a sort of hype-reality condition in the sense of Baudrillard; where images became visual commodities far from the experimental world they have emerged from.
5pm Monday 7th December 2009
Alex Broadbent, University of Cambridge
Can Epidemiological Evidence be Relied upon to Prove Causation in Court?
Epidemiology studies the occurrence of illness in populations. Can it provide evidence that bears on proving in a court of law that an individual claimant's illness was caused in a particular way? To answer this question requires settling questions of both legal policy and scientific methodology. On the legal side, the courts appear to have moved towards a view of the relevant issues in a way which in principle allows the use of evidence about a population from which a claimant is drawn to infer causation in the claimant's particular case. However, some prominent epidemiologists have criticised the actual use made by courts of epidemiological evidence, on a somewhat bewildering number of grounds. Furthermore, some have claimed that courts should never rely on epidemiological evidence "alone" to prove causation. These critical discussions do not offer many specific positive guidelines for the use of epidemiological evidence, not least because they regard it as impossible to formulate a mechanical relationship between any epidemiological measure and the probability of causation in an individual claimant's case. Nevertheless, if the law is to use epidemiological evidence, it must have either clear and predictable rules for applying that evidence to the proof of causation, or, if experts are relied upon, clear directions as to what questions the experts are expected to settle for the court. In this paper I seek to lay out the conceptual issues on both the legal and the epidemiological side, with a view to deciding whether, and if so when and how, epidemiological evidence can be relied upon in proving causation in court.