Abstract
The chapter introduces Joseph Ben-David as a scholar of sociology of science and elucidates briefly his particular comprehensive—comparative, international—approach to the study of scientific growth and higher education research. Competing views regarding a study of (a sociology or philosophy of) science serve to disambiguate Ben-David’s position, and all chapters of the present volume are summarized.
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- 1.
There is a certain tendency in the historiography of science to do just that—and to stop right there; Ben-David (1964a, 455) remarks, in this context: “The development of science is often viewed as a process where the intellectual heroes of mankind speak to each other above the heads of nations and down the generations.”
- 2.
In the words of Ben-David and Collins (1966, 452), “on the transmission and diffusion of ideas” and “on the environmental mechanism which determine the selection of mutation [of such ideas]”.
- 3.
In his “To Jerusalem and Back”, Saul Bellow (1976, 105) characterizes his friend in the following way: “I have learned to think twice before offering Ben-David an opinion on any matter, because his tolerance for vague views and inexact formulations is limited. He is a short, compact man. His blue gaze is mild enough, and he can even look contemplative and dreamy, but he fires up easily. Our discussions would turn into arguments if I didn’t give ground, so, because I respect him, I invariably back off”.
- 4.
The sociology of knowledge, as conceived in the 1920s and 1930s by figures like Max Scheler or Karl Mannheim, was to refer to a much broader context, namely to the interplay of knowledge, conceptions and beliefs in its various forms and the respective societies or social environment in which these emerged: it was meant to be a “theory of the social or existential determination of actual thinking” (Mannheim 1985/1936, 267). This ‘determination’ was not meant to be strict: that would imply a one-to-one relation between class, social stratum or setting on the one side and knowledge, conception and beliefs on the other.
- 5.
The respective broader nexus was already widely discussed in the 19th century, not only by Marxists, and it was further amplified through the work of ethnographically oriented social scientists or philosophers—like Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss or Claude Lévi-Strauss—who were dealing, in one way or another, with “social consciousness” (Mead 1912); some decades later, “social perception” was demonstrated experimentally (Ames 1951).
- 6.
It is obvious that science practice is culturally codetermined: faculty-faculty relations and faculty-student relations (Herbst et al. 2002), the conduct of experiments, forms of presentations or lecturing, intellectual discourse, science languages, et cetera, are culturally affected. Less obvious is perhaps the notion, shared at least partially by Ben-David, that science practice codetermines the effectiveness—and possibly even the content—of science.
- 7.
It appears that Ben-David did not know, or did not pay attention to, Ludwik Fleck—and vice-versa (Werner and Zittel 2011). Fleck used the term Denkstil to refer to a culturally molded scientific practice, a notion that was quite alien during Fleck’s time—and has remained alien in many circles until now. In his foreword to Ludwik Fleck’s “Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact” (Fleck 1979, viii), Thomas S. Kuhn cites the former Harvard president James Bryant Conant to whom Kuhn had introduced Fleck’s work. When Conant had become US High Commissioner for Germany a few years later, “he [i.e. Conant] reported with glee the reaction of a German associate to [Conant’s] mention of the title of Fleck’s book: ‘How can such a book be? A fact is a fact. It has neither genesis, nor development’ ”.
- 8.
This seems shortsighted, as Ilana Löwy points out (in Chap. 4): “The dismissal of Ben-David’s heritage in the name of more progressive ideas may deprive the defenders of these ideas of efficient tools to promote them”.
- 9.
It might be instructive also to note issues within higher education which Ben-David, for all practical purposes, did not—or didn’t have to—address. Among such issues, a topic of some reverberation during the past two or three decades concerns tuition fees (Bowen et al. 2006).
- 10.
Abraham Flexner (1930), an American expert on medical and higher education, and the founder and first director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was involved in an advisory capacity during the preparatory and early years of the Hebrew University.
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Herbst, M. (2014). Introduction. In: Herbst, M. (eds) The Institution of Science and the Science of Institutions. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 302. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7407-0_1
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